That night, Zbigniew broke up with Davina, definitively. He left no room for the possibility that they might get together again. He was as gentle as he could be, and also as final. It was over.
57
Mary wasn’t sure what to make of the specialist cancer nurse who came to stay at the house when her mother was dying. It didn’t help that she kept forgetting her name. She was called Joanna but Mary had some sort of mental block about it: she got the Jo but kept landing on Josephine, Joan, Jody, Jo, then realising the name wasn’t quite right and bailing out part of the way through. Every day she told herself at least ten times that Joanna’s name was Joanna, to no effect.
The nurse was a brisk woman of about forty-five. She had hair which had gone from blonde to white-grey and wore her uniform with conviction. The staff at the hospice had been warmer; this one was all business. She had a faintly Scottish accent which added to the sense of chill. No doubt she saw so many people falling apart so completely that she had to make clear boundaries. I, the nurse, am over here; you, the family of the dying person, are over there. At quiet moments, she would commune with her mobile phone, having very quiet conversations which could be seen but not overheard, and texting at length. When she texted she bent forward to look at the keys. She was old to be such a mad texter.
One thing you had to say about the nurse, though, was that she did everything. She knew what was happening, which was a big help to Mary, who was lost, especially so since her mother was now not reacting to anything and had all but passed over. This made Mary feel, more than anything else, lonely. She was sad too, but that was beneath the surface; what she was mainly aware of feeling was her complete isolation. She had an overwhelming wish to help her mother, to ease her last moments, and at the same time knew that there was nothing she could do. Except smoking. Smoking seemed to help. She was back up to a pack a day; Alan would kill her, if the fags didn’t. But she was sticking to her rule about not smoking indoors. To smoke indoors would be to have properly taken up smoking again, rather than to have adopted it temporarily as an emergency measure. Also it would stink the place out when they were showing buyers around.
Afterwards, she knew, there would be plenty to do. The funeral, the probate, the tax bill, selling the house, or more likely fixing up the house then selling it. All that would be a nightmare; but the business of it would be a relief too. For now there was nothing to do. The cancer charity were not shy about saying that their nurses only came during the final days, so she knew it was a matter of hours until her mother died, and yet the time still seemed to stretch.
In the evening Joanna, in her uniform, came into the sitting room where Mary was sitting in front of – watching would be too strong a word – EastEnders, and fighting the craving for a cigarette. Joanna’s body language was different: she clasped her hands in front of her lap, like a child standing in front of Teacher for a telling-off.
‘I think you should come up now,’ she said, and her voice was different too. Mary went upstairs to the bedroom, wishing, as she did so, that the ten seconds it took would last for much longer. When she got to the opened door it was immediately apparent that her mother was breathing differently. It was a shallower noise but seemed to come from deeper in her chest; it had a note of rasp to it. Mary turned and looked for guidance from the nurse, who moved her head forwards in a gesture which Mary understood: it meant, go to your mother’s bedside and take her hand. This she did.
Petunia’s hand was warm. That surprised Mary. Her mother’s breathing was unnatural, but it did not sound as if she were struggling for breath; this was some more profound shift than that. She tried to imagine what was happening inside her mother’s mind, inside her being. Was it a succession of images, of recollections from childhood – glimpses of things which had happened to her in this very house, decades ago? Her father and mother, walking to school, the birth of her children, the thousands of meals cooked and eaten? Was it a kind of dream of those things? Or was she immersed in pure feeling, so that there was nothing but fear, or love, or loss, or some other pure state? Or was she given over to pure sensation, warmth or cold or pain or itching or thirst or some terrible combination of all of them? Or was she looking into the light, moving towards it, fading into it, becoming light herself? Or was her mother not there any more, so that this was just her body?
Petunia took a ragged, broken breath, then made a cracked, fragmented, deep exhalation. Mary felt a change in the way her mother’s hand felt in hers; it did not go limp, because it already was limp, but it no longer felt the same. A charge of presence was no longer there. Her mother was no longer there. Petunia Howe was dead.
It was frightening and wrong to see her mother’s eyes still open. The nurse, as if she realised – but then she probably did, she had done this many times before, you had to remember that this happened all the time – the nurse reached out and closed them. Strange, Mary had seen that gesture in films, it always looked hard to believe, as if the eyes had little levers in them so you could pull them down just like that, with the palm of your hand, but it must be true because that was just what the nurse had done. Maybe they taught you how to do it. The nurse put her hand on Mary’s shoulder; the first time she had touched her. She didn’t say anything, and nor did Mary, who more than anything else in the world, at this moment, wanted a cigarette. After a minute or two she got up and went downstairs, taking the packet of Marlboro Lights out of her cardigan pocket and opening the garden door. She thought: my poor old mum. Thank God. My poor old dad. One of them suddenly, one of them slowly, the first hard on the survivors, the second hard on everybody. Poor me, she thought also. Orphan Mary. Mary Mary quite contrary look at her parents go. If you had been a better daughter they would still be alive, a voice told her, as another voice immediately contradicted it: rubbish!
I suppose this is what they call denial, thought Mary. Except it didn’t seem to her that she was denying anything; what she mainly felt was numb. Anaesthetised. She must call Alan. She finished the first cigarette then did something she hardly ever did and lit another from the stub.
If Mary had been looking outside herself, there still would have been just enough light to see the garden, which had kept growing and growing, untrimmed and unattended to, all through the spring. Now the hollyhocks and delphiniums were flowering, and the lupins had started to bloom. The clematis at the back wall had stretched into the neighbours’ gardens on both sides, and reached over the wall into the flats which fronted onto Mackell Road. The unkempt patch of lawn was a deep, chaotic green. The garden was sheltered, and when the plants were in bloom their perfume hung in the air; today that smell, always more vivid at dusk, was also sharply green. Even through the cigarette smoke, Mary could detect the spearmint that had spread all through the left-hand flower bed like the weed it was. It was a time of day, a time of the year, that Petunia had loved. The honeysuckle which grew around the door had spread, and one or two tendrils of the plant had reached around the window into the kitchen itself. It was as if the garden Petunia had loved was trying to reach towards her, into the home where she had lived and died, as she set out on her final journey.
58
‘I have to do another poo!’ said Joshua. Matya wasn’t sure whether to sigh or laugh, so did a little bit of both. They were in the sitting room downstairs, with the loo mercifully close. It was raining, so they were having an indoors day, though if the weather improved Matya had promised that they would go to the pond on the other side of the Common and feed the ducks. On the way, they would discuss superpowers, an interest Josh had now caught from his older brother: which were their favourite powers, which one they would have if they could only have one, which one they would have if they could make up a new one, and which superhero was best. Joshua’s current favourite was Batman because he liked his cave.