Capital

and a path around the edge with formally planted borders to one side. Petunia had come to the garden several times on the hospice’s summer open day; she had admired it very much and often expressed admiration for whoever was the person in charge of its keeping. Now she was in the hospice, and too ill to take any pleasure from any aspect of it. Mary sat on a bench for ten minutes, in the shade of an apple tree. She could feel the heat of the day radiating off her.
    Then she went up to her mother’s room. The hospice was a well-established respectable charity, and it had the feel of someone’s country house in an earlier time, the mid-fifties say, deposited in the middle of the city. It felt calm and ordered and some of that feeling seeped into Mary while she was there.
    Petunia was in a room at the front of the building, whose window looked towards the Church and the Common. There was some traffic noise, but she didn’t seem to notice that, or anything else. Mary opened the door carefully in case she startled her mother, and almost jumped back in shock to see that there was another visitor in the room. There was her son Graham, sitting in the sagging leather armchair pecking away at his iPhone.
    He looked up.
    ‘Wotcher, Mum,’ said Smitty. ‘She’s asleep.’
    ‘Graham!’ said Mary. ‘What . . . er . . . what are you doing?’
    ‘I was over this way. Just dropped in to see Nan. She was already asleep then, so . . . well, so nothing really. I hadn’t seen her since your big night out.’
    ‘That’s . . . nice,’ said Mary, entirely failing to conceal her surprise. Her son was getting to his feet.
    ‘I’ve got a thing,’ said Smitty. ‘My parking ticket’s about to end. If she wakes up, tell her I popped in to say hello.’ He gave Mary a kiss on her cheek and went off to his mysterious life, leaving Mary, not for the first time, thinking how little she knew him. She looked after him for a moment and then turned to her mother. Petunia was lying on her side with her face towards the window and her eyes closed.
    ‘Mum?’ said Mary. ‘Mother? Petunia?’
    No response. Mary sat in the chair beside the bed. On the table next to her there was a jug of water, a glass and cut flowers. Mary felt the pressure of being in the room, an agonising sense of her loss, of her mother’s death occurring in slow motion. At the same time, nothing was happening. Time seemed not to pass. Her mother, in approaching so close to death, had moved to a state of pure being. Mary found it hard just to be.
    She thought: I’m tired of this. My mother is going to die, and if she is going to die, I need it to be soon. It doesn’t matter what she needs, any more; what matters is what I need. A voice in her head said: Mum, please leave soon.
    A nurse was standing in the doorway. Mary couldn’t remember if she had met her before, but it didn’t seem to matter, because the woman knew who she was. They talked about Petunia for a bit.
    ‘She could come home,’ said the nurse. Mary understood that to complete that thought she would have to add the words ‘to die’. And the alternative was for her mother to die in the hospice.
    ‘How long?’
    ‘Not long. A week.’

53
     
     
    Parker rolled over in bed and muttered something in his sleep. The hotel bedroom had been full of light since before six in the morning, because the blinds were flimsy and in any case let in sunshine around their edges and at the bottom. That had woken Daisy, Parker’s girlfriend, hours ago. She lay there feeling irritated by the blinds. The bow window had huge heavy ruched curtains in deep scarlet, but they were only pretend-curtains, which you couldn’t actually pull all the way across. That was in keeping with what was wrong with the hotel. It was pretending to be some olde-worlde haven of calm and order and how-life-should-be, while being full of small modern bits of crapness. The daylight showed no signs of waking Parker, who occasionally shifted and gave little snuffling noises but otherwise seemed dead to the world. Sleeping had always been one of the things Parker was very good at. Daisy, a tad tetchy and underslept, allowed herself a bad thought: maybe it would be good if Parker was as talented at some other stuff as he was at sleeping. But as soon as she let that into her mind, another part of her was telling herself that that wasn’t really fair. Parker had plenty of talents, he really did. He just hadn’t had much luck yet.
    Daisy had