Mum had never understood phones, so it was the nursing home that called. Father was dead, but Annie felt nothing. Not sadness, remorse, relief – not even anger anymore.
‘So the old bastard’s shuffled off at last then’, said Stuart, momentarily looking up from The Daily Mail when she delivered the news.
‘Stuart, I don’t see why you have to –’
‘Bunny, you’re surely not about to try and sell me the bloke?’ said Stuart, his head now reburied in his paper. ‘He made your life hell! If it wasn’t for me –’
‘I just don’t need Davey to hear you talk that way’, said Annie. ‘Not about an old man - his grandad!’
‘Okay’, said Stuart.
‘Are we going to Granfer’s funeral?’ asked Davey, looking up from his homework table on the far side of the room.
‘Well, I – ’
‘No’, said Stuart. ‘Your mother can do as she sees fit, but you and I, Davey, will not be going.’
‘Stuart, I – ’
‘Now don’t get all emotional Bunny’, said Stuart, carefully placing his newspaper on the coffee table. ‘I’ve made the decision and that’s that. If you really think it’s a bright idea to put yourself through all that then –’
‘I’m going’, said Annie. Avoiding Davey’s beaming blue eyes, she shot Stuart a subversive look before heading into the kitchen. To make His tea no less.
‘What’s for di –’, began Stuart when she reached the doorway.
‘Nothing as yet’, said Annie. She closed the door firmly behind her, located her cigarettes from the cutlery draw and opened a window. ‘Dinner’ would be a while tonight.
Three days later, Annie stood in the rain outside, waiting for a taxi. She needed to get to the home where her mum lived by 10.15, so that they at least could face this day together.
Her mum, or ‘Bibi’ as she now liked to be called, shouldn’t really have been living in a home at all. One of the last to leave Bath Road she was, still holding her ground when the bulldozers came knocking on her door. Though Annie and Stuart had lived with the family since they were married, Annie understood that Stuart’s patience was wearing thin. She’d always known that he would refuse to have her mum live with them.
Annie and Davey had watched transfixed – the methodical flattening of the only home they’d even known. But Stuart had dragged them away, symbolically pulling apart whatever ‘relationship’ he’d had with his in-laws. Just two years ago and yet it already felt to Annie like she was remembering another life. Receiving not so much as a goodbye from her well-to-do son-in-law, Bibi must have prepared herself then for the end of life as she’d known it. Father was already losing his marbles at a rate worth gambling on, and fortunately Cedar House had agreed to take them together.
‘Why did you never leave him?’ Annie had asked one day, staring at Father’s picture while he was off being bathed.
Her mum had looked at her and smiled – a lost, distant smile of one who has lived to see her children die and the world gather speed. ‘There was never a right time, Luv’, she said. And leaning back into the superficially polished nursing home chair Annie had meditated on this, trying to draw from it some form of meaning.
Her mum reached out and touched her knee. ‘He gave us all we needed. You know that, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Your father provided you and me with a life.’
Annie considered this.
‘And it’s very difficult to leave these things we call our ‘life’ behind, no matter how painful staying put might be…’ It was Bibi’s first words that afternoon that had struck a chord in Annie’s heart: there was never a right time. As the taxi pulled into Cedar’s, she was still considering her mum’s long, hard life. She thought about Joe’s death and her own prison-like childhood. She could see how important it was to find that right time.
Bibi was already waiting in the reception lobby with a nurse. She was dressed to perfection in dark green wool coat and skirt, black court shoes and an ornate emerald broach Annie recognised from special occasions as a child. Her hair was newly permed and set, protected under a plastic rain hood; she clutched a small green bag in one hand, along with an umbrella that matched it exactly. The nurse held her by the other arm, passing her on like a parcel to Annie who took her down the front steps and into the taxi.
‘You look fantastic, Bibi’, said Annie, and her mum blushed, almost coquettishly. She knew she did. There was something vulnerable about her today, a certain fear in her light blue eyes and a childlike nervousness. But she knew she looked her best and was proud of it.
‘You look lovely yourself, Annie’, she said, and for a moment Annie paused to relish this freedom: a new world where they could be civil, kind to each other even, without reprimand or criticism.
The funeral was beyond desolate. Annie, Bibi, an estranged cousin Doug and a chap from down Bath Road who used to sell Father his meat. His name, which they’d never known before, was Ron. They talked of the old times and the wrench of leaving their beloved community. Ron shared news about Mary Glover, the grocer’s daughter, who had since run off with some gypsy; ‘Scarlet’ they called her now.
‘Blige, Ron. Scarlet?’ Doug scoffed. ‘I mean, I ask ye – she baint be no film star!’
‘Them gypsies takin’ over up there now’, said Ron, signalling up hill with a jerk of his head. ‘Like they owns the place. That there eagle were pride of Bristol once, but what’ve we got now eh?’
‘Heavin’ rubbish dump and all they vermin kiddies!’ said Doug.
‘And the bleeding rest!’
Annie turned to Bibi. Her mum’s eyes followed the men’s gaze but were reaching far beyond the latest eyesore on the horizon. Annie looked back at the men, blankly. Anything was better than talking of the dead man they’d come to consider. Had they really come to pay their respects?
There were no poems, no personal readings, and the director’s address was so irrelevant Annie found herself thinking about Father only by way of negatives: the loving father he was not; the husband so clearly unmissed. The whole thing was over too quickly for Annie; emptiness raged in her chest. She needed to feel something if she were to take any meaning at all from the life of this man who held power in his fingertips, now rendered as futile as the ‘respect’ he had demanded. Though the lash of his cane had ceased ringing in her ears, deeper scars still bled for resolution.
As the body journeyed towards the furnace, Annie felt cheated. Now the memory of this bitter man would be laid to rest, the incinerated evidence lost to the cosmos. Bibi’s eyes were full of tears. Ron offered her his handkerchief and stroked her back, gestures of comfort Annie felt unable to extend. How could she empathize with grief in this death when she didn’t yet know how to grieve even the living memories?
As they left Annie took Bibi’s arm; it was easy to hide in practical help. They bid Ron and Doug goodbye and returned to the waiting taxi together, journeying in silence back to the home. There was to be no wake. Already there was nothing more to say.
But, as Annie stood up to leave, Bibi pressed a bundle of letters into her hand. ‘Please forgive me’, she said, ‘I just didn’t know how to do it with your father here.’ Annie looked at the pile of envelopes, each addressed in the same spidery script to their old house in Bath Road. Turning the top letter over confirmed her greatest hope and dread – that the sender was none other than a Mr. Davey Grace of Balham, London. She was struck as though by labour pains welling up again in her stomach. She bent over, stood up, sat down, didn’t know what to do with herself. She felt she might choke if she even attempted to speak. Putting her face in her hands, she dropped the precious pile onto the floor.
‘I’m sorry, Annie’, said Bibi, ‘I thought it for the best.’ And yet what had changed? Bibi had gained some release today, amid the depressing lonely funeral of a hated man. Maybe she wanted to give her daughter a chance after all.
‘I –’, Annie began, at last able to open her mouth without screaming.
‘I was just waiting for the right time’, said Bibi, tears in her eyes and her forehead racked in desperation.
No comments:
Post a Comment