Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  Tess bought herself some time by taking a big gulp of tea. ‘Wow. Congratulations. That’s … that’s amazing …’

  ‘It’s bloody fantastic. I mean, I wanted it, I’ve wanted it for ages. I thought maybe another year or two … but it’s come up now.’

  ‘Did somebody die?’

  ‘No! Andy’s leaving.’ Again, the feeling of having missed something. Who the hell was Andy with no surname? Then the vague recollection of drinks and dinner a few months ago with a broad and tall American with that uniquely thick hair only American men seem to have, and those very straight, very white teeth, and his monogram embroidered above his heart on a cotton shirt.

  ‘You know Andy.’

  Not exactly. A Martini, two courses and an espresso with a bloke who liked to talk about himself a lot. She sure as hell knew Andy better than Andy knew her.

  But Sean was allowing only very brief pauses in which she could catch up. ‘So it’s Andy’s job. And they want me to start relatively soon. I mean no pressure, obviously. We’re talking months, not weeks.’

  That’s a relief, then, Tess thought ruefully. Although of course these days she was all about the weeks and the months. Thirty-six weeks to go. Eight months. If they were going through with it. If it was real, and really happening. When the company said no pressure, she didn’t imagine they meant that they’d wait thirty-six weeks.

  ‘I mean, of course they understand we’ve got things to sort out (there it was, the first we) – renting this place out, finding somewhere there, that kind of stuff. Visas, obviously – a mile of red tape, for sure, but they have people to help with that – a whole department of people. But start as soon as that’s sorted …’

  Tess watched him while he spoke, replies or interjections clearly not required at this point – his familiar face in what she recognized were unfamiliar raptures. She stopped listening, but he didn’t stop talking, and so she was tuned out of the exuberant diatribe. And she felt like she was at the top of a black run on her skis and they’d made the decision to set off down the mountain without her permission – as so often happened when she was at the top of a mountain on skis, and she’d got her angle all wrong, and pointed downwards before she was ready. Exhilaration, excitement, panic and sheer terror, swirling in a nauseating maelstrom in her stomach.

  ‘Please say something.’ As if there’d been a space. Or even a pause. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘I’ve sprung it on you. I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. I know it has implications for you, and it’s not straightforward. I know that. You need some time. I’m just so bloody excited. I should have chosen a better moment. But this all happened yesterday, and we were late last night, and so sleepy when we came in, and I have barely slept, and I just couldn’t hold it in.’

  The comparison was so obvious a child could have drawn it. New York was Sean’s baby. And he hadn’t been able to hold it in. He’d been fizzing and brimming and desperate to share it with her. He hadn’t been hugging this new information to himself for five days.

  She knew this was the optimum moment, now, to tell him. It should have just burst from her. Not a yes, or a no. Not a weird revelation one-upmanship, even though she’d so win that contest.

  ‘It’s just a bit of a shock.’

  ‘But we’ve talked about it before.’ His tone had become imploring.

  He was right. They had. Of course they had. But it had formed part of those daft couple conversations over their time together. Mostly at the very beginning, when you still had sex in places other than the bedroom, and could get sort of drunk without drinking, just from being together. The kind that happened on long walks and in dark corners of restaurants and on lazy Sunday mornings. Full of what ifs and dreams and future plans. The trouble was, she couldn’t remember the last time they’d had one of those. And she knew that for her two things had changed dramatically since the last time. Iris. How could he not understand, after all the time they’d been together, how central Iris was to all her thinking? And this baby. Was it Sean’s fault those things hadn’t the chance to be uppermost in his mind, or was it hers?

  So this was the moment. To make it their news, not hers. To start. So why couldn’t she form the words?

  ‘I thought you’d be excited too.’ The first tiny note of something in his voice that she didn’t have a name for. A casual bystander would miss it; you had to be one of the two people in the relationship to hear it, the infinitesimal inference that she was spoiling it for him. A mere hint of resentment which, once she heard it, was her cue to make it all okay. To smooth it over, compensate for her disappointing reaction. This time, though, there was something else, as she opened her mouth to speak. Rising in her throat.

  She lurched forward, her hands cupped at her mouth.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick …’

  He’d been kind. Because he was kind. He’d tucked her back into bed, blaming last night’s dinner, or a bug circulating at the office. He’d even called her assistant and said she wouldn’t be coming in. If his care had been slightly mechanical, his interest distracted, his kiss on the top of her head perfunctory, she could only be glad. It clearly hadn’t entered his busy, preoccupied head that it could be anything other than a transient illness. And then he couldn’t get out of the flat fast enough, already racing towards his shiny future …

  Tess missed Holly. If she’d been here, that’s who she’d have called. That’s who she would have told. That’s who she would have listened to, whose advice she’d have taken. But Holly was away – on the holiday of a lifetime. Three and a half weeks in Australia with her family. The Barrier Reef, Uluru, Sydney, Perth … She’d been planning it for more than a year, and dreaming of it for far longer than that. She’d left the minute the autumn term at the private school where she worked had ended, sending a breezy and excited voicemail from the airport departure lounge. She’d be seeing the New Year in from Sydney Harbour, and she wouldn’t be back until a few days after that. She’d uploaded a few pictures so far on Instagram – the three of them shiny, happy people, with a variety of exotic-looking backgrounds – and Tess, of course, had done no more than ‘heart’ them. It wasn’t fair to land this on Holly when she was so far away. She didn’t want to say it over the phone, and she didn’t want to write it down, blunt and factual, in an email or a text. But she was counting down the days. Of course Sean should hear it first, but she knew it would be much easier to say it to Holly. A dress rehearsal: get all the nerves out before the real thing …

  Tess gladly put her head under the duvet and closed her eyes, gratefully asleep again, her body and its overwhelming need for rest winning over her brain and its endless machinations. It was two hours before she woke again, and that was only because her mobile phone, on the bedside table and horribly close to her left ear, jolted her from sleep.

  ‘Is that Tess?’ She knew the voice, but in her fog, she couldn’t immediately place it.

  ‘Yes. This is Tess.’

  ‘This is Carol Thomas. Your grandmother’s neighbour …’

  Tess sat up, wide awake at once. Another tremor of nausea at the sudden movement, overlaid with a shiver of dread. She hadn’t called last night. She called most nights. Every night, probably. But she hadn’t last night. It had been late, by the time they’d got home. She hadn’t called.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Thomas. Is everything all right?’ She knew it. This was it. And she hadn’t called.

  ‘Carol. Call me Carol. Please. I hope it’s okay to call.’

  ‘Of course …’

  ‘It’s your grandmother.’

  Obviously. Tess wished she’d get to the point, kind and careful though she was. She was frightened.

  ‘She’s very poorly.’

  Relief flooded warmly over Tess. Poorly wasn’t dead.

  ‘She’s had this cold. I know you know. She’s been in bed for a few days. The carers have been coming in, of course, as usual. But this morning, I popped in, and she … well, sh
e wasn’t right, Tess. She was … it seemed like … she was having trouble breathing. I didn’t want to wait for the carer. So I called an ambulance.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Thomas. Carol. Thank you.’

  ‘That was about half an hour, perhaps an hour ago.’

  ‘And they took her –’

  ‘Yes. She’s at the hospital. I told them I’d call you. It is right, yes, to call you, and not your mother?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll call my mum. Let her know. You did exactly the right thing, Carol.’

  ‘Okay. Good. I can go in, if you need me to … The boys won’t be back from school for a few hours.’

  ‘No. No. That’s very, very kind of you. I’ll come. I’m coming now.’

  There was no need to call the office, who weren’t expecting her. Thank God the nausea seemed to have passed. In truth, it had probably just been superseded. Twenty minutes after she’d hung up on Carol, Tess was in the car, damp-haired from a hasty shower, and afraid. She could feel her blood pounding in her temples and wrists and in her chest. She pulled out too quickly at a junction, causing a driver to brake sharply, and a surge of adrenalin to course unpleasantly through her. The man in the other car honked angrily at her, flipped the bird as he drove past her, his mouth forming a silent, angry slur. Tess gripped the wheel hard, and forced herself to slow both the car and her breathing down.

  She’d known Iris wasn’t well, dammit. She’d last seen her a week, maybe ten days ago. It felt like longer with everything that had happened since. Her grandmother had had a hacking cough that shook her narrow shoulders, and a wheeze on every breath, in and out. She’d lost some weight too, and she had no weight to lose. She’d been particularly absent, as if she’d needed all her energy to breathe, and had none left for memory. She’d looked at Tess but not really seen her, and given short, vague answers to her questions. Their relationship veered this way and that now. Sometimes Iris was still parental, and sometimes it was completely reversed and Tess felt like the adult. Mostly it was both at the same time, within the same visit. But, poorly, Iris had never seemed quite so small, and helpless. There was never so little evidence of the woman she had always been for Tess. She had left profoundly sad. Tears had swum in her eyes and she’d stopped to fill the tank with petrol, even though it was half full already and she normally drove it on fumes, because she had needed a moment. One of the carers who came in twice a day had been with Iris. She’d been particularly kind and calm and reassuring and, besides, Tess had had no choice, with work in the morning and the rest of her life ninety miles up the A303.

  Her grandmother’s dementia had crept in so slowly and so gradually that it had been okay to ignore it for a long time. Iris was an old lady – it was easier, at first, to put things down to that. That wasn’t terrifying. In the beginning, Tess was too busy processing the fact that the upright, vital woman she had known was shrinking in every way. Well into her eighties, Iris had been very much like the Iris she’d always known. She’d seemed like a considerably younger woman. Tess knew Iris had known for some time before she did that what was happening to her wasn’t just ‘wear and tear’. Known before the doctor had confirmed it. It hurt to remember some of the ways Iris herself had tried to cover it up. She’d put notes in her purse, and by the telephone. She’d learnt to cover up what she’d forgotten. Always happy to share her opinion in the past, she’d held back, listening for facts, and framing her responses with the information you’d just given her. It all made sense, in the end, when you looked back.

  One of the carers had told her once that making a cup of tea took twenty-seven different, separate thoughts and actions. That was why it was so hard for a person with a loss of short-term memory. Your brain had to do twenty-seven different stages, just to make a cup of tea. How colossally terrifying it must have been for Iris … as one by one the twenty-seven dwindled away. To multiply that fear – the fear that you don’t know how to make a cup of tea any more – by a hundred, by a thousand everyday functions. Tess came to see the escalation as something close to a blessing. Not for her, but for Iris. When the function of remembering that you weren’t remembering started to fade, the fear must too. She hoped that was so. She needed to believe that was so. It was unbearable to think of Iris being frightened.

  The disease crept along slowly. She’d googled, read up. It wasn’t always slow. It could progress at breakneck speed. Or it could creep. With Iris, it crept. For the first year, it hardly progressed at all. But then, oh so gradually, Iris had declined. Like a full-colour photograph left to fade in the bright sunshine. Less and less of her seemed to remain. Like dementia was nibbling at the edges of her …

  Iris had been adamant about staying at home for as long as she could, and Tess knew how hard she had worked at convincing the roster of carers whom the council sent in that she was coping. Tess had helped when she could, complicit in the subterfuge. She did her grandmother’s food shopping on the internet, so all Iris had to do was to let the man in with his bags. Whenever she visited, Tess spent time reorganizing the cupboards. Iris put beans with washing powder, and toilet rolls behind the biscuits, but she’d sit with a cup of tea and chat while Tess made sense of the chaos. She paid all Iris’s bills. Iris kept notes by the oven, reminding her to switch it off, though, increasingly, Tess bought microwaveable things. She ate less and less heartily anyway, often preferring a bowl of soup to a full meal. Sometimes Tess found a microwave meal cold and congealed still in the machine. She’d remembered to put it in and switch it on, but not to take it out, the ping ignored and the meal uneaten.

  Iris had always been immaculate: that changed. Tess would find her in dirty, unironed clothes – tea stains on a blouse, food marks on a skirt. Sometimes, she smelt less than fresh, and her hair had that sebum odour which meant it hadn’t been washed. She remembered bottles of perfume on a dressing table, a scent she could almost conjure up. Iris ironing in front of Coronation Street, saying she felt less guilty about watching a soap opera if she was doing a task at the same time. Teaching Tess to thread a needle and sew on a button. A wicker basket with pins and spools of cotton thread.

  But Iris’s life had become a delicate balance between holding on and letting go, and Tess knew that she fought to find this balance on her own. Sometimes, often, Tess felt like she’d let her grandmother down. Sean said it wasn’t true but the feeling persisted.

  Over time, ‘Don’t let me go into a home. Never. Promise’ had become ‘Don’t let me ruin your life, love. Promise.’ There was no answer. And now there were no pleas. Iris was past the point of advocating for herself or for anyone else. The passivity of it was deeply sad for Tess. It was the opposite of the Iris she’d known.

  Now physical ill health may be forcing their hands, or removing the decision from them entirely. Sitting in traffic, feeling the panic rise as she went in and out of first gear, Tess didn’t know which would be worse.

  She called her mother’s mobile phone from the car, on her hands-free.

  Donna didn’t pick up: the call went to voicemail. They mostly did.

  ‘Mum. It’s me. They’ve taken Gran to hospital … that cold she had seems to have got worse – Mrs Thomas – Carol – the lady next door – she called an ambulance …’

  Tess paused. If her mother was screening calls, she’d see her name, maybe pick up. She waited for a long moment. Nothing.

  ‘So I was off today anyway. I’m on my way there now. I don’t know what you’re up to. I don’t even know where you are, actually, I realize. But I’ll call again once I’ve seen what’s going on. Okay? I’m in the car for another hour or so. Call me if you get this message … I’ve got the hands-free on, so I can talk. If you call …’ She pushed the button to end the call, cross at the tone of her own voice. Why had she sounded like a little girl? Desperate for her mother’s help? She’d taught herself years ago not to need it, and God knows she hadn’t had it in a long while. And yet there it was, the wheedling tone. The lonely-little-girl plea for help.

  Gigi />
  Gigi would never actually throw the 4.5kg free-range bronze turkey she was holding, hands wide apart clutching the heavy platter, hard and fast at the wall of the dining room.

  Of course she wouldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of woman. Was she?

  Besides, they’d only had it redecorated last year.

  But that was exactly what she was imagining as she stood on the threshold. And thinking about it, just for a few seconds, was strangely fun. Bernard (weren’t all turkeys called Bernard? She’d had to name him – they’d spent so much damn time together) would hit the wall, halfway between the oak sideboard and the coving, making an unwipeable Bernard-shaped grease mark on the striped wallpaper, before sliding down to slump between the decanter and Richard’s father’s ugly clock. Butter trails would slowly follow him. The Royal Doulton platter from their wedding dinner service would shatter with a satisfying crack, sending its hateful burgundy and gold border all across the carpet. She’d been trying to wash off that gold she’d so adored when she first married for years now, but it clung. Bacon strips might be left dangling on the lampshade, Dalíesque.

  And their faces. That was the best part of the imagining. Their shocked and horrified faces.

  Did every happy homemaker feel this way just before Christmas lunch, Gigi wondered. Or was it just her?

  Clearly she was simply delirious with exhaustion. And should have eaten something before that first glass of Prosecco Richard had poured. And the second one she’d poured for herself in the kitchen when no one else was in there, swigging it down in two great gulps. Damn bubbles sent it straight to your toes. Delicious feeling most of the time – slightly debilitating when we you were doing a Christmas dinner. It wasn’t Bernard’s fault, any more than it was anyone else’s. She’d ordered him five weeks ago, from that good butcher in the parade. She’d collected him on the 23rd, queuing up early under the red-and-white-striped awning of the shop with the other smug organized women, ticking things off their endless lists while they waited, and telling each other who they were feeding on the 25th, as if this was in any way interesting. Between then and 5.45 this morning, when she had staggered downstairs, bleary-eyed in her dressing gown, he had commandeered a whole shelf in the refrigerator, relegating the vegetables to a covered bucket in the back garden. Then he had come out, coming closer to room temperature while the oven heated up and she peeled potatoes and parsnips, wondering for the umpteenth time why you had to carve that cross thing in the bottom of every Brussels sprout. Then he had a studded onion shoved up his arse along with some fancy herbs tied with kitchen twine, had been anointed with a coronary-inducing amount of butter, and at last had taken pride of place in the oven. Since then he had been tended more attentively than the average ICU patient – looked at, basted, had his thighs skewered to monitor juice flow, and, eventually, as his moment approached, he’d been dressed up smartly in a streaky bacon waistcoat with tin-foil epaulettes on his wings.