by Patrick Gale
“But it’s the other end of the country!”
“Well I can’t very well entertain them in Wandsworth without you.”
“I don’t see why not. You’re the relation.”
“Julian too. Anyway, I’m curious. And I feel a certain responsibility toward Skip.”
“That’s not really her name?”
“Course not. She was christened Petra Louise or something but they never used it. Well, they never actually christened her. And if she’s going to be living in England now … She is my niece after all …” His words petered out, then Frances seemed to realize she was scowling.
“You’re quite right. It was only that, well, I’d so looked forward to having you all to myself. Just you and Julian.”
“Funny.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he sighed but it had occurred to him that she was looking on the holiday as a time for spending more time with her husband so as to get pregnant and he was looking on it as a time for getting to know his son better and his son was looking forward to a fortnight of blissfully Oedipal access to his swimsuited mother. The three of them were locked in a circle of unrequited need and probably required some healthy interruption from outside. “I’ll go up to that telephone box in the car park on the cliff and call his secretary tomorrow,” he said. “Suggest they might like to join us before I have to go back to work. They probably won’t be able to make it—we don’t know for sure when they get here from Europe anyway—but at least we’ll have done our bit. Happy?”
“Of course,” she said and turned the light out again.
But then she had to get up to pee and, as always, the sound of distant flushing got him going so he had to pee too. By the time he slipped back into bed, Frances was fast asleep and he was wide awake. He lay there listening to the sea and her touchingly adenoidal breathing which was never quite a snore, more a series of clicks and halting sighs. And he thought about Becky.
His elder sister by four years, Becky was cleverer, funnier, prettier than he was. Trailing, unwanted, in her wake, he had idolized and tried in vain to despise her. Once she deemed him old enough to notice, she judged him stuffy and conventional. Their mother died when he was nine and Becky had fought against the obligation to mother him and his father in turn. She escaped at the first opportunity to Rexbridge, then on to Berkeley where, in one of her rare, maddeningly sketchy letters, she informed him that she had fallen in love and married. The husband was studying for an English doctorate, like her. She expressed no qualms about turning her back on England. She wrote to John to announce the birth of his niece. The alienation between brother and sister reached rapid completion. He had no interest in visiting America and, after her one visit to Wandsworth to meet his young wife, found he could not miss a woman who had made herself so unlike the golden girl he remembered. This made the reality of her sudden death all the harder to accept.
The husband, Bill, by then a writer who did some teaching or a teacher who wrote on the side—the emphasis varied from year to year—sent two newspaper clippings in an envelope. To be accurate, one was from a newspaper and reported how Dr. Palmer died when she danced out of a tenth story window during a faculty party. It went on to state that she left behind husband, daughter and an unfinished book on Blake. She died instantly and her blood was found to contain high levels of alcohol and a homemade hallucinogen derived from a certain cactus. Her husband was being questioned in relation to the drug but was distraught and no foul play was suspected, since Dr. Palmer had been a known experimenter in mind-altering substances privately, justifying it as part of her research into Blake’s visions. The second clipping was from some counterculture journal, apparently printed on home-made paper which caused the ink to spread as on a blotter. By way of an obituary it said that Becky had a big soul and had expressed her wish to be reincarnated as a seagull. Bill attached a note, scribbled on the back of a crude drawing of a frowning flower—presumably by poor Skip. So sorry, John, it read. I know you’ll miss her as much as we do. Bill.
There was no funeral, just a party. John felt no compulsion to attend, especially when he learned that there would be no grave to visit. Becky was swiftly cremated and her ashes taken to India for scattering on the Ganges by some devoted pupils.
It was only in the weeks that followed, during which the numbness of shock gave way to the relentless workings of memory, that it struck him that his sister had affected his choice of wife. In many ways, Frances resembled the pre-American Becky; restless, rebellious even but still rooted. He wondered now whether his brother-in-law would notice or whether, like Becky in her catty letter of “congratulation” after her visit, he would merely see her as a wife in John’s own image; inhibited, conventional and quiet.
BLUE HOUSE
John strolled by the Bross then went to his usual pub—not quite his local. A residual Puritanism made him slightly ashamed of drinking in public and he fancied that a greater distance from home lent him a measure of anonymity. However, contrary to what he had told Frances, the walk was short and the drink was anything but quick.
Sylvia was at their usual corner table. She had none of his wife’s inhibitions about entering a pub on her own. She gave him a little wave as he entered. He smiled at her on his way to the bar and pointed at her gin glass but she covered it with a small hand to show that she was all right for the moment. Joining her, he marveled afresh at how very neat she was. White hair, discreetly assisted so that one could tell she had once been a blonde, curled neatly about small ears. Her pink blouse was creaseless. Her thin legs were tucked neatly away into the recess beneath her settle. The only untidy touch was her jewelry, of which she wore a profusion, but even then she favored gold over gems; the glitter combined with the sharply pressed outlines of her clothes to lend her appearance a hint of the military. They did not kiss.
“How are you doing?” he began instead, their customary greeting.
Sylvia spoke lightly, raising her glass. “If Teresa hadn’t arrived when she did, I think I’d have pushed him under a bus.”
“Not good then.”
She drank then laughed bitterly. “Funny, isn’t it? Good used to mean a sunny holiday, a comfortable retirement or, what was it you called it that time? The tenuous possibility of very cautious sex. Now it’s what? A smile that might be meant for you or might just be wind. A morning when he hasn’t pulled his nappy off in the night. A day when he’s calm, even nice. I tell you, I used to want him to be aware so badly. I wanted him to recognize who he was. Now I want his brain to hurry up and fry itself. When that look comes into his eyes and I know he’s aware and he’s like ‘what’s happening to me?’ I can’t stand it.” She drank again, lit a cigarette, hand shaking slightly with need as she inhaled. “Listen to me,” she said and restored neatness with a smile. “I’m fine, John. I’m fine. How are you?”
“Fine,” he said, smiling. “I’m fine and Frances is fine too. I mean, relatively. A bit forgetful. A bit … But compared to what Steve’s going through …”
“I know,” she said quietly, adding words that were both reassurance and threat. “Early days yet, John. Early days.”
Given the way they had found each other and the clandestine manner of their meetings, they ought to be having an affair. In a woman’s sense, he supposed, in an emotional sense, they already were. Certainly Frances would be as wounded and jealous if she knew of the depth of their shared confidences as if he had set Sylvia up in a love-nest. Generous colleagues had bought him a personal computer as a retirement present over ten years ago. He had found little serious use for it at first, merely using it to play chess, to keep the household accounts and to write the occasional formal letter. When Will bought him a modem and organized Internet access, he had made an effort to use the thing, out of politeness at first, but had swiftly become hooked. A lifetime’s user of any local reference library, a lover of facts and arcane information, he now found that the Internet was like having the great libraries of the world and
an unlimited newsagent accessible, Narnia-fashion, from one small corner of his study. Now if he had any query, about the safety of a rose spray or the timetable for trains to Haverfordwest, he switched on his computer. Not only were there documents out there, but people, helpful if opinionated people. An intensely private man, moved on repeatedly through most of his working life, John had never been a great one for chatting over the garden fence but the Internet was like having neighbors one could switch off.
The family nettle-grasper, Poppy, had taken action after her shock at bringing the grandsons to a long-arranged birthday lunch only to find that Frances had laid in preposterous quantities of knock-down Rioja and nothing else.
“I’m bringing Jude Farson round to look at her. We’ll keep it very casual. He’s a friend, after all, as well as a specialist. So you can just pretend we were passing and dropped in.”
Jude and she came and went, then Jude rang up a discreet hour or two later and said that he feared it looked like early-onset Alzheimer’s. He had called on one of Frances’s bad days.
“What can we do?” John asked.
“Not a great deal. I mean we can run some tests, even book her in for a scan to check there’s no other cause, but …” The doctor was not hopeful.
Frances was watching television very loudly. John retreated to his study, turned on his computer, logged on to the Internet and ran a search on early-onset Alzheimer’s. He found a welter of references to Alzheimer’s, many of them humorous, and a surprisingly high number of articles on potato cultivation, then a direct hit. Early-Onset Alzheimer’s—A Wife’s Story. In three bleak pages, someone described how her husband had become more than usually absentminded soon after his fiftieth birthday. Forgetfulness progressed to the point where he would make a telephone call then forget who he was calling or even who he was. He also suffered terrible depressions, in which he became wordless and withdrawn and which he described, in a lucid moment, as entering a black pit with no certainty of return. He became doubly confused when losing his job forced the pair to move to a cheaper neighborhood and wandering was added to his list of problems.
The prognosis is never good, the writer finished. Depending on how early the diagnosis was made, the patient (not the sufferer—you are both going to suffer here) will have ten to fifteen years. Decline will be steady and, this being a disorder of the central nervous system, double incontinence is a treat in store, along with irrational terrors, violent mood swings, and the knowledge that your loved one is going somewhere you cannot follow. Or at least you can and may follow, God help you, but it will be as a fellow patient, not as a traveling companion. But to be reading this you are probably still young and feel cheated of the retirement you expected. You are not alone. To prove it, you can e-mail me and I promise to get back to you or to have a colleague do so. Just click here.
John e-mailed her, outlining his situation. She e-mailed him swiftly back, giving the telephone number of the Alzheimer’s Society and attaching her standard help pack of advice. E-mailing her to thank her, he felt he must relieve the one-track nature of their doomy correspondence so added some personal details, mentioning his wife’s name, his son’s bookshop and that he lived just outside Barrowcester and was a keen yachtsman on the river. This in turn inspired a more chatty reply from her and soon they were corresponding every few days, always with their partners’ conditions as a pretext or opening gambit. Once she admitted that she lived in nearby Arkfield it was merely a matter of days before he found the courage to suggest they meet.
She was about Frances’s age, perhaps a little younger, and had retired as a personnel manager in local government so as to care for her husband. She had the flat vowels and nasal twang of the local accent, which had always conveyed for him—quite irrationally, of course—an air of easy moral slovenliness. Tonight was not exceptional in that he had no sooner sat beside her than he felt a dispassionate desire to kiss her, if only because he felt he could, because he sensed she would not make a scene about it but would, at best, encourage him, at worst, laugh.
“Will’s with her tonight,” he said.
“Playing cards?”
“Not tonight. Bad day. Crisp?”
“No thanks. They catch in my plate. There’s romance.” She laughed.
“He’s asked us on a holiday. To Cornwall.”
“That’s nice.”
“But it’s a place we went to before. Years ago.”
“But that’ll do her good. Familiar places can be far more stimulating than new ones. It’ll stoke up her memories without unsettling her.”
“I’m not sure these are memories we want stoked up.”
“Did you argue there, or what?”
“I’ve never told anyone.”
“Tell me.”
“I …” He looked at her tidy, expectant, careworn face then imagined it registering her shock if he did as she asked. “I don’t think I can,” he said. “And I’m not sure I should.”
“I can respect that,” she said, lighting another cigarette. She always mutely offered him one, although she must have known by now that he would refuse. He liked it. One day he might surprise her. “There are things I’d never tell a soul about Steve and me. Not even my sister, and I tell her everything. That’s a lie for a start. I haven’t told her everything since we were about twenty and I fancied her boyfriend. In a funny way I’ve got closer to him since he got ill than I ever was before. We never used to share a bathroom. I didn’t even see him shave. He was so sensitive of my ladylike sensibilities, he even used to wait till he’d got to the office before he’d have a crap.”
“What did he do at weekends?”
“Public library lavvy on Saturdays, pub one on Sundays. He’d die if he knew I knew. And now, well, there’s not a thing about him I don’t know. Not that it’s much compensation for what we lost. I’ve got the answers to the little things I’d always wondered—his savings accounts, his wine cellar, his toenail clippings. I’ve even got rid of the hairs in his ears and nose that always used to drive me crazy. But it’s a bit like, what’s it called? What’s-her-face’s box.”
“Pandora.”
“That’s the one. I’ve opened the box. I know everything. But now it’s just me and the box and the box is empty and not half as exciting as when it was locked.”
“Pandora’s box wasn’t empty.”
“Yeah. I know. It was full of nasties like war and famine and plague that the silly moo let out.”
“Yes, but she slammed the lid shut just in time and kept back one feeble, fluttering little thing.”
“Euthanasia?”
John smiled. “Hope.”
“Spare me.”
A young couple came to sit at the table opposite. The girl smiled briefly across at them and he wondered how she saw them. Husband and wife? Father and daughter? Viagra-fueled illicit fling? Anything but the truth.
“My box is still so much fuller than yours,” he said. “We still talk. She’s still … She hasn’t stopped feeling like herself. The odd thing is that I suppose, if I’m honest, I’ve never really understood women. Women’s things. Maybe if my mother and sister had lived longer. Women have always been alien to me. I’ve always lived in male worlds.”
“Do we scare you?”
“A bit. Yes. In that I don’t understand you. You’ll laugh, but in a way, living with Frances has made me a bit of a fetishist.”
“You old devil.”
“I said you’d laugh.”
“No. Sorry. Honestly. Go on.”
“I just … well … I suppose I’ve always focused on the surfaces. Her shoes. Her slips. Her hats. Her soap. Her lipstick. I’ve identified the outside with the flesh beneath for so long that on one level that’s something that won’t change much. The surfaces, I mean. I suppose I find them easier to love because they’re so comprehensible. In a way, as she becomes more helpless, the little things I associate with her will come more and more into my grasp. Sorry. I’ve lost you.”
&nbs
p; “No you haven’t.”
“I don’t know why I find you so easy to talk to. All this stuff I come out with …”
“Me being a woman, you mean? It’s because I’m common.”
“No you’re not,” he said automatically.
“I certainly am compared with you. Don’t worry. I’m not offended. Common’s only a perspective, not an insult, like me finding you a bit posh. I can’t see it from here. It’s the same as you wanting to kiss me.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
“Well.”
“Just to see. Because you could. That’s because I’m common too. I don’t remind you of your mother. Frances probably does.”
“Now I’ve made you cross.”
“I’m not cross, I’m thirsty.”
“Sorry. I’ll get you another.”
After their second drink, he saw her to her car then walked home. The sun had not quite set as he entered their quiet, leafy street but lights were coming on. He saw through windows to where families stared at televisions. A man dandled a baby. A bunch of young people stood around self-consciously clutching wine glasses. He froze below a bedroom window where a neighbor he knew faintly, a man around sixty, was unzipping his wife’s dress, then hurried on as the woman turned to draw their curtains. Had they seen him staring, they would have assumed he was an old man hankering after a tantalizing glimpse of bra or breast. Nobody could guess it was not flesh he lusted after but the ordinary, practiced intimacy of the moment.
The last tableau was displayed in his own conservatory, which branched out to one side of the house and was clearly visible from one point on the pavement. Frances was sitting with Will and playing cards after all. He saw her laugh at something Will had said and flap her cards as though to swat the witticism out of the air like a passing fly.