Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

‘How’s that?’ she asked.

Larry carried his mother down the stairs and settled her into the wheelchair at the bottom, lifting her feet on to the hinged rests, then steering her through the living room into the kitchen.

‘Happy birthday, Mrs V!’ said Mrs Samson, touching for a moment Alice’s shoulder and leaving a faint row of flour prints on the blue of the dress.

Alice showed her hand.

‘That’s it,’ agreed Mrs Samson. ‘The boys are in charge all right.’

They manoeuvred her on to the terrace, but getting her up the bank on to the lawn was more difficult. Alec raised the small wheels at the front, tilting the chair backwards, while Larry leaned his weight from behind.

‘I can help!’ called Osbourne, hurrying towards them from the direction of the stile. ‘Many happy returns,’ he panted.

‘Where’s Stephen?’ she asked.

‘This side please, Dennis,’ said Larry.

‘Righto.’

They gathered around the chair, lifting it up the bank like Sicilian villagers struggling out of the sea with a seated Madonna in re-enactment of some half-remembered miracle. Ella watched from the top of the bank, a scarlet balloon in her hand.

In the orchard the tablecloths were patterned with the shadows of the leaves. Larry wheeled his mother to the head of the table. Una came out with a sunhat she had found in the hall, a large straw affair with a wide ribbon that tied under the chin. In the shade of the brim Alice’s face was hardly visible. A butterfly settled for a moment on the stillness of her arm, then went on, drunkenly, across slabs of green light.

‘Someone’s here,’ called Kirsty.

It was Judith and Christopher Joy, who had strolled from their cottage in matching linen jackets and panama hats. They carried gifts: a pot of luxurious hand cream from Jolly’s in Bath and, from a beach in County Galway, a large pebble that Judith Joy had painted in healing colours. Next to arrive was Mrs Dzerzhinsky. Her present was an illustrated calf-bound edition of Gibran’s The Prophet, and as she put it into Alice’s hands Alec overheard her murmur words in a language that was not English, a blessing perhaps, or a piece of folk wisdom from the old country, wherever that was. He had noted this recently, how people needed to communicate to Alice something intense and private, to give voice to the seriousness she provoked in them, as if her affliction flushed out the trivial from their lives and made them all mystics and philosophers.

The last of the guests was the art teacher, Miss Lynne. She said it looked like a scene from one of those endlessly long but delicious Italian films. She tucked her head under the brim of Alice’s hat to kiss her. She said she’d love to paint it all.

Mrs Samson brought out a tray with two large teapots on it. Larry carried the sandwiches and the scones. On Alice’s right, Una sat with a box of tissues on her lap, wiping Alice’s chin when the juice she sipped through a straw spilled from the slack of her mouth. Behind them, the oxygen bottle lay in the grass like an unexploded bomb.

When the scones had been eaten, Ella and Kirsty went to the kitchen and came out with the cake. Larry used his Zippo to light the candles – one for every ten years of Alice’s life – and while the candles burned they stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, finishing the song with a burst of applause. Ella blew out the candles. They clapped again and took their slices of cake, and after trying a few forkfuls of sugary sponge and praising it, the guests began to take their leave.

Mrs Dzerzhinsky blamed her tears on hay fever (‘Worse every year!’). Miss Lynne knelt by the side of the wheelchair, then went, with a hurried wave, through the trees to her car. Christopher Joy, sweeping off his hat, kissed Alice’s hand in a gesture that was genuinely gallant. Osbourne said he would volunteer for the clearing-up detail, and in the kitchen, his jacket dropped over the back of a chair, he tried to make himself useful by passing absorbent paper towels to Mrs Samson, who wept openly and noisily as she wrapped the leftover sandwiches in clingfilm.

Una moved Alice into the shade and untying the sunhat gave her a few minutes with the gas bottle. Alec, coming out for the last plates, stood unobserved under the trees, studying them as though one day he would be called on to recite the details. The wasps dancing around the cake crumbs. The silvery tracks of the wheelchair in the grass. The cat padding through a private corridor of air. And at the heart of the picture, his mother, her eyes shut above the plastic mouthpiece, her eyelids grey and flat and leaden. Would he have pitied her more if she had been a stranger? Some woman whose name he did not know and to whom he owed nothing but an ordinary debt of compassion? Then at least he would have felt something manageable, not this tangle of pity and fear; this childish revulsion like a weapon he did not know whether to turn against himself, or her. So why not leave like the party guests? Take the car. Get out. He had done it before, running from that gulag of a school he had taught in (thirty-five fourteen-year-olds, some almost savage); a week’s fugue of which he could remember very little other than a noise in his head like the hissing of pylons, and an image, strangely beautiful, of the lights from the esplanade reflecting on the wet shingle he was walking on. No one would be surprised if it happened again. They would be expecting it.

‘Who’s there?’ asked Una, shading her eyes.

‘Just me,’ he said. He came forward and started to stack the plates. She was squinting at him, smiling, and he saw that the sun had brought out a dozen freckles on her nose and cheeks, which made her look younger and somehow carefree.

He put the wicker tray on the table and quickly loaded the last of the crockery. He didn’t want to disturb them – didn’t think he should be there with them at all – but as he moved away Alice opened her eyes, tugged the mask from her face, and called out after him, a single garbled word of protest that froze him in mid-stride.

‘Mum?’

But whatever it was she wouldn’t repeat it. The effort had set her off and she needed her gas again, her oxygen. It was several minutes before Alec realized that the word had been ‘menteur ', and that she had called him a liar.

At half past five, Una came to the summerhouse to say goodbye. Alice was back in bed, she said, resting. Alec thanked her for staying so long. He thought she would leave then (he could think of nothing else to say to her), but she stayed, looking round as if she had never been in the place before.

‘I wouldn’t mind a hideout myself,’ she said. ‘Somewhere like this.’ She stepped up to where he was sitting and reached past his shoulder to open the manuscript on the desk.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, turning over the pages, ‘how this makes sense to you and none at all to me. What’s this here? This bit?’

He twisted in the seat and looked to where her finger pointed. ‘It says, Who here is cruel enough to leave a brother behind? A father underground? A sweetheart in hell?’

‘You don’t like me looking at it,’ she said, standing back.

Alec pushed the manuscript to the edge of the desk. ‘It just reminds me how much I still have to do. That’s all.’

‘You’ll get it done.’

‘I’ll have to.’

‘You will.’

‘You’ve been very kind to us,’ he said.

‘I haven’t done so much.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Really kind.’

‘It’s my job,’ she said.

‘Even so.’

‘May I?’ She gently lifted his glasses from his face. ‘I can’t talk to you with these on. You look like a hit-man.’

‘Sorry.’ He took the glasses from her and unclipped the shade attachment. Una leaned against the whitewashed wall, watching him.