The Return of Maeve Carver

The phone rang at twenty past four on a Tuesday, which was a bad time for a phone call, because it was the hour when the afternoon has gone on too long and the evening has not yet begun, and you cannot pretend to be busy. I was at the kitchen table in the flat in Bethnal Green with a mug of tea gone cold and a lighting plot for a revival of A Month in the Country that was refusing to solve itself. The director wanted the third act lit like a room that had been lived in for too many years without being aired. I had been staring at the plan of the stage for an hour and had drawn nothing.

I knew it was my mother before I picked up. She always rang on the landline, even though I had given her the mobile number twice, written out in block capitals on the back of a Christmas card the second time. She did not trust the mobile. She did not trust any number that was not tied to a wall.

"Maeve," she said.

"Mam."

She let a silence go that was not awkward. My mother and I had a long and settled grammar of pauses. I waited.

"He's been moved," she said. "They've shifted him up to the hospice on Monday. Saint Clodagh's. The one out by Barna."

"Right," I said.

"They said to tell the family. If there was anyone who'd want to come."

There was nothing in her voice. She might have been ringing to tell me the price of oil had gone up again. My mother had been ringing me like this for fouryears now, since the first bad winter when Daddy could not finish a sentence without stopping to breathe, and each time she had spoken as though the weather were changing and not a man.

"How is he in himself?" I said.

"He's comfortable enough. They've him on the pump now. He knew me this morning."

"And yourself?"

"Ah. Sure."

We were not going to talk about herself. We never did. I looked at the lighting plot and at my handwriting on it, which looked like a stranger's handwriting, and I put the mug down and did not make any kind of sound.

"Would you come," she said.

It was not quite a question. The Irish inflection had been carved out of it. She had made it as plain as she could manage, and it had cost her something to say it plain, because we were not a family who asked outright, we were a family who hung things in the air and waited to see whether they would be taken down.

"I'll come," I said.

"Thursday would be soon enough," she said. "Don't be getting on a plane tonight in a state."

"I'll come Thursday."

"There's no rush on you. He has a while in him yet, they said."

"How long is a while," I said, before I could decide not to.

"They wouldn't say. They never will."

She put down the phone before I did, which was a thing she had started doing in recent years. There used to be a ritual where we each waited for the other. Now she went first.

I sat at the table for a long time. The plot on the paper had not changed. I had written cool, cool, warmer on the upstage left in pencil across the top, and beneath that Natalya's entrance — the window? and I could not remember now what I had meant by the window. Outside the kitchen window of the flat, a bus was going past on the Bethnal Green Road. The sound of a bus is a London sound that I have stopped hearing in