Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  ‘Tess.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Tess. Are you here on your own?’

  ‘Yeah. My mother couldn’t make it today.’ She didn’t know why she felt she needed to add that – convention, she supposed.

  Gigi took a sip of her tea, and a bite of the shortbread biscuit she’d put on her saucer. ‘Well … the truth is, Tess, I have no clue whether he’s happy or not.’

  ‘Is he … does he have Alzheimer’s?’

  Gigi shook her head. ‘Dementia. Same difference, really. I’m guessing your grandmother does too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we’re happy with him here. It’s an excellent place. Truly. The staff are brilliant. His care is exemplary.’

  ‘How long has he been here?’

  ‘Five years.’

  Half a million. Tess couldn’t help the thought. It was like Gigi read her mind.

  ‘Yes. National debt of a small Third World country. I know …’

  ‘My grandmother’s ninety-five.’

  Gigi avoided the obvious response – that she was highly unlikely to stay so long.

  ‘I know it’s only any good if you have it, I know.’

  She doesn’t know if I have it or not, Tess realized.

  ‘There are other places … are you local?’

  It’s okay, Tess wanted to tell her. ‘She has … I mean, we can afford …’

  Her eyes were suddenly full of tears, and she bit down hard on her lip to stop them. It was something about the way Gigi was looking at her.

  ‘Oh, you poor girl.’ Gigi squeezed her arm. Tess had an absurd thought that she wanted Gigi to put her arms around her. That she wanted to tell her about all of it – about her mother, about the baby, about Sean, and his impossible request. This complete stranger who was being kind. But of course she didn’t.

  ‘Then do it. You won’t have to worry about her. When you can’t get here. I mean, you’ll always worry, you always do. But you’re young. You must have a life … You can’t spend all your time here. It’s worth it to know that when you’re not here, your grandmother is being properly cared for. Treated with kindness and respect. Like a person. With dignity. That’s priceless …’

  ‘You’re right.’ It was exactly and all she had needed to hear.

  ‘What’s her name, your grandmother?’

  ‘Iris. Iris Garroway.’

  ‘What a lovely name. One of my favourite flowers, the iris. Does she have blue eyes?’

  Tess nodded. ‘Very blue. They were.’

  ‘And where is she now, love?’

  ‘She’s been in hospital with a chest infection. She was home before that, in Salisbury, with carers.’

  ‘We tried that. It worked for a while. There just comes a point when it isn’t enough, doesn’t there?’

  Tess nodded. ‘And we’re there now, I think …’

  ‘Then you’re doing the right thing. For both of you.’

  And from this woman, this complete stranger, with the kind face, Tess took the permission she needed. There was no one else to give it.

  Week 10. You’re the size of a kumquat, if you please. If I can make it all about me for just a moment, I’m supposed to have skin that is suddenly clearer, and more supple. My hair – which has apparently stopped falling out – is meant to be thicker and more lustrous than before … in short, I am meant to be glowing at this point. Perhaps I am a late bloomer, because I don’t think any of this stuff is happening.

  You, on the other hand, are busy with much more important things. Your angry little fist stumps have emerging fingers and your feet are getting some toes. Five on each foot, I hope. In the pictures online you look all thoughtful, like someone in prayer, your new digits forming a triangle as you put your hands together. Your head is still weird – the back of it runs into your neck like a seal or how John Irving describes the back of Garp’s head in a book I read once and never forgot.

  The GP was amazed it had taken me so long to come and see her. She said first-time mothers were always in a hurry to get confirmation, get their next appointments booked. I think she was a bit suspicious of me, truthfully. She looked at me hard from behind her glasses like a stern headmistress. Not that any headmistress ever really had to look at me sternly. I was a bit of a goody-two-shoes. Is it wrong that I hope you are just a little bit naughty? Just William-type naughtiness – nothing hardcore. I wonder if I will ever be able to tell you off. Whether I am capable of strictness. Anyhow … the doctor certainly was. She had to send off straightaway for the first scan appointment. That’s in a fortnight, baby mine. I will get to see you – real, actual you, instead of the pictures of other people’s babies I pore over on the internet.

  She glossed over the subject of your father. (If only it were that easy.) I swear she glanced at my ring hand. It was all very PC. She referred to my taking a partner or companion for the scan. Emphasis on not going alone. I’ve watched enough films and TV shows to know that sometimes there’s no heartbeat. Or something else has gone wrong. Or there are two heartbeats and it’s twins. You need a person. I feel like I know there’s only one of you, and I feel very certain that you’re fine. I feel it. Apparently, though, we’re higher risk, you and me. Good to know. I have leaflets for terrifying risky-sounding tests I have to decide whether I want. Nuchal fold. Amniocentesis. I haven’t read them yet. I may never read them.

  I’m an elderly primigravida, by the way. That’s what she called me, and what it said on my notes. It means old for a first-time mother. Nice.

  Your great-grandmother is coming out of hospital. And going straight into a care home. I’m making myself say it to prove it’s true. You know how I feel about it, about her. You must do. You’re wrapped close to my heart, so you have to know.

  And your grandmother isn’t here.

  Sometimes, apart from you, I feel quite alone. You’re not much company, to be brutally honest …

  Now, your godmother is back. Holly. She’s the best company in the world. And she’s going to be so bloody excited about you …

  Gigi

  Gigi thought about the anxious-looking young woman at Clearview House as she sat on the train into Central London. She’d been very pretty – huge bush-baby eyes, and a warm smile – but she’d had such a sadness in her lovely face. Gigi had wanted to scoop her up and bring her home – a wounded bird to be cared for. She was too young to be shouldering all the responsibility, bless her. She wondered why her mother hadn’t been with her: she couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which she’d leave that kind of decision about James or Violet to one of her own children. She hoped the girl would bring her grandmother to Clearview. Although Gigi had a feeling it wasn’t the only thing making her sad.

  She knew she was intuitive about people – instinctive. It was one of the things that made her a good midwife. She almost always knew how a woman wanted to be treated in labour – and how to deal with their birthing partners. Anxious about-to-be-new parents trusted her, which helped so much. This tendency to read people, whether she was trying to or not, spilt over into her life outside of work. She was the kind of person people told things to. Or wanted to. The girl had wanted to, she’d known. There was more to her story, Gigi guessed. If she saw her again, if she brought her grandmother to Clearview, maybe she’d tell her.

  Gigi watched the houses speed by. She was on her way to meet Olly for lunch, a treat they both tried to make happen a few times a year – just the two of them. Of her children, he was the one she’d had the least one-to-one time with. Christopher had had the exclusivity of being the firstborn, and Megan long days when her brothers were at school, and then years when they’d been absent altogether. Olly was the sandwich child. Maybe she’d been making up for it ever since. She knew everyone thought he was her favourite. He wasn’t. But if he had been, who’d have blamed her? His joy-versus-worry ratio was streets ahead of the other two, even if his siblings’ joy was just as joyous.

  These trips were amongst her favourite days. She’d
choose a restaurant near his office, and book herself a ticket to an exhibition at the V&A or Tate Modern for the afternoon, after Olly had gone back to work. She’d been a big shopper, once upon a time, but stuff had lost a lot of its allure in recent years. She’d accumulated more than enough. It was experiences and memories she wanted now. That let you know you were officially middle aged, almost before anything else. That and a new fondness for big knickers and flat shoes.

  There’d been a heavy frost last night, but now the sky was that unlikely and rare cobalt-blue you always hoped for on cold winter days, and almost never got. Gigi seldom read on trains – she liked the thinking time of journeys. She looked out of the windows at the back gardens and playing fields of the suburbs, and then at the cranes and scaffolds of new builds as the train swept in through Wandsworth and Vauxhall and then Waterloo. She walked across one of the Golden Jubilee footbridges, stopping, as she always did, as near to the exact middle as she could figure, taking a moment to look at St Paul’s, its domed roof glinting in the bright sunshine, and the Millennium Wheel, and the Art Deco clock just along from Charing Cross. It was her very favourite view of the city.

  She’d booked a tapas restaurant in Covent Garden, arriving first, as was usually the case. Gigi settled herself into the leather banquette and perused the menu with a glass of Fino sherry while she waited for her son. Olly’s office was a few minutes away, on Great Queen Street, but he was habitually at least five minutes late for everything – a habit which drove Richard to distraction – so she didn’t look for him at once.

  When he did come in, pink-cheeked from the cold and open-jacketed as usual, she felt the familiar flush of pride that he was hers. He was tall and slim, blond and doe-eyed, but it was his smile that people remembered. His grin, as the saying goes, went from ear to ear. Like a kid’s. His ready laugh was loud and unselfconscious. He had old-fashioned manners, and she loved that about him too. She heard him before she saw him, thanking the waitress for her offer to hang up his coat. She had Richard to thank for that, at least; Christopher also had them. Slim was Richard’s gene pool, but the rest – from the unruly curls he only partly tamed with male-grooming products, to the sense of humour, to the sheer love of people – that was her.

  You weren’t supposed to love one of your children more than the other, and she hand-on-heart didn’t. In a Sophie’s Choice, who’d-she-hand-over, deep-in-her-uterus way, of course she couldn’t choose between them. She lived for all of them, she’d die for any one of them. She knew them all. And adored them unconditionally. But you could definitely enjoy one more than the other, even if you never admitted it to anyone else, and, for her, that child was Oliver. Christopher was her first, her pride and joy, but the anxious child had grown into a careful and watchful man and he’d caused her the most worry along the way. There was a wonderment in Meg’s being a girl, after two boys, and a connection between them. She cherished their bond. But it was different with Olly. He had always – simply – just made her happy.

  He’d been a fat Buddha of a baby, smiley and placid. Happy to be plonked down on the rug where he could see what was going on. Then a boisterous and adventurous toddler, and an inquisitive and bright child. He’d been good at lots of things, brilliant at very few, and unworried about whatever he found difficult, which had struck Gigi, even at the time, as a good balance. It meant he kept up in class easily enough and played on most sports teams at school. He never fell out with people – had no time for it. He didn’t worry about much. He ate her out of house and home, and went to far too many parties through his teens, because everyone invited him, but was better than most of her friends’ sons at reporting on his whereabouts and knowing his limits with alcohol. He had, once, been spectacularly sick in the back of her car after a party. But he’d got up unprompted at seven the next morning and cleaned it all up before he went to school, instinctively understanding the route to forgiveness.

  He’d taken a gap year after school, which Richard had been afraid would turn into a gap life when he announced, from New Zealand, that he was extending his trip to work as a tour guide on one of the bus companies that specialized in ferrying young people around. That’s when he’d worried her the most, probably, delighting in posting video clips online of him sky diving in Queenstown, white-water rafting in Rotorua and canyoning in Auckland. She’d slept lightly that year, and checked her phone much more often than was healthy. My God, how she’d missed him. It was like a dull ache – omnipresent and sore. Richard joked that he’d meet a Kiwi and never return, but Gigi couldn’t share the joke. She couldn’t describe how much she’d hate that. But he’d deferred his place at university only one more year, and he’d come back eventually. Gigi knew he’d found it quite hard to settle, but he had. Richard was relieved his life was on a more even, conventional footing, but Gigi sometimes wondered if he’d really got it all out of his system. And when he’d graduated, she’d been proven right when he took another year and worked his way around the US.

  Thus he was almost twenty-five years old before he even began to think about what his father called a ‘proper job’, and, seemingly unconcerned with material possessions or security, he’d fallen on his feet with a job at a small digital start-up run by a mate of his from uni days. The mate had the technological know-how, and the good idea. And, it turned out, Olly could sell it, in his snow-to-Eskimos way. They’d made a successful team. Though Olly was just joking when he did his best Del Boy and declared ‘Next year we’ll be millionaires’, rubbing his hands and showing his dimples, Gigi understood enough to know that it was entirely possible – maybe likely – that at some point they would indeed be. She knew it bugged the hell out of Christopher, earnestly and worthily working his way up a corporate ladder. It even rankled slightly with Richard. And gave Meg an entirely unrealistic impression of the job market for young graduates. But she couldn’t begrudge Olly his good fortune. Something about getting back from the universe what you put out into it …

  ‘Darling.’

  ‘Hiya, Mum. I’m late. Sorry.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘You’re actually early. On Olly time … Not to worry. Lovely to see you, sweetheart.’

  He leant over and kissed her, his cheek cold against hers, and squeezed her shoulder, then sat down opposite and put his napkin on to his lap.

  ‘You look gorgeous.’

  ‘You too, sweet boy. Cold.’

  ‘I know.’ He rubbed his hands together, blew between his fingers to warm them. ‘No scarf.’ He grinned.

  ‘I’m starving. The food is so good here. Let’s order first, shall we, and then we can talk?’

  Gigi was used to waitresses being somewhat taken with her son. She let him charm this one for a moment while he ordered for them both – braised Ibérico pig’s cheeks with squash purée, roasted salt cod, stuffed courgette flowers, burrata with smoked aubergine salad and patatas fritas. Two glasses of white wine.

  ‘Sounds delicious.’

  ‘How are things?’

  Gigi gave a small shrug. ‘All fine. Nothing much to report. Not here to talk about me!’

  ‘Oh, is that right? What are you here to talk about, Mummy dearest?’ His eyes were dancing, his tone teasing.

  ‘I think you know, my boy.’

  ‘Caitlin.’

  ‘Caitlin.’ She laid her palms on the table and leant forward slightly. ‘Discuss …’

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Shall I cancel my meetings for this afternoon?’

  ‘Do you need to?’

  He laughed his booming laugh. ‘Okay. Okay. I’m an open book.’

  ‘You didn’t tell us. Not so much as a heads-up.’ She made a mock stern face at him.

  ‘And I should have done. It was all meant to be a bit of a surprise …’

  ‘Well, it certainly was that, darling.’

  ‘Good surprise?’

  ‘Surprising surprise.’

  ‘That’s a non-answer.’


  ‘I’m your mother. I want you to be happy. That’s all.’

  ‘I know … and you want to know how many you’re catering for.’

  ‘That too!’ He winked at her. ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So … are you happy?’

  ‘I am.’ There was something about his reply that didn’t entirely ring true. Perhaps it was the way his smile failed to reach his eyes, and his eyes didn’t quite meet her gaze when he spoke.

  The waitress arrived with the wine and some olives, and they both smiled up at her as she put the glasses down on the table, although she only really noticed Oliver.

  Gigi impaled a black olive with a cocktail stick and wagged it at him. ‘Start at the very beginning …’

  ‘Okay. Okay. The very beginning … We met five months or so ago. In the office. She was with an ad agency we had a meeting with. You can see she’s a beautiful girl. We didn’t go with the agency, in the end, but I had her number, and I liked the look of her, and she’d seemed nice, so I rang her, chatted a bit, and then I took her out.’ He put his hands up. ‘That’s about it. Bit of a non-story, I’m afraid. No meet-cute, as they say in films. The rest is history …’

  ‘You’ve been seeing her for five months. And you never mentioned it.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And we never met her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s that about? We’re not the Spanish Inquisition.’

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate. It’s just … well, she’s not all that into family.’

  Gigi thought of gorgeous Emily, and Ava, and the joy she felt when all her chicks were in the nest, followed immediately by the unwelcome thought of how empty her nest felt without them all, and a small hard lump formed at the base of her throat. Caitlin wasn’t ‘all that into family’. Family was everything. Everything.

  The waitress starting coming with plates of tapas. For a moment, as she pushed things around on the table to make space for them, and then refilled their water glasses, they didn’t talk. Olly served them both, and they tasted their food, and murmured appreciative noises for a minute. Gigi tried to ignore the lump still in her throat. She realized she’d been hoping to hear about a thunderbolt – an encounter that had swept him off his feet, knocked him sideways, rocked his world. That’s what she’d always imagined for him – for this golden, glorious boy. That when she appeared, it would be spectacular. Ridiculous. This seemed … this seemed too ordinary.