by Michael Pye
“The thing about being really good at natural wonders,” said Nicholas, “is that we’re incompetent at history. We lose the plot, because it doesn’t interest us. We’re obsessed with that one big statement: that we come from the Alps, that we’re somehow a separate people.”
“Yes, yes.”
“I’m sorry if I don’t make sense. It’s just that Helen somehow feels all this. She loves the place. And when the place is contaminated by its history, she’s—she’s disoriented. She wants to put things right, but more than that, she wants to put things back. She won’t stop.”
“Quite right. Something was stolen. Something has to be handed back. You didn’t see Sarah crying—”
It was always so particular, Nicholas thought; Clarke’s kind of history was a list of particulars, with no big thought to turn them into a story or a philosophy. He only wanted to know things. He wanted things to be right. And all the other human circumstances, muddled as usual, simply did not count.
The doctor was a wonderfully social man, without exactly being ingratiating, affable without ever for a second losing concentration. He wore a peculiarly good suit, very tight-waisted, and he smelled of a London aftershave.
He said: “It would be wise to make some tests. Some assessments.”
Helen listened brightly. Just as the doctor was playing a doctor impeccably, she would play the grateful, intelligent listener.
“It’s possible that your grandmother suffers from depression. There may be something physically wrong. It’s also possible she is not entirely as capable as she was. And it’s possible she simply dozed off with candles burning, which I suppose any of us could do.” But he could never do such a thing, because it would imply that for one moment he had closed his cold assessing eyes.
Helen said: “I’d like to talk to her. Is that possible?”
“Of course. We want her to be comfortable.”
“Then perhaps—”
“She only has her hospital gown to wear.”
“I brought clothes.”
Lucia came to the doctor’s rooms in her hospital gown, with a white robe over that, with a nurse just behind her. She’d never before shown Helen her maculate self, warm brown marks on the face; without powder and lights, she was stained by age.
She took the comfortable chair across from the doctor, as of right.
“I know,” the doctor said to Lucia, his eyes still on Helen, “how distressing this has been. We simply want to make sure that there are no underlying issues. Problems, that is.”
Lucia sat silent.
“As the brain ages,” the doctor said, “the gray matter undergoes progressive synaptic and neuronal loss. Happens to everybody. Sometimes it’s noticeable at forty. But after the age of eighty-five, it’s something we have to think about very carefully.”
Helen found herself nodding, smiling, making small gestures as a doctor’s audience is meant to do. Lucia, for the moment, sat quite still: horrified, it seemed, at the insult of his talk.
“So. There are a number of things we can do. We can take a history, your granddaughter can help us. We can eliminate a good many things—check the drugs you take, check your thyroid, that sort of thing. Check for malnutrition. There are one or two tests we normally do that I’m sure aren’t needed, but they’re part of the routine.”
Helen said: “What do you mean?”
“We test for tertiary syphilis,” the doctor said.
He still would not look directly at Lucia. She was an impressive ruin: hair still red and wild, features elegantly sharp, but she willed herself into a certain blankness. If the damned doctor chose to think her incompetent, she would wait and prove him wrong in one considered action.
In the meantime, she wanted him to look at her. Her authority lay in her eyes.
“There is,” the doctor was saying, “a very simple preliminary test. Frau Müller-Rossi, perhaps you could answer a few questions.”
She waited patiently like a good child.
“Do you know the date—the day, the month, the year?”
She couldn’t speak for a moment, dust of anxiety in the throat. She had to speak clearly, get the language right; they noticed language. Then she told him.
“And the day of the week? The name of this place? Your telephone number?”
She said: “At the shop or at my apartment?”
“How old are you now? When were you born? What was your mother’s maiden name?”
She answered. Helen thought she was a little slow, as if shocked. But Lucia was only being careful. It didn’t matter if this man considered her old, but it mattered very much if he considered her sickly old.
“Will you please count backward from twenty? By threes?” Helen watched Lucia’s face, thought she saw a flick of impatience there. The old woman thought she would win, somehow: either come back to her life, or escape all responsibility for it, and make it seem her moralistic family preferred some medical compromise to the truth.
Lucia said: “Twenty. Seventeen. Fourteen. Eleven. Eight. Five. Two.”
The doctor said, encouragingly: “Very good.”
Lucia’s face barely changed. She knew, because she had acquaintances who had been old and put on trial by doctors, that she must not seem angry at this patronizing tone. The doctor would consider her anger inappropriate. He would call her demented.
“Well-educated people always do well on that test,” the doctor said, to Helen.
She wasn’t safe yet.
“Tell me,” the doctor asked Helen, “about your grandmother’s apartment. She has a housekeeper, I suppose?”
“Of course.”
“It’s sometimes difficult if there’s a loyal housekeeper. They cover up the little incidents, the forgetfulness about washing, the fits of temper. The family just don’t know.”
Lucia held the arms of the chair. She’d learned that trick in front of the judges: anchor yourself, and then you can hurt yourself if you have to, just to distract from the questions.
Lucia thought: I am old, and therefore he knows what I am. But he does not know who I am.
The doctor said: “Tell me. Are you basically satisfied with your life?”
Now how would she answer that one? She liked the taste of tea, the smell of freesias, the delicacy of a Chinese tree picked out in blue on a porcelain plate; these things were not unsatisfactory. But how could anyone be satisfied to move awkwardly, to speak indistinctly, to have hair that is white and brittle and a face that has been etched away with lines?
“. . . that your life is empty?”
Her little business occupied her. He might guess that her care to maintain her name was an occupation which had never ended. Besides, she would never dare have a life that was truly empty; she would have to open up memory like a locked storeroom and visit it closely.
“. . . are you bothered by thoughts you can’t get out of your head?”
These must be standard questions; he was taking them, she could see, from a printed list. He would not want her to list the thoughts that refused to dissolve, unlike so many thoughts now simply dissolved into forgetfulness. He wanted only a “yes” or a “no.”
But if he expected her to confess to conscience, she would not. Helen felt uneasy in her stomach, annoyed at the process which made Lucia, her grandmother, into a parcel of flesh to be analyzed.
“Are you afraid that something bad is going to happen to you?” the doctor said.
Lucia particularly did not look at Helen. She didn’t want to see what was in Helen’s eyes: whether the girl wanted her healthy and sane in order to ruin her.
“. . . worry about the future?”
“. . . do you think it is wonderful to be alive now?”
And then: “Do you worry a lot about the past?”
She thought: Not unless the world decides to worry a lot about my past.
“Do you feel that your situation is hopeless?”
She wanted to laugh. She had an extraordinary possibility at thi
s very moment: she could choose to be an old woman. She could subside into pleasant rooms and constant care. She could outgrow responsibility.
“Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked her, abruptly.
And the temptation passed. She would be very exact.
“I am in the hospital,” Lucia said, “in a doctor’s consulting room because I seem to have alarmed people. I am so sorry, Helen. I sometimes have difficulty sleeping at night—”
“Very often?” the doctor said. He wouldn’t stop concentrating.
“You will notice, Doctor, that I am not at a loss for words.”
The doctor nodded. “Later on,” he said to Helen, as though Lucia was wearing a cloak of invisibility instead of a hospital dressing gown, “you’ll find a certain withdrawal from life—a lack of interest. Anger, which is only natural, and depression because memory is fading. No care about appearance or actions.” And here he looked at Lucia after a hospital night. “Manners go. Sometimes they misplace things and then insist and insist they were stolen.”
“I talked to her housekeeper,” Helen said, not wanting all these obligatory tests to turn into trouble. “My grandmother is meticulous about lights and fires. She’s always alone when she goes to bed because the housekeeper leaves after dinner, and there’s never been anything out of place.”
“So what do you think happened last night?”
Helen said: “I think you should ask Lucia.”
“I’ve been rather tired,” Lucia said. “A business—issue, as you would say. I organized some candles, some music, a book of poems that I like, and I tried to relax. I took a sleeping pill, and it took effect faster than I expected.”
“She did all this,” Helen said, pointedly, “while the housekeeper was still in the apartment.”
The doctor said: “You don’t think this—accident—might be some kind of aggression?”
In front of this neat, scented, impassive man, Lucia was no more than her dossier said: which mostly was “very old.”
“I really think,” Helen said, “my grandmother would be better at home.”
“It will be on your responsibility, Helen. We can’t be absolutely sure she has not had a stroke.”
“I think,” Helen said, “those tests could be run quite quickly. And then perhaps late today my grandmother could be released?”
This talk did not make Lucia entirely comfortable; she hadn’t expected Helen as such an ally.
“What is this?” the doctor said directly to Lucia, holding up a computer mouse.
Lucia thought for a moment that she had truly forgotten the word. It was not a word of her generation. She knew she couldn’t hesitate too much, couldn’t seem to stammer, must produce a perfect sentence. “That, Doctor,” she said—and she worried at the word, the “switch,” the “key,” the “rat,” in French the “truc,” in English the “thing”—“is the mouse for a computer.” She must not on any account show the relief she felt.
The doctor said: “I don’t think it would do any harm if she rested at home. For a while.”
Helen, as very nearly next of kin, thanked the clinic for their discretion, made Lucia’s health sound like the kind of business secret that is almost sacred in Swiss law, and paid the bill at once. She thought she caught blame in the senior nurse’s eye, as though this should never have been allowed to happen.
Lucia was dressed again, and slightly painted with the makeup Helen thought to bring.
“I don’t understand,” she said, “why it was necessary to take me to that place.”
“Would you rather we’d taken you to the cantonal hospital? With sirens blaring?”
Lucia said: “I took some pills to sleep. That’s all.”
Helen said: “And you made a whole play out of it.”
“I had appointments the next day. I would never have missed them.”
The Turk drove too slowly. Lucia was irritated by his care; she waved her hands.
“I have been a proper, respectable businesswoman in this city for almost sixty years,” she said. “Nobody has to worry about my checks. Nobody worries about their husbands. What I sell is what I say it is, and it is fine. I do not draw attention to myself, only to the shop and what I sell, and I sell under another name, as I always have done. I am a private person and I do not wish to be made public. Do you understand that?”
She was hunched as the Turk helped her out of the car, and across the sidewalk and into the building, and into the shiny metal box of the elevator. But then she saw herself in the mirror of the walls. She straightened herself.
“I hope you can afford your morals,” she said to Helen. “I always had the morals I could afford.”
She used her own key to open the apartment door. She pushed it hard, and she swept into the hall.
The living room had not been touched.
Lucia said: “That woman. She’s not here?”
There were porcelain bits on the carpet, and candlewax, and damp. Lucia’s chair had shifted from its usual place. A table was overturned.
“This is intolerable,” Lucia said. “I shall fire her.”
Helen watched the old woman pick her way about the room, checking and inspecting how the damp had darkened the carpet by the open window, and the rain left faint stains on the pale curtains.
“I might as well have been burgled,” she said.
Helen said: “You said nothing happened.”
“The woman should have cleared things up.”
“I told her not to.”
“You told her?”
“I wanted you to see all this.”
Lucia sat down very cautiously.
“I made a mistake,” she said.
“And the candles?”
Lucia said nothing. For a moment, Helen fancied she might mean a mistake in the past, something terrible. But then Lucia said: “You never had a chance to do wrong. You should be grateful.”
“I don’t want excuses,” Helen said.
“There might be explanations.”
“I couldn’t stand them,” Helen said.
Lucia said: “So you have one point of weakness?” She rubbed her hands together out of necessity because they were dying on her. “Such a strong girl,” she said, furiously.
Sarah had the power to alarm him, make the quiet, decent Peter Clarke terribly aware that nothing was going to be simple ever again.
“Purpose,” Sarah said. “They want bloody purpose. They all want me to be their bloody purpose because it’s easy for them and they know I am right.” She spilled gin on her skirt, looked up defiantly. “Easy. Easy. Easy.”
Clarke said: “You think it’s easy to think these things of a mother or a grandmother?”
“What the hell else do they have except bad thoughts about the past? The past is a bad thought in itself. They’ve grown out of politics, they’ve grown out of nations, they just want a good time and a nice car and a quiet life and a winter holiday in the damned Maldives. There’s nothing left to connect them to history except what their family remembers, and that’s not entirely real to them. Hegel,” she said.
“I expect so.”
“Hegel. They really believe they have come to the end of history, and the end of politics, and from now on they just need managers to cope with a few fiscal questions. They don’t need morals anymore, so they find them interesting and amusing and diverting and—like a game. They play at condemning, they play at pardoning. They play at it all. They don’t understand what it means to the rest of us.”
Clarke said: “I’m sometimes glad I didn’t read too much.” “What do you mean? You mean you’re glad you don’t have to doubt and worry?”
“I doubt,” Clarke said. “I doubt if my legs will carry me through the day. I doubt if my heart will still work tomorrow. I don’t worry, that’s true. But I doubt.”
“That’s different.”
“Yes. It is. It’s fundamental.”
“I don’t know why I talk to you,” Sarah said. She slam
med her glass down on a glass table.
“You have to talk to someone,” Clarke said. Later, he came to think he’d come dangerously close to a declaration with those words.
“I suppose so,” she said; which was the answer he wanted.
And they sat, old, stiff, opposite each other.
“If she asked me to forgive her,” Sarah said, “I wouldn’t hear her. If I hear her, I have to deal with her as an equal. She asks, I give.”
“She won’t ask.”
“I’m not equal to her. She is wrong. She did wrong.”
“Nowadays,” Clarke said, very carefully, “people don’t seem to think about doing wrong. It’s all psychology and excuses.”
“They like an absolute wrong that comes along with dramas and spotlights and horrors. That, they like. And in time, they’ll explain that, as well.” She sat forward. “And if I just coexist with the woman, not challenging her, not prosecuting her, not throwing a rock through her lovely windows—what’s that except forgetfulness, pardon in disguise? And if I do anything, if I do anything—”
“We used to say you shouldn’t bring yourself down to the other person’s level.”
“Exactly,” Sarah said. “It’s in the moral philosophers, and it’s in your common sense, both. It’s a question of where you stand—remember that? And whether you’re entitled to look down on someone. A question of level.”
“Nobody else is up there with you. Nobody else is still alive.”
He saw that her eyes were watering, but out of anger.
He shouldn’t say anything more. He should start to repair the afternoon, fill it up with a gentle walk, the sight of the lake, the prospect of cakes and coffee; whatever it would take. But he said, even so: “You think she can forgive herself?”
He was startled, even alarmed, to see that her face was suddenly easy and loose, not bent in with feeling as it had been.
“Nobody can do that,” Sarah said. “Nobody. You pardon someone, you make yourself equal with them, but she’s always more concerned with what she did than with forgiving it. Crime traps you that way.”
She smiled. She’d managed now to push away the image of an old Lucia, a sad Lucia, sitting under the influence of a pill in the middle of flames. She needn’t bother with pity. She seemed to relax back into the chair, no longer tense on the edge of it.