Quilt (13 page)

– Not, he queries chuckling, presumably to be part of the fixtures and fittings?

– I’d be taking that with me, you say, struck momentarily by the enormity of doing so.

– What are they in there anyway? asks the man, stooping a little and peering in.

And then one of them, Taylor, flaps into vision, and it occurs to you that you haven’t in fact shared the secret of the rays with anyone since the funeral.

– Curious, exclaims the visitor. Like an underwater kite.

There is now a delayed version, you suggest, a shadow-replay of his falling through the ladder five minutes earlier and almost breaking his legs when, his curiosity getting the better of him, the agent goes to put his hand near the surface of the water as Taylor edges up close and you, rallying to the defence of both parties, pull the arm back, exclaiming at the danger of the spine lashing his hand. Stung at any rate mentally, the estate agent remarks that it is not going to be easy transporting a contraption of dangerous creatures that size and you have to agree. Surveying the upstairs rooms he more than once poses the question of the fate of other furnishings and items obviously capturing his business eye.

– Some nice furniture, he remarks. Will you be instructing the auctioneers in town?

A query too far for you at this moment, you merely note you have not yet decided what to do with it, and the agent with newfound gusto and boldness avers that while the condition of the house, so obviously in need of modernisation, is not going to put off a prospective
purchaser, given that the price would be tailored to that fact, and while such a person would be attracted as much as anything else by the size of the plot of land coming with the property, nonetheless a bit of tidying up and clearing space in the bedrooms and the drawing room downstairs might be advantageous for the purpose of viewings.

– Your father’s study in particular, he sighs with but a thin veneer of professional decency.

He leaves you with the promise of papers to sign, coming with luck in the post next day, and an unnecessarily impactive handshake.

Five minutes later you too drive out, seeking replenishments of your favourite bottled cider.

It happens, or has already begun, on your return. There is a sound coming from the kitchen. You can hear it above the noise made by the water-pump in the pool as you come through the front door. There is, you write, a resting place in every mental archive, a discrete space of effects walled up without a listener’s awareness. Most remain unnoticed in the dull daily roar. Then there are the others, those isolated, unmistakable sounds which, once heard again, transport more directly and more frighteningly than any odoriferous power of reminiscence or snapshot visual recall. Of course there is a kind of common stock, shared files of archetypal distinction, the sound of rock falling, a footstep where none is expected, the thrown vocable of a diabolical chuckle, the autumnal rustling of trees, a snatch of distant seas shrugged off in the dozy instant. But there are also sounds peculiarly your own, received and buried, as it were, in your heart of heart. It is what you mean, you remind me, when you
tell me I am your pristine.

The sound you hear on coming back through the front door, carrying over the peaceful bubbling of the pumps in the ray pool, is a screech. You recognise it immediately: it is the shriek, initially a scrawny cry but rising, made by your mother locked in the bathroom upstairs one night twenty years ago, shortly after the local GP downstairs administers a final dose of morphine, on the occasion of the first death, the deciding death. And now coming into the house the hallucination, for you tell yourself it could only be such, is that unmistakable but faint cry, started up from you can’t think where. It is a savage gutturality, a fugal scree. After a moment of absolute disorientation you think of the upstairs bathroom, where you recall she would not respond to your murmured entreaty but kept up this speechless screech intolerably, forcing you in due course to let her be and return downstairs. Climbing the stairs again now the sound, you note, has outstripped you. The upstairs landing is silent and still. Coming face to face with a bathroom door that is closed, however, re-establishes your disquiet with a sharp, unpleasant flutter. Always in the time of your parents the door of the bathroom, if unoccupied, would be ajar. With trepidation you open it. There is nothing: a once pleasing up-to-date
emerald-green
bathroom now unequivocally in need of what the estate agent called modernisation, the chrome covers to the taps long since broken off, the cracked cover to the cistern leaning against the wall below the window, the bath and bidet stained bone-gray and cobwebbed. Then you realise it must have been the estate agent, closing the door behind him as he was making his tour of the house.

Your mother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table.

– Is your father out?

She is sitting with a cup of coffee, with her daily crossword, shopping list and pen on the table, along with her cigarettes, a lighter and ashtray.

– He has died, you say.

– Typical. Is there anything you’d like me to get while I’m down in town?

She has put out her cigarette and picked up her ballpoint to write.

Yes, you think, before or beyond any religious belief, the dead speak. You don’t choose them any more than they choose you. Masters and mistresses of restraint, they hardly ever raise their voices. They try, if anything, to keep their commentary in wraps, their interventions airy nothings, their refrains mere janglery. Yet life is mostly a matter of how you listen to them.

– You’re smoking again.

– People who don’t smoke don’t exist.

– But you gave up.

– Once a smoker always a smoker.
When
did he die, did you say?

– Three weeks, no, nearly four weeks ago.

She then fills in a crossword clue, precisely as if she is in a world of her own and has neither spoken nor listened.

– Are you well?

She scrutinises you over her spectacles as you continue to stand, as if paralysed, at the kitchen door.

It is, without a shred of doubt, your mother, restored like the work of an old master, but alive, here in the
kitchen, smoking, drinking coffee, doing the crossword, talking to you, apparently capable of driving down to town and getting shopping.

– What of the Alzheimer’s?

The moment you utter the word you realise you had never in her hearing done so. You begin now to advance into the kitchen, walking like an invalid, supporting your slow progress by keeping a hand on the counter as you take one step forward, then another. You wonder what has happened to your body.

–
Alzheimer’s
? she says, quizzically. That’s an invention, dear boy, not my bag at all. Of course it has currency, as you call it. Don’t get me onto currents. I lost my marbles. To each her own. I’m losing my marbles I said to you, I’m sure you remember (at which you nod).

And now you are standing in front of her at the table and trying to take her hands and bring her to her feet and gather her in your arms. And as you do so your strength seems to return. No longer seeing her, you hold, buried in the warren of this embrace, alternately closing your eyes as if to protect them and gazing out through the window at the forsaken ghost of a garden, you regale her with details of everything that has happened up to this moment, since your father died, every nuanced little thing. And you want to tell her what happened to her in turn, what it was to lose face, both of you, your mother no longer recognising you, speaking to the dead mother of a mother living but no longer capable of being addressed.

– The last time I saw you, you whisper at her ear, a weightless wisp of her dead gray hair caressing your cheek, was two and a half years ago and you didn’t recognise me. You were in a care home, past caring or
home. For months already you were powerless of speech, incontinent, reduced to liquid foods, unable to follow even fragments of conversation. Before that, still here at home, for months and months already you’d lost the plot. You’d sit in your armchair in the drawing room, in wandering glassy-eyed silence for minutes or hours on end, then rise, walk on autopilot through the dining room into the kitchen, stare out through the window, trying to fool an observer into perhaps thinking you were looking at the bird-table where your once-beloved blue-tits, nuthatches and woodpecker might be pecking at the peanuts, perhaps actually looking at the bird-table, perhaps neither looking nor feigning to do so, then walk back to the drawing room and sit again, glassy-eyed again, or else again here, in the kitchen, try to do one of the things you used to be able to do, such as make a cup of coffee or get yourself a cigarette or help yourself to a biscuit from the cupboard. But those days were past. You had to be followed everywhere, in case you fell over or set the house on fire. And you were still his beloved wife. He would come to see you at the care home every day after breakfast, bringing a packet of digestive biscuits and a pocketful of paper kitchen-towels for when you dribbled. He would feed you, just as if you were your birds, and afterwards wipe the dribbling, trembling, futile mouth, over and over, whether or not that morning you were willing or able to munch and crumble. You would scarcely recognise him, giving out, in the early weeks, some sigh or stammer in the semblance of acknowledgement, then not even that. It must have been around then he had his silent heart attack. He claimed you recognised him, right up to the end (and here you
draw back and stare into the shifting whorls of your mother’s eyes). But I couldn’t see it.

Then she looks you over, her eyes foam-flowers, with all the clarity of yore:

– Done rabbiting? Who’s this girl you’re with? How ever did the garden get into that state? What happened to the raspberry patch, the greenhouse, my flowerbeds, the roses, the orchids, the irises, the tiger lilies, the montbretia? And what, since I could hardly fail to notice it coming through the door, is that enormous
tank
-thing in the dining room? What have you done with my dining room table and chairs?

In consternation I call, but you don’t pick up. Perhaps you are still at the Tea Party, waiting for me to write back. I realise anew the appalling isolation in which I have left you: I have no contact numbers for neighbours or anyone else in the vicinity. In any case it is impossible to judge the gravity of what you have written or to interpret the abrupt manner in which your message concludes. There is no signing off, no closure or explanation. You just stop, as if mid-stream. I email you asking to call me back. I try to call you repeatedly, to no avail. In the end I resort to a text message, hazarding: ‘Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, my love.’

Early next morning you call. I am angry and worried in ways I think it best not to voice. I let you do the
talking. You apologise. You tell me you had to stop writing, because the café was closing. And when you got back to the house you were suddenly overwhelmed with an incredible tiredness, as if you hadn’t slept for weeks. Omitting even to feed the rays you fell into a sleep as deep as a coma and have only just come to. You say you thought it was in your head, or the estate agent stolen back into the house and playing a trick on you, improbably hiding in your parents’ bathroom and producing a top-class imitation of your mother’s screech. But how did he know how to imitate her? No: there was no one in the bathroom. The door was closed and you couldn’t open it. Not locked, just a window you’d left open had blown the door shut and now the wind was blowing a gale through, keeping the door as if stuck fast and whistling up a sound like a mad fugue, you say, a horrible frenzied feeling subsiding as you heard the screech fade and found the door could, after all, be opened quite easily and the bathroom empty, a site of harmless ruin and cobwebs enlivened by breezes. But then in a state, you say, of high but bleary relief you went downstairs and your mother was sitting at the kitchen table, fresh as reality, puffing on a cigarette, sipping at her coffee, fiddling with the
Times
crossword, quizzing you about your father and asking did you want any shopping as she was planning to drive down to the town. You asked about her Alzheimer’s, you say, and suddenly realised you’d never used the word to her face. It was mortifying. You say you were frozen rigid at first but then went closer. You thought you were in Madame Tussaud’s. When you first saw her, you admit, it was unpleasant to say the least, like a huge wave of
something staggeringly malodorous washing in from the sea. Not this, you thought. You couldn’t move. You were stranded at the open kitchen door in a trance, rigid, and would have called me, an ambulance, a neighbour, but so many things seemed to be happening at once. It wasn’t just your mother sitting calm as the moon, it was like curtains pulled back very sharply, to expose another veil, one giving way to the next. It was when I said the word ‘Alzheimer’s’, you say.