Free A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones Page A

ward, where the first joyful cries of life are heard every waking moment. The floor she is on now has the sly and silent air of process and procedure.
    In the dark she seems unaware that I am sitting in the armchair in the corner of her room. She raises her hand from the bed to hold it above her and looks at it as if it is not part of her but something that in a bored moment she has found interesting. Eventually her hand flops back to her side, and her head turns to the pale light in the window.
    Dawn. There will be another day after all.
    I used to wonder if she ever wondered, How strange to think I will soon be leaving this. Especially at night when the prospect of the end acquires its theatrical side.
    For several weeks she has hovered in that twilight world, dumbly feeling her way along corridors that the dying are left to figure for themselves without information or guidance, bumbling along in a fog of morphine.
    Half blind, she sniggered at the window. She fetched up the name of an old neighbour. And when I looked, a lumpy cloud was passing.
    It is too late to ask her about Maud. It is too late to ask searching questions or to expect her to answer honestly of herself. It is too late for her to shed light on the past. On the other hand, the earthquake is still some years off and so I have still to arrive at the point where the past, in particular my own foundations, holds any interest. Maud, who knew so much, died many years earlier, unlamented as far as I am concerned, and now Mum is about to follow her.
    I read to her, fragments from Chatwin’s In Patagonia . I doubt she understood any of it, least of all that I was attempting to read life back into her. Sometimes she managed a show of concentration, as though listening—but then reading too felt wrong to me, or ill-chosen, absurd in a way, to use one’s last days to concentrate on a writer’s journey through communities of exiles in the wilds of a place she might not have known actually existed.
    On the other hand, being read to returned some dignity to her—she was engaged, it seemed—and this was better than the crash bang of the breakfast trolleys and the patronising cheer of the nurses. This seemed to be the official approach: keep everything bubbling along to the end with a light humour.
    When the doctor, a solid and charming older Indian man, arrived on his morning round, my mother’s eyes lit up. She was almost girlish in her flirting.
    Out of her earshot the doctor asked me, ‘Has anyone told your mother that she is dying?’
    The need to point this out to her hadn’t occurred to me. Surely she knew. How could she not?
    The doctor gave me a searching look. The warm regard of a moment ago disappeared. He took off his glasses and wearily examined them.
    â€˜So,’ I said. ‘Should I tell her?’
    He looked up, found his smile, nodded, and after a friendly pat of my shoulder he continued on his round with a brood of junior doctors in their new white coats.

    Her grey hair has fallen carelessly across her face. I smile, and she smiles back. She was about to say something. So I delay my ‘news’ and wait, even though it is months since she managed a sentence. She was last heard from when invited to state her life ambition.
    Her eyes look up expectantly, and I realise I have got it wrong. She doesn’t want to speak. She is expecting to hear something said. She turns her head on the pillow. She tilts her eyes to the door. She must have seen me talking to the doctor. So I bend over her and in the same bullying manner I have seen the nurses use, sinking her into shadow, I say, ‘I thought I would get a cup of tea. Would you like one?’
    The light returns to her eyes and she replies with a nod, and I burst out of there.
    Outside her room, fake cheer rebounds along the walls—splashy paintings by school children. There is the rush of a female visitor’s footsteps for the lifts, followed by the