Wait Till I Tell You (25 page)

For two weeks after that, Norman did not collect his mother after work. He had not yet met Denise, but he liked the piano tuner to whom he was apprenticed, and went back some evenings to have dinner with him and his wife. They had two rolls for the pianola that had been made from the actual playing of Rachmaninov.

‘We’ve no pianola, maybe, but the potential to hear that great player himself. You can look at those holes and just tell. Hearing it might be a disappointment. The piano would not be anything like the one he played. This way though, I see the intervals,’ said the piano tuner. ‘That’s how it is on paper. The holes don’t hold like the notes you hear. There’s a space around them.’

Ernest Cargill began to call round at the haberdasher’s. He bought bits of ribbon and yards of elastic, explaining that these were for tying mirrors in the cages of his budgerigars and holding the night-cosies close around the cages. He did not say who sewed him the elasticated cosies, or if he made them himself. One day, he bought two and a half yards of fawn wool, and asked for it to be wrapped, together with as many balls of white angora as would make a short-sleeved jumper. The soft balls and the folded cloth were left at the door for Peggy that night as she left the shop, wrapped in stout brown paper and tied with the kind of string that is reluctant to repeat its knotting in reverse.

Since she was a good housewife however, Norman’s mother slowly unpicked the string. Stan watched, not interested but offended at this unusual turn to his evening. The room was as it had been always in Norman’s life, a green kitchen up to waist height, cream up the rest of the walls, pipes under the sink coughing, the pulley of washing hauled up to the ceiling.

Peggy rolled the string into a tidy loop, waisted it with its end, and set it aside. She opened the parcel’s brown paper like a book and lifted up the kittenish angora, ball after ball. Each one she carried to the work bag that hung off the back of the chair she used, and stowed it. She behaved as though she were being lent these balls of wool just to look after for a time, for someone else.

Stan said, ‘Does this mean I’m to starve?’

Peggy said, and Norman recognised that she was now able to give because she had been given to, ‘I’ll do rich pastry with onion gravy over beef mince and the pie and cream to follow.’

Then her son knew that she had not been buying the cream that had recently appeared in their lives.

His father, he saw, was directly pleased about the dinner to come, too tired to consider its actual source. His mother wrapped the skirt length up in the brown paper. She put it away with the winter blankets in the wooden box on the stair.

As he watched the angora jumper take shape between his mother’s softly probing, softly conversing, knitting needles, Norman saw the new way she would be seen by Mr Cargill take shape in the white wool. She would be a woman fed with cream and dressed in wool – fed and dressed by him. He wondered if she knew how plain a small eventual surrender appeared to her son, or if she knew of it herself.

His father continued apparently unaware. This pleased Norman, for he did not think that any surrender to Mr Cargill by his mother need be definitive. He could imagine her accepting something quite innocent in the way of an offer – a trip to the pictures, a walk – and how surprised she would be and bothered by the spelling out of the unsaid. At that stage, Norman believed, he could still stave off Mr Cargill, perhaps with some offputting filial behaviour. Then it would be only a matter of weeks until Mr Cargill became another of the quiet jokes linking mother and son in a way that did not prejudice the father but gave them patience with him.

Peggy and Mr Cargill married on Norman’s twenty-eighth birthday. Although angora does not take dye and the jumper was not new, Peggy wore it, under a remodelled suit made of pre-war cloth. The furry wool over his mother’s breast took Norman’s attention. He thought of Mr Cargill’s head there, the airy animality of the wool in his nostrils. He wondered whether it had been his mother’s decision to wear the jumper, which might indicate an erotic bond between bride and groom, or Mr Cargill’s, which would just go to show he was a mean old brute.

Peggy was fifty that year, her new husband – Ernest – sixty-eight years old.

‘Lovely thing is, I’m retired. Or semi,’ Mr Cargill would say. ‘Semi meaning I still have to do as she says.’ At this he would indicate Peggy as though she had unfulfillable private whims.

Stan dealt with it in silence. How it took him was in one fell swoop. From being a taciturn fit man in early middle age, he adopted the manner and appearance of a broken grandfather. His pipe, that had been the fruity conclusion of each day, became his mouthpiece. He hid inside its smoke. Norman had the idea that once his father had sent out enough smoke he just absented himself, so that you might have been able to pass a hand clean through the wad of pipe smoke filling the kitchen chair on top of an old pair of corduroy legs. The beige tartan slippers that had only come out when Stan was ill were all he wore indoors now. He took to talking at night, outside, among the overblown cabbages and dithering moths. He would dig for hours, without energy or purpose, turning over the soil as though looking for something very small he had lost.

Stan’s ears and cheeks grew whiskery, his veins purple. He ate little, removing his teeth for longer periods of time each day until he put them in only for visitors. His eyes hardened to a babyish unadapting blue. He seemed to be concentrating on missing all he could, as if the implications of anything might be too great to support. He felt the furniture as he progressed through his small house, touching it with hands that were always on the verge of trembling. The tone of the furniture in the house loosened. Two window sashes frayed away. The casement window in the eaves was opened minutely further each night by the ivy’s furtive persistent growing.

Although Stan was ten years younger than Mr Cargill, it did not seem so in the first years of Peggy’s new marriage. It was as though she had carried an indulgence from time away from the house where Norman grew up and into the detached brick house she now shared with Ernest Cargill. Norman feared that there was something in marriage – and by this time he
had
met Denise – that filled a man with a temporary defiance of time, a fullness as brute but as desirable as whatever it is that makes an apple an apple, a pear a pear. Norman too, never having experienced this fullness, began to fear its loss. Before sleep, he plotted its attainment.

Resistant to finding himself one day deserted or widowed, Norman at this time resisted marriage.

He was visiting his father, sanding the back of a rough-running drawer, when there was a knocking at the back door.

Stan pushed himself up out of his chair and moved towards it, hollow-legged and slow, the slippers shuffling on the red oilcloth floor. The smoke sat where he had left it, over the chair.

It was Ernest Cargill, less weighty, less red, than he had looked before his marriage that had lifted time from him.

‘Sit down,’ he said to Stan.

‘It’s my house,’ said Stan.

‘You’ll need to sit down.’

‘I know what I need.’

‘You’ll need to get your father a hot drink,’ said his stepfather to Norman.

‘It’s his house,’ said Norman. There was a panting heart somewhere in the room, a hot unsaid phrase. As the youngest man of the three, linked through his mother to both the others, Norman listened to the silence and weighed it.

‘Go on, Dad,’ he said, ‘sit down.’

‘That’s right. That’s it,’ said Ernest Cargill.

Norman looked at his stepfather, not a man to come to a back door, nor one to show consideration for his wife’s first husband and his needs. All this talk of needing suggested that the chair, the hot drink were wanted to stem a need for more than merely rest or refreshment.

When he had the two stubbornly silent old men – for they seemed to have come closer in years by this contact with one another – sat down with cups of tea, Norman asked Mr Cargill, ‘Was it fatal?’

He did not understand where this question had come from and worried as he spoke that he might not make himself clear.

‘I mean to say: is my mother going to live? Or are we beyond that?’

Stan looked as though the idea of her death were not so far from the fact of her departure. He did not seem shaken, nor satisfied, but shrunk and cold. The latent trembling of his shiny-skinned hands ticked into action, that was all. He could only run down from here.

Mr Cargill stepped towards Stanley and shook him warmly by the beating hand, as though catching a bird.

‘
You
will understand what a blow this is to me, Stan,’ he said. ‘Only you, very likely. Since it could have been you she was married to.’

‘It was,’ said Stan.

Norman made the second cups of tea he could see were in order.

Four years later, he was still making cups of tea for the two old men, washing, cooking and cleaning for them, collecting their bandages, powders and pills. For his father had been made old by the same clot in Peggy’s brain that had widowed Mr Cargill when she fell down over the counter at the haberdasher’s, setting off a long hoop of curtain tape that bowled smoothly across the floor, havered and fell flat, dry as a spent coin.

It was not until he had nursed first his father and then the less destructible Mr Cargill until there was no more to be done that young Norman, born in 1921, was able to marry Denise and move into their first home together, the retirement apartment at the conjunction of one busy and one quiet road, where they lived with abandoned youthful carelessness within their love, even if it seemed to one passing that they were an old couple content to sit knitting and smoking under the gaze of a cat with a rhythmic tail and a clock that would not tell much more time.

Pass the Parcel

A year younger than the century, I tell the nurses, and watch the expressions form up on their blank young faces. Once, being a year younger than the century meant that I was thirteen, but now it means that I am some age for which I am accounted wonderful and at which no friend remains to me. I have tried to make friends with new people, but their destination is not the same as mine. They will come to rest in another time, when I will have become part of the past, a kind of compost for their own flowering. It doesn’t do to look too closely at the components of the compost, but once it has reduced to a fine-textured lumpless loam it will serve its purpose well enough. At the time, of course, we did not know what we were throwing upon the compost heap. Along with the old ways, constricting corsetry and weak emperors, we chucked a multitude of living bones. Those many wars were open-mouthed for food, and liked it fresh. The bodies that did come home had often left their minds behind for good.

We can’t seem to pass it on, the awful truth we know. It’s a parcel we can’t pass, tired and messy now, with out-of-date stamps and string too knotted to be worth saving. It’s been redirected so often there’s not much room for more words on the wrapping, but it always comes back to the sender. No one wants it. It’s not a nice present, the past that is mine.

Here’s where the difference is, as I see it, between being me and being the next-door old woman, lying in the bed light and grey as driftwood; it seems to me that her wits have stolen away from her, so she is no longer holding the parcel. She is living, I perceive, in the now, like a baby. Not that I envy her. She is like a baby in other ways, and must be moved and swabbed and powdered in a manner I hope she does not mind. I would mind. I don’t like people up close to me; I should hate them near me in that way. Having things done for me is my idea of hell. It is this streak that has kept me going; I’ve derived my energy from it. It kept up my appearance too, at least fifteen years longer than my poor child’s looks lasted. Her softness bloated her and blurred her features, while I have kept myself down to the bone with willpower, discipline, self-restraint. I have not been one to take sugar. You could not show me the occasion on which I have lost command, and so it is here in hospital although I am a year younger than the century, and have hair the colour of old thin polished forks, done like a child’s in an Alice band and hanging down my aching back. Here I wear clothes I know are not my own. They come from a room full of uncreasable garments chosen by the dead.

I shall not have a deathbed; it will be a chair. I shall meet death awake and sitting up, though I shall not rise to greet it. It will have come to relieve me of the parcel, which grows heavier in ways I do not care for, while the parts of the parcel that might once have appealed to me, the coloured and scented bows that held my life in shape like good sheets in a linen press, and the folded tissue of memories, seem to have gone to dust.

This had not been my understanding. The old people whom I knew when I was young remembered not the great impersonal events but the vinegar-and-fruitcake taste of farthing toffee, or the stripes on a spinning top. I have been awaiting these sweet visitations from my early life. But I find that those things I remember are facts, not feelings or sensations. What I recall is old news: wars and bombs, death plural or unnatural, great shiftings of boundaries and skies full of killing rain. The shinier events of the time in which I lived, the sort of events that are recorded in magazines rather than newsprint, have fallen away.

Remembering is accounted an indulgence. Old folk are meant to smile over their memories, turning the pages like a tired mother with her mid-morning coloured paper, in the certainty of small reliable gratifications well earned. If I ever possessed such memories, they have been collected by some operative keen to reduce clutter in the minds of old women. I am left with the dingy impacted weight of a million stored newspapers. As they rot down, they become drier and more acid, the events they record more monumental, arbitrary and heartless. I search my memory for scraps of colour. I enter more rooms stacked with towers of newspaper, great autumnal heaps of events – but bled of the colour of autumn. The rooms frequently display one wall blown off and wallpaper indecently open to the sky. I find no human traces, no boot or bowl or knife. Were I to find such a thing, what would I do? Put it away, certainly, for I have always insisted upon everything in its own place. I am the tidiest person I have ever known; I say it in all modesty. I could reduce the Milky Way to order, given time.