My Animal Life(26)

And I wonder, too late, looking back, whether all the newfangled pickled and spiced and sugared concoctions which Mum fell upon delighted, dry-roasted, cook-chilled, marinated — might have had something to do with the cancer that killed her.

But before the final reckoning was drawn up for my parents, there was time for years of ‘lux’, and some real luxury, brought to their feet by the river of age. Thanks to the Travel Club of Upminster (bless you, oh Travel Club of Upminster, now deceased, which flew plane-loads of pensioners off to the sun), Vic and Aileen found they could spend January and February abroad. As my father’s neck grew stiffer and his fingers more knotted, as his pounding pace faltered and shortened into the small-stepping shuffle of Parkinson’s, as my mother’s right shoulder began to ache, they longed for warmth, for the winter in Norfolk is harsh, with winds coming straight from Siberia and not much cover, on their little modern road with its newly planted, slow-growing shrubs. Then through one or other of their new coevals, their new classmates, they heard you could spend the winter in Portugal, land of almond blossom and beach-cafés, for less than the cost of your normal central heating. Moreover, ‘in four or five-star hotels! Including meals!’ They could hardly believe what they were telling us.

Five-star hotels. Did the skinny seventh of a seventh of a seventh ever dream she would get to stay in a luxury hotel with a balcony over the beach, not for a week but for months? As Vic became weaker and his glaucoma worsened, they were whisked not long after Christmas by the local taxi from their bungalow all the way to Gatwick, then into a disabled buggy that carried them painlessly all the way to their plane. Taxis. Airports. So far from the streets they were born in. My mother, who had always been frightened of flying, decided not to be. She was a pragmatist: ‘What’s the point of being frightened? You have to get on with it.’

But sometimes there’s good reason to be frightened. In 1990, Mum must have repressed her fear and her sense that something was wrong, as all her life she had repressed her emotions, tried to placate and please. She was a long way from home, amongst the almond blossom, with the balcony over the strip of beach and the blazing sea, taking the same dazzling walks every day, the same question waiting when they came back to the room. She had only her husband with her, with whom her habit was concealment. When her digestion became more erratic, there were other things she could blame: the hotel kitchens, eating too much or too little, the heat. Constipation, then diarrhoea. ‘I’m fine.’ But then she was home and the evidence was undeniable, brutal, she could feel it, hard, in her abdomen. Now she had to tell. ‘Vic, I’ve found a lump.’

But I don’t have to tell that story, not yet. I don’t have to see it all happen again. In life it came too fast, in this book I can keep her with me, my beloved mother, until her loss can be borne. And I have to remember (because tragedy sits heavier in the scale-pan than everyday contentment) that she told me, more than once, during those last Norfolk years of retirement, ‘I like my life, Marg. I hope you know I like my life. And when it’s just Dad and I, we get on fine.’ When the children were there, Dad was more ‘on edge’, she explained, ‘although you know he loves to see you’.

But she said, ‘I like my life.’ How many people can say as much? And she said something else as well, when asked. ‘After I went back, he never hit me again.’

There were things she could add up as triumphs. She drove the car (they got their first car in 1970, when they were both in their fifties; this in itself was a triumph); passed her test, to Dad’s fury and disbelief, before he did; as his eyes declined, she became for the last few years the only driver. Mum in the driver’s seat! She was a star in her creative writing class, popular for her quick wit, her one-liners, her Church gift for telling jokes. (Rarer in women, this talent bypassed me and went straight to my daughter. My husband says, ‘You’re funny but you can’t tell jokes,’ which is true; I can never remember the punch line, nor indeed the beginning.) She got her degree, her BA, from the Open University, aged sixty-four, and that mattered enormously to her. And the books she read for the politics and society modules filled her with indignant delight, fuelling the growing socialism she hid from her husband.

Why? Because she could not let him think the Gees had won the ideological battle. I remember sitting with her in the sunny kitchen-diner where Mum and the rest of the family always gathered while Vic presided alone in his red velvet Parker-Knoll armchair in ‘the front room’ next door, drinking crimson Ribena, often in a wine-red woollen waistcoat, mostly out of earshot though every so often he would call through, ‘What was that, Aileen?’ Mum was full of excitement about an article she was reading for her Open University course that told her the numbers of barristers, judges, top civil servants and cabinet ministers who came from public schools. ‘Eighty-five per cent,’ she announced to me happily, green eyes flashing across the kitchen table, smiling as if it was tremendous news; reinvigorated by this insight into a bad old world where nothing much had changed since she was small and poor — except that she and Vic and their children and other families like ours, by a miracle, thanks to the war and the welfare state and in particular free education, were no longer at the bottom of the heap, no longer poor, no longer working-class. ‘Can you believe it, eighty-five per cent!’