Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  ‘Rubbish yourself. It’s a Herculean labour. Can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to pull it off …’

  ‘Course you will. When you have to.’ Gigi curled up in the opposite corner. ‘You’ve got your hands full, anyhow, just feeding this one right now.’

  Emily’s fingers played in the morning quiff of Ava’s baby hair. ‘One very greedy one.’

  ‘What about the expressing?’ There’d been some talk, the last time she’d seen Emily, of what Emily had called ‘the milking machine’. Evidently Emily’s mum was of the opinion that Emily should be expressing milk now, so that Christopher could do his fair share of night and early-morning feeds.

  Emily turned her nose up disdainfully. ‘Hated that machine. Never felt more of an Ermintrude. You should see what it does to a nipple, G.’ She held her thumb and forefinger wide apart.

  Gigi grimaced and folded her arms protectively over her own chest.

  ‘Besides, truthfully, I don’t mind this bit. The night feeds. And the early ones. Actually, it’s rather lovely. Peaceful. Just me and her.’

  ‘And me.’

  Emily blew her a kiss. ‘And Granny.’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother with the bottles, then. If it’s easy and you don’t mind …’

  ‘I suppose I’m being a bit selfish. Chris might like it just as much as me.’

  Gigi didn’t suppose so. ‘Who has the stitches and the dodgy pelvic floor, though?’

  Emily laughed. ‘Quite right. Screw Daddy, hey, Ava?!’

  It had been that way from the first time Christopher had brought her home, when she’d bounced into the kitchen, sat down at the table with a mug of tea and made them all feel like she’d been there forever. She’d never made Gigi feel like the mother-in-law. She’d never staged the silent war the wives and girlfriends of her friends’ sons had – those first couple of years where the younger woman had to make it clear to the older woman that they’d been usurped and replaced. Very Animal Kingdom. Gigi was profoundly grateful for that: she’d never wanted the war. In some ways it had been a relief to hand Christopher over. Emily could never have what she had had of Chris, and the same was true of what Emily had of her son now, and it was all absolutely as it should be.

  If she was completely honest, though, it wasn’t true in the same way about Oliver. You loved your children equal amounts in vastly different ways. Christopher, Oliver, Megan – they were all so very distinct, and so was the way she felt about them.

  Emily’s voice was low and conspiratorial now. ‘So … what do you make of Caitlin and the very big announcement?’

  Gigi shuffled a little closer, although she thought it was unlikely that either Olly or Caitlin were the 6 a.m. sort, earwigging in the hall.

  ‘Bloody hell …’

  It was the most cogent thought she could offer this early and this soon.

  ‘I know, right?’ Emily was delighted. ‘Chris and I couldn’t stop talking about it when we went to bed.’

  Gigi felt a stab of envy. Richard had barely said a word about it or anything else when they went to bed. Their bedroom had become something of a Trappist Monk’s affair of late. He’d mumbled something about a good day, and Olly being a piece of work, patted her hand by silent way of thanks for it all, and been asleep before she’d taken off her mascara.

  ‘What did Chris say?’

  ‘He said it was bloody typical Olly.’

  ‘I suppose he’s half right. Though even for Olly it was a bit of a –’

  ‘But what about her?’

  ‘Letting him?’ Gigi could hear the incredulity in her own voice.

  ‘Exactly. I mean, wouldn’t you want to get to know us a bit first?’

  ‘She didn’t really seem that interested in getting to know us.’

  Emily nodded in furious agreement. ‘What do you reckon? Shy or aloof?’

  ‘Aloof.’ That was the truth.

  ‘Oh dear. I think you might be right …’

  Gigi realized she’d hoped Emily might say ‘shy’ and make her feel bad for her own answer.

  ‘I mean shy might explain being quiet and not eating properly and all that Princess Di fringe-gazing, but it doesn’t really explain not doing the dishes or even offering to do them, or choosing to go for a walk when we’re all about to play Balderdash, or going to bed from a position of wakefulness. Everyone knows the Christmas rule is that you fall asleep sprawled on the sofa during the Bond film under a blanket of sweet wrappers, and then you go to bed when you wake yourself up with your own snoring …’

  ‘Prosecution rests, milord.’ Gigi winked.

  ‘Oh God, I’m being a bitch, aren’t I?’ Emily gazed down at Ava’s downy head. ‘I’ll turn my milk sour and give Ava the squits.’

  Gigi laughed. ‘You’ve just said all the things I thought.’

  Emily sat Ava up on her lap, leant forward into an open hand in a position so utterly familiar and dear to Gigi that she thought she might just spontaneously lactate, and began to rub and pat her back to elicit the magical burp.

  ‘We’ll have to drag her out of her shell, though, won’t we? If she’s a Gilbert-in-waiting? I want a sister-in-law I can hang out with –’

  Ava burped, far more loudly than someone so small ought to be able to.

  ‘Clever girl!’ both women said simultaneously, in their baby voices, as though the involuntary digestive response was Mensa-worthy.

  Emily handed the lollopy bundle that was milk-drunk Ava to Gigi while she refastened her nightclothes. Gigi put the baby high on one shoulder and inhaled deeply from the crease in her neck.

  The long driveway of Clearview House was flanked by trees, like one of those long avenues in France – the trees Napoleon planted to give his troops shade, many years before they’d needed it. Now that was what you called planning ahead … So named because of its position on top of a hill, the building possessed a view that was indeed clear and rather lovely. You could see for miles on a good day, which this was not. The house was big, and beautiful. Palladian? Was that the word? Gigi wasn’t up on her architecture, but it was grand. First pages of Country Life grand. You could almost imagine you were a house guest at a glamorous shooting party or something, where Anthony Hopkins was the butler, as you drove up. If you ignored the ambulance and the municipal-style signage to the visitors’ car park tucked around at the side. And, once inside, the faint and universal institution smell was hardly Downton Abbey. Faint but omnipresent.

  The reception area was optimistically dressed with a lit Christmas tree and a pile of obviously fake presents. Someone had evidently brought in homemade mince pies – an unlidded tin sat on the coffee table with last year’s magazines. The receptionist greeted them warmly, relentlessly cheerful as always.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr and Mrs Gilbert. Did you have a good one?’

  ‘Great thanks,’ Richard answered. ‘You?’

  She smiled. ‘I was here. I’m not off until tomorrow. We’ll have our dinner then. Me and the kids.’

  He nodded. Gigi smiled back. ‘Someone else cooking, I hope, if it’s your day off?’

  ‘Ha, ha. I wish!’ She pushed the buzzer that admitted them to the inner hall. ‘Mr Gilbert Senior is in the day room, I think.’

  The dreaded day room. Richard called it God’s waiting room. To its face, working on the principle that no one sitting in it really heard you. His father had been in the nursing home for five years. Richard still wasn’t comfortable here; it was painfully obvious. Gigi didn’t feel that way. It always took her aback, just for a moment, to see her beloved father-in-law as he was now – he loomed so large in her memories as a different person. But she liked it here. They were kind, and it was calm and peaceful most of the time. Easily the nicest of all the places they’d visited. Progressively managed, with compassionate and committed staff.

  She had a very definite memory of how James had been. Tall and upright. Proud and strong. Funny and warm. Twinkly. That was a good word. And now he was here, and, most of the time, he was
the exact opposite of all those words, and most of the others you might have used to describe him thirty years ago.

  Richard’s mother, Mary, had died not long after Richard and Gigi had met, and after thirty-five years of marriage. Gigi never met her. She and Richard weren’t serious, not at first, and Mary was already ill, so there’d never been a good time to introduce them. Richard hadn’t taken her to the funeral either, although she would have gone if he had asked. She hadn’t even met James until a couple of months after that. Theirs had been an almost immediate connection. The first time they’d met – over a Cheddar ploughman’s in the pub – they’d found acres of common ground – left-of-centre politics, a deep and abiding loathing of Paul McCartney’s Wings, the ability to perform the Dead Parrot sketch with one hundred per cent accuracy, and a vague daydream of driving around New Zealand in a campervan one day. They laughed at the same daft things. Often things Richard didn’t find funny – although, of course, she’d been so in love with him at that point that she hadn’t noticed, or maybe she had noticed and just hadn’t minded. She’d wished she’d known James earlier – while he was losing Mary, and afterwards. She always knew she would have helped.

  For the first ten years after his wife’s death, James, proud, sad and determined not to be a burden (his word, not theirs), had rattled around in the large Arts and Crafts house the two of them had shared, surrounded by the memories he’d held so dear, and which had, in fact, imprisoned him in his grief and in the past. James lived more than three hours by car from where Richard and Gigi had set up home, so elaborate plans and arrangements had to be made to see him. Her own parents were much closer, and it showed in the relationship. Retirement hit James at the same time as bereavement, in a perfect storm of the unfamiliar and frightening, and it took him out at the knees. He’d commuted to work in London all their married life, leaving before seven in the morning and returning in darkness. His friends had been the husbands of her friends, and, without the glue of his wife, his life simply and quietly came apart. There was no shape to it. The garden, given over almost entirely to grass when Richard had been a boy and trained into something altogether lovelier by Mary over the years, became painfully immaculate because it was essentially all he had to do. The precisely trimmed hedges and perfectly pruned rose bushes made Gigi profoundly sad.

  In the early 1990s, after a health scare – an angina attack in the garden, not serious but tremendously helpful at the time – he’d finally been persuaded to sell that house and move into a smaller home much nearer to Richard and Gigi, in a village with a proper sense of community. It was where Gigi’s own mother and father lived. The new home, along with the will and the connections of his in-laws, had given him something of a second wind, and he’d had probably fifteen good years there – playing bowls with Gigi’s father, Harry, pottering in his small garden, and being genuinely helpful and useful to Gigi, who had come to adore him. She was back at her work as a midwife, and the boys were like puppies, and there was suddenly, magically, a job for him to do. Chris and Olly had worshipped him. When Richard was time-poor, focused on work and paying the mortgage, and not, anyway, a father of the wrestling and building variety, their grandad had all the time in the world for them. He picked them up from school and walked them home the long way, through the woods, taught them how to fish and tie knots, and read everything Tolkien ever wrote to them. He’d been wary of Megan at first – unsure of how to be with a little girl – but she’d enchanted him, and he’d done serious time at her fairy tea parties at the end of his garden, sipping water from a miniature cup and making small talk with dollies. The garden was pleasingly haphazard, and even a little overgrown, and Gigi loved each weed that sprouted while he was busy being Grandad.

  Gigi’s dad had died in 1998, the same year Megan was born – and after that her mother, Violet, and James had become a bit of a double act, tackling the supermarket together and going to matinee shows at the cinema in the afternoon, ‘when the stench of nachos isn’t so strong’. There was no romance – neither of them had had the remotest interest in that sort of connection, both treasuring memories of a beloved spouse – but they had been wonderful companions for each other.

  And then, around the time Megan turned four, something had started to eat away at the edges of James’s brain, even as his age made him frailer and weaker – almost suddenly. Gigi had made excuses and allowances for his memory lapses and conspired with Violet and the kids to hide his forgetfulness from Richard, for all their sakes, but when he brought Megan home from a walk in the park and left her outside in the buggy in the driving rain because he’d forgotten that she was in there, even she had been forced to confront the reality of the situation. Once she’d accepted it, it seemed to speed up. The man she’d known was disintegrating, from the outside in, and from the inside out. For another few years, they’d struggled on, maintaining a patchwork of care between themselves and the NHS, and then, eventually, private home nurses. But it wasn’t fair, on any of them. Violet said it was almost like being widowed twice.

  And so he’d come here five years ago. It was what he’d needed – the right thing. Richard had power of attorney by then, and he had insisted, and James was his father, after all. He’d argued that the toll on Gigi was too great. But she’d always felt like that was an excuse – and she’d always resented him just a little bit for it, even though she grudgingly admitted how hard it had become. He needed pretty constant care, proper medical attention – a holistic approach to looking after him. It was the right thing to do. Gigi knew it. But she’d hated it. More even than Richard, she thought. They’d found the very best place they could. The nurses were committed and kind, and they treated the residents as people, not inmates. But she still hated it. His lucidity came and went, but he’d been particularly with it the day they’d first left him there, and his face as they’d gone – betrayed and frightened – had haunted Gigi ever since.

  Clearview was ferociously expensive – almost the dearest place they’d looked at. James had insured against his need for social care and released capital from the sale of the home he’d shared with Richard’s mother, when he’d downsized. So his bills were covered. Gigi had friends facing far harder decisions. She knew people who’d had to make heart-breaking choices and compromises because they simply couldn’t afford places like this. She never stopped being grateful that she and Richard didn’t have to, and it made her cross that Richard still pulled a face about coming here to visit his dad. She wondered what would happen by the time they needed the same type of care. Generations like James’s had wanted to leave something behind for their children. Generations like hers probably stood no chance. It was often the thought of that, and not this place itself, that made her sad. James was safe and cared for, and he would be until he died. And that made him lucky, even in the misfortune of his illness.

  And now he was the last man standing, after Violet died in her bed, of an unheralded and catastrophic stroke, two years earlier. Gigi’s sense that he was the last link with their pasts made him seem even more precious. Placing a new-born Ava on his lap a few months ago – the first great-grandchild – had been so very poignant for her. He hadn’t a clue who the baby was, but he’d held her carefully and stroked her smooth pink cheek with his gnarled finger, murmuring gently that she was beautiful, exactly the way he had done with Megan years before.

  Gigi had spent her working life in hospitals. But she worked at the other end. The good end – the happiest moment. Midwifery was ninety-nine per cent of the time about the beginning of life, full of promise and excitement and the future. This half-alive, half-dead state sometimes freaked her out. It was just so damn sad, the idea that, after everything, at the end, this was what there was …

  ‘How are you, Dad?’ Richard had a special tone he used for James now. Like a vicar, Gigi always thought. A vicar talking to Sunday school. It jarred with her, and, she suspected, with his father, even if through the fog.

  James looked up from the television,
where the cast of EastEnders appeared to be celebrating Christmas with their customary joie de vivre and love for all mankind. A younger, healthier James would have left the room, shaking his head in disdain, if such a programme had been on. His head sat pushed forward on his neck now, his shoulders hunched like a vulture. He was thinner these days, so his older sweaters – like the navy zipped cardigan he was wearing today – hung shapelessly off him. He’d always been so tanned from the gardening, stark lines on his muscled upper arms and thick thighs from shorts and t-shirts. Now his skin had the thin, parchment quality of elderly people who spent most of their time inside. His eyes were watery and red. And today, she realized, completely empty.

  Upstairs, in his room, there was a large corkboard, on which were pinned photographs: pictures of James and Mary, one from their wedding, and through their decades together. Of Richard and Gigi, and the children – all labelled with their names. There was a new, arty, black-and-white shot of Ava, taken the day she came home from hospital, the camera up very close to her precious face, all bush-baby eyes and flattened new-born nose. YOUR FIRST GREAT-GRANDCHILD, AVA MARY! Gigi had written beside it.

  Some days, James did a passable impression of the man he’d once been. You could have a conversation with him, do a few clues in the crossword. Some days, much rarer ones, thank God, he was visibly distressed, stuck in a period of time you might not understand, asking for his own mother or begging to go home. He would cry. He was never in the day room on those days. Distress could be contagious.

  Some days, he was just vacant, like he’d been emptied out. Today was clearly one of those days.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, politely curious.

  Gigi pulled a footstool nearer to James and sat down on it, taking his hands in her own. ‘It’s us, James. Richard and Grace.’ Everyone in the world but him called her Gigi, and they had for as long as she could remember. He never once had. Grace was such a beautiful name, he had said, right from the start. The name her parents had chosen for her. And the name he would use. And he always had. She was better at the voice, she knew. Years of practice, pitching her tone right with labouring women. That bit, at least, was not so very different. James nodded ponderously, as if he knew, but that was just a reflex. Three minutes later, he might well ask again.