Julian Barnes: Pulse

‘No, I’m not asking.’

‘Except that you just did.’

Same old Janice, I thought. ‘Thank you for your sympathy,’ I said, as formally as I could. ‘No, there’s nothing you can do, and no, she wouldn’t like a visit.’

‘So be it.’

The summer Mum was dying was hot, and Dad wore those short-sleeved shirts of his. He used to wash them by hand, then struggle with the steam iron. One evening, when I could see he was exhausted, and trying unsuccessfully to fit the yoke of a shirt across the pointy end of the ironing board, I said,

‘You could send them to the laundry, you know.’

He didn’t look at me, just carried on wrenching at the damp shirt.

‘I am well aware,’ he eventually replied, ‘that such businesses exist.’ Mild sarcasm from my father had the force of rage from anyone else.

‘Sorry, Dad.’

Then he did stop and look at me. ‘It’s very important,’ he said, ‘that she sees me looking neat and tidy. If I started getting scruffy, she’d notice, and she’d think I couldn’t manage. And she mustn’t think I can’t manage. Because that would upset her.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ I felt rebuked; I felt, for once, a child.

Later, he came and sat with me. I had a beer, he had a careful whisky. Mum had been in the hospice three days. She had seemed calm that evening, and packed us off with no more than the switch of an eye.

‘By the way,’ he said, settling his glass on a coaster, ‘I’m sorry your mother didn’t like Janice.’ We both heard the tense of the verb. ‘Doesn’t,’ he inserted into the sentence, far too late.

‘I never knew that.’

‘Ah.’ My father paused. ‘Sorry. Nowadays…’ He didn’t need to go on.

‘Why not?’

His mouth tightened, as I imagine it did when a client told him something unwise – like, Yes I was at the scene of the crime after all.

‘Come on, Dad. Was it because of the garage incident? The puncture.’

‘What puncture?’

So she hadn’t told him that.

‘I always rather liked Janice. She was… sparky.’

‘Yes, Dad. The point.’

‘Your mother said she thought Janice was the sort of girl who knew how to make people feel guilty.’

‘Yes, she was particularly good at that.’

‘She used to complain to your mother about how difficult you were to live with – somehow implying that it was your mother’s fault.’

‘She ought to have been grateful. I’d have been a lot harder to live with it if hadn’t been for Mum’s love.’ Once again, a mistake born of tiredness. ‘Both of you, I mean.’

My father didn’t take the correction amiss. He sipped his drink.

‘So what else, Dad?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘I just think you’re holding something back.’

My father smiled. ‘Yes, you might have made a lawyer. Well, this was towards the end of – of your… when Janice was hardly herself.’

‘So spit it out and we’ll laugh at it together.’

‘She told your mother she thought you were a bit of a psychopath.’

I may have smiled, but I didn’t laugh.

We saw so many different people at the hospital and the hospice that I can no longer remember who told us that when someone is dying, when the whole system is shutting down, the last remaining senses still at work are usually those of hearing and smell. My mother was by now quite immobile, and being turned every four hours. She hadn’t talked for a week, and her eyes were no longer open. She had made it clear that when her swallow reflex weakened, she didn’t want a gastric feed. The dying body can exist for long enough without the sludge of nutrients they like to pump into it.

My father told me how he went to the supermarket and bought various packets of fresh herbs. At the hospice he closed the curtains round the bed. He didn’t want others to see this intimate moment. He wasn’t embarrassed – my father was never embarrassed by his uxoriousness – he just wanted his privacy. Their privacy.

I imagine them together, my father sitting on the bed, kissing my mother, not knowing if she could feel it, talking to her, not knowing if she could hear his words, nor, even if she could, whether she could understand them. He had no way of knowing, she no way of telling him.

I imagine him worrying about the ripping noise as he opened the plastic sachets, and what she might think was happening. I imagine him solving the problem by taking a pair of scissors with him to cut open the packets. I imagine him explaining that he had brought some herbs for her to smell. I imagine him rubbing basil into a roll beneath her nostrils. I imagine him crushing thyme between finger and thumb, then rosemary. I imagine him naming them, and believing she could smell them, and hoping that they would bring her pleasure, would remind her of the world and the delight she had taken in it – perhaps even of some occasion on a foreign hillside or scrubland when their shoes tramped out a rising scent of wild thyme. I imagine him hoping that the smells wouldn’t come as a terrible mockery, reminding her of the sun she could no longer see, gardens she could no longer walk in, aromatic food she could no longer enjoy.

I hope he didn’t imagine these last things; I hope he was convinced that in her last days she was granted only the best, the happiest thoughts.

A month after my mother died, my father had his last appointment with the ENT specialist.

‘He said he could operate, but couldn’t promise more than a 60/40 success rate. I told him I didn’t want an operation. He said he was loth to give up on my case, especially since my anosmia was only partial. He thought my sense of smell was waiting there and could be brought back.’

‘How?’

‘More of the same. Antibiotics, nasal spray. Slightly different prescription. I told him thanks but no thanks.’

‘Right.’ I didn’t say any more. It was his decision.

‘You see, if your mother…’

‘It’s all right, Dad.’

‘No, it’s not all right. If she…’

I looked at him, at the tears pent up behind the lenses of his spectacles, then released to run down his cheeks to his jaw. He let them run; he was used to them; they didn’t bother him. Nor did they bother me.

He started again. ‘If she… Then I don’t…’

‘Sure, Dad.’

‘I think it helps, in a kind of way.’

‘Sure, Dad.’

He lifted his glasses from the creases of flesh in which they sat, and the last tears ran down the sides of his nose. He wiped the back of a hand across his cheeks.

‘You know what that buggery specialist said to me when I told him I didn’t want an operation?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘He sat there meditating for a bit and then said, “Do you have a smoke alarm?” I told him we didn’t. He said, “You might be able to get the council to pay for it. Out of their disability funds.” I said I didn’t know about that. Then he went on, “But I suppose I’d advise a top-of-the-range number, and they might not be willing to cover the cost.”’

‘Sounds a pretty surreal conversation.’

‘It was. Then he said he didn’t like to think of me being asleep and only realising the house was on fire when I was woken by the heat.’

‘Did you punch him, Dad?’

‘No, son. I got up, shook him by the hand, and said, “That would be one solution, I suppose.”’

I imagine my father there, not getting angry, standing up, shaking hands, turning, leaving. I imagine it.