Keeper

by Andrea Gillies

  BY THE END of the first summer we have the measure of the house. It is only late in August, as the light begins to fail and the first cold snaps descend, that measuring announces itself and the charming dark green of every inner wall is revealed as algal, the invoker of Stygian gloom. When it rains, water comes into the library. The chimneys are blocked by decades of nests. There are three kinds of heating, all expensive and inadequate. When the wind blows in a certain direction, the rain is driven under the roof and the children are called to bucket duty. When the wind blows in a certain direction, the kitchen stove and central heating are snuffed out and all the fireplaces puff out choking smoke. Needless to say, the wind blows in that certain direction quite a lot. And before you wonder aloud what all this has got to do with September, believe me, even August can be cold. Not cold as in chilly out of the sun. Cold as in hailing. Summer happens on about May 20 (with the occasional parting of clouds, an increase in the temperature of the wind) and if you’re lucky will stutter through, notwithstanding the occasional storm, a surprise snow shower or two, the odd monsoon, until the final week of July. August marks the start of autumn. On the twelfth, when ice cream’s dripping down the hands of children at the southern English resorts, the north of Scotland’s putting on its tweed for the beginning of the field sports year.

  Despite this hard-won knowledge, the peninsula agricultural show is held in August. It doesn’t always rain. It isn’t always freezing. The show’s sprawling and immensely competitive, whether you’re entering a bullock, a Labrador, or a bouquet of onions. Also, Boots the chemist runs out of hair dryers. I know this because I went to buy two for the B and B rooms. “You’ll not get one in show week,” the assistant told me. I must have looked blank. “They wash the beasts, you see, and then they need to dry them.” And indeed, when idling round the stalls on Saturday afternoon, the penned-up, fed-up-looking sheep are unnaturally white and fluffy, fat clouds anchored on legs.

  Among the promotional goodies on offer there’s free local steak and also rather good beer, in unlimited, plastic pint-glass quantity. I join the steak queue and Chris gets in line for the beers. We notice that some people are eating steak and drinking beer while queuing for another. I, not driving that day (a nondriver, in fact), get back in the beer queue three or five times. After this, I am fearless about breaking the ice. And this is how we come to order the chickens.

  We’ve never kept hens before and I expect to be able to take them home immediately, have already wondered aloud whether they’ll stay put on the backseat or, like a Jack Russell, indicate a preference for driving, but alas, the chickens on view are representative only of style and color: display chickens, not for sale. We order six: two Dutch Blacks (good layers, we’re told), two Marans (delicious brown eggs), and a pair of French Bluebells (pretty), plus henhouse and accoutrements.

  Two weeks later they arrive, dealt out from a vanload of identical hole-punctured cartons. There inside are murmuring little chicken bodies, fluffed up and warm and faintly disgusting smelling. Poor Audrey, a Dutch Black, dies on day three, found slumped on the henhouse floor, and is buried with full state honors in the wood. As in Hollywood, so in the henhouse: Ava and Bette are sworn enemies, plotting behind each other’s backs. Doris is chirpy, Lauren sardonic, Marilyn the one that can’t find the door (ouch). Nancy enjoys the chickens. Ava turns out the tamest and will crouch low to be stroked, or consent to be tucked under an arm and petted. Nancy bends to touch, her gnarled hand strikingly discolored as it moves very softly and with concentration along the dark feathers of Ava’s back. For a few minutes after this triumphant rural experience, I feel vindicated in bringing Nancy here and confident in everything that semiremoteness can offer her.

  I DECIDE I need to crack on with the garden, which now, as summer’s turning, is gloriously profuse, though the weeds are as profuse as the flowers. There are thistles, docks, a firm infiltration of giant dandelion, and even—horrors—abundant patches of nettle lurking at the back. Morris is supposed to be helping with the garden, if only in an advisory capacity. He kept an allotment for thirty years. But Morris seems to have lost interest. The August wind is shockingly cold, but at least in the separate pair of formal gardens, high walled and south facing, it’s still possible to work without a coat. I help him outside, and take chairs out, and make a point of asking his advice about the care and pruning of various shrubs. I’m hoping that sitting in the flower garden will engage him a little. There’s a lot to do here, its former grandeur overgrown and tatty, but it could be wonderful.

  “It could be wonderful, couldn’t it?” I say.

  “Uh-huh,” he agrees.

  Poor Morris seems more depressed than ever. Nothing we do to try to cheer him up—outings, lunches, tea parties, lavish amounts of grandchild attention—seems to make any difference. Several times I almost embark on a conversation designed to let him talk about his sadness—about how he feels now, deprived of his last remnants of independence, brought into our lives and his own effectively over, the two of them smothered by our inept attempts at kindness, unable to salvage anything meaningful from it all. Nancy, her condition, her deterioration, must be overwhelming for him, and it’s inescapable that his role now as husband is to accompany her with as much strength as he can muster to the end. He must feel like the oarsman directing the rowboat across the Styx. What would you wish for in his situation, that the current would pull faster or that it would linger longer? It’s an impossible question. The impossibility of things getting better, ever, of this being the final slow descent to the end of time—that must haunt him every waking minute, mustn’t it? Though I don’t know if that’s how he feels. We don’t have the conversation. I’m not sure why. I can only suppose it is out of some instinct that he wouldn’t be glad of it, would find it intrusive and final. Once darkness is admitted, self-consciously, to our situation, then all hope of lightness will be lost. I can’t bear to introduce this intensity to all our lives. And so I talk to him about the garden.

  Morris must see that the garden could be lovely. It’s just that he’s found himself on holiday in the valley of the shadow of death and so, understandably, can’t speak enthusiastically of such temporal things. Loveliness may offend him, and our happy, irreverent family silliness offend him also. He does, increasingly, seem to offer an unspoken opinion that our continuing, apparently undaunted and unaffected, to be a cheery child-parental group is somehow a failure of tact. Pushing this to the back of my mind, I press on with discussing the planting. The bare bones of loveliness are all here. The walls are of the most beautiful old stone, patina-rich in grayish cream, luxuriant in places with ivy. The trees along the west wall are twisted and furry with lichen. In the center of the garden there’s a horseshoe-shaped pond, green with weed, and four borders bracketing it in an interrupted circle, each of them matted tightly with grass. There’s a lot to do. The Victorian greenhouse has broken and jagged glass, its roof open to the weather. The grapevine inside has tiny pips of grapes, and its interior raised bed is dense with shell-pink poppies. I am trying to talk to Morris about the plants, but it isn’t easy. He is gray, sullen, chain-smoking, and much more interested in what Nancy’s doing. It reminds me of conversations with a girlfriend in my then-kitchen, way back, when our children were small and she couldn’t focus on anything but toddler discipline.

  “What do you think about this Pulmonaria?” I say to him.

  Nancy offers him six blades of grass in her hand. “What do I do with this?”

  MORRIS: It’s just a bit of grass, you silly woman! Put it down! Put it down, Nancy!

  She turns to me, holding the six blades at arm’s length as if they will bite. “What will I do with it?”

  ME: Just put it in the wheelbarrow. Look. Over there. See? Wheelbarrow. With all the grass in it.

  She looks around helplessly and I take her to the wheelbarrow. She starts to rearrange the weeds, talking to them. “Now you’re a nice yellow one. And, oh look, you have a friend.”

&nbs
p; I return to the digging. After a while I see that Nancy has gone to the paved area by the greenhouse and is moving stones about.

  MORRIS: Nancy, will you stop doing that! Leave the gravel alone!

  NANCY: I’m just tidying it; it’s my day to sort it out.

  MORRIS: What are you talking about, your day?

  ME: Morris, do you think these primroses will survive if I move them over there?

  NANCY: The people who live here want me to do it so I’d better do it.

  MORRIS: What are you talking about? You live here. We are the people who live here.

  NANCY: Don’t be silly. I never heard such nonsense. You say that to all the people but they know who you really are. (She stalks off, through the archway and out.)

  ME: I’ll fetch her. Shall I get you some tea? A hat? The sun’s quite warm.

  MORRIS: That would be lovely, dear. I really don’t understand what Nancy was on about.

  ME: She has Alzheimer’s, Morris. You do know that, don’t you? You know what Alzheimer’s is?

  MORRIS: Oh yes, yes. But she talks such rubbish now. I worry she might really be ill.

  I return with Nancy and with a tray of tea and biscuits. Tea and biscuits are consoling for Morris and work also as a sort of Nancy-sedative. Then I resume the gardening. I start at one of the borders that frame the pond, digging out deep-rooted mats of trespassing lawn. Jack comes in his Wellies and shorts to help, and gets into the water, a foot or so deep in its concrete mold, pulling out great green ropes of smelly weed and shrieking. The dogs rush about chasing birds into bushes.

  But I’m aware that an argument is brewing over in the corner.

  “All I’m asking you for …” His voice.

  Then hers, shrill with irritation. “Well, I’m not doing it. I don’t know where it is or what it is and I can’t do it.”

  “Of course you can do it. I told you, it’s on the chair in our sitting room. Our sitting room where the telly is.”

  “I am not going anywhere and you have no right! No right at all! To ask me anything at all!”

  Out of confusion, anger springs.

  I lay down my tools. “What is it, Morris? Something I can do?”

  MORRIS: I’m feeling a bit cold and Nancy won’t go and get my cardigan.

  ME: Why didn’t you say so? I can go.

  When I get back, Nancy is over in the far corner, pulling hollyhocks out by the roots, and Morris is chiding her.

  “I was told to do it,” Nancy says, “by that man there.”

  “Here is Morris’s cardigan, Nancy,” I say to her. “Why don’t you take it to him?”

  Morris clears his throat. “Actually, do you think we could go in now, dear? My legs are bothering me.”

  Morris is supposed to be in charge of the kitchen garden, and the seed catalogs sit on the coffee table. The newspaper gets put on top, and the mail, and a packet of biscuits. I give him a notebook and pen and ask for ideas about how to lay the vegetables out, but these are put aside and forgotten about. There’s a run of warm days, moist and fuggy. Deep white fogs roll in from the sea and engulf us. Chris gets the acres of grass cut, tractoring up and down on the ride-on mower in the fog, audible from the windows but invisible. The waves crash onto the beach with rhythmic suddenness, sounding bizarrely close, the distance distorted by the bowl of the sea fret, the bay licked by humid and milky mist. Directly overhead it thins a little like a balding head and the sky beyond is a rich and brilliant blue.

  Morris and Nancy are invited to go to the Thursday Club in the village. Morris doesn’t want to go, but neither is he able to withstand the entreaties of the two women from the club who storm the house to persuade him otherwise. Other than for this weekly outing, Morris sits in front of the television almost all of the time. I’ve given him a little silver bell to ring if he needs tea, or the fire fed, or a sweater, or help with Nancy, and he uses it with enthusiasm. I have spiritless phone conversations with my mother about the invalid role. On sunnier days, I have been encouraging the children to ask him if he’d like a walk in the garden, to be pushed in the chair. He hates the chair and doesn’t appear much to enjoy his excursions. In any case, the program comes to an abrupt halt one afternoon when Jack is taking him across the lawn to show him the greenhouse and the chair trips on a tussocky bit of grass, sending Morris flying out forward. Luckily the grass is soft and thick and only masculine pride is dented.

  “Do something about it! Do something!” Nancy shouts as I rush to Morris’s aid. “I can’t do it. I can’t do anything. It’s only my first day here!”

  As summer cools and the days shorten, the true nature of the life we have landed in begins to sharpen and clarify. Caregiving permeates everything and nothing is spared. If Chris and I leave Nancy and Morris alone, something occurs, some small but pertinent crisis. Teapots are dropped and people near scalded. Nancy is found with black hands, black handprints on her trousers and chair, having put coal in the fire without using the hearth tools. Outer doors have been opened and dogs let out. While we are gone retrieving them, there are other crises at home. Nancy has wandered off, leaving Morris panicky, unable to keep up with her. Nancy trips and injures herself. She puts herself to bed and promptly falls out, bashing her head on the bedside table and giving herself an impressive black eye. She is sent by Morris into the kitchen to get him a drink or a snack, and returns with the wrong thing, prompting an argument and Nancy leaving home (again). Morris answers the phone and is stern with B and B guests, demanding to know what they want.

  It has, in short, reached a point, a point, of constant supervision. If we go out we have to take Nancy and Morris with us, levering Morris into the high front seat of the Land Rover, belting Nancy into the back, taking them into town, round the stores with us, sitting in tea shops, dealing with Nancy’s car-sickness on the way home. Anything that is done without Morris and Nancy in attendance is done at risk, and risk assessment becomes a part of life. We don’t go for walks anymore. We don’t go out as a family anymore—just the five of us—unless we can go as seven. We go as seven to the cinema, out to dinner, to visit new friends. We’re not often invited back.

  I begin waking in the night in a panic, heart thumping, clammy. What is this future I appear to have solicited? I never imagined that the in-laws would become so immediately passive, and it didn’t occur to me that it’d become so particularly my job to look after them, but that’s how it falls, when men have proper jobs and women don’t. The conscience is sated, plump and shiny, but the appetite for the day is shrunken, alarms going off all over the internal city. What kind of person is it that can give of herself this much, I think, jadedly, lying awake and waiting for dawn. People who feel guilty about happiness and freedom, I think (shamingly cynical). People who crave dependents, perhaps. People who never really had a life of their own and relish the absolute vocation of this role. This isn’t me. This really isn’t. I came looking for the Sublime. The hunt for the Sublime, however, has become a grimly private joke. It isn’t out there, is stubbornly absent. And actually it’s worse. Something else is out there, when I go off running toward the beach, sit on the dunes chewing on the pale inner bits of grass, wander entirely aimlessly along the neck of the headland toward the sandstone plunge of the cliffs. The anti-Sublime. The wilderness will only give me back what I yield up to it and all I have to offer is disheartedness. It lends me its own, magnified and in multiple. I’m not just uninspired, but positively oppressed by outdoors.

  Uncontradicting solitude

  Supports me on its giant palm

  And like a sea-anemone

  or simple snail, there cautiously

  Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

  Philip Larkin has the idea of the Sublime in his sights. I want to unfold and emerge. But I’m having the opposite experience. It occurs to me, during one of these walks, that Nancy and I are engaged on parallel journeys, hers into death and mine into depression, though this is grandiose and probably also offensive. My problems are conti
ngent, after all. Life will shift, the sun will come out (the plain fact that her death may be the engine of this improvement is something I prefer not to think about). I’d never claim her metaphorically, poor Nancy, who’s twice my age and terminal, when all I can complain of is that I’m demoralized and low. But the beginnings of unhappiness are here, poised at the end of summer, for Nancy and also for me. And unhappiness distorts perspective. Thus it is that when I read on in my Larkin edition and come across one of his many poems about death, I see Nancy there and then myself.

  This is what we fear—no sight, no sound

  No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with

  Nothing to love or link with

  The anaesthetic from which none come round.

  Caring produces a kind of anesthetic in this narrow sense, in its full immersion into near-intolerable practicality. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” and I’m aware that my feelings are being distorted by the anti-Sublime, the terrible useless self-pity I find down on the beach and transpose onto the pitying sea, the pitying sky, the pitying cliffs. Latching onto poetic sentiment has become a sort of literary defeatism. I am falling for the Romantic idea of myself as a victim. Caring is taking me somewhere new, somewhere poetry can’t follow without hindering my settling into it. This is a life-and-death struggle I’m engaged in now, someone else’s life-and-death struggle. It seems to blot the point of fiction out. I find I can’t read novels anymore and turn to biography. Biography and nonfiction. Read Wittgenstein, not Keats, I tell myself. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—phooey. Read Wittgenstein. “The world is everything that is the case.” That’s all. Get used to it.

  Chapter 6