14

My father groped for my hands. I gave them to him and he lifted them, pressing them against his eyes. After a while his own hands dropped, but I didn’t move. My mother was sobbing by the window, little squeaking sobs with no strength in them. I sat for a long time with my hands over my father’s eyes, until my arms ached and I was afraid of leaning on him too heavily. When I drew them away, gently as quilts from a sleeping child, I knew he was dead.

“I think he’s dead,” I said.

“Dead?”

“Yes. I think so.”

She ran to him, crying. I couldn’t bear to see her touch him, hold him, persuading him back to life.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t. It’s no good …”

“The doctor. The doctor …!”

“Yes, I’ll get the doctor.” I tried to lift her up. “But come away.”

She shook her head, twisting it from side to side on his chest. “George!” she called. “George…”

I went downstairs and telephoned the doctor. Then I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The kitchen was full of trays. For two days and two nights my mother had said, “You must have a little snack, dear. Yes, I think I might have a little snack.” I tipped all the little snacks into the dustbin and emptied three teapots. My father is dead, I told myself cautiously. My father is dead. Somehow I felt that it should be a great statement, tragic, triumphant. My father is dead, long live … That was for sons, though. He had no son. He had never needed me until that moment when he took my hands. A son’s hands would have been hard, uncomforting. Perhaps he had been trying to say he was glad. Or perhaps, in those last minutes, barely alive, he had needed protection, a shield against some intolerable light. As I washed my hands under the kitchen tap and dried them, slowly, finger by finger, on the roller towel, I thought of all the things they had done; now they were mosses for a dead man’s eyes. Familiar hands, very similar to his: broad-heeled, long fingered, square tipped, the skin already puckering on the knuckles, the wedding ring loose. They felt empty. The only sensation I had was of empty hands.

Late that night we sat in his study, my mother and I. They had been to lay him out and for hours, it seemed, the house had been full of their mournful tramping, their buckets, their winding sheets (“Anything’ll do, dear, anything nice and clean. An old table runner, now, that’d do very nicely”). They had left his windows wide open, and the house was very cold. He lay like a little man struck by a blizzard on the double bed with its clean sheets and unnecessary heaps of pillows. He was askew, but I hadn’t the courage to straighten him out. The blowing wind and the smell of formaldehyde, the dark and the icy bed, frightened me against my will. We were snug, almost riotously snug, in the study. I had bought some brandy and my mother was slightly tipsy. Each time a door creaked we glanced up, but not at each other in case we should spread alarm.

“He was such a good man,” my mother said for the tenth time. “Nobody knew how good he was. Well, look how he helped you and Jake to get started. Have you told Jake yet? He was very fond of George. There are many things I don’t care for about Jake — I know I’ve never said so, and I hope I’ve never shown it. But he was very fond of George. And George was fond of him. George really was fond of him.”

“I know,” I said.

“He didn’t care for any of the others, although he might have got used to the Major, if he’d lived. But Jake … I don’t know what it was, he was really fond of Jake.”

“Yes. Jake was fond of him, too.”

“I know he was.”

At last I got her upstairs. She wanted to sleep with me in my old room, so I tucked her into Ireen’s bed. She began to cry again, but wouldn’t take a sleeping pill. “It’s so terrible to think of … his poor body there … but he’s gone, I’ll never seen him again …”

I stroked her frizzed grey hair. Her face was sodden with tears.

“You don’t believe in God, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I. George never knew that, he would have been shocked, I think he would have been… Do you?”

“No, I’m sure he wouldn’t have been shocked.”

“I wish I did,” she whispered. “Oh, I wish I could believe I’d see him again. You don’t think … it’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

“But not that. Oh George, George …” She turned her face into the pillow. She was seventy, and hopeless, and I didn’t know how to comfort her. I went to the window and drew back the curtain. It was too dark to see the church spire.

“Ma…”

“I’m glad he wanted to be cremated. I am glad about that. It would be dreadful to think …”

“Ma, listen.”

“To think of him buried …”

I sat on the edge of her bed and held her shoulder.

“I want to tell you something.”

Automatically, obedient to years of training, she perked round, sniffing back the last rush of tears. “Yes, dear?”

I swallowed, looked confused, not meeting her eye.

“No!” she said. “No!”

I nodded.

She sat bolt upright, almost knocking me off the bed. She scrubbed her face furiously, repeating again and again.

“You’re not! You can’t! My dear child, you can’t!”

“Well,” I mumbled, picking at the fluff in the blanket, “there it is …”

“But it’s insane! What can Jake be thinking of? What — ?”

“He doesn’t know yet. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“But how can you start all that over again? How can you? My poor child, are you never going to get any rest? …” I didn’t have to listen any more. I knew it all by heart. Slyly, under cover of the barrage, I tipped two sleeping pills out of the bottle and reached for the glass of water. “You’ll be the death of me,” she said, using the word as though it had no meaning. “You will, you’ll be the death of me. Have you no consideration for other people? In my mother’s day there was no proper prevention but how can you contemplate …” In these moments of crisis, which she loved, my mother had great fluency. “This! This on top of everything else! I’m glad your father didn’t live to see it. Yes. I am. I’m glad your father …”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have told you. Here, you’d better take these pills.”

She took them without noticing she was doing so. I pushed her gently back on to the pillow and straightened the bedclothes. She nagged me heartily all the time, her face pink with outrage. I turned out the bedside light.

“When will it be?” she asked.

“Oh, not for ages. Not till October.”

“October!” she groaned, her eyes closing. “How will you manage?”

“We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“Careless girl. How could you be so… careless…”

She slept abruptly. I went downstairs and, sitting at my father’s desk, wrote to Jake. I told him that my father was dead and that to take her mind off it I had told my mother that I was pregnant. I said it had taken her mind off it wonderfully, so far; and that it also happened to be true. I said that I hoped he didn’t mind too much, and that I was very happy about it myself. I asked him to see that the char was paid, and to give my love to the children, and told him that I would telephone his secretary about the cremation, it would please my mother very much if he could manage to come. I gave him my love, drew three children’s kisses at the bottom and left it, with threepence, on the kitchen table for the postman to collect in the morning.