English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world. The air is cold. The floorboards are cold. It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost. There is a smell of toast. And on the block of butter small grains of toast from the last impatient knife. Outside, there is sunlight which is simultaneously soft and very precise. Every leaf of each tree seems separate.
She lay in a four-poster bed: her face was ashen-coloured and her cheeks fallen in. Her eyes were tight shut in pain. She wheezed as she breathed, especially when breathing out.
The doctor stood looking and then asked for a cupful of warm water and cotton wool. As he injected morphia into her upper arm, she flinched a little. Strange that suffering so much pain in her chest she should flinch at the pin-prick. With the warm water and cotton wool he cleaned away the little droplet of blood from her worn, large arm, the colour of stone or bread, as though it had acquired the colour through its scrubbing and baking.
Then, using the same much-worked arm, he took her blood pressure. It was very low. She kept her eyes shut as if the light, so soft and so precise, was pressing between them. She had still said nothing.
He prepared a syringe for another injection. The fifty-year-old daughter was standing at the foot of the bed, waiting to be told what to do.
He inserted the needle into a vein near the wrist. This time she didn’t flinch. After half the injection he paused, holding the syringe in the loose fold of skin as if it were the skin’s feather, and with his other hand he felt her neck to check the strength of her pulse in the artery and the degree of congestion in the jugular vein. He then completed the injection.
The old woman opened her eyes. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said very distinctly, almost crisply.
He listened to her chest. Her overworked brown arms, her deeply lined face, her creased strained neck were suddenly denied by the soft whiteness of her breast. The grey-haired son down in the yard with the cows, the daughter at the foot of the bed in carpet slippers and with swollen ankles, had both once clambered and fed here, and yet the soft whiteness of her breast was like a young girl’s. This she had preserved.
Downstairs in the parlour the doctor explained the medicines he was leaving. The old woman’s wheezing was still audible through the floorboards. Three dogs lay on the carpet, heads on outstretched paws, eyes open. They scarcely stirred when the old man came in.
He seemed dazed and sleepy. The doctor asked him how he was. ‘Not so bad,’ he said, ‘except for the screws.’
Neither father nor daughter nor the son outside asked the doctor about the old woman. The doctor said he would be coming back that evening.
When he came back the parlour was in darkness. This disturbed him somewhat. He called out and receiving no answer felt his way up the stairs. The stairs led straight into the first bedroom. Across it he could see the light under the door of the second room.
The room smelt now of sickness: under the dressing-table on which stood all the family wedding photographs in leather frames and a nineteenth-century child’s mug with the Death and Burial of Cock Robin engraved upon it, there was an enamel bowl with urine in it, and spit stained a little with blood. The daughter explained that every time her mother coughed she peed a little involuntarily. The old woman was paler and a piece of damp rag was laid over her forehead. The room smouldered around her, all its comfort burnt and drenched and then burnt again.
The doctor listened once more to her chest. She lay back exhausted. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, not as though it were an apology but simply a fact. He took her temperature and blood pressure. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you’ll sleep soon and feel rested.’
Her husband was sitting in the dark in the next room. The doctor had walked through it without noticing him, when he had come up the stairs. Now the daughter shepherded both men down, but still without putting a light on. For a moment it seemed that the stairs and the parlour were part of the outbuildings, unlit, unheated, belonging to the animals now stabled for the night. It seemed that the home was reduced to the four-poster bed in the lighted room above, where the old woman, the soft whiteness of whose breast had never changed, was dying.
When the daughter suddenly switched the light on, the doctor and the old man were dazzled. For each of them it was like finding himself on a stage. The familiar furniture was part of a stage set and both had to play roles which were utterly strange to what they thought of as their true nature. Both would have grasped any chance of reverting to the normal truth.
The old man sat down with an overcoat across his knees. ‘She has pneumonia now,’ the doctor said, ‘and she must take another medicine beside the ones I gave you this morning. Do you think she can swallow these pills? They are rather large. Or would she prefer to take it in liquid form? The liquid is made up for children but we can increase the dose. Which do you think would be best?’
The daughter, submissive and finding her only slight hope in trust, said: ‘It’s up to you doctor.’
‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you. Can she or can she not swallow these pills?’
‘Perhaps the liquid then,’ said the daughter, abandoning her small hope. The doctor also gave her some sleeping pills – for her father as well as her mother. They would at least sleep tonight under the same drug.
The old man, whilst the doctor was explaining the medicines to the daughter, sat looking in front of him, his hands clutching and unclutching the heavy material of the overcoat across his knees.
When the doctor had finished his explanations, there was a silence. Neither father nor daughter moved to show him out or ask when he would be coming again. They simply waited. The doctor said, ‘The immediate danger is past – another half hour and she might have died this morning, now she’s got to pay the price of surviving the attack.’
‘It sounds a funny mixture,’ said the old man without looking up, ‘heart trouble and then pneumonia. A funny mixture. She was quite well yesterday.’ He began to cry, very quietly, like a woman can: the tears welling up in his eyes.
The doctor, who had already picked up one of his bags, put it down again and leant back in the chair. ‘Can you make us a cup of tea?’ he said
While the daughter was making the tea the two men spoke about the orchard at the back and this year’s apples. When the daughter was there, they spoke about the father’s rheumatism. After the tea the doctor went.
The next morning was another autumn morning like the preceding. Every leaf of each tree seemed separate. The sunshine, filtered through a tree in the orchard, played on the floor of the old woman’s bedroom. She clambered out of bed and suffered a second attack. The doctor arrived within a quarter of an hour. Her lips were purple, her face clay-coloured. She died quickly, her hands very still.
In the parlour the old man rocked on his feet. The doctor deliberately did not put out a hand to steady him. Instead he faced him. The older man was the taller by nine inches. The doctor said quietly, his eyes extra wide behind his spectacles, ‘It would have been worse for her if she’d lived. It would have been worse.’
He might have said that there have been kings and presidents of republics who have never recovered from the death of their wives. He might have said that death is the condition of life. He might have said that man is indivisible and that, in his own view, this was the only sense in which death could have no dominion.
But whatever he said at that moment, the old man would have continued to rock on his feet, until the daughter lowered him into his chair in front of the unlit fire.
Only her feet betray her. There is something about the way she walks on her feet – a kind of irresponsibility towards them – which is still quite childish. Her figure is 36–25–36.
She