Still You

by Claire Allan

  Áine smiled thinly, her shaking hands carrying the teapot to the table. She sat down. “That sounds perfectly lovely, Charlotte,” she said before a shadow passed over her face. “No, not Charlotte. Sorry. Your name …”

  “Georgina.”

  “Georgina, that sounds lovely. I met you yesterday, I know that. Jonathan arranged for you to come here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He cares about you a lot.”

  We ate together and I made sure to give Áine her medication. We maintained a relatively calm patter of small talk. The weather. Then Áine switched on the TV that sat on one of the kitchen counters and I located Come Dine with Me for her. She immediately became absorbed in it and I began the washing up.

  As I put the last cup onto the drainer we heard the front door open and close.

  “That’ll be Jonathan,” Áine said absently, still focused on the TV. “He always calls at this time. Since the pot incident, he’s been making me some dinner. God love him, he’s not much of a cook, but he tries. I tell him I’m okay, it was only once. I can still cook – he doesn’t need to come here and try and make something but he still calls. He still tries. He’s an awful fusspot.”

  “I’m sure he’s just concerned about you,” I said, even though I was sure in fact that he was more worried about me and what I might or might not be doing, and whether or not Brightly Care was pulling its proverbial socks up.

  And, sure enough, he walked into the kitchen and gave a cursory glance at his aunt before meeting my gaze. Despite feeling totally ambushed by the events of the day I was, admittedly, hugely relieved that the scene that was greeting him was one of calm and contentment and that Áine seemed more than happy with the new face in her house.

  “Auntie Áine,” he said, turning his gaze from me again, “how are you?”

  “Well, I’m just fine. Not overly impressed with cucumber sandwiches two nights in a row – but Georgina here has promised we’ll have something decent tomorrow night. Look at what these boyos are cooking up on the TV. I’d like that.”

  “We’ll have something special tomorrow, Áine,” I interjected. “Pasta maybe – lasagne?”

  “My aunt is a plain eater,” Jonathan spoke.

  “Says who?” Áine demanded. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Jonathan. Just because you were fussy as a child and I had to cater to your whims, don’t write me off! You should know full well that I’m fond of Italian food.” She smiled and looked at me. “It’s himself that’s a plain eater. Making me spuds and beans every night this past week – not that I mind spuds and beans … but every night?

  I stifled a smile as Jonathan blushed. I went back to putting away the crockery.

  “We’ve had something to eat. I’ve made sure your aunt has had her medication. We’ve had a lovely chat about Noel Edmunds and I have tidied up – and we’ve made a few plans about what we are going to try next. Including some nice dinners.”

  Jonathan bristled. “Routine is very important to people with … people like Áine.”

  “I’m a grown up, not a child,” Áine snapped. “You can say it, you know. The word. Alzheimer’s.”

  “We’ll still maintain a routine,” I said. “Áine and I talked over tea earlier and we thought we’d just try a few things. Easy recipes. Just basic home cooking. She has told me about the incident with the pot being left on the range too long, but I can assure you I will be here the whole time. If it gets too much for either of us, I’ll just bring over some leftovers from home. My daughter is a great cook.”

  Even as the words were out of my mouth I wondered if Jonathan, with his urge to judge me on every occasion, would think I was giving his aunt less than top service with my mention of basic cooking and leftovers.

  “Maybe we’ll do some soups and the like for lunch too, Áine? Something nice and warm and filling.”

  “Will your daughter make the soup too? I’m sure Maria will be delighted to know her food is being pushed aside for leftovers.” Jonathan smirked in a sly way which made me want to hit him squarely around the head with the plate I was drying.

  “Maria has more than enough to do, without having to worry about making me lunch or baby-sitting me,” Áine said.

  “She’s paid well enough to do it,” Jonathan said, his condescending tone doing nothing to warm me to him. “She’s our cleaner,” he added.

  I nodded. “I know. You said.”

  “Yes, but she is more than that. She’s like one of the family.”

  One of the family who is reduced, in conversation, to just someone paid handsomely to make sandwiches, I thought.

  “She has been doing a lot for us. She helps Áine to get dressed, cleans and makes her lunch and these last few days she has helped by making this tea for you both.”

  “She sounds like a gem,” I said.

  “She is,” Jonathan said.

  “But she is the cleaner, Jonathan, as well you know,” said Áine. “And she has other clients – who she has been sorely neglecting since the unfortunate incident in the kitchen. She can’t lose her clients – and she’s not paid that handsomely. She’s paid well, for a housekeeper and cleaner, but she needs to be elsewhere …”

  Jonathan looked suitably chastised and I couldn’t help but smile inwardly at how his aunt could put him in his place.

  He blinked, puffed himself up and opted for a complete change of subject, knowing that Áine had won this round. “Anyway, Georgina, I thought, while I was here, if you have time, I could show you around the house a bit,” he said.

  “Very well,” I said, hanging up the tea towel.

  He led the way out of the room, leaving Áine to the company of the TV. In the hall, he stopped and turned to me.

  “I’d like to let you know a bit more about Auntie Áine’s routine,” he said. “Not every day is as good as today. Not every conversation is as coherent, as you learned yesterday. And the truth is more days are going to become like the day she had yesterday, over time, so I don’t want you lulled into a false sense of security.”

  “Mr Hegarty, I can imagine how difficult all of this is for you and I know how this disease can be very cruel.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is very cruel. You didn’t know the woman she was – and we know, she knows, that is starting to slip away. She’s a very intelligent woman – a very proud and independent woman …”

  He looked as if he would go on but he stopped himself and I saw the shutters come down. I could sense that this conversation was difficult for him, that he was a proud man who didn’t often show any emotion.

  I thought of Áine the day before. Lost. Childlike. Not sure of where she was or who she was talking to – and while I had found it deeply unsettling, I could only imagine how Jonathan found it. For all his considerable faults as a condescending, bossy man who didn’t know how to exist outside of getting his own way, he did seem to genuinely care about his aunt.

  “I can see that,” I said. “She seems to be a lady who is a force to be reckoned with. I’m here to try and understand more so let’s talk routine.”

  Jonathan nodded, took a deep breath as if to settle himself, and gestured to me to follow him. He pointed to the room Áine had been in earlier. “This is the sitting room where my aunt likes to watch TV, although you have probably already figured out that she likes to spend as much time as possible in the kitchen. It has always been her favourite place.”

  He proceeded down the corridor and stopped, opening a door to the left to show me a grand dining room, its heavy mahogany furniture and dark-green wallpaper making it look foreboding against the fading evening light. It looked like the kind of room where people used perfect manners, where conversations were clipped, where children were seen and not heard. I thought of our dining room at home. Our dining table was currently holding a week’s worth of clean washing which had yet to be ironed and put away. One corner of the table had become a nail station for the girls, where they would invite their friends over and make their best at
tempts at gel art. Twinkling lights swirled around some grand willow branches, pictures of my family filled the walls, along with some framed pictures the girls had drawn when they were smaller. The French doors let natural light flood in and the walls were painted in a light duck-egg blue. It was a far cry from the staid room of Áine’s house. It was a room that buzzed with the busyness of family life. This room looked unlived in, unloved. But then again, I supposed it didn’t get much use. I couldn’t imagine there were many dinner parties held there now.

  “We don’t use the other rooms any more,” he said, pointing to the closed doors in front of him. “A formal sitting room – where my grandmother would entertain guests,” he said, nodding to the right, and then pointed to one on the left. “We used that room as playroom and study when we were younger – not much need for it now there are no children in the house.” He turned and walked back up the hall to the staircase, gesturing for me to follow him.

  We reached the top. Light glinted in through a stained-glass window at the end of the landing but the rows of closed doors along the corridor gave the whole house a gloomy feel.

  “We keep most of these rooms locked,” Jonathan said.

  I raised an eyebrow. To say it seemed unusual was an understatement.

  “We don’t want to confuse Auntie Áine,” he said. “We figured if we kept things simple, she would have less chance of getting confused. These rooms – they hold a lot of memories, they could send her into a spin.”

  I nodded, even if I didn’t really understand the logic. I may have been relatively clueless about dementia care but I was pretty sure memory-work was a pretty big thing in those circles these days.

  “And we want to limit the damage she can do to herself. It might sound strange but the fewer choices she has, the less chance she has of hurting herself.”

  He walked to the end of the corridor, gestured towards a bathroom and then opened the door to a bedroom which looked almost as stark as the dining room downstairs.

  A metal-frame bed, covered with a patchwork eiderdown, stood against the wall. Beside it sat a side table holding a lamp, complete with a faded pink silk lampshade and a glass of water.

  Across from the bed stood a fifties-style chest of drawers and beside it a dressing table. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting but this didn’t look like the room of a woman who had lived here most of her years. The number of personal items were limited. A bottle of face cream and a bristle hairbrush were all that sat on the dressing table. Just two photos rested on top of the chest of drawers – one black-and-white, two young girls grinning widely at the camera, standing on the shore of some unknown beach as the white foam of the waves hit the back of their legs. Curls, wild and frizzy, were pulled back in identical ribbons.

  Beside that photo an older woman, with traces of Áine’s familiar face, stood in seventies faded colours holding the hands of two older children. All three were grinning at the camera, their faces so utterly bright that I wondered for a second who they were smiling at. Whoever it was, I thought, they loved that person with every part of them. It was the most precious thing I had seen in that big, imposing house since I got there.

  Chapter 5

  1964

  Charlotte laughed, throwing her head back as she watched her children, Jonathan who was just five and eight-year-old Emma, run through the vineyard close to their villa on the edge of Lake Garda. Her face was sun-kissed. Her golden curls were bleached by the sun and by a month in Italy. Charlotte thrived in the sun.

  Her husband, Jack, called it “work” – this life in the sun. And sure, he worked. He had meetings and made deals and talked yield and profit and import taxes and blends and Charlotte had heard those snippets as she walked through the terracotta-tiled dining room, the breeze blowing through the open doors – warm and comforting as it caressed her bare legs under her chiffon kaftan. She wasn’t there to work – she was there to live, to breathe in the sun. To play with the children – to watch their bodies tan and glow and to listen to the gorgeous tinkle of their laughter as they splashed in and out of the pool.

  She lit her cigarette, lay back on her lounger, slipped off her kaftan and let the sun caress her bare skin. If the children weren’t there, she would have slipped off her bikini too, she thought. Oh, the scandal it would cause if people back home even knew she was contemplating it. Maybe she would later. Maybe, when the work was done and her two little sun-kissed babies were asleep, she would slip off her bikini and entice her husband into the pool. Skinny-dipping. Then drinking wine, letting the warm evening air caress their naked bodies. Laughing, smoking, making love until dawn.

  There was nothing that could beat it – that freedom. That was what life was about – embracing every moment. Not caring. Just living it to the full. She paused amid her thoughts of decadent living – the kind of living that would make the old women of Temple Muse rearrange their cardigans, cross their arms and purse their lips in judgement. Jealous, she figured. They were all just jealous. They could do with a week in the sun – all of them. And good wine. And good sex. She smiled, listened to the children squeal with delight and drifted off as the sun warmed her skin.

  Later, when she was warmed through to the bone and the children were tired from running around in the sun they – along with her husband’s business partners – sat around a long wooden table in a cool dining room where the cook served huge steaming bowls of pasta, with breads and oils, and wine like she had never tasted before. Each taste, each bite, each delicious morsel made Charlotte feel even more alive. For a moment she wished Áine and their mother were there – that Áine wasn’t playing it always so safe with her stubborn determination to stay close to home and play the good girl. And their mother – through no fault of her own except her desire to remain attached always to the home her beloved husband had bought for them – she was only too happy to allow her younger daughter to stay with her. She would never encourage her to leave the nest – to experience the world in the way Charlotte had. Charlotte wished she would – wished Áine would find her courage and move on. Áine loved cooking – she would have adored this, adored exploring these new flavours, enjoyed the easy chatter around the table. Then again, she might find it all too relaxed – she might struggle to fit in. She definitely wouldn’t be sunbathing topless by the pool anyway. Charlotte loved her little sister – so much – but she wished she would just live a little. If she could get her to try new things, to visit new places she was sure she would be happier.

  “You can’t wait for life to happen,” Charlotte once told her. “You have to go out there and grab it by the balls.”

  Áine had blushed furiously and walked away. She didn’t use that kind of language. She didn’t appreciate it. She was the very definition of a goody two-shoes, but she had such a kind heart. She would do anything for her family, Charlotte knew that. And even if their mother had encouraged her out into the world, she had the notion Áine would do everything she could to stay closer to home. She sighed as she took another forkful of pasta. Maybe if Mohammed wouldn’t go to the mountain … She resolved to ask the cook for a few recipes and when she got home she would land at that big old, oppressive house and she would slosh olive oil in one of the heavy copper-bottomed pots and she would crush garlic, chop herbs, and the whole place would sizzle and steam with the smells of Italy. And even if it was cold and rainy outside, and even if Áine was still wearing that awful powder-blue cardigan she insisted on wearing and had her hair pulled back in that ridiculously unflattering manner, she would do it.

  Present Day

  Eve had played a blinder with a delicious beef hotpot for dinner. The smell of it had my mouth watering as soon as I walked through the door. I kissed her cheek and told her I loved the very bones of her while she dished out a large plate before pouring me a glass of milk to wash it down with.

  Even Sorcha couldn’t help but voice her approval for her sister’s latest creation and, much as I tried not to dwell on the day that had passed, I had a
brief moment of being exceptionally grateful to have my two girls and for the fact that we tended to rub along quite nicely together.

  They had adapted relatively well to their dad moving out. Sorcha had been more sullen for a few weeks and Eve had cried but said she would support us – but there had been no mad histrionics. They were incredibly mature about it and, sitting in our kitchen now, talking together, laughing over dinner and thinking of the messiness that was both our home and our family life I, despite everything, felt incredibly blessed. I knew – just knew – my girls would always be there for me. We would always be close. I would not have to worry about being alone in my later years. I hoped, one day – in the very distant future, to have grandchildren run through these rooms. That my walls would be covered in pictures of smiling faces all that little bit similar to my own – our family together. Whatever happened with Matthew.

  “Girls,” I said, as I mopped the last of the gravy from the plate with a hunk of crusty bread and devoured it, “I love you both very, very much and I’m proud of how you have coped with everything. You are remarkable young women.”

  Eve reached over and squeezed my hand, while Sorcha rolled her eyes and said: “Are you sure that’s just milk you’re drinking, Mum? Are you sure you didn’t drop a wee something extra in there? A drop of vodka?”

  “Vodka and milk?” I laughed. “No. I just love you.”

  “We love you too, Mum,” Eve said, starting to clear the table. “Don’t we, Sorcha?” She eyeballed her sister.

  “Yes. Duh!” Sorcha intoned, but I noticed she helped clear the table as well, instead of sloping off to her room like she normally did.

  Later I sat talking with Sinéad, who had walked down the street to my house. She was curled on my comfy (codeword for ‘battered’) sofa, cradling a cup of tea and munching on chocolate biscuits with abandon. She didn’t keep chocolate biscuits at home – it would tempt her too much, she said.