13
“Barbara? Lovey? Have you gone to bed? Because the lights are out and I don’t want to disturb you if you’re asleep. You need your sleep. It’s your beauty sleep, I know. But if you’re still up, I thought we might talk about Christmas. It’s early, of course, but still one wants to be prepared with gift ideas and decisions about which invitations to accept and which to decline.”
Barbara Havers closed her eyes briefly, as if by that activity she could shut out the sound of her mother’s voice. Standing in the darkness at her bedroom window, she looked down on the back garden where a cat was slinking along the top of the fence that separated their property from that of Mrs. Gustafson. Its attention was speared onto the snarl of weeds that grew in place of what once had been a narrow strip of lawn. He was hunting a rodent. The garden was probably swarming with them. Barbara saluted him silently. Have at them, she thought.
Near her face, the curtains gave off the odours of old cigarette smoke and heavy dust. Once a crisp, starched white cotton sprigged with clusters of forget-me-nots, they hung limp and grey, and against this background of grime the cheerful blue flowers had long since given up the effort of contrast. Now they looked largely like smudges of charcoal set against an ever-darkening, bleak field of ash.
“Lovey?”
Barbara heard her mother tottering along the upstairs passage, her mules alternately shuffling and slapping against the bare floor. She knew she ought to call out to her, but instead she prayed that before she reached the bedroom, her mother’s fleeting attention would make the jump to something else. Perhaps to her brother’s bedroom which, although it long since had been cleared of his belongings, often still proved enough of a lure that Mrs. Havers would wander into it, talking to her son as if he were still alive.
Five minutes, Barbara thought. Just five minutes of peace.
She’d been home for some hours, arriving to find Mrs. Gustafson sitting erect on a kitchen chair at the foot of the stairs and her mother above in her bedroom, crumpled on the edge of the bed. Mrs. Gustafson was curiously armed with the hose of the vacuum cleaner, her mother was bewildered and frightened, a shrivelled figure in the darkness who had lost the simple knowledge of how to operate her bedroom lights.
“We had ourselves a bit of a scuffle. She’s been wanting your father,” Mrs. Gustafson had said when Barbara came in the door. Her grey wig had been pulled slightly askew so that on the left its curls hung down too far below her ear. “She started looking through the house calling out for her Jimmy. Then she wanted the street.”
Barbara’s eyes fell to the hose of the vacuum.
“Now, I din’t hit her, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson said. “You know I wouldn’t hit your mum.” Her fingers first curled round the hose then caressed its worn covering. “Snake,” she said confidentially. “She does behave when she sees it, luv. I just wave it a bit. That’s all I have to do.”
For a moment, Barbara felt as if her blood had congealed, rendering her immobile and incapable of speech. She felt wedged solidly between two conflicting needs. Words and actions were called for, some sort of castigation of the elderly woman for her blind stupidity, for resorting to terrorising instead of tending. But, far more important, placation was required. For if Mrs. Gustafson drew the line on what she was willing to endure, they were lost.
So in the end, despising herself, creating a new, more capacious reservoir in her conscience to hold the guilt, she settled upon saying, “It’s hard when she gets confused, I know. But if you frighten her, don’t you think she gets worse?” and all the time she hated herself for the tone of reason she employed and the underlying plea for understanding and cooperation. This is your mother, Barbara, she told herself. This isn’t an animal we’re talking about. But it made no difference. She was talking about caretaking. She had long ago abjured the quality of life.
“She does for a bit,” Mrs. Gustafson said, “which is why I phoned you, luv, because I thought she’d lost what few beans she has left. But she’s fine now, isn’t she? Not a peep out of her. You should have stayed in Cambridge.”
“But you phoned for me to come home.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I? A bit of a panic that was, when she wanted her Jimmy and she wouldn’t drink her tea or eat the nice egg sandwich I’d made. But she’s fine now. Go on up. Have a look. She may even have dropped off for a bit of a kip. The way babies do, you know. Just cry themselves to sleep.”
Which went a great distance to let Barbara know what the last few hours prior to her arrival had been like in the house. Except that this wasn’t a baby crying itself to physical exhaustion. This was an adult, whose exhaustion was one of the mind.
She had found her mother hunched over on the bed, with her head on her knees and her face directed towards the chest of drawers next to the window. When Barbara crossed the room to her, she saw that her mother’s spectacles had slipped off her nose and lay on the floor, leaving her vague blue eyes looking even more detached than they normally did.
“Mum?” she said. She hesitated about switching on the light on the bedside table, afraid it might frighten her mother in some further fashion. She touched the older woman’s head. Her hair felt very dry, but it was soft like wispy bits of cotton wool. It would be nice to get her a perm, Barbara thought. She’d like that, Mum would. If she didn’t forget where she was in the middle of the treatment and try to flee the hairdresser’s when she saw her head covered by lumpy coloured rods the purpose of which she no longer understood.
Mrs. Havers stirred, just a small movement of her shoulders as if she were trying to rid herself of an unwanted burden. She said, “Doris and I played this afternoon. She wanted a tea party and I wanted jacks. We tiffed over it. But then we had both.”
Doris was her mother’s older sister. She’d died as a teenager during the Blitz. She’d not had the courtesy of adding to the family history by being eliminated by a German bomb, however. Instead, it was an inglorious but nonetheless appropriate finish to a life that had been characterised by unfailing rapacity: She’d choked to death on a piece of black market pork which she’d whipped off her brother’s plate at Sunday dinner when he left the table to make an adjustment to the wireless out of which, like a saviour, Winston Churchill was due to speak.
Barbara had heard the story often enough as a child. Chew everything forty times, her mother would say, else you’ll end up stiff like your auntie Doris.
“I’ve prep to do for school, but I don’t like prep,” her mother went on. “I played instead. Mummy won’t like that. She’ll ask. And I don’t know what to say.”
Barbara bent over her. “Mum,” she said. “It’s Barbara. I’m home. I’m going to turn on the light. It won’t scare you, will it?”
“But the blackout. We must be very careful. Have you drawn the curtains?”
“It’s all right, Mum.” She switched on the lamp and sat on the bed at her mother’s side. She put her hand on her shoulder and squeezed lightly. “Okay, Mum? That better?”
Mrs. Havers’ eyes went from the window to Barbara. She squinted. Barbara reached for her spectacles, polished away a grease spot on one of the lenses by rubbing it against her own trouser leg, and slipped them back on her mother’s nose.
“She has a snake,” Mrs. Havers said. “Barbie, I don’t like snakes and she’s brought one with her. She brings it out and she holds it and she tells me what it wants me to do. She says snakes crawl up you. She says they crawl inside. But it’s so big and if it gets inside me, I’ll—”
Barbara put her arm round her mother. She crouched to duplicate her mother’s position. They were face-to-face, heads resting on knees. “There’s no snake, Mum. It’s the vacuum cleaner. She’s trying to frighten you. But she wouldn’t do that if you’d just manage to do what she says. She wouldn’t even bother. Can you try to behave?”
Mrs. Havers’ face clouded. “Vacuum cleaner? Oh no, Barbie, it was a snake.”
“But where could Mrs. Gustafson have got a snake?”
“I don’t know, lovey. But she has it. I’ve seen it. She holds it and waves it.”
“She’s holding it now, Mum. Downstairs. It’s the vacuum cleaner. Would you like to go down and have a look at it with me?”
“No!” Barbara felt her mother’s back go rigid. Her voice began to rise. “Because I don’t like snakes, Barbie. I don’t want them crawling up me. I don’t want them inside. I don’t—”
“Okay, Mum, okay.”
She saw that she couldn’t pit her mother’s frail coping skills in psychological warfare against Mrs. Gustafson. It’s just the vacuum, Mum, isn’t Mrs. Gustafson silly to try to scare you with it was not going to work to maintain the fragile peace in the house. Their peace was too volatile, especially when it rested on her mother’s failing ability to stay firmly grounded in the here and now.
She wanted to say, “Mrs. Gustafson’s as afraid as you are, Mum, that’s why she resorts to frightening you when you get a bit wild,” but she knew her mother would not understand. So she said nothing. She merely drew her mother close to her and thought with longing and loss of that studio in Chalk Farm where she had stood beneath the false acacia and allowed herself a moment to dream of hope and independence.
“Lovey? Are you still up?”
Barbara turned from the window. Moonlight made the room a place of silver and shadow. It fell in a band across her bed and pooled round the odd, ball-and-claw legs on the chest of drawers. The full-length mirror that hung on the door of the built-in clothes cupboard—“Look at these, Jimmy,” her mother had said. “What a nice touch! We won’t need wardrobes here.”—reflected the light in a shaft of white against the opposite wall. She’d hung a cork board there when she’d turned thirteen years old. It was supposed to hold all the souvenirs of her adolescence: programmes from the theatre, invitations to parties, mementoes from school dances, a dried flower or two. It held nothing at all for the first three years. And then she’d come to realise it never would unless she pinned to it something more than unrealistic dreams. So she’d clipped newspaper articles, first human interest stories about babies and animals, then intriguing pieces about small acts of violence, and finally sensational columns on murder.
“Not the thing for young ladies,” her mother had sniffed.
No indeed. Not the thing for young ladies.
“Barbie? Lovey?”
Her door was half-closed and Barbara heard her mother’s fingernails scratching against it. If she was absolutely quiet, she knew there was a slight chance that her mother would go away. But it seemed an unnecessary cruelty after what she’d been through that day. So she said:
“I’m awake, Mum. I’ve not gone to bed.”
The door swung inward. Light from the passage behind her acted as accent to Mrs. Havers’ gaunt frame. Especially her legs, human spindles with bulbous knees and ankles that were emphasised by the fact that her housecoat was rucked up and her nightdress too short. She toddled into the room.
“I did a bad today, Barbie, didn’t I?” she said. “Mrs. Gustafson was to spend the night with me here. I remember you said that this morning, didn’t you? You were going to Cambridge. So I must have done a bad if you’re home.”
Barbara welcomed the moment of rare lucidity. She said, “You got confused.”
Her mother stopped a few feet away from her. She’d managed a bath on her own—with just two quick supervisory visits—but she hadn’t done as well with the post-ablutionary rites, for she’d doused herself with so much cologne that it seemed to surround her like a psychic aura.
“Is it near Christmas, lovey?” Mrs. Havers asked.
“It’s November, Mum, the second week of November. It’s not too far from Christmas.”
Her mother smiled, obviously relieved. “I thought it was near. It gets cold round Christmas, doesn’t it, and it’s been like that these past few days, so I thought it must be Christmastime. With the fairy lights on Oxford Street and those lovely displays in Fortnum and Mason. And seeing Father Christmas talking to the children. I thought it was near.”
“And you were right,” Barbara said. She was feeling enormously weary. Her eyelids seemed pricked by thousands of pins. But at least the burden of further dealings with her mother seemed lifted for a moment. She said, “Ready for bed, Mum?”
“Tomorrow,” her mother said. She nodded as if satisfied with her decision. “We’ll do it tomorrow, lovey.”
“Do what?”
“Speak to Father Christmas somewhere. You must tell him what you want.”
“I’m a bit old for Father Christmas. And at any rate, I’ve got to go back to Cambridge in the morning. Inspector Lynley’s still there. I can’t leave him on his own. But you remember that, don’t you? I’m on a case in Cambridge. You remember that, Mum.”
“And we’ve all the invitations to sort through and the gifts to decide upon. We’ll be busy tomorrow. And busy, busy, busy as bees until after the new year.”
The respite had been brief indeed. Barbara took her mother by her bony shoulders and began to guide her gently from the room. She chattered on.
“Daddy’s the hardest to buy for, isn’t he? Mum’s no problem. She’s got such a sweet tooth that I always know if I can just find chocolates—you know the kind she loves—I’ll be all right. But Dad’s a trick. Dorrie, what’re you going to get Dad?”
“I don’t know, Mum,” Barbara said. “I just don’t know.”
They managed the passage to her mother’s bedroom where the duck-shaped light she loved was burning on the bedside table. Her mother continued her Christmas conversation, but Barbara tuned it out, feeling a tumour of depression begin its slow growth in her chest.
She fought it off by telling herself that there was a purpose behind it all. She was being tested. This was her Golgotha. She tried to convince herself that if nothing else the day had taught her that she couldn’t leave her mother for the night with Mrs. Gustafson, and having that knowledge now, under circumstances when she had been close enough to get back home quickly, was so much better than..
Than what? she wondered. Than if she had been called home from an exotic holiday she would never take, in a place she would never see, with a man she would never know, in whose arms she would never lie?
She shoved the thought aside. She needed to get back to work. She had to have a focal point for her thoughts that was anywhere else but in this house in Acton.
“Perhaps,” her mother was saying as Barbara pulled the covers up and tucked them under the mattress, hoping the gesture would seem like concern for her warmth rather than a desire to keep her anchored to the bed, “perhaps we should take a holiday at Christmas and not worry about a thing. What d’you think of that?”
“It’s a grand idea. Why don’t you work on it tomorrow? Mrs. Gustafson can help you sort through your brochures.”
Mrs. Havers’ face clouded. Barbara removed her spectacles and laid them on the table by the bed. “Mrs. Gustafson?” her mother said. “Barbie, who’s she?”