His mother arrived at the Grand at the worst possible moment, thirty-six hours before Mrs Thatcher. She had a gift for perfectly atrocious timing. He was in the midst of dealing with the Close Protection Unit, and also the plain-clothes Sussex police officers. Politicians were cluttering the reception area, politicians were swapping rooms, politicians were complaining about overbookings. They didn’t understand that you had to overbook; had to assume one in ten wouldn’t turn up. The hospitality industry was founded on this fraction but some people went crazy, didn’t care that you were going to cover their whole stay in the Metropole, didn’t care for the implication that they perhaps could have called to confirm. Staff frowning. Staff flirting. The twitch of temporary security cameras, the yapping of small ineffectual dogs. Men with thinning hair and full smooth faces and that combustible mix of fatigue and wealth that made people step out of the way.
‘It’s me,’ she said, standing under the chandelier on her outstandingly abbreviated legs. That hunched posture. That forward tilt. Countering, he supposed, the constant impulse to sink back.
‘Mum!’ He kissed her. ‘So great to see you.’
‘Pipe down,’ she said. ‘I’m not one of your guests to impress.’
‘Mum.’ He sighed. ‘Not really a great time, really.’
‘You have five minutes.’
‘Well —’
‘You do. Everyone does. Most jobs can wait a thousand years.’
He took her into the restaurant, sat her down underneath a painting of a boat. He loved his old mother. Really he did. But he was busy, very busy, and she had a knack for distracting him from his goals. Her method was to tell him many sharp things he didn’t want to hear about himself. It was death not so much by dagger as by a million unfurled paper clips. In her old age she was a great dispenser of tips and wisdom, around 5 per cent of it excellent. She seemed to favour a throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Probably the tactic ran in the family.
‘Can I order you something?’
‘I brought my own food.’
‘That’s not allowed, actually, but —’
She unzipped her handbag. Gave him, with her usual flawless intuition, a freezer bag full of nuts. ‘Unsalted,’ she said, and removed a balled tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan. From a second freezer bag she began to feed herself splodges of dried apricot.
He asked her a couple of questions. She held up a finger to indicate that she was still eating. Robbed of conversation, he lifted the first nut to his lips. His saliva glands began gratefully welling, the tingling anticipation of a lovely savoury treat. The disappointment when the nut touched his tongue was huge. Without salt these things were pointless. To get through this exchange, what would he need? A better quality of snack, for sure. Also an enormous amount of alcohol combined with an enormous amount of caffeine. He waved at Shirley and ordered his first glass of wine since the infarction.
His mother’s chin, badly receded these last few years, bobbed and creased as she chewed. One or two little hairs poked out from furrows in the flesh. He longed to lean forward and pluck them. When she was seated her long neck gave a false impression of stature.
‘Heart,’ she said, taking a sip of water from a squat little bottle.
So then, she knew. Inevitable. The part of town she lived in was remote but rumours seemed to like the local soil.
‘First thing to go when you run around all day.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It’s what I’ve read.’
‘The Mail?’
‘That and the liver,’ she said. ‘Hits hotel workers in particular. What you need is to think less, and then do less. Simple. Get a couple of things right instead of this constant ridiculous —’
‘Running around. Yes. I know.’
‘Accept your fate, Philip.’
‘Meaning?’
She chewed and inspected a further piece of soft fruit. ‘You’ll die just the same as me.’
‘I’m pretty sure the running around hasn’t been as bad for me, Mum, as the cigarettes and fatty food.’
‘Mr Self-Aware,’ she said.
‘I don’t know why you always say that.’
‘Where’s that Marina lady? I like her.’
He coughed. It hurt.
Theatrically she sniffed. ‘How could you?’ she said. ‘Not a word from my own son.’
‘I didn’t want to worry you, Mum.’
‘How could my granddaughter not tell me? This is a double betrayal, make no mistake.’
He sighed. ‘I told her not to. I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘You always did make things up. If you scored two goals you’d say you’d scored three.’
‘That never happened.’
‘Terrible exaggerator.’
‘Untrue. That’s you. How did you find out?’
‘Freya.’
‘Well then,’ he said, feeling only a little let down. ‘It’s not a double betrayal, is it, if she told you?’ He thought for a moment. ‘How long have you known, then?’
‘Eh?’
‘How long have you known about my — the infarction?’
‘Few days,’ she said.
‘And you didn’t think to visit me earlier?’
She was squinting.
He said, ‘How did Freya seem, when you saw her?’
‘We had tea. Her visits are so quick. A boy in a car was waiting for her outside.’
‘A boy in a car?’
‘I think so. Some kind of sail on top of the car. Like the car was a boat. She had a flushed look in her face.’
‘Who?’
‘Your daughter.’
‘What do you mean?’
A sigh. ‘She was wearing a very short skirt, Philip.’
‘She’s young, Mum. It’s what they do.’
‘I know. I helped her take it up an extra inch.’
‘Oh.’
She chewed on a dried apricot. ‘Yes, there’s no avoiding it, she was wearing very sexual knickers.’
‘Mum, Jesus.’
‘There’s a study in masculinity waiting to be written about you.’
‘What does that even mean?’
He drank half his glass of wine and felt his brain begin to soften. He settled on the not unpleasant idea that the boy waiting outside the house for Freya had been a taxi driver — Stan the Taxi Driver, probably — and chose to ignore the fact that Stan was seventy-something years old, a little beyond being called a ‘boy’, and didn’t drive a car that looked like a boat.
He almost enjoyed the first five minutes of any given exchange with his mother, the dry asides and minor duels. It was only by, say, the thirtieth minute in each conversation that he tended to dream of stabbing her with a cheese knife and selling her body to medical science.
Twenty-nine minutes had passed. He could feel a tingle in his fingertips. She told him to stop looking at his watch.
‘You’d have been better off staying at the College,’ she said. She opened a piece of cling film, strips of dried mango within, another of her favoured snacks. He looked at all the bad luck in her eyes. It was there always between them, the fear it would pass on.
Chew chew.
Chew.
He’d finished his wine. It burned now in his chest. Watching her eat, listening to her eat — it killed all the hunger he had. The Listen to Your Mother Masticating Diet. Lose ten pounds in a month. He could hear policemen talking in the lobby. From the kitchen came the dim sound of Chef Harry shouting.