But a Whimper

"This is how the world will end

Not with a bang, but a whimper"

The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

Transcript

But a Whimper

Margery turns left at the little, stone church and trudges up the high-street. She shuffles, with sluggish irritation, past the paint shop, the charity shop, the antique shop, Frank's, Bessie's, and a store that sells office equipment. She catches her crooked reflection in the wide, well-polished windows of each establishment. She is hooded in a translucent cagoule which is slightly too large for her. She thinks it’s going to rain. Her old age is amplified by a chequered wheel-basket which she pulls behind her. There is nothing inside it.

 Flora still drives. (She feels that it will soon be time to give up driving). She parks in the car-park on the seawall and walks, more ably and speedily than Margery, into town.

 Margery reaches The Lock and Barrel first. It is a Weatherspoon's pub, two storeys. It is not an environment in which she feels perfectly at ease. There are many alcoholics around, swarthy, hoarse-voiced men, bedraggled youngsters speaking in inappropriately raised, boozed voices. But it's cheap. Everything here is cheap as chips and, being as she is on only a modest pension, she appreciates a bargain. She also appreciates the dimness of the lighting and the absence of background music.

 Flora enters soon after Margery. She finds her at their usual table, a table off to the side, where it’s quieter, by windows looking onto a deserted alleyway. 

It takes Margery longer to recognise Flora than it takes Flora to recognise Margery. At any rate, Flora approaches, and their paths at last converge. 

 "Goodday, my dear," Flora cries.

 "So glad you made it," Margery answers, struggling to her feet. 

 They embrace. They take each other's gaunt bodies in their wrinkled hands. They sit.

 "Fish and chips?" Margery suggests. 

 They usually both order battered cod and chips, with a pot of mushy peas, and plenty  of vinegar on the chips. They used to share a half-bottle of white wine. Now they drink tea.      

 "I thought I might try something else today..." Flora says, without certainty.

 "Pardon?" 

 "I thought I'd try something else, Margery dear," Flora repeats. 

 She looks at what's new, she scans other, more unchartered sections of the colourful menu. The dishes do not comfort her. Chicken wings, curries, Jamaican stuff. She sees nothing she recognises or desires. There's no steak and ale pie, no bangers and mash, no toad in the hole.

 "Think I'll stick with fish and chips," she says at last. "Tea?"

 "Yes please. Alcohol's too much for my system now." Margery says this like it’s news. 

 The process takes a long time. Flora goes to the bar to order tea and lunch, forgets to order with her table number in mind, goes back to the table, looks at it, goes back to the bar, forgets it. (She discovers, time after time, that she is not as sharp as she thinks). She tries to shout across the pub to Margery to ask her for the table number but Margery can't hear what Flora is saying to her. The barman reassures Flora that he knows where she and her friend are sitting and that the food will get to them.

 Tea is brought in a steel tea pot, with three miniature milk packets. Margery stirrs her tea. She stares down disapprovingly at the beige liquid. She insists she needs more milk.

They hardly say anything to each other. It seems that they have nothing to confide to one another, nothing to enquire of one another. The palaver of getting here and ordering a drink and some lunch seems to have exhausted them.

 The two portions of fish and chips arrive, with mushy peas, and a dab of tartare sauce on the rim of each plate. The scent of vinegar wafts upwards from the thick pile of chips, acerbic and vitalising.

 They eat, very slowly.

 "My cod's drier than usual," Margery says.

 "Mine's alright," Flora replies.

 An obese man passes the window. 

 "Goodness..." Margery says. 

 "My!" Flora exclaims in answer.

 It is not obvious that they are reacting to the same thing.

 "Saw something in the paper about that nurse...the one who killed all those babies..." Flora ventures.

 "Did you?"

 "Yeah. What was her name... Mary I think."

 "Nasty piece of work," Margery says.

 "Nasty piece of work," Flora concurs.

 "My cod's a bit dry..." Margery says, as if for the first time. 

 Flora ignores her.    

 ***

It isn't obvious that Flora has been lying to Margery, that she pities her. Flora has never told Margery that she is married to a man called Walter who is slowly fading away, who has been in and out of hospital over the last two years. Flora has never told Margery about her son, Martin. Flora is disappointed in Martin. Martin is some kind of folk musician. Flora thinks her son is lazy, entitled, and undisciplined. Her daughter, Felicity, has a child, Tony. Flora's only grandchild is quite seriously developmentally disabled. Flora has never mentioned Felicity or Tony. 

 Flora enjoys this anonymity, this masquerade as a straightforward old maid. She befriended Margery at church, at the post-service refreshments, just over four years ago. As far as Flora can tell, Margery is an atheist who goes to Holy Communion at St. Mary's on a Sunday and Wednesday morning simply for lack of anything better to do. Flora is using fellow septuagenarian Margery for her own obscure purposes, for some kind of escape from the complexities and sadnesses of her life. Margery is a slower, more broken-down specimen of old age; she is of diminished and steadily diminishing mental capacity.

Five months later, they meet up again and Flora is the first one at the table. Flora was only able to arrange the meet-up by contacting a younger neighbour, Phillip. Margery requires constant assistance, assistance which Phillip benevolently provides. 

 Margery arrives, accompanied, almost forty minutes late. She moves very slowly. There is an absence, a waywardness about her eyes, an uncomprehending smile on her lips. She is accompanied by Phillip, the helpful neighbour. He is ten, maybe fifteen years younger. Phillip assists her as she shuffles, directing her towards the usual table from which Flora signals avidly.

 When Margery arrives, Flora thanks Phillip for his help. Phillip says he'll be back in two and a half hours to pick Margery up. Margery doesn't understand. He leaves.

 She looks blankly at Flora, not seeming to recognise her. But she still smiles, smiles the same stupid, general smile. 

 "Margery...it's me...Flora..."

 "Hello, dear."

 "Margery, it's Flora. F-LOR-A," she over-enunciates.

 "Yes," Margery says vaguely. 

 Margery’s acrimony and irritability has been utterly replaced by a sedate quietness, a slack geniality.

 They sit, in stasis. Flora's feelings are mixed: she is both concerned and grateful for Margery's degeneration.

 "Was that man my husband?" Margery asks.

 For some reason, instead of telling the truth, that Margery doesn't have a husband, Flora says:

 "Yes, dear."

 Silence.

 "Fish and chips?" Flora suggests.

 "Fish and..."

 "Fish and chips," Flora repeats, a note of frustration in her voice.

 "Not sure I...not sure I like it," Margery says.

 "You've been enjoying fish and chips for nearly eighty years," Flora persuades, feeling upset by the things Margery is saying.

 "I don't remember."

 She says nothing for a while. Flora isn't quite sure what to do, what to say, what to suggest.

 "I want to go home," Margery says at last.

           ***

Five months later, Margery is too frail to get out of bed.

 Flora's husband dies. Her son has a career change, though she forgets what he's now doing, what line of work he's currently in. It was explained to her but she failed to grasp even the basics. Something to do with the internet. Her grandson gets accepted into a decent special-needs college. Felicity's husband, Simon, leaves his accounting job with decent severance pay and starts spending a lot more time at home. Felicity goes back to work at Seesaw Publishing House.

 Still Flora is saddled with this sad old woman. Their curious, deceptive relationship continues, though Margery is too weak even to go out into the facility gardens for a quarter of an hour let alone to honour their semi-regular lunch at The Lock and Barrel.

 Flora stands in the reception of Harewood Senior-care. A nurse, in sterile pale-blue, directs Flora to Margery's room. 64. 64. Six four, six...four...  Flora follows the room numbers, she advances through the corridor.

 She arrives at Room 64. She knocks on the door and enters gingerly. The door creaks open.

 Margery lies, supine and still on her clinical bed, in a well-heated room with closed curtains. 

 Flora approaches the hushed, heavy spectacle. Margery is pale, her hair long and white, her face narrow and bony and skull-like.

 Flora is ready to confess to Margery, to tell her that the basis of their relationship was not what it appeared.

 But she realises that the circumstances are not conducive to a confession, and that she would probably not be understood. The facts of Flora’s existence, the deaths and births and changes and events worth reporting, all pale into irrelevancy as she stares down at the old woman, her mouth yawning wide, her eyes open but unseeing. Flora, herself, hovering above, pales into irrelevancy. Flora thinks that Margery probably never thought of her as anything more than a burden, a task, a sentient errand. But, Flora thinks, Margery touched so few other lives: Margery served a purpose in her unmarried dotage, Flora thinks, with self-congratulation and finality. I gave her a purpose. Now she can sleep easy.

 "Goodbye, Margery," Flora utters. Her voice is dried and eerie in the quiet, carpeted room.

 Margery breathes softly.

 "I am dissolving this union," Flora adds, and concludes: "Goodbye."

 Somehow, Flora has the reassuring sense that Margery understands her, that she understands what's happening.

 Flora is gone, she has shut the creaky door and is retracing her steps in the dark winding corridor when the croak quietly comes, husky, deathly, and final:

 "Goodbye".