A Line of Blood. Ben McPherson

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      The young nurse touched my elbow gently.

      ‘Would you like me to find you a chair, Mr Mercer? A cup of tea perhaps? And for you, Mrs Mercer?’

      ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, please.’ Why so kind?

      ‘I had to, Alex, son,’ said my mother. ‘I’m so sorry.’

      My father had suffered a massive stroke. Millicent had been right. ‘I didn’t want to worry you unduly, son,’ said my mother. ‘Then they told me that he wasn’t coming back. I mean, there was a theoretical chance, or some such, but it was awfully small. And I made the consultant tell me what the percentages meant, and she said your father would never return to me, not as himself. So I took a decision. I’m so very sorry, son.

      ‘I know I could have waited until you came,’ my mother said, ‘but I don’t think your father would have wanted you to see him like that. I could tell that the spirit was gone from him.’

      My mother insisted on driving home from the hospital. It took her some time to find a parking space, and in the end we had to walk for five minutes to reach the flat. Dark sandstone loomed behind monumental trees. No chickenshops or foot pursuits here. Residents’ associations and doors in approved colours. Pragmatic elegance.

      My mother took the stairs briskly when we arrived, installed herself at the dining table still wearing her coat; she filled two tiny crystal glasses with gin, topped them off with vermouth, and handed one to me.

      ‘To your father.’ She drained her glass, set it back on the table. Then she exhaled heavily, seemed to become a little shorter, a little older.

      ‘Fifty years married,’ she said. ‘Do you know, I thought I was too old.’ She gave a sad little laugh. ‘I was twenty-eight.’

      I reached across and took her hand. ‘I know, Mum.’

      ‘Well, that was old.’ She poured herself another drink. ‘He was a good man, but he never loved me in quite the way I loved him.’

      She gave a little half-sob, then pulled a handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed at her eye.

      The walls were the same as they’d ever been: dark salmon pink and country-house green, white skirtings and door frames. It showed off the pictures, my mother always said.

      ‘You’re wrong, Mum. He cherished you.’

      ‘No. No, Alex, I’m not wrong. I wasn’t his first.’

      I took her hand. ‘Come on, Mum.’

      She went into the living room. When she came back, she had a photograph in her hand.

      ‘That’s her.’

      A woman, strikingly beautiful, her mirror-black hair in a single braid, a calligraphic downstroke across the white cotton shirt. Behind her a light grey ocean. A darker grey sky. Cloudless.

      Japan, I thought. My father had been stationed in Japan before Korea. They had sent him out in a troop ship. Taught him to drive and fire large ordnance.

      ‘Noriko,’ said my mother. ‘That was her name.’

      The woman’s pose was Western but formal, unsmiling; all the same there was a warmth in her eyes, a secret shared with the man behind the camera.

      ‘Did Dad take this?’

      ‘Yes.’

      I looked at my mother. She was watching me for my reaction; there was no anger, no sadness now, just a resigned patience.

      ‘She’s beautiful, is she not?’ she said at last.

      There was a searching look in her eyes. I fought the urge to say something soothing.

      ‘Yes, Mum, she is beautiful.’

      ‘Thank you, Alexander.’ A little smile of satisfaction. My mother set great store by honesty. She didn’t want me to protect her.

      ‘He told me all about her. He wanted me to have all the facts at my disposal. Before I said yes to marriage.’ She nodded, as if to herself. ‘They were very much in love, you know. They wrote to each other, all through the war in Korea, and when he got home he kept writing, and so did Noriko. Then suddenly her letters stopped, and your father could only assume that she had ended the relationship. A terrible blow to him.’

      She refilled my glass, then refilled her own. ‘And of course your father’s misfortune was my good fortune. He was a very handsome man, and a very honest man. He loved me, and he adored you, son. He really did. More than anything in the world.’

      ‘Dad loved you most of all, Mum.’

      ‘No, Alexander, no.’ She took my hand in hers, catching me in the lie. ‘I’m seventy-eight, son. I’m not afraid of the truth.’

      ‘OK, Mum.’

      ‘Anyhow, one day your father received a letter from Japan. It was from Noriko, and it troubled him greatly. She asked why he had stopped writing. Your father showed me the letter, because he thought I ought to know; and then he burned it, because he was a good man and he had made his choice.

      ‘And then … and then he went to his mother, and he asked why she had hidden Noriko’s letters from him. And at first she denied it, but eventually she admitted that she had burned them. A cruel thing to have done, do you not think?’ She left the question hanging for a moment. ‘But I have her to thank, I suppose, because without her there would be none of this.’

      My mother went to bed shortly afterwards. I wandered around the flat for a while, trying to understand what I should be feeling. My father was everywhere here: his books, his records, the rack of pipes and the stacked ashtrays; his keen eyes staring out from silver-framed photos, never less than immaculately turned-out. The sharpness of those collars.

      My father’s life had been a series of tickets out: the army; Edinburgh; my mother. He had entered the forces as a welder, and left as an engineer; he had taken a second degree at Edinburgh University, met my mother at a dance. He had come up. A sharp-looking man with quick wits and an easy charm, by the time he had left the army he had erased the Govan shipyard from his voice. He had made good. His parents lived an hour down the road. Tower-block folk, he called them. We never visited my grandmother. The Noriko story, of course. It made sense now.

      My father had taken me to a war film once, at a cinema on the outskirts of town.

      Later, at home, he had sat for hours, silent in his chair, smoking his pipe. And though he would often boast to his friends about having had ‘a good war’, I had seen him crying at the cinema.

      I could hear my mother sobbing from the room that she and my father had shared. I thought of knocking on the door, of entering the room and sitting there, holding my mother’s hand over the blue silk counterpane. But it would mortify my mother to know that I could hear her in her grief. It would bring her no comfort.

      Now was the time I should have cried: for my father, for my mother, for what was lost. All those decisions my mother had taken, СКАЧАТЬ