Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  ‘I’d get used to it?’

  ‘It doesn’t work that way, Sean, I don’t think.’ She sniffed. ‘And if I don’t have this baby, how am I supposed to ever, ever forgive you?’

  Week 9. I will never tell you why, baby mine – never. What he said, what he wanted. But now I know and now I am sure. He triggered something in me, something I wasn’t sure was there. I’m a bear. A mother bear. And I will tell you right now: I will love you more than anything in the entire world. I already love you with a love that is stronger, and fiercer, than I believed myself capable of, or than I have ever come close to feeling before. And it will be enough.

  Gigi

  It was odd to realize the lengths to which you could go to disguise or deny or ignore your unhappiness, and odder still the moments which stripped that away and forced you to confront it. Mostly it was other people who held up a mirror you had to stare at. Or tiny moments.

  Most of the time Gigi was fine. ‘Fine.’ The answer she always gave to the question of how she was. And most of the time it was true. She went to work, and helped people, and ate biscuits and joked with her colleagues, who were friends too after all these years, and moaned about management, and she came home again. She checked in with her kids by email or text, more rarely by phone. She flicked through the Sunday papers and wondered if she was a cruising type of person, and, if she was, would she choose Norwegian fjords or the exotic East. She watched television, and listened to the radio, and formed opinions about the news, and read her book-club selection religiously before the monthly meeting at The White Horse with her colleagues from the maternity ward. She kept house and baked and took the car to the car wash. Weighed herself periodically and made promises to eat less and move more, and bought things on sale that were just a bit too small, because she intended to slim into them. Held dinner parties, and from time to time went to the posh makeup counter in the department store and asked them to update her look with a new lipstick or attempt to preserve her youth with an expensive eye cream. Gave money to good causes. Visited her father-in-law and sat with him, trying to get the Pointless answer on tea-time television. Tried to see the films nominated for Oscars so she could say, when the time came, whether she agreed that the winners were deserving. She was funny, and warm, more a listener than a talker, and far, far too proud to let anyone see that anything was wrong.

  Most of the time, she looked at Richard and willed herself to remember all the good things about him. Not to resent washing his socks, or his falling asleep in front of any television programme that started after 9 p.m. Or that he didn’t talk to her any more – always the crossword at breakfast, the news at supper. She flicked through her memories of better times. He was a good man. A kind man. He didn’t shout, he hadn’t a violent bone in his body, he never had a go at her if she bought a new dress, he didn’t go on at her to lose weight. He’d fathered her children, and the two of them had provided for their family.

  She tried. And still …

  Watching a mother answer a dozen questions her son asked her in the supermarket, helpless against the irresistible pester power of the toddler in the trolley – the absolute fondness with which she talked to the child, the tenderness … could make Gigi cry in the aisle, where five minutes earlier she’d been busy with a list, trying to remember whether she needed washing powder or icing sugar.

  A husband in front of her in a queue could put his hand on the small of his wife’s back, and stroke her, lean in to whisper something in her ear, and the possessive, intimate gesture could make Gigi ache.

  And sometimes, at 3 a.m., as Richard slept soundly beside her, she could feel complete despair and utter loneliness, even as she tried to count her blessings instead of sheep, and be gripped by the terrible fear that her life might always be just like this – like the best bits of it were all far behind her, and what was left was a slow decline to a state like James’s with only moments of joy, and all of those vicarious.

  She had tried, really tried, to talk to Richard. Much more than once. But he wouldn’t meet her in the middle. He waved away her concerns with rhetorical questions – we’re okay, aren’t we – we’re so lucky, aren’t we? He had a way of making her doubt the seriousness of her issues, blame tiredness or menopause or empty-nest syndrome, and by the time she realized it was a confidence trick, the moment had passed, blown away by Richard’s bluster. And she went back to ignoring it.

  But somewhere in the back of her soul, she knew that whatever Richard said, and however often he said it, this feeling was relentless and, eventually, it would not be ignored. It was like watching the tide go out on a beach. Gradually, bit by bit, and oh so slowly, the waves receded. Whether you wanted them to or not.

  Tess

  January

  By mid-January, Iris was physically well enough to be discharged and Tess couldn’t procrastinate any longer about deciding where she should go. There was a space at Clearview. There wasn’t always. Someone had had to die to free up that place. The woman who phoned was gentle but firm. She needed an answer about Iris. Tess said yes, please, she’d take it, pending a visit, which was hastily arranged. She’d burst into tears when she put the phone down. She felt utterly overwhelmed. Nothing in her life was as she thought it would be. She needed to move out of Sean’s flat. He’d left, that night, eventually – that dreadful New Year’s Eve, when it had become clear to him that no amount of tea or apology or explanation was going to lead to resolution. He stayed with friends, she presumed, although she hadn’t asked.

  She’d gone to bed, fully clothed, and cried herself through to midnight.

  In the days that followed, they’d avoided seeing each other. She knew he’d been to the flat – presumably to pick up clothes and his post – but he’d done it while she was at work, where she’d been going through the motions, preoccupied horribly by what was happening. After a week of this weird, unnatural way of living, he’d come to see her, texting to ask if he could and ringing the doorbell of his own flat.

  Sean had looked drained and tired when she’d opened the door: there were dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there before. She felt a rush of pity for him. He’d made the storm that had engulfed them, but now he looked so pathetic, shivering in the rain.

  ‘What’s happening?’ His arms were out, his palms upturned. He looked vulnerable, pleading.

  She made her voice sound stronger than she felt.

  ‘Well, it’s over. I’ll move out. As soon as I can get myself sorted.’

  ‘I don’t mean … I don’t need … I don’t want you to go.’

  ‘But I have to. We can’t carry on living together. We’re clearly going in very different directions.’

  ‘This is madness. How did we get here?’

  Tess felt herself harden against him. ‘You know how.’

  Sean shook his head in an almost violent gesture, and raised his hand like a stop signal.

  ‘I want you to forget what I said. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I can’t lose you, Tess.’

  As she answered, she knew she meant what she said. ‘You already have.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’ Still the head shake. Denial.

  Now she resented having to explain it to him.

  ‘You can’t just put it all away, Sean. It doesn’t work like that. You did say it. I can’t forget it. This has to be it. It has to be over. You’ll end up hating me in the end. Or I’ll hate you.’

  ‘I couldn’t hate you.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

  She didn’t doubt it. He looked close to tears.

  Perhaps he interpreted her silence as weakening. He reached out to touch her hand. ‘I can make you forgive me.’

  It was a bad choice of words, although he wasn’t to know it. It was Donna’s phrase. Forgive me. She pulled her hand out of his and folded her arms protectively across herself. It was Tess’s turn to shake her head.

  ‘Maybe I could. But I couldn’t
forget.’ She looked at the floor.

  For a moment they both stood in silence. Then Sean sniffed hard, rubbing his hand under his nose. His voice was quieter when he spoke again.

  ‘They’ve asked me to go to New York, for two or three weeks.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s what you wanted.’

  ‘I wanted it with you.’

  But just with me, she thought.

  ‘You wanted it for you, Sean.’

  ‘You make me sound like such a prick.’

  She didn’t mean to. She was trying to be honest. But she daren’t back-track on anything now.

  ‘I’ll be gone by the time you come back.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’m going to ask my mother if I can stay at hers for a while.’

  ‘Christ, Tess. You and your mum?’

  ‘She’ll probably be away. She most often is.’

  ‘Still …’ Sean knew what her relationship with Donna was like. But she couldn’t let him in.

  She put her hand up to stop him. ‘It’s only temporary. I’ll find something else. Besides, it’s not really your problem. Not any more.’

  She knew she sounded brittle, and harsh. It was the only way she could do it. She was holding it all together, hanging on by a thread. If she let him be kind, if she leant on him in any way at all, she might shatter.

  ‘It’ll be my baby too.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  But she knew he was right. He turned and walked away.

  Tess made herself focus on Iris. With Sean in New York for a few weeks, she needn’t ask Donna right away. That would take a bit of working up to. She’d need to tell her about the baby: nothing else but that truth would make sense to Donna. She’d sent her an email asking when she was home, but she hadn’t heard yet. That wasn’t unusual. Donna usually checked emails only when she was near an internet café.

  What mattered first was getting Iris settled. Tess, and the baby – they could wait. She booked an appointment with her GP, which was in ten days’ time. She wouldn’t think too much about it until then. She had the appointment at Clearview to get through first. One thing at a time. If she could just take things one thing at a time.

  It was a particularly horrid day, grey and cold and drizzly, but that seemed appropriate. If Clearview looked okay on a day like this, it would look more than okay when the sun shone. And the brochure hadn’t lied. The long driveway swept around towards the house, perched high. Tess parked up around the back, and walked to the front entrance. The manager, Claire, gave her the tour. She was a large, smiley woman, with a calm and reassuring way about her. As they walked, she talked enthusiastically about the facilities, and respectfully about the residents. She’d had a grandfather with Alzheimer’s, she told Tess, who’d died long before this kind of place was available. Her voice broke very briefly when she spoke about him, and she took a deep breath before she carried on speaking. That was why she was so evangelical about matching the right care with the person. Tess completely believed her. If it was a sales pitch, she was buying. But it didn’t feel like it was.

  Tess knew it was a nice place, as places like this went. As places like this went, it was actually pretty wonderful. It had been described as ‘cutting-edge’ in an article Tess had read when she was trying to decide where Iris should go, designed after the Dutch model. It specialized in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, so it was custom-built for their needs, rather than adapted to try to meet them. It was avowedly non-medical in feel, the brochure claimed. It was set up more like a village, designed to be familiar and comforting for its residents. As well as en suite rooms for all its residents, set on corridors that had street names like King Street and the Green, rather than numbers and letters, it had a small pub, with a darts board and a wooden bar, a hairdresser’s and even a tiny sweet shop, with old-fashioned sweets in big jars. A vast noticeboard in the entrance lobby advertised a huge array of activities – sing-along sessions, games afternoons, movie nights – Arsenic and Old Lace was on tonight – next week it was The Sound of Music. She wondered if her grandmother would ever be well enough to make the most of any of it.

  Iris was ill enough but not too ill to be here. Tess was quickly growing used to the intricate processes and exacting criteria of healthcare for the elderly, the paperwork and the administrative hoops. The bronchitis that had seen her admitted to the geriatric ward of the local hospital had responded well to the antibiotics and that part of Iris was better. Tess had wondered long and hard in the dead of night whether she was glad about this, whether it would’ve been better for Iris to have died. Whether Iris would want to die, if she really knew what was happening to her. Part of her knew Iris would hate this half-life she was living, but not as much as she hated the burden her living it placed on Tess, the fixer. The larger part of her responded like a child to the illness, became tearful and anxious, and wanted to pray she would recover. In recent times, the scales had tipped slightly, but she had still felt more relief than anything else when the young doctor with the shy smile had said Iris was doing well enough to be moved.

  She’d seen several places she couldn’t have borne to leave her. But at this place, she thought maybe she could. It was much nearer than the hospital, thank God. She could come and go much more easily, and see more of Iris than she had done when she was in Salisbury. It had a good feel and a warmth – an optimism, almost – that had been missing in other places.

  It was terrifyingly expensive, but Tess had been surprised at how much Iris had saved between her husband Wilf’s pension and the money they’d invested when he was alive. They’d lived, she realized, more simply than they had ever needed to. Iris’s house had to be worth somewhere near half a million, she guessed. It seemed like an enormous amount of money. But this place would cost an enormous amount of money too. It was a hateful sum. But it had to be done. She tried not to think about how families of younger sufferers felt. People who couldn’t possibly afford this kind of facility. Imagine having to leave someone you loved somewhere you hated? This was bad enough. They were impossible decisions. At ninety-five, Iris’s life really was finite. Ten years seemed impossible – two or three more likely. Possible that she wouldn’t live the rest of this one. But if Iris lived to be a hundred, it would cost almost half a million pounds for her to spend those years here. It was an astronomical amount. There’d be nothing left to show for her life, or Wilf’s.

  Tess knew what Iris would have to say about it. She’d hate it both politically – she was fiercely proud of the NHS and instinctively mistrustful of anything she perceived as threatening it – and she’d hate it personally. ‘Christ, darling. That’s a lot of holidays … Bugger that. I’ll take the long walk. Pass me the paracetamol and the whisky. Ice flow here I come …’

  She’d hate it more if she knew about the baby. Iris had that generation’s interest in leaving something behind. She’d worry less about Donna, but she’d want to do something for the baby. Tess could hear her on the subject, almost as if she was actually speaking.

  But she didn’t know about the baby. She didn’t know about any of it. She’d forgotten what Tess had told her. She’d probably never really taken it in. And she never would, now. Knowing what Iris would want to happen didn’t help Tess.

  This was her decision and hers alone, and she was making it in this place. Whatever it cost, Tess was going to pay it. Even if Iris never went to one damn fitness class or listened to one sing-along. She was coming. It was the best that Tess could give her.

  Someone appeared in the corridor and told Claire there was a phone call she needed to take. Claire put her hand on Tess’s arm and asked if she minded.

  ‘We had to send one of our residents to hospital last night. I’ve been trying to speak to her son – he’s away on holiday.’

  ‘Of course. Please do.’

  ‘Please feel free to have a look in here, rather than comi
ng back to sit in the office. By all means chat to some of the carers. Have a cup of tea … I’ll be right back.’

  Tess helped herself to a cup of tea from the heated jugs on a table by the door. She was pouring milk and stirring the mug when a woman came and stood beside her. She wasn’t wearing the pink tunic the staff all seemed to be wearing.

  ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m just … I’m waiting for Claire. I’m on a tour.’

  The woman looked at her curiously. But the curiosity felt strangely uninvasive, just kind.

  So Tess explained. ‘My grandmother … she might be coming here.’

  The stranger nodded understanding, and for a moment busied herself making a coffee.

  ‘Do you have someone here?’

  ‘My father-in-law. He’s that one, over there, in the red jumper.’ She gestured towards the fireplace, to an old man in a winged-back armchair.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you, if he’s … is he happy here?’

  ‘Bless you. There’s a question …’ She smiled ruefully. ‘He’d hate knowing that this was how he’d ended up.’

  ‘So would my grandmother.’

  ‘He’d be foaming at the mouth at how much it costs, and I’m pretty sure he’d have topped himself if he’d known.’

  Tess laughed with relief. ‘I was just thinking the exact same thing about my gran.’

  ‘But that is the only silver lining in the whole bloody awful cloud, isn’t it? They don’t know …’

  This was the first conversation Tess had ever had with someone in the same position, she realized.

  The other woman was still watching her face intently. ‘It’s brilliant here, by the way. Do you want to sit down a minute?’

  She pointed to a table by the window, and Tess nodded. ‘If you’ve got time.’

  The woman looked over at her father-in-law. ‘He’s nodded off. I like to think it’s not my conversation.’ She laughed. ‘I’m Gigi, by the way.’