by Francis: TO THE HILT

'Thanks, Jed.'

He gave me cash from his pockets. 'Phone me tomorrow evening.'

I nodded.

He said, 'They've put the heater on in the waiting-room here.'

I shook his hand gratefully and waved him away home to his comfortable Flora.

Best to forget that night.

The face that looked back from an oblong of mirror as the train clattered over the points on the approach to Euston was, I realised, going to appeal to my mother's fastidious standards even less than usual. The black eye was developing inexorably, my chin bristled, and even I could see that a comb would be a good idea.

I righted what I could with the help of Jed's cash and a chemist's shop in the station but my Mama predictably eyed me up and down with a pursed mouth before dispensing a minimum hug on her doorstep.

'Really, Alexander,' she said. 'Haven't you any clothes free of paint?'

'Few.'

'You look thin. You look… well, you'd better come in.'

I followed her into the prim polished hallway of the architectural gem she and Ivan inhabited in the semicircle of Park Crescent, by Regent's Park.

As usual, she herself looked neat, pretty, feminine and disciplined, with short shining dark hair, and a hand-span waist, and as usual I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but didn't, because she found such emotion excessive.

I'd grown tall, like my father, and had been taught by him from birth to look after the delicately boned sweet-natured centre of his devotion, to care for her and serve her and to consider it not a duty but a delight. I remembered a childhood of gusty laughter from him and small pleased smiles from her, and he'd lived long enough for me to sense their joint bewilderment that the boy they'd carefully furnished with a good education and Highland skills like shooting, fishing and stalking was showing alarming signs of nonconformity.

At sixteen, I'd said one day, 'Dad… I don't want to go to university.' (Heresy.) 'I want to paint.'

'A good hobby, Al,' he'd said, frowning. He'd praised for years the ease with which I could draw, but never taken it seriously. He never did, to the day he died.

'I'm just telling you, Dad.'

'Yes, Al.'

He hadn't minded my liking for being alone. In Britain the word 'loner' flew none of the danger signals it did over in the United States, where the desirability of being 'one of a team' was indoctrinated from preschool. 'Loners' there, I'd discovered, were people who went off their heads. So maybe I was off mine, but anything else felt wrong.

'How's Ivan?' I asked my mother.

'Would you like coffee?' she said.

'Coffee, eggs, toast… anything.'

I followed her down to the basement-kitchen where I cooked and ate a breakfast that worked a change for the better.

'Ivan?' I said.

She looked away as if refusing to hear the question and asked instead, 'What's the matter with your eye?'

'I walked into… well, it doesn't matter. Tell me about Ivan.'

'I er…' She looked uncharacteristically uncertain. 'His doctors say he should slowly be resuming his normal activities…'

'But?' I said, as she stopped.

'But he won't.'

After a pause I said, 'Well, tell me.'

There was then this subtle thing between us: that shadowy moment when the generations shift and the child becomes the parent. And perhaps it was happening to us at an earlier age than in most families because of my long training in care of her, a training that had been in abeyance since she'd married Ivan, but which now resurfaced naturally and with redoubled force across her kitchen table.

I said, 'James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree…'

She laughed, and went on, 'Took great care of his Mother, though he was only three.'

I nodded. 'James James said to his Mother, "Mother," he said, said he, "You must never go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me." '

'Oh, Alexander .' A whole lifetime of restraint quivered in her voice, but the dammed up feelings didn't break.

'Just tell me,' I said.

A pause. Then she said, 'He's so depressed .'

'Er… clinically depressed?'

'I don't know what that means. But I don't know how to deal with it. He lies in bed most of the time. He won't get dressed. He hardly eats. I want him to go back into the Clinic but he won't do that either, he says he doesn't like it there, and Dr Robbiston doesn't seem to be able to prescribe anything that will pull him out of it.'

'Well… has he a good reason for being depressed? Is his heart in a bad state?'

'They said there wasn't any need for by-passes or a pacemaker. They used one of those balloon things on one of his arteries, that's all. And he has to take pills, of course.'

'Is he afraid he's going to die?'

My mother wrinkled her smooth forehead. 'He just tells me not to worry.'

'Shall I… um… go up and say hello?'

She glanced at the big kitchen clock, high on the wall above an enormous cooker. Five to nine.

'His nurse is with him now,' she said. 'A male nurse. He doesn't really need a nurse, but he won't let him go. Wilfred, the nurse - and I don't like him, he's too obsequious - he sleeps on our top floor here in those old attics, and Ivan has had an intercom installed so that he can call him if he has chest pains in the night.'

'And does he have chest pains in the night?'

My mother said with perplexity, 'I don't know. I don't think so. But he did, of course, when he had the attack. He woke up with it at four in the morning, but at the time he thought it was only bad indigestion.'

'Did he wake you?'

She shook her head. She and Ivan had always slept in adjoining but separate bedrooms. Not from absence of love; they simply preferred it.

She said, 'I went in to say good morning to him and give him the papers, as I always do, and he was sweating and pressing his chest with his fist.'

'You should have got a message to me at once,' I said. 'Jed would have driven over with it. You shouldn't have had to deal with all this by yourself.'

'Patsy came…'

Patsy was Ivan's daughter. Sly eyes. Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself. Ivan's assurances got nowhere: and Patsy's feelings for me, as my mother's potential heir, would have curdled sulphuric acid. I always smiled at her sweetly.

'What did Patsy do?' I asked.

'Ivan was in the Clinic when she came here. She used the telephone.' My mother stopped for effect.

'Who did she want?' I prompted helpfully.

Amusement glimmered in my mother's dark eyes. 'She telephoned Oliver Grantchester.'

Oliver Grantchester was Ivan's lawyer.

'How blatant was she?' I asked.

'Oh, straight to the jugular, darling.' Patsy called everyone darling. She would murder, I surmised, with a 'Sorry, darling' while she slid the stiletto into the heart. 'She told Oliver,' smiled my mother, 'that if Ivan tried to change his Will, she would contest it.'

'And she meant you to hear.'

'If she hadn't wanted me to, she could have called him from anywhere else. And naturally she was sugar-candy all over the Clinic. The loving daughter. She's good at it.'

'And she said there was no need for you to bring me all the way from Scotland while she was there to look after things.'

'Oh dear, you know how positive she is…'

'A tidal wave.'

Civility was a curse, I often thought. Patsy needed someone to be brusquely rude about the way she bullied everyone with saccharine; but if ever openly crossed she could produce so intense an expression of 'poor little me-dom' that potential critics found themselves comforting her instead. Patsy at thirty-four had a husband, three children, two dogs and a nanny all anxiously twitching to please her.