The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker by Joanna Nell

Author:Joanna Nell [Nell, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780733640384
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2019-09-24T07:00:00+00:00

I barely recognised my mother, lying pale and drawn against the satin sheets in her apartment. When I’d last seen her, she’d been wrapped in her new life back in her native Paris. Now, barely three years later, she was a frail shell of a woman.

I put the wrapped flowers I’d brought on the table next to the bed. ‘How is the pain, Mother?’

‘Unbearable, chérie. I’m in a living hell.’

Her chic apartment, although stuffy and dark behind the drawn curtains, didn’t exactly look like a living hell. But then we all have our own private purgatory. And my mother’s came with a live-in staff of three.

‘It’s a slipped disc, Maman. It’s hardly terminal. Perhaps if you got out of bed and moved a little …’

‘What would you know?’

‘I am a registered nurse, in case you’d forgotten.’

My mother sniffed then, building up to one of her withering put-downs.

‘Was a nurse, Evelyn. Was.’

‘Once a nurse, always a nurse.’

‘You could have been a doctor if your father hadn’t filled your head with all that Florence Nightingale nonsense.’

I’d inherited my mother’s brain, I knew that much, but thankfully not its capacity for bitterness. She’d studied literature at the Sorbonne and had seen herself as an intellectual until my father had ‘locked her away in a gilded cage’ as she put it. She’d never seen her role as an ambassador’s wife as a career, more an imposition.

My father couldn’t have functioned without her. A large part of his diplomatic role fell on her shoulders. Her skill in entertaining and forging connections with the other embassy wives was something he had taken for granted, his career coming to an end when their marriage did. They were truly a partnership. Vicar and vicar’s wife. Rabbi and rebbetzen. Two sides of the same coin.

‘You’re entitled to your opinions.’ I unfastened my coat and draped it over a chair. It was time to go into battle. ‘But I will not have you bad-mouth Florence. Not only was she the mother of modern nursing who probably saved the lives of thousands of soldiers in the Crimean War and afterwards, but she was also a gifted mathematician, statistician and social reformer. And let me remind you that, despite what she might have cautioned about “women’s rights”, she was a feminist.’

My mother receded at that, turning her head towards her pillow. ‘La féminisme?’ She sniffed. ‘Perhaps you should have paid more attention to her.’

‘Oh but Mother, I did pay attention,’ I said, moving deter minedly towards the long windows that overlooked the Marais. ‘There are five essential points in securing the health of houses: One. Pure air. Two. Pure water. Three. Efficient drainage. Four. Cleanliness. Five. Light.’ With that, I threw open the thick velvet curtains, blinding her with the morning sun. Lifting the catch, I pushed open the windows that had been sealed like a sarcophagus for months. Looking back at my frail mother cowering beneath the bedclothes, I was worried that the fresh air might blow her away. ‘Noxious air, foul odours and effluvia will do you no good at all, Mother.

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