The next day Maman’s mouth was still twisted and her speech somewhat troubled; her long eyelids were drooping over her eyes, and her eyebrows twitched. Her right arm, which she had broken twenty years before, falling off a bicycle, had never mended properly; her recent fall had hurt her left arm: she could scarcely move either of them. Fortunately, she was being looked after with the greatest care. Her room overlooked a garden, far from the noise of the street. Her bed had been moved, and they had put it along the wall that ran parallel to the window so that the telephone, which was fixed to the wall, was within hand’s reach. With her back propped up with pillows, she was sitting rather than lying: her lungs would not get tired. Her pneumatic mattress, connected to an electrical device, vibrated, massaging her: this was to prevent bed-sores. Every morning a physiotherapist came and exercised her legs. It seemed as if the dangers Bost had spoken of could be averted. In her rather drowsy voice Maman told me that a maid cut up her meat and helped her to eat, and that the meals were excellent. Whereas at the hospital they had given her black pudding and potatoes! ‘Black pudding! For invalids!’ She talked more easily than on the day before. She went back over the two dreadful hours when she was dragging herself across the floor, wondering whether she would manage to get hold of the telephone flex and pull the instrument to her. ‘One day I said to Madame Marchand, who also lives by herself, “Luckily there is always the telephone.” And she said to me, “But you still have to be able to get to it.” ’ In a most significant voice Maman repeated the last words several times: she added, ‘If I had not managed to get there, I should have been done for.’
Would she have been able to shout loud enough to make herself heard? No, surely not. I pictured her distress. She believed in heaven, but in spite of her age, her feebleness, and her poor health, she clung ferociously to this world, and she had an animal dread of death. She had told my sister of a nightmare that she often had. ‘I am being chased: I run, I run, and I come up against a wall; I have to jump over this wall, and I do not know what there is behind it; it terrifies me.’ She also said to her, ‘Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.’ When she was creeping along the floor, she thought that the moment for the jump had come.
‘It must have hurt dreadfully when you fell?’ I asked her.
‘No. I don’t remember that it did. I didn’t even feel it.’
So she lost consciousness, I thought. She remembered having felt giddy; she added that a few days before, when she had just taken one of her new medicines, she felt her legs giving way under her: she had just had time to lie down on her divan. I looked distrustfully at the bottles she had asked our young cousin Marthe Cordonnier to bring from her flat, together with various other things. She was bent on continuing the treatment: was this advisable?
Professor B came to see her at the end of the day and I followed him into the corridor. Once she had recovered, he said, my mother would walk no worse than before. ‘She will be able to potter around again.’ Did he think she had had a fainting-fit? Not at all. He seemed disconcerted when I told him that her bowels had been giving her trouble. The Boucicaut had reported a broken neck of the femur and he had confined himself to that: he would have her examined by a physician.
‘You will be able to walk just as you did before,’ I said to Maman. ‘You will be able to go back to a normal life.’
‘Oh, I shall never set foot in that flat again! I never want to see it any more. Not at any price!’
And she had been so proud of that flat. She had come to loathe the one in the rue de Rennes, which my father had filled with the noise of his ill-temper as he grew older and hypochondriac. After his death and my grandmother’s, which happened very shortly after, she had wanted to make a break with her memories. Some years earlier a woman she knew had done up a studio, and this modernity quite dazzled Maman. In 1942, of course, it was easy enough to find somewhere to live, and she was able to make her dream come true: she rented a studio with a gallery, in the rue Blomet. She sold the ebonized pearwood desk, the Henri II dining-room suite, the double bed and the grand piano; she kept the rest of the furniture and some of the old red carpet. She hung my sister’s paintings on the walls. She put a divan in the bedroom. In those days she went up and down the inside staircase perfectly happily. I did not think the place really very cheerfuclass="underline" it was on the second floor and in spite of the big windows overhead there was not much light. The upstairs rooms – bedroom, kitchen, bathroom – were always dark, and it was there that Maman spent most of her day since the time every stair began to force a groan out of her. In the course of twenty years everything, the walls, the furniture, the carpet, had grown worn and dirty. When the building changed hands in 1960 and Maman imagined she was going to be evicted she thought of a rest-home. She did not find anything she liked; and besides she was fond of her own place. She learnt that no one had the right to put her out and she stayed on in the rue Blomet. But now we – her friends and I – were going to look for a pleasant rest-home where she should settle as soon as she was better. ‘You shall never go back to the rue Blomet, I promise you,’ I said.
On Sunday her eyes were still half-closed; her memory was drowsing, and the words came dropping heavily from her lips. She told me about her ‘calvary’ again. Yet there was one thing that comforted her – the fact that they had brought her to this clinic: she had an exaggerated notion of its excellence. ‘At the Boucicaut they would have operated on me yesterday! It appears that this is the best clinic in Paris.’ And since for her the pleasure of praising was incomplete unless it was accompanied by blame she added, referring to a nearby establishment, ‘This is far better than the G Clinic. I have been told that the G Clinic is not at all the thing!’
‘I have not slept so well for ages,’ she said to me on Monday. She had her normal look again; her voice was clear and her eyes were taking notice of the things around her. ‘Dr Lacroix ought to be sent some flowers.’ I promised to see to it. ‘And what about the policemen? Shouldn’t they be given something? I put them to great trouble.’ I found it hard to convince her that it was not called for.
She leaned back against her pillows, looked straight at me and said very firmly, ‘I have been overdoing it, you know. I tired myself out – I was at the end of my tether. I would not admit that I was old. But one must face up to things: in a few days I shall be seventy-eight, and that is a great age. I must arrange my life accordingly. I am going to start a fresh chapter.’
I gazed at her with admiration. For a great while she had insisted upon considering herself young. Once, when her son-in-law made a clumsy remark, she had crossly replied, ‘I know very well that I am old, and I don’t like it at alclass="underline" I don’t care to be reminded of it.’ Suddenly, coming out of the fog she had been floating in these three days past, she found the strength to face her seventy-eight years, clear-sighted and determined: ‘I am going to start a fresh chapter.’
She had started a fresh chapter with astonishing courage after my father’s death. It had grieved her very deeply indeed. But she had not bogged down in her past. She had taken advantage of the freedom that had been given back to her to rebuild a kind of life for herself that matched her own tastes. My father did not leave her a penny, and she was fifty-four. She passed examinations, attended courses, and she won a certificate that enabled her to work as an assistant librarian in the Red Cross. She learnt to ride a bicycle again to go to her office. She thought of doing dress-making at home after the war. When that time came I was in a position to help her. But idleness did not suit her. She was eager to live in her own way at last and she discovered a whole mass of activities for herself. She looked after the library in an observation sanatorium just outside Paris as a volunteer, and then the one that belonged to a Catholic club in her neighbourhood. She liked handling books, putting wrappers on them, arranging them, dealing with the tickets, giving advice to readers. She studied German and Italian, and kept up her English. She did embroidery at Dorcas meetings, took part in charity sales, attended lectures. She made herself a great many new friends: she also took up again with former acquaintances and relations whom my father’s surliness had driven away, and she very cheerfully had them all to her studio. At last she was able to satisfy one of her oldest longings, and travel. She fought stubbornly against the anchylosis that was stiffening her legs. She went to see my sister in Vienna and Milan. In the summer she tripped through the streets of Florence and Rome. She went to see the museums of Belgium and Holland. During these last years, when she was almost paralysed, she gave up hurrying about the face of the earth. But when friends or cousins invited her out of Paris or into the country, nothing would stop her: she would have herself hoisted into the train by the guard without a second thought. Her greatest delight was to travel by car. A little while before, her great-niece Catherine had taken her to Meyrignac, driving by night in the little very slow Citroën – close on three hundred miles. She stepped out of the car as fresh as a blossom.