Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

“Lovey?”

Barbara heard her mother tottering along the upstairs passage, her mules alternately shuffling and slapping against the bare fl oor. She knew she ought to call out to her, but instead she prayed that before she reached the bedroom, her mother’s fleeting attention would make the jump to something else. Perhaps to her brother’s bedroom which, although it long since had been cleared of his belongings, often still proved enough of a lure that Mrs. Havers would wander into it, talking to her son as if he were still alive.

Five minutes, Barbara thought. Just five minutes of peace.

She’d been home for some hours, arriving to find Mrs. Gustafson sitting erect on a kitchen chair at the foot of the stairs and her mother above in her bedroom, crumpled on the edge of the bed. Mrs. Gustafson was curiously armed with the hose of the vacuum cleaner, her mother was bewildered and frightened, a shrivelled figure in the darkness who had lost the simple knowledge of how to operate her bedroom lights.

“We had ourselves a bit of a scuffl e. She’s been wanting your father,” Mrs. Gustafson had said when Barbara came in the door. Her grey wig had been pulled slightly askew so that on the left its curls hung down too far below her ear. “She started looking through the house calling out for her Jimmy. Then she wanted the street.”

Barbara’s eyes fell to the hose of the vacuum.

“Now, I din’t hit her, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson said. “You know I wouldn’t hit your mum.” Her fi ngers first curled round the hose then caressed its worn covering. “Snake,” she said confidentially. “She does behave when she sees it, luv. I just wave it a bit. That’s all I have to do.”

For a moment, Barbara felt as if her blood had congealed, rendering her immobile and incapable of speech. She felt wedged solidly between two conflicting needs. Words and actions were called for, some sort of castigation of the elderly woman for her blind stupidity, for resorting to terrorising instead of tending. But, far more important, placation was required. For if Mrs. Gustafson drew the line on what she was willing to endure, they were lost.

So in the end, despising herself, creating a new, more capacious reservoir in her conscience to hold the guilt, she settled upon saying, “It’s hard when she gets confused, I know. But if you frighten her, don’t you think she gets worse?” and all the time she hated herself for the tone of reason she employed and the underlying plea for understanding and cooperation. This is your mother, Barbara, she told herself. This isn’t an animal we’re talking about. But it made no difference. She was talking about care-taking. She had long ago abjured the quality of life.

“She does for a bit,” Mrs. Gustafson said, “which is why I phoned you, luv, because I thought she’d lost what few beans she has left. But she’s fine now, isn’t she? Not a peep out of her. You should have stayed in Cambridge.”

“But you phoned for me to come home.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I? A bit of a panic that was, when she wanted her Jimmy and she wouldn’t drink her tea or eat the nice egg sandwich I’d made. But she’s fine now. Go on up. Have a look. She may even have dropped off for a bit of a kip. The way babies do, you know. Just cry themselves to sleep.”

Which went a great distance to let Barbara know what the last few hours prior to her arrival had been like in the house. Except that this wasn’t a baby crying itself to physical exhaustion. This was an adult, whose exhaustion was one of the mind.

She had found her mother hunched over on the bed, with her head on her knees and her face directed towards the chest of drawers next to the window. When Barbara crossed the room to her, she saw that her mother’s spectacles had slipped off her nose and lay on the floor, leaving her vague blue eyes looking even more detached than they normally did.

“Mum?” she said. She hesitated about switching on the light on the bedside table, afraid it might frighten her mother in some further fashion. She touched the older woman’s head. Her hair felt very dry, but it was soft like wispy bits of cotton wool. It would be nice to get her a perm, Barbara thought. She’d like that, Mum would. If she didn’t forget where she was in the middle of the treatment and try to flee the hairdresser’s when she saw her head covered by lumpy coloured rods the purpose of which she no longer understood.

Mrs. Havers stirred, just a small movement of her shoulders as if she were trying to rid herself of an unwanted burden. She said, “Doris and I played this afternoon. She wanted a tea party and I wanted jacks. We tiffed over it. But then we had both.”

Doris was her mother’s older sister. She’d died as a teenager during the Blitz. She’d not had the courtesy of adding to the family history by being eliminated by a German bomb, however. Instead, it was an inglorious but nonetheless appropriate finish to a life that had been characterised by unfailing rapacity: She’d choked to death on a piece of black market pork which she’d whipped off her brother’s plate at Sunday dinner when he left the table to make an adjustment to the wireless out of which, like a saviour, Winston Churchill was due to speak.

Barbara had heard the story often enough as a child. Chew everything forty times, her mother would say, else you’ll end up stiff like your auntie Doris.

“I’ve prep to do for school, but I don’t like prep,” her mother went on. “I played instead. Mummy won’t like that. She’ll ask. And I don’t know what to say.”

Barbara bent over her. “Mum,” she said. “It’s Barbara. I’m home. I’m going to turn on the light. It won’t scare you, will it?”

“But the blackout. We must be very careful. Have you drawn the curtains?”

“It’s all right, Mum.” She switched on the lamp and sat on the bed at her mother’s side. She put her hand on her shoulder and squeezed lightly. “Okay, Mum? That better?”

Mrs. Havers’ eyes went from the window to Barbara. She squinted. Barbara reached for her spectacles, polished away a grease spot on one of the lenses by rubbing it against her own trouser leg, and slipped them back on her mother’s nose.

“She has a snake,” Mrs. Havers said. “Barbie, I don’t like snakes and she’s brought one with her. She brings it out and she holds it and she tells me what it wants me to do. She says snakes crawl up you. She says they crawl inside . But it’s so big and if it gets inside me, I’ll-”

Barbara put her arm round her mother. She crouched to duplicate her mother’s position. They were face-to-face, heads resting on knees. “There’s no snake, Mum. It’s the vacuum cleaner. She’s trying to frighten you. But she wouldn’t do that if you’d just manage to do what she says. She wouldn’t even bother. Can you try to behave?”

Mrs. Havers’ face clouded. “Vacuum cleaner? Oh no, Barbie, it was a snake.”

“But where could Mrs. Gustafson have got a snake?”

“I don’t know, lovey. But she has it. I’ve seen it. She holds it and waves it.”

“She’s holding it now, Mum. Downstairs. It’s the vacuum cleaner. Would you like to go down and have a look at it with me?”

“No!” Barbara felt her mother’s back go rigid. Her voice began to rise. “Because I don’t like snakes, Barbie. I don’t want them crawling up me. I don’t want them inside. I don’t-”

“Okay, Mum, okay.”

She saw that she couldn’t pit her mother’s frail coping skills in psychological warfare against Mrs. Gustafson. It’s just the vacuum, Mum, isn’t Mrs. Gustafson silly to try to scare you with it was not going to work to maintain the fragile peace in the house. Their peace was too volatile, especially when it rested on her mother’s failing ability to stay firmly grounded in the here and now.