Keeper

by Andrea Gillies

  Chapter 17

  Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

  —THOMAS HARDY

  SPRING BRINGS SUICIDE TALK. WE NO LONGER LEAVE Nancy alone with Jack, since she started seeking counseling from him about her urge to go and jump in the canal. She means the canal that passed by their Edinburgh apartment, I presume; a canal she’s known twelve years, hanging grimly on in episodic memory. Heaven knows why she picks on Jack, but she does, singling him out and pinning him to the wall with conversational monologuing, from which there is no easy escape; Jack signaling for help wild-eyed, like a desperate guest at a cocktail party cornered by a bore. I look up dementia and suicide and find there’s no consensus on their interplay. The orthodoxy is that suicidal feelings are burnt out early because of the self-awareness that’s required, though there are heretics who say otherwise. Giving up eating and drinking, voluntarily and abruptly, in a way that seems to have been considered and decided upon, is known in nursing homes as Alzheimer’s suicide. It’s a not-uncommon way to go. Whether it is suicide is debatable. If people live long enough, the disease will reach the brain area that sponsors sensations of hunger and thirst.

  Alzheimer’s is set to become a hot potato when, eventually, assisted suicide is legalized. Dignitas, the Swiss suicide organization, which offers a legal framework to the suicidal—providing a house and a lethal dose of barbiturate, and leaving it to the client’s discretion whether they take the drug or not—was questioned a few years ago about the death of an Alzheimer’s patient, and whether he could be guaranteed to have been of sound enough mind to make the contract between them legal. Dignitas responded that even someone with advanced dementia may have moments of sufficient lucidity to want to die. This idea has been shouted down as ludicrous but I’m not so sure. Nancy keeps talking about the canal.

  She talks to her address book about it. She’s carrying her address book everywhere with her now, and won’t put it down. Not on the toilet. Not in the bath. Not in bed. She tells me she’s heard “the people” plotting to take it. She sits in her armchair and talks to it. Sometimes to herself, about it, flicking the pages and narrating; sometimes to the book directly, asking it questions. She seems to recognize that it has something to do with her past. An address book is, after all, as personal as a photograph album. She’s had this one for thirty years or more. Addresses in it are written in various inks, the handwriting varying according to mood and circumstances, health or tiredness, and whether the writing was done on lap or table or against the wall, the telephone receiver held tight under her chin. Numbers and names have been scratched out and replaced. Old friends, some of them long dead. People she worked with once. Relatives, former neighbors, and fellow school parents. The addresses Chris and I have lived at in our many nomadic wanderings, and those that track the life path of her daughter. It’s a fairly small address book, small enough to fit in an ordinary business envelope, cream bound, tatty, its cover dotted with seventies-looking flowers and butterflies. The hinge of the binding is beginning to wear through, and pages are coming loose from the stitching.

  Every time I go into the in-laws’ sitting room, there’s Nancy with the address book, head bent in concentration, flicking through and talking to herself in a low and urgent tone.

  “And that’s the one I want. That was always the one. Yes.” She taps her finger on the page decisively. Her nails have grown long again and mysteriously they appear well shaped, with smooth semicircular ends. She must be using an emery board at night; there’s one in her underwear drawer. Nail care, so much a part of her life once, must be embedded deep in long-term memory, one of those automatic activities that don’t need thinking about. (Thank god for the cerebellum. Imagine having to learn to walk afresh every morning.) “And there it is,” she says, confidentially to an entry in the address book, a pointed finger hovering. “There’s the one. That’s the one.” Flick flick. “Ah, now look. That’s the one I was meaning. I meant that one. That one there. That’s it.”

  “You’re not having it!” she shrieks at me when I try to put it on the coffee table.

  “I’m not taking it, just putting it down. Right there. So you can eat your supper.”

  “It’s not any of your business!”

  “Here’s your knife and fork, look. You’re going to need two hands to eat this piece of chicken.”

  “I will do it as I do it and I thank you to keep your nose out.”

  “Okay, then.”

  She holds on, her grip white-fingered, to the book, and uses the fork a little. Then she puts the fork down and eats with her hand. The book is not relinquished.

  She starts taking her teeth out in bed. This is a new development. It’s been impossible to get her to take her false teeth out for years. But now she wakes with a jaw-caved-in look and speaks in a different way and it’s obvious that they are out. We play hunt the falsies. They get put away in unpredictable places in the night: in drawers, under things, on windowsills. One morning we find them in the toilet, sitting unflushable under the water. On another, the Tuesday bus is kept waiting, engine running, at the conservatory door while we do a last frantic search.

  “She’ll just have to go without them,” Chris says.

  I pick up her wallet, her latest pet, which unaccountably she’s left sitting by the bed, and find it is strangely lumpy. Sure enough the dentures are within, stuffed in tight and straining at the leather.

  Next, the invasion begins. The in-laws are getting lots of visitors. Since I said to one of the health team that they should come straight in and not bother to knock, everybody now does this. Which is fine. We might not hear the doorbell, we might be on the phone. We don’t, in any case, want to have to go to the door repeatedly and make stilted conversation with health visitors. Far better if they just come straight in. They know where to find Morris. Morris no longer moves. He keeps the urine bottle by his armchair and uses it in situ.

  The house no longer feels the same. It no longer feels entirely like a house. The emphasis, once firmly on the children and on child raising, has shifted. We seem to have reached a tipping point, and tipped. Now it’s all about Morris and Nancy. They sit at the center of it, two fat spiders in a web (not fat as it happens but you get the gist). I can’t help thinking of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the four bedridden grandparents, living in the giant bed in the sitting room being fed cabbage soup. That is how home is becoming. The rest of us are satellite creatures with satellite lives.

  An ancillary to this is the feeling that we are constantly on show. The house has to be kept tidy, approvably clean and swept of personality. Overdue bills can’t be left sitting on tables, nor open books, letters, sales catalogs that might provoke comment, any signs of extravagance, unusual foodstuffs, alcohol of any kind, drawings half drawn and half-done crosswords nor anything to do with business. Sometimes when visitors come looking for me, wanting consultation about some Morris-and-Nancy matter, they find me on the sofa reading. Apparently doing nothing.

  “How do you get the time to read so much?” one of the care ladies asks me, blushing pink, “because I never get the time,” her eyes flickering toward the ironing pile. Our home aides aren’t the kind of people who sit down much, and nor were Morris and Nancy in their prime. Working hours were long, for them, at home as well as the office. None of them associate sitting down with earning a living. Sitting down is something that’s available when all possible chores have been done, late at night or not at all—and there’s considerable kudos attached to never getting the chance. Nancy, when first we moved in, was heard to complain about the state of the housekeeping. “They’re terrible here,” she’d say, looking in horror at the dishes by the sink. “Look at this! It’s terrible.” Sitting down during the day might be construed as immorality. The owning of too many books, to some ways of thinking, is an admission that one misuses one’s time.

  Out here, far from everything, a village is a village and also a world. Peo
ple talk. News and rumor are the lifeblood of isolation. Talking is a major activity and we’re all too conscious of people’s curiosity, their assumptions and misconceptions. Private conversations can’t be had until late at night, phone calls can’t be enjoyed: not in daylight hours when there are likely to be outsiders present. I can’t be seen in the kitchen in my bathrobe (not after 8:00 A.M.! “Have you had a nice lie-in today? Lucky for some”), nor am I happy to have the children seen in theirs. Judgment, both real and imaginary, hangs heavy over us. Downstairs has become a public zone. Dogs must be locked away upstairs in case they escape. Chris and I start having daytime conversations by e-mail. Doing otherwise risks being overheard, at least before 9:00 P.M., when the back door closes the final time and the home care lady is gone. At nine o’clock we all relax. But that’s also Jack’s bedtime. The window of ordinary family interaction has shrunk alarmingly.

  The phone calls continue and are on occasion deeply aggravating. The physical therapist rings to ask why we haven’t had the wet room installed that she recommended. From health and social workers, recommendations are usually orders. Someone else rings to report that Morris, at the day hospital, has complained that Nancy’s being unsettled at night is keeping him awake and that he worries we won’t hear him if he calls for help. She is insistent that we install a baby monitor, so we can listen to Nancy and Morris, reassure ourselves that they are sleeping, and be alert to anything we ought to go and sort out. This phone call has a peculiarly depressing effect. The house has become an institution and we are its night staff. And we ought to be aware that a part of our duties is lying awake listening to Nancy monologuing away in the early hours, and Morris shrieking at her to shut the fuck up and go to sleep.

  Then one of the nurses at the day hospital telephones to say that Morris is complaining of being lonely. She mentions the name of the day center, the Thursday day center he point-blank refuses to attend.

  “But he doesn’t like the day center!” I retort, perhaps too vociferously. “He used to go to it. He canceled it. He hated it.”

  “Well, I’m just ringing to let you know that I have booked him in to recommence. He’ll start on Thursday. Okay?”

  Morris makes a face when I pass the message on. “I didn’t really have any choice,” he grimaces, though when Thursday comes he goes off on the bus cheerfully enough. What does he really think about the day center? What does he really think about anything?

  As if in punishment for our not agreeing to the baby monitor, we have a series of late-evening and early-morning crises. Nancy begins getting up and getting dressed at two or three in the morning, and trying to get to Somewhere Else. I no longer believe the “doorknob prompts” theory. These are breakouts. I find her downstairs rattling at the door that leads from the main hall into the porch. It’s a half-glass-, half-wood-paneled door, a Victorian door, and heavy. When it’s rattled it swings in its housing and echoes through the house like thunder.

  “Nancy. It’s you. Couldn’t figure out what the noise was. You gave me a fright.”

  “I need to go now. I’m late.”

  “Come back to bed. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “That’s all right for you to say but I’m not supposed to be here!”

  We meet Nancy almost every evening, on one of her moonlight sojourns. The drawing room door opens in spooky slow motion and she shuffles in, waddling from side to side, shoes on the wrong feet, holding some combination of possessions: her handbag, clothes, a pair of shoes, her address book, her teeth in a handkerchief. Quite often she’s singing, to the usual tune.

  “When I am young and busy, and the world will have to be, and the thing that comes down is the thing I brought here, and that’s the same to me.”

  She will be in one of two moods, black and white. Either very glad to see us and intent on joining in our late-night whisky, or misanthropic and full of gloom. And she can still rhyme.

  I feel bad about putting her to bed so early, but this is how it is. Morris has no choice but to be put to bed at eight-thirty; that’s the only slot he could get in the home care schedule, and quite often he’s glad of it, his legs bothering him, bed wanted. Nancy must go with Morris. There has to be some granny-free time and this is it. Nine P.M. to 11:00 P.M. is sacred. I’ve gone the other way on occasion: taken pity on her restlessness, sat with her in front of the television till after midnight, till she began at last to flag, remade the fire, made her toast and hot milk and been tolerant about the ranting. But I can’t do it anymore. Besides which, if Nancy is absent, Morris can’t sleep. He stays awake waiting for her return. He grows agitated, wondering what she’s up to.

  Late one weekend evening, while the rest of us are upstairs in the family room, there is a sudden hullabaloo from downstairs. A frantic impassioned yelling. It takes a few moments to register that it’s somebody calling out Chris’s name and sounding desperate about it. Chris and I jump up and go down, insisting the children stay put.

  “Oh god, it’s Granddad!” Millie cries out. Jack bursts into tears and Caitlin follows. Millie joins in and the three of them stand on the top landing, snuffling and clutching each other.

  When we get to Morris’s bedroom the door’s open and he’s by the threshold, on the chair at the end of Nancy’s bed. He’s managed to stagger to the door and open it in order to shout for help, but has not been able to get further.

  He looks ghostly, yellow, terrified.

  “Oh, son,” he says, emotionally. “It’s Nancy. My Nancy. I think she’s dead.” She’s lying on her back, utterly still with her arms by her sides. Chris listens to her chest and puts his ear to her mouth. Then he listens to her chest again.

  “Her pulse is regular,” he says.

  “Oh thank god, thank god. I’ve been trying to wake her up for a good half hour. Normally she’s awake at this time and chatting to me. I couldn’t get her to answer.”

  Chris helps his father back into bed. Meanwhile I sit with Nancy and talk to her. “Nancy. Na-an-cy. Nancy! Nancy! Wakey wakey. Hello-o. Are you there?” I squeeze her hands. She doesn’t respond. Ten minutes pass like this: me tickling and squeezing and shouting and demanding that she wake up, get up, right now; Nancy unresponsive and apparently unconscious. I keep going. Finally, when I squeeze her big toe, she kicks out at me with a sleepy growl.

  “Nancy,” I say, very firmly, my head dipped close to hers. “You need to get up now. Come on. I need to speak to you. Open your eyes.”

  “No,” a small voice says.

  “Come on.” I pull at her arms and she rises, eyes still closed, and puts her legs out of the side of the bed. I pull gently on her arms and she glides to a standing position. I take her, slowly, eyes still closed, to the bathroom, where she sits and has a pee. Then I put her, eyes still closed, back to bed. She’s grumbling under her breath.

  “I just need to speak to you for a moment,” I say, knowing Morris is still in a panic. “I need to ask you a question. Would you like a drink of water?”

  “Bugger off,” the voice says, from between near-closed lips.

  “Thank god,” Morris says. “She’s fine.”

  AT THE END of the month, as the school Easter holidays begin, Chris goes off with his good mate Michael for a week’s sailing course. I’ve known about this booking for a long while and am in favor, despite dreading it. An annual week off from family life to do something independently is official marital policy; it’s just that I never take mine. It isn’t a happy week for the nonsailors. The weather is cold and rainy. The children and I have to be on hand, on duty, in case of upset or crisis, so we hang out in the drawing room most of the day, where we can keep an ear and eye on things. Nancy comes in at regular intervals to ask for help with the chap through there.

  “I can’t help you with that, Granny, sorry,” the children say, as coached.

  “No. No. You don’t understand,” Nancy tells them. “You have to come and talk to him. He seems to think we know each other and he’s being annoying.”


  Eventually, weary of interceding, the four of us take to hiding upstairs, reading by the fire, Jack playing his self-absorbed role-playing games with guns, coded messages, cloaks, and light sabers. We work through a stockpile of films, magazines, and chocolate. Chris and Michael have a freezing cold, challenging week on the water, with bad weather and plenty of chucking-up and have the time of their lives. It isn’t such a vintage week at home: I’m up early, mucking out horses in a gale force 7 and horizontal hail showers.

  Each of the seven days Chris is away there are tears. Sometimes mine. Almost daily Nancy’s. “This man is NOT MY HUSBAND,” she insists. “He’s NOT, he’s NOT, I’ve never seen him before in my LIFE.” She means it. She’s frantic, and she can’t understand why I’m not equally exercised by the stranger in the sitting room. It’s particularly bad timing, as poor Morris is beginning to have embarrassing “toileting issues,” to use the social care argot. He is soiling himself in bed. As is the way of things, this begins in spectacular style while Chris is away. The morning home care lady arrives to find her charge awake and mortified. She deals with the worst of it (getting him up and clean is her remit) and then hands me the marigolds (getting the bed clean isn’t). I text Chris, who is night sailing in the Cromarty Firth. Yr parents hell. You owe me big time fr this chum. It’s decided that we’ll look for a privately employed home help to work twenty hours a week.

  The council announces a residential care crisis (another in a series), and all respite at the town nursing home is revoked for the year, all six weeks that were so painstakingly negotiated. It’s a financial crisis, one being experienced simultaneously all over the United Kingdom. The council doesn’t have enough in the budget to run their homes, to hire their staff (nor can they keep them: We hear constantly how low morale is among the workers at the town home), and so, in this situation, cancellation of the bookings of respite clients—who will only be there for a few days, or a fortnight at a time—is the immediate money-saving mechanism. They know, even so, at the council that there will have to be some negotiating and exceptions will have to be made. Several emotional phone calls later, Nancy’s April week is rearranged. She’s to go to the new home, the countryside home, a swish bungalow-based home with an Alzheimer’s unit, half of which is locked off unused because there isn’t the funding to run it. So Nancy goes there, and Morris goes to the seaside home: separate destinations because it’s judged that he needs a break also. Respite requires a formal social work assessment on each occasion, which entails a pot of tea with our care manager in the conservatory, answering detailed questions about the in-laws’ abilities or lack thereof, and the exactitude of need. Questions, I can’t help thinking, that could have been asked on the phone. It can only be that they want to run an expert eye over the household, sniff the air, and gauge the mood.