‘Wow!’ Jill puts down her knife and wipes her hands on her striped butcher’s apron. ‘It takes years off you.’
‘Great, isn’t it? That hairdresser’s a genius.’ She pauses. ‘I just hope it stays this time.’
‘Fingers crossed.’ Jill takes off her apron to reveal a long, blue-and-orange kaftan-type dress. She always wears this sort of thing for cooking. If she’s working outside, she usually wears a pair of David’s jeans, tied up with a bit of old rope for a belt and one of his oversized shirts. Jill and David tell all the new volunteers about how they met as carefree young hippies in the sixties. ‘And now,’ they add proudly, ‘we’re carefree old hippies in our sixties.’
‘Before I forget.’ Jill hands her a mug of tea. ‘Two things to tell you and a favour to ask. First, your mum phoned.’
Eleanor’s heartbeat quickens and she feels a tickle of shame as she realises she hasn’t spoken to her mother since Christmas Day, almost two months ago.
‘Everything’s okay, but she said there’s something she needs to tell you. Said it was very important.’
‘That’s weird. She hardly ever calls me. I wonder what could be so important?’
‘Only one way to find out. Use the landline.’ Jill passes her the handset. ‘I need to get the cabins ready for the new helpers anyway.’
‘Thanks.’ She starts to key in the number, then pauses. ‘You said there were two things?’
‘Oh, yes. And a favour. Favour first – can you take my yoga class for me tomorrow? I’ve pulled something in my back sorting out those bloody cloches.’
‘All right, if your group don’t mind.’ She’s taken the yoga classes before, but she isn’t as good at it as Jill, who at sixty-eight is more than eighteen years her senior, but is tall and slender and can do things with her body that would defeat most women half her age.
‘Of course they won’t; they love you.’
‘And the other thing you had to tell me?’
‘Ooh, yes. Postcard from Dylan.’
There is a tiny skip in her stomach.
‘It’s on the corkboard. He’ll be here sometime in May or June, he says, and he’ll probably stay until late autumn, if we can use him, which, of course . . .’
‘We most definitely can.’ She smiles as she reads his postcard, which has a picture of Tower Bridge on the front; he’s in London again. Dylan never uses the telephone; doesn’t even own a mobile, never mind a tablet or even a laptop. He has no need of such things, he says. She feels lighter as she goes back to keying in her mum’s number.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Mum. Jill said you phoned. Is everything all right?’
‘Who do you wish to speak to?’ her mother says in her most formal telephone voice.
‘Mum, it’s me. Eleanor.’
Silence. It must be one of her bad days. ‘Mum, are you there? It’s Eleanor. You rang earlier; you said you had something to tell me.’
‘Eleanor? Oh, hello. Nice to hear from you. How are you keeping?’
‘I’m fine, Mum. You called me, this morning. Do you remember?’
‘Did I? No, I don’t think so. I seldom use the telephone these days. I can never remember the numbers. They’ve all changed.’
‘You don’t need to. I put them in your phone last time I was down, remember? You just need to look at the list on the front and you’ll see which number you have to press for which person.’
‘Last time? When was that? I don’t remember.’
For a moment, she thinks her mother is being sarcastic; after all, although she tries to phone every couple of months, she hasn’t actually seen her mum for over two years. Probably more like three, now she thinks about it. ‘It’s been a while, I know. But when I came, I put the important numbers in for you, and if you look on the front of the phone, there’s a list. Have a look now. Can you see it?’
Silence.
‘Mum? Peggy’s mobile should be first, then—’
‘I don’t need Peggy’s number.’ She sounds irritated. ‘She’s only upstairs, and we’ve got an extension.’
‘I know, I meant her mobile. In case she’s out and you need to talk to her. It should be my mobile next, then I think it’s the landline for here, but if you—’
‘I’d better go,’ her mother says. ‘Peggy will be down for coffee presently. I’ll tell her you called. Bye, darling.’ And she’s gone.
Eleanor sighs. She ought to go down again soon. Her mum and Peggy have been friends since they were teenagers, but it isn’t fair to rely so heavily on Peggy; after all, she’s only two or three years younger than Marjorie, although Marjorie often seems much older. It was Peggy who’d rung to tell her about the diagnosis, more than three years ago now. ‘Your mum didn’t want to worry you,’ she’d said. ‘But I told her not to be so bloody stupid. She’s struggling to take it all in, but I said I’d let you know.’
She’d called her mother the next day and asked exactly what the doctor had said.
‘Well, they’re almost certain that’s what it is. There’s no blood test or anything, but they did some memory tests . . . like being at school. They had me counting backwards in nines, or was it sevens? I had to draw something – a clock, I think. And lots of silly questions – what year is it, who’s the Prime Minister, that sort of thing.’ She sighed heavily. ‘They think I’ve had it for a while. I’m always forgetting things when I go shopping, or leaving my keys in the front door. But I forget people’s names now, too. And things that have happened.’ She paused. ‘Even big things.’ For a moment, Eleanor had wondered if she might finally mention the ‘big things’ that had defined their lives, coloured their relationship. But then she sounded brisk again. ‘Anyway, it’s not too bad at the moment, but it’ll get worse. I’ll just have to learn to live with it.’
Ever since then, Eleanor has made sure she keeps in touch more frequently in an attempt to move some way towards being a dutiful daughter. She’s been meaning to arrange a visit for ages, in fact; she thinks about it every few weeks. But the weeks and months have quietly stretched and become years, and somehow all this time has passed and now it seems the disease is starting to crank up.
*
Eleanor is working in the kitchen this week. Jobs on the farm are allocated on a rota system for the sake of variety, so if you’re in the kitchen one week, you’ll probably be working in the grounds the week after, either on gardening duties – digging, weeding, planting; anything associated with growing food – or you could be on maintenance and repairs. That can mean things like repointing, replacing broken tiles, securing loose guttering or perhaps repainting the house and the cabins – the salty sea air tends to eat through the exterior paint quickly. If you have a particular talent or skill, that’ll be taken into account, too. Bread-making is one of her regular duties, and she and David take turns because they both seem to have the knack for it, whereas Jill can make cakes but is, in her own words, completely bloody useless with yeast!
They bake two or three times a week, depending on how many volunteers they have, and she’s always trying out new things. She loves the smell of newly baked bread and the sight of the table laden with fresh loaves, rolls and baguettes, and she revels in the warm appreciation of the volunteers, especially those used to limp supermarket sandwiches grabbed on the way to the office. And although she hates to admit it, she likes it when the volunteers – with their homes and families, their proper jobs, their mortgages and pensions – look at her properly and say things like, Where did you learn to bake like that? Or, What a wonderful skill to have.
She has just started mixing water into a mound of flour and yeast on the kitchen table when her phone vibrates in her pocket. ‘Shit,’ she mutters. This is not a point at which she can stop, so she carries on mixing with her fingers until she has a loose dough, then she pulls what she can off her hands before washing them and getting her phone out of her pocket. It’s her mum again. At least that means she must have remembered how to use the stored numbers.
There’s a voicemail. ‘Eleanor?’ Her voice sounds hesitant. ‘Is that you? It doesn’t sound like you.’ There is a pause, then she hears her mum make a tutting noise. ‘Oh, it’s the machine, isn’t it? Are you there, Eleanor? Pick up the phone if you’re there.’ Eleanor has explained voicemail again and again, but her mum can’t seem to hold onto it. Marjorie is seventy-four, so not exactly old. Well, not old old, anyway. Next new message. ‘Eleanor, it’s me again. I need you to telephone me.’ She doesn’t sound upset exactly, but there is an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. It’s very important, so I must speak to you.’ Pause. ‘Yes, so ring me, please.’
She calls back immediately. It’s less than twenty minutes after her mum’s message, but by that time, Marjorie has completely forgotten what it was she wanted to tell her, or that she’d even called.
Eleanor
Over the next three days, there are two more ‘I need to tell you something’ voicemails, but each time, by the time Eleanor calls back, Marjorie can’t even remember phoning.
‘I’m worried about her,’ she says to Jill as they dig in the rich, seaweed-enhanced compost ready for the start of planting next month. ‘I need to visit soon. In fact, I might have to start going down quite regularly, depending on how bad she is.’
‘Of course,’ Jill replies. ‘You don’t need to think about this place, you know that.’
She smiles. ‘True.’ She always tells people it’s the very ‘no ties’ aspect of the farm that has kept her here so long, but in truth it’s a long time since she’s considered leaving. ‘It’ll only be for a couple of days this time, anyway. I should have gone down before, but I suppose I’ve been putting it off. It’s never easy.’
Jill pauses to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes, a gesture Eleanor always notices. ‘Do you have to go? I mean, it’s not as though you’re close, is it? And if—’
‘That’s the problem, though. If I can’t make some sort of connection with her, I don’t know . . . I suppose I always thought there would be time to sort things out.’
‘You never know; she might even feel the same way. Did you ever find out what it was she wanted to tell you?’
‘No, she couldn’t even remember phoning. I don’t suppose she really has anything to tell me – it’s probably the Alzheimer’s.’ Even as she says this she wonders if she might be mistaken – her mum had sounded quite distressed in the voicemails.
‘It might not be all that bad. I mean, we all forget things, don’t we?’
‘Not my mother.’ She tips out more compost from the wheelbarrow. ‘At least, I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure because she never bloody tells me anything.’ She is fairly sure her mother recalls everything that’s ever happened to her, whereas Eleanor herself still has gaps in her memory. Maybe some things are better forgotten, but she wishes she’d been given the choice. Instead, her parents took her to a psychotherapist. A quack, more like, Dylan had said when she told him. Her mother wasn’t sure where they’d got the idea – possibly from an article in Reader’s Digest – but the gist of it was that children could be made to forget traumatic events by being taught to symbolically dispose of bad memories. Every time the young Eleanor remembered anything that made her unhappy, she was to imagine herself throwing the upsetting memories into a dustbin and putting the lid on tight. Then she was supposed to think of something nice, because if you filled up your head with nice memories, there would be no room for the nasty ones.
So she spent a lot of her early childhood thinking about picking sweet peas in different colours, stroking a fluffy kitten or being given a whole box of Smarties at Christmas.
*
Most of the drive to south-east London isn’t too bad, but the drizzling rain turns to a deluge, and visibility is so poor that she has to crawl the last twenty miles as her wipers thrash uselessly at the flooded windscreen. By the time she arrives it’s mid-afternoon, the rush hour has started and traffic in the centre of Lewisham is heavy. The road layout seems to have changed since she was last here, or maybe it’s that she is so disconnected from who she was when she lived here that the place feels alien to her all the time now. She passes Lewisham Hospital and indicates to turn left. The shops all look so different now. She notices that the pub has gone, although the Chinese takeaway is still there, and the little general store where she and her friends used to buy Jamaican patties after school; they still sell them, according to the board outside, along with curried fish or goat.
Her stomach shifts as she pulls up outside the huge corner house where she grew up. This is one thing that doesn’t change. At least, her mother’s half of the house, the topsy-turvy part where you go downstairs to bed instead of up, has barely changed since she left.
Pulling her coat up over her head, she goes up the steps to the main front door and rings the bottom bell. She waits for a minute and rings again, but there’s no reply. Perhaps her mum is upstairs with Peggy. When she was growing up, it felt as though it was one house instead of two maisonettes. The inner front doors were often on the latch so she could go up or down without having to ring the bell, and she’d taken advantage of this as a child, spending much of her time up at Peggy’s.
She tries the top bell but there’s no response to that, either. A sense of unease begins to creep through her. She leans across to look through the rain-lashed bay window into the living room, but there are no lights on, no sign of life. Maybe her mum has forgotten she’s coming. She goes down the steps and along the side alley into the garden. If her mum is downstairs in one of the bedrooms a light will be on somewhere – you need electric light down there on all but the brightest of days. But the basement is in darkness. An image flashes into her head of her mother lying unconscious on the floor, but she rejects it almost immediately. After all, physically, Marjorie is far from frail.
She climbs the steps to the veranda, where she’ll be able to see through into the kitchen. Again, no lights, no sign that anyone’s around. There is a shock of cold wetness on the back of her neck as water starts to seep through her coat. Why hadn’t she thought to bring her Barbour? She feels the faintest stirrings of panic as she gets back into the car, but when she checks her phone she sees there are two texts: On our way. Be about 10 minutes P x Thank God. She scrolls up to the previous text, which came through half an hour ago. Not sure what time you’re arriving, but we’ll be back soon. P xx She texts a reply, Am here, see you in a bit, then sits back to wait.
The house is Victorian and could reasonably be described as imposing. Her parents bought it while it was undergoing conversion from a single dwelling into two maisonettes. Her mum told her that when they first viewed the lower part as newlyweds, there was still a row of servants’ bells in the basement. She looks up at the black windows. The Dralon curtains that still hang in the living room were once a deep red, but they’re badly faded now, almost pink with darker stripes in the folds where the sun can’t reach. She looks down at the bay window to her mum’s bedroom, half sunken beneath ground level. Those curtains haven’t changed either: an oatmeal colour with sprinklings of insipid lilac flowers. Her eyes flick up to Peggy’s windows: tasteful wooden blinds for the living room; curtains in the bedrooms at the top – huge red poppies on a white background – very Peggy.
She remembers how thrilled she’d been the day she heard that Peggy and her husband Ken had bought the upstairs maisonette. She must have been only five or six, because it was about the time her mum was in and out of hospital. The first she knew of it was when Peggy came round with Martin and Michael after school one day to tell them that it had all gone through at last and that, as from Saturday fortnight, she, Ken and the boys would be their new upstairs neighbours.
Eleanor had felt her grin stretch across her face, and her dad had ruffled her hair. ‘That’s good news, isn’t it, Ellie-belly?’
Then Peggy smiled at her. ‘It’ll make babysitting easier, won’t it, sweetheart? Not that you’re a baby any more, obv
iously.’
Eleanor always went up the road to Peggy’s when her mum wasn’t well. She liked playing with the twins, although they were boys, of course, and a bit older. Mainly, though, she liked being with Peggy. She liked looking at Peggy, too; she felt guilty thinking it, but her mother wasn’t as pretty; she was thin, with a pale, dry face and a frown that stayed around her eyes even when she smiled, which wasn’t often. But Peggy had wide-awake eyes and a mouth that always looked as though it was about to laugh. Her cheeks were peachy pink, and they were ripe and juicy.
Peggy leant forward with her hands on her knees. ‘Tell you what, Ellie, when we move in, how would you like to come up and help me and the boys unpack?’
She’d nodded vigorously, and when the day came, she reminded her mum that Peggy had said she could go upstairs to help. Her heart sank when her mother said she would come too, but to her amazement, once they were up there, surrounded by more cardboard boxes than she had ever seen, her mum was soon chatting and laughing with Peggy as they tried to work out which box the kettle was in.
She’d wondered whether it was partly the house itself that was causing her mother’s malaise. Her mum spent too much time in the dingy basement where revolting, squirmy silverfish lived in the carpets and you dared not move anything in case you disturbed them. Maybe simply being in a higher, brighter part of the house cheered her mum up. Downstairs, misery built up like mould in the rooms; the very bricks and mortar were steeped in it. She’d known even then that something bad had happened, and she had an inkling that she’d been part of it, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Sometimes, just as a ray of sunlight might illuminate the dust motes in a stuffy old room, a chink of light would fall upon a buried memory, causing it to brighten and glow in her mind: herself, sobbing as she ran barefoot down the garden; Peggy’s face as she dropped her shopping bags, oranges rolling across the grass. But nothing stayed long enough for her to make sense of it. Sometimes she wished she could find that imaginary dustbin and take all her memories out again, even if they weren’t very nice.
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