Flight (12 page)

Jill Foley lived out her long, contented widowhood in a 1930s house called White Gates, which had white gates, a crunchy gravel drive, and half an acre of garden. She had not lost her interest in flowers, and her garden – the English garden she had always longed for – became over the years her chief occupation. The house was in a built-up area rich in superstores, light industry, and sports fields. Beyond the suburbs, it was neither quite in London nor quite in the country. It was near the Thames, but not in sight of it. Martagon thought of it as sub-rural nowhere-land. It was everything that he most disliked about what England was becoming. He nearly always lost his way nowadays, when he drove to White Gates, and generally arrived in a bad temper.

As Martagon joined the slow crawl of traffic leaving central London towards the south-west, he noticed that the year was turning. The green of the trees was dull and dusty; some of their leaves were already yellowing. As he drove, he was still thinking about that last Tyrolean holiday, remembering how he had scampered off a mountain track to pee in the pine forest while his parents walked on. His pee made a dark puddle in the squidgy forest floor. For fun, he ran further into the forest, zigzagging between the pines, arms outstretched, being a plane. Looking around, he could no longer see the path, or his parents. There were bad smells of things rotting, and weird noises from the dark pines. He began to run, and tripped on a root, falling on his face on the dank earth. He got up again and ran first in one direction, then in another. The forest looked the same whichever way he turned. He shouted for Mummy, for Daddy, hearing his little-boy voice thin and weak, muffled by the encircling trees. He shouted and shouted, and began to cry. He was
lost.

Back with his parents on the path, he affected bravado. ‘I wasn't really lost, I was only pretending. I'd have found my way back. You were lost, I wasn't. I'd have found you all right if you hadn't come looking for me.'

‘It was an ordeal, wasn't it? You were Christian in
Pilgrim's Progress,
or one of the Knights of the Round Table on a quest.' His mother connived, as she would, with his face-saving strategy.

His father was a man for accuracy, for keeping the accounts straight.

‘Ah, now, he was only having a pee. It wasn't a quest or an ordeal, or a trial.' Mr Foley's illness made him even more irritably pedantic than usual.

‘It was, it was a test of character. I think he was very brave.'

Martagon's mother's appearance was fixed in his imagination and memory at about this time; it tallied with the leather-framed photograph of her which she packed in his suitcase to take to boarding-school that autumn, and which he still had. Crossing Hampton Court Bridge, he saw in his mind's eye her fluffy fair hair, her round blue eyes, and the silver brooch in the shape of a tortoise that was pinned on the lapel of the green coat she had worn for years.

In the past, he had gone to White Gates for Sunday lunch quite often. In the early days of his friendship with the Harpers he had sometimes taken them along with him. His mother liked bustling around providing for the ‘young people', and in good weather they ate at a table in her garden. But these days he didn't go to see her nearly as often as he should – and not only because he was working abroad most of the time and, when he was back, dreaded the long time-wasting drive. She greeted his rare but regular telephone calls with ‘Well, hello, stranger! I thought you'd forgotten all about me. I've not been too well, you know.' The archness and the reproach irritated him, so that he left it even longer before calling again.

When he did go down to see her, she always seemed pretty well, though increasingly forgetful. She would press him to stay for a meal, for the night – the spare-room bed was always made up for him, just in case. This irritated him too, because it made him feel guilty. He would smilingly refuse to stay for the meal, even if there was a chicken already cooking in the oven. He never, ever, stayed a night. There was something about her yearning eagerness for his company that hardened his heart and made him recoil. If he had had a wife and children, he would be easier with her and less defensive. What he was defending himself against was becoming one half of a little unit, mother and son, all in all to one another, like when he was a young boy. He was ashamed of his lack of generosity but could not help himself. In any case, she never complained. She just let him go.

*   *   *

The white gates stood open. He glanced at the garden, untidy now with a shapeless, lolling, late-summer luxuriance. If his mother had been well, she would have disciplined the shrubs and herbacious plants, cutting back, shaping, staking, dead-heading. Martagon parked on the drive. He went to the nearest flower-bed and picked an overblown red dahlia. Audrey the cleaning lady, who must have been listening for the sound of his tyres on the gravel, stood at the open front door.

‘You didn't need to do that, she's got flowers upstairs already. Your mum's in her bed. Been there ten days now, says her legs won't carry her any further. She's been waiting for you. Father Damian is expected, too.'

Audrey panted upstairs after him. She halted him on the landing outside the bedroom door. ‘It can't go on like this, you know. I can't cope. Not the way she is. It's too much, at my age. You're going to have to make arrangements. I'm fond of her all right, but I can't take the responsibility. I'm not family and I've got worries enough of my own.'

‘I'll see to everything now, Audrey. I'll come and talk to you in a minute.'

*   *   *

His mother lay in bed, sunken and diminished, her face creased and yellow. Her shoulders were wrapped in the worn old dust-grey pashmina shawl he remembered from childhood. He stuck the red dahlia in a vase of mostly dead Michaelmas daisies on her bedside table, kissed her forehead, and stroked the shawl. ‘You're in fashion, Mum. All the girls in London have pashminas now, in all the colours of the rainbow.'

She seemed unaffected by his arrival. He sat down on the chair beside her bed. ‘Mum? How are you? The garden's looking pretty good.'

‘Paradise is a little disordered right now. All I want is to understand,' she said. ‘Men don't want to understand. They want to be understood. No, not quite that, even. They want to be forgiven.'

‘Do you really think that?' Martagon, deprived of the expected initial ceremony of exclamations and embraces, struggled to join her in her flight of fancy from a standing start. ‘Men do want to understand. They have to. In my job, for instance, I have to understand a whole lot of things, or the buildings and bridges would just fall down.'

‘Those are “how” questions, not “why” questions.'

‘Mum, how long have you been ill? Why didn't you tell me?'

She said nothing and turned her head aside.

‘Look, here I am, asking you a perfectly good “why” question, and you don't answer.'

‘Your “why” questions are never the right ones. They never were.'

‘Tell me something then, anything.'

She took a deep breath and began to talk fast. ‘I was turning out the drawers. Sorting old papers, throwing things away. I came across some letters to your father, dozens of them, from a girl, or a woman, I don't know who she was. Something came apart inside me, like the strands of a string, and I won't ever put it together again. It was – what is the word? Something like “definitive”.'

Terminal, thought Martagon, she means terminal. But he did not supply her with the word.

‘Oh, Mum, we know what Dad was like, he wasn't that sort of person, it can't have been important, you know he adored you.'

‘What shocks me most was that I never guessed, that I couldn't tell. It was probably all my fault.'

‘What have you done with the letters?'

‘I boiled them.'

‘You
what?
'

‘I boiled them all up in my preserving pan. With sugar.'

‘What did you do that for?'

‘To preserve them. I put it all in jars. I've been waiting for you, to give you this,' she said, indicating a plastic Sainsbury's bag lying on the bed beside her hand. ‘It's very important.'

What did Martagon expect? More letters, family documents, photographs, perhaps.

He peered into the bag then tipped its contents out on to the patchwork quilt. All there was inside were two chocolate digestive biscuits and dozens of bits of newspaper torn up very small.

‘Mum? What's all this?'

He knew her memory had been getting bad. She had always been what people call ‘original', which can be a nice way of saying ‘eccentric'.

‘Can't you see? It's obvious.'

He looked at the scraps of paper and the biscuits.

‘You tell me.'

‘These are my sins.'

‘The biscuits?'

‘Don't be silly. All
these
…' and she picked up handfuls of the scraps and let them flutter and fall back on to the bed and on to the floor beside the bed. ‘My sins.'

Martagon took a deep breath. ‘That's an awful lot of sins. I can't really believe you have been so sinful.' He tried a little laugh.

‘If you take them away now,' she said, ‘I shall be absolved.'

‘Easy!' He began to gather up the pieces of paper and to stuff them back into the plastic bag.

‘Not in there! Not in there!' She tipped all the bits of paper out again. ‘You can't take my soul.' She clasped the plastic bag to her chest.

‘I don't want your soul, Mum. I really don't. You hang on to your soul. I can take your sins away in my pocket.' He proceeded to stuff them in handfuls into his jacket pocket, while she watched him carefully. ‘They've all gone now, OK?'

‘There's some down there – on the floor.'

He picked them up. She lay back, stroking the plastic bag, fatigued.

‘What about the biscuits?'

‘There was one for your father and one for you.'

‘Do you want me to take them away too?'

‘You might as well, now. Nothing is for ever.'

He put the two biscuits into his other jacket pocket. She never took her eyes off him. They could hear voices downstairs; Father Damian had arrived. He was parish priest at the nearby church of Our Lady of Dolours, which Martagon's mother pretended was called Our Lady of Dollars, since Father Damian was always collecting for something or other.

‘Pass me my brush and comb,' she said.

Martagon sat in the background, on her dressing-table stool, while his mother exercised her remaining powers of enchantment on her old friend the priest.

‘What do you think heaven will be like, Father?'

‘I fear the worst,' said Father Damian. ‘I fear the worst, I really do. Heaven is always described, by those who profess to know, in terms of emotions – peacefulness, happiness, that kind of thing. Not much there to occupy the enquiring mind, I fear.'

‘We won't have minds, will we, in heaven?'

Father Damian clicked open his holy box of tricks and extracted a thin white stole of office. He put it round his neck. ‘In that case,' he said, ‘my requirement will be for a very moderate heaven, since mindless I am nothing, and my emotions tend to be only moderate in their intensity. Are you ready to make your confession, now, Mrs F?'

‘I already made a confession of my sins,' she said, ‘to my son.'

‘Ah,' said Father Damian. ‘But I haven't heard them for a month, Mrs F, have I? I've been looking forward to giving you absolution.'

‘Oh, all right,' she said, ‘I don't mind. You always do hate not to be in on everything.'

‘This is not about me,' said Father Damian. ‘It's hardly even about you. It is about Him. He absolutely insists.'

As Martagon left the room he heard the two of them wrangling about their respective notions of the God in whom neither of them really believed. Or did they? They are both as mad as hatters, he thought. He sat in the spare bedroom on the bed that was always made up ready for him, and looked out over the neglected garden.

When Father Damian had teetered off down the stairs, Martagon went back into his mother's room. She was looking pleased with herself.

‘I really gave him something to think about today,' she said. ‘He tries to get his own back because, of course, it used generally to be the other way round. What he really liked was confessing his own sins to me, in the old days. I used to put a tea-cosy on my head and look very severe. We did it in the kitchen.'

‘Mother!'

‘It was only a game, darling. We were younger then. You mustn't worry.' Suddenly tired, she sank down in her pillows. ‘I'll tell you how I knew that I had got old. You must remember it, for when it happens to you. It was when I found myself sitting in a chair in the middle of the morning and doing nothing. Not thinking what I was going to do next, not reading the paper, not mending something, not watching TV or listening to the radio, not thinking even. Just sitting.'

And then, in a frightened whisper: ‘Has my life been quite pointless?'

‘Of course it hasn't…' He catalogued her achievements as well as he could. ‘You looked after me, you looked after Dad, you've had lots of friends, you are a lovely person and we all love you, and you made your lovely Paradise garden.'

‘I grew a purple foxglove once. Or, rather, it grew itself, among the others at the bottom of the garden. Self-seeded. There it was. Not the ordinary pinky-purple they all are, but a real, dark, velvety, royal blue-purple, with black speckles inside. It was absolutely gorgeous.'

‘You never showed me.'

‘You were probably away. When the flowers began to go over I tied a ribbon round the stem so I would know which it was. I let the seeds ripen and saved the lot. I thought I would raise lots of purple foxgloves and become famous, they would be called Foley's Foxglove, or
Digitalis purpurea v. Foliensis.
I even wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society about it. But nothing happened. The seeds didn't germinate. Not a single one.'