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turn a palpable corruption of “son of Rawley” or “Ralegh,” his lineage might be traced, with much labour and subterfuge, to the great Elizabethan worthy himself, he of the pointed beard, muddied cloak and imperishable fame …
    And then, going back a generation on my grandmother’s side, there was the Devon branch of the family—the right region for Sir Walter if the wrong name—who had made and lost their fortune in local copper and tin, neither of which seemed to have been as steady a bet as plastic.…
    And then (did Uncle Ratty feel moved to pause here, I wonder? Did he peruse the Notebooks? But what did he want with
another
scandal and a lot of wordy mumbo-jumbo, and another non-Rawlinson?) there was Matthew Pearce—my mother’s great-grandfather—of Burlford.
    All this she told me in the early stages of her illness—not, if I have given that impression, on that final, gilded evening. By then she could not have said anything more, because she had lost the mechanism of speech. Those last visits were to a silent, staring woman, her throat and neck packed around with all kinds of surgical junk, so that she could still breathe, and all verbal communication restricted to what she could write with a marker-pen on a special, wipe-clean clipboard. I think the sudden bout of disclosures, if it expressed in her peculiar way her own readiness to accept death, was also a recognition of the anticipated fact: that before loss of life would come loss of voice; that if she had things to say, she had better speak away. Though when silence struck, I could not help wondering—I still wonder—whether she had quite got round to saying all she intended.
    I blamed her, silently, and she knew this, for the timing of her death, coming so soon, or at least announcing itself so soon, after Ruth’s. Perhaps Ruth’s death had immunized me, so that I could face the distress of my mother’s with a sort of foggy, battered steadiness. But then she
was
seventy-eight. And, of course, this worked the other way round. I was witnessing in my mother the sort of horrors that Ruth had—avoided. My mother’s unrebelling submission to them was a kind of declaration that she was made of tougher stuff than Ruth, as she was made of tougher stuff than my father. (Oh, she was tough, all right.) And I could not help thinking that her merciless appraisal of her family, her parables on mortal dread and the vanity of ambition, were her indirect way of delivering, at last, her jealous judgement on her daughter-in-law.
    Why did she have to do it? To die then? To be so cruel? To block, to steal, Ruth’s afterlight? But then it struck me that perhaps all of this could be turned round yet another way again, and that, amazing as it was to conceive, there might have been in the cruelty a shred of unbelievable kindness: she was using her death to shake me out of my stupor of grief. (“Buck up, darling, it’s not the end of the world.”) There was a moment when my grasp of this possibility must have shown in my eyes; and her eyes had glittered back: you see, I am really a mother, after all, not such a selfish bitch—I give myself up for my son.…
    It was an irony that went unmentioned that death came for her in the form of cancer of the throat, of the larynx. A punishment for having already, in one sense, forsaken her voice? You cannot help these thoughts. But I do not think she was cowed by superstition, any more than she was cowed by death.
    Her voice! Her singing! Her ringing soprano. It is significant that in her lecture on the lure of fame she did not cite her own once budding musical career. But then she had abandoned it long ago: the point was made. And in any case, in her opinion, her singing voice was just a “gift,” she owed it no special duty; and the reason she always gave for her early dedication to it was simple economic necessity in the face of Uncle Ratty’s stinginess: “You have to use what you’ve got, darling—but only when