Visiting Mrs. Rutherford

'Tea', I asked, 'I'll make.'

'Yes, thank you. I have bags in the cupboard. Irish. I hope you don't mind.'

Ordinarily I would not have the bad manners to offer somebody tea in their own home, using their own teabags and milk. But Mrs. Rutherford I had known since the age of two, and though our relationship had not the clarity of a parent, or even a grandparent and child, she occupied that level of familiarity.

The teabags, as I knew, were on top of the fridge. I did my best not to show the correction, nor break stride as I felt her freeze behind me, stupefied by her mistake. The mistake of an aging brain. After a moment, I sensed too that she had resumed turning pages with her papery fingers, looking for a vat return.

The kettle was mottled. Very old, and unkempt. Used three times daily? Perhaps four on days like today – the rain had started three hours ago and had been ceaseless, not tapping at the window with relentless, metronomic timing. It had dampened me, even in the mere twenty yard dash from bus to door. With cold-stiffened fingers I lit the stove and nestled the tea bags into two cream colored cups, rung with the brown from daily use.

'So, how are things Ruth?' Ruth. My contraction on Mrs. Rutherford. I had never called her Lorraine.

She was slow to change attention to my question, and with her gaze averted I had a moment to study the changes two years had wrought. Hair white and thinned; the pinkish glow of scalp from beneath. The skin around her eyes drawn deep into the sockets, articulating the runny, red globes of the sclera. Her hands were meshes of blue and green wires, scudded with purple abrasions. Seeing her in the predictable state of old ladyhood brought to me a pang for my own mother, seventeen years passed, who would never see this age.

Only once Ruth had found what she was looking for did she respond. 'Rosy, thank you very much. But for the greens. Have you noticed the sprouts? You cannot get decent sprouts anywhere.'

Her voice was wonderfully comforting, and a confirmation of being home. The nasal clip of postwar England still there. With it, the promise of McVitties, marmalade and custard creams. I felt a lurch of olfactory return, whereupon the memory was evoked of my delivering her post in exchange for a break of Cadbury's chocolate. The dry and wooden smell of the house, with its various antiquities, brought the past right up to me, and I felt mesmerized by it.

'And how was America dear?'

'Hot,' I said, pouring from the kettle which had begun its hoarse whistle, 'hot, loud, but a lot of fun.'

'Yes, Americans are loud aren't they. And awfully big. I don't think I would like that at all.'

'No, I don't suppose you would. But, you know, most of them really are very nice. Loud maybe, but not loudmouths like you would think. Or how Europeans think.'

Ruth, in that implacable way she had, had made up her mind. Her grimace didn't break as she followed her own ossified summary, 'and the guns.'

The prerogative of the elderly. To drop the pretense of individualized opinion, and instead adopt the principles society inexorably presses on them; curmudgeon, dear, etc... There was a certain giving it the finger about how she said which I admired, and knew that because she was saying disingenuously, she didn't really believe these things about Americans.

She rose suddenly with a finger aloft to keep me quiet. I could here her sifting in the other room before she came back with some DVD cases in her hands, which she presented to me, of the show Friends. 'These' she said, beaming 'are from America'.

I cringed inwardly. Was this where she was? What my visit was to be? Patting old Nan on the shoulder, feeding her soup and reminding her thirty times a day the clubhouse had been closed for a half century?

'No, you silly fool. I mean the discs. The discs. I ordered them on the internet, but I didn't know they would only work on American disc players. They don't work on mine.'

Then she said something which I wished she wouldn't, because I wasn't ready for it yet. Wasn't ready to remember why I had come. 'Anyway, I thought you might take them to Sarah's, if you wouldn't mind. She's always traveling to America too, and might have something to do with them.'

Sarah, the Rutherfords' blonde haired daughter, was a few years older than me, and had always felt somehow less of a staple in the household that a child ought to. I might have put this impression down to the self-centrism of youth – as the adored guest of Mrs. Rutherford, I must somehow have been the actual child. But over the years, Sarah's flitting presence was both confirmed and explained by stories of her misbehavior, the company she kept, and the path these would take her down. I had known her a little bit, and quite liked her, her pretty and constant smile, but for my vague envy that she was Ruth's biological daughter.

The knot which had coiled tight in my chest loosened as I allowed coward to win, and let the opening pass. I took the DVDs, wordlessly. Not saying I will, not saying I won't.

'Do you still see the Coopers?' I asked, muddling the question with a hasty sip of tea which made me cough.

'I still see them, not that I think they see me very much. Not since Henry died, I should think they aren't quite sure what to do with me. Carol on her own will come in for tea occasionally, but Mr. Cooper stays quite well away. Margot and Loretta, on the other hand – do you remember them – lovely women, come very often indeed, and always leave something for me. They are the ones who brought this.' She opened the fridge where sat an enormous chocolate cake, down a third, and covered in saran wrap. 'Would you like some?'

I nodded. Terribly, in the latter decade of his life, I had forgotten Henry Rutherford had been alive. He had always been as forbidding as Ruth was kind, and I had always steered well away. As a child, I would shudder at the sight of his mustard clothing and austere argyle socks. He would speak chummily enough with my parents (never to the children), but back in the privacy of our home, my father would talk scathingly about him, and my mother would energetically agree. I believe they felt, and I have no reason to dissent, that he may have been the proximal reason for Sarah's behavior. It certainly vexed all who knew her, that such a warm, gentle soul as Ruth could have been with such a misery bastard as Henry. In the final stages of his life, he more or less disappeared into the upstairs bedroom in the house, and cloaked himself in cigarette smoke, watching West Ham matches from the 70s on his video cassettes. Nonetheless, he was Ruth's husband, had passed in my absence, and I felt embarrassed and guilty at the omission. But it was very well too late to ask now how she was coping.

'Now,' she sat a large piece of sweating cake in front of me and sat opposite with her own much smaller piece. 'Do tell me about your life. Why did you come back from America? It wasn't for a woman was it?'

And so another of Ruth's charms was demonstrated; her genuine (or apparently genuine) pleasure when listening to me speak about myself. With ease I fell in lock-step with our arrangement over the thirty six years that I had known her. All the years of ringing round, just to talk. Sitting at this very table, or in the living room, or out in the garden chairs watching the ants take off from the grass, just me talking as she would peer over a cup or through her knitting; and how she would croak, or scoff, or chuckle at all the correct moments. More than filial comfort, and its incumbent judgment and expectation; she had never once advised or chided. What did I provide for her? I'll never know. Perhaps it had something to do with Sarah? Perhaps with Henry? Maybe she needed the dull calm recitation of an ordinary life to remove her from the darker shades of her own. Or perhaps she simply liked company.

The words, as I spoke now, flowed as they always had. I didn't anticipate my readiness to confess why I had come back; that life in America had been too much for me – too vast, too debauched, too expensive, and finally too foreign. These things summed had beaten me back from a venture which in hindsight was undertaken with heartbreaking naivete, and I was very ashamed. But to admit this to Ruth felt natural. I was free to explore this pain in real time, and verbalize it under in the security of Ruth's sympathetic presence.

When I felt I had expended myself, to reintroduce some levity and catch my breathe, I answered her initial questions and confided that there had been a woman in American. An olive eyed, ethically ambiguous brunette from Arizona who I met in Pennsylvania where she studied medicine.

'And whatever happened there dear,' Ruth asked, as though for the spoiler to a thriller.

'Well, nothing. She was... of a modern sort.'

'Oh dear.'

'Didn't want a relationship. At least not at that time.'

'Well you know, when Henry and I met, it was much the same.'

'Really, that does surprise me.'

'For our parents' generation of course, it would have been unheard of. The unorthodox. But we just made the cut I suppose – and we very nearly didn't stick. We both wanted our liberation, and how embarrassing to say, variety.'

'But...'

'But we found we could not be apart for long, and could not be together under these... I guess you would call it open... these conditions.'

I considered her for a moment, and supposed I had done her an injustice and misplaced her on the cultural timeline somewhat. Maybe she courted the contradiction knowingly, with how she spoke and dressed; this was the fashion of austerity surely. Something might have shown on my face, for she said 'Oh, its not so surprising. He and I met in '72 and married in, hold on, '75? '76? Right in the heart of things anyway.'

'Were you swept up in all that cultural stuff?'

'No, not at all. Well, not really I should say. I mean, you cannot help it entirely, can you, when the world changes around you. But we couldn't be doing with the marches and the rallies, and so on. And Henry always had a bit of a mean streak, and didn't like what he called the 'queerization' of England. Nasty thing to say nowadays isn't it?'

Always, I thought, but didn't say.

I felt contented, and didn't really want to move or speak. The rain had stopped, and the window was steaming up in the muggy yellow glow of sunlight. A vehicle could be heard, chugging down Lynton Road, and the faint sound of childrens' laughter floated off, presumably, the playgrounds of the Japanese School across the way.

Looking around, in this intermission, I admired the unchanged state of the home. A duplex, in which Ruth and Henry had lived their entire married life. It was removed from my own childhood home only by a short bridge which spanned the railway track that cut Acton in half. It was a bridge which, in the nineties, had been the frequent target of IRA threats – ultimately false – and I had spent many mornings watching police bomb squads clearing the scene before running across to apprise Mrs. Rutherford of the drama. 'Gracious!' she might say before offering me a biscuit.

Back then, romantic, gilded steam trains still ran the line, and the Concorde could be seen above the London skyline, nose tilted, approaching Heathrow. On my return from America, I'd noticed how London had changed, even in that brief interval. But here in Ruth's timeless kitchen, the change seemed condense, almost cartoonized. Because here, in Ruth's kitchen, I was thirty years ago.

Birds twittering in the warm light brought my attention back, with a melancholic stirring. I started to feel anxious again, knowing I would have to be off soon. The break, I supposed, was as good a time as any. Coughing spittle from my nervous throat, I said 'Ruth, when did you last see Sarah?'

Ruth pinched a nose between thumb and fore finger, and wriggled. 'Oh, let's see. Last July probably?'

Unwilled, my left hand slid halfway across the table, palm upward. 'She's not well Ruth. She's really not well.'

'Oh, dear.' Ruth fidgeted, and I could see despite her fussing the shrinking wetness of grief in her eyes.

'It seems,' here I almost choked up, 'it seems you should go and see her. Soon.'

There was an unbearable silence, where I wondered if Ruth might just fall from her chair. Then she hardened and spoke as though the tenor of my delivery had been different, as though we were discussing a distant acquaintance, 'But you know, she has always had trouble, that girl.'

Trouble. Ruth knew what it was. I didn't have to say it. The drugs had taken their toll. She was protecting herself with the euphemism, and in a way perhaps preserving the tragedy of her daughter as uniquely troubled. Not just another drug user. But there was a severity here too, and I couldn't quite place it. As though she'd been preparing herself for some time, and therefore had had the time to toughen her skin.

'Well,' said Ruth, 'I'd better get cutting veg. I'd like stew today.'

'I can go with you, if you like? I can take you?'

'I rather think we shouldn't trouble her if she's in a state. Sarah always gets so agitated when I'm around.'

I was stunned at the force of her will. For the first time Mrs. Rutherford was unfamiliar to me. She stood and from a side table drew into her self a small leather-bound book, tucking it into her sweater. Without looking at me she went to the fridge and took out grocers bags full of carrots and cabbage. Standing at the counter top, to silence but for the the tick-tock of a grandfather clock in the hall, she began to chop.

I accepted my place was to no further intrude on a private matter. Instead, I placed an arm across her shoulders and squeezed lightly, and she reanimated, plying me with goodies to take home. She reminded me about the DVDs which remained on the table, beside my teacup and plate with its crumbs of chocolate cake.

Outside, the smell of paper and wood and tea was replaced by petrichor and exhaust. The sound of the Central Line trundling toward Ealing Broadway, and teens swearing at each other as they whizzed by on motorized scooters.

As I sat at my bus stop, careful not tread on the shards of a smashed window, I could not decide if I should visit Ruth more or less often.