Playing for the Ashes (99 page)

I told myself that I had to know. I phoned her, but there was no answer. I phoned all day and into the evening. And the following afternoon I broke down.

I asked Chris could we go to Kensington now. I said I wanted to see Mother alone if he didn’t mind. Because things had been awkward between Mother and me for so long, I said. She’d be grieving, I said. She wouldn’t want someone who’s not family there, I said.

Chris said he understood. He’d drop me off, he said. He’d wait for me to phone him and then he’d fetch me back.

I didn’t ring the bell when I’d made the muscle-aching climb up those seven front steps. Instead, I let myself in with my key. I closed the door behind me and saw that the dining room door was shut as was the farther door to the morning room. Curtains were drawn over the distant window that overlooked the back garden. I stood in the resulting near-darkness of the entry. I listened to the profound silence of the house.

“Mother?” I called with as much self-assurance as I could muster. “Are you here?” Like Wednesday night, there was no response. I made my way to the dining room and opened the door. Light filtered into the entry, falling against the newel-post at the foot of the stairs.

A shoulder bag hung from this. I went to it. I ran my fingers along the soft leather A
flo
or board creaked somewhere above me. I raised my head, called, “Mother?” and then added, “Chris isn’t with me. I’ve come alone.”

I squinted up the stairs. They ascended into darkness. It was early afternoon, but she’d managed with curtains and doors to turn the house into a nighttime tomb. I couldn’t see anything but shapes and shadows.

“I’ve read the papers.” I directed my voice to where she had to be, on the second
flo
or of the house, standing just outside her bedroom door, leaning against the panels, her hands behind her clutching the knob. “I know about Kenneth. I’m so sorry, Mother.” Pretend, I thought. Pretend nothing has changed. “When I read about the fire, I had to come,” I said. “How awful for you. Mother, are you all right?”

A sigh seemed to float down from above although it might have been a gust of wind lightly hitting the curtained window at the end of the corridor. A rustle followed. And then the stairs themselves began to creak slowly as if a hundredweight were being lowered an inch at a time.

I moved myself back from the newel-post. I waited and wondered what we would say. How can I carry off this pretence, I wondered. She’s your mother, I told myself in reply, so you’ll have to. I rif
fle
d through my mind for something to say as she made her way down the first flight of stairs. As she moved across the passage above me, I opened the door to the morning room. I pulled the curtains away from the far corridor window. I went back to meet her at the foot of the stairs.

She paused on the mezzanine. Her left hand clutched the banister. Her right hand made a fist between her breasts. She was wearing the same dressing gown she’d put on at three in the morning on Thursday. But unlike three in the morning on Thursday, she seemed unpossessed of what Chris had seen as unusual energy and what I now realised had been tautly strung nerves.

I said, “When I read about him, I had to come. Are you all right, Mother?”

She descended the last half-flight of stairs. The telephone began ringing in the morning room as she did so. She didn’t give any indication that she heard the noise. It went on insistently. I looked towards the morning room and wondered about answering it.

Mother said, “Newspapers. Vultures. Plucking at the corpse.”

She was standing on the bottom stair, and in the light I’d let in from the open doors and uncurtained window, I could see how deeply the last day had altered her. Although she was dressed for it, she couldn’t have slept. Lines had become gouges on her face. Pouches of flesh hung beneath her eyes.

I saw she was holding something in her
fis
t, mahogany coloured against the ash of her skin. She raised the fist to her cheek and pressed her cheek against whatever she held.

She whispered, “I didn’t know. I
didn’t
, my darling. I’m swearing it. Now.”

“Mother,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were there.”

“Where?”

“In the cottage. I didn’t. I didn’t know.”

All at once my mouth felt like I’d been walking a month in the desert as she destroyed every possibility of pretence between us.

I felt the only answer against going faint was to concentrate on something outside the realm of my own spinning thoughts, so I concentrated on counting the double rings of the phone that still shrilled in the morning room. When the ringing finally stopped, I moved my concentration to what my mother still held to her cheek. I saw it was an old cricket ball.

“After your first century.” She whispered, with her eyes fixed on something only she could see. “We went to dinner. A group of us. What you were like that night. Buoyant. Life and laughter, I thought. So splendid and young.” She raised the ball to her lips. “You gave me this. In front of all those people. Your wife. Your children. Your parents. Other players. ‘Let’s give credit where credit is rightly due,’ you said. ‘I lift my glass to Miriam. She’s given me the courage to pursue my dreams.’”

Mother’s face crumpled. Tremors shook her hand. “I didn’t know,” she said against the worn leather ball. “I didn’t know.”

She walked past me as if I wasn’t there. She went down the corridor and into the morning room. I followed slowly and found her at the window, tapping her forehead against the glass. With each tap, she increased the force. She said only, “Ken,” with every tap.

I felt immobilised by fear, dread, and my own disability. What to do, I wondered. Who to talk to. How to help. I couldn’t even go below to the kitchen and engage in the simple task of fixing her a meal which she no doubt needed because I couldn’t bring it up to her once I’d cooked it and even if I could have done, I was terrified to leave her alone.

The telephone began to ring again. As it did so, she increased the strength with which she was hitting her head against the glass. I felt my legs start to cramp. I felt my arms weaken. I needed to sit. I wanted to run.

I went to the phone, lifted the receiver, then replaced it. Before it had a chance to begin ringing again, I punched in the number of the barge and prayed that Chris had gone directly back once he’d dropped me off. Mother continued to bang her head against the window. The panes of glass rattled. As the phone rang on the other end of the line, the
fir
st pane cracked. I said, “Mother!” as she increased both the force and the rhythm of her pounding.

When I heard Chris answer, I said, “Come back. Hurry,” and I hung up the phone before he could respond. The pane of glass broke. Its pieces shattered on the windowsill and then on the floor. I went to Mother. She’d cut her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice the blood that ran in a trickle into the corner of her eye and then down her cheek like a martyr’s tears. I took her arm. I tugged on it gently. I said, “Mother. It’s Olivia. I’m here. Sit down.”

She said only, “Ken.”

“You can’t do this to yourself. For God’s sake. Please.”

A second pane broke. Glass tinkled to the floor. I could see the new cuts begin to ooze blood.

I jerked her back towards me. “Stop it!”

She pulled away. She went back to the window. She continued to pound.

“Goddamn you!” I shrieked. “Stop it! Now!”

I struggled to get closer to her. I reached around her. I grabbed her hands. I found the cricket ball, snatched it from her, and threw it to the floor. It rolled into a corner beneath an urn stand. Her head turned then. She followed the ball with her eyes. She lifted a wrist to her forehead and brought it away smeared with blood. Then she began to weep.

“I didn’t know you were there. Help me. Dearest. I didn’t know you were there.”

I guided her to the chesterfield as best I could. She shrank into a corner with her head against the arm and her blood dripping onto the ancient lace antimacassar. I watched her helplessly. The blood. The tears. I shuf
fle
d into the dining room where I found the decanter of sherry. I poured myself one and threw it down my throat. I did the same to another. The third I clutched in my
fis
t and, eyes on it to keep from spilling, I returned to her.

I said, “Drink this. Mother, listen to me. Drink this. You’ve got to take it because my hands don’t work well enough to hold it for you. D’you hear me, Mother? It’s sherry. You need to drink it.”

She’d stopped speaking. She seemed to be staring at the silver buckle on my belt. One of her hands plucked at the antimacassar beneath her head. The other gripped the tie of her dressing gown. I inched my hand forward and held the sherry out to her.

“Please,” I said. “Mother,” I said. “Take it.”

She blinked. I set the sherry onto the games table next to her. I blotted her forehead with the antimacassar. The cuts weren’t deep. Only one of them continued to bleed. I pressed the lace to it as the doorbell rang.

Chris took over with his usual competence. He took one look at her, rubbed her hands between his own, and held the sherry to her mouth until she’d drunk it down.

“She needs a doctor,” he said.

“No!” I couldn’t imagine what she’d say, what a doctor would conclude, what would happen next. I modulated my voice. “We can deal with it. She’s had a shock. We need to get her to eat. We need to get her to bed.”

Mother stirred. She lifted her hand and examined the wrist that was smeared with blood, dried now to the colour of wet rust. “Oh,” she said. “Cut,” she said. She put the wrist to her mouth. She cleaned herself with her tongue.

“Can you get her something to eat?” I asked Chris.

“I didn’t know you were there,” Mother whispered.

Chris looked her way. He started to respond.

I said, “Breakfast,” in a hurry. “Cereal. Tea. Anything. Chris, please. She needs food.”

“I didn’t know,” Mother said.

“What’s she—”

“Chris! For God’s sake. I can’t get down to the kitchen.”

He nodded and left us.

I sat next to her. I kept one hand gripped on to the walker just to feel something solid and unchangeable beneath my fingers. I said in a low voice, “You were in Kent on Wednesday night?”

“I didn’t know you were there. Ken, I didn’t
know
.” Tears slid from the corners of her eyes.

“Did you set a
fir
e?”

She brought her fist to her mouth.

“Why?” I whispered. “Why did you do it?”

“Everything to me. My heart. My mind. Nothing will hurt you. Nothing. No one.” She bit her index finger as she began to sob. Between her teeth, she took the meaty part of the finger from knuckle to first joint. All the while she wept.

I covered her fist with my hand. I said, “Mother,” and tried to pull it away from her mouth. She was far stronger than I would have imagined.

The phone began to ring again. It was cut off abruptly, so I supposed Chris had picked it up in the kitchen. He would fend off journalists. We had nothing to fear there. But as I watched my mother, I realised that it wasn’t the phone calls of journalists I feared. I feared the police.

I tried to calm her by putting my hand on the side of her head, by smoothing down her hair. I said, “We’ll think this through. You’ll be all right.”

Chris returned with a tray that he took into the dining room. I heard the sound of plates and cutlery clicking onto the table. He came into the morning room. He put his arm round Mother’s shoulders, saying, “Mrs. Whitelaw, I’ve made you some scrambled eggs,” and he helped her to her feet.

She clung to his arm. One of her hands climbed his chest to rest on his shoulder. She examined his face so closely it looked as if she was committing it to memory. She said, “What she did to you. The pain she caused you. It was mine when it wasn’t. I couldn’t bear that, darling. You weren’t meant to suffer any longer at her hands. Do you see?”

I could tell Chris was glancing my way, but I kept my face averted by concentrating on rising from the chesterfield and positioning myself within the three-sided protection of the walker. We went into the dining room. We sat ourselves on either side of Mother. Chris picked up a fork and put it in her hand. I drew the plate closer to her.

She whimpered. “I can’t.”

Chris said, “Have some, won’t you? You’ll need your strength.”

She let the fork clatter to the plate. “You told me you were going to Greece. Let me do this for you, darling Ken. I thought. Let me solve this problem.”

“Mother,” I said quickly. “You need to have something to eat. You’ll be talking to people, won’t you? Journalists. The police. The insurance…” I dropped my eyes. The cottage. Insurance. What had she done? Why? God, what a horror. “Don’t talk any more while the food’s getting cold. Eat
fir
st, Mother.”

Chris scooped up some eggs and returned the fork to her hand. She began to eat. Her movements were sluggish. Each one of them seemed thought out at great length before it was made.