‘She has memory problems, you know.’ I’ve been unsure whether to mention it.
‘I had wondered, yes. She repeated herself a couple of times. Is it serious?’
‘Not too serious, yet. But yes. I think it’s probably Alzheimer’s.’
The look on Edie’s face makes me feel the full weight of this. In all the story of Gloria’s past and worrying about my pregnancy I’ve got used to Gloria muddling through her forgetfulness. But she can’t keep on muddling through. It’s going to get worse. The terminal illness where you get to die twice.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Edie says.
‘What if we get to Whitby and she forgets it all?’
Edie shakes her head.
‘She won’t.’
* * *
I watch Edie and Gloria as they say goodbye to each other. They just look like two old ladies, one a cosy, grandmotherly type who bakes cakes for the village fête, one thin and glamorous, wearing a bit too much make-up. Just two old ladies saying goodbye to each other. But looking at them I see those two girls and everything they went through together and their friendship still strong after all these years, not wanting to let go of each other, and it makes me so happy and so sad.
‘Take care of yourself,’ Edie says to Gloria, wiping her eyes. ‘Behave yourself.’
‘Why break the habit of a lifetime?’ Gloria says, and they both laugh. I wonder if they’ll see each other again, and if they do whether Gloria will recognize Edie, or remember who she is. Maybe she won’t even remember St Monica’s or that she had a baby or any of it. Edie’s eyes are full of tears and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.
‘Bring her to see me again soon, won’t you?’ she says to me.
‘You think I’d submit myself to her driving again?’ says Gloria, trying to make light of their goodbyes. I think again what a brilliant actress she is. I wish I could have seen her on stage.
As Edie looks at Gloria I see her face change as she notices something. ‘You’ve still got the locket. The one I sent you.’
Gloria’s hand goes to her neck, touching the heavy silver locket I’d found in her suitcase at the start of our journey. I hadn’t noticed she was wearing it. ‘Yes,’ she says.
As they say their final farewell and we walk back to the car, I look at the locket, intrigued. If Edie sent it to her it must be really old. Whose pictures are inside? Ones of Edie and Gloria perhaps? Did Edie send it all those years ago to remind her of their friendship, of their bond, of their lost babies?
‘Can I see the locket?’ I say as we do up the seat belts. ‘I didn’t know you’d had it all that time.’
‘No,’ Gloria says sharply. ‘You may not.’
Gloria doesn’t speak as we leave the village. She keeps her mouth clamped shut. I think of everything Edie said.
‘What did you name your baby?’ I ask at last. It’s funny, I’ve never thought about it until now.
Gloria is silent for a moment.
‘I didn’t name him,’ she says. Her voice warns me not to ask more, much as I want to. Had it been a way of protecting herself, of not becoming attached to him? Or had it simply been because she knew he’d be given another name when he was taken away? Either way it seems sad. What had Gloria felt for her baby? Had she loved him?
We drive on in silence.
‘Are you okay?’ I say.
‘Yes.’ It comes out as a strangled croak, and I realize that she’s not speaking because if she does she will cry, and she doesn’t want to cry. Not in front of me, anyway. So I put the local radio station on and hum along to some eighties pop and have an argument with myself about whether or not it’s Bananarama, and I say the name of every village we drive through and make inane comments about the funny names they give places oop north, and about the twinning of obscure villages. What’s all that about? (Gloria still hasn’t said a word, so I plough on talking to fill the silence.) What does it actually mean if Dol-de-Bretagne in France is your twin? I wonder. Because if it’s anything like Ollie and Alice it mainly means that you blame each other when you fart, and make up jokes that no one else in the world finds funny, and find ever more inventive ways of cheating when you play each other at cards, and nick each other’s toys because no matter how many times you explain to well-meaning relatives that it’s Ollie who likes dolls’ houses and Alice who likes night-vision goggles they can never quite get their heads round it.
All the while there’s an uneasy backing track of Edie’s questions running round and round in my head on a loop: What has Gloria told you? About what happened in Whitby? What do you know about what happened to her son? About what happened to her?
Gloria stares out of the window not hearing any of it.
The overwhelming urge to cry as we drive away from Edie takes me completely by surprise, not just to cry but to weep, to give in to the uncontrollable sobbing that has, it seems, been hiding there inside me. I had thought I was beyond such things as emotional farewells. I haven’t seen Edie for so many years. How can it hurt so much to say goodbye again, and to know that the next time I see her I may not know who she is? It shouldn’t. I shouldn’t let it. But it isn’t just me I am crying inside for. It is for the girl who was me, who said goodbye to Edie all those years ago, who locked herself in the bathroom at St Monica’s so that no one would see her cry. In this moment, somehow, in this little car driving through the hills in the early evening, the lines have become blurred and I am that girl again.
The smell of disinfectant and damp. I am sitting on cold linoleum, my back against something hard. A cast-iron bathtub. Big old Victorian thing with clawed feet.
I am locked in the bathroom at St Monica’s. I am crying so much that I think I will be sick, but silently, because there are people outside the door and I can’t let them hear.
‘Gloria! Is that you in there?’
‘There are girls waiting for the lav out here, you know. Hurry up, will you?’
‘Are you okay? Can you hear me, Gloria? Just open the door, there’s a good girl.’
None of the voices is Edie’s.
She has gone, left this morning with her battered brown suitcase. Perhaps I will never hear her voice again. She said she would write but I wonder. It has been so painful for her, giving up Ted. Perhaps once she is at home with her family she will want to forget it all, put it all behind her, including me.
We went into town the afternoon before they took Ted, just the two of us and our babies. ‘Just think, Glo,’ she says, rubbing Ted’s back to wind him. ‘If we had wedding rings on our fingers it’d all be different. We’d be able to meet up in town with our babies and do all the things normal mums do. I’ve seen my sisters do it. Showing off when one of them takes their first steps or says their first word. We could meet up in the park and push them on the swings in the park or take them to feed the ducks. And then in a few years we’d be watching them go off to school together. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’
I reached up to her and tried to brush the tears away but there were too many of them.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It would.’
I look at my baby that night as I feed him, and I wish so much that I could love him. I know it would break my heart if I did. Perhaps I should be grateful that I don’t. But I feel like a failure, unnatural. How can a mother not love her own baby? It gnaws at my insides, that failure, the numbness I feel when I look at him, it hollows me out. I examine every bit of him. ‘Look at his little fingernails,’ Edie says, when she’s looking at Ted. ‘So perfect.’ Or she’ll just breathe in the smell of him when she’s holding him, touching her lips to the soft hair on his head. I try it all. I really, really try. But I can’t do it. I can’t love him.
Will he know? I wonder. Even though he won’t know me, will he know his mother didn’t love him? Will it be inside him somehow, just as Edie’s love will be inside Ted? Will my baby feel the absence of it?
Ted is with his new family now. Edie put on her best clothes to go and sign the pap
ers at the Town Hall. Perhaps she hoped that somehow she could persuade them she was worthy of keeping her baby. As if reheeled shoes and new nylons would persuade them when all her love and devotion to Ted had failed to.
‘I know it’s for the best,’ she said, but her voice was empty. It’s like she’s not a whole person without him.
And now I feel that I am not a whole person without her. She is the only person who understood. I told her things I can never tell anyone else.
A week after Edie left, a little parcel arrived for me with a Whitby postmark. My heart leapt; Whitby was Edie’s hometown.
Before we gave up our babies we had to make a box for them. We had to wrap it in pretty paper and fill it with all the things our babies would need. It would go with them to their families. It seemed a peculiarly cruel thing to do for the girls who would have done anything to keep their babies, a reminder of the things they would be missing out on. The girls made so much effort to make them beautiful, neatly folding the tiny clothes someone else would dress their babies in. Edie wept as she made Ted’s, consoling herself with the thought that the clothes she had made would be with him, would keep him warm. We were told we could put in a present for the baby, something for when they were older, that they could keep as a memento of us, their birth mothers. Edie had brought her dad’s old Brownie camera with her and when she made her box she put in a locket with a picture of her on one side and a picture of Ted on the other. On the back she wrote their names and the date.
‘What will your gift be, Gloria?’ she’d said.
I shook my head.
‘I won’t be giving him a gift.’
It was a locket just like hers, but inside there was a picture she’d taken of me and one of my baby.
And now she is gone. And soon my baby will be gone. Sam is gone.
I have gone too, I think. Like Mum. Always hiding. I do not know where I have hidden. How will I know where to find myself when all this is over?
Something wakes me that night, after we’ve been to Edie’s. I lie in the dark, disoriented for a moment. What woke me? Was it a dream? I don’t think so . . . It was a sound, I think. Was it Gloria? I’m not sure. I clamber, half-awake, out of bed and through the shadows to her room.
Something makes me push the door open a little just to check she’s okay.
Her bed is empty.
I stare at it, my mind racing. How long has she been gone? Where might Gloria have gone? Does she even know where she is? She might think she’s at home and try to walk to the shops, or she might just have no idea and panic. She may not remember that I’m here with her.
Where should I look? Perhaps the noise that woke me was the front door closing. If so, she can’t have gone far. I pull on some trousers and shoes and race downstairs, grabbing the torch from the kitchen before running out into the garden. There’s no sign of Gloria. I walk down to the gate and along the path up to a little hill where there’s a bench and table. The moon is so bright I don’t need the torch and as I get to the top of the slope I see Gloria, sitting at the table with the bottle of brandy I bought at the convenience store and a tumbler, staring up at the sky.
‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘I thought—’
She looks at me and smiles. She doesn’t say anything but I know she knows what I thought.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Come and sit next to me. Can you see? Orion’s belt. Sirius, the dog star. And the Pleiades over there. The Seven Sisters.’
‘Wow,’ I say, sitting down on the bench and looking up into the star-flecked darkness spread wide over the fells. ‘It’s incredible. Hard to believe it’s the same sky as at home. You can see so many stars here.’ I’d forgotten. It comes back to me, suddenly, how I’d said the same to Dad when I was a kid.
‘Stars,’ she says to herself. ‘Of course. Stars.’ She laughs.
I look at her. ‘What’s funny?’
‘I could remember the word “constellation”,’ she says. ‘I could remember that it was Orion I was looking at. I could even remember the myth of Orion. He was the son of Poseidon, who could walk on the sea and hunted with Artemis. I could remember translating Homer at school, with sad Miss Lytton on a rainy day, watching the raindrops trickle down the window and the bedraggled first years out on the hockey pitch, and thinking that one day I should like to travel to Crete.’
I watch her.
‘Which I did eventually. With Gordon, unfortunately. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is, I could remember all of that. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember the word for – oh, bugger it, it’s gone again. What are they? The little lights. In the sky.’
‘Stars?’
‘Stars. I couldn’t remember the word for stars.’
She takes out a cigarillo and lights it, the flame bright in the darkness, lighting up her face for a moment, with its shadows and secrets.
‘Dad loved them,’ I say. I remember one holiday, perhaps it was even the one here in the Lake District, though I can’t be sure. The twins were in bed. I don’t remember where Mum was, probably washing bottles or doing laundry, though I wouldn’t have realized at the time. Dad and I played cards for a while, mixing a bit of his beer with my lemonade to make shandy, and I felt very grown-up. Then he lifted me up and took me outside and we looked up at the night sky together. ‘I remember him showing me Polaris,’ I tell Gloria. ‘He said, “All the rest of the stars seem to move in the sky as time passes. But Polaris, the North Star, stays fixed.”’
‘Did he say that?’ Gloria turns to me. ‘Did he really?’
‘Yes.’
‘How wonderful,’ she says, taking a sip of brandy.
‘There it is,’ I say, pointing at a bright star. ‘At least I think it is.’ Still fixed in its place and Dad long gone. It’s a strange thought. Then I remember how the light we see from stars is really thousands of years old and the whole thing seems so mind-boggling I feel a bit dizzy.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? So big. It makes you feel small. Insignificant. I don’t usually like to think of myself as insignificant, as you know, but this is different.’
‘Yes.’ I know what she means.
‘How long will it be before it all goes? How long before I forget all of this? Forget everything I’ve told you on this journey?’
I don’t say anything. I know she’s not asking me.
‘When everything else goes,’ she says. ‘When language has gone, words, and the names of the stars, and stories. When my story is gone. When I don’t remember who you are or who I am, or even what it means that I am and you are . . . Do you think I’ll still remember how to feel like this? Is feeling something that we learn to do, stored in the memory, or is it something else? Awe and wonder and love . . . Do they come from another part of us and bypass the brain?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, honestly.
‘No.’
I think about it. The feeling of sitting here with Gloria, the stars above us, the mountains around us, the darkness and the light of the moon. The feeling in my chest. Surely that wasn’t something I’d learned. Surely that would always be there? ‘Babies cry and laugh,’ I say at last. ‘They smile when they see a face or a person they love. It’s not something they learn.’
She looks at me sceptically.
‘Maybe that’s what makes us who we are,’ I continue. ‘You said it was memories, and without those we’re nobody. But maybe that’s not right. It’s not memories. It’s what we feel and what other people feel about us. I mean, if you think about it, it’s not the memories themselves that matter, is it? It’s what we feel about them, and the people we care about. All the things you’ve told me about on our journey. Love, sadness, anger, joy. Those are what matter, aren’t they? Perhaps happiness and sadness and love are just in us, right from the beginning. Right to the end.’
‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘Perhaps not. What I need to decide is, is it worth hanging around to find out?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Yo
u know what I mean.’
Yes, I know what she means. At a time and in a manner of my own choosing.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’
I find I’m crying.
‘You have to, Gloria. Please. Please.’
She’s quiet for a long time.
‘I have an appointment with the consultant when we get back,’ she says, and I remember the letter I saw in her flat. ‘Various scans and so on. It will confirm what I already know.’
‘I can come with you, if you’d like me to?’ She looks at me and she holds my hands, her skin cold against mine.
‘I’m scared.’ She says it as a statement of fact, her voice quiet but firm. She’s never said it to me before, and I don’t suppose she ever will again. She isn’t asking for my help or asking me to comfort her. I can’t comfort her. I can’t change how she feels. I can’t change what will happen to her. I can only be with her and hope that is enough.
It’s a long journey to Whitby. The first bit we spend in traffic jams with cars full of holidaymakers, the sun beating down, the car stuffy and uncomfortable. Gloria dozes, or perhaps pretends to, inscrutable in her sunglasses. She’s not in a talkative mood today. She seemed preoccupied as we packed and left, and refused to eat any breakfast.
As we get closer to Whitby the landscape changes. All around us are the sunlit moors, purple with heather, wild and ancient and alive.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I say to Gloria. ‘Isn’t it so beautiful? I had no idea. I thought it would be . . . bleak. More, I dunno, wuthering.’
Gloria looks out of the window and ignores me. It’s as if the last two weeks haven’t happened, as if we’re back to me being the irritating do-gooder.
‘Whatever wuthering is,’ I say.
Gloria unwraps another boiled sweet and pops it in her mouth without offering me one.
‘Windy,’ she says, not looking at me.
‘Pardon?’
‘Wuthering. Means windy.’
‘Does it really? ’
‘Yes. Why would I make it up?’
How Not to Disappear Page 25