Wilma unplugged the television and left the bedroom. The door clipped shut. For a long while Anselm tried to read the motionless face of the woman waiting to die. Nothing moved. There was just a slow blinking and then a welling-up of tears that ran into the soft creases of her skin.
Now was as good a time as any, thought Anselm. On this day of death there should be powerful words about life. He cleared his throat. ‘Agnes, I have something to tell you.’
She raised a finger off the bedspread.
‘I know you had a son, Robert, and that he was taken away from you.
She reached for his hand.
‘You have lived as though he were dead.’
She turned her head, applying the lightest of pressure to Anselm’s fingers.
‘Victor did not betray you. He took your boy and protected him. I have met Robert. He is very much alive.’
Agnes suddenly raised herself from the bed, startling Anselm, and rasped out a thick sound of pain or wonder. She fell back, gripping Anselm’s hand. Her mouth moved round the shape of words but nothing broke into sound.
Anselm said, ‘He’s tall.’ A squeeze.
‘In comparison to me, moderately handsome.’ A squeeze.
‘I understand he’s a prodigy on the piano.’
A frail, lingering squeeze.
‘He’s married to a charming woman. She’s called Maggie.’
Her strength had gone; her fingers lay warm and still within Anselm’s hands.
‘They have five children. Some of them are married and they, too, have children. Agnes, you are not only a mother… you are a grandmother and a great-grandmother.’
Her lips pursed into a loop, her eyes wide and swimming. Somehow the years were stripped back and Anselm sensed the ambiance of youth, captured by Victor Brionne in the photograph seen earlier that afternoon. He immediately recognised her for who she was, and who she had become; they were one and the same.
Wilma bustled in, carrying a teaspoon, a saucer and a bowl of ice cubes.