After two weeks and a day of living in a spacious suburban home to look after a cat and visit a mother in hospital, we are now all where we are meant to be. It wasn’t long after I filed last week’s column that I noticed that my mother was on the mend. A couple of days before she was discharged, I turned up at the Whittington to find my brother and his wife already at the bedside. As I thought he was still on holiday, this came as a pleasant surprise. After some general chit-chat, I felt emboldened to raise the subject of my return to Brighton.
“I have plants that will need watering,” I said.
“What kind of plants?” my mother asked, in a voice that had been trained at Juilliard to reach the furthest recesses of Carnegie Hall without a microphone. “Marijuana?”
I turned to my brother and said, “She’s better.”
The switch from her losing her marbles to her regaining them is remarkable and somewhat disconcerting. Last week I was describing a person rapidly approaching the final limit of a worthwhile life, utterly frail and bewildered; then it got worse, when she was moved to another ward. The only news from the outside world that seemed to penetrate was that the Pope was dead. (Her faith is vestigial, but faint to the point of non-existence, in the way that the temperature of outer space hovers just above absolute zero.) She says it is reviving and such is the subtlety of her humour that it takes you a few moments to work out that she’s joking. “Should I stop hollering at the nurses?” she asks a close family relation, in front of several ill and old ladies who seem to have perked up a lot since my mother’s arrival. This is not my imagination. Even the nurses, who, at the beginning of her stay, looked, in repose, as though they might want to reconsider their careers, and at me with a kind of awed pity, were now saying how lovely she is. When I answered this last remark with a certain look, the nurse burst out laughing.
My mother has been telling people about her career in showbusiness, among other things. I wonder if the nurses and doctors think she’s fantasising. She is not. To think she once had Broadway at her feet, and, I have it on distressingly good authority, Yul Brynner. There are details about that affaire that have aged me about 30 years, which makes us almost contemporaries.
“How’s your love life?” she asks.
“Non-existent,” I say.
“What?” she says, cupping her hand to her ear.
“I SAID ‘NON-EXISTENT’.” (She’s going a bit deaf.)
It was kind of odd, also, the transition from a four-bedroom family home with a garden the size of Liechtenstein to the Hove-l, which you could probably fit into her home’s living room if you pushed. Much was made of the modesty of the late Pope’s dwellings, in contrast to the splendour of the Vatican; ha, I thought, the Pope’s got nothing on me. (“When it comes to humility, I’m the tops,” was one of the first jokes my mother told me.)
What I miss most, of course, is the cat. She and I became inseparable towards the end of my stay, and even now I still see her dark form moving at the edge of my vision, and twice now I have imagined a gentle thump as she jumps up on to the bed. But of course, she is not there. There is something very appealing about having a cat for company; somehow, it both banishes loneliness and puts one’s solitude into sharp relief at the same time. There was only one bad moment, and that was when, after a two-day campaign of emotional blackmail trying to get me to feed her more, she threw up all over the kitchen floor, and I mean “all over”: three large piles of regurgitated cat food, each one the size of a meal in itself. At least she did it on the linoleum.
“See what happens?” I said, picking up the warm lumps with fistfuls of kitchen roll. She looked at me a little guiltily and actually became much more reasonable after that, but the kitchen smelled of Felix for a couple of days, even with the door open.
In the end I left before she was delivered back to her home. My asthma medication was running out, and the thought of her arrival wasn’t helping my condition, so I told my brother that he’d have to take over.
“I’ve been hospitalised with this before,” I said, “and I really don’t want to see the inside of a hospital again for as long as possible.” I suspect he thinks I left with indecent haste and he isn’t answering my calls at the moment but he’ll come round. After all, he was the one who’d been on holiday.
Would I call my stay in East Finchley a holiday? Well, it was a break from routine, and the fact that my mother recovered really helped, and I had the use and pleasure of a garden and a pussycat. But I found myself missing Brighton. I like the place well enough in winter but now it’s all summery, I am going to go down to the beach and splash my toes in the sea the moment I’ve finished writing this.
[See also: David Attenborough at 99: “Life will almost certainly find a way”]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion