Capital

mother get to the toilet, with the fact that her husband Alan kept saying she must stay there as long as she had to stay there, as if that were not completely obvious and as if there were anything else she could do.
    Clumping up the stairs with the tray, Mary went. Her mother was sitting in her usual chair, as usual looking out the window at the garden, as usual saying ‘Thank you, dear’ before Mary had fully come through the door. Even Petunia’s gaze had somehow faded, was not fully there; it wasn’t that she looked straight past you, it was more that when she looked at you it was as if she were looking halfway towards you and then conking out. Her attention didn’t reach the whole way.
    ‘That’s nice, dear,’ said Petunia. ‘Tea. Thank you.’
    ‘I’ll just put it here on the side,’ said Mary. She noticed that her mother, having briefly looked at her, was now looking away again.
    ‘I’ve let it sit already,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll pour it out now.’ She poured tea into the mug. ‘I’ll take the tray back down to keep the space clear,’ she said. Her mother was less likely to spill the mug if she had a whole uncluttered table to land it on. Also, this gave her an excuse to get out of the room. She had been in for less than a minute. When she went downstairs, the post had come. There was something that looked like a bill, and another of those bloody postcards of the front door with the menacing slogan on it. How dare you say you want this? Mary thought.
    Mary liked change, movement, colour, walking, sex (with her husband), Ikea, going out to the pub with friends for Sunday lunch, being well-off in a pretty part of the country, being married to a man who had done well for himself (he owned a string of garages). She had always been depressed by her mother. Petunia was one of those people who stay in character, and whose character sets limits around them like metal bars. She wasn’t a depressive, in her daughter’s view, but she acted like one, constantly finding reasons for not doing things, for not acting, not changing, not breaking out. Parents are often a disappointment to their children, and Petunia was a severe disappointment to Mary. While her father had been alive, Mary had thought that he had been the difficult one, the person who set all the limits and restrictions on her parents’ lives; after he died she saw that it was more complicated than that. Petunia never did anything that she didn’t want to do, and what she wanted to do was what she had done the day before. She was a gentle and loving person but a very, very restricted one; restricted by herself. Mary found that lowering.
    The punchline was that she was now dying. Petunia’s story was an example of life’s capacity to go on being one thing, to be it more than it was possible to imagine, and then to be more of the same, only more intensely so. It was unbearable. And like so many unbearable things, it had to be borne.
    Mary opened the sliding patio door into the garden – which her husband had installed for Petunia after Albert’s death, before they gave up on trying to change her life or improve it for her – and lit a cigarette. After a ten-year gap she had started smoking again while looking after her dying mother. The cravings had begun as soon as she moved in, and with no husband to nag her, she had given in to them. After Petunia died, and before she went home, she would have to give up, because Alan would kill her if she took smoking up again. After giving up himself, he had become a fanatical anti. So she smoked because she needed a fag, and also to have something to think about, something that was about her life and not about her mother’s, a future task to be accomplished – no small task, either, since giving up the first time had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done; it was something to be done in the future, after this other extraordinarily difficult thing was over, her mother’s death.
    Mary took a last puff on her cigarette, then stubbed it out on the patio floor. She set off back upstairs to tidy up.

34
     
     
    Middle-class mediocrity.
    Suburban mediocrity.
    A culture that openly worships the average.
    A society which allows the idea of the elite to exist only in relation to sport.
    A culture of fat people, lazy people, people who watch reality television, people who aren’t interested in anything except celebrity, people who eat in the street, people who betray their ordinariness every