Cont'd …

“Peggy’s well,” I say, in a tone which fails to be noncommittal.

“And what’s she doing now?” asks Mother.

“Living up in Scotland,” I say.

“Living up in Scotland?” Mother also fakes indifference, also badly. “With this Gregory chap?” she asks after a few moments.

“With this Gregory chap,” I say.

“And what about Stephen?” asks Mother. Stephen is Mother’s grandchild, or, as I sometimes tend to forget, my son. I look round, at the plum tree, at the runner beans.

“He’s with her too,” I say. Mother puts her sandwich very neatly on the plate.

“Oh, Robert,” she says. And then again, “Oh, Robert.”

I nod.

Mother looks round, at the plum tree, at the runner beans. I know what she is thinking. Or at least, I know what she ought to be thinking, because I am thinking it myself. How can young people who have so many opportunities these days make such disastrous marriages? We ponder the question in silence, waiting for another plane to go past.

And then the way he died! Not in any of those bombing raids but twenty-five years later, run down outside Euston Station because he didn’t look both ways before crossing the road. The stupidity, the pointlessness, the sheer futility of his death is something from which I know you have never recovered. You lost your faith in God when he died. You lost your faith in everything.

And, well as I know you, Mother, I’ve really no way of telling how much faith you’ve managed to retrieve from the wreckage yet. I can’t give you a lot of hope. And I can’t believe that even your beloved garden is sustaining. I would love to see you arriving at some point of acceptance, some kind of reconciliation with the past, but I just can’t see it happening. You look betrayed, and you’re getting no better at disguising it. And though you don’t know it, I can imagine the tedium of the days you live through now, because I think about them all the time.

I remember when you told me the news. I had just come back from school and I was poking about in the larder in search of something to eat. I was at the ravenous stage of growing up and I ate everything I could lay my hands on. I was always getting into trouble for it. There I was in the pantry, opening packets of biscuits and cutting off chunks of cheese and suddenly your voice came --

“Robert!”

I recognized the tone. It was the tone your voice had when you were really, deeply angry. My stomach turned over and I came out of the pantry prepared for a confrontation. We had a lot of them in those days. I was still swallowing biscuit and wiping my mouth on the back of my hand when you came into the kitchen.

“Robert,” you said in the same tone, and your face was white and harder than I have ever seen it. “Your father is dead.”

Then you sat down at the kitchen table, dropped your head on your forearms, and made no sound for three whole hours. I heard you in the night, though, when I was in my bed and you were pacing through the downstairs of the house. You were wailing like a siren, like an air-raid siren.

Mother offers me another piece of cake, which I decline. She asks me if I’d like something else, fruit, perhaps, or some chocolate, but we both know what this game is about. I want to leave now and there’s no way that Mother can dissuade me from doing so.

“Are you sure you won’t have just a cup of coffee?” asks Mother. “To keep you awake on the road?”

“No,” I say, “I’ll be all right on the road.”

“Tea, then?” Even as she says it, it sounds like a last resort.

“No, thanks, Mother,” I say, “I must be going now.”

“All right then,” says Mother. “Do you think you could help me in with the plates?”

We put the plates on the tray and I carry them through into the kitchen, Mother following at a more leisurely pace.

“It’s a pity the tomatoes aren’t ready,” she says, “you could have had as many as you like.”

“I’ll be back before long,” I say.

“By the end of August the Haversham Standards should be ripe,” she continues, and then suddenly stops. “Haversham Standards,” she says, “that’s what they’re called. Haversham Standards.”

For a second I think that my analysis is wrong, and that she has found her faith again.

Then it’s time to part, and all the awkwardness of parting comes over us. We peck each other on the cheek, we hug each other half-heartedly, we pull away from one another at what is somehow not quite the right moment. Everything is clumsy, inexpressible, almost repulsive.

I get into my car and drive away. Mother goes back to her garden, waters her tomatoes, waits for another bomb to drop. 

First published in Story Cellar Issue 6, Spring 1996

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