Free Goodness by Tim Parks Page A

couldn’t help feeling it might have been worth hanging on to him for a while). Otherwise, they encouraged home care, and given that the social worker had reported my mother as being ‘valiant and willing, if a little overprotective’, they were of the opinion he should remain in Gorst Road.
    Well, with property prices rising sharply again, I felt on reflection that this solution suited me for the moment too.Hang on a few years, then get a whole bundle of money for the house, enough not just to pay for Grandfather’s home but to leave something to spare for setting up Mother in a small place of her own as well. That way we wouldn’t be forced to take her in ourselves.
    Until two things happened in the same week. Grandfather fell down the stairs and bust his hip, and Mother, who now had to wash him and change him like a baby at all hours of the day and night, came down with some sort of virus that completely floored her. She phoned me feebly at 7 a.m., having waited of course until the third day of this illness before ‘bothering me’.
    I drove over in excruciating traffic to the banana republic of Hackney, aiming to winkle out the ever phoneless Peggy and take her over to Park Royal to help out. In the event, however, the gipsy painted third-floor door of her bedsit was answered, not by my sister, but by a rather stout Indian woman, the kind with a beachball of brown belly showing through gaudy drapes and a neat red bullet-hole in her forehead. She was holding the lardy and wriggling young Frederick, while her own (presumably) two small girls peeped duskily from behind her sari – beyond which, a backdrop of carelessness and charity-shop makeshift. I noticed a saucepan on the carpet, for example, a newspaper torn to shreds.
    Peggy had a job, the woman said. Where, doing what, how could I get there? She didn’t know. Which again is typical of Peggy. She gets a babysitter and then doesn’t bother to explain how she can be contacted. What was the woman supposed to do if the child fell ill, if there was an emergency? But Peggy always imagines all will go well. This was what she had taken over from our childhood religion I suppose: faith. Well may it serve her. Still it was good to think there was another income in the family.
    I drove over to Gorst Road, another hour simply tossed into the maw of the capital’s time-gobbling traffic system, and had to wait a further five minutes for Mother to drag herself down to the front door, since I’d forgotten my ownkeys. She was quite ashen and complaining, very unusually for her, of crippling stomach pains. Had she seen a doctor? No she hadn’t and didn’t want to. It was just a bug. But she must go and see her doctor. For heaven’s sake! She wouldn’t. But . . . She wouldn’t. She hated doctors. God would take her in his own good time. My mother actually said that. I hugged her all the same and half carried her in her nightie to the sofa; then went up to see Grandfather; the stink on the landing, however, told me more than I needed to know and I went back downstairs.
    Mother had now stretched out on the couch. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘And the social services, for Grandfather, have you been in touch?’ Apparently a social worker would come in the next couple of days. ‘So we should take him to hospital. Immediately. Where they can look after him.’ But he didn’t want to go to hospital, she said. He refused. He’d shout and scream if you tried. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. She closed her eyes and sighed, holding her stomach. I thought: ‘Incredibly, these two people are my responsibility. This is my family. And I’m supposed to be meeting my contact from Tektronics for an early lunch.’ I asked: ‘Isn’t there anybody from the church could help?’ She shook her head. There was, but they were on holiday.
    For a moment I stood helpless in the dark cave of my childhood sitting room, trapped again: the photographs, the Wedgewood, the dusty