Mary Lavin Happiness
Mother had a lot to say. This does not mean she was always talking but that we children felt the wells she drew upon were deep, deep, deep. Her theme was happiness: what it was, what it was not; where we might find it, where not; and how, if found, it must be guarded. Never must we confound it with pleasure. Nor think sorrow its exact opposite.
'Take Father Hugh,' Mother's eyes flashed as she looked at him. 'According to him, sorrow is an ingredient of happiness - a necessary ingredient, if you please!' And when he tried to protest she put up her hand. 'There may be a freakish truth in the theory - for some people. But not for me. And not, I hope, for my children.' She looked severely at us three girls. We laughed. None of us had had much experience with sorrow. Bea and I were children and Linda only a year old when our father died suddenly after a short illness that had not at first seemed serious. 'I've known people to make sorrow a substitute for happiness,' Mother said.
Father Hugh protested again. 'You're not putting me in that class, I hope?'
Father Hugh, ever since our father died, had been the closest of anyone to us as a family, without being close to any one of us in particular - even to Mother. He lived in a monastery near our farm in County Meath, and he had been one of the celebrants at the Requiem High Mass our father's political importance had demanded. He met us that day for the first time, but he took to dropping in to see us, with the
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not know that there was a cavity in his own life, much less that we would fill it. He and Mother were both young in those days, and perhaps it gave scandal to some that he was so often in our house, staying rill late into the night and, indeed, thinking nothing of stopping all night if there was any special reason, such as one of us being sick. He had even on occasion slept there if the night was too wet for tramping home across the fields.
When we girls were young, we were so used to having Father Hugh around that we never stood on ceremony with him but in his presence dried our hair and pared our nails and never minded what garments were strewn about. As for Mother - she thought nothing of running out of the bathroom in her slip, brushing her teeth or combing her hair, if she wanted to tell him something she might otherwise forget. And she brooked no criticism of her behaviour. 'Celibacy was never meant to take all the warmth and homeliness out of their lives,' she said.
On this point, too, Bea was adamant. Bea, the middle sister, was our oracle. 'I'm so glad he has Mother,' she said, 'as well as her having him, because it must be awful the way most women treat them - priests, I mean - as if they were pariahs. Mother treats him like a human being - that's all!'
And when it came to Mother's ears that there had been gossip about her making free with Father Hugh, she opened her eyes wide in astonishment. 'But he's only a priest!' she said.
Bea giggled. 'Ifs a good job he didn't hear that,' she said to me afterwards. 'It would undo the good she's done him. You'd think he was a eunuch.'
'Bea!' I said. 'Do you think he's in love with her?'
'If so, he doesn't know it,' Bea said firmly. 'It's her soul he's after! Maybe he wants to make sure of her in the next world!'
But thoughts of the world to come never troubled Mother. 'If anything ever happens to me, children,' she said, 'suddenly, 1 mean, or when you are not near me, or I cannot speak
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to you, I want you to promise you won't feel bad. There's no need! Just remember that I had a happy life - and that if I had to choose my kind of heaven I'd take it on this earth with you again, no matter how much you might annoy me!'
You sec, annovance and fatigue, according to Mother, and even illness and pain, could coexist with happiness. She had a habit of asking people if they were happy at times and in places that - to say the least of it - seemed to us inappropriate. 'But are you happy?' she'd probe as one lay sick and bathed in sweat, or in the throes of a jumping toothache. And once in our presence she made the inquiry of an old friend as he lav upon his deathbed.
'Why not?' she said when we took her to task for it later. 'Isn't it more important than ever to be happy when you're dying? Take my own father! You know what he said in his last moments? On his deathbed, he defied me to name a man who had enjoyed a better life. In spite of dreadful pain, his face radiated happiness!' Mother nodded her head comfortably. 'Happiness drives out pain, as fire burns out fire.'
Having no knowledge of our own to pit against hers, we thirstily drank in her rhetoric. Only Bea was sceptical. 'Perhaps you £<?£ it from him, like spots, or fever,' she said. 'Or something that could at least be slipped from hand to hand.'
'Do you think I'd have taken it if that were the case!' Mother cried. 'Then, when he needed it most?'
'Not there and then!' Bea said stubbornly. 'I meant as a sort of legacy.'
'Don't you think in that case,' Mother said, exasperated, 'he would have felt obliged to leave it to your grandmother?'
Certainly we knew that in spite of his lavish heart our grandfather had failed to provide our grandmother with enduring happiness. He had passed that job on to Mother. And Mother had not made too good a fist of it, even when Father was living and she had him - and, later, us children -to help.
As for Father Hugh, he had given our grandmother up early in the game. 'God Almighty couldn't make that woman
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happy,' he said one day, seeing Mother's face, drawn and pale with fatigue, preparing for the nightly run over to her own mother's flat that would exhaust her utterly.
There were evenings after she came home from the library where she worked when we saw her stand with the car keys in her hand, trying to think which would be worse -to slog over there on foot, or take out the car again. And yet the distance was short. It was Mother's day that had been too long.
'Weren't you over to see her this morning?' Father Hugh demanded.
'No matter!' said Mother. She was no doubt thinking of the forlorn face our grandmother always put on when she was leaving. ('Don't say good night, Vera,' Grandmother would plead, 'ft makes me feel too lonely. And you never can tell-you might slip over again be/ore you go to bed!')
'Do you know the time?' Bea would say impatiently, if she happened to be with Mother. Not indeed that the lateness of the hour counted for anything, because in all likelihood Mother would go back, if only to pass by under the window and see that the lights were out, or stand and listen and make sure that as far as she could tell all was well.
'1 wouldn't mind if she was happy,' Mother said.
'And how do you know she's not?' we'd ask.
'When people are happy, I can feel it. Can't you?'
We were not sure. Most people thought our grandmother was a gay creature, a small birdy being who even at a great age laughed like a girl, and - more remarkably - sang like one, as she went about her day. But beak and claw were of steel. She'd think nothing of sending Mother back to a shop three times if her errands were not exactly right. 'Not sugar like that - that's too fine; it's not castor sugar I want. But not as coarse as that, either. I want an in-between kind.'
Provoked one day, my youngest sister, Linda, fumed and gave battle. 'You're mean!' she cried. 'You love ordering people about!'
("ľT-ar.Hmfirtipr nrpptwi. as if Linda  had acclaimed an
Happiness
attribute. 'I was always hard to please,' she said. 'As a girl, I used to be called Miss Imperious.'
And Miss Imperious she remained as long as she lived, even when she was a great age. Her orders were then given a wry twist by the fact that as she advanced in age she took to calling her daughter Mother, as we did.
There was one great phrase with which our grandmother opened every sentence: 'if only'. 'If only,' she'd say, when we came to visit her - 'if only you'd come earlier, before I was wom out expecting vou!' Or if we were early, then if only it was later, after she'd had a rest and could enjoy us, be able for us. And if we brought her flowers, she'd sigh to think that if only we'd brought them the previous day she'd have had a visitor to appreciate them, or say it was a pity the stems weren't longer. If only we'd picked a few green leaves, or included some buds, because she said disparagingly, the poor flowers we'd brought were already wilting. We might just as well not have brought them! As the years went on. Grandmother had n new bead to add to her rosary: if only her friends were not all dead! Ry their absence, they reduced to nil all real enjoyment in anything. Our own father - her son-in-law - was the one person who had ever gone close to pleasing her. But even here there had been a snag. 'If only he was my real son!' she used to say, with a sigh.
Mother's mother lived on through our childhood and into our early maturity (though she outlived the money our grandfather left her), and in our minds she was a complicated mixture of valiance and defeat. Courageous and generous within the limits of her own life, her simplest demand was yet enormous in the larger frame of Mother's life, and so we never could see her with the same clarity of vision with which we saw our grandfather, or our own father. Them we saw only through Mother's eyes.
'Take your grandfather!' she'd cry, and instantly we'd see him, his eyes burning upon us - yes, upon us, although in his day only one of us had been born: me. At another time, Mother would cry, Take your own father!' and instantly
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we'd see him - tall, handsome, young, and much more suited to many one of us than poor bedraggled Mother.
Most fascinating of all were the times Mother would say 'Take me!' By magic then, staring down the years, we'd see blazingly clear a small girl with black hair and buttoned boots, who, though plain and pouting, burned bright, like a star. 'I was happy, you see,' Mother said. And we'd strain hard to try and understand the mystery of the light that still radiated from her. '1 used to lean along a tree that grew out over the river,' she said, 'and look down through the grey leaves at the water flowing past below, and I used to think it was not the stream that flowed but me, spread-eagled over it, who flew through the air! Like a bird! That I'd found the secret!' She made it seem there might be such a secret, just waiting to be found. Another time she'd dream that she'd be a great singer.
'We didn't know you sang, Mother!'
She had to laugh. 'Like a crow,' she said.
Sometimes she used to think she'd swim the Channel.
'Did you swim that well, Mother?'
'Oh, not really - just the breast stroke,' she said. 'And then only by the aid of two pig bladders blown up by my father and tied around my middle. But 1 used to throb - yes, throb - with happiness.'
Behind Mother's back, Bea raised her eyebrows.
What was it, we used to ask ourselves - that quality that she, we felt sure, misnamed? Was it courage? Was it strength, health, or high spirits? Something you could not give or take - a conundrum? A game of catch-as-catch-can?
T know,' cried Bea. 'A sham!'
Whatever it was, we knew that Mother would let no wind of violence from within or without tear it from her. Although, one evening when Father Hugh was with us, our astonished ears heard her proclaim that there might be a time when one had to slacken hold on it - let go - to catch at it again with a surer hand. In the way, we supposed, that the high-wire walker up among the painted stars of his canvas
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sky must wait to fling himself through the air until the bar he catches at has started to sway perversely from him. Oh no, no! That downward drag at our innards we could not bear, the belly swelling to the shape of a pear. Let happiness go by the board. 'After all, lots of people seem to make out without it,' Bea cried. It was too tricky a business. And might it not be that one had to be born with a flair for it?
'A flair would not be enough,' Mother answered. 'Take Father Hugh. He, if anyone, had a flair for it - a natural capacity! You've only to look at him when he's off guard, with you children, or helping me in the garden. But he rejects happiness! He casts it from him.'
'That is simply not true, Vera,' cried Father Hugh, overhearing her. 'It's just that 1 don't place an inordinate value on it like you. I don't think it's enough to carry one all the way. To the end, I mean - and after,'
'Oh, don't talk about the end when we're only in the middle,' cried Mother. And, indeed, at that moment her own face shone with such happiness it was hard to believe that her earth was not her heaven. Certainly it was her constant contention that of happiness she had had a lion's share. This, however\we, in private, doubted. Perhaps there were times when she had had a surplus of it - when she was young, say, with her redoubtable father, whose love blazed circles around her, making winter into summer and ice into fire. Perhaps she did have a brimming measure in her early married years. By straining hard, we could find traces left in our minds from those days of milk and honey. Our father, while he lived, had cast a magic over everything, for us as well as for her. He held his love up over us like an umbrella and kept off the troubles that afterwards came down on us, pouring cats and dogs!
But if she did have more than the common lot of happiness in those early days, what use was that when we could remember so clearly how our father's death had ravaged her? And how could we forget the distress it brought on us when, afraid to let her out of our sight, Bea and I stumbled after her
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everywhere, through the woods and along the bank of the river, where, in the weeks that followed, she tried vainly to find peace.
The summer after Father died, we were invited to France to stay with friends, and when she went walking on the cliffs at Fecamp our fears for her grew frenzied, so that we hung on to her arm and dragged at her skirt, hoping that like leaded weights we'd pin her down if she went too near the edge. But at night we had to abandon our watch, being forced to follow the conventions of a family still whole - a home still intact - and go to bed at the same time as the other children. It was at that hour, when the coast guard was gone from his rowing boat offshore and the sand was as cold and grey as the sea, that Mother liked to swim. And when she had washed, kissed, and left us, our hearts almost died inside us and we'd creep out of bed again to stand in our bare feet at the mansard and watch as she ran down the shingle, striking out when she reached the water where, far out, wave and sky and mist Were one, and the greyness closed over her. If we took our eyes off her for an instant, it was impossible to find her again.
'Oh, make her turn back, God, please!' I prayed out loud one night.
Startled, Bea turned away from the window. 'She'll have to turn back sometime, won't she? Unless...?'
Locking our damp hands together, we stared out again. 'She wouldn't!' I whispered. 'It would be a sin!'
Secure in the deterring power of sin, we let out our breath. Then Bea's breath caught again. 'What if she went out so far she used up all her strength? She couldn't swim back! It wouldn't be a sin then!'
'It's the intention that counts,' 1 whispered.
A second later, we could see an arm lift heavily up and wearily cleave down, and at last Mother was in the shallows, wading back to shore.
'Don't let her see us!' cried Bea. As if our chattering teeth would not give us away when she looked in at us before she
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went to her own room on the other side of the corridor, where, later in the night, sometimes the sound of crying would reach us.
What was it worth - a happiness bought that dearly.
Mother had never questioned it. And once she told us, 'On a wintry day, I brought my own mother a snowdrop. It was the first one of the year - a bleak bud that had come up stunted before its time - and I meant it for a sign. But do you know what your grandmother said? "What good are snowdrops to me now?" Such a thing to say! What good is a snowdrop at all if it doesn't hold its value always, and never lose it! Isn't that the whole point of a snowdrop? And that is the whole point of happiness, too! What good would it be if it could be erased without trace? Take me and those daffodils!' Stooping, she buried her face in a bunch that lay on the table waiting to be put in vases. 'If they didn't hold their beauty absolute and inviolable, do you think I could bear the sight of them after what happened when your father was in hospital?'
It was a fair question. When Father went to hospital, Mother went with him and stayed in a small hotel across the street So she could be with him all day from early to late. 'Because it was so awful for him - being in Dublin!' she said. 'You have no idea how he hated it.'
That he was dying neither of them realized. How could they know, as it rushed through the sky, that their star was a falling star! But one evening when she'd left him asleep Mother came home for a few hours to see how we were faring, and it broke her heart to see the daffodils out all over the place - in (lie woods, under the trees, and along the sides of the avenue. There had never been so many, and she thought how awful it was that Father was missing them. 'You sent up little bunches to him, you poor dears!' she said. 'Sweet little bunches, too - squeezed tight as posies by your little fists! But stuffed into vases they couldn't really make up to him for not being able to see them growing!'
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So on the way back to the hospital she stopped her car and pulled a great bunch - the full of her arms. 'They took up the whole back seat,' she said, 'and 1 was so excited at the thought of walking into his room and dumping them on his bed - you know - just plomping them down so he could smell them, and feel them, and look and look! I didn't mean them to be put in vases, or anything ridiculous like that - it would have taken a rainwater barrel to hold them. Why, I could hardly see over them as 1 came up the steps; I kept tripping. But when I came into the hall, that nun - 1 told you about her - that nun came up to me, sprang out of nowhere it seemed, although I know now that she was waiting for me, knowing that somebody had to bring me to my senses. But the way she did it! Reached out and grabbed the flowers, letting lots of them fall - I remember them getting stood on. "Where are you going with those foolish flowers, you foolish woman?" she said. "Don't you know your husband is dying? Your prayers are all you can give him now!"
'She was right. I was foolish, but 1 wasn't cured. Afterwards, it was nothing but foolishness the way 1 dragged you children after me all over Europe. As if any one place was going to be different from another, any better, any less desolate. But there was great satisfaction in bringing you places your father and I had planned to bring you - although in fairness to him I must say that he would not perhaps have brought you so young. And he would not have had an ulterior motive. But above all, he would not have attempted those trips in such a dilapidated car,'
Oh, that car! It was a battered and dilapidated red sports car, so depleted of accessories that when, eventually, we got a new car Mother still stuck out her hand on bends, and in wet weather jumped out to wipe the windscreen with her sleeve. And if fussed, she'd let down the window and shout at people, forgetting she now had a horn. How we had ever fitted into it with all our luggage was a miracle.
'You were never lumpish - any of you!' Mother said proudly. 'But you were very healthy and very strong.' She
turned to me. "Think of how you got that car up the hill in Switzerland!'
"The Alps are not hills, Mother!' I pointed out coldly, as I had done at the time, when, as actually happened, the car failed to make it on one of the inclines. Mother let it run back until wedged against the rock face, and I had to get out and push till she got going again in first gear. But when it got started it couldn't be stopped to pick me up until it got to the top, where they had to wait for me, and fora very long time.
'Ah, well,' she said, sighing wistfully at the thought of those trips. 'You got something out of them, I hope. Alt that travelling must have helped you with your geography and your history,'
We looked at each other and smiled, and then Mother herself laughed. 'Remember the time/ she said, 'when we were in Italy, and it was Easter, and all the shops were chock-full of food? The butchers' shops had poultry and. game hanging up outside the doors, fully feathered, and with their poor heads dripping blood, and in the windows they had poor little lambs and   suckling pigs and  young goats, all skinned and hanging by their hind feet.' Mother shuddered. 'They think so much about food, I found it revolting. I had to hurry past'.-,But Linda, who must have been only four then, dragged at me and stared and stared. You know how children are at that age; they have a morbid fascination for what is cruel and bloody. Her face was flushed and her eyes were wide. I hurried her back to the hotel. But next morning she crept into my room. She crept up to me and pressed against me. "Can't we go hack, just once, and look again at that shop?" she whispered. "The shop where they have the little children hanging up for Easter!" It was the young goats, of course, but I'd said "kids", I suppose. How we laughed.' But her face was grave. 'You were so good on those trips, all of you/ she said. 'You were really very good children in general. Otherwise I would never have put so much effort into rearing you, because I wasn't a bit maternal. You brought out the best in me! I put an unnatural effort into you, of course,
iw
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because I was taking my standards from your father, forgetting that his might not have remained so inflexible if he had lived to middle age and was beset by life, like other parents.'
'Well, the job is nearly over now, Vera,' said Father Hugh. 'And you didn't do so badly.'
"That's right, Hugh,' said Mother, and she straightened up, and put her hand on her back the way she sometimes did in the garden when she got up from her knees after weeding. '1 didn't go over to the enemy anyway! We survived!' Then a flash of defiance came into her eyes. 'And we were happy. That's the main thing!'
Father Hugh frowned. 'There you go again!' he said.
Mother turned on him. T don't think you realize the onslaughts that were made upon our happiness! The minute Robert died, they came down on me - cohorts of relatives, friends, even strangers, all draped in black, opening their arms like bats to let me pass into their company. "Life is a vale of tears," they said. "You are privileged to find it out so young!" Ugh! After 1 staggered on to my feet and began to take hold of life once more, they fell back defeated. And the first day I gave a laugh - pouff, they were blown out like candles. They weren't living in a real world at all; they belonged to a ghostly world where life was easy; all one had to do was sit and weep. It takes effort to push back the stone from the mouth of the tomb and walk out.'
Effort. Effort. Ah, but that strange-sounding word could invoke little sympathy from those who had not learned yet what it meant. Life must have been hardest for Mother in those years when we older ones were at college - no longer children, and still dependent on her. Indeed, we made more demands on her than ever then, having moved into new areas of activity and emotion. And our friends! Our friends came and went as freely as we did ourselves, so that the house was often like a café - and one where pets were not prohibited but took their places on our chairs and beds, as regardless as the people. And anyway it was hard to have sympathy for someone who got things into such a state as
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Mother. All over the house there was clutter. Her study was like the returned-letter department of a post office, with sacks of paper everywhere, bills paid and unpaid, letters answered and unanswered, tax returns, pamphlets, leaflets. If by mistake we left the door open on a windy day, we came back to find papers flapping through the air like frightened birds. Efficient only in that she managed eventually to conclude every task she began, it never seemed possible to outsiders that by Mother's methods anything whatever could be accomplished. In an attempt to keep order elsewhere, she made her own room the clearing house into which the rest of us put everything: things to be given away, things to be mended, things to be stored, things to be treasured, things to be returned - even things to be thrown out! By the end of the year, the room resembled an obsolescence dump. And no one could help her; the chaos of her life was as personal as an act of creation - one might as well try to finish another person's poem.
As the years passed, Mother rushed around more hecticallv. And although Bca řind I hid married and were not at home any more, except at holiday time and for occasional weekends, Linda was noisier than the two of us put together had been, and for every follower we had brought home she brought twenty. The house was never still. Now that we were reduced to being visitors, we watched Mother's tension mount to vertigo, knowing that, like a spinning top, she could not rest till she fell. But now at the smallest pretext Father Hugh would call in the doctor and Mother would be put on the mail boat and dispatched for London. For it was essential that she get far enough away to make phoning home every night prohibitively costly.
Unfortunately, the thought of departure often drove a spur into her and she redoubled her effort to achieve order in her affairs. She would be up until the early hours ransacking her desk. To her, as always, the shortest parting entailed a
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preparation as for death. And as if it were her end that was at hand, we would all be summoned, although she had no time to speak a word to us, because five minutes before departure she would still be attempting to reply to letters that were the acquisition of weeks and would have taken whole days to dispatch.
'Don't you know the taxi is at the door, Vera?' Father Hugh would say, running his hand through his grey hair and looking very dishevelled himself. She had him at times as distracted as herself. 'You can't do any more. You'll have to leave the rest till you comeback.'
'I can't, I can't!' Mother would cry. Til have to cancel my plans.'
One day, Father Hugh opened the lid of her case, which was strapped up in the hall, and with a swipe of his arm he cleared all the papers on the top of the desk pell-mell into the suitcase. 'You can sort them on the boat,' he said, 'or the train to London!'
Thereafter, Mother's luggage always included an empty case to hold the unfinished papers on her desk. And years afterwards a steward on the Irish Mail told us she was a familiar figure, working away at letters and bills nearly all the way from Holyhead to Euston. 'She gave it up about Rugby or Crewe,' he said. 'She'd get talking to someone in the compartment.' He smiled. "There was one time coming down the train 1 was just in rime to see her close up the window with a guilty look. I didn't say anything, but I think she'd emptied those papers of hers out the window!'
Quite likely. When we were children, even a few hours away from us gave her composure. And in two weeks or less, when she'd come home, the well of her spirit would be freshened. We'd hardly know her - her step so light, her eye so bright, and her love and patience once more freely flowing. But in no time at all the house would fill up once more with the noise and confusion of too many people and too many animals, and again we'd be fighting our corner with cats and dogs, bats, mice, bees and even wasps. 'Don't kill it!' Mother
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would cry if we raised a hand to an angry wasp. 'Just catch it, dear, and put it outside. Open the window and let it fly away!' But even this treatment could at times be deemed too harsh. 'Wait a minute. Clow the window!' she'd cry. 'It's too cold outside. It will die. That's why it came in, I suppose! Oh dear, what will we do?' Life would be going full blast again.
There was only one place Mother found rest. When she was at breaking point and fit to fall, she'd go out into the garden - not to sit or stroll around but to dig, to drag up weeds, to move great clumps of corms or rhizomes, or indeed quite frequently to haul huge rocks from one place to another. She was always laying down a path, building a dry wall, or making compost heaps as high as hills. However jaded she might be going out, when dark forced her in at last her step had the spring of a daisy. So if she did not succeed in defining happiness to our understanding, we could see whatever it was, she possessed it to the full when she was in her garden.
One of us said as much one Sunday when Bea and I had dropped round for the afternoon. Father Hugh was with us again, it's an unthinking happiness, though,' he cavilled. We were standing at the drawing-room window, looking out to where in the fading light we could see Mother on her knees weeding, in the long border that stretched from the house right down to the woods. '1 wonder how she'd take it if she were stricken down and had to give up that heavy work!' he said. Was he perhaps a little jealous of how she could stoop and bend? He himself had begun to use a stick. I was often a little jealous of her myself, because although I was married and had children of my own, I had married young and felt the weight of living as heavy as a weight of years. 'She doesn't take enough care of herself,' Father Hugh said sadly. 'Look at her out there with nothing under her knees to protect her from the damp ground.' It was almost too dim for us to see her, but even in the drawing room it was chilly. 'She should not be let stay out there after the sun goes down.'
'Just you try to get her in then!' said Linda, who had come into the room in time to hear him. 'Don't you know by
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now anyway that what would kill another person only seems
to make Mother thrive?'
Father Hugh shook his head again. 'You seem to forget it's not younger she's getting!' He fidgeted and fussed, and several times went to the window to stare out apprehensively. He was really getting quite elderly.
'Come and sit down, Father Hugh,' Bea said, and to take his mind off Mother she turned on the light and blotted out the garden. Instead of seeing through the window, we saw into it as into a mirror, and there between the flower-laden tables and the lamps it was ourselves we saw moving vaguely. Like Father Hugh, we, too, were waiting for her to come in before we called an end to the day.
'Oh, this is ridiculous!' Father Hugh cried at last. 'She'll have to listen to reason.' And going back to the window he threw it open. 'Vera!' he called. 'Vera!' - sternly, so sternly that, more intimate than an endearment, his tone shocked us. 'She didn't hear me,' he said, turning back blinking at us in the lighted room. 'I'm going out to get her.' And in a minute he was gone from the room. As he ran down the garden path, we stared at each other, astonished; his step like his voice, was the step of a lover. 'I'm coming. Vera!' he
cried.
Although she was never stubborn except in things that
mattered, Mother had not moved. In the wholehearted way
she did everything, she was bent down close to the ground.
It wasn't the light only that was dimming; her eyesight also
was failing, 1 thought, as instinctively I followed Father
Hugh.
But halfway down the path I stopped. I had seen something he had not: Mother's hand that appeared to support itself in a forked branch of an old tree peony she had planted as a bride was not in fact gripping it but impaled upon it. And the hand that appeared to be grubbing in the clay in fact was sunk into the soft mould. 'Mother!' I screamed, and I ran forward, but when I reached her I covered my face with my hands. 'Oh Father Hugh!' I cried. 'Is she dead?'
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It was Bea who answered, hysterical. 'She is! She is!' she cried, and she began to pound Father Hugh on the back with her fists, as if his pessimistic words had made this happen.
But Mother was not dead. And at first the doctor even offered hope of her pulling through. But from the moment Father Hugh lifted her up to carry her into the house we ourselves had no hope, seeing how effortlessly he, who was not strong, could carry her. When he put her down on her bed, her head hardly creased  the pillow. Mother lived for
four more hours.
Like the days of her life, those four hours that Mother lived were packed tight with concern and anxiety. Partly conscious, partly delirious, she seemed to think the counterpane was her desk, and she scrabbled her fingers upon it as if trying to sort out a muddle of bills and correspondence. No longer indifferent now, we listened, anguished, to the distracted cries that had for all our lifetime been so familiar to us. 'Oh, where is it? Where is it? 1 had it a minute ago! Where on earth didt.put it?'
'Vera, Vera, stop worrying,' Father Hugh pleaded, but she waved him away and went on sifting through the sheets as if they were sheets of paper. 'Oh, Vera!' he begged. 'Listen to me. Do you not know—'
Bea pushed between them. 'You're not to tell her!' she commanded. 'Why frighten her?'
'But it ought not to frighten her,' said Father Hugh. 'This is what I was always afraid would happen - that she'd be frightened when it came to the end.'
At that moment, as if to vindicate him, Mother's hands fell idle on the coverlet, palm upward and empty. And turning her head she stared at each of us in turn, beseechingly. 1 cannot face it/ she whispered. '1 can't! I can't! I can't!' 'Oh, my God!' Bea said, and she started to cry. 'Vera. For Cod's sake listen to me/ Father Hugh cried, and pressing his face to hers, as close as a kiss, he kept whispering to her, trying to cast into the dark tunnel before her the light of his own faith.