But I need a little time. Soon I will mend but now I hurt. The she devil is wounded: she has slunk back into her lair: the ogre motherhood paces outside with heavy feet.

  I must think of this grief as a physical pain. I must remember that just as a broken leg heals with time so with this psychic injury. There will be no disfiguring scar tissue: this is an inner wound, not an outer one.

  I am a woman learning to be without her children. I am a snake shedding its skin. It makes no difference that the children are Nicola and Andy, that they lack charm. A child is a child: a mother, a mother. I twist and squirm with guilt and pain, even knowing that the quieter I stay the quicker I will heal, slip the old skin, and slither off renewed into the world.

  I’m sure I miss them more than they miss me. They have been the meaning of my life: I have merely served their growing purposes, as old Mrs Fisher once served her daughter Mary.

  SIXTEEN

  GEOFFREY TUFTON CAME TO this particular Travelodge three times a year, and went from firm to firm in the city, promoting new advances in information technology. Once he had flown from country to country doing the same thing but on a grander scale, dealing with orders worth tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But something had happened — his personality had not fitted, or he had failed to clinch a deal just once too often — or perhaps it was his wife’s refusal to blend, to enter into the company spirit; he could not be sure — and the air trips became fewer and the rail trips more frequent, and promotion did not come, and inflation overtook his salary and these days he was glad enough of the Travelodge, and the drinks at the bar he could acquire on his expense account.

  It was his fifty-first birthday and he had no one with whom to celebrate — if such a day merited celebration. He had weighed himself and discovered he was a full stone heavier than he thought. Worse, he had a stubborn conjunctivitis in one eye: it itched, it wept, it drizzled pus. His doctor had suggested the ailment was psychosomatic in origin, which made him yet more miserable. He was unsightly, overweight and useless. He kept his bad eye to the wall, in the corner of the bar, and drank, and watched his fellow salesmen pick up the girls who came in, discreet night visitors, and knew he had no chance with them at all. His eye smacked of disease. They thought nothing of age or paunchiness, except to put their prices up, but were nervous of skin eruptions, inflamed eyes, or sores around the mouth. And why not? He was half glad, because he did not like deceiving his wife, although she was to blame for many of his troubles, but only half because she lately had taken a job of her own, all but out-earning him, and depriving him of his sense of purpose, his reward for the life he led — that is, the thought that he supported her.

  He watched Ruth come into the bar. She had to bend her neck to pass through the mock-Tudor arch. She was wearing a white trouser suit in a shiny fabric and all eyes turned towards her, and a breath of astonishment was exhaled through the bar, and one of the girls — well, she was pony-tailed but from the look of her upper arms was nearing fifty — giggled aloud. The plump man who sat beside Geoffrey said to him, ‘Specialised tastes, I presume.’

  Geoffrey felt sorry for the uneasy-looking giantess, and moved over to sit beside her and bought her a drink; thus, he felt, saving her face. He could not keep his bad eye hidden from her for ever.

  ‘That looks nasty,’ she said, peering at it. ‘Have you rubbed it with gold?’

  ‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you don’t exactly rub, you roll. You roll the evil away.’

  And she demonstrated, taking off her wedding ring and rolling it over the infected eye. The metal was surprisingly smooth and silky, and afterwards the eye felt soothed.

  ‘Yes, but see here,’ he said, ‘I’m not evil. I know it looks evil, but that’s the eye, not me. I’m a nice guy, really.’

  ‘There’s something you don’t want to see, I expect,’ she said. Her own eyes were luminous and perfect. They had a pinkish glitter which he assumed was a reflection from the little red satin lampshades. He looked at the other girls, who had a shadowy quality, as if very little stood between them and nothingness, and then at Ruth; it was as if she was rough-hewn in granite, and the sculptor had left suddenly to go to lunch and never came back, but he was grateful for her substance.

  ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘nothing ever seems quite real to me. None of it’s what I meant, and I’m fifty-one today. Too late to start again.’

  She said nothing, but handed him the ring.

  ‘You’d better keep that,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s your wedding ring.’

  She shrugged. He felt around his eye. Already the swelling was subsiding and the itching less acute.

  ‘Is that the gold?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  He knew it wasn’t and was elated, freed and grateful. It seemed to him that something amazing had happened: that he was cured of a disease he never knew he had — that is, of loss of faith.

  He bought a bottle of champagne from the barman and took it and her up to his room. A customer or so sniggered as they went, but he didn’t care.

  ‘It’s not looks that count,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ she said bleakly. She liked to have the light out, and to be beneath the covers, and he was not averse to this. He and his wife had started their married life this way, until his wife had started reading the higher quality women’s magazines and decided that sex, nudity and physical imperfection were nothing to be ashamed of. It was, he had felt at the time, an unfairly unilateral decision, but he said nothing. His wife had a good body — he hadn’t. His wife had also, under the influence, he felt, of the same magazines, developed a liking for oral sex and odd positions, which embarrassed him. Ruth liked simply to lie beneath him, which was perhaps just as well. She told him that her husband had complained of her unadventurousness, but what could she do?

  He stayed at the Travelodge for a full week, and paid Ruth’s bill for that time. On the Monday morning his eye was completely healed, nor did the infection return afterwards. Ruth was compliant and docile: she seemed dazed. She talked very little about herself, nor did he ask questions.

  One night he woke to find her crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m crying for a friend of mine, a neighbour. The only one I ever really got on with. She died three years ago. I don’t forget her. She killed herself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She had a row with her husband. Her name was Bubbles and she had two children. He hit her and she took offence. She went home to her mother, leaving him with the children. She wanted to teach him a lesson; everyone said she should, he was always coming home drunk. But the very next day he moved a girl friend into the house to look after the children and made her pregnant, so when Bubbles wanted to move back home, she couldn’t. So she drank a bottle of whisky and took pills and her mother found her, dead in the bedroom she grew up in.’

  ‘Those kind of things happen. It’s no one’s fault.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ruth, ‘that’s all over now. It’s every woman for herself. I shall never cry again. I expect I was crying for myself, really.’

  He laid his head between her large breasts and heard the slow beat of her heart. He had never, he thought, heard a beat so slow, and commented upon it.

  ‘I have cold blood,’ she said. ‘It moves slowly. I am coldblooded, and it’s getting colder every day.’

  It occurred to him that they could stay together; that he could leave his wife, which he thought perhaps was what his wife wanted, and the long, dark, decorous nights could go on for ever, but she said she couldn’t. There was too much she had to do.

  ‘What do you have to do? What does a woman have to do?’

  She laughed and said she was taking up arms against God Himself. Lucifer had tried and failed, but he was male. She thought she might do better, being female.

  SEVENTEEN

  ON MONDAY MORNING RUTH rose healed from her bed in the Travelodge, said goodbye for ever to her clear-eyed lover, and went to the outskirts of the city, where she stopped at the door of a large detached house with many windows, some of them barred, set in the middle of damp greenery. Shrubs had been planted in an orderly fashion, and were of the kind bred to need minimum care.

  Ruth rang the bell marked ‘Visitors’. Mrs Trumper opened the door. Mrs Trumper was in her early sixties and had many broken veins in her cheeks. She had a large-jawed face, unkind eyes and her middle ran to fat and slack. To many of her residents she appeared large indeed, but to Ruth she appeared quite small.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mrs Trumper, in not a very friendly fashion, but not too unfriendly, to be on the safe side: one of her old ladies had died the previous week and the room thus vacated was still not filled. This large person might have a suitable parent to offer, possibly even one of the best kind — an old woman suffering from premature senility, but not yet incontinent. Government grants were often quite substantial for such cases, an incontinence allowance being automatically payable once senility was diagnosed, whether or not it was appropriate.

  ‘Mrs Trumper?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Trumper stubbed out her cigarette, just in case the visitor was from the local health authority. Not only did the caller have a large, dominant jaw but it was Mrs Trumper’s experience that women who allowed hairs to grow from face moles had a self-righteous nature. Such people were often employed finding fault with others.

  ‘I hear you have a vacancy for a live-in domestic,’ said Ruth, and Mrs Trumper examined her cigarette and found that, with care, it could just about be re-ignited. She took Ruth into her office. She always had such vacancies. There are far more helpless old people in the world than there are young ones prepared to look after them.

  Ruth described herself as being from the north, recently widowed, and with experience in the care of the elderly.

  Mrs Trumper did not enquire closely into these claims. The applicant was strong, which was necessary, and clean, which kept the visitors happy. It did not matter whether or not she was honest, since the residents had very little property to steal, being of an age when, surely, possessions meant little, and, more to the point, lived in rooms which would clutter up in no time if they were allowed to do as they liked.

  Mrs Trumper took Ruth through the house, explaining her duties and the nature of Restwood, for this was the name of the establishment. In the front of the house, with the privilege of a room to themselves and a view over the garden, lived the relatives of the rich. There was one titled lady who had to be especially well looked after, for she gave the place class; she had her own bathroom. In the back of the house, sharing in twos, threes or fours, were the relatives of the less affluent. The home charged triple the basic pension allowance per week, which kept it more or less exclusive.

  ‘The old are all the same,’ said Mrs Trumper, ‘so exclusive’s just in the head! Allow no nonsense; take a firm line: remember, they’re no different from children. Are you used to children?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  Then you’ll feel at home here,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘Report any damp or smelly beds at once. And remember, they’re cunning: I’ve known them smuggle out whole wet mattresses in an attempt to deceive. Of course, I always find out in the end.’

  ‘Find out what?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Incontinence!’ said Mrs Trumper.

  When residents started wetting the bed, Restwood was not the place for them to be, said Mrs Trumper.

  ‘They must love it very much here,’ said Ruth, ‘to go to such lengths to stay.’

  ‘Oh, they do,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘They do. Sometimes, of course, I overlook it longer than I should. I’m too soft-hearted for my own good.’

  Ruth’s bedroom was small and the bed too short, and her pay was $85 a week. Mrs Pearl Fisher, Mary Fisher’s mother, shared one of the back rooms with Ruby Ivan and Esther Sweet.

  ‘What lovely names you all have,’ said Ruth the next day, bringing their early morning tea, startling them out of drugged slumber. The visiting doctor prescribed Valium and Mogadon for depression and sleeping disorders, in large quantity. What else could he do? In his opinion, the less the old ladies saw of Restwood the better, and they had nowhere else to go.

  Mrs Fisher, Mrs Ivan and Mrs Sweet seemed quite pleased and surprised at this comment, and thereafter regarded Ruth as a friend. The Restwood staff, in their eyes, divided sharply into two—friend and foe. Mrs Trumper was foe. Mrs Trumper watched and waited until her residents wet the bed: then she turned them out, back into the merciless hands of relatives, until a proper nursing home with sheet-changing facilities could be found. And such places, everyone knew, did not exist. There was a bottleneck, here at the very end of the road that was their lives.

  Ruth chatted and patted and heaved and combed and wiped and sloshed disinfectant about the place for a week or so, and presently remarked to Mrs Fisher that she knew her daughter, Mary, but Mrs Fisher looked at her vacantly and did not respond. Ruth replaced her Valium with Vitamin B tablets and her Mogadon with Vitamin C and made the same remark a week later.

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘I don’t think anyone ever knows Mary, least of all her own mother, which is me. How is she?’

  ‘She’s very well,’ said Ruth. ‘She has a new lover.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘She’s no better than a little she-cat on heat. Always was. I could see through her from the very start. She belongs to the gutter, and I say that advisedly, because so do I.’

  She spat. She swung her head, gathering spittle as she went, and spat. She could spit right from the end of the bed to the far corner, over the tops of Mrs Ivan and Mrs Sweet, who were gentle souls. They looked depressed. Ruth wiped up the lump of spittle. Its texture was thin and runny, like the white of an old, warm egg.

  ‘She did me a bad turn,’ observed Mrs Fisher. ‘She stole my man. He had money, too. I was half his age, but she was a quarter, so she finished him off twice as soon. Dirty old man. Serve him right. A socialist, too.’

  Ruth encouraged Mrs Fisher out of bed and into her metal frame walker. By the end of a month Mrs Fisher could walk without a frame, and by the end of six weeks could manage the stairs on her own.

  ‘On your own head be it,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘It looks good for the visitors, I’ll say that; one of our bedriddens leaping up like that. On the other hand, they’re less trouble in bed than out of it, you must agree.’

  Ruth gave Mrs Fisher beans and apples and coleslaw and brown rice and the grinding pains in her stomach subsided. She hiccuped and farted a great deal, and Mrs Ivan and Mrs Sweet became restive.

  ‘You need a room to yourself,’ said Ruth. ‘You’re not bedridden, you have a right to personal space.’

  She had explained the concept of the latter to Mrs Fisher. That individuals had rights was something Mrs Fisher had never before understood. She had assumed that people just got what they could, in a basically hostile world. She took to the new doctrine with alacrity.

  ‘I have a right to two rashers of bacon,’ said Mrs Fisher, up and down the corridors. ‘A person has a right not to be hungry.’ Or, ‘I’ll have two baths a week if I want; I have a right.’ Or, ‘After all I’ve done for my country, I have a right to a rubber ring that keeps my arse comfortable all night through.’ Or, ‘A mother has a right to spit/fart/blow her nose with her fingers when and as she wants.’ And grunts and groans of assent would echo in and out of the bedrooms and even into the common room, where the ambulants sat around the wall in plastic armchairs and stared at television programmes they did not, could not and would not understand.

  Visitors, instead of being acquiescent and grateful, started asking for extra pillows, saucers with cups, and for the water in vases to be changed more often, especially in the dahlia season.

  ‘Why don’t they look after their own folk, if they’re so fussy,’ asked Mrs Trumper into her gin, ‘instead of leaving me to do it?’

  Mrs Trumper was fairly sure the trouble had started with Ruth, and was torn between the desire to fire her and the anxiety as to how she could replace someone so strong, clean and willing. She was also frightened of Ruth; Ruth was too big. She could snap Mrs Trumper between forefinger and thumb. Her eyes glittered.

  Mrs Fisher demanded a room of her own. ‘And where will you get the money to pay for it?’ asked Mrs Trumper. ‘Your daughter gives us little enough as it is. Out of sight, out of mind, so far as old ladies are concerned, Mrs Fisher. I’ve seen it often enough! Of course, people get the end in life they deserve. At the beginning it’s all luck: at the end it’s all justice. You, Mrs Sweet and Mrs Ivan deserve each other.’

  She liked to have her little jokes with the patients. They rarely understood her, in any case. Sometimes Mrs Trumper felt very alone.

  ‘I’ll write to my daughter myself,’ said Mrs Fisher.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Mrs Trumper, ‘because you don’t have her address.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ said Mrs Fisher, ‘so sucks to you!’ She used a far cruder expression in fact, having been, as she kept saying to Ruth, in the gutter.

  Mrs Fisher wrote to her daughter. Ruth dictated the letter.

  My dear Mary, it is a long time since you have been to see me. I know you are very busy, but you should sometimes think of the one who reared you and saw you through your difficult years. My lot in life would be much improved if you could pay Mrs Trumper for me to have a room to myself with my own television. Then I would not miss visitors so much.

  With all good wishes to you and yours, and my love to the little ones,

  Your loving Mum,

  Pearl

  ‘But she doesn’t have little ones,’ said Mrs Fisher.