Lewis Percy (5 page)

‘Will you make your lemon cake?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. She seemed charmed at this evidence of being admitted to his working life. There was even a little colour in her cheeks.

He studied late in his room that night. As his eyelids grew weary from reading he heard her light step in the corridor, on the way to the bathroom, but, too tired to stay awake another minute, he got into bed and fell instantly asleep. All at once he had an unpleasant and hallucinatory dream, in which his mother was showing him an expensive carpet, woven of many colours, with a long silky fringe. When he had admired it he asked her where it was to go. Was it for the drawing-room, to replace the prayer rug that lay before the fire? With a sly smile his mother refused to tell him. He understood her to mean that she had another house, somewhere else, in a place unknown to him, to which she refused him access. He awoke with a beating heart and a feeling of terror. He could not remember the last time he had had a dream. And what did it mean? He lay in the pulsing darkness, throwing off sheet and blanket in a sudden flush of heat. He could not calculate what time it was, or how long he had been asleep. Waiting for his body to cool down he stirred uneasily, aware of a malaise. He waited to see if he were ill, but nothing seemed to be amiss. Turning over in bed, resolving to sleep again, he heard a sound. A sound at night – particularly one he could not recognize – was unusual in this quiet house. He put his ear to the wall dividing his room from his mother’s, but could hear nothing. She was all right, then: the sound must be coming from next door. He wondered if the neighbours were unwell and he were only just becoming aware of the fact. But what he had heard was more like a sigh, lifting to a murmur; it did not appear to be the sort of thing he associated with illness, of which he had little experience. He pushed back the covers again, sat irresolutely on the side of the bed. In the
darkness the sound came again, bringing with it a dreadful fear. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted as he got to his feet and felt his way blindly down the corridor. It did not occur to him to switch on the light.

His mother was on the floor of the bathroom. She had managed to prop herself against the wall. She was wearing the dressing-gown, which was soiled now; the sound was coming from her mouth. She must have been calling for him for a long time, hours, perhaps, and he had not heard her; he knew that he would never forget this fact. In the overhead light, which was still on, must have been on since before he fell asleep, he saw her dishevelled hair, grey wisps stuck to her face by her tears. There was a foul smell, and he realized that she had vomited. He sank down beside her and put his arms round her. They wept together, his mother with relief at his arrival, Lewis himself at the prescience of his dream.

He did not know how long they stayed on the floor. He tried to move her but she was an awkward shape and weight. It seemed to him that she dozed a little, and he held her until the coldness of the night told him that he must get her back to bed. He tried to wake her, but she was not asleep. She even smiled at him and took his hand. He pulled the soiled dressing-gown round her, lifted her in his arms, and carried her back to bed.

Instinctively he went back to bed himself: he turned on his side and willed himself to sleep. To remain awake, with the image of her sickness in his mind’s eye, was more than he could bear: he thought he might die of it. He heard no sound from her room, and told himself that it was all over, whatever it was, that she was sleeping normally, and would wake in the morning to another normal day. But an inner trembling kept him awake, and when the window between the curtains turned grey he heard the sound again. By the time he reached her it had changed into a high-pitched and uncensored moan. In a panic he made for the telephone beside her bed and dialled for an ambulance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No,’ and then vomited again.

The ambulance men were very kind. They put her into a folding chair and told Lewis to get dressed. In the ambulance he held her hand, although she did not seem to know that he was there. They sped through the desolate dawn streets, her moaning the only sound he could register. At one point she opened her eyes and whispered, ‘Look after my son.’ Then they were at the hospital, and she was taken away from him. He watched the trolley being sped along a silent corridor, shot through with brilliant lights.

After half an hour a middle-aged nurse found him and told him to come back in the afternoon with her night clothes and her sponge bag. ‘Will she be all right?’ he asked, reassured in spite of himself by the woman’s competence and the normality of the sounds of breakfast being served. The nurse patted him on the arm. ‘We’ll see that she’s comfortable,’ she said.

He walked home, shivering. He welcomed the sight of an early milk float with tears of gratitude. Inside the house he told himself to be practical. He would make a cup of tea, clean up the bathroom, strip her bed and remake it for her return, pack her suitcase, make things pleasant, cancel the previous night. When it was properly morning he would telephone his cousin Andrew and then return to the hospital. He was troubled that he had not thought to ask the name of the ward she was in. They had told him to come back in the afternoon, but he would not wait. He opened windows wide, threw the soiled linen into the linen basket. Then he sat down on her bed to telephone his cousin. On the night table he noticed a box of pills. On the box was written, ‘One to be placed under the tongue as required.’

His hand went out to the telephone. At that moment it rang. A voice said, ‘Mr Percy? Mr Lewis Percy? One moment, please.’ There was a sound of laughter in the background. Then footsteps. ‘Mr Percy? I’m sorry, dear. There was nothing we could do. She went quite peacefully. We’d like you to come in some time today and collect the
form. Any time today. Are you all right? Mr Percy? Is there somebody with you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody with me.’ He replaced the receiver carefully, and sat on the bed, looking down at his large cold trembling hands.

3

Lewis reflected that Andrew’s wife’s dim personality was entirely matched by her ineffective jewellery. Fixing Susan with a glittering eye, which they thought was occasioned by grief, he saw that today, for the funeral, she had secured the collar of her white blouse with a hand-painted miniature of flowers in a gold frame. On a previous occasion she had worn a brooch in the form of a tennis racquet, with a very small pearl as the ball. Her necklace, of even smaller pearls, was too modest to be anything but real. Her limp brown hair was held back by a velvet Alice band, and she sat, in the late Grace Percy’s chair, examining her nails.

Lewis’s rage sprang from Susan’s occupancy of his mother’s chair, and, by extension, spread to cover the whole of her existence. He not only found her annoying; he found her entirely and mysteriously offensive. On her brief and unsatisfactory visits to their house, made when Grace Percy was alive, she was always mute, although he suspected that she had plenty to say to his cousin when they were alone together. She appeared to think that visits to Andrew’s unspectacular relations derogated in some subtle way from her own position. She was the sort of woman who only bestowed her full attention when she was talking about herself, and this she had to be coaxed to do if others became too exasperated by her silence. When asked her opinion on any matter, her normal response was, ‘I really wouldn’t like
to comment’, or, ‘I don’t think that’s a fair question’, thus bringing about a new silence. And yet the triumph of the will was there, Lewis thought; she was the type of wife who would collect her husband from the station, not out of her desire to see him, but so that he should not deviate on the way home to her. With that, joyless, vigilant. Lewis did not doubt that she was the stronger of the two. She had several bizarre and inflexible opinions which she passed on, like a spirit guide, to Andrew, who recounted them to the world at large. She thought there was something untrustworthy about people who lived in flats rather than houses. She doubted the virtue of countries other than England, and, at a pinch, and if she were feeling particularly broadminded, Scotland. She thought it beneath her dignity to enter another woman’s kitchen. When Andrew suggested a cup of tea after the miserable ceremony at the crematorium, she turned her attention, studiously, to the pleats of her skirt. Lewis got up furiously and went into the kitchen. Making as if to bang the door, and then securing it quietly, he heard her say, ‘Well, why not? It’ll give him something to do.’

He knew that his mood was dangerously unstable, that he should not be wasting his emotional energy in this way, should be concentrating on the awful facts of his mother’s disappearance and his own impending solitude. But his mother’s death was not a matter he wished to share with these strangers – for all who had not witnessed her last hours were strangers to him for evermore – and he knew that he would need the rest of his life to comprehend the fact that she was gone. His mother’s death was too serious an event to be admitted to general conversation. He postponed even a consideration of the fact until he should be alone. In those long night hours, sleepless, he would think of her, usually with pain. On this day he failed to remember any episode in their past which could be called happy. And yet he knew that they had been happy, in their largely wordless but companionable lives together. He knew that they had always had undying love for each other, the small boy, then the youth,
and the serious faintly smiling woman. Coming back from the funeral he had lowered his eyes so as not to see her absence at the window. His dreadful grief of the past two days had given way to a sort of numbness, as if everything that were to happen to him now were irrelevant, unimportant, unconvincing. Yet through the numbness came random, almost unwelcome flashes of feeling, flashes of dislike for Susan, of pity for Andrew, who managed to be – probably had to be – both pompous and humble, a great man at the office, Lewis suspected, but a poodle at home. Pouring the boiling water into the teapot, he found himself invaded by a rush of pure panic. How would he manage? What would he eat? Who would look after him?

In the two long days that it had taken Andrew to assume his position as head of the family – and he would be everlastingly grateful to his cousin for so doing – Lewis had sat, frozen with misery, on a footstool by the fire, trying to get warm. His lack of experience was terrible to him. He had never arranged a funeral before, had never even been to a funeral. He supposed that someone had kept him at home or taken care of him when his father had died. He could very faintly remember crying for his mother and being restrained by his grandmother from going after her. Even in the matter of building a fire he was ignorant, his experience having been limited to bringing in the coal for his mother. The labour of lighting it, on his first day alone in the house, had left him with smudges on his hands and wrists which he lacked the energy to remove. Higher and higher he had built the fire, piling on coal, unable to get warm, sitting endlessly, with the tears drying to a glaze on his cheeks, his face tightening with the heat which he could not feel. Not daring to go upstairs, past his mother’s open door, waiting until it was dark, and late, before forcing himself to bed, leaving the fire to smoulder and to burn the house down if necessary: he half wished that it might be so.

When hunger had finally driven him to the kitchen he had found only some biscuits and a tin of soup, yet he had not
been aware that the household arrangements were breaking down. Clearly there had been moments when the weight of the future had been too much for his mother to contemplate. His cousin, coming upon him as he stood in the kitchen, the tin of soup in one hand, tears coursing down his face, had been kind but also severe. ‘Be thankful it was over quickly,’ he had said. ‘Be thankful she didn’t suffer like your father. She was never the same after Uncle Jack’s death; nursing him like that – for months – left a permanent mark on her.’ But Lewis, who did not remember his father, had not been aware that his mother was lonely. And if she had lived for him, Lewis, what was wrong with that? He would have lived for her if she had stayed with him a little longer.