course,’ Annie said numbly. ‘It will do you good.’
Of course. Tibby was sixty-five, but she looked older. Her hair was thin, and her arms and legs seemed fragile enough to snap under her tiny weight. Annie wondered, How long? Her mother’s pleasure in having reached the ward by herself stood out in a different, colder light.
Tibby was leaning back in the chair, looking at her daughter.
‘I’m glad to see you in your clothes. What about your hair?’
She was striving for the painful brightness that she had adopted for her other visits. Annie had weakly accepted it then, but she was well enough now to look beyond Tibby’s determined smile. She felt almost too heavy-hearted to answer, but at last she said, ‘I’ll have it cut when I get home. It won’t be long now, they’ve promised me.’ She was thinking that she would be going home almost well again, her own strength confirmed in her. But Tibby wasn’t going to get better. Annie remembered that she and Steve had talked about it as they held hands and looked up into the blackness. She had wondered if her mother felt the same anger, confronted by death, the same sense of regret for everything left undone. No, Steve had said. Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.
She sat down beside Tibby and took her thin hand between hers. Annie was filled with a longing to be close to her, and to make the most of the time that was left to them.
‘Tibby, what do they say? The doctors. Tell me honestly.’
‘That you’re doing fine.’ Tibby’s smile was transparent.
‘You know that I didn’t mean me. What is this rest? How long is it for?’
Suddenly Annie heard in her own voice the same demanding, indignant note that was familiar from Thomas and Benjy. You’re my mother. You can’t leave me. I need you, and you belong here, with me.
More dues, Annie thought.
Tibby shrugged and said gently, ‘Well, darling. You know this disease. It doesn’t go away. They can’t predict what course it will take. They do what they can, and they tell me what they do know, because I ask them to. One doesn’t want to be deceived about the last thing of all, does one? A rest will help, they say. And it makes a break for your father, too.’
‘I should be helping,’ Annie said dismally.
Tibby surprised her with her laughter. ‘What could you do?’
‘Help Pop out in the house, or something.’
‘Darling, are you offering to come and clear up in my house?’
Annie laughed then too. In her mind’s eye she saw the polished, formal neatness of her mother’s rooms in contrast with the rag-bag of family possessions that filled her own. Annie’s indifference to domestic order hadn’t always been a joke between them.
‘I’m sure the house looks immaculate.’
Tibby nodded, her smile fading a little. ‘It does. And will, as long as I have anything to do with it.’
Annie wondered, without speaking, how long that would be. She couldn’t imagine even now how Tibby could polish the parquet tiles and scour the big old sinks. She had thought with Steve how sad it was that her mother’s life had been dedicated to a house. How happy had she been? Her hand tightened on Tibby’s.
‘I was thinking about you, and the house, while we … while I was waiting for them to come and dig us out. I could remember it all as clearly as if I was really there. I thought I was a girl again, wearing a green cotton dress with a white collar, and white ribbons in my hair.’
‘I remember that dress,’ Tibby said. ‘I remember the day we bought it for you.’ She leaned forward, closer to Annie, and her fingers clutched more tightly. ‘It was very hot, the middle of a long, hot summer. You were six or seven, and you had gone to play for the day with Janet. Do you remember Janet? You were inseparable, and then the family moved away and you cried for a whole week, insisting that you would never have another best friend in all your life.’
‘I don’t remember her at all,’ Annie said.
‘Your father and I went shopping, and we bought you the green dress. When we came to pick you up you and Janet were playing in the garden, pouring water over each other with a watering can.’
‘Go on,’ Annie prompted her, and Tibby smiled. She began to talk. Some recollections made her laugh, and she sighed at others. She told stories about Annie’s childhood and babyhood that Annie had never heard before. She remembered the day that her daughter was born.
Annie listened, watching her mother’s face. She felt Tibby’s need to recollect and to make the patterned strands tidy, as she had remembered herself, with Steve. As she listened the layers shifted over one another to give altered perspectives. Her own memories, rubbed painfully brighter while she lay beside Steve, her mother’s additions to them, stretching back beyond the reach of Annie’s own recollection.
‘You were a funny, good little girl, always,’ Tibby said at last. ‘Isn’t memory a strange thing? I can remember you at eight, nearly thirty years ago, better than I can remember Thomas from last week. And I can’t remember at all whether I paid the milkman last Saturday, or the name of the girl in the book I’ve just read.’
‘I know,’ Annie smiled, seeing the truth in the truism. ‘Tibby, I wish we could talk more.’ She had meant like this, while we still can, but her mother made a little startled gesture and peered at her watch.
‘Oh, my dear, I said I would meet Jim downstairs a quarter of an hour ago. He didn’t think the sister would let us both in. You know what he’ll be like.’
Impatient, Annie knew.
‘I’ll walk down with you.’
‘Can you manage that?’
‘Of course I can.’ I’m stronger, Annie thought sadly. Much stronger than you are.
They stood up, Annie much taller than her mother. Tibby seemed to be shrinking into herself. With her hands on Annie’s arms she said, suddenly, ‘I can manage everything else. Other people do, after all, with reasonable dignity. But I don’t think I could have borne it if you had died. Not now, Annie, after all.’
Her face creased, vulnerable, with the beginning of tears.
Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.
‘Tibby.’ Annie wrapped her arms around her. She rested her cheek against her mother’s head. ‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t want to die.’
For a long moment, they held on to each other.
Then Tibby sniffed hard.
‘I came to cheer you up,’ she said, her voice wobbly.
Annie let her go, briskly gathering up her mother’s coat and bag. ‘That’s Barbara’s chosen role. I should leave it to her.’ She felt that her mother’s bright, tight smile had transferred itself to her own face, but Tibby responded hearteningly. Their faint disparagement of Martin’s mother had always
