The Face That Must Die Read Online Free

one can always rewrite.
    Of course the situation with my mother could only get worse, though gradually enough to let me believe she was just the way she had always been. She became convinced that the neighbours were circulating a petition to have her put out of her house because she was only a tenant whereas they owned their homes, but a few of her neighbours were on her side and refused to sign. Miss Holme began to accuse people of stealing items from her house, which was infested with demons, and my mother called in Miss Holme’s nephew to help, but after Miss Holme’s death some years later she denied that she had ever said anything was wrong with her friend. By then, however, my mother was on the same path.
    I suppose I realised this soon after my wife and daughter and I moved house to the far side of the river from Liverpool. We invited my mother for dinner on her birthday that October, and I arranged to meet her at our local station. She never arrived. I waited several hours, phoning her home between trains, and eventually went home to a phone call accusing me of having played a trick on her. She’d been waiting for me at the station in Liverpool, where, she insisted, people had taken her for a prostitute.
    After that things quickly grew worse. Aeroplanes were being used to spy on her, though perhaps one of the pilots was protecting her. When we gave her a photograph of herself holding our daughter, she refused to believe she was the woman in the photograph. Her next-door neighbours had bought her house from her landlord and were trying to take over one of the rooms for their daughter’s use. Her neighbours on the other side were social workers who wanted her to take care of a mad old woman during the day. She would phone me in a panic, saying that the room was full of people who were staring at her, or that she was in the house that looked like hers but was miles away from hers. Sometimes she felt she was being drugged to cause her to hallucinate. When I tried to persuade her these things weren’t happening she would accuse me of conspiring against her, trying to drive her mad.
    Even I couldn’t pretend nothing was wrong now, but more than thirty years of not discussing her at her insistence made me incapable of seeking medical advice on her behalf. I felt helpless and increasingly desperate whenever I thought of her. Usually on my visits I had to try and disentangle the truth from her account of something that had happened, or that she claimed had happened, since my last visit; often we had violent arguments over nothing at all — sometimes we came to blows. More than once I grew so frustrated that I ran at a wall of the room head first. I wasn’t always sane myself. Eventually, on the theory that living near me in a house she knew I owned would make her feel more secure, I managed to obtain a mortgage for one from the bank.
    Perhaps this seemed the perfect solution because I was at my wits’ end, or because it was so close to the ambition she’d nursed throughout my childhood of owning her own home. I couldn’t see (though my wife tried to make me see) that it was too late and might very well make the situation worse. It wasn’t long before we found a house my mother was delighted with, a few minutes’ walk away from me.
    The negotiations for buying it took months, as they will. Meanwhile my son was born and my mother kept calling to say that heads were looking at her out of vases or to plead with me to take her home from the house someone had left her in. She slept downstairs on the couch, because people came into her bedroom and pushed her out of bed. By now I left the phone off the hook when I went to bed, but more than once I woke in the dead of night convinced I’d heard its ringing.
    Shortly after the contracts of sale had been signed, my mother decided she didn’t want to move house after all: she felt at home where she was, she had friends among the neighbours. I managed intermittently to