Constitutional

by Helen Simpson

  Twenty-five minutes, and I’ve reached the tangled old oak near the top fence with its scores of crooked branches and thousands of sharp-angled twigs. I use trees to help when I’m explaining to my sixth-form biologists how the brain works. ‘Neurons are the brain’s thinking cells,’ I say, and they nod. ‘There are billions of neurons in everyone’s brain,’ I say, and they nod and smile. ‘And each one of these billions of neurons is fringed with thousands of fine whiskers called dendrites,’ I continue, while they start to look mildly incredulous – and who can blame them? The word dendrite comes from the Greek for tree, I tell them, and our neuron-fringing dendrites help create the brain’s forest of connectivity. Dendrites are vital messengers between neuron and neuron, they cross the little gappy synapses in between, they link our thoughts together. It’s as though several hundred thousand trees have been uprooted and had their heads pushed together from every direction – there is an enormous interlocking tangle of branches and touching twigs.

  While I waited for Max as he wrestled with that clue, I could almost hear the rustle and creak of trees conferring. ‘I’ll give you another clue,’ I said. ‘You’re in it.’ But even that didn’t help him.

  It’s not that my mind is going, it’s more like my long-term memory is refusing to accept any more material unless it’s really unmissable. When I was young I remembered everything because it was all new. I could remember whether I’d locked the door because I’d only locked it a few hundred times before. Now I can’t ever remember whether I’ve locked it as I’ve done it thousands of times and my memory will no longer deign to notice what is so old and stale.

  My short-term memory is in fact wiping the slate clean disconcertingly often these days. Like an autocratic secretary, it decides whether to let immediate thoughts and impressions cross over into the long-term memory’s library – or whether to press the delete button on them. ‘I’ve got an enormous backlog of filing and I simply can’t allow yet more unsifted material to accumulate,’ it snaps, peering over its bifocals. ‘It’s not that there isn’t enough space – there is – but it’s got to the point where I need to sort and label carefully before shelving, or it’ll be lost forever – it’ll be in there somewhere, but irretrievable.’

  The thing about my sixth-formers – about all my pupils, in fact – is that it is not necessary for them to commit anything to memory. Why should they store information in their skulls when they’ve got it at their fingertips? Yet Stella’s decades of learning speeches by heart meant that when age began its long war of attrition her mind was shored up with great heaps of blank verse. I have noticed myself that if I don’t continue to learn by repetition, even just the odd phone number, then my ability to do so starts to slide away. I will not, however, be trying to learn Russian in my old age as I once promised myself. No, I’ll follow the progress of neuroscientific research, wherever it’s got to. I’ve learned from Jane Blizzard’s example that you have to find a way to graft new stuff onto old in order to make it stick.

  My ex-colleague Jane had been teaching French and Latin for as long as anyone could remember. She decided when she took early retirement at fifty-five last year that she wanted to study for the three sciences at A-level, and came to me for help in organising this. Forty years ago she had not been allowed to take science at her all-girls school, even at a lower level, and felt this was a block of ignorance she wanted to melt. She’s clever, and passed the three A-levels with flying colours, but to her horror discovered a few months later that all her newly acquired knowledge had trickled away. She had not been able to attach it to anything she already knew, and her long-term memory had refused to retain it.

  As I overtake a couple of pram-pushing mothers in their early thirties, I hear ‘Her feet were facing the wrong way’. Would this mean anything to a girl of seventeen? Or to a man of sixty-three? My pupils will balk at my pregnancy. The younger ones will find it positively disgusting. I speed up and pass two older women, late fifties perhaps, free of make-up, wrapped in a jumble of coloured scarves and glasses on beaded chains, escorting a couple of barrel-shaped Labradors as big as buses. ‘She was just lying on the pavement panting, refusing to move,’ one of them announces as I pass. They have moved on from the dramas of children to the life-and-death stuff of dogs. And I, I who am supposed to be somewhere between these two stages, where am I in this grand pageant? My colleagues will say to each other, so why didn’t she get rid of it?

  Eighteen minutes left, and I’m making good time. If I’m lucky I might even catch Max groaning over his unsolved clues and help put him out of his misery.

  It was my grandfather again who introduced me to crosswords – first the general knowledge ones, then, as I left childhood, the cryptics. He had an acrobatic mind and a generous nature. I used to stay with him and my grandmother for long stretches of the school holidays, as we liked each other’s company and my parents were otherwise involved.

  When my grandfather started to forget at the age of eighty-one – by which time I had long since finished at university and was on to my second teaching job – it was not the more usual benign memory loss. It was because his short-term memory, his mind’s secretary, was being smothered and throttled by a tangle of rogue nerve fibres.

  Since different sorts of memory are held in different parts of the brain, the rest stayed fine for a while. He could tell me in detail about his schooldays, but not remember that his beloved dog had died the day before. It reminded me of the unsinkable Titanic with its separate compartments. In time his long-term memory failed as well. The change was insidious and incremental, but I noticed it sharply as there would usually be several months between my visits.

  Talking to someone whose short-term memory has gone is like pouring liquid into a baseless vessel. Your words go in then straight through without being held at all. That really is memory like a sieve. While I was digging the hole in his back garden in which to bury the dog, he stood beside me and asked what I was doing.

  ‘Poor Captain was run over,’ I replied, ‘so I’m digging his grave.’

  ‘Oh that’s terrible,’ he exclaimed, tears reddening his rheumy old eyes. ‘How terrible! How did it happen?’

  I described how Captain’s body had been found at the kerbside on the corner of Blythedale Avenue, but he was examining the unravelled cuff of his cardigan by the time I’d finished.

  ‘What’s this hole you’re digging, then?’ he asked, a moment or two after I’d told him; and I told him again, marvelling to see new grief appear in his eyes. As often as he asked I answered, and each time his shocked sorrow about the dog was raw and fresh. How exhausting not to be able to digest your experience, to be stalled on the threshold of your own inner life. For a while he said that he was losing himself, and then he lost that.

  Finding his way back into a time warp some fifty years before, he one night kicked my terrified old grandmother out of bed because, he said, his parents would be furious at finding him in bed with a stranger.

  ‘I’m not a stranger,’ she wept. ‘I’m your wife.’

  ‘You say so,’ he hissed at her, widening his eyes then narrowing them to slits. ‘But I know better.’

  From then on, he was convinced that she was an impostor, a crafty con-artist who fooled everybody except himself into thinking that she was his eighty-year-old wife.

  In the evenings he would start to pace up and down the length of their short hallway, muttering troubled words to himself, and after an hour or so of this he would take the kettle from the kitchen and put it in the airing cupboard on the landing, or grab a favourite needlepoint cushion from the sofa and craftily smuggle it into the microwave. He wrote impassioned incomprehensible letters in their address book, and forgot the names of the most ordinary things. I mean, really forgot them. ‘I want the thing there is to drink out of,’ he shouted when the word ‘cup’ left him. He talked intimately about his childhood to the people on the television screen. He got up to fry eggs in the middle of the night. He accused me of stea
ling all their tea towels.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he wept.

  ‘But you are home,’ howled my grandmother.

  ‘And who the hell are you?’ he demanded, glaring at her in unfeigned dismay.

  But, because muscle memories are stored in quite another part of the brain, the cerebellum at the back, he was still able to sit at the piano and play Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse with unnerving beauty.

  Thirteen minutes. It always surprises me how late in the year the leaves stay worth looking at. November gives the silver birches real glamour, a shower of gold pieces at their feet and still they keep enough to clothe them, thousands of tiny lozenge-shaped leaves quaking on their separate stems. That constant tremor made them unpopular in the village where I grew up – palsied, they called them.

  Trees live for a long time, much longer than we do. Look at this oak, so enormous and ancient standing in the centre of the leaf-carpeted clearing, it must be over five hundred years old. It’s an extremely slow developer, the oak, and doesn’t produce its first acorn until it’s over sixty. Which makes me feel better about the elderly prima gravida label.

  They have been known to live for a thousand years, oak trees, and there are more really old ones growing on the Heath than in the whole of France. Look at it standing stoutly here, all elbows and knees. When the weather is stormy, they put up signs round here – ‘Beware of falling limbs’. It was these immensely strong and naturally angled branches, of course, which gave the Elizabethans the crucks they needed for their timber-framed houses and ships.

  Stella was like seasoned timber, she stayed strong and flexible almost until the end. When she had her second stroke, three weeks after the first, she was taken to a nursing home for veterans of the stage and screen, somewhere out in Middlesex. In the residents’ lounge sat the old people who were well enough to be up. They looked oddly familiar. I glanced round and realised that I was recognising the blurred outlines of faces I had last seen ten times the size and seventy years younger. Here were the quondam matinee idols and femmes fatales of my grandparents’ youth.

  Then I went to Stella’s room. I held her strong long hand and it was a bundle of twigs in mine. There was an inky bruise to the side of her forehead. Her snowy hair had been tied in a little topknot with narrow white satin ribbon.

  I talked, and talked on; I said I’d assume she understood everything – ‘Squeeze my hand if you can to agree’ – and felt a small pressure. I talked about Shakespeare and the weather and food and any other silly thing that came into my head. Her blue eyes gazed at me with such frustration – she couldn’t move or speak, she was locked in – that I said, ‘Patience, dear Stella. It’s the only way.’

  Her face caved in on itself, a theatrical mask of grief. Her mouth turned into a dark hole round her toothless gums, a tear squeezing from her old agonised eyes, and she made a sad keening hooting noise.

  Afterwards, in the corridor, I stood and cried for a moment, and the matron gave me automatic soothing words.

  ‘Not to worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not even a relative. It’s just the pity of it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘The pity of it, to be sure. Ah but during the week I nurse on a cancer ward, and some of those patients having to leave their young families. . .’

  I really did not want to have to think about untimely death on top of everything else, and certainly not in my condition; so I returned to the subject of Stella.

  ‘Walled up in a failed body,’ I said. ‘Though perhaps it would be worse to be sound in body but lost in your mind, dipping in and out of awareness of your own lost self. Which is worse?’

  ‘Ah well, we are not to have the choice anyway,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘We cannot choose when the time comes.’

  The trouble is, old age has moved on. Three score years and ten suddenly looks a bit paltry, and even having to leave at eighty would make us quite indignant these days. Sixty is now the crown of middle age. And have you noticed how ancient the parents of young children are looking? Portly, grizzled, groaning audibly as their backs creak while they lean over to guide tiny scooters and bicycles, it’s not just angst at the work-life balance that bows them down. Last time I stopped for a cup of tea at the café over by the bandstand, I saw a lovely new baby in the arms of a white-haired matriarch. Idly I anticipated the return of its mother from the Ladies’ and looked forward to admiring a generational triptych. Then the baby started to grizzle, and the woman I’d taken for its grandmother unbuttoned her shirt and gave it her breast. No, it’s not disgust or ridicule I felt, nothing remotely like – only, adjustment. And of course that will probably be me next year.

  My baby is due early in summer, according to their dates and charts. If it arrives before July, I’ll still be forty-three. Who knows, I might be only halfway through; it’s entirely possible that I’ll live to be eighty-six. How times change. My mother had me at thirty-two, and she will become a grandmother at seventy-five. Her mother had her at twenty-one, and became a grandmother at fifty-three. At this rate my daughter will have her own first baby at fifty-four and won’t attain grandmotherhood until she’s a hundred and nineteen.

  I’d better take out some life insurance. I hadn’t bothered until now because if I died, well, I’d be dead so I wouldn’t be able to spend it. But it has suddenly become very necessary. I can see that. Maternity leave and when to take it; childminders, nurseries, commuting against the clock; falling asleep over marking; not enough money, no trees in Dalston; the lure of Cornwall or Wales. I’ve seen it all before. But it’s possible with just the one, I’ve seen that too.

  I’m not quite into the climacteric yet, that stretch from forty-five to sixty when the vital force begins to decline; or so they used to say. And a climacteric year was one that fell on an odd multiple of seven (so seven, twenty-one, thirty-five and so on), which brings me back to my glee at that crossword clue last week, and the way I taunted old Max with it – ‘Caring, calm, direct – New Man’s sixty-third year (5,11).’ Grand climacteric, of course. The grand climacteric, the sixty-third year, a critical time for men in particular.

  To think that my grandfather had three more decades after that. Towards the end of his very long life – like Stella, he lived to ninety-three – it was as though he was being rewound or spooled in. He became increasingly childish, stamping his feet in tantrums, gobbling packets of jelly babies and fairy cakes, demanding to be read aloud to from The Tale of Two Bad Mice. He needed help with dressing and undressing, and with everything else. Then he became a baby again, losing his words, babbling, forgetting how to walk, lying in his cot crying. Just as he had once grown towards independence, so, with equal gradualness, he now reverted to the state of a newborn. Slowly he drifted back down that long corridor with fluttering curtains. At the very end, if you put your finger in the palm of his hand, he would grasp it, as a baby does, grab it, clutch at it. When at last he died, his memory was as spotless as it had been on the day he first came into the world.

  Seven minutes left, and I’ll pause here at the home-run ash tree to pull off a bunch of keys, as children do, for old times’ sake. So ingenious, these winged seeds drying into twists which allow them to spin far from the tree in the wind; nothing if not keen to propagate. I have a particular liking for this ash tree; it’s one of my few regular photographic subjects.

  I’m careful how I take photographs. I’ve noticed how you can snap away and fail to register what you’re snapping; you can take a photograph of a scene instead of looking at it and making it part of you. If you weren’t careful, you could have whole albums of the years and hardly any memories of them.

  I take my camera onto the Heath, but only on the first of the month, and then I only take the same twelve photographs. That is, I stand in exactly the same twelve places each time – starting with the first bench at the ponds and ending with this ash tree – and photograph the precise same views. At the end of the year I line up the twelves in order, the February dozen beneath the Janu
ary dozen and so on, and in the large resultant square the year waxes and wanes. You don’t often catch time at work like this. Aidan was quite intrigued, and soon after we met he was inspired to add a new Monday-morning habit on his way to work. He left five minutes early, then paused to sit in the kiosk near the exit at Baker Street to have four of those little passport photos taken. He stuck these weekly records into a scrapbook, and after eighteen months it was nearly full. It was what I asked for in September when I found out that he already had a wife and child. He refused. So, in a rage, I took it. I was going to give it back, it belonged to him; but now clearly it doesn’t belong to him in the same way any more. It’s his baby’s patrimony.

  I have a feeling that this baby will be a girl. In which case, of course, I’ll call her Stella. If the dates are accurate, then she’ll be born in early summer. I might well be pushing her along this very path in a pram by then, everything green and white around us, with all the leaves out and the nettles and cow parsley six feet high.

  Four minutes to go, and I’m nearly there. Walking round the Heath on days like this when there is some colour and sun, I can feel it rise in me like mercury in a thermometer, enormous deep delight in seeing these old trees with their last two dozen leaves worn like earrings, amber and yellow and crimson, and in being led off by generously lit paths powdered silver with frost. It must be some form of benign forgetfulness, this rising bubble of pleasure in my chest, at being here, now, part of the landscape and not required to do anything but exist. I feel as though I’ve won some mysterious game.

  Two minutes to spare, and I’m back where I started, off the path and on to the pavement. That got the blood circulation moving. It’s not often that I beat the four scowling kings. There’s the bell. Just in time.