When I got back to London, Bernard told me how everyone had missed me at his birthday party. In fact, it had gone off much as it might have, had I been in town for it. Norman—with whom Bernard had finally reached an adequate peace—had taken lots of photographs, and Bernard and I spent a long and happy evening looking over them. Jane had worn the most purple dress ever made, and if the photos were to be believed, Frieda had spent the entire evening grinning madly. Bernard did not know why. I thought Bernard’s choice of the gray linen suit very successful, and wanted a blowup of the photograph of him with Claire and Michael, which was really a great photo. The flowers were not quite as I had ordered them, but they looked acceptable, and I was very pleased with the lighting in the room. They had remembered about the candles’ being ivory.

In the first weeks that I was back with Bernard, I was afraid of calling my mother, afraid of being depressed or angered, afraid that I would be splattered with blood again. But in fact, when I called her we would laugh and tell each other stories until it was difficult for me to say goodbye. I felt that my mother knew what I was going to say before I said it, and that I knew what she was going to say, and I sometimes wondered why, if that was the case, it gave us both so much pleasure to say these already known things. But I could not stop, and neither could she. My mother was slowly turning into my fondest memories of her. She did not drop her ironies, but she took on a tender mildness that surprised me by telephone. Her essential softness had seemed to disappear during the first year of her illness; now it was back, closer to the surface than it had ever been.

My mother’s unnoticeable chemotherapy clearly made her feel terrible; sometimes when I spoke to her I felt that she was expending the most enormous effort to exchange the day’s pleasantries, that to say what she had always said without thinking now required an intense concentration of hypnotic energy. The new chemotherapy did not affect her hair, and she told me by phone that she had given up the wig. “I look like I’ve been shorn for the army,” she reported. “But at least it’s been trimmed and styled. Wait till you see your mother with a crew cut.”