On the bus, I’d huddle into my coat and keep my eyes fixed on the buildings flashing by. This was because on one journey a man—quite an old man, with a mustache—sat next to me and asked if I had a boyfriend. When I shook my head, he offered to be my “fancy man” and to do all sorts of things to me, although I hadn’t stopped to hear what.
I put my fingers in my ears—he was sitting too close for me to get to the earplugs I kept in my backpack as part of a Safety Kit for when things got to be Too Much—and squeezed past him, the zipper of my backpack scratching his face. (I’d worried about that afterward.) I stood next to the driver for the rest of the journey. There had been an Incident at Sandhaven Museum, years ago, which had left me with the same sort of feeling.
I’d gone to an exhibition of Historical Baking Methods on my own, because Mother said she couldn’t bear the tedium and Father had been Away. There’d been a dried bun from the eighteenth century in a display case, and some rusty baking tins in elaborate shapes, and an early packet of Jacob’s Cream Crackers with swirly writing.
I’d spent a long time making notes of new Facts. Near closing time, I was approached by a man—the curator, he said—who asked me to pose for their next display, Fashion through the Ages. He said I was just the right shape for a young Victorian lady, and if I wouldn’t mind modeling for some background photos, I would be helping the museum and I would get free entry to the exhibition.
I wasn’t able to look at him. I wanted to help, because I liked museums, but I knew I always looked rigid and stiff in photos. I hadn’t liked the idea of putting on a tight corset that had belonged to someone else either.
The curator had smiled a lot. He asked me if I was interested in baking methods, and I said yes, particularly cookies, and he said that, behind the scenes, they had extra cookie packaging, too much for them to display, and I could keep some of it in return for the photos. I’d looked at my watch because of the time. I’d chewed my lip. There hadn’t been anyone else around, and in a bewildering change of subject, he’d said I was like a ripe peach. I’d stared at the floor—polished Victorian tiles—for a long time trying to work out what he meant because the exhibition hadn’t featured fruit or canning methods.
He’d said I’d have to pose for the photos as soon as the museum closed, but I had to be home by six to put on the dinner so I couldn’t do it then. I said I could check with Mother and come back tomorrow, but he had to dash off.
When I’d told Mother, thinking she’d be pleased someone had needed my help, she’d been angry. I should have had more sense than to engage in such a conversation. The curator had exploited a position of trust. (Actually, he’d stood quite still; he’d just leaned rather too close.) She’d rung the museum to complain, and I’d run up to my bedroom and slammed the door, fingers in my ears, face burning at having got something wrong again.
Mother had ordered me downstairs. She’d looked like she did when she filled in a crossword clue right away. “There, I knew it,” she’d said. The man hadn’t even been a curator, but a security guard on a temporary contract, which had ended that day. He probably hadn’t known anything about cookies. Or fashion through the ages.
• • •
I knew Mother wouldn’t want me to eat Convenience Foods, stripped of Vitamins, or to eat exactly the same thing every day, because she’d called a stop to it before.
Mother was a fan of Adventurous Cookery, which meant eating strange things from different countries and having variety in our diet, Elvira. But, after her knees had lost their flexibility, she’d had to stop making unusual dishes. We’d tried having me do the Adventurous Cookery, but her voice had gotten hoarse from repeating the instructions. I was perfectly capable of cooking the recipes from Delia Smith’s cookbooks, though, because they were foolproof. Mother bought me one, a different one, every Christmas. Delia Smith went through things step-by-step and wore a cardigan in her picture.
I made a list, which was always calming, of seven Delia Smith dishes, such as Vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie with Cheese Mash, and wrote them down like a menu on the calendar in the kitchen. The calendar had a picture of a different terrier for each month. Sylvia had bought it for Mother because of our dog, Tosca. This month’s was a Jack Russell. I added the activities I was participating in too: the dates and times of Casualty and Coronation Street, and the days the bins had to go out.
At the start, buying food without Mother’s list meant I bought too much or too little or the wrong thing. I panicked once when a cauliflower wouldn’t fit in the fridge’s vegetable drawer. How was I going to eat it all? I wasn’t supposed to throw away food. In the end, I had to cook it as a bonus vegetable and add it to every Delia Smith meal for the next five days, even though it wasn’t mentioned in her recipes. It made me feel uncomfortable.
Eventually, though, because of eating exactly the same things every week, I was able to make a master shopping list and take it with me each time. This was the sort of thing that, if Mother had thought of it, she would have called Maximum Efficiency.
I’d always shopped at Asda, so at least that wasn’t new. It was within walking distance of my house. (There’d been an Incident—one of a series, none of which Mother had allowed me to forget—involving another Asda, but I tried to put it to the back of my mind.) I liked Asda because the layout of its aisles stayed the same, and because I had friends there.
The man who collected the shopping carts—his name badge said Clive—always said Hello, and Dennis behind the cheese counter wrapped up small quantities of Stilton and mature cheddar cheeses without me even asking. He said it was because I was a regular customer. I always went to the checkout where Janice worked because she said Hello too, and sometimes added a comment about the weather. She asked me once what my name was, and when I told her, she said, “Elvira. Now that is unusual.”
I used the terriers calendar again—it was proving to be invaluable—to add a housework schedule and checklist where I could tick off the tasks as I did them. There was one like it on the back of the Ladies’ Toilet door at Asda. I’d wanted to do this before, but Mother had said it was ridiculous. Ridiculous was one of her favorite words.
I gave myself Thursdays off from housekeeping, but I still went to see Mother. I wasn’t sure what else to do on a day off. I’d never had one when Mother was at home because I’d had to buy her Daily Telegraph and take back her Library books and get her prescription and do the food shopping every other day so that things still had Vitamins, and go up and down stairs fetching her glasses.
I didn’t have to do any of those chores now. But not having to do them made me feel empty inside.
3.
Never rely on assumptions.
—Mr. Watson, lawyer
The phone rang. I didn’t like answering it because of not knowing when it was my turn to speak. It stopped, then rang again. My hand hovered. It might be the hospital. I lifted the receiver.
“Hello, dear. How are you?”
No nurse had ever called me dear. I was silent.
“Is Mother there? I haven’t heard from her for weeks. I’m your mother’s old school friend, dear. Jane. From Dunstable.”
“Jane from Dunstable,” I echoed. I knew her. She’d advised Mother to put me in a home. Mother used to ring her every Sunday evening at six thirty. It was the only time I ever heard Mother laughing. The receiver slipped from my hand, and I felt the world draining away again. Could Mother put me in a home now, when she couldn’t even speak to Social Services? Could Jane, although she lived in Dunstable? I scrabbled for the phone on the floor.
“Hello, dear. Is everything all right?” Jane asked.
“Mother’s had a stroke,” I babbled. “She’s in the hospital. She can’t walk.”
“Oh! Oh! Poor Agnes! Struck down!”
“I didn’t strike her,” I said, my heart thudding. “She fell down. I wasn’t even in the room.”
“No, dear.” Jane pronounced each word separately. “I was using the verb strike in its passive form. Oh, your poor mother. She’ll be coming home soon, will she?”
“No.” My heart was beating so fast I felt light-headed.
“Won’t you be looking after her, dear? I’d come and care for her myself except for the weakness in my spine.”
“We…we’re waiting for her to be assessed.”
“We?”
“Me and Sylvia next door.”
There was a sniff and then a long pause from Jane’s end.
“I’m not surprised, you know, dear,” she said. “About the stroke. If ever there was a woman driven to one, it was your mother.”
I was silent again. Mother hadn’t driven for years, not since she’d sold the car. The car’s name had been Morgan—or that might have been its brand name. It had been Father’s pride and joy. Mother had sold it while Father was Away on the very long trip to Japan, to recompense the Bridge Club members, she’d said. I’d been puzzled by this because Father had lost interest in Bridge, and it was his car, and not having it anymore was the reason he’d shut himself up in his study for days when he got back.
“I shudder at what she had to put up with…the deceit and the lies. And then, of course, there was the shame… And yet, at first, she forgave. How such a clever woman could be such a fool! I told her. I told her many times. Make a clean break, I said. She used to say that because I was a single woman, and not a mother, I wouldn’t understand, but in the end, of course, she’d had enough.” Jane sniffed. “All in the past now, and yet here she is, poor, dear Agnes, still paying for it.”
• • •
I stood by Father’s desk, gazing out at the oak tree in the front garden. What Jane had said—Deceit, Lies, Forgiveness, Shame—sounded like the titles of the Foreign Films Mother was so fond of.
I fetched the Japanese notebook to get my thoughts in order and wrote down Jane’s words, then a question: What did she mean? Underneath, I added that it couldn’t have been me who’d deceived Mother because I didn’t tell lies. They were too complicated. Jane had called Mother a fool and a clever woman. How could she be two such different things at once? A fool was what Mother used to call me. I’d never heard her say it about herself.
• • •
“Of course I’ll come with you, pet.” Sylvia hung up my coat. “Go and sit down, and I’ll make us a nice cup of tea. I’ve got some cookies from Marks & Spencer. In a tin!”
Earlier at the hospital, a nurse had told me they’d be assessing where Mother should go. Just when I was getting used to her being there. Moving again. Where would she move to?
The gold cookie tin was a Continental Assortment. I kept looking at it, wondering if the cookies inside were different from those in Asda’s Extra Special Continental Selection. When Sylvia opened the tin, some of the cookies were wrapped in gold foil, rather than silver, and the chocolate fingers were plain, not milk. I hugged my knees for a moment.
I took a white chocolate triangle and a praline wafer and tried to make sense of what Sylvia was saying. Keeping an eye on me, and Mother’s lawyer, and managing the money side of things, I heard. “She was a wise old bird, your mum,” Sylvia went on. “Thought of everything. Well, she had to, didn’t she? What with your dad…”
I looked away, seeing Mother, her gaze stern and all-seeing, perched on top of a tree. It was a disturbing image. My mind strayed to the cranes on her Japanese kimono, then to them flying thousands of miles without using maps. Maps led to passports, and to Father’s being empty, and then I thought about the unanswered question of Mother leaving the hospital. Leaving the hospital to move where? Not that way, I heard over and over again. I saw Mother at home with me, her face lopsided, waving her lion-headed stick with her one good hand. I couldn’t finish the praline wafer, and I found myself rocking to and fro.
Sylvia put her arms around me. “It’s difficult, pet. All these changes.”
I nodded, my head squashed against her chest. Although it was soft, I didn’t like the feeling of being squeezed.
She said how well I was doing and how not everyone could visit their mother in the hospital twice a day. When I looked up, Sylvia’s eyes were filled with tears.
I didn’t understand why she was crying when she was saying nice things. “Shall I make you another cup of tea?” I asked. We’d been taught at school to make tea whenever someone was upset.
She laughed and blew her nose. “No, you’re all right, pet. I’m not sad, love…only sometimes, when I think about your poor mum.”
Sylvia gave me some of the cookies to take home, wrapped in a napkin with holly on it. We’d spent nearly all the Christmases Father was Away at Sylvia’s. When he was at home, they came to us for drinks on Christmas Eve. That hadn’t happened for a while, though, because of Father dying in 2010.
Last year, I’d taken an Asda bottle of champagne, a Best Buy in the Telegraph, and Mother had brought them a richly fruited Christmas cake in a special box. Trevor, looming above me on the doorstep, his beard bristling, had taken the champagne and muttered about opening it being the only bit of excitement he’d get all day, and then Sylvia had called out from the kitchen, “Come in, come in. Happy Christmas!”
Father had gotten lots of excitement from celebrations. He had a loud voice, and he smiled and laughed and reached out to touch people, especially women, on their arms. He’d say, How marvelous, darling, or if they were men, Well, you’re spot on there, old chap. He’d have a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other, and would be enveloped in a cloud of smoke and brandy fumes. Larger than life, Mother called him, but although he was tall, I would not have called him large.
• • •
At home, I wrote what Sylvia had said about me doing well, with the date, in the Japanese notebook as evidence against being sent Away. In bed, I unwrapped the Christmas serviette and laid the cookies out in a row on the pillow with the same size gap between them. There was a round white one with a scalloped edge—a Coquille—one I’d never seen in any other Continental Assortment. I saved it till last.
• • •
There was a plate of Custard Creams at Mother’s Assessment Meeting, on a side table next to a box of tissues. Mother’s complex needs and nursing home requirements were discussed, and a doctor said a medical word that Sylvia, pencil poised over her British Legion notebook, asked him how to spell. Mother, in a wheelchair, shook her head—Not that way—but whether she meant the doctor had spelled it wrong, or that she was refusing to go into a nursing home, I didn’t know. I counted the number of zigzags on the parquet floor. Nobody suggested that Mother should come home.
When they asked me what I felt, all I could feel was my heart thudding. Sylvia said, Honestly, pet, she couldn’t see any alternative. I swallowed without saying anything, quicksand sucking at my feet, because I was part of arranging things for Mother, who’d always arranged things for me. I’d worried so often about her sending me Away, and now here I was doing the dispatching.
I stared at a spot on a parquet tile where the polish had worn off. A hospital social worker told me, slowly, that I’d be able to see Mother whenever I wanted, and hesitating between me and Sylvia, handed us A Directory of Nursing Homes in Sandhaven.
When Sylvia and I said good-bye to Mother, she drew herself up in her wheelchair and turned her head away. There was a bony hollow at the base of her neck when she lifted her chin. Sylvia didn’t say anything as we drove home. But she sighed a lot.
• • •
I got the Spinach Gnocchi ingredients out for later. I was in a sort of daze. I made a cup of tea in the Coronation Street mug that has Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Rita Fairclough, Hayley Cropper, and Deirdre Barlow in a garland around the sides. It was a Christmas present from Sylvia three years ago.
Upstairs, I switched on the radio in Mother’s room and left her door open to make it
seem as if she’d just gone into the bathroom for a minute. I got into bed and lay there, repeating David Attenborough’s words from The Blue Planet out loud to block out Mother’s refusal to look at me earlier.
• • •
I kept my eyes on the furrows a vacuum cleaner had made through the plush carpet of the office of Mr. Watson, Mother’s lawyer. His voice bounced from its paneled walls. He’d advised Mother many times over the years. When I glanced up, his shaggy eyebrows were leaping up and down. Had that been about sending me Away?
Since Mother had Lost Capacity, he said, we had to decide things for her. I stared at my shoes, my best ones, thinking about Mother hating that.
Sylvia looked up from writing in her notebook. “And how to pay for it all.”
Mr. Watson explained that Mother had a Trust Fund set up for her by her parents to protect her interests in marriage. This was unusual, but there had been concerns about Mr. Carr’s—Father’s—finances.
I sat up. What had been wrong with Father’s finances? Sylvia was examining her red fingernails. I took the Japanese notebook from the pocket of my coat and wrote the question down. I also added another one: Where is Mother’s Lost Capacity?
Mother’s nursing care would be paid for by her Trust Fund. “A most reliable source of income,” Mr. Watson said, “being impregnable to the persuasion of others.” Mother had arranged for her Fund to pay me an allowance, should she be incapacitated. This would enable me to stay at home, provided I was managing, even though Mother would no longer be there.
I felt my toes unclench. The master shopping list could be evidence for that. And the terriers calendar. And the Japanese notebook. Mr. Watson said Mother had made these Arrangements a long time ago, at the same time he’d helped her to rearrange her finances, protect her inheritance, close joint accounts, that sort of thing. I didn’t ask him what these words meant in case it was a sign of me not managing.
The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr Page 3