The Towers of Love by Stephen; Birmingham

in God’s name is the hooch?” All the while, of course, she drank nothing. It was a tactic that was possibly designed to cover up the fact that she was not drinking. Or possibly, by getting everyone else to drink more than he should, she reinforced her own morale, her own stalwart abstinence. It had been—he tried to think now—it had been at least twelve years since she had stopped drinking and had begun substituting, for alcohol, quantities of tea and ginger beer.
    It had been right after his brother Billy’s death in 1947 that her drinking had become so much worse, and the years following that had been terrible years for them all. Those years had receded now, and faded, but he could still remember the old, chilling fear he had felt at seeing his mother drunk. Drinking, for some curious reason, had not made her gayer or wittier, as one might have supposed it would. Instead, it withdrew her, pulled her into some dark and solitary place, some cavity where, removed from life, she could not be reached at all. Drinking had made her quieter, sullen and taciturn, instead of livelier. She never laughed when she was drunk, though he remembered sometimes she had screamed. Most of it she had done during the day, alone, though she had often shared her drinking bouts with his Aunt Reba; and so, for the most part, coming home in the evening, the rest of the family saw only the results, the disaster, saw her sitting silently in the corner of a room—on a little stool, perhaps, or even on the floor—her eyes dazed and unblinking in the masklike ruin of her face, her shoulders hunched and still, her partly finished drinks around her. During those two or three years the quiet terror of her drinking had stalked through the house. Sometimes she would burst out of her silence into a violent tantrum. Once, he remembered, she had gone to the kitchen and, in front of Maria’s weeping eyes, had systematically broken all the dishes. And she had had a number of serious falls. Once she had come into his room late at night and fallen on the floor. A week later she had fallen on the stairs and, when they found her, her hip was broken, and it was this injury that had meant she could never ride again. She had recovered from that, and the drinking continued. The family—all of them—had tried to do everything they could, and finally, when she had lost so much weight and seemed so sick that they had decided to put her in a sanatorium—she had suddenly stopped.
    She had just stopped. No member of Alcoholics Anonymous had reached her, no clergyman. The family doctor had admitted that he could take no credit for it. It had been something, apparently, that she had resolved on her own to do. And that, Hugh supposed, was one of the most remarkable things about her. Perhaps it was something she had been brooding about and planning to do during all those evenings and afternoons, sitting in her solitary corner; perhaps not. They never knew. All they knew was that from somewhere, some reservoir of strength within her had been tapped, and she had stopped and never had a drink again. “The more I know of your mother,” an old family friend had said to him once, “the more I think that she is truly a magnificent woman.” There was some kind of magnificence in her, surely. She had never talked about the drinking years, never mentioned them. All she had ever done since had been, whenever there was a party, to go from guest to guest and cry, “Nobody’s had enough to drink. Quick, more cocktails! Nobody’s tight enough. What’s the matter with everybody? Let’s get frazzled!”
    They were finished with dinner now, and Hugh realised that, at her bright insistence, he had drunk a whole bottle of champagne. He was feeling a little lightheaded, but he supposed he should be grateful that she had not managed to get him to drink the second bottle. They were rising from the table, and his mother was