Man and Wife (20 page)

In a house full of boys, she was as distant and regal as a Virgin Queen. Doted on by her parents, encouraged to think of herself as special, she was as indulged as an only child.

I know my mum was always loved – as the only girl in a large family of boys, and as the only female in the small family that I grew up in – and I believe that is why she is so good at giving love. I know that Pat and I would be lost without her. I can’t even imagine what the world would be like without my mum in it.

She is full of life. She has more life in her than anyone I’ve ever known. She likes to sing and dance. I know she likes a laugh,
even at the worst of times, especially at the worst of times. We still smile about when she slammed her head against my father’s coffin at his funeral.

Only someone who loves people as much as my mum could ever get so lonely. She carefully plans her evening viewing. She likes the news, real-people documentaries, but she raises an eyebrow at all the pierced tongues and nipples on
Six Pissed Students in a Flat
. I know she sneers at soap operas, although back in the eighties she liked JR in
Dallas
. Cartoon villainy amuses her.

What else? Oh yes.

I know my mother hates going to the doctor.

In the end Tex didn’t take my mum to the hospital. Apparently his car was having trouble with its big end, although I suspected that the real problem was Tex having trouble with his nerve.

My mum told me she would get the bus. I said that I would come to the hospital with her. She said the bus was fine. She didn’t want to make a fuss. That was always one of her big things – not making a fuss. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared in her back garden, rampaging through her rose bushes, my mum would try not to make a fuss.

Having a laugh and not making a fuss. That was her way. That was her philosophy. A kind of light-hearted stoicism that pulled at my heart, and made me feel like putting my arm around her.

But it was difficult to laugh today. It was difficult to grin and bear it on days like these.

When she came out from seeing the specialist I could tell the news was bad.

She was struggling to understand the diagnosis, trying to understand the language, trying to understand how a hardened piece of flesh could change your world so completely.

She didn’t want to talk about it in the overcrowded waiting room. She didn’t want to talk about it until we were back in my car.

We sat in the hospital’s endless car park. Other cars circled
like sharks, looking for a precious parking space. It was a busy day for the hospital. They were probably all busy days.

‘Look – I’ve written it down.’ She showed me a scrap of paper. She had written
invasive carcinoma
in her shaky hand.

‘What does it mean?’ I said, sort of knowing what it meant, but unable to believe it.

‘Breast cancer,’ said my mum.

Of course, I thought. First one parent and then the other. The most natural thing in the world, as natural as the birth of a child. Then why did it feel like the world was coming apart?

‘The doctor at the breast unit says they don’t know what they’re going to do yet. How to treat it. Nice bloke. Some sort of Mediterranean. Spoke English better than me. They do, don’t they? Gave it to me straight. Says there’s something called
staging
. It means they have to assess the risk of it spreading. And, you know. How far it’s spread already.’

I was speechless.

‘I met the breast care nurse. She was nice. Lovely girl. Her nose was – what do you call it? Pierced. Specially trained to deal with my kind of case. I’ve got to go back, Harry. I can get the bus. Don’t worry. I know you’re busy.’

I stared at her profile as she looked across at the hospital, I watched that soft, kind face that I had known longer than any other, and saw all the emotions churning inside her.

Shock. Fear. Bewilderment. Anger. Even the darkest kind of amusement.

‘Graham didn’t stick around long, did he? Old Tex. Cowboy Joe from the Rio Southend. Soon buggered off when the music stopped. Your dad would have been here. Your dad would have been here for me, Harry. That man would have walked through fire for me. That’s a marriage, Harry. That’s what a marriage is all about.’

‘There’s lots they can do, isn’t there?’

She was silent, lost in her own thoughts.

‘Mum? I said, there’s plenty they can do, isn’t there?’

‘Oh yes. Oh yes. Lots they can do. I’m going to beat this thing. I mean it, Harry. People live with breast cancer. They
do. People
live
. It’s not like your dad. Can’t fight lung cancer. Can’t fight that. Bloody lung cancer. Bloody cancer. Took your dad. It’s not going to take me. Bloody, bloody cancer. It’s a right…
bastard.’
She glanced at me. ‘Excuse my language.’

‘Mum?’

‘What, love?’

‘I’m really proud that you’re my mum.’

She nodded, took my hand and held it. Held it so tight in her own small hand that I could feel that piece of precious metal pressing into my palm, that sliver of gold, burnished by a lifetime.

My mother’s wedding ring.

It fit her perfectly.

My parents met through her brother. The one she threw the knife at and tried to kill. He was always her favourite.

My mum’s brother and my dad went to the same boxing club for boys. This was back when boxing was as popular among schoolboys as football. That’s all changed now, of course, and the only men in television I know who boxed at school all went to Eton.

But this was back when boxing was considered a healthy pastime for growing boys. And after sparring together – my uncle and my father were exactly the same weight and age, both one year older than my mum – my mum’s brother brought my dad home to that house in an East End banjo, which was what they called their little dead-end street, a banjo, because that’s exactly what it was shaped like. And growing up in that banjo, a house full of boys. And one girl.

At seventeen, my dad had already been at work for three years. He was cocky and wild, his pride primed with an explosive temper – after one of his army of cousins had sworn at him, he had tied her to a lamppost and washed her mouth out with soap. There was an anger in him. He would fight anyone. He seemed to enjoy it. Then he saw my mother, just sixteen years old, the spoilt princess of the banjo, and he found his reason to stop fighting and start living.

She taught him to be gentle – her and the unimaginable things he did and saw in the war. He taught her to be strong. Or maybe it was all there already – the roaring boy was more sensitive than he dared to let on. And perhaps she was always harder than she seemed. The reserved sixteen-year-old girl had been toughened up by poverty, life in the banjo and all those brothers.

But they had a deliriously happy marriage. Even up to the day my father died, they were mad about each other. For an entire lifetime, they never really stopped courting.

He sent her red roses, she brought him breakfast in bed. He stared at her, unable to believe his luck. She wrote him poems. Put them in his lunch box. I saw his cards to her – Mother’s Day, birthday, Christmas. His angel, he called her. The love of his life. He seemed like the least romantic man in the world, and she inspired him to write sonnets.

The products of close-knit, crowded communities, they were content in the company of each other. The only real trauma in their union was all those years at the start when a baby just would not come. And later, after I finally arrived, when she suffered a heartbreaking string of miscarriages. One of my clearest memories of childhood is my mum sitting on the floor of our rented flat above a greengrocer’s shop, inconsolable as my father tried to comfort her, his broken-hearted angel, his devastated true love, crying for another lost child.

My first look at married life.

When I became a parent, I found myself imitating them, trying to strike their balance between being strict and being gentle. They seemed like perfect parents to me. Loving and tough.

My father never lifted a finger to either of us – he reserved his violence for strangers who were dumb enough to cross him. My mum was not averse to aiming a shoe at me – at least it wasn’t a knife – when I drove her to distraction with my daydreaming and solitary games, the comforts of the only child that frequently prevented me from coming when I was called. But she had waited too long for a baby to ever be mad at me for long.

‘Wait until your father gets home,’ she would tell me, and it was her ultimate threat.

It never frightened me, though. Because I knew they loved me, and I knew that it was a love that was unconditional and everlasting, a love that was built to last a lifetime and beyond.

No, what frightened me as a child was the thought of losing my mother. Small, curly-haired, five foot and a bit, she would disappear up to the row of shops near our home on black, blustery winter evenings, the kind of November and December nights that we no longer seem to get, off to buy something for our tea. Those were the years when it snowed in winter and, in my memory at least, the streets were shrouded in the fog of countless open fires. She would be on an errand for mince, pork chops or baked beans, or on Fridays fish and chips wrapped in newspaper – the menu of my childhood.

And I would be anxious, unbearably anxious for the return of this woman, my mum, who had just nipped down the shops. Still in my school uniform of grey flannel trousers, grey shirt and stripy tie, that old man’s drag they made us wear, I would stand on the back of the sofa and press my face against a window streaming with condensation, scanning the dark, empty streets.

Searching for the irreplaceable sight of my mother, and tortured by the thought that she was never coming home again.

Cyd and I took my mum to a show.

My father had always taken my mother to shows. Every six months or so they would put on their best clothes and head for the bright lights of London. For two people who spent most evenings in front of the television set, they were connoisseurs of musical theatre.

When the film versions of
Oklahoma!, West Side Story
or
My Fair Lady
came on TV, they would both sing along, word perfect. My mum would also dance – she did a particularly good imitation of the cool-daddy-o ballet of the Sharks and the Jets in
West Side Story
. For my mum, musicals were not a passive experience. She had been going to the West End for fifty
years, and there were few tunes being banged out nightly on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand and Haymarket that she didn’t know better than the people singing them.

Now she decided she wanted to catch
Les Misérables
again.

‘I love that one,’ she told Cyd. ‘I like the little girl. And I like the prostitutes. And I like it when all the students get shot. It’s very sad and there are some lovely melodies in it.’

She wore a white two-piece suit from Bloomingdale’s that I had brought her back from a trip to New York. She looked lovely but frail, and older, far older, than I had ever thought she would be.

Cyd took her hand when we picked her up, and never let it go as we made our way to the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. Cyd held her hand on the drive into town, held it as we made our way through the teeming early-evening crowds, my mum looking too easily broken for the city, too delicate to be surrounded by all the traffic and bustle and hordes.

The audience inside the Palace was the usual mixture of foreign tourists, coach trips in from the suburbs and locals on a big night out. Directly in front of us there was a young man in a pinstripe suit, some well-scrubbed junior hotshot from the City, with what looked like his mother on one side and his grandmother on the other side. I didn’t like him from the start.

He made a big deal about turning round and shaking his head just because my mum clipped him around the ear a few times with her coat as she was struggling to take it off. Then he tutted elaborately when she whistled through the overture. And then, when the show began, he kept on loudly clearing his throat when my mum sang along to Fantine’s big dying number, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Finally, as my mum joined in for the cast’s stirring rendition of ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’, he turned around angrily.

‘Will you please shut up?’ he hissed.

‘Leave her alone, pal,’ said Cyd, and I loved her for it. ‘We’ve paid for our tickets too.’

‘We can’t enjoy the show if she acts like she’s part of the chorus!’

‘Who’s
she?’
I demanded.

Behind us people started going, ‘Ssssh!’ Bald and permed heads were turning. Well-fed faces creased with irritation.

‘Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?’
sang my mum, happily oblivious.
‘It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!’

The young suit’s posh old granny stuck her oar in. ‘We’ve paid for our seats, too, you know.’

‘We can’t concentrate on the performance,’ whined her frumpy daughter.

‘You don’t need to concentrate, lady,’ said Cyd. ‘You just need to lie back and enjoy it. You know how to lie back and enjoy it, don’t you?’

‘Well, really!’

‘I’m getting help,’ said her son, and went off to find a young woman with a torch.

Then they threw us out.

They were very nice about it. Told us that if we couldn’t silence my mum then the management reserved the right to ask us to leave. And there was no way of shutting up my mum when we still had the deaths of Valjean, Javert, Eponine and all those nice students to look forward to.

So we went. My wife and my mother and me. Laughing about it already, as though getting thrown out of a musical was actually much more fun than watching one. Making our way through the funky crowds to the Bar Italia where my mum was promised a lovely cup of tea.

The three of us, my wife and my mother and me, arm in arm in the streets of Soho.

Singing ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ at the top of our voices.

seventeen

I met my son at the airport.