Case Histories - Страница 13

Chapter 5. Amelia

Victor died as he wished, in his own bed, in his own home, of nothing much more than old age. He was eighty-four and for as long as they could remember had been adamant that he wanted to be buried rather than cremated. Thirty-four years ago, when their baby sister Annabelle died, Victor had bought a "family plot" for three people in the local cemetery. Amelia and Julia hadn't really considered the arithmetic of this until Victor himself died, by which time the plot was two-thirds full – their mother having joined Annabelle with gratuitous haste – leaving just enough room for Victor but excluding his remaining children.

Julia said it demonstrated typically inconsiderate behavior on Victor's part, but Amelia said their father had probably deliberately planned it this way in case it turned out that there was an eternal afterlife and he might be forced to spend it with them. Amelia didn't really think this was likely – Victor was a staunch atheist and it wasn't in his stubborn, abrasive character to suddenly start hedging his bets at the end – it was just that proposing a contradictory viewpoint to Julia's came automatically to her. Julia was as tenacious (and as yappy) as a terrier when it came to disputes, so that they both constantly found themselves arguing the case for opinions that neither of them really cared about one way or the other, like a pair of bickering, jaded courtroom lawyers. Some days it felt as if they had returned to their turbulent childhood selves and any moment now would resort to the covert pinching, hair pulling, and name-calling of those earlier years.

They had been summoned. "Like attending the deathbed of a king," Julia said resentfully, and Amelia said, "You're thinking of King Lear," and Julia said, "What if I am?" and Amelia said, "You can only relate to life if you've seen it on the stage," and Julia said, "I never even mentioned fucking Lear" and so they were arguing before the train had even pulled out of King's Cross. Victor died a few hours after they arrived. "Thank fuck," Julia said, as they had been suspicious that Victor was trying to finesse them back into the family home to look after him. They both resented the word "home" – it was decades since either of them had lived there, yet they couldn't stop using the word.

Amelia said, "Sorry," but Julia was staring out the train window at suburban London passing by and didn't speak again until they were traveling through the full summer fields of East Anglia, when she said, "Lear wasn't dying, he was abdicating power," and Amelia said, "Same thing sometimes," and was glad they'd made peace.

They sat on either side of him, waiting for him to die. Victor was beached on his bed in what had once been the marital bedroom, a room that was still decorated in the overblown female style that their mother had once favored. Was Rosemary getting ready at this very moment to welcome Victor into the clammy soil of the family plot? Amelia imagined her parents clasping each other's bodies in a cold embrace and felt sorry for their poor mother, who probably thought she had escaped Victor forever.

And anyway, Amelia pointed out to Julia, picking up the argument despite her best intentions, neither of them wanted to be close to their father in life, so why would they want to be close to him in death? Julia said that wasn't the point. It was "the principle of the thing," and Amelia said, "When did you start having principles?" and so the conversation went downhill again, long before they had got round to discussing the more difficult topic of the funeral service itself, for which Victor had left no guidelines.

When had they decided to stop calling him "Daddy" and start calling him "Victor"? Julia sometimes called him "Daddy," especially when she was trying to cajole him into a pleasanter mood, but Amelia liked the distance that "Victor" gave. It made him more human somehow.

Victor's chin was bristled with white, and this new beard, coupled with the weight he had lost, made him unfamiliar. Only his hands seemed not to have shrunk – still huge, like bony shovels, brutish against his sticklike wrists. He suddenly mumbled something neither of them could make out and Julia cast a look of panic across the bed at Amelia. Julia had expected him to be dying but she hadn't expected him not to be himself. "Do you want anything, Daddy?" she said loudly to him and he shook his head as if trying to dislodge a cloud of flies but it was impossible to say whether or not he had heard them.

Victor's GP had told them on the phone that district nurses were coming in three times a day. "Popping in" was the phrase he had used, which made everything seem convivial and informal, but neither Amelia nor Julia had expected those adjectives would be applicable to Victor's death, as they certainly hadn't been applicable to his life. They thought the nurses would stay, but the minute Amelia and Julia arrived, one of them said, "We'll be off now then," and the other shouted to Victor over her shoulder, "They're here!" in a cheerful way as if Victor had been waiting anxiously for his daughters, which he wasn't, of course, and the only one pleased to see them was Sammy, Victor's old golden retriever, who made a gallant attempt to greet them, his arthritic hips moving stiffly as his claws clacked across the polished boards of the hallway.

Victor had a massive stroke, the GP said on the phone. A month ago, a different GP had told them that there was nothing wrong with Victor except for old age and that he had "the heart of an ox." "The heart of an ox" had seemed a muddled axiom to Amelia: wasn't it "heart of a lion" and "strong as an ox"? What was an ox? Just a cow? There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing – fusing and arcing and dying – leaving her unable to retrieve information. Right up until the end, Victor's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there – a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver – would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

Victor's mind might have remained organized but his house hadn't. After they left home it had steadily deteriorated until it was now almost squalid, like one of those houses where environmental health officers had to be brought in to clean up after some unfortunate had lain dead and unnoticed for weeks, lying in a pool of their own putrefaction.

Everywhere you looked there were books, all of them mildewed and foxed, none of them inviting you to read them. Victor had long since given up maths, it was years since he had kept up with research or shown any interest in journals or publications. When they were children Rosemary had told them that Victor was a "great" mathematician (or perhaps it was Victor himself who had told them that), but whatever his reputation it had long since faded and he had been nothing more than a plodding member of the department. His speciality had been probability and risk, which Amelia didn't understand at all (he was always trying to demonstrate probability to her by tossing coins), but it struck her as ironic that a man who studied risk for a living had never taken one in his life.

"Milly? Are you alright?"

"What is an ox?"

"A cow. A bullock." Julia shrugged. "I don't know. Why?"

They had eaten ox heart as children. Rosemary, never having so much as boiled an egg before her marriage, had learned to cook the kind of stalwart, old-fashioned food that Victor favored as being both nutritious and cheap. Boarding-school food, the kind he was brought up on. The very thought of all those liver-and-bacon casseroles and steak-and-kidney puddings made Amelia feel sick. She could still see a bloody heart sitting on the kitchen counter, dark and glistening, and swagged with threads of fat, looking as if it had only just stopped beating, while her mother, huge knife in hand, contemplated it with an enigmatic expression on her face.

"Oxtail soup, I remember that," Julia said, making a disgusted face. "Was it really made from a tail?"

Rosemary had slipped out of her own life very easily. She had shown no tenacity for it at all when she discovered that the baby girl she was carrying when Olivia disappeared had a twin, not Victor's longed-for son, but a tumorous changeling that grew and swelled inside her unchallenged. By the time anyone realized it signaled a life ending rather than a life beginning, it was too late. Annabelle lived for only a few hours and her cancerous counterpart was removed, but Rosemary was dead within six months.

Victor seemed to be snoring – a deep, wheezing noise as if his windpipe were narrowing and collapsing. This was followed at regular intervals by a dreadful gasping when his reflexes kicked in and he found another breath. Amelia and Julia stared at each other in alarm. "Is that a death rattle?" Julia whispered, and Amelia said, "Shush," because it seemed impolite to talk about the mechanics of death in front of the dying. "He can't hear," Julia said, and Amelia said, "That's not the point."

This noise subsided after a while and Victor gave all the signs of being peacefully asleep. Amelia made them both tea, scrubbing out the stains from the mugs first, and they drank the tea standing by the window, looking down into the darkness of the garden.