My Animal Life(76)
At his funeral, all his children spoke. I chose Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.’ He was a fearful man who no longer had anything to be afraid of; he was a brave man despite his fear; he had always, unstintingly, uncomplainingly, supported us. Home was what he lived for and he loved us absolutely, with a blind, worry-filled, concentrated love. He was fiercely proud of each one of us, and prayed for us each night on his knees, though he was too obstinate to go to church. His belief in me helped me to write. He told Aunty Kit I would be a great writer. My mother ferried this back to me, and though he was formally unqualified to make the judgement, that generous faith surged like a wave behind me.
I imagine my father slipping once again through the golden fields of grain between Stony Stratford and Wolverton, sloping home through the late sun, light on his small feet, stopping to dribble and kick a stone, his check Viyella shirt soft and warm on his neck, his pale blue painter’s and meteorologist’s eyes as keen as they were when he was a boy, enjoying and naming the gentle feathers of cirrus cloud high in the sky, nothing to worry about, no one to fret, the money he had earned a friendly weight in his pocket, going home for a rest now, Vic Gee of Wolverton, sure he would be welcome at last, going home.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the winter’s barren rages.
Thou thy earthly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Mum died exhausted, herself, six months later. At least she had lived alone, and for herself, for a while, and danced in the kitchen to her tapes, and come to London, and watched The Sound of Music tucked up in bed with her adored Rosa, and met my friends, who liked her; and at home, made a friendship, unmonitored by Dad, with her witty neighbour Janet, and rode her red bike, and drove off to Weybourne every morning before breakfast to go swimming.
And then there were the weeks we spent together, Mum and I, a final gift from the gods before everything was taken away. We had never had enough time à deux: never had a mum-and-daughter day out, or lunch out, let alone a mum-and-daughter holiday. Dad was jealous even of the coffees we had, at the Copper Kettle, in Billingshurst, when we were shopping. He would tap his watch: ‘What took you so long?’
Now I came to stay with Mum on her own, and we had a month of amity and happiness, Marg and Mum, Mum and Marg. My husband let me go, as he always let me go, as Vic could never let Aileen go. I wrote in the day, in the warm cedar shed, and in the evening we ate delicious meals and drank sherry and watched TV. And my mother bought clothes. After a lifetime of ‘not spoiling herself’, she spent the small reserve of money in the bank on jackets and skirts and blouses, all in the bright colours she loved, mostly scarlet. Maybe she had a premonition, one of her rare and unlucky premonitions, that there would be no use for the money later.
Mum explaining the world to me. She said, ‘I grew up in the woods and fields. Scatter me in the woods and fields.’
On the station platform at Sheringham, seeing me off on an autumnal evening after the happy month we had spent together, a wintry chill in the air but the sky midnight blue and drenched with small bright stars, Mum held my hand in the dark. Our living hands, flesh over the bone. There weren’t many passengers. The train was late. She said, ‘I feel fine, let’s wish for a couple of years. Three. Five.’ ‘Yes,’ I said fervently. ‘I’m wishing.’ ‘How about seven?’ she said. ‘Seven,’ I agreed, clutching at her living hand, but the night felt cold, and inside me some voice was saying, ‘Not seven’, and the train for Norwich shunted into the station.
Three weeks after I went back to London, by a random side-blow of fate, perhaps through overworking on the novel in our first house, where the new central heating wasn’t yet installed, I was in hospital with pneumonia, taken in as an emergency with a sky-high temperature and put on intravenous antibiotics while I lay there seeing visions of crystalline architecture that are, it seems, a side-effect of brain chemistry in fever. Coming out weak and thin, I had been home only a few days when I got the phone call from my mother. She had always asked for so little, but now she was urgent and direct, as only once before, when my father was dying. ‘Margaret, please come. Will you come?’
Mum had woken up to find she had turned yellow, and was very afraid. She had arranged an appointment with the doctor, knowing that if this was jaundice, it probably came from her liver. After that call I went to Norfolk, and did not leave her.
Next day Mum’s face was more yellow than before. We visited the surgery together. The doctor, who knew her history, looked stricken, but agreed there was more than one possible explanation. We begged for some that weren’t cancer, and he gave them, but in his eyes we could see he did not believe them. ‘Have you been losing weight?’ he asked my mother. ‘No,’ she said. And then, ‘Only a few pounds.’ He was nodding his head. That was what he expected.