Strangers in a Garden

by Deanna Maclaren

  ‘Does she know you?’ Penny asked, when she rang on Sunday.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘She didn’t recognise Richard. He was terribly cut up. I can’t tell you.’

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ Laura said. ‘She’s only sixty three. That’s not really old.’

  What Penny didn’t say but that Laura could sense piercing her brain with the cruelty of a Norfolk wind, was that Mother was 63 and Laura was 23 and she could go on like this for years. And years, and years.

  Laura discovered from the travelling hairdresser and locals in the post office that people respond in one of two ways when the dreadful calculation cranks through their heads that she could still be caring full time for her mother in thirty years time.

  Then they either ask, ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’ or, as Penny did, ‘How is she within herself?’

  To which the standard reply was, ‘Up and down. Good days and bad.’

  On a good day, Laura told Penny, she’ll have slept through till about five and will remember where the bathroom is and what it’s for. I’ll make some tea, help her get washed and dressed, make toast, fresh orange juice and coffee and give her the paper to read while I get myself ready. Then she’ll watch TV and look out for the postman – Penny and Richard were very good about encouraging their girls to send drawings, and photos of their new little brother. After this, Laura went on, I do the housework. On a good day, she won’t get in a muddle taking her tablets, she’ll be calm about me going to the shops and won’t shout at the meals-on-wheels lady bringing her lunch.

  Laura could almost see her sister-in-law frowning. ‘I thought you were doing the meals.’

  ‘Penny, three meals a day seven days a week is too much.’ Especially as she was so worried about her mother, she had no appetite.

  Penny gave a hollow laugh. ‘It’s obvious you’ve never been a mother, Laura.’

  There followed a terse exchange of views about school meals, suppers with friends, lunches out and holidays with one’s able bodied parents in their Provençal villa.

  ‘The nearest shop is an hour’s walk away,’ Laura continued crisply, ‘and as you know, I don’t have a car. By the time I’ve walked there, done the shopping, waited for the bus, lugged the shopping home, I’m –‘ ready for a large gin she was going to say. ‘I just want some hearty soup and a hunk of bread. I’m not in the mood to arrange diddly little prawns on diddly bits of lettuce the way mother likes it.’

  ‘Do the meals-on-wheels ladies do that then?’

  ‘Of course not. But they’re better than I am at taking no notice of mother when she starts on at them for giving her a paper napkin because I haven’t ironed the sodding linen ones.’

  Penny giggled. ‘I expect she has a nap in the afternoon?’

  ‘No. On a good day she’s napped while I was at the shops. In the afternoon I try to nod off with a copy of Honey but she has the television on so loud it’s impossible. I might do the ironing or clean her silver. She seems to find it soothing to watch but then she gets screaming mad if I put the sauce boat back in the wrong position on the dresser. At four I make a pot of tea and we watch Pick n’ Mix, that awful quiz show. At five she nods off, waking up at six when I’m getting supper ready. Then she’ll want to go to bed not long after eight so I have to get her ready for the night.’

  ‘Milky drink, that sort of thing?’ said Penny in a Sundayish, time I put the sprouts on voice.

  ‘Fresh nightie if she wet herself the night before. Hot water bottle. Cup of tea, glass of water, rich tea biscuits on Royal Albert plate. Clean hankie ironed into a triangle, box of tissues, Pond’s Cold Cream, hand cream and Woman’s Own.’

  ‘And what happens on a bad day?’ Penny asked faintly.

  On a bad day the place stank of shit and pee. No wonder Laura couldn’t eat. But she wasn’t going to put Penny through all that. It was 12.20 and Laura could almost smell her Norfolk roast demanding to be basted.

  ‘She’s in pain,’ Laura said. ‘Arthritis. So she gets angry, resentful, the whole bang shoot.’

  Penny sent some leaflets about Helping Others to Cope with Pain. They informed Laura that when you are in pain your personality may change.

  One of the ways in which Kay James’s personality had changed showed in the speed with which she snatched all letters off the postman and ripped them open, regardless of whether they were addressed to her or not. Before her decline, she would have been horrified at anyone opening other people’s mail.

  So she read Penny’s leaflets and because she was fairly pain free and lucid that day, her comments were useful.

  ‘What people don’t realise is that pain doesn’t just make you bad tempered. It also has the effect of closing down thought. It takes a peculiar possession, it’s like it’s sitting at the end of the bed like some fearful monster and wherever you go, it lumbers after you.’

  ‘Trouble is, two women in the same house have different ways of doing things,’ Laura said to Karinne, the Care Manager, when she finally called round. ‘One of mother’s irritating little economies is sticking all the bits of soap together. It feels tacky and drives me mad. Every time I get out a nice fresh piece of soap I find her scrabbling in the bin, rescuing all the old dried up bits and sticking them to the new bit. I can’t stand it!’

  Karinne regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Are you getting enough sleep, Laura?’

  ‘Sleep?’ Laura shouted. ‘Of course I’m not getting enough sleep. She’s up three times a night, banging about, talking in a strange gruff voice and peeing on the floor. I’m forever trekking two miles to the shop for endless supplies of Dettol, Air-Wick and Tide for the sheets when she messes the bed. I have to bath her, dress her, feed her, clean up after her and keep her amused. I need help, Karinne.’

  ‘Laura, you’ve done all the right things. You’ve filled in all the forms, and you’ll certainly be getting help soon. There’s income support, attendance allowance…I’ll speak to the Benefits Manager this afternoon.’

  She put on her spectacles, took out the forms and guided Laura through the benefits maze. Laura discovered that after basic household expenses, the extra cash would just about keep her in gin, and Kay James in peppermint creams.

  ‘That’s all very well, Karinne, but I need a person. An extra pair of hands. Someone to help bath her, do some housework, make ME a cup of tea. You never get a hot meal or a hot drink. Do you know that? As soon as you sit down, she wants something, or drops something.’

  ‘Laura, I have to tell you that our resources are seriously stretched. I do have a fleet of carers who operate under the social security system but, quite frankly, I have to send them to people worse off than your mother.’

  ‘But she needs –‘

  ‘Laura, she’s only 63. If she were over eighty she’d have a higher priority. I have people on my books who live completely alone, who can’t get out of bed unaided and who certainly can’t bend far enough to scrabble around in waste bins fishing out bits of soap.’

  Damn. Damn, bloody damn. She’d made mother sound like a cranky old woman, not a person with severe disabilities meriting priority treatment.

  Laura changed tack. ‘There’s me as well to consider, Karinne. I can’t spend the rest of my life banged up here like this. I can’t go out for longer than a few hours without her working herself into a state. And I need to get back to work, earn some money, live my life.’

  Karinne sat with her knees together, pen poised on her pad. ‘What exactly is your work, Laura?’

  ‘I work in advertising.’

  As Karinne was writing this down, mother came in, sank into a chair and said, in a frail voice, ‘I’ve folded all the napkins. Is there anything else you’d like me to do to help?’

  Laura glared at her.

  Kay James turned to Karinne. ‘So good of you to come and see us. We don’t get many visitors.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come before, Mrs James. I’ve been on a course.’

  ‘How nice, my dea
r. You deserve a holiday.’

  As Laura was smirking at Karinne’s expression, Kay James went on earnestly, ‘I’m so worried about Laura.’

  Good grief, thought Laura. She’s remembered my name.

  ‘She looks so tired. I feel I’m such a trial and a burden, making so much extra work for her.’

  Karinne leaned forward and gently took Mrs James’s hand. ‘But you mustn’t think like that, Mrs James. When Laura was little, you looked after her. And now she’s looking after you. It happens this way, because daughters love to give.’

  Some course you’ve been on, Laura raged. Drivelling bilge.

  Laura jumped up. ‘If you’re going to the village, I’ll cadge a lift.’ She had become shameless about this. If ever she bumped into anyone she knew, even vaguely, and they had a car, she simply got in the car with them. So far no one had been strong-minded enough to tell her to eff off.

  When they reached the shop Karinne said quietly, ‘If I were you, Laura, I’d try and get some sleeping pills from the doctor. Take the edge off a bit.’

  Laura slammed into the shop. How can I take sleeping pills when mother needs me in the night? Why isn’t there anyone here I can actually talk to?

  The Benefits Manager, when he finally turned up, didn’t come across as someone who would become an understanding chum. He looked about twelve, as if he’d had his very first shave that morning and instead of his cheap suit he’d rather be in his Boy Scout uniform, complete with toggle and useful whistle.

  Kay James gave him a winsome smile across the kitchen table. It was the same smile she gave any man, the postman, the milkman, the TV announcer reading out the football results on Saturdays.

  The Benefits Manager looked up from Laura’s completed form. ‘Miss James, may I take a look at your utility bills?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your phone bill, electricity, Rates.’

  ‘I don’t have any. They go straight to my brother.’

  ‘I see. Could you furnish me with his address.’

  Laura duly ‘furnished.’

  ‘And your mother. What does she live on?’

  ‘There’s her widow’s pension. I collect that from the post office. Then she has a pension from the bank where Daddy worked. That’s administered by my brother. And he sends us what we need on an ad hoc basis.’ Laura was actually quite grateful to Richard for supplying this phrase. It made her feel very grown-up and businesslike.

  ‘I see. Would you mind if I had a look round, Miss James?’

  Laura turned to her mother. ‘He wants to look in your bedroom.’

  Mrs James scuttled ahead and coyly slipped her nightie under the pillow. Laura was not at all surprised when the Boy Scout asked to see upstairs. He thinks we’re hiding a lucrative lodger, she realised. The Red under the bed.

  She followed him out of the front garden and jumped into his Ford Prefect. ‘Can you drop me in Chepstow?’

  ‘I’m not going to Chepstow. I’m going the other way.’

  ‘So make a detour.’

  Laura considered that Chepstow was a town that just missed it. Chepstow could have been charming. It had an imposing castle, with interesting walks in the grounds and beyond, meandering streets led down to a pub by the river. But the shops were dismal and the main square cluttered with litter. Chepstow, in Laura’s opinion, needed a lot of taxpayers’ money thrown at it, to give the town back its civic pride.

  The one excellent shop was the bookshop, where a friendly assistant immediately offered to help. Laura was studying a bewildering array of cookery books.

  ‘I need something very simple,’ Laura told the girl. ‘I’ve never done cooking before, and I have to feed my mother.’

  ‘And yourself,’ smiled the girl.

  Laura couldn’t tell her she was so fraught at Spring Cottage, and so tired, just the smell of the food she had to prepare made her retch. The Stork Cookery book, being naturally in favour of Stork margarine, had only come up trumps with Empire biscuits. Kay loved the white icing and the morello cherry on top.

  When Laura told the assistant that yes, she did have an oven, but the hob only had two working rings, the girl handed her Cooking in a Bedsitter.

  ‘I know you’re not in a bedsitter, but this book gives you the basics and doesn’t mess about telling you how to whip up a Victoria sponge.’

  Laura remembered her mother making that, with she and Richard competing to lick out the bowl.

  It was raining. Laura had missed the bus, and with an hour to kill, took refuge in Chepstow library. The day after her fifth birthday, her father had taken her to the local library and shown her what to do. Ever since, she had regarded libraries as a haven. Apart from Glasgow, of course, but that one quite literally stank.

  On impulse, in Chepstow, she took down a book on Glasgow, and was astounded at what she’d never seen there. The Gorbals, of course, but Adrian had refused to allow her to set foot in the sprawl of slum dwellings that had been thrown up to house the dock workers. Periodically, there would be a Press campaign protesting at this gash on Glasgow, with recommendations that the Gorbals be torn down and replaced with flats.

  Immediate outcry from the dockers. They didn’t want to live in ‘tenements.’ They wanted their own front door, however mean that door may be, or how squalid the interior.

  So Laura had never seen the Gorbals. Neither had she visited the famous Mackintosh exhibition (she had no interest in furniture) the botanical gardens (gardening was for the middle-aged), the cathedral or the docks.

  What had her life been in Glasgow? Weekends she saw Adrian. Monday to Friday was work, the bus home, and gossip with the girls. They only went out if it was free or, like Laura with Darling Cosmetics, there was the chance to earn extra money.

  We didn’t have a television, Laura mused as she ran for the bus, but we kept ourselves amused. Lol at the piano, singsongs, jigsaw puzzles, knitting, word games. She remembered the gales of laughter when a small group of them had played Consequences. And everyone had started off in exactly the same way:

  Prince Philip / met Miss Speddie.

  Fiona’s Consequence involved a constitutional miracle whereby Miss Speddie became Queen.

  When she got home, with a stack of magazines for her mother, Laura read the first paragraph of Cooking in a Bedsitter, and the sheer common sense of author Katharine Whitehorn told Laura that this book was destined to be her best friend.

  ‘Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, and a pot boiling over onto your landlady’s carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which in any case is full of socks.’

  The Boy Scout came round three more times, and asked all the same questions he’d asked the first time. When he said he’d like to look upstairs, Laura exploded,

  ‘I am fed up with you coming round here, asking the same things over and over. I am fed up with your snooping. My brother has, I know, taken time off from his very important job to answer your questions personally. You’ve seen how we live here. We live very simply, we’re honest, we’re not extravagant and we need financial help. What we don’t need is to be treated like suspects, like you’re some kind of private detec –‘

  The Boy Scout was racing for his car. He drove off at some speed.

  But Laura’s outburst brought results. First, an official letter from the Benefits Manager awarding her four times what she and Karinne had originally estimated.

  Then came a call from Karinne herself. ‘Laura, I think I can offer you some help.’

  Laura’s spirits ro
se. It had been a bad day, with the meals-on-wheels offering thrown on the floor, and mother decapitating a poinsettia with her walking stick.

  ‘You mean you can send someone in?’

  ‘Er, not every day, no. It’s just that I’ve been studying the Carer’s form you sent in and you say you feel tired all the time. I’m also worried about your increasing feelings of isolation. So what I can do for you, some time in the New Year, is offer you some respite care. That means some time off.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the council is going to send me to the Ritz for a week?’

  Karinne sighed. ‘Well, no, Laura. What I can do is send someone to sit with your mother for one afternoon a month while you come along to a Carers day centre, and then you can share your experiences with other carers.’

  ‘Have you got enough gin?’ Vi said, as they sat in her cosy kitchen.

  ‘Well there’s a bottle on the dresser.’

  ‘Not enough. Not when you’ve got Christmas to get through. I’ll bring you more back in the car.’

  ‘I can’t really cook Christmas lunch when I’m tipsy.’

  ‘Nonsense. With my husband, at the end, I thought I’d write something called Cooking While Drunk.’

  Vi lit another Kensitas. She smoked them to get what she called ‘kewpons’ which could be converted into household goods. Most of Vi’s house had been supplied by ‘kewpons.’

  ‘I’ll have to get a turkey,’ Laura said.

  Vi shook her head. ‘You won’t find one small enough. Do a nice chicken. Just turn it upside down so the breast lies in the fat.’

  Laura put on her raincoat and ran home. Her mother was standing at the window, staring out at the rain. ‘Mother, what are you doing?’

  Kay James addressed the china figurine on the windowsill. ‘Waiting.’