Aunt Milly had no humour at all, but she could vaguely detect when she was being teased, and she did not dislike it. But she was obdurate.
‘You can always invent reasons for not doing the right thing,’ she said at the top of her voice.
Soon I went upstairs to my mother. I expected to find her asleep, for the room was dark except for a nightlight; but, in the shadowy bedroom, redolent with eau-de-Cologne, brandy, the warm smell of an invalid’s bedroom, my mother’s voice came, slurred but distinct: ‘Is that you, dear?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was Milly shouting about?’
‘Could you hear?’
‘I’m not quite deaf yet,’ said my mother, stuffing in the flickering light, smiling with affronted humour, as she did when, at nearly fifty, she heard herself described as middle-aged. Her physical vanity and her instinctive hold on youth had not abandoned her. ‘What was she shouting about?’
‘Nothing to worry you,’ I said.
‘Please to tell me,’ said my mother. She sounded exhausted, but she was still imperious.
‘Really, it’s nothing, Mother.’
‘Was it about Za’s money?’ Her intuition stayed quick, realistic, suspicious. She knew she had guessed right. ‘Please to tell me, dear.’
I told her, as lightly as I could. My mother smiled, angry but half-amused.
‘Milly is a donkey,’ she said. ‘You’re to do nothing of the sort.’
‘Of course, I shouldn’t think of it.’
‘Remember, it’s some of the money I ought to have had. Please think of it as money I’ve given you. You’re to use it to make your way. I hope I see you do it.’ Her tone was firm, quiet, unshaken, and yet worried, I noticed, with discomfort, how easily she became out of breath. After saying those words to me, she had to breathe hard.
‘It’s a great comfort to me’, she went on, ‘to see the money come to you, dear. It’s your chance. We shall have to think how you’re going to take it. You mustn’t waste it. Remember that you’re not to waste it.’
‘We won’t do anything till you get better,’ I said.
‘I hope it won’t be too long,’ said my mother, and I caught the tone again, unshaken but apprehensive.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘I’m not getting on as fast as I should like,’ said my mother.
As I said good night, she told me: ‘I’m angry with myself. I don’t like lying here. It’s time I made myself get well.’
She was undaunted enough to tell Aunt Milly, on each of the next two days, that I was on no account to spend any of the legacy in getting my father’s discharge. My mother stated haughtily that it was not to happen. She explained to Aunt Milly that it was only right and just for her son to possess ‘her money’, and that money must be used to give him a start. In a few years, Lewis would be able to settle Bertie’s affairs without thinking twice.
Aunt Milly had to restrain herself, and listen without protest. For by this time she, like all of us, realized that my mother might not live.
She seemed to have, Dr Francis explained to me, the kind of heart failure that comes to much older people. If she recovered, she would have to spend much of her time lying down, so as to rest the heart. At present it was only working strongly enough just to keep her going without any drain of energy whatever.
From our expressions, from the very air in the house, my mother knew that she was in danger. Her hope was still fierce and courageous. She insisted that she was ‘better in herself’. Impatiently she dismissed what she called ‘minor symptoms’, such as the swelling of her ankles; her ankles had swollen even though she lay in bed and had not set foot on the floor for three weeks.
One Sunday morning Dr Francis spent a long time upstairs. Aunt Milly, my father and I sat silently in the front room.
Dr Francis had come early that morning, so as not to miss the service. The church bell was already ringing when he joined us in the front room. He had left his hat on the table, the tall hat in which he always went to church, the only one in the congregation. I thought he had come to take it, and would not stay with us. Instead, he sat down by the table and ran his white, plump fingers over the cloth. The skin of his face was pink, and the pink flush seemed to shade up to the top of his bald dome. His expression was stern, resentful, and commanding.
‘Mr Eliot, I must tell you now,’ he said. His voice was hoarse as well as high.
‘Yes, doctor?’ said my father.
‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to get over it,’ said Dr Francis.
The church bell had just stopped and the room was so quiet that it seemed to have gone darker.
‘Isn’t she, doctor?’ said my father helplessly. Dr Francis shook his head with a heavy frown.
‘How long has she got?’ said Aunt Milly, in a tone subdued for her but still instinct with action.
‘I can’t tell you, Mrs Riddington,’ said Dr Francis. ‘She won’t let herself go easily. Yes, she’ll fight to the last.’
‘How long do you think?’ Aunt Milly insisted.
‘I don’t think it can be many weeks,’ said Dr Francis slowly. ‘I don’t think any of us ought to wish it to be long, for her sake.’
‘Does she know?’ I cried.
‘Yes, Lewis, she knows.’ He was gentler to me than to Aunt Milly; his resentment, his almost sulky sense of defeat, he put away.
‘You’ve told her this morning?’
‘Yes. She asked me to tell her the truth. She’s a brave soul. I don’t tell some people, but I thought I had to, with your mother.’
‘How did she take it?’ I said, trying to seem controlled.
‘I hope I do as well,’ said Dr Francis. ‘If it happens to me like this.’
Dr Francis had deposited his gloves within his tall hat, Now he took them out, and gradually pulled on the left-hand one, concentrating on each fold in the leather.
‘She asked me to give you a message,’ he said as though casually to my father. ‘She would like to see Lewis before anyone else.’
My father nodded, submissively.
‘I should give her a few minutes, if I were you,’ said Dr Francis to me. ‘I expect she’ll want to get ready for you. She doesn’t like being seen when she’s upset, does she?’
He was thinking of me too. I could not reply. He gazed at me sharply, and clicked his tongue against his teeth in baffled sympathy. He pulled on the other glove and said that, though it was late, he would run along to church. He would get in before the first lesson. He said good morning to Aunt Milly, good morning to my father, put his hand on my arm. We saw him pass the window in short, quick, precise steps, his top hat gleaming, his plump cushioned body braced and erect.
‘Well,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘when the time comes, you will have to leave this house.’
‘I suppose we shall, Milly,’ my father said.
‘You’ll have to come to me. I can manage the three of you.’
‘It’s very good of you, Milly, I’m sure.’
‘You two might have to share a room. I’ll set about moving things,’ said my aunt, satisfied that there was a practical step to take.
Then the clock struck the half-hour. My father did not repeat his ritual phrase. Instead he said: ‘Lena didn’t use to like the clock, did she? She used to say “Confound the clock. Confound the clock, Bertie.” That’s what she used to say. “Confound the clock.” I’ve always liked it myself, but she never did.’
My mother’s head and shoulders had been propped up by pillows, in order to make her breathing easier – so that, asleep or awake, she was half-sitting, and when I drew up a chair that Sunday morning, her eyes looked down into mine.
They were very bright, her eyes, and the whites clear. The skin of her face was a waxy ochreous cream, and the small veins were visible upon her cheeks, as they sometimes are on the tough and weather-beaten. She gave me the haughty humorous smile which she used so often to pass off a remark which had upset her.
Outside, it was a windy April day, changing often from sunlight to shade. When I went in the room was dark; but, before my mother spoke, the houses opposite the window, the patch of ground between them, stood brilliant in the spring sunshine, and the light was reflected on to my mother’s face.
‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ said my mother. She was speaking with difficulty, as though she had to think hard about each word, and then could not trust her lips and tongue to frame it. I knew – with the tight, constrained, dreadful feeling that overcame me when she called out for my love, for in her presence I could not let the tears start, unbidden, spontaneously, as they did when Dr Francis spoke of her courage – that she had rehearsed the remark to greet me with.
‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ she repeated. But she could not maintain her resignation. Her real feeling was anger, grievance, and astonishment. ‘It’s all happened through a completely unexpected symptom,’ said my mother. ‘Completely unexpected. No one could have expected it. Dr Francis says he didn’t. It’s a completely unexpected symptom,’ she kept saying with amazement and anger. Then she said, heavily: ‘I don’t want to stay like this. Just like an old sack. It wouldn’t do for me, would it?’
For once, I found my tongue. I told her that she was looking handsome.
She was delighted. She preened herself like a girl, and said: ‘I’m glad of that, dear.’
She glanced round the bedroom, which was covered with photographs on all the walls – photographs of all the family, Martin, me, but most of all herself. She had always had a passion for photographic records: she had always been majestically vain.
‘But I shouldn’t like you to think of me like this,’ she said. ‘Think of me as I am in the garden photograph, will you, dear?’
‘If you want, Mother,’ I said. The ‘garden’ photograph was her favourite, taken when she was thirty, in the more prosperous days just after I was born. She was in one of the long dresses that I remembered from my earliest childhood. She had made the photographer pose her under the apple tree, and she was dressed for an Edwardian afternoon.
She saw herself as she had been that day. She rejected pity, she would have rejected it even if she had found what she had sought in me, one to whose heart her heart could speak. She would have thrown pity back even now, even if I could have given it with spontaneous love. But she saw herself as she had been in her pride; and she wished me eternally to see her so.
We were silent; the room was dark, then sunny, then dark again.
‘I’ve been wondering what you’ll do with Za’s money,’ said my mother.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.
‘If it had come to me as it ought to have done,’ she said, ‘you should have had it before this. Then I should have seen you started, anyway.’
‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do something with it.’
‘I know you will. You’ll do the things I hoped for you.’ She raised her voice. ‘
I shan’t be there to see
.’
I gasped, said something without meaning.
‘I didn’t want just the pleasure of it,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘I didn’t want you to buy me presents. You know I didn’t want that.’
‘I know,’ I said, but she did not hear me.
‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she cried, ‘I wanted to be part of you. That’s all I wanted.’
I tried to console her. I told her that, whatever I did, I should carry my childhood with me: always I should hear her speaking, I should remember the evenings by the front-room fire, when she urged me on as a little boy. Yet afterwards I never believed that I brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women, and she was vain, but in the end she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I, that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it – and if one repels it, even though one may long, as I did with my mother, that one might do otherwise, even though one admires and cherishes and assumes the attitude of love, yet still, if one repels it, no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are very many – some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.
My mother was exhausted by her outburst. She found it harder to keep her speech clear; and once or twice her attention did not stay steady, she began talking of something else. She was acutely ashamed to be ‘muddle-headed’, as she called it; she screwed up all her will.
‘Don’t forget’, she said, sounding stern with her effort of will, ‘that Za’s money ought to have been mine. I should like to have given it to you. It was Wigmore money to start with. Don’t forget that.’
Her lips took on the grand smile which I used to see when she told me of her girlhood. She lay there, the room in a bright phase of light, with her grand haughty smile.
I noticed that a Sunday paper rested on the bed, unopened. It was strange to see, for she had always had the greatest zest for printed news. After a time, I said: ‘Are you going to read it later on today?’
‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said, and the anger and astonishment had returned to her voice. ‘What’s the use of me reading the paper? I shall give it up now. What’s the use? I shall never know what happens.’
For her, more than for most people, everything in the future had been interesting. Now it could interest her no longer. She would never know the answers.
‘Perhaps I shall learn about what’s going on here,’ she said, but in a formal, hesitating tone, ‘in another place.’
That morning, such was the only flicker of comfort from her faith.
We were quiet; I could hear her breathing; it was not laboured, but just heavy enough to hear.
‘Look!’ said my mother suddenly, with a genuine, happy laugh. ‘Look at the ducks, dear!’
For a second I thought it was an hallucination. But I followed her glance; her long-sighted eyes had seen something real, and she was enjoying what she saw. I went to the window, for at a distance her sight was still much better than mine.
Between the houses opposite, there was a space not yet built over. It had been left as rough hillocky grass, with a couple of small ponds; on it one of our neighbours kept a few chickens and ducks. It was a duck and her brood of seven or eight ducklings that had made my mother laugh. They had been paddling in the fringe of one pond. All of a sudden they fled, as though in panic, to the other, in precise Indian file, the duck in the lead. Then, as though they had met an invisible obstacle, they wheeled round, and, again in file, raced back to their starting point.