The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr

by Frances Maynard

  • • •

  At home, I made a mug of tea and went upstairs. I lay in bed with my eyes shut for a little while, and then I wrote an answer to a question in the Japanese notebook: February 12, 2016, adding, Now at Bay View Lodge under question two: When is Mother coming out of the hospital? The questions about Father’s empty passport and his finances, and who the woman and the baby were in the photo, and what Jane from Dunstable had meant by her comments, and where Mother’s Lost Capacity had gone remained unanswered.

  • • •

  The next day, Mother was in a high-backed armchair by her window. She stared at me without saying anything. Sylvia was busy, Trevor said, so I was on my own. This was showing I was capable, I kept telling myself.

  At the back of my mind were past Incidents when I hadn’t been. Mother was no longer able to remind me of them, but they were still there. She’d called one of them the Asda Bus Incident. The shame of it still haunted me, although I’d since caught the right bus to visit Mother in the hospital (seventy-two times) and gotten off at the right stop without there being any repetition of the Incident.

  I’d wanted to go to the opening of a new Asda on the other side of town. There was going to be ten percent off everything and a free tangerine and Asda paper hat for each customer. Mother had highlighted the bus timetable and the name of the stop. These came up on an illuminated sign inside the bus, but it was possible it could malfunction.

  I had caught the right bus. Two stops later, lots of people had gotten on, a whole crowd of foreign students with broad shoulders and big backpacks. When I’d tried to get off, a wall of them had blocked the aisle. They hadn’t heard me say Please or Excuse me. I’d had to stand there, my face on fire, my toes clenching painfully, until they all got off.

  I’d ended up in a suburb I’d never been to before, miles away from the new Asda. I’d had no idea where I was. My breath had come in gasps. I couldn’t ring Mother because: (a) she would have been angry, (b) she wouldn’t have known where I was either, and (c) even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to come and get me because she no longer had a car.

  There’d been a red telephone box on the corner of the street. I’d opened the door and dialed the emergency number.

  I’d traveled home in the back of a police car. I felt like a criminal. They’d tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t get the words out to answer them.

  Mother’s facial expression when she answered the door had been Surprise. She’d never expected me to have any dealings with the police. I couldn’t get my words out to her either. I’d gone straight upstairs and under the duvet.

  Afterward, Mother had tacked a map of Sandhaven onto the wall of the utility room, under the dead impala’s horns, with our road marked with a thumbtack. She’d made me go through different routes home with her, but after a while, her throat had gotten too sore for her to carry on and she said she thought it best for me to just stick to the local area.

  • • •

  “Been as good as gold,” said a nurse (caregiver, Sylvia said) in a hoarse voice, coming in now to spread a crocheted blanket over Mother’s knees. The caregiver was a big lady with her hair in a high ponytail. She wore a blue nylon tunic with the name badge Kim. “Haven’t you?” Kim said to Mother, tucking in the blanket, then to me, “Her name’s Agnes, isn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Agnes Carr.” I looked at the pink swirls in Mother’s carpet. I noticed patterns in things all the time, but especially in carpets, because of looking down.

  There was a pause, then Kim asked, “What does she like to be called?”

  “My father called her Agnes, but waiters and her students and people at the Bridge Club call her Mrs. Carr. Called. I call her Mother.” There was another pause. I chewed my lip.

  “Not that way,” said Mother.

  “Oh hello!” Kim turned to Mother. “You’re speaking now, are you? Sedative’s wearing off,” she added in a whisper. “Takes a long time when they’re elderly.”

  “Mother isn’t elderly,” I said.

  “No?” Kim’s ponytail bounced.

  “Not that way,” Mother said louder than before.

  • • •

  I was tired when I got home. I put my feet up on Mother’s footstool and rubbed my face. I didn’t know if I was tired because of walking up and down the hill or because of listening to Mother saying “Not that way” over and over again in a small space for a long time.

  I visited again after lunch, because a girl should respect her mother and your knees are younger than mine, and is it too much to ask for a little assistance? Maria’s eyebrows shot up when she opened the door. Mother was asleep, but Maria took me upstairs to see her.

  Mother lay very still with her eyes shut and her mouth open. She looked like the mummies in the British Museum, except that you could see her face and there was no black wig.

  • • •

  In the lounge the next day, the cords of Mother’s neck stood out. “Not that way, not that way, not that way!” she shouted.

  I tried to explain where she was, but she just kept shouting over the words stroke and nursing home. My heart jumped around in my chest.

  Maria came in with a tray. “What this noise? Why you shouting, Agnes? Have nice coffee for you. And cookies.” She patted Mother’s shoulder. “I put music on. What sort you like?”

  Maria found a CD called Chilled Classics, not one that Mother owned. “We give it go,” said Maria. “Perhaps it calming.”

  It wasn’t.

  I kept my hands behind my back in case people thought I was hurting Mother. Would Bay View Lodge turn her out for shouting like they’d done with a boy at my school who’d screamed and hit walls? Where would she go then? Sand slipped away beneath my feet when I thought of Mother back at home. Then she stopped shouting. A piece of music I’d heard before was playing, by the same man, Mozart, who’d written the Opera with my name in it.

  “Magic.” Maria patted Mother’s shoulder. “You listen to nice calm music, Agnes, and have nice chat to nice daughter come to see you.” She held out a plate of cookies. I recognized them as Sainsbury’s Belgian Chocolate Biscuit Selection because of the red foil. Mother took a long, curled one, a Cigarillo, and nibbled the end of it until the piece of music ended.

  • • •

  Four days later, just as I was leaving, my head aching, my shoulders stiff from shrinking back in my chair, Mrs. Hulme called me over. My heart began to thump, and I squeaked my sneakers together on the linoleum, sure this would be Mother’s final warning. But it was to tell me about Bay View Lodge’s leisure activities: Musical Entertainment and Pet Therapy. When I mentioned Mother’s shouting, Mrs. Hulme said it would be drowned out one way or another: either by people singing or dogs barking.

  • • •

  Musical Entertainment was led by a young man playing Wartime Classics on an electric organ. Kim came in with a tray of tiny glasses of sherry. She offered one each to Mother and me. “Go on, spoil yourself. Put hairs on your chest.” Mother’s left hand shook toward a glass. I hesitated, thinking about the hair, but… “Take one,” urged Kim. “Help you unwind.” I put it down on a side table next to Mother’s chair. Mother smacked her lips and finished hers. She picked up my glass and drank that too, so in the end, I didn’t have to worry about chest hair, or unwinding.

  Mother jumped when the music started. It didn’t sound like Operas or Mozart. I could see her mouth opening and closing, but because she was drowned out, I didn’t know if she was enjoying herself or not. Shrieks of “Not that way!” filled the lounge when the music stopped.

  Kim hurried over with a tin of Walkers Scottish Shortbread Fingers. “What’s the matter, Agnes? I thought you liked music.”

  “Not that way!” Mother glared.

  Kim wheeled her to the elevator. “Let’s take you back upstairs before all our heads explode. Hang on to your shortbread
. Going up.”

  Mother and I sat by the window in her room. I was on the little carved chair from Father’s study. She was nibbling her Shortbread Finger and not shouting, and I was checking the number of holes pricked in the top of mine. There were twelve. That was the correct number.

  • • •

  The lounge chairs were arranged in a big circle for Pet Therapy. Mother had just taken a Nice cookie from a tin of Tea Time Assortment. There was barking outside the door, and Maria slammed the cookie tin lid back on.

  Twenty years ago, Father had bought our dog, Tosca, for my seventh birthday. “You’re old enough to appreciate a dog now, darling.”

  “But not old enough to look after one,” Mother had snapped. She’d said that would be her job, she supposed, since Father was never here, and the dog was going to compensate for that, was it?

  “It’ll turn out wonderfully, darling,” Father had said. “Just you wait and see.” Mother had made a hmph sound through her nose.

  Perhaps his only child would prefer to see more of her father than a dog, she’d said, staring at him over the top of her glasses.

  Tosca was mine, but had seen Father as pack leader. When he was out or Away, she’d jump on the sofa and stare out the living room window, watching for him to come back. Tosca had spent a lot of time at the window. This was when Mother had started liking her. “I know precisely how you feel, Tosca,” she’d said. “Gregory seduces everyone he meets. And more the fool us.”

  I’d looked up seduce: to lead astray. It was incorrect because Father rarely took Tosca for a walk.

  The other meaning was not appropriate.

  • • •

  A white-haired lady Pet Therapist in beige trousers brought in a golden retriever. Kim quickly collected the empty cups. “You could clear a table with one sweep of your tail, Buster. I know you.” Her words sounded cross, but she was laughing. This was the type of thing that utterly confused me.

  Buster wore a red dog jacket with Caring Canine embroidered on it. He stopped beside each resident, his tail waving. “Like the Queen opening a community center,” commented Kim.

  The white-haired lady asked me to hold Buster’s leash while she got herself a cup of tea. Her teeth were long and stuck out slightly, like Grace the pony I remembered from my childhood.

  I would have loved to lie down beside Buster with my head on his tummy, but I knew this would make Mother cross because of the lounge being a public place.

  Mother stroked Buster, her Not that way quieting. She didn’t notice Brenda, a lady with black hair in a fringe and a brightly colored face, bringing in a large box. The box rustled and squeaked.

  The white-haired lady’s teeth flashed. “Goldie, Gertie, and Geraldine: Guinea Pigs Who Give. Who’d like to hold one?” She surveyed the lounge. A lady attached to an IV spread out a napkin on her lap. “Ah, here’s someone keen to have a go.”

  I remembered a TV Variety Show I’d watched with Father while Mother was teaching Opera on a cruise. As I got older, Mother had begun to go Away as soon as Father came back from an engineering trip. Sometimes it was to teach Opera, and sometimes it was to stay with Jane in Dunstable. Mother and Father had almost seemed to avoid each other! On the TV show, there’d been a magician with a wand and a pack of cards and an assistant who’d encouraged the audience to Join In. That was not something I was good at, Mother said.

  Brenda lifted out a black-and-white spotted guinea pig, her tiny feet making bicycling movements, “On duty now, Geraldine,” she said, handing her to me. I stroked her stocky little body with one finger, and she snuggled into my sweater.

  Mother raised her drooping head and stared. Her voice rose.

  “Oh dear,” said the white-haired lady.

  Brenda bent toward Mother. “You might be thinking Geraldine is a rat. Some people do, you know. Guinea pigs get bad press.”

  Mother screamed, not listening, until Maria rushed over with a Pink Wafer from the cookie tin.

  • • •

  I pinned a pair of navy trousers on the line. The elasticated waist sagged. My clothes were looser because of walking up and down to Bay View Lodge twice a day and not eating so many cookies. Mother and I used to choose our favorites from the Peek Freans Family Assortment tin twice a day, at eleven and three o’clock. It is our one indulgence, she used to say.

  After her stroke, it wasn’t the same. There is no point in choosing a cookie on your own. I hadn’t had much time to compare varieties either, so the barrier of dishes hiding the tin had hardly been needed.

  Sylvia’s French doors opened. She’d had a brainstorm. “Your mum going quiet when they played that Mozart made me think…and then it suddenly came to me now. What about an iPod?” Sylvia leaned back, eyebrows arched, mouth open, like people did when they’d won things.

  She explained what one was and that Katie could record all Mother’s Opera CDs onto it. Sylvia touched my arm. “We’ll calm her down and bring you into the modern world, pet. Don’t you worry.”

  I turned a clothespin around and around in my pocket. But I did worry. I worried about Mother being excluded and about Trevor phoning Social Services to send me Away. The unanswered questions about Father’s empty passport and faulty finances, about Mother’s Lost Capacity, and the identity of the woman and baby were niggles at the back of my mind too. And I worried about the Modern World. Managing it without upsetting people or getting shouted at, or there being Incidents.

  7.

  A soft cookie saves dunking.

  —Gregory Carr (Father)

  It was a Wednesday, my scheduled day for dusting and vacuuming upstairs. I was wiping Mother’s dressing table with a damp cloth, replacing the original photos in their exact positions. I looked at Mother and Father’s wedding photo again, thinking how young they looked, and happy.

  Mother had told me they’d gotten engaged at the Ritz. She’d spoken about it once when Father was Away for a long time, when I was about twelve.

  “The night we got engaged, he took me for dinner and dancing at the Ritz,” she’d said. “At midnight, the band played ‘Volare,’ and Gregory got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Everyone held their breath.”

  “What did you say?” I’d asked.

  “I said yes, of course!” There was a snort. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here now, would you? I was head over heels. We both were. He was the most exciting man I’d ever met. Tall, charming, energetic. Like Laurence Olivier. My friends envied me.”

  “What shoes were you wearing?” I’d wondered if Mother’s slippers had been made of glass.

  She’d stopped smiling. “They were turquoise blue to go with my dress. Pointed. That was the fashion.”

  “Did you leave one behind?”

  Her frown had returned. “No, of course not. How could I have walked with only one shoe?”

  She’d looked down at her antique engagement ring and turned it around and around on her finger, its diamonds glinting. “All a long time ago. And now your Father is away and I am left, again, to pick up the pieces.” She’d flashed me a glance that stopped me from asking where the pieces were.

  “He’s always ignored his past mistakes, and he answers my pleas for caution with a joke or an endearment.” She let go of the ring. “There are none so blind as those who cannot see, dear Jane has so often told me. But then dear Jane is not a mother.” Mother sighed, then snatched up her crossword again. But she could see the clues quite well, even though the print was small.

  Yes, I’d understood what Mother meant. Father had once burned a hole in his study chair with his cigar and had never mentioned it to Mother. That was ignoring past mistakes. He did put his arm around Mother when she was cross, or said in a funny voice: Trouble at t’mill or The native is restless.

  The Great Dictator was another of his names for her. She didn’t like it, even though it made her sound im
portant, because she left the room when he said it. Suddenly. With a slam of the door. Sometimes Father marched on the spot as well, as if he was reliving his days in the Army. All these were jokes because Father laughed when he said them.

  Mother didn’t laugh. She used to widen her eyes at him and tilt her chin toward me in a signal I didn’t understand. In the end she’d say Oh, I give up and stop mentioning debts or risks or schemes. She’d pick up a book on Ancient History—there is comfort in revisiting the grandiose folly of others—and it took her mind off what was bound to happen, yet again, to Father.

  I’d tried to imagine Mother and Father when they were young, long before I was born. I screwed up my eyes and saw them dancing at the Ritz, saw the people clapping when Mother said yes, saw them turning joyful somersaults together around the ballroom.

  Sylvia came over with the iPod. I hadn’t imagined something so tiny, something you just rubbed with a finger, like Aladdin’s lamp in The Thousand and One Nights, to bring it to life. I half expected an Opera Singer, mouth open, arms outflung, to materialize.

  When I brought the iPod into Bay View Lodge, Mother wouldn’t look at it and swatted the earphones away. Her Not that way got louder, and I felt heat rising in my face. It was only when I turned the volume up that she looked around her.

  “In here, Mother.” I tapped it. “All your Operas are in here now.”

  She let me put the earphones in her ears, and then she sat, silent, her left hand clutching the side of her chair. A tear trickled from under her glasses. I took a startled breath. Had I hurt her? I dabbed at her cheek with a tissue, but she smacked my hand. I was looking at her, chewing my lip, wondering if I should ask Maria to make her a cup of tea, when she smiled.