‘Well, that’s the right question to ask, Mrs Mitchell. Why on earth would they? And will the world be any better for it?’ Doubler shook his head at the perplexity of life. He looked around the room, his systematic sweep taking in the empty bookshelves, the lack of personal effects, not even the trace of a scent of cooking coming from the kitchen.
‘Forgive me if this observation seems like an intrusion, but I’m guessing, Mrs Mitchell, that you must be very lonely.’
Mrs Mitchell sighed heavily. ‘I suppose I must be. But this isn’t about me. He’s so lonely it’s killing him.’
‘Do you think so? I think he’s probably in the best place. He’s very well looked after. Surely you can trust in that at least?’
‘Oh, that’s what they all say. You’re just no different from the rest of them.’ Mrs Mitchell stood up and left the room. He could see glimpses of her through the hatch in the wall busying herself in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, but there was still no sign of a boiling kettle or the reassuring rattle of a biscuit tin.
‘But you can understand, can’t you,’ he said, raising his voice to continue their conversation, ‘the practical difficulties? You can see why everyone thought he might be better off elsewhere?’
She appeared at the hatch, poking her head through it and shaking it with force. ‘Actually. No. No. No. I just can’t accept that.’
Doubler chose to respond with calmness, adopting a gently cajoling manner rather than entering into combat. ‘But he’s got needs, and you can’t possibly look after him at this stage. I know it’s tough. On you both. But you can visit, can’t you?’
‘Yes, yes, I can. And I do. But I find it so very hard. I try to be strong, but I just cry and cry and that upsets him. He doesn’t really understand.’
‘It must be very, very hard on you. I’m so sorry. I take it you were very close.’
‘Close? Well, of course. As close as two beings can be.’
‘And how long did he live with you?’
‘Live with me?’ She thought for a few minutes. ‘Gosh.’ Mrs Mitchell frowned and then smiled as her eyes flicked through a back catalogue of memories. ‘We’d have been celebrating fifty years just about now. Coming up for it.’
‘Fifty years! Goodness me! I had no idea!’ Doubler shook his head in disbelief. ‘Fifty years! Imagine! What’s that in donkey years?’
‘You’re right.’ Mrs Mitchell nodded sadly, making her way back to the sitting room to take her seat opposite Doubler. ‘Donkey’s years.’
‘Well, no wonder you were traumatized by the separation. I’m beginning to understand the depth of the relationship. But nonetheless. You simply can’t keep him here!’
‘Why ever not? That’s what I don’t understand. It’s a big house, you know. Two bedrooms. And a dining room. What do I need a dining room for, for goodness’ sake? I’m not exactly throwing dinner parties. I eat in front of the telly most nights. Alone. I could have him in the dining room if he couldn’t manage the stairs.’
‘Oh, but you just can’t, Mrs Mitchell. That’s the problem. Do you realize what a ludicrous proposition that is?’
‘But why? Give me one good reason why not. There’s nobody better qualified to look after him than me. Nobody that would take better care of him than me.’ Mrs Mitchell cried out her appeal and it was clear to Doubler that this was something she’d had to do many times before.
‘I don’t doubt your good intentions, but it’s not possible. That’s the thing you’ve just got to get into your head.’
Mrs Mitchell scowled, rose to her feet, planted her hands firmly on her hips and said with palpable disgust, ‘You can see yourself out.’
‘Now, now, Mrs Mitchell, don’t be like that. Let’s see if we can find some middle ground. I’m here to help.’
‘You can’t help. Your mind is made up. You’re no different from the rest of them.’
‘I am different. I can help you.’ Doubler looked at the woman before him, the slackness of her shoulders, the despair in her eyes. Once again she took a deep breath, the gulp of a woman who might be drowning.
‘This is the deal. You give me one good reason why he can’t live here with me and I’ll listen. But you’d better make it good.’ The fire in her eyes returned and she folded her arms in challenge.
‘There are plenty of good reasons, but I’ll start with the obvious one. Because, Mrs Mitchell, he needs plenty of grass to graze on.’
‘He needs what?’
‘Grass, Mrs Mitchell. You do understand that, don’t you?’
Mrs Mitchell looked him up and down, a range of emotions playing across her face. Disgust, shock, anger, puzzlement. And then a pause while Doubler shifted uncomfortably in his chair. She sat down slowly and leant forward, scrutinizing him carefully as understanding began to sweep across her face, replacing the bafflement that had been there just a second ago.
‘Oh my,’ she said, a broad smile breaking out and wiping decades of pain away. ‘Oh my, oh my.’
Doubler swallowed, unsure what might follow.
‘I’m not talking about the donkey, you daft oaf. I don’t miss the donkey. I haven’t been in a relationship with the donkey for fifty years, you foolish, foolish man. I’m talking about my husband! It’s Thomas I miss!’
Doubler looked at her in horror. ‘Your husband? You have a husband? He’s still alive?’
Mrs Mitchell leapt to her feet. ‘Of course he’s alive. Very much so,’ she said, a little indignantly, and then, under her breath, ‘but I bet he wishes he wasn’t.’ She sat down again.
Doubler raced through their conversation, pulling scraps to the front of his mind, trying to work out what he had learnt and what he hadn’t from the visit. If they had been talking at cross purposes throughout, then he knew very little indeed.
‘We grew spuds,’ said Mrs Mitchell, as if in answer to Doubler’s earlier conversation around the development of the Maris Piper.
‘You did? You and Thomas, Mrs Mitchell?’
‘Me and my hubby, yes. And please, call me Maddie. We grew cabbage and broccoli. Sprouts, too. Didn’t bother with the lettuce and such, but we liked our brassicas a lot. Brassicas and roots will see you through a winter.’
‘True that, Maddie. You had a bit of land, did you?’
‘A bit? More than we could handle. We didn’t have a patch, you know – we had a farm. A smallholding some would call it, but it didn’t feel small when you were responsible for everything that you put in the earth or took out of the earth. It didn’t feel small when it was your soil to dig, or your weeds to remove, or your animals that would die if you didn’t take proper care of them. We never stopped. We worked ourselves hard, but I wish . . .’ She paused, uncertain of continuing this train of thought with a stranger.
‘You wish what?’
‘I wish we’d worked ourselves harder. I wish we’d worked ourselves to death. It would have been so much better if we’d both died of digging.’
Doubler allowed Maddie to compose herself, waiting until her chest had stopped heaving in emotion before asking, gently, ‘What happened to Thomas?’
‘He didn’t die. More’s the pity. He’s still very much alive. Technically. But he’s definitely retired from living. I wish he’d died and that’s the truth. And I wish I’d died with him. He had a heart attack. That was the start of his decline. They said the farm was too much. They forced us to sell it, insisted we had to downsize. Then he had a stroke shortly afterwards and they put him in a home. They used the money from the sale of the farm to keep him alive. Ironic.’
Doubler nodded, the sound of his son’s voice ringing in his ears. ‘It’s not an unusual story. I hear this time and time again. But it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. I’m truly sorry for your loss.’
‘We should never, ever have left the farm. Never. It would have been so much better to just be there, even if we had let it go a bit. But they had other plans.’
Doubler watched her carefully. Although
the subject was obviously distressing, he could sense her beginning to unwind a little, as if just the act of telling him her story was therapeutic.
He kept his voice calm, coaxing more from her through gentle probing. ‘Who are “they”? These people you’re talking about? The social workers?’
‘Heavens, no! The social workers have been pretty good when you consider the runaround I give them. No. My sons.’ Mrs Mitchell bowed her head in shame.
‘Oh, Maddie. I’m so, so sorry.’ The pain in her eyes etched sharp lines around her face and it was easy to see where the pain and the anger had blurred and become inseparable.
‘Tell me about the runaround you give the social workers. What do you get up to?’
‘I don’t quite know. I’m doing fine. I can go a few days just right. And then I get this terrible, terrible darkness and I just want to break him out of that place. He’s unhappy, I’m unhappy, and so I make up my mind to go and bust him right out of there. But it all gets so confusing and I work myself into a state and I, somehow – I’m damned if I know how – go and break that blasted donkey out instead.’
Maddie paused for a moment to dab at the corner of her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘They took away everything. Percy was my Tom’s love, you know. He was the one thing that didn’t really have to do a day’s work on the farm and nobody resented it. The chickens had to lay eggs or they went in the pot; the cats had to catch mice or they’d starve; the veggies had to produce or they be dug right back in. But not Percy. Lord and master he was. It sometimes felt like he was running the place. Had his pick of the best grazing. Had carrots grown for him! Can you imagine? But Thomas loved that donkey, said there was something a little bit holy about him.
‘When Thomas went into that place, he begged me to look after Percy and I didn’t quite know what to do. I was still grieving from the end of my world as I knew it, the end of the Thomas I knew. I wasn’t really strong enough at the very moment when I needed to be strong to resist all of this horrible change that was being imposed on me. It’s hard to describe just how ghastly that time was. A nightmare. It was poor Thomas lying there in hospital, but I was the one that was treated like I was brain-dead. Nobody told me anything. My sons sold the farm, bought me this place. They thought they were doing what was best, I suppose, but I don’t ever remember them asking my opinion.
‘Soon after I moved in, I had the rather brilliant idea of bringing the donkey here to live with me. I was almost unbearably lonely and it seemed like a marvellous plan. Defiant, even. The donkey had been left at the farm and I suppose they knew somebody would tip up and collect him one day, so I did. Nobody even questioned me. I popped a halter round his neck and walked him down the bridle path. We had the loveliest walk, the two of us. Several miles of chatting and then, bold as brass, I brought Percy here and made a stable for him in the garage. I know it was wrong. It was terribly wrong, but I thought then that Thomas might come home to me and I couldn’t bear not to have Percy ready and waiting.
‘I kept him as best as I could. But God, they don’t half make a mess. You don’t really appreciate it when they’re out in a field, but keep them inside and for every barrow load of food you give them, they produce three barrow loads of muck the other end. It overwhelmed me a bit. And it’s heavy stuff to move. So for a while I did what I could to get it in the bin for the collection each week, but the more I shovelled, the more the donkey produced. It was like a story I used to read my children about a bad man and a magic porridge pot and the porridge spilt over from the pot, into the kitchen, then the house. There was a terrible, terrible picture of the porridge escaping from the front door and threatening to drown the whole village. That’s what it felt like – that me and Percy were going to suffocate in a mountain of manure.’
Doubler tried to imagine the scene and couldn’t help smiling a little at the image of this fierce woman shovelling donkey manure into her wheelie bin. He was also delighted at the ease with which she had told him the tale; in fact, he was beginning to wonder if now she had started to talk, she would ever stop. But she’d paused and her eyes looked troubled as she remembered the mounting manure, the mounting panic.
‘What happened next?’ he asked gently.
‘The neighbours got wind. Got wind! Get it? Oh, they certainly did get wind! The smell of it must have had the whole close wondering what I was doing in here.’
Maddie was suddenly delighted by the memory.
‘I suppose it must have been the stench or the rats. I’ll never know which gave the game away, but social services knocked on the door first, and then the RSPCA turned up and they lectured me like I was some kind of animal abuser. Which I’m not. I just wanted the donkey to be here when my Thomas comes home. And I suppose I still do.’
‘Is he ever coming home? Your husband, I mean.’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. He is poorly. Not in his body so much now, but his mind has gone. I don’t think he’d like it much here: there’s nothing he’d find familiar. But he hates it there. I know he does and I can’t bear it. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, that man. He worked so hard and he gave what he could to anybody that needed it. And he was a good, good dad. He didn’t deserve this ending.’
Doubler frowned. ‘And what about the donkey? Obviously that was a bit of a mess you had to sort out. But do you miss him, too? Is that why you keep going back for him?’
‘No. That’s the joke. Having the donkey here was terrible. Just terrible. But I look at that donkey in the eye and I just see Thomas. I can’t seem to separate the two in my mind. On a good day, I can, of course, but on a bad day, I don’t really know which way is up. I just feel so alone and so confused and so betrayed.’
‘Who betrayed you?’
‘My sons for sticking me here, for not respecting my choices. I looked after them all their lives, I sorted their problems out, and I was always there for them. But the minute I needed them, they did what was most convenient for them. So yes, they definitely betrayed me. But most of all, Thomas. His betrayal was the worst. We had a pact. We were in it together. It was a marriage. And he left me.’
‘Aren’t you being a bit tough on him? I mean, it doesn’t sound like he had much of a say in the matter.’
‘But he promised! He made a commitment to stay with me for richer or poorer, for better or worse, and he gave in to them. He let them decide what was best.’
‘Your sons?’
‘Yes. I don’t know when he became so weak in his spirit. He so wanted them to grow up to become good men that he was blind to it when they weren’t. Anything they did he thought was brilliant, so when they told him how things were going to be after his heart attack, he just sort of succumbed to them. He didn’t want to admit that they might not have his best interests at heart, so he just agreed with everything they said.’
‘And you felt this betrayed you?’
‘Of course it did. But they’re my kids, too. No one wants to admit that their kids aren’t very nice people. To raise unkind people is the biggest failing you can make as a parent. But to acknowledge out loud that they’re not nice is taken as a sign not just of bad parenting but, apparently, of your mental decline.’
‘Is it? I think I’m able to admit that my son is a bad sort. I’d be a bit soft in the head to think anything else. But is that my failing? I don’t think so. Aren’t some kids just predisposed to be not very nice? Does it always have to be somebody’s fault?’ Doubler thought about Julian as if for the first time, shocked that his son might be a product of his own making.
Maddie was emphatic. ‘Yes. Somebody has to take responsibility. Or at least admit that they managed to breed an awful human being. But pretending they’re better than they are just because they’re your own flesh and blood is pretty weak, pretty delusional, don’t you think?’
‘Gosh. I’ve never thought about it. My son doesn’t appear to have any values. Or perhaps he has values but they don’t coincide with mine. Right now I’m trying to think of a single redeeming feature
and I can’t.’ Doubler stopped and thought, images of his son’s deeds flashing in front of his eyes.
‘Nope. Not one. He is not evil, you know; he’s not a psychopath. He’s just not somebody I’d particularly choose to spend any time with. Is that my fault? I think it’s a straightforward case of genetics.’ Doubler paused again, searching for an image to help him illustrate his point. He found one. ‘Take a potato. Two spuds that look identical when you put them in the water to boil. There’s a chance that one will go brown when you cook it and one won’t. There’s no way of knowing which before you put it in the water and yet the occurrence is entirely predictable. While that gene exists, there’s a one in four chance of it happening, regardless of outward appearances. It must be the same with us. If niceness is dominant and unpleasantness is recessive, then it doesn’t really matter how you are as parents – you have a twenty-five per cent chance of having an unpleasant child.’
‘Not very good odds.’
‘No. And maybe you think you can nurture and educate that child into becoming something other than its true destiny. But no, that unpleasantness is inherent and will probably pop up in the next generation as well.’
‘So you raised a bad potato, too?’ asked Maddie, her relief palpable. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody else who admitted that. Normally people are falling over themselves to tell you how great and accomplished their children are. You read some of the round robins I get at Christmas and you’d think they were handing out Nobel Peace Prizes like Smarties.’
‘Ah, perhaps that’s because they are doing exactly what you’re guilty of – taking responsibility for them and thinking their children are an absolute reflection of themselves, when in fact they’re just a sequence of DNA.’
‘I wish I’d had this conversation years ago. I should have persuaded them not to reproduce themselves. Too late, sadly.’
‘Well, that’s definitely not the answer either, is it? Because there’s a seventy-five per cent chance they’re going to produce a kind child. Although, I’ve got a few grandchildren and I’ve got to say the jury is still out.’
Mr Doubler Begins Again Page 18