The Northern Clemency (92 page)

Nothing like this had ever happened between him and Alice, all the years of their marriage, and this was the longest period they had ever spent apart. Apart, to Bernie, meant “apart at night.” Night terrified him, now that the depth and breadth of his love and dependence was revealed to him, and he thought, over and over, of the first months of their lives together. He recalled in exact detail their first outings, to the pictures, for a coffee in an espresso bar, to the youth-club dance. He remembered how lovely she had looked in her boned dress, full-skirted with a fitted bodice, swirling out when they danced, the feel of the heavy ruched white cotton under his hand, white cotton with a print of electric blue Himalayan poppies all over it. He remembered that dress much better than her wedding dress; the wedding itself had been a blur, and now was reduced to nothing more than what the photographs had recorded. He remembered the different stages of their relationship, going from single outings to courting, and then her coming home to meet his mother and Uncle Henry, her sitting down willingly and helping unpack the boxes of stockings, was it?, that his mother had acquired somehow and was going to make a profit out of through Mrs. Harris’s market stall. How she’d done that cheerfully, only afterwards telling him she couldn’t believe his mother made her way like that, but she’d liked his uncle Henry. And then the engagement; they hadn’t had a party, as people tended to these days, and they’d known each other for what now seemed an incredibly short time, only six months before they’d got engaged, and in another six months they were married. That was thirty-five years ago. Ever since then he’d half taken her for granted, half existed in a state of astonished gratitude that had become utterly familiar, and only now was it being taken away from him. He’d thought he would lose it through the Insult, as the doctors called it, and now, quite unexpectedly, Alice was turning away from him, and he did not know why. In all those years she had never turned away from him. Most of all what broke his heart was, resurrected in the purest clarity, the false memory of her in a red kilt with a big safety-pin and a grey jersey under a duffel coat, her breasts held separately and apart as the bras of the period did, coming through the door of his friend’s party with two friends of her own and already laughing, and him looking at her and saying—and that must be a false
memory—to himself, “I’m going to marry that girl.” The first time he ever saw her.

The canteen at the Hallamshire was quite different in style from the one at the Northern General, and less brutally functional. There were trellises between tables, wound through with fake plastic ivy, and real potted plants on waist-high brass stands. Bernie had gone down there one Friday morning, and was sitting with a mug of coffee and a cheese scone. He had left Francis upstairs with Alice; she liked to have him to herself, Bernie thought, when he arrived after a few days, and he liked to see what progress she’d made in the few days since he’d seen her. It felt to Bernie that, in the weeks since the Insult, he and Francis had grown closer together than they had ever been before, but it was an intimacy of a peculiar kind. They had gone from not speaking openly to each other through reserve and restraint, the usual conditions of an English life, to a state in which nothing needed to be said because they both understood what the other was thinking, and what the other was dealing with. Bernie had said nothing to anyone, even Francis, about the way Alice was turning away from him. It seemed to him that it was paining Francis as much as it was him.

He had been in the canteen for an hour and a half, drawing out his cheese scone with a second mug of coffee—he had had breakfast, and in general he wasn’t hungry these days—when Francis came in, looking around to find him. “I’m just going to get a coffee,” he said. “Do you want anything?” Bernie waited, and in a moment Francis came back and sat down. He said immediately, “It’s Mum. She’s been thinking something, she hasn’t told anyone. She just told me, though.”

He had come in with Bernie that morning, and the difference in the way Alice greeted each of them had been marked. Bernie had disconsolately kissed her, Alice turning her cheek away as much as she could, and then said bravely that he’d leave the two of them to chat for a while and would be up in an hour or so. He’d left, and Francis, he said, just had to ask his mother what was wrong; the behaviour was so strange, and anything that suggested what the doctors had warned of, a change of personality, ought to be addressed rather than tactfully left alone. At first she had denied anything was on her mind; she conveyed to Francis that it seemed to her to be quite reasonable to be taking this attitude. She gave the impression that a “situation” had caused a rupture between her and Bernie, and nothing in this was her own fault.

Francis looked into his coffee, and then, haltingly, and with embarrassment, it came out. “It’s some kind of delusion,” he said. In the
moment of the Insult, a fantasy had been planted in Alice’s brain, and, with some kind of evil ingenuity, it had manufactured a grotesque explanation for the sequence of events that had ended with her lying in hospital.

“She doesn’t believe, or she doesn’t think she had a brain haemorrhage,” Francis said. “I don’t know whether she hasn’t taken it in, or that she doesn’t believe it.”

“What does she think happened?” Bernie said, aghast.

Francis shuffled with his hands. “She thinks—sorry, this is a bit difficult,” he said. “She thinks what happened was that you were both worried about me, that I didn’t have enough money, or something, and agreed that you would both—that you would enter into a suicide pact. And she thinks she tried to do it but you decided that you wouldn’t do it.”

“That’s—” Bernie said, but “ridiculous” didn’t seem to cover it.

“Look, I’ve been explaining to her it wasn’t like that,” Francis said. “She can’t remember—not just since the haemorrhage, but what was happening just before, with the cat and everything. Me bringing the cat up, I mean. I’ve been explaining to her what really happened.”

“Is she all right now?”

“I don’t know,” Francis said. “She was quite angry at first, she thought you’d told me to tell her another story, but I told her that wasn’t true. I talked to a doctor. They’re going to explain to her again what’s happened to her, that she couldn’t possibly have done it to herself.”

“I wish she’d said something,” Bernie said.

“It’s not easy,” Francis said, and Bernie had to agree with that; he had seen how hard it was to talk even to your son about what you were feeling and what you believed, and there had been as little of that in his own marriage. The trust that had existed between them had been most beautifully unspoken, and there had never been any misunderstanding before. He had relied on silence and love, as Alice had.

Francis had arranged for a doctor to come and explain the facts to Alice, but it seemed as if he had broken Alice’s belief with the conversation. He and Bernie came in together, Bernie feeling, of all things, shamefaced, and there was an immediate difference in the way Alice looked at him. She looked at him with quickness, alertness, surmise, and when he kissed her, she did not turn away from him. There was an expression of abashed silliness in her face, like a small child caught out and preparing an apology, and once they had talked it over in careful
steps, and the doctor had come in to explain the events of the last few weeks, they felt that the worst of it had been dispersed.

It was difficult for Francis to tell his father this; as he went through the explanation, he felt like a headmaster laying out a child’s wrongs. And Bernie felt this too, because he seemed to flush as if at something brought out into the open. There was nothing Francis could do: it was his plain duty to tell his father, and the doctor, what he had extracted from his mother. And the next day, as if to take the place of this delusion, another delusion arose. He arrived, and within ten minutes, his newly talkative mother was telling him that John Major had been paying a visit to the hospital the day before, that he had greeted her and asked her how she was. She was quite serious about it, making perfect sense, and by now Alice had returned so much to the state of reason that Francis found himself excusing himself, as if to go to the lavatory, and asking a nurse whether, by any chance …

For some reason, the delusion about the prime minister proved much harder to shift from Alice’s mind than the one about her husband. She had let her belief about Bernie go swiftly, and gratefully, after a couple of anguished assurances; and there must always have been some deep-buried anchor of love in her which had known that he could not have done such a thing, that, indeed, whatever her brain was telling her, he had not. But Alice knew that the prime minister visited hospitals, and his name had been planted firmly in her mind by the twice-daily question; she grew insistent, then impatient, then finally angry with Francis when he maintained that her mind was playing tricks on her. These delusions continued; Bernie was better than Francis at securing agreement when Alice needed to be assured that she had had a brain haemorrhage and had not attempted suicide unsuccessfully, that the prime minister, but, oddly, never the Queen, had been speaking to her, that Sandra had visited the night before, after they had left. If it had been up to Francis, he would have humoured her, have allowed her to go on believing whatever she wanted to believe in that now borderless no man’s land between memory and dream. It could do no harm. It was his father who firmly refused to stop correcting her. He had seen the nurses, who happily humoured her, saying, “That’s nice,” when she wondered out loud whether the prime minister had enjoyed his visit, and what prevented him saying the same sort of thing was the fact that, as they said, “That’s nice,” even though they were by Alice’s bed, they raised their voices and enunciated. There was nothing wrong with Alice’s hearing. It was just their habit when talking to anyone
old or demented, and it was the raise of the voice that convinced Bernie and made him insist to Francis that to give way to Alice was to give up on her. So they went on correcting, and gently insisting, and Alice, finally, would allow her delusion to be erased. Once it had gone, she never went back to it; but there was no shortage of others to replace it.

To Francis, his mother was running through the literary genres, one after another, and after a long period in which she was a baffling complex of clues, laid out like a room for the forensic reconstructive narrative of a Sherlock Holmes, after a period when, in her reawakened state, she spoke the murmurs and cryptic nonsense of an Imagist poem, after the nineteenth-century limelit melodrama, the collapses and the unexpected revivals, of her attack and its consequences and the
bildungsroman
of her slow improvement, there seemed here to be a science-fiction epic of the most abstruse, tawdry and terrifying variety. It seemed to Francis that his mother was in some H. P. Lovecraft fantasy of body-snatching and remote control, in which thoughts, beliefs, a whole new external world were being inflicted on her by some malevolent outside power. The world had been erased, or partly erased; what was familiar to her had been extracted and placed within a new, unreal world of delusions and phantoms. It was not, however, from outside that this parallel narrative was being imposed: it was coming from within Alice, as her passively receiving and interpreting brain burst all its bounds, as love or blood or rivers did, and finally created a world for her. They would recede in time, the doctors said, and took not much specific readerly interest in even the most elaborate of Alice’s constructions.

The alternative narrative taking place for Alice, in which an attempt at suicide, foiled, was rewarded by visits from the prime minister and, perhaps most upsettingly, from Sandra, tormented Francis in his three-day weekends, and in the end he thought, were he to write any of this down, he did not know whether he would choose to describe what had happened to him, or whether he would go on being the creator of the Gurganian Empire, and follow his mother’s sad and consoling delusions. Her beliefs, it seemed to him, made more narrative sense, had more narrative power, than what had actually happened; and, more than that, they contained within them some promise of redemption and defeat. The doctors were talking about the insertion of a tiny silver coil, to seal the source of the bleed. That seemed a fiddly result, a solution dramatic only to one who was actually present, compared to
the bounding heroes so clearly implied and required by the account his mother’s brain was giving of the thing which had happened to it, to her.

“But what about love?” the man who had called himself Timothy said. He was glittering as if with fever. The end of his nose, the corners of his glistening eyes, his mouth plumped with a rush of blood—pink as a white rabbit’s. “Have you thought, ever in your life, about that? What about love?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sandra said, bravely in the circumstances. “Go fuck yourself.”

They glared at each other.

The sun had long since set. For a while, she had been switching on one small lamp after another as the hours had gone by and the room sank into gloom. Each time she had done so with a feeling of being permitted to do so, as if he were her jailer in her own home, his eyes following her as she got up and turned on a light. From the restaurant terrace in the street below the calls of waiters had been succeeded by its usual music starting up—the old rumba you got so familiar with, night after night—and now the ebb and flow of conversation from its arriving crowd of customers. From the front, a block or two away, could be heard the hooting of car horns leisurely crawling up and down, promenading like humans. The phone had rung twice in the previous hour and a half, and it had been Stewart. The first time he’d left a message, the second time he’d put the phone down without speaking, though she’d known it had been him. She hadn’t made a move to answer the phone, and now, as it started ringing again, she decided not to answer the phone, not to make any kind of sudden move.

“We’d get on a lot better,” she said, after a long, conciliatory silence, “if you’d just sit down.”