The Whole Day Through (16 page)

‘You daft twat.’ He ruffled Ben’s hair and walked out. ‘You’ve only been married to her twenty years.’ He shut the door behind him and hurried out to where Jeff was thoughtfully refolding his cuffs and the happy pair sauntered out of sight.

Ben took a while to find the leather portfolio he’d so stupidly left unzipped. Bobby had perched it on a book-shelf under a neatly stacked heap of entirely unrelated papers – takeaway menus, flyers from car valets and window cleaners, a bank statement and a council tax notice and a glossy brochure detailing the many ways in which the council tax was spent.

He tipped the file and papers from the hospital onto the table and forced himself to go through them carefully because the page he was looking for was written in such a happy daze it could have been slotted in at any point. Finally his spirits leapt when he thought he’d found it somewhere at the very back of the file but they fell again when he saw it was one of several rough drafts, unfinished and unsigned.

Clutching at straws, he left the front door carelessly open to run up the street to their nearest letter box. A little notice, blamelessly cruel, informed him the last collection from that box would have been made roughly while they were singing
All Things Bright and Beautiful
. The letter to Laura, brim full of love and apologies and the assurance that, with her agreement, they would now be together for ever, was already on its way to Chloë.

Back in the house he reread the draft, forcing himself to note the various points at which Chloë would quite understandably believe it was addressed to her and no one else. The address not to Laura but to darling, which, like Laura, she had never cared for. The references to her unexpected visit to the clinic, to his recent wounding
behaviour…He thought about ringing her, risking her ridicule by telling her not to open it when it came. But who could resist tearing into such an intriguing Pandora’s box?

He read the draft again and as he read, he pictured Chloë reading it the following morning. She’d be in the kitchen, luxuriating in its being Saturday. The window would be open onto the tiny balcony where she kept trying to grow herbs. She’d have dressed already, to slip out for the papers and some healthy treat or other for breakfast, but she’d be in comfortable weekend clothes. She wouldn’t understand the letter at first and, like everyone, she always had trouble picking through his handwriting. She would have on the tortoiseshell reading glasses she always used around the flat at weekends to give her eyes time off from contact lenses and the steam from her coffee would fog them as she sipped while deciphering. In her attempt to understand, her mouth would be slightly open in the way he used to find sexy when he still thought she was clever. He pictured the way she would reread
I love you and I want to be with you always, whatever it takes and whatever compromises or sacrifices that involves me in
. Would she smile? When she read
all my love, absolutely all of it
, would she cry? Of course not. It was grotesque egotism even to imagine it. But having set it thoughtfully aside to finish her coffee and eat another slice of pineapple, she would pick it up and read it again. And by the time she set it down a second time, phrases from it would have lodged in her
heart, and her morning, even, however briefly, her outlook on her life, would be transformed.

Bobby’s handwriting was appalling, but he would have used capitals to address the envelope, the way he always did when he knew clarity mattered. He would have taken great care to write the diaeresis of the E of Chloë as two perky little circles, flowers even.

Laura’s forgiving visit to the clinic that afternoon had convinced him he had to tell Chloë now, hurt her to set her free, divorce her, leaving her flat and fortune her own. The decision powered the writing of the letter’s several drafts, buoyed his sunny walk home and had probably contributed to his teariness in church. But to tell her now, after apparently sending her such a letter (and with his brother’s lovable connivance), would be inhumanly cruel. And cruelty, even the indirect cruelty of distance, silence and neglect, was not enough. With a hot wave of shame he recognized afresh that no amount of disdain or mistreatment would drive her away from him because of her dogged conviction, however much feelings between them cooled, that he was a good man whose principles somehow blessed her and cancelled out her father’s relative lack of them.

He rang the hotel by the law courts, the one he now thought of as
theirs
, and booked the only room they had left. Then he climbed the stairs and took from the back of his sock drawer an old Roger et Gallet soap box that contained a few things of his mother’s and spent a few thoughtful minutes picking through it. Back downstairs
he poured himself another glass of wine and drank it very fast, walking from room to tiny room as though the house itself might offer up some merciful alternative to what he had in mind.

Then he poured another and rang Laura.

As the last of the storm wind stirred about the house, rattling windows and insinuating draughts of humid garden air, Laura padded up the stairs in the wake of the stair-lift, Mummy riding before her, impassively stoical. The scent of the current favourite bubble bath reached them on clouds of steam. It was blue and smelt of water mint with surprising accuracy for something so cheap. She waited as usual for her mother to go in on her own and use the lavatory. The radio being turned on and the door opened would be the signal to join her. Without it being much discussed they had arrived at a routine.

When she first moved in, Laura had found the bathroom one of the most immediately charming rooms in the house: wood-panelled, painted cream, with a low, sloping ceiling and a deepset casement window that afforded one a view of trees from the lavatory but complete privacy. It looked out across the railway cutting
so the pleasure of lying in the bath was enhanced by the roar of a passing train down below the trees and the thought of all those passengers still hours from such a soothing.

After the breaking of Mummy’s hip and ankle and the onset of her tendency to fall, the room had come to reveal its unsuitability. Ugly grab rails and handles had been fixed on every side by a man from the council’s disability support unit and a care worker had equipped the lavatory with a freestanding support frame, like a titanic metal clothes horse, and a plastic extension unit, which had raised its perching height by nearly a foot.

These ugly additions were part of the price of precious independence but they brought with them a grim whiff of the care home Laura had hoped to avoid and a no less lowering sense of entering a narrowing one-way street to debility. As did the commode.

The
commode
. The very word, with its lip-puckering French gentility, stood in opposition to everything her mother cherished, and its ugly design – it was a turquoise plastic throne with a wirehandled half-bucket in its middle, coyly concealed by what looked like a plastic dustbin lid – would have fitted in no better among their old Ripplevale Grove furniture than it did with the Jellicoe family treasures. The commode had been dropped off by their care worker after a couple of distressing incidents where Mummy had failed to hobble to the bathroom in time when she woke in the night. And, like all the handles in the bathroom and the electric lift which
now ruled the stairs, it silently asserted itself as a fixture-unto-death.

At the moment Laura could manage bath times on her own but at some point they would have to rip out the bath and install a walk-in model or a shower. The room was far too small to allow for both a shower and a bath. She had already investigated, with the help of the inexhaustibly patient woman at Age Concern, and found a shower model with a sturdy slatted bench that folded down from the wall and not too high a pedestal edge to the base – so that even a bather barely able to lift their legs could step inside. The subject had been raised and swatted aside a few times. Mummy was not keen. She was convinced all showers soaked one’s hair unavoidably and she hated washing her hair more than twice a week. But at least Laura had the facts at her disposal and sometimes, she had discovered, the early raising of an unpalatable topic served as a kind of vaccination against the time when it would need to be raised in earnest.

While she waited for her summons, Laura carried the bundle of discarded clothes into her mother’s room, hung up the dress to dry and set aside the fortified underwear, which for once had seen almost a full day’s wear, for adding to the small load she would set to wash overnight.

She had not been so well acquainted with her mother’s wardrobe since childhood. Then, she had raided it to try on hats and shoes and to gaze in wonder at the complexities of bras and suspender belts. Perhaps precisely because she had lived as a naturist, Mummy had always dressed
well on her tight budget, and precisely because her naked body held no mystery for Laura, the clothes she chose to dress it in and the mysteries of how they came together to good effect had a heightened fascination for her. When clothes were not a given, they counted more.

She turned on the bedside light – a very pretty wooden one she coveted, carved to resemble a segmented palm trunk – turned down the bed, pulled tight the sheet rumpled by her mother’s afternoon nap then turned off the overhead light. She might have raised no children of her own but she remembered her own girlhood strongly enough to know that these evening scenes carried echoes of a child’s bedtime. She couldn’t decide, however, if that was disturbing or a source of reassurance. To scrub a parent’s back for them and wash their hair without getting soap in their eyes, to furl them in a fluffy bath towel and see them safely into a warm and comfortable bed and still their fretting about the night and day to come was a chance to demonstrate love in circumstances where words did not come easily.

And yet. Oh, and yet.

There was a frightening meekness in her mother sometimes now, something horrifying about the ease with which a woman so witheringly self-possessed in other areas had ceded her right to privacy in this. Summer clothes were easily shed but winter layers, especially tights and vests, needed assistance. One had only to say
skin a rabbit
for her arms to point up in childish eagerness for the drawing off of vest or jersey.

The bathroom door opened and through it, along with a renewed gust of scented steam, came the applause for the end of that evening’s Prom.

‘Coming,’ Laura called, drew the curtains to block out the glow of a streetlamp which Mummy said kept her awake and crossed the landing.

She needed help getting her legs over the side of the bath, that was all. They had an electric device called the Tritoness. It was a large, sea-green cushion of some rubbery material which, when fully inflated by a little motor, reached to the top of the bath. Mummy sat on the flat surface at the bath’s rear on a plastic carrier bag, Laura gently manoeuvred her legs up and swivelled her on the bag until her legs were in the bath. She then edged herself forwards onto the Tritoness, whose motor would release air from it until she was sitting on the bath’s bottom. Bathing done, the same motor pumped air back in and the Tritoness raised her, like Venus from the waves, as she felt prompted to murmur most nights.

Only Mummy had become convinced she couldn’t make the Tritoness work on her own. All she had to do was press a button. Perhaps she was scared of electrocution – although the control panel was designed to be safely used by wet fingers and was sealed behind a waterproof layer for extra security. Anyway, for whatever reason, she insisted that only Laura –
Clever Laura
she became at this moment – could make the device work. Having been lowered in, there was no reason she shouldn’t be left to enjoy the radio and the bath and
Laura had tried leaving her to wash herself but she only became fretful if she had to call out to be helped with anything. And recently some childlike impulse of vulnerability, or loneliness even, always prompted her to keep Laura there with little bursts of conversation until she was ready to emerge.

Apart from her hair, which Laura washed because Mummy was apt to neglect it if she didn’t, and her back, which rheumatic shoulders no longer let her reach, she still washed herself, rubbing all the bits she could reach with a flannel. She couldn’t reach her feet any more but she wouldn’t let Laura touch them either as she claimed her fingernails tickled. Instead, on the recommendation of the chiropodist who called by every other Monday to file her heels and cut her toenails, she had acquired off the Internet a device like a giant plastic nail brush – she dubbed it the
Pixy’s Doormat
– which attached near the plughole with a series of suction pads. Laura had taken to using it too, dreamily rubbing her feet on it when it was her turn, as the sensation was unexpectedly delicious.

She could tell Mummy was using it now because she couldn’t seem to use it and talk at the same time. Her conversation dried up and she stared at the ceiling, wearing a thoughtful expression like a toddler’s while filling its nappy. Did one feel desire at eighty? Was her mother’s eye still snagged by male beauty, by this man’s meaty legs or the curls on that one’s nape, or was the restless hunger finally switched off? Perhaps lust transmuted at last into
easy pleasures like wiping one’s feet on the
Pixy’s Doormat
or having someone rub one’s scalp while washing one’s hair. For lust to continue when the body that housed it was giving out would be too unkind to be borne, but it was not a query one could put to one’s mother.

‘Would you mind doing the honours?’ Mummy asked, focused again, and Laura bent forward to pull out the plug then click the Tritoness into action. It began its chuntering sounds, air pipe vibrating, and the balloon slowly reinflated, lifting Mummy as Laura stood ready with a warm towel held before her.

‘Venus from the waves,’ sighed Mummy.

They had been allocated the room directly above the one they had always had before. At first it seemed almost identical: same floor plan, same bed, same furniture and curtains. Then he noticed the ceiling was lower, and the windows smaller and the pictures different and he saw there was only a shower where the other afforded a luxurious, claw footed bath. Of course it was only an accident but it felt to Ben like an insidious draining down of expectation.