Marina Lewycka: The Lubetkin Legacy

The crone looked baffled. ‘Is Pushkin, no?’

‘See what I mean?’ said Mother. ‘Emphasism. Now, Inna, sing us one of your foreign songs.’

The old woman cleared her throat, spat and started to drone: ‘ Povee veetre na-a Ukrainou … Is beautiful song of love from my country. De zalishil yah-ah-ah …’

The other patients were craning in their beds to see what the racket was. Then the pink-tie doctor came up to the bedside consulting his notes. He looked hardly out of his teens, with tousled hair and long pointed shoes that needed a polish.

‘Are you Mr … er … Lukashenko?’

This was not the time to go into the complexities of Mother’s marital history.

‘No. I’m her son. Berthold Sidebottom.’

For some ignorant people, the name Sidebottom is a cause of mirth. The teen-doctor was one of those. In fact Sidebottom is an ancient Anglo-Saxon location name meaning ‘broad valley’, originating, it is believed, from a village in Cheshire.

The doctor smirked behind his hand, straightened his tie and explained that my mother had atrial fibrillation. ‘I asked her how many she smokes. Her heart isn’t in good shape,’ he said in a low voice.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said first of March, 1932.’

‘That’s her birthday. She was eighty-two recently. I’m not sure how many she smokes, she keeps it secret — doesn’t want to set me a bad example.’

The teen-doctor scratched behind his ear. ‘We’d better keep her in for a few days, Mr … er … Lukashenko.’ He glanced down at his notes.

‘Sidebottom. Lukashenko was her husband.’

‘Mr Sidebottom. Hum. Have you noticed any variation in her behaviour recently? Any forgetfulness, for example?’

‘Variation? Forgetfulness? I couldn’t say.’ I myself have found that a bit of selective amnesia can be helpful in coping with the vicissitudes of life. ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ I said.

To my embarrassment, my eyes filled with tears. I thought back over the years I’d lived in the flat at the top of Madeley Court with my mother, assorted husbands and lovers, the politics, the sweet sherry, the parrot. In my recollection, she’d rambled a bit at the best of times, but the core of her had been steadfast as a rock. ‘Shakespeare,’ I said. The teen-doctor looked miffed, as if I’d been trying to get one up on him, so I added, ‘When you live with someone, you don’t always notice the changes. They hap-pen so gradually.’

‘You still live with your mother?’

I detected a note of derision in his callow voice. Probably he was too wet behind the ears to understand how suddenly everything you take for granted can fall apart. You can reach half a century in age, you can have some modest success in your profession, you can go through life with all its ups and downs — mainly the latter, in my case — and still end up living with your mother. One day it could even happen to you, clever Dr Pointy-toes. People come and go in your life but your mother’s always there — until one day she isn’t any more. I was filled with regret for all the times I’d been irritated with her or taken her for granted.

‘Yes. We sup-port each other.’ My old stutter was spluttering into life. Must be the stress.

Mum had slipped further down the bed. Her breathing was laboured. A frail filament of saliva glimmered between her open lips like a reminder of the transience of life. She let out a shuddering moan, ‘First of March, 1932!’ The filament snapped.

The doctor dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Of course we’ll do all we can, but I think she may not be with us very long.’

Panic seized me. Big questions raced into my mind and took up fisticuffs with each other. How long was very long? Why did this have to happen to her just now? Why did it have to happen to me? Had I been a satisfactory son? How would I manage without her? What would happen to the parrot? What would happen to the flat?

The teen-doctor moved away and the ward sister sailed up, shapely and black, a starched white cap riding like a clipper on the dark sea of her curls. ‘We need to change her catheter now. Can you give us a minute, Mr Lukashenko?’

‘Side-b-bottom.’

‘Sidebottom?’

Our eyes met, and I was struck by how beautiful hers were, large and almond-shaped, with sweeping lashes. The beast in my pants stirred. Oh God, not now. I withdrew outside the drapes, thinking I’d better find the canteen and have a calming cup of tea, when from the next bed the old woman hissed, ‘Hsss! Stay. Sit. Talk. Nobody visit me. I am all alone.’

As a penance for my unruly thoughts, I pulled up my chair closer to her bed and cleared my throat. It’s hard to know how to strike up conversation with a total stranger who thinks you are gay. Maybe I should put her right?

‘You think people who wear pink are homosexual. Well, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual, but —’

‘Aha! No problem, Mister Bertie,’ the old woman interrupted. ‘No problem wit me. Everyone is children of God. Even Lenin has permitted it.’

‘Yes of course, but —’ I really needed that cup of tea.

‘You mama, Lily, say we must treat all people like own family. She like good Soviet woman. Always look at sunny side, Inna, she say.’

‘Yes, Mother’s a very special person.’ I glanced at the curtain around her bed, my heart pinched between anxiety and tenderness. There seemed to be a lot of whispering and clattering going on. ‘What about your family, Inna?’

‘Not homosexy. My husband, Dovik, Soviet citizen,’ Inna declared. ‘But dead.’ She leaned over and spat into her bowl.

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ I put on a faux-sympathetic voice, like Gertrude in Hamlet , trying to avert my eyes from the revolting greenish fluid that was lapping at the cardboard edges of her bowl.

‘Why for you sorry? You not killed him.’

‘No, indeed not, but —’

‘Killed by olihark wit poison! I living alone. Olihark knocking at door. Oy-oy-oy!’ This sounded delusional. She fixed me with dark agitated eyes. ‘Every day cooking golabki kobaski slatki, but nobody it wit since Dovik got dead.’ She wiped her nose on the sheet. ‘Husband Dovik always too much smoking. I got emphaseema. Heating expensive. My flat too much cold.’ She reached for my hand with her dry twiggy fingers and gave it a flirtatious squeeze. ‘You mama tell me she got nice flat from boyfriend. Now she worry if she will die they take away flat for under-bed tax and you will live homeless on street.’ Behind the silver curtain of hair, her eyes were watching me, dark and beady. What Mother been telling her?

Mother had lived in the flat since it was built in 1952, and she used to tell me with misty eyes that Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed it, had promised it would be a home for ever for her and her children. But since then the buggers hadn’t built enough new homes to keep up with the demand, she fumed, and the ones instigated by the council leader, Alderman Harold Riley, and built by Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had been flogged off to private landlords — like the flat next door, which had once belonged to a dustman called Eric Perkins and now belonged to a property company who filled it with foreign students who played music all night and littered the lift with takeaway boxes.

‘Under-bed tax?’ Could they make me move out because of that?

‘Is new tax for under-bed occupant.’

I kept mainly dog-eared scripts, odd socks and back copies of The Stage under my bed. Nothing you could call an occupant.

‘You mama very much worrying about break-up of post-war sensors. She say it make her sick in heart to think they take away her apartment and put you into street. This tax is work of Satan, she say. Mister Indunky Smeet. You know this devil-man?’