Mum in the Middle

by Jane Wenham-Jones

  I pushed away the memory of Tilly saying that when she’d last phoned, Granny sounded even more bonkers than usual and the way my mother had suddenly sounded vague and distracted and appeared to temporarily struggle to recall Ben’s name. Was she feeling unwell more often than she was letting on?

  I’d been phoning daily, I told my sister instead, as I tried to still the anxious fluttering in my stomach as I imagined my seemingly indestructible parent suddenly helpless and frail. Her dear old friend Mo was there a lot; Gerald as often as he was allowed to be.

  Alice was having none of it. No amount of explaining that our mother herself had actively discouraged me from going down this weekend, saying the traffic would be bad with all those other mothers being towed out to lunch, that I had a long list of household tasks to complete and a presentation to finish before Tuesday, would sway my elder sister. You need to see for yourself, she instructed. While actually numbering my duties: 1) get a proper list from Mother of all symptoms. NB What exactly was said by medics? (suggest you take notes). 2) double-check with Mo for accuracy. Have noticed Mother can be woolly of late. 3) Speak to Gerald (do not be fobbed off by Mother. I do not have a number for him. Make sure you obtain. 4) I think it would be best to phone her GP on Monday and you’ll need to be fully armed with the facts …

  I growled and sighed. Years of experience have taught me that when a diktat arrives from the US, it is quicker in the long run to follow it. Alice may be three thousand miles away in Boston. But her sheer will can still fill a room.

  Thus on an afternoon when I would rather be perusing my sample pots and deciding which shade of foodie yellow – I am hovering between autumn honey, golden sugar and lemon delight – to use on the dining-room walls, drinking wine with Jinni or even wielding the Shake n’ Vac in Ben’s bedroom – Tilly has complained it smells of hamsters – I am crawling around the M25, with a potted azalea and the gnawing suspicion that by the time I actually have the opportunity to start this brave new life of mine, I’ll be on a mobility scooter.

  Then I hear Alice’s voice reminding me it’s the least I can do on Mother’s Day when I haven’t seen our mother since before I moved – even if she was away with Gerald on an art appreciation cruise and then spending every spare minute rehearsing H.M.S. Pinafore – when she, Alice, is sitting on the other side of the world, worrying.

  ‘Get on a bloody plane, then!’ I say out loud, looking at the line of traffic snaking ahead and braking sharply as the van in front abruptly stops.

  ‘Arse!’ I shout, as I inch forward again, shot through with guilt and resentment.

  My mother’s not overly thrilled, either.

  ‘He’s a very clever man,’ she says, as I step across the threshold of her neat chalet bungalow. ‘But I do wish he wouldn’t go around in that dress.’

  She has been to an exhibition by Grayson Perry at the Turner Contemporary, where she has admired the pots and ‘those wooden ones’ but still isn’t convinced the artist needs the frock and wig.

  ‘It’s the children I think about,’ she says. ‘They’ll get teased at school.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mum.’ I say, handing her the plant and throwing my coat over the bannister. ‘As far as I know, he’s only got one daughter and she’s grown up now.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ my mother looks as though she doubts this. ‘Sonia hasn’t got any better either.’ My mother has always believed in the non sequitur to keep conversation zipping along. While I am still making the mental leap from the famous artist to Gerald’s rather dour daughter, she has moved on to her geranium cuttings having died in the frost.

  ‘You don’t expect it in March,’ she says. ‘Though Mo will say that May thing about casting the clout.’

  ‘How is Mo?’ I enquire, trying to analyse what is even odder about my mother than usual.

  ‘Still likes her tea.’

  It is then that it hits me. My mother hasn’t moved. Usually by now I’d have been offered three different sorts of hot beverage and very probably a sandwich. But I’ve been in the house a good five minutes and she is still in the hallway in front of me.

  ‘Shall we go and make some?’ I suggest.

  ‘Some what?’

  Everything in the kitchen looks as always. The surfaces shine, the sink is scrubbed, the storage jars arranged in formation. The floor is speck-free, the tea towels folded with regimental precision and the mugs lined up along the shelf have their handles pointing in the same direction.

  But as I watch my mother, watching me filling the teapot, the low-level dread that started when I hit the Thanet Way, deepens further. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ I ask, disturbed by her stillness.

  She looks back at me, her face troubled, the skin on her cheeks seeming to sag. I see how old she looks and how tired.

  ‘Not really,’ she says.

  I carry the tray to the sitting room and wait while she settles herself in her usual chair. The book on the table is the same crime thriller she told me she was reading weeks ago. A bookmark pokes out of it, barely a quarter of the way through.

  The air in here feels slightly stale and the irises on the pine cupboard are curled and faded. My mother flings open windows in deepest February, will sense a dead petal at ten paces.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask. ‘You’re not well, are you?’

  She shakes her head slowly. I am clutched by fear.

  ‘It wasn’t a migraine, was it? When they took you to hospital?’

  She sits up straighter. ‘Oh yes, they think it was,’ she says, sounding stronger. ‘A migraine with auras,’ she adds firmly. She smiles at me now. ‘I thought it was a stroke too …’

  She lifts up her tea and takes a small sip. ‘I didn’t want to say it on the phone’.

  My heart is thumping as she tells me.

  She’d been in the garden, trying to pull out the dandelions from among her sprouting forget-me-nots, when she’d started to feel a bit sick. So she’d come indoors to get some water and then her vision had started to go hazy and she was seeing wavy lines. Recognising this as classic migraine, after having them for years, and feeling her head start to ache, she’d called Mo to put her off coming round for supper. But when she tried to speak to Mo, her words came out backwards.

  Mo called an ambulance and came straight round. They both now thought my mother was having a stroke, and the paramedics clearly agreed as she was whisked off to A&E – ‘such nice young people, couldn’t have been kinder’ – where she had various tests and a CT scan, which showed that in fact she hadn’t had a stroke, and they concluded, according to my mother, that it probably was just a migraine after all.

  By now she could talk normally again and they told her migraines could affect speech and that if she hadn’t tried to make the phone call she might never have known. The relief made my mother feel better immediately and she went home, took painkillers and had a better night’s sleep than she usually did, feeling fine by the next day, although the hospital wanted her to have a second, different, sort of scan, just to make sure, so she had gone for that when she got back from Poole, and seen a neurologist.

  ‘And?’ I prompt as she is silent again. ‘What did he say?’

  The room is getting darker and my mother rises from her chair and walks slowly across the carpet and turns on the standard lamp she’s had all my life. Then she sits down again and I see the distress in her eyes. ‘I had wondered,’ she says. ‘But it was still a terrible shock.’

  ‘What?’ I ask softly, my mind racing through the possibilities. A stroke the first scan had missed? Cancer? A brain tumour? ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Oh Tess,’ my mother says, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve got some sort of dementia.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘My uncle had Alzheimer’s.’ Jinni opened a cupboard with one hand and reached into the tall fridge with the other. ‘It’s an absolute bastard.’

  I sat at the enormous table in her vast stone kitchen, looking in awe at the battered range, deep butler’s sink and
numerous drawers, as she deftly uncorked a bottle and put a generous white wine in front of me. I swallowed.

  ‘It’s not necessarily that – the damage is frontal-temporal only but I’ve been Googling and it doesn’t sound good. I don’t know how quickly …’ I stopped. ‘We’re waiting for an appointment with the consultant.’

  Jinni looked back at me. ‘And she’s okay at home on her own?’

  ‘Her friend Mo is going in and out. And her partner, Gerald. Not that we’re allowed to call him that!’

  I didn’t add that Mo had said she thought the days of my mother being left alone were numbered. I was still getting my head around it. Mo, sworn to silence until my mother had told me herself, had been on the phone for over an hour.

  She’d been worried about my mother’s forgetfulness, peculiar statements and occasional lack of coherent speech for some time. But Gerald had appeared unbothered (‘typical man! They don’t notice anything unless it’s in a mini skirt’) and my mother had dismissed her concerns, while insisting I was due to visit any day, so Mo had hoped I’d turn up soon and pick up on it myself.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I’d said guiltily.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for, Pet,’ Mo interrupted me. ‘Wouldn’t have made a ha’pence worth of difference’

  It seemed nothing would. I was hanging onto the word ‘slow’ I’d found on the internet. A slow, degenerative neurological condition. Perhaps it would take a long time and my mother would stay at this stage, where she lost her train of thought and stood staring. Maybe all the other horrors I couldn’t bear to imagine, listed under symptoms and outlook, happened to other people’s mothers and not mine.

  I hadn’t told the kids yet. I told myself it was best to wait till we’d had the full prognosis, but really I couldn’t bear to say the words out loud.

  I wouldn’t have told Jinni if she hadn’t looked at me so directly and said I seemed upset.

  ‘She looks normal,’ I said. ‘She sounds the same, but there’s this …’ I stopped, struggling to put my finger on it. ‘Lack of interest …’

  I’d shown her photos of the house, suggested dates for her to come and stay. Usually she’d have been on her diary like a tramp on a kipper.

  Now she nodded with distance in her eyes.

  ‘She’s afraid too,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what will happen. Alice is already talking about carers but Mum says she just wants to keep everything normal for as long as she can …’

  I’d read about people with mothers who’d simply gone a bit doo-lally and couldn’t be trusted with a gas supply, but who were happy enough in their own little world. I’d tried to picture my mother like this and failed.

  Then I’d found horror stories of aggression and incontinence and smashed furniture, and switched off the computer, unable to bear the tales of rage and tears and family breakdown.

  ‘But I don’t know how long that will be …’ I said.

  Jinni shook the plaster dust from her hair. ‘Come and see a fireplace.’

  I followed her obediently up a wide staircase to a bare back bedroom overlooking her tangled garden. A large chunk of ceiling was missing.

  ‘Look!’ She waved an arm at a pretty iron grate surrounded by flowered tiles. ‘Victorian! Been boarded up.’ She kicked at the sheet of painted hardboard she’d hacked away from the chimney breast. ‘Philistines!’

  She threw open one of the cupboards either side of the chimney breast. ‘It’s the third one I’ve uncovered. Don’t you just love all this storage?’

  ‘It’s going to be gorgeous,’ I said, looking around at the long windows and cornice work, grateful to be distracted.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jinni pulled a face. ‘If I don’t drop dead of exhaustion first. I’m knocking through here to make an en suite.’ She slapped a palm against the wall. ‘If you ever want a stress-buster, grab the sledge hammer.’

  Back downstairs, my fingers curled around the leaflet in my pocket. The reason I’d plucked up the courage to bang on Jinni’s door.

  ‘Did you get one of these?’ I held out the flyer for a Wine and Wisdom evening for the local theatre group. Individuals welcome! ‘Do you fancy going?’

  Jinni stiffened. ‘Eurgh. Those am-dram types get on my wick – all emoting and “getting in the zone” as if they’re Dench or Olivier – and if I see Ingrid once more this week, I might swing for her.’

  She took a large mouthful of wine. ‘She’s the bane of my bloody life. Still objecting to my change-of-use application on all sorts of insane grounds and she’s been up and down the street trying to get everyone else to protest as well.’

  ‘She put a note through my door about it,’ I told Jinni uncomfortably. ‘Said she was worried about extra vehicles and you chopping down trees.’

  Jinni scowled. ‘Don’t listen to that environmental crap,’ she said. ‘It’s sour grapes. Her creepy son tried to buy it before I managed to. I outbid him. That’s the real reason the old witch is so bitter and twisted.’

  ‘Oh!’ I waited while Jinni took another swig from her glass. ‘What was he going to do with it?’

  ‘Turn it into flats probably. Or demolish it – one of his mates owns the place behind me so I expect the plan was to flatten the lot and build a whole new cul-de-sac. Even more cars, even more of the dreaded DFLs tempted here. Not that they need much tempting now we’ve got the fast train. And a whacking great profit for him. Wanker.’

  She poured some more into her glass and pushed the bottle towards me. ‘I wouldn’t mind if she was honest about it. But it’s so damn hypocritical. I’m making this place beautiful again, bringing out all the original features. I’ve been advised to take out one tree because it’s diseased and it might bloody fall on me. I’ve got huge plans for the garden. It’s going to be stunning. And if I had his money, yes, I’d keep the whole place just for me but I’m going to have to do B&B to afford the upkeep.’

  She stopped and took a deep breath. ‘Sorry to rant on.’

  ‘He’s a builder, is he?’

  ‘David?’ she said, with a comical sneer. ‘He’s an architect. Got some flash practice in town. But fingers in all the local pies. Ingrid’s always storming the council offices talking about all the new commuters ruining the area and there not being enough affordable housing, while her precious boy is the first one to mop up any bargains and make a fast buck. They both make me sick.’

  I looked at her, startled by the real venom in her voice. I made myself smile. ‘So that’s a no, then?’

  Jinni grinned back.

  ‘Sorry hun – you’ll have to be brave and go on your own.’

  ‘Bravery’s not my strong point.’

  It was held in a function room at the back of a pub called the Six Pears. I walked the half mile there, looking in the old-fashioned shop fronts, as I crossed the cobbled market square onto the High Street, still finding it hard to believe this was now home.

  The town had changed and spread over the years since I’d first come here to visit my friend Fran. There were rows of houses where once there were fields, more traffic and speed bumps and the lovely old ironmongers had closed down now. But Northstone always kept its charm. Even in the years when Fran was in Italy, we’d got into the habit of stopping off on the way back from the coast for coffees or ice-creams, to poke about among the antiques or simply find a loo, and I’d often imagined living here.

  The fantasy had grown legs the moment I’d read about the new high-speed link to the city. House prices were rising sharply and already the bookshop had become an emporium of scented candles and high-end bath oils and our favourite pub, with the bar billiards table, a raw-food restaurant. When we got a buyer for Finchley, I moved fast. I loved the idea of a small community and a proper local, quiet streets and the river nearby. With London now under an hour away, it seemed meant to be. I’d thought about Ben getting to uni and me getting to the office, and having somewhere to park and a garden. But somehow I’d overlooked the day-to-day reality of making new friends and who I�
�d talk to …

  The wind was cold and I could feel the make-up running from my streaming eyes as I reached the door, suddenly wishing I’d stayed at home with some biscuits and the box set of Downton Abbey.

  But, I reminded myself as I shoved my body across the threshold, I needed a social life.

  Visions of painting the place red with Fran had faded fast – the last time I’d dropped in, it was all baby yoga, organic dishcloths and making sure her four children got their ten-a-day. Apart from Jinni, the only person I’d spoken to at any length since I got here was the chap in the corner shop and that was only a thrilling exchange about my newspaper delivery and why he was fresh out of washing-up liquid.

  A woman with grey-blonde hair and some rather nice silver jewellery was sat at a table next to a cash box.

  ‘Wicked Wits?’ she enquired, consulting a list.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She repeated it, mouthing the words carefully as if I were in need of learning support. ‘Are you on a TEAM?’

  ‘No, I’m on my own …’

  She rustled the paper. ‘The Wits said they were waiting for one more.’ She beamed. ‘But if you’re a one-off I’ll give you to Brigitte …’

  Brigitte, a dramatically made-up lady with highly defined eyebrows, was, as she immediately introduced herself, chair of the Northstone Players –for which the evening was raising much-needed funds – and currently rehearsing Madame Francine for their forthcoming production of A Frenchman in Disguise.

  ‘Do you know the play?’