Читать книгу A Line of Blood - Ben McPherson - Страница 15

Millicent’s phone rang. After four rings it stopped. I went downstairs, found the phone on the kitchen table and checked the screen. A missed call from Aileen Mercer. A bolt of guilt. Why hadn’t I called my mother? I found my own phone. It was lying face down on the living-room sofa, hidden against the black leather. Two missed calls. I rang her back.

‘Alexander, it’s about your father.’ My mother was one of those women who still had a telephone voice; her staccato formality made it hard to know how she was.

‘What’s happened, Mum?’

‘Ach, it’ll turn out to be nothing, I’m sure.’

‘Mum?’

‘I’ve some concerns about him. He’s been hospitalised. Mainly tests.’

‘What do you mean, mainly tests?’

‘An electrocardiogram. Some blood samples.’

‘Mum, that doesn’t sound like nothing.’

‘He took a little fall, Alexander. I’d to call an ambulance.’

‘Do you want me to come up, Mum?’

‘Ach, no, you’re awfully busy down there, son.’

Millicent was awake when I went back upstairs. I told her about the call.

‘I should ring her,’ she said.

‘You don’t need to do that.’

‘Sure I do.’

I lay on the bed. Downstairs Millicent spoke to my mother for ten minutes. I could hear the coaxing softness in her voice, the gentle laughter, the long silences she left for my mother to fill. Why are you so good at this?

Something deep within me had feared that Millicent and my mother would hate each other. But a year into our marriage, when I had started to trust that there was a reality to our love, that I genuinely was more than a work permit to my wife, I had rung my parents in Edinburgh to tell them my old news.

I suspected my mother minded terribly that I hadn’t wanted her at the wedding, and I wondered whether her long pauses on the phone were because she was crying. She had asked to speak to Millicent, and with great formality welcomed her to the family.

Millicent was very touched, and profoundly embarrassed: even more so when my mother sent her the little gold bracelet that had belonged to my grandmother. She wrote back to her in the kind of flowing copperplate handwriting that they only teach in American schools, a long letter that she refused to let me read.

‘You’re really very well-brought-up, aren’t you, Millicent?’

‘What were you expecting, rube-face?’

‘Someone less nuanced, I suppose.’

‘And yet here you are with me.’

My mother called Millicent Lassie, and occasionally Girl, and Millicent called my mother Mrs Mercer. They would write each other weekly letters that again neither of them ever let me read; they even spoke regularly on the telephone, which mystified me. My mother hated the telephone. Strange that they should have this bond: what could Millicent know of my mother, or my mother of Millicent?

My father would openly disparage America at every opportunity, and Millicent would laugh gently, and quietly put him right. ‘No, sir, we really are no more stupid than anyone else. Education may not be fairly distributed, but that is because wealth is concentrated in a very small number of hands, sir. Surely we can agree on that?’

They never agreed, but my father liked the fact that Millicent called him sir.

Would I have worked as hard with her parents as she did with mine? It’s a question I’ve never had to answer: Millicent has never allowed me to meet them.

I heard Millicent end the call, heard her toss the phone on to the table, heard her feet cross the living-room floor and climb the stairs.

She came in and sat down on the bed.

‘OK, so I think maybe you have to face the possibility that this situation is worse than your mother is saying, Alex. I think maybe she really needs you there. She even cried a little.’

‘The timing couldn’t be worse, could it?’

‘Honey, listen to me: I think your dad had a stroke. That’s pretty much what your mom told me. They didn’t say it to her yet, I guess, because they’re still doing tests, but I think she already read between the lines. She’s scared and you need to be there.’

The fall. The electrocardiogram. It made sense.

‘Millicent?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’d be lost without you.’

‘Sure.’

The grinding sadness of that last Edinburgh train, all shouting children and glowering men, Fruit Shoots, crisps, six-packs of beer. Millicent had bought my ticket for me; she had sent me out into the London evening, an overnight bag in my hand, long before I needed to go. Now I glowered too, alone at my table, hoping no one would sit down opposite me, hoping people could read it all in my expression. Stay away. All is not well here.

My thoughts would not settle. My father was seriously ill – Millicent was always right about these things – and my mother would be out of her mind with worry. But when I tried to picture my mother at my father’s bedside I saw only the neighbour: the swollen tongue, the red-encrusted nostril. Please, I thought, don’t let that be my father’s fate.

That blue-red tongue, I thought, pushing at my wife’s lips. That milk-white hand seeking out her breast.

She as good as pushed you out of the front door.

I sat, trying to feel the moment again. Did she want me gone? No. No, she had held me very tightly, her cheek pressed against mine. She hadn’t broken the embrace. I was the one who had pulled gently away from her.

Millicent had thrown her arms around me then, kissed me very deeply. Her eyes did not flick to some imagined lover somewhere just out of sight.

And yet, I thought. That pawing hand, that searching tongue. I worried at them; I couldn’t leave them alone.

She as good as pushed you out of the door.

My mother was not at the station. I rang her. There was no answer so I took a taxi to the hospital. Millicent had written the number of the ward on the train ticket that she had printed for me. For a moment I saw myself running from one end of the building to another, hopelessly lost, but the hospital was modern and the signs were clear.

I was surprised to find two nurses at the Gerontology desk. It was almost one.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ said the younger of the two.

‘Alex Mercer,’ I said. ‘That’s my name, and it’s also my father’s name.’

The older nurse whispered something to the younger nurse.

‘Alex Mercer is a patient here,’ I said. ‘Just to be clear.’

The younger nurse was looking not at me but past me. She stood up, and put a hand on my shoulder. So much kindness. Then she put her other hand on my other shoulder and turned me. How very gentle she was.

It was then that I saw my mother, stiff-backed on a white plastic chair, immaculate in her dark blue fitted jacket and skirt. On a little table beside her was a cup of tea, two pink wafers crossed on a napkin beside it.

My mother’s dark eyes were on me, and she smiled as I approached. ‘The nurses have been very good,’ she said. ‘Tea in a porcelain cup. Hello, Laddie.’

I took her in my arms, felt her crumple a little. Then she stiffened again. She would not cry. Not yet; not here.

‘I had to, you see. They told me he wasn’t coming back.’

The young nurse touched my elbow gently.

‘Would you like me to find you a chair, Mr Mercer? A cup of tea perhaps? And for you, Mrs Mercer?’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, please.’ Why so kind?

‘I had to, Alex, son,’ said my mother. ‘I’m so sorry.’

My father had suffered a massive stroke. Millicent had been right. ‘I didn’t want to worry you unduly, son,’ said my mother. ‘Then they told me that he wasn’t coming back. I mean, there was a theoretical chance, or some such, but it was awfully small. And I made the consultant tell me what the percentages meant, and she said your father would never return to me, not as himself. So I took a decision. I’m so very sorry, son.

‘I know I could have waited until you came,’ my mother said, ‘but I don’t think your father would have wanted you to see him like that. I could tell that the spirit was gone from him.’

My mother insisted on driving home from the hospital. It took her some time to find a parking space, and in the end we had to walk for five minutes to reach the flat. Dark sandstone loomed behind monumental trees. No chickenshops or foot pursuits here. Residents’ associations and doors in approved colours. Pragmatic elegance.

My mother took the stairs briskly when we arrived, installed herself at the dining table still wearing her coat; she filled two tiny crystal glasses with gin, topped them off with vermouth, and handed one to me.

‘To your father.’ She drained her glass, set it back on the table. Then she exhaled heavily, seemed to become a little shorter, a little older.

‘Fifty years married,’ she said. ‘Do you know, I thought I was too old.’ She gave a sad little laugh. ‘I was twenty-eight.’

I reached across and took her hand. ‘I know, Mum.’

‘Well, that was old.’ She poured herself another drink. ‘He was a good man, but he never loved me in quite the way I loved him.’

She gave a little half-sob, then pulled a handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed at her eye.

The walls were the same as they’d ever been: dark salmon pink and country-house green, white skirtings and door frames. It showed off the pictures, my mother always said.

‘You’re wrong, Mum. He cherished you.’

‘No. No, Alex, I’m not wrong. I wasn’t his first.’

I took her hand. ‘Come on, Mum.’

She went into the living room. When she came back, she had a photograph in her hand.

‘That’s her.’

A woman, strikingly beautiful, her mirror-black hair in a single braid, a calligraphic downstroke across the white cotton shirt. Behind her a light grey ocean. A darker grey sky. Cloudless.

Japan, I thought. My father had been stationed in Japan before Korea. They had sent him out in a troop ship. Taught him to drive and fire large ordnance.

‘Noriko,’ said my mother. ‘That was her name.’

The woman’s pose was Western but formal, unsmiling; all the same there was a warmth in her eyes, a secret shared with the man behind the camera.

‘Did Dad take this?’

‘Yes.’

I looked at my mother. She was watching me for my reaction; there was no anger, no sadness now, just a resigned patience.

‘She’s beautiful, is she not?’ she said at last.

There was a searching look in her eyes. I fought the urge to say something soothing.

‘Yes, Mum, she is beautiful.’

‘Thank you, Alexander.’ A little smile of satisfaction. My mother set great store by honesty. She didn’t want me to protect her.

‘He told me all about her. He wanted me to have all the facts at my disposal. Before I said yes to marriage.’ She nodded, as if to herself. ‘They were very much in love, you know. They wrote to each other, all through the war in Korea, and when he got home he kept writing, and so did Noriko. Then suddenly her letters stopped, and your father could only assume that she had ended the relationship. A terrible blow to him.’

She refilled my glass, then refilled her own. ‘And of course your father’s misfortune was my good fortune. He was a very handsome man, and a very honest man. He loved me, and he adored you, son. He really did. More than anything in the world.’

‘Dad loved you most of all, Mum.’

‘No, Alexander, no.’ She took my hand in hers, catching me in the lie. ‘I’m seventy-eight, son. I’m not afraid of the truth.’

‘OK, Mum.’

‘Anyhow, one day your father received a letter from Japan. It was from Noriko, and it troubled him greatly. She asked why he had stopped writing. Your father showed me the letter, because he thought I ought to know; and then he burned it, because he was a good man and he had made his choice.

‘And then … and then he went to his mother, and he asked why she had hidden Noriko’s letters from him. And at first she denied it, but eventually she admitted that she had burned them. A cruel thing to have done, do you not think?’ She left the question hanging for a moment. ‘But I have her to thank, I suppose, because without her there would be none of this.’

My mother went to bed shortly afterwards. I wandered around the flat for a while, trying to understand what I should be feeling. My father was everywhere here: his books, his records, the rack of pipes and the stacked ashtrays; his keen eyes staring out from silver-framed photos, never less than immaculately turned-out. The sharpness of those collars.

My father’s life had been a series of tickets out: the army; Edinburgh; my mother. He had entered the forces as a welder, and left as an engineer; he had taken a second degree at Edinburgh University, met my mother at a dance. He had come up. A sharp-looking man with quick wits and an easy charm, by the time he had left the army he had erased the Govan shipyard from his voice. He had made good. His parents lived an hour down the road. Tower-block folk, he called them. We never visited my grandmother. The Noriko story, of course. It made sense now.

My father had taken me to a war film once, at a cinema on the outskirts of town.

Later, at home, he had sat for hours, silent in his chair, smoking his pipe. And though he would often boast to his friends about having had ‘a good war’, I had seen him crying at the cinema.

I could hear my mother sobbing from the room that she and my father had shared. I thought of knocking on the door, of entering the room and sitting there, holding my mother’s hand over the blue silk counterpane. But it would mortify my mother to know that I could hear her in her grief. It would bring her no comfort.

Now was the time I should have cried: for my father, for my mother, for what was lost. All those decisions my mother had taken, alone, in her demure desolation.

Could you not have waited, Mum?

I paced through the flat, my teenage self again, skirting the walls, trying not to cross my own path, trying not to hear my mother’s sobs.

I tried to ring Millicent. Four rings, then voicemail. It was three o’clock, but she must have known that I would need to call her. I called again. Four rings, voicemail.

My parents’ flat was unchanged from the day I left home twenty-two years ago. Same fridge, same photographs on the walls, same furniture. It wasn’t for lack of money. They’d done well for themselves. But they had known what they liked back then, and they had never stopped liking it. Continuity. Restraint.

Where is Millicent?

I rang our home phone. It rang for the longest time.

There was a worn patch on the carpet by the side of the sofa where my mother liked to sit, and another by my father’s smoking chair.

Answer the phone.

Two decades of pipe smoke had gently curled across the flat, coating every white surface in a warm sepia, damping down the pillar-box red of the living-room curtains, the cobalt blue of the silk counterpanes in the bedrooms with which my mother had, rebelliously, accented their home. Answer the phone, Millicent.

It was Max who answered.

‘Max, it’s Dad.’

‘You woke me up. Is Grandpa dead?’

‘It was peaceful, Max. He died in his sleep.’

‘Oh,’ said Max.

‘Are you OK, Max?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I love you very much, Max.’

‘I love you too, Dad,’ he said dutifully.

‘Can you get Mum?’

I heard him put the receiver down, could make out the sound of his footsteps as he went back upstairs to wake Millicent. How can you sleep at a time like this?

I looked out into the night. Large windows, wide streets, sandstone solidity. Safe, I thought. Very safe.

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Max.’

‘Dad, she’s not here.’

‘Have you checked in the garden? She could be in the garden.’

‘It’s raining.’

‘Can you check in the garden, please, Max?’

‘But why would she be in the garden? It’s raining.’

‘Please check the garden, Max. Now.’

‘But what if she’s not there, Dad? What if something’s happened to her?’ I was scaring him. This wasn’t good.

‘We’ll figure it out, Max. She might have gone to the shops.’

‘OK.’ Max put down the receiver again. Of course Millicent hadn’t gone to the shops. I shouldn’t be exposing my son to my fears like this.

Where was she?

Max picked up the phone again.

‘Dad, Dad, she’s not here. She’s not in the garden. Dad, can you come home?’

It’s happening again, I thought. Please God, don’t let it happen again. I considered ringing Fab5 and asking him to go round, but Millicent would view it as a betrayal. She would hate me for exposing her like that. Who could I ring, though? Certainly not the police.

I had to keep the fear out of my voice. ‘Max,’ I said. ‘Max, listen to me. I want you to do something for me.’ Measure your words.