Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon онлайн

8 страница из 77

I walked across to her bedside, unafraid.

I felt no sudden pain of separation. Like my father, though in a different sense, my mother had always been leaving home by degrees.

I remember feeling that it was not as if her life had ended, but more that she’d arrived at the natural conclusion of some motherly process. Since the beginning of time, her voice had been growing steadily quieter and her movements more slow. In the last few weeks she’d read to me in a barely audible whisper, and in the last few days she had read in silence, her mouth forming words I’d been unable to hear. She moved less and less until her movements became imperceptible, until, finally, there were no movements at all. One thing becoming another – this was how it had always been, and in the end, it was no more complicated than that.

I stood quietly beside the bed, my hand on my mother’s, watching the snowflakes swirl and pile against the windowpane. I could feel snow falling inside me too, I realised, a settling white blanket that made my thoughts quiet and edgeless, a cosy sort of numb.