Capital

could feel her friends noticing the change in her and deciding not to comment on it; she knew they’d talk about it between themselves afterwards. She’s just not herself. She’s all over the place. She’s taking it hard. Poor Mary. And all that.
    Part of what made it difficult was Mary’s feeling that she was much more like her mother than she had ever realised. Mary had always seen her mother as someone who was stuck, trapped within limits she imposed on herself, and living only a fraction of the life she could have been living. Mary had blamed her father, but when he died it turned out that it was just what Petunia was like, or had become like. She was always someone who was worried about being ‘too’ something, too noisy, too bold, too conspicuous, too careful, too fussy, too worried, too whatever. Back in her own life, cleaning her own house, tidying and fussing around her own sitting room, Mary was being forced to ask herself whether she was really any different. What have I ever done that’s so big, so expansive? If my mother lived in too small a way, where’s the larger scale in my life?
    Since she couldn’t get away in her head, Mary decided that she would do better not to be away in the flesh. After three days at home, she told Alan that she was going to go back to London.
    ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said. ‘I just feel I have to be there.’
    ‘Poor baby,’ said Alan. She knew him so well, she knew that the expression which flickered off his face was something like relief – which in turn made her realise how difficult she had been to live with. Being human, she resented Alan for thinking that, at the same time as realising it was probably justified. So she went back to London on the train, the fifty-minute journey which always seemed so much longer: countryside, the hills and fields and sparse villages of Essex, then the low spreading outer suburbs of London, then the taller blocks and the East End and the sense of old London, of working-class London, the places where you could, still, see the memory of the Blitz in the gaps between buildings, and then just at the end the sudden shocking wealth of the City, and then Liverpool Street. Ever since she had moved out of town this had been for Mary the longest short journey in the world. This would be the last time she took this journey while her mother was alive; the last time her mother’s house, the house she herself had grown up in, was there as the other place she could go to if she had to. A row with Alan, a night in the city to see a show, a visit for Petunia’s birthday – although there hadn’t been many of these occasions, there had been enough of them to keep Pepys Road as a somewhere else for Mary, a place of potential refuge, a toehold in her old life. That was all going to end soon. Soon her mother would be dead and there would be no somewhere else. It was like the comforting feeling you had as a child of sitting in the back of the car, with your parents in the front; and then one day that feeling is gone for ever.
    This late spring had days, or parts of days, on which it had flipped over into summer. The day Mary went back to Pepys Road was properly hot, and humid, with a faint haze about the deep green that the Common always had at this stage of the year, before it had been dried out and trampled on by the summer crowds. Mary walked to 42 Pepys Road from the Tube station, dropped off her bag, had a pee, and set off for the hospice. It wasn’t far. She could walk there in five minutes or so. She walked as slowly as she could and spent the whole walk wishing that time would stretch out, slow down, that the hospice would turn out to be further than she remembered it to be, further than she knew it was.
    ‘Hello, you’re back early,’ said the woman in the reception at the hospice. One of the things Mary liked about it was that you never had to explain who you were or why you were there; they always remembered. It made things much easier.
    ‘Couldn’t stay away,’ said Mary. In her head those words had a light tone, but when she said them they came out as a plain and desperate statement of fact. The woman’s eyes registered that.
    Mary could have gone straight to her mother’s room, but she decided to go out into the garden first. It was one of those unexpectedly large hidden London gardens, with a conservatory, an area of wild grasses, a lawn that was tidy but not over-trimmed, a patch of fruit trees at the far end,