Tree of Hands (8 page)

Barry didn't know what she meant for a minute but he could see Carol did. She took one of her mother's cigarettes, lit it from Iris's.

‘It may come to that. It just may.'

‘I'd like to do more myself,' said Iris. ‘You know I'd bend over backwards to give you a helping hand. But if it means giving in my notice, I have to draw the line. I couldn't let Mr Karim down. I've been there seven years or it will be come New Year and he, like, relies on me, doesn't he, Jerry?' She didn't even wait for the confirmation. She knew it wouldn't come. ‘You'll have to play it by ear, I reckon,' she said cheerfully. ‘Just go on from day to day.'

‘I couldn't cope before, and if I can't again, they'll have to step in.'

Barry understood then. ‘It's not going to come to that,' he said. He felt that his voice was firm, authoritative, manly, the ruling voice the women were waiting for. ‘We'll manage.
I'll
manage.'

Carol had been holding his hand. She put her other arm round him, over his chest and held his shoulder. She leaned her head against chest. ‘You're lovely,' she said. ‘You're so strong. Isn't he lovely, Mum? He reminds me of Dave. Doesn't he remind you of Dave?'

‘He does a bit,' said Iris.

Barry knew there could be no higher praise. Feeling Carol's soft warmth against him, a thread of excitement moved in his body. He began to look forward to the evening's end, to their parting from Iris and Jerry on the pavement under the white moon, for him and Carol once more to be alone together.

THE DAYS BLENDED
into one another without demarcation, without date, without weather, almost without light or dark. She lay, then sat, in her bedroom, the big room in the very top of the house in the Vale of Peace. Mopsa brought her food on trays, but when she saw Benet didn't want to eat, could not eat, the food was replaced without demur by cups of tea, of instant coffee and, in the evenings, their coming preceded by no inquiries, tumblers of brandy and water.

Life had stopped. At first, because what had happened was unbelievable, it could not have happened, little children in the 1980s do not die – because of that, there was only shock which stunned and numbed. For a good deal of the stunned, numbed phase, Benet had been kept in hospital herself. In that same state, armed with sleeping pills and tranquillizers, she had been sent home to her chaotic house and Mopsa. There the shock began to wear off. It was like the anaesthetic wearing off after you have been to the dentist and the pain starts. Only no physical pain Benet had ever known was like this. Even when she was giving birth to James and had shouted out, her cries had been part pleasurable, compounded of effort and intent and joy as well as pain. Now she found herself holding both hands tight over her mouth to keep herself from screaming out her suffering. She sat or paced the room because when she lay down she could not keep from twisting and turning and digging her nails into the soft parts of herself. One afternoon she stuck a pin into her arm to have a different focus of pain.

Because she had no idea of time or its passing, it seemed
to her that she had been a year in that room at the top of the house, tended by Mopsa, with Mopsa coming every hour to the door. Perhaps it had been no more than two days. She took a lot of barbiturates and a lot of Valium. The sleeping pills she put down the lavatory and pulled the flush on them. The oblivion they brought was not worth the awfulness of waking up, appreciating the light of morning, listening for the first morning sounds from James next door – and realizing there would be no morning sounds from him, there never would be. Never never never never never.

The Valium stopped her wanting to scream or wanting to put her hands over her mouth to stop the scream. It made her, while sitting quiet and still, consider in a low muddled way methods of suicide. She threw those pills away too. She stood by the window, high above the Vale of Peace, looking at a large white moon like a radiant pearl. Two years before, James had not existed, yet she was the same person she had been then, not much older, unchanged in appearance. She looked into the mirror and saw the same familiar regular features, almond-shaped dark eyes, high cheekbones, full folded lips. The dark brown, longish, implacably straight hair was the same and the clear sallow skin. Why then could she not be as she had been before he came into her life? It was such a short time ago. How could she have been so unimaginably affected, so transformed, in less than two years by another person and that person scarcely able to speak?

She did not want to think of him as a person, as himself, of the things he had done and said. That was the worst. That way unbearable panic lay, the kind of panic that comes from knowing one more step in that direction and the mind will break. She went downstairs, all the way down the long flight that wound through the middle of the house, and came into the basement room and sat in the window looking up at the garden wall and the street. She felt she would never go out there again. It was impossible to
imagine going into the open air, walking, confronting other human beings.

Mopsa was at the kitchen end of the room, apparently making a cake. What was the use of it? Who would eat it? Mopsa wore an apron Benet had never seen before, a pink-and-white check gingham apron with straps that crossed over at the back. She had cleared every trace of James out of that room. The doors of the toy cupboard were closed. The highchair was gone. Upstairs Benet had closed her eyes while passing James's bedroom door on her way to the bathroom. She had been afraid it might be open and its contents showing. Now she knew she need not have bothered to close her eyes. Mopsa would have seen to those things. Dimly, through that timeless time up there, she had perceived that Mopsa had been seeing to things, had seen to everything.

The things she could not name even in her own thoughts. The registration of death. The undertakers. The funeral. To herself she named them, shivering long and inwardly, with a euphemism she had once despised: the formalities. Poor mad Mopsa, who was mad no longer, who had taken up this terrible challenge better than the sanest of women, had seen to . . . the formalities. Vaguely, up in that high room, that dark tower, Benet had been aware of Mopsa going out, of the car starting, of doors closing and opening, of Mopsa returning, of Mopsa
bustling
, busy in her recording angel, amanuensis, indispensable role. And now, having turned to look at her daughter and give her a small, sad, pitiful smile, she was making a cake, beating eggs with a hand whisk into a creamy concoction in a glass bowl.

Mopsa had been – wonderful. That was the word one always used of someone who did what she had done in this situation – wonderful. Often Benet had heard the phone ringing. Mopsa had answered it, though Benet never heard what she said. It rang now. Mopsa rested the whisk against the side of the bowl and went to the phone and took up the receiver. She spoke to Antonia as if they were old friends, though to Benet's knowledge they had never met.
Her tone was chatty, pleasant, in no way tragic. Benet would certainly phone Antonia, Mopsa said. As soon as she was up and about and fit again, she would phone her. Yes, Mopsa would pass on the message.

Benet addressed the first question to her mother she had put since she had come home from the hospital. Her voice which had been silent for so long sounded strange to her. She walked over to Mopsa, her legs feeling weak as if she were convalescent.

‘Have there been many phone calls?'

Mopsa was sifting flour through a sieve. She worked neatly, without spilling. ‘Half a dozen. Quite a few. I didn't count them.'

‘What have you told people?'

‘I've told them you're not well enough to speak to anyone. I've told them you're confined to your bed and can't be expected to talk.'

It was the correct response, it was the prescribed, ideal, merciful way for anyone in Mopsa's position to behave. Benet felt, creeping into the immense wide cold sea of her misery, a trickle of unease. She ignored it. It was nothing. Unease was nothing any more, of no importance, and never would be.

‘Have you spoken to Dad?'

‘He's phoned every evening nearly.' The complacent look touched the corners of Mopsa's mouth. ‘He sent you his love.'

Poor Mopsa who was unstable, ill really, not like other women, other people's mothers. A line came into Benet's mind – there's a part of my heart that's sorry yet for thee . . . She said quietly, ‘It must have been very hard for you to tell him.'

The thin custardy stuff was poured into the tin. Mopsa had an air of frowning concentration. When it was done she expelled her breath with a puffing sound. She was like a schoolgirl making a cake for a home economics exam. She was like someone who had never made a cake before. Perhaps she hadn't. Benet couldn't remember cakes in
Mopsa's crazy days. She put the cake into the oven and slammed the door as if slamming it on something she would never return to, the final closing of the door of a house she was quitting for ever.

She turned to Benet, wiping clean hands down the front of her apron.

‘Oh, I didn't tell him, Brigitte. I couldn't
tell
him. He doesn't ask, you see. It's an embarrassing subject for him. He might have got over it if things had been different. But since he doesn't ask, there's no point in telling him, is there?'

‘He will have to know sometime.'

Mopsa didn't say anything. She looked levelly into Benet's eyes. At that moment, in her apron, a smudge of flour on one cheek, her hair silvery-gold with pins fastening it, she was exactly like other people's mothers.

‘Have you told anyone?' Benet said.

A hand went up and touched the flour smudge, a finger rubbed and flicked at it. Mopsa's stare shifted from Benet's face to the light switch on the far wall.

‘You haven't told anyone at all, have you?'

Mopsa began to mumble. ‘I couldn't, Brigitte. I didn't want to upset myself. It's bad for me to be upset.'

Benet shouted at her: ‘Who do you suppose is going to eat that bloody cake?'

She ran out of the room and up the stairs. Behind her she could hear Mopsa starting to snuffle and cry. She didn't go back. She went on up the stairs, a feeling of pressure on the top of her head, a throbbing behind her eyes. She passed the open door to Mopsa's bedroom and the photograph on Mopsa's bedside table caught her eyes. It was a photograph of Edward. What was Mopsa doing with a photograph of Edward? Benet hadn't even known she possessed one. It was a head and shoulders shot, rather fuzzy, enlarged from a snap.

She went up the last flight and entered James's bedroom. The cot was still there and the bare mattress. Apart from that, there was nothing to show the room had ever been
occupied by a child. From the window you could see the row of pines behind the pond, the green strip of the Heath, a large white empty sky. She shut herself in her own bedroom. Should she tell Edward about James? Was there any point? He had only seen him once and that when he was two days old. He had come into the hospital and seen him and Benet and not known what to say.

‘You have utterly humiliated me' was what at last he did say. He had glanced at the child and looked away.

‘It would have been better if you hadn't come, Edward. You shouldn't have come.'

She felt as bad about things as he did, in her own way. It
had
been wrong to use him, it
had
been wrong to set out to have a child by him when she had no intention of marrying him or even continuing to live with him. But it had not seemed like that at the time, it had seemed the obvious thing, even the moral thing. With that decision made, with the baby in her arms, even then she had not been able to ignore Edward's beauty, a beauty that inevitably moved her. She had thought, why can't that alone be enough for me, though I know there is nothing else, scarcely anything else to him at all? The world was full of men bound to women for no more reason than that those women were beautiful. Why couldn't it be the other way round and be so for her?

He sat on the side of her bed and once more asked her to marry him. She said no, no, she couldn't, please not to ask her again, it was impossible, they would both be unhappy, all three of them would be unhappy. He had got up and gone and she had never seen him again.

From somewhere or other, Mopsa had acquired a photograph of him and had it framed and put it by her bed. As if he were her son. Did it matter why? Did it matter, come to that, that Mopsa had not told anyone of James's death? Did anything matter?

Strangely, she remembered dreams she had had which she had not known were dreams at the time but had believed, while she was living through them, to be real.
Suppose she were dreaming now and due to wake and find it had been the most terrible nightmare of her life but still only a nightmare, find that it was morning and James was waking up in the room next door?

She went back in there and looked at the neat bareness Mopsa had made of it. Grief fills up the room of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me . . .

Next morning there was a note from Mopsa on the hall table.
I have gone to lunch with Constance Fenton
, it read.
Back about four
. Mopsa hadn't bothered to leave her notes on other days. Or had she? There was a small wastepaper basket under the table. It was full of screwed-up pieces of paper. Benet began flattening them out. They were all notes from Mopsa, daily notes.
I have gone to the hospital. I have gone to the registrar. I have gone to see Sims & Wainwright
. Benet did not want even to guess who Sims & Wainwright might be. She was touched, she felt guilty, that Mopsa had written all those notes and, seeing them ignored, had patiently retrieved each one and thrown it away before writing the next.

She opened the door of the room that was to be her place to work in, the room Mopsa inevitably called the study. What else, after all, could you call it? When last she had been in there, books had lain in heaps all over the floor. Mopsa had put them away. She had put them on the shelves, in no sort of order, some of them even upside down. And into the roller of the typewriter she had inserted a clean fresh sheet of paper as if inviting Benet to begin work. Benet wondered if she would ever work again. The idea seemed grotesque. How could she, in her own devastation, ever hope to render on to paper the emotions of others?