Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
The only thing I wasn’t able to do was excise Mother from memory and thought. I’m not sure anyone can accomplish that when it comes to a parent or a sibling. The tie that binds one to immediate family can be cut, but the severed ends of it tend to flutter in one’s face on windy days.
Naturally, when Mother and Kenneth Fleming became the subjects of heavy journalistic speculation some two years ago, those ends began fluttering in my face more often than I would have liked. It’s difficult to explain how I felt, now and again seeing her picture and his in the Daily Mail, which one of the technicians religiously brought to the zoo’s animal hospital to read while she was enjoying her elevenses each day. I’d see the photographs over her shoulder. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the headline. I’d look away. I’d take my coffee to a table near the windows. I’d drink it down fast with my eyes on the tree-tops. And I’d wonder why my stomach felt queer.
I originally thought that I’d seen nothing more than proof that she’d carried her lifetime of good works to their logical conclusion by making fact out of theory like a competent social scientist. The hypothesis had always been that, given the appropriate set of opportunities, the disadvantaged could reach the same heights of glory as did the advantaged. It had nothing to do with birth, blood, genetic predispositions, or familial role models. Homo sapiens wanted to succeed by virtue of being Homo sapiens in the first place. Kenneth Fleming had been the subject of her study. Kenneth Fleming had proved her theory true. So what was it to me?
How I hate to admit it. How juvenile and questionable it really seems. I can’t even relate it without embarrassment.
In keeping Kenneth Fleming in her home, Mother had confirmed my long-held belief that she preferred him to me and had always wished that he were her child. Not just at that point in time when it was reasonable to think that she’d be more than eager to find a replacement for the street slime she’d encountered near Covent Garden Station. But long before that, when I was still at home, when Kenneth and I were both fifth formers at our respective state schools.
When I first saw their photographs in the newspapers, when I first read the stories, beneath my brittle veneer of what’s-the-old-cow-up-to-this-time, lay the unprotected skin of rebuff. Beneath that thin skin, the reaction to rejection festered like a boil.
Hurt and jealousy. I felt them both. And I suppose you’re wondering why. We’d been estranged for so many years, my mother and I, why should I care that she’d taken into her home and her life someone who could play the role of her adult-child? I hadn’t wanted to play that role, had I? Had I? Had I?
You don’t quite believe me, do you? Like Chris, you think I’m protesting too much. You’re deciding it wasn’t hurt or jealousy at all that I felt, aren’t you? You’re labelling it fear. You’re reasoning that Miriam Whitelaw isn’t going to live forever, and there must be quite an inheritance involved when she pops off: the house in Kensington and all its contents, the printworks, the cottage in Kent, God only knows how many investments…Isn’t that the real reason, you’re wondering, that Olivia Whitelaw’s stomach did flip-flops the first time she realised what Kenneth Fleming’s presence in her mother’s life might really mean? Because the truth is that Olivia wouldn’t have had much of a legal leg to stand on had her mother decided to leave everything she possessed to Kenneth Fleming. Olivia had, after all, removed herself from her mother’s life in a rather terminal fashion some time in the past.
Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I don’t actively recall those concerns being part of what I felt. My mother was only sixty years old when she became reinvolved with Kenneth Fleming at the printworks. She was in perfect health. I had no real thought of her dying, so I had no real thought of how she intended ultimately to dispose of her possessions.
Once I got used to the idea of Mother and Kenneth together—more, once the oddity of their situation began to strike people when Kenneth continued to do nothing to alter his marital status—my hurt dissolved first to incredulity. She’s over sixty years old, I would think. What’s she planning on happening between them? Incredulity fast faded to derision. She’s making a howling fool of herself.
As time went on and I began to see that Kenneth and Mother’s arrangement suited them fine, I did my best to ignore the two of them. Who gave a hoot if they were mother-son, best mates, lovers, or the biggest cricket freaks ever known to mankind? They could do what they wanted, as far as I was concerned. They could have their fun. They could wiggle and wag in the nude in front of Buckingham Palace, for all that I cared.
So when Max suggested that it was time to tell Mother about ALS, I said no. Put me into hospital, I said. Find me a nursing home. Put me on the street. But don’t tell that old twat anything about me. Is that clear? Is it? Is it?
Nothing was said about Mother after that. But the seed had been planted, which may have been Max’s intention in the first place. If that’s so, he’d planted the seed in the cleverest fashion: Don’t tell your mother for her sake, girlie. That isn’t the point. If you’re going to tell her, do it for Chris.
Chris. At the end of things, what is it that I wouldn’t do for Chris?
Exercise, exercise. Walking. Lifting weights. Climbing endless stairways. I would be the random victim to beat this disease. I would beat it in the most fantastic manner. I wouldn’t do it like Hawking, a brilliant razor mind confined within an immobilised body. I’d take my mind under complete control, name it master of my body, and triumph over the quakes, the cramps, the weakness, the shakes.
The initial progress of the disease was slow. I dismissed the fact that I’d been told to expect this, and instead I took the disease’s relative inactivity as a sign that my programme of self-recovery was proving effective. Look look, my every stumble-bumble step announced, the right leg’s no worse, the left leg’s unaffected, I’ve got this sod ALS by the curlies and I don’t intend to let him go. But there was no real change in my condition. This period was merely an interlude, a time of irony when I allowed myself to believe I could stop the ebb of the tide by wading into the sea and politely asking the water if it wouldn’t be willing to stick around.
My right leg became loose flesh that dangled from bone. And underneath it hung muscles that twisted, tightened, fought with each other, tied themselves into knots, and loosened into strips of gristle again. I asked why. Why, if the muscles still move, if they still cramp and twist, why why why won’t they do what I want, when I make the demand? But that, I was told, is the nature of the disease. It’s like a high tension electrical wire that’s been damaged in a storm. Electricity still runs through it, sparks shoot out randomly, but the energy produced is useless.
And then my left leg began to go. From the time of the first fibrillations in the restaurant near Camden Lock, there was no real yielding of the disintegration. It was slow, true, a minor weakness that became ever slightly more pronounced as the weeks went by. But there was no denying that the disease was advancing. Fibrillation increased, building strength from the vibrations until they evolved into agonising cramps. When this occurred, exercise became out of the question. One couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or lift weights when one was concentrating on managing pain without beating one’s head into rotting grapefruit against the nearest wall.
Through it all, Chris said nothing. By that, I don’t mean to say he was mute. He kept me apprised of how the assault unit was managing without me, he talked about his renovation work, he solicited advice about dealing with sticky situations among the governing core of ARM, he chatted about his parents and his brother and made plans for us to make another trek to Leeds to see them.
I knew that Chris would never be the one to bring up ALS. I had made the decision to start using a cane. I had made the decision when it was time for a second cane. I could see that the next step was going to be a walker so that I could drag myself more efficiently from bedroom to loo, from loo to galley, from galley to workroom to bedroom again. But after that, when the walker began putting demands on my e
When I began to use the aluminium walker, to wrestle my way from the workroom into the galley, I knew it was time. The effort at movement with the walker brought sweat out in great patches down my back and beneath my arms. I tried to tell myself that the only problem was one of getting used to this new form of mobility, but to get used to a new form of mobility I was expecting myself to build upper-body strength in a situation in which strength was draining from me a teaspoon at a time. It became apparent that Chris and I would have to talk.
I’d been using the walker for less than three weeks when Max came to spend an evening with us. It was in early April, this very year, on a Sunday evening. We’d had dinner together, and we were sitting on the deck of the barge watching the dogs play-act at brawling on the roof of the cabin. Chris had carried me up the stairs, Max had lit my cigarette, both had pulled at non-existent forelocks, made sweeping bows, and disappeared below to fetch blankets, brandy, glasses, and the bowl of fruit. I heard the murmur of their voices: Chris saying, “No, nothing really,” and Max saying, “Seems weaker.” I turned away from the sound of them as best I could and concentrated on the canal, the pool, and Browning’s Island.
It was hard to believe that I’d been here five years, coming and going, establishing myself at the zoo, moving animals in and out, alternately fighting with and loving Chris. There had been moments when I’d acknowledged the safety and the peace of this place, but never before had each element of Little Venice meant to me what it meant that night. I took all of it in in great gulps, like air. The one strange willow on Browning’s Island that, dissimilar to the others, leans like a reckless schoolboy over the water, drooping branches within an inch of the pier. The row of citrus-coloured barges whose owners sit on the decks when the evening’s pleasant and nod and wave as we run the dogs by. The red and green wrought-iron of the Warwick Avenue bridge and the great row of white houses that line the avenue that leads to the bridge. And in front of those houses, the ornamental cherry trees are beginning to bloom, and the wind stirs the blossoms like angel’s hair and they float to the pavement and form palettes of pink. Birds scatter the petals. They dart from Warwick Avenue to the canal. There they flitter from tree to towpath in a search for bits of string, small twigs, hair from which to fashion their nests…. How could I leave this place?
Then I heard their voices again.
“…difficult, you know…She calls it our trial by fire…doing her best to understand…”
And Max’s reply: “…whenever you need to get away, you know.”
And Chris: “Thanks. I know. It makes things more bearable.”
I studied the water, how the outline of the canal trees and the buildings beyond them zigzagged in the ripples, how a goose plopping into the pool from the island caused an ever-widening circle of undulations that ultimately reached but did not move the barge. I felt no betrayal in the fact that Chris and Max were talking about me, about her whose name I still didn’t know, about the miserable situation we found ourselves in. It was time I did some talking about myself.
They returned with the brandy, the glasses, the fruit. Chris wrapped a blanket round my legs and, with a smile, tapped his fingers gently against my cheek. Beans leaped off the cabin’s roof to the deck, eager at the prospect of food. Toast pranced along the edge of the roof, whining and waiting for someone to lift him down.
“He’s being a baby,” Chris said as Max made a move to lower Toast to the deck. “He can manage well enough.”
“Ah, but he’s a sweet wee beastie,” Max said as he set Toast next to Beans. “That being the case, I don’t mind the trouble.”
“So long as he doesn’t get used to being catered to,” Chris said. “He’ll become too dependent if he knows someone’s willing to do for him what he can do for himself. And that, my friend, will be the ruination of him.”
“What?” I asked. “Dependence?”
Max took his time about cutting up an apple. Chris poured the brandy and sat at my feet. He pulled Beans down next to him and rubbed the tender spot he called “the area of supreme puppy ecstasy” just underneath the beagle’s floppy ears.
“It is,” I said.
“What?” Chris asked. Max fed a quarter of the apple to Toast.
“Ruination. You’re right. Dependence leads to ruination.”
“I was just blithering about nothing, Livie.”
“It’s like a fishing net,” I said. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The kind boats lay out on the surface of the water to catch a school of mackerel or something. That’s what ruination is, a net. It doesn’t just snag and destroy the dependent one. It catches everyone else as well. All the little fishes swimming blithely along with the single fish who’s dependent in the first place.”
“That’s rather an elastic metaphor, girlie.” Max plunged his knife into another apple quarter and held it out to me. I shook my head.
“It suits,” I said. I looked at Chris. He held my gaze. His hand stopped rubbing beneath the beagle’s ears. Beans nudged his fingers. Chris dropped his eyes.
“If all those fish swam apart from one another, they’d never be caught,” I said. “Oh, perhaps one or two of them, even ten or twelve. But not the whole school. That’s what’s so sad about the fact that they stay together.”
“It’s instinct,” Chris said. “That’s how they operate. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, herds of animals. It’s all the same.”
“Except for people. We don’t need to operate on instinct. We can reason things through and do what’s best to protect our fellows from our own ruination. Don’t you agree? Chris? Well?”
He began to peel an orange. I could feel the rich oil of its scent on the back of my tongue as I drew a breath. He began to divide the orange into sections. He handed me one. Our fingers touched as I took it. He turned his head and examined the water as if he was searching for debris.
Max said, “There’s some sense to what you’re saying, girlie.”
Chris said, “Max,” in a cautious tone.
Max said, “It’s a question of responsibility. How far are we responsible for the lives that have meshed with our own?”
“And for the ruination of those lives,” I said. “Especially if we turn a blind eye to what we can do to prevent the ruination.”
Max fed the rest of his apple to the dogs—a quarter to Beans, a quarter to Toast. He set upon another with his paring knife. This time he peeled it, starting at the top and striving to achieve a single spiral. We watched him, Chris and I. The knife slipped three-quarters of the way through the project, slitting through the peel, which fell to the deck. The three of us observed it against the boards, a ribbon of red marking a failed attempt at perfection.
“So I can’t,” I said. “You see that, don’t you?”
“What?” Chris asked.
We watched the dogs sniff at and then reject the apple peel. They wanted the real thing, Beans and Toast. The sweet pith of the fruit, not the biting sharp taste of the skin.
“What?” Chris repeated. “Can’t what?”
“Be responsible.”
“For what?”
“You know. Come on, Chris.”
I watched him closely. He had to feel relief at my words. I wasn’t his wife, wasn’t even his lover, had never been either, had never been promised that I might be either. I was five years later the tart he’d picked off the street across from Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre as he’d passed by with a ruined dog on a lead. I had held my own as his barge mate. I had made a contribution to our living circumstances. But
And yes, I suppose I wanted him to protest. I imagined him saying, “I can cope. We can cope. We always have done. We always will do. We’re bound together, you and I are, Livie. We’re in it till the end.”
Because he’d said it before in rather different words when it was easier, when the ALS wasn’t quite as bad as it was fast becoming. Then we could talk bravely about how it would be, but we didn’t have to face it because it wasn’t how-it-would-be at the moment. But this time, he said nothing. He pulled Toast to him and scrutinised a rough patch between the dog’s eyes. Toast enjoyed the attention and brushed his tail happily against the deck.
“Chris?” I said.
“You’re not my ruination,” he answered. “Things’re tough, that’s all.”
Max pulled the cork from the brandy bottle and topped up our glasses although we’d none of us touched a drop yet. He rested his big hand on my knee for a moment. He squeezed. The pressure said, Take heart, girlie, go on.
“My legs are getting weaker. The walker’s not enough.”
“You need to get used to it. Build up your strength.”
“My legs’ll be like cooked spaghetti, Chris.”
“You’re not practising enough. You’re not using the walker as much as you could.”
“I won’t be able to stand in another two months.”
“If your arms are in shape, then—”
“Goddamn it, listen. I’m going to need a wheelchair.”