He fumbles for my hand.
“What’s happening to me?” he asks.
Next day, at Fran’s suggestion, Lin and I and Woody - Lin’s eighteen year old son - ship the blue reclining chair around to the nursing home. Despite the weight loss my father is still a big man and the motorised riser will make it much easier to get him on his feet. The chair weighs a ton and Woody and I manhandle it in from the street. There’s a space already cleared beside the bed. The recliner looks nice there, the blue Draylon spotted with rain.
My father is watching from another armchair. He’s half way through his breakfast but the moment he spots the blue chair he looks troubled again, and anxious. He lived in that chair for the best part of a year. Has it triggered the odd memory or two? Is he back in the flat he shared with my mum?
Fran and one of the staff decide to transfer dad into the newly arrived recliner. I offer to help but Fran says it will be OK. She puts my father’s tray carefully to one side, parts his legs, and stands between them. Then she bends towards him.
“Put your arms around my neck, Stan.”
My dad stares up at her, alarmed now.
“What?”
“Your arms, Stan. Put them round my neck.”
My mother is here too. We’ve brought her round in the van so she can stay afterwards. My father’s eyes flick towards her. Then he does what he’s told, reaching up for Fran.
“Grip your hands together, Stan. Go on, do it for me.”
The other nurse, Les, stands beside Fran. Fran counts to three then hauls my father to his feet. It happens smoothly, in a single movement, and my father finds himself standing upright on a tiny revolving disc, pre-positioned on the carpet. He’s about to make a fuss but Fran is already using his body weight on the disc to swing him into the blue recliner. A second later, my father is sitting down again, too startled to protest.
I feel like applauding. This makes my own efforts with an armlock and the Zimmer frame look very laboured indeed. Fran is undoubtedly strong. But where on earth did she learn a trick like that?
“Life’s all technique” she says gaily, “Isn’t it Stan?”
All eyes return to my father. His eyes are closed. His breath is coming in little shallow gasps. He looks frail and old and hopelessly vulnerable. For a long moment I remember the black and white photos in the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe. The two young aviators under the cedar tree. My mother and father, newly married, standing rather stiffly beside the bird bath. The many lines that must have joined up these dots are still a mystery to me but watching Fran plump a pillow for my father’s head, and then coax a spoon into his fingers for the half-finished bowl of Weetabix from his interrupted breakfast, I realise that the time is probably short if I’m ever to find out more.
My father’s somehow got the spoon upside down. He gazes at it, uncomprehending. Fran again, pointing at my mother.
“Peggy’s here, Stan. Isn’t that nice?”
Twenty Three
With my father settled in around the corner, our lives quickly acquire yet another routine. My mother, naturally enough, wants to visit dad daily. Coping with the mysteries of the immediate neighbourhood is now beyond her but walking the 267 yards to the nursing home involves only two right hand turns and one left, and after she’s lost the fourth map we treat the route like a poem, making her learn the directions by heart. First right, first left, first right, she mutters, tottering gamely off.
For the first couple of days, we shadow her at a discreet distance, making sure she doesn’t add a verse or two to our precious directions, but once it becomes obvious that the chant has found a secure perch in some corner of her brain, we leave her to it, making sure that she’s happy and secure in her flat and making our own arrangements to pop in and see dad. By now, we’ve realised that £47 a day buys us a great deal more than a bed in a nursing home. For the first time in nearly four years, our lives are no longer shaped by my poor father’s failing brain.
For three whole days, hiding behind the pressure of the airshow book, I keep the lowest of profiles. Then, guilt-ridden, I abandon the word processor and walk round to the home. Dad, sprawled in the blue riser, seems pleased to see me. Len’s television is showing one of the World Cup quarter final games and we watch the first half together. I’m still prattling on about the glories of South American football when I notice the deep frown of concentration on my father’s face. He’s thinking about supper.
“What are we going to have?”
This is awkward. Dad’s living apart from us now. He has his own meal times, his own menus, he’s own tray with “Stan” pentelled in black on a little oblong of white cardboard. Away in the depths of the home I can hear the clatter of cutlery but in the hunt for the usual compromise I suggest that I get him fish and chips. It is, after all, Saturday. Mum and dad always had cod and six on Saturday nights, and I always fetched it from the chippie round the corner. Tonight will be no different - except that dad will be eating alone.
“But what about mum?”
“Mum’s having supper with us.”
“Here?”
“Not exactly.”
“Where then?”
“At home.”
“Home?”
He looks blank, trying to coax some sense from the word he’s always taking for granted. If home isn’t here, then where is it?
I bend towards him, trying to soften the harshest of truths: that home is now this special little hospital, that we live round the corner, that mum has become a visitor, rather than a wife. My father’s fingers are plucking at the waistband of his trousers. He’s always had a little buttoned pocket there where he used to keep his spare change.
“Get some for all of us.” he says, “But not too many chips.”
“All of us?”
I go through it again. How he’s getting extra special care. How the staff are doing things for him that only they can do. How lucky we are that we’re all still so close. He follows the logic as best he can, staring at the TV screen, nodding from time to time, but I can tell that he hasn’t a clue about what I’m really saying. It’s like talking to a child. He picks out what he wants to hear and just ignores the rest.
I leave shortly afterwards, returning minutes later with medium cod and a generous portion of chips. One of the staff warms a plate and I take it in on a tray. Dad is having a blood test for his diabetes. These last couple of days, the readings have been all over the place, sometimes under, more often wildly over.
He peers up at me, genuinely curious, as if he hasn’t seen me for weeks.
“What are you doing here, mate?”
“I’ve brought your supper. Fish and chips.”
The nurse is still holding one of his fingers. He yells as she stabs him with a needle, then fumbles for the chips with his other hand. Holland have just beaten Argentina 2-1. I go back over the game, reminding him about Bergkamp’s clincher, about Ortega head-butting the Dutch goalie, about the cloggies in the crowd going mad. The chips are disappearing fast.
“I havn’t seen the boys at all.” My father is frowning again.
“They’re not here, dad. Tom’s in London. Jack’s in Devon.”
“Oh?” He looks up. “I thought they lived upstairs?”
That same night, as planned, mum comes over to supper. I do my best with a recipe for Chilean fish stew but I can tell that she prefers pork pie and salad. After the third tumbler of Martini, she’s in the mood for a little gentle reminisence.
Being with my father day after day is becoming a real test. Her supplies of stamina and courage are seemingly limitless but in her confusion she’s finding it harder and harder to associate the slumped figure in the blue armchair with the man she met on a warm summer’s night all those years ago. Sheer loyalty makes her visit daily but my father’s wild mood swings are beginning to nudge the foundations of a marriage she’d always taken for granted. She needs to remind herself that she made the right decision. She needs a little tenderness.
/>
And so, over apple pie and custard, we return to pre-war Clacton. How she met my father. How handsome he was. How she took the memory of that first evening back to London, and wrote to him, and invited him to stay. How her mother, touched by his shyness and impressed by his courtly manners, made a great fuss of him. And how, once the war was under way, my mother found herself working for the government department that dealt with censorship.
“They were the good old days” she says fondly, “We had such fun.”
She begins to tell us a story about typewriters being lowered on ropes from the upper stories of the Long Acre office building the moment the war had ended, and we prepare to laugh when she finally gets to the punchline. My mother does this all the time now, racing pell-mell from from story to story, and as far as we can tell it’s all part of the same slow descent into senility. Day after day, she draws the straightest conversational line from one fading memory to the next - and the older she gets, the more chaotic the narrative becomes. It’s like one of those kids games - connecting the dots until a shape appears - but her failing brain has robbed her of most of the connective detail that gives a life coherence. There are dots on her page she’ll never remember, bits of the picture she’ll never be able to share.
That’s a shame, and I’ve drunk enough Adnam’s Suffolk Ale to say so. My mother is quick to agree.
“We all get old, Graham” she says, “We all get past our sell-by date.”
I’m thinking of my father’s father, the go-getting industrialist who lost everything in the Great Depression and ended his life beneath the wheels of a train. My Auntie Kay, my dad’s sister, has a photograph of him. It shows a heavily-built man sitting behind the wheel of an open car. He and his buddies are wearing beautifully cut, velvet-trimmed coats and snap-brimmed hats. They look like a bunch of Chicago gangsters en route to a funeral.
This man’s death had knocked the props from beneath my father’s young life. He’d been ten at the time, the oldest, cleverest, best-behaved child of them all. He’d flourished at the little private school he attended. He’d been destined for great things. Didn’t he ever talk about this? Didn’t he ever share just a little of his angst?
My mother shakes her head.
“He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t talk about it.”
“But didn’t you try and make him?”
“I couldn’t. He wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t that sort of man.”
Wasn’t that sort of man? I shake my head in genuine bewilderment. What kind of marriage lasts for 56 years and doesn’t have the room for something as fundamental as this? All my life, my father has been tormented by his childhood, by those terrible events that had robbed him of his full potential. Wouldn’t kindness argue for a listening ear? For a touch? A kiss? A cuddle? A hug?
I’ve had the chance to watch my mother very closely over the last three years and I’ve realised that my father seems to physically repel her. It was the chiropodist who cut his nails, the barber who trimmed his moustache, Lin who soaped his hands and face. Did they always deny themselves these little kindnesses? Just how long can you stay married at arm’s length?
I want to pursue these questions, I want to find out the truth about their marriage, but the expression on Lin’s face tells me to shut up. My mother’s looking glum.
“It was very difficult, Graham” she sighs, “It’s very hard to explain.”
Twenty Four
It’s mid-July by now and the air tattoo is nearly upon us. The publishing schedule is extremely tight and I’m obliged to draft chapter after chapter as the story unfolds. The days preceeding the show, and the show itself, will occupy nearly half the book and a week before two hundred thousand people gather to gaze skywards, I decamp for RAF Fairford for a bout of sustained reportage. Two days later, my mother falls over in her flat and breaks her thigh.
Ward D2 is on the third floor of the Portsmouth hospital where my father ended up the evening he nearly died. Mum occupies a bed in the corner, a pale figure in a blue nightie, slighter than I’ve ever seen her. The break was severe enough for one end of the shattered bone to protrude through the skin. The surgeons have pinned the bone back in place, and with physiotherapy she may yet walk again, but for now she must lie on her back until the bone begins to knit. I can tell from her face that she’s less than comfortable but she weathers the pain, as she weathers everything else, with amazing fortitude. It’s nice to see us, nice to have company. Pull up a chair. Make yourself at home.
She peers up at us.
“Will I have to be here long?”
Two weeks later, the airshow over, mum is discharged from hospital. Lin and her sister Sue have been working all week to get the flat ready for her return. The kitchen has been scrubbed from top to bottom. There are new curtains in the spare room and the bedroom where mum sleeps has been transformed. For the first time in her life, whether she likes it or not, my mother is to be indulged.
Mum arrives in a taxi in the early afternoon. She’s accompanied by an occupational therapist - Nikki King - and a youngish student nurse. Their job will be to see exactly how well she can cope on one good leg and what physical difference an extra pair of hands might make. When mum rolls out of the taxi and down the ramp in her wheelchair, she’s visibly pleased to see us. We wheel her into the flat and the OT supervises while she gets herself unsteadily vertical. Anchored to a Zimmer frame - smaller than dad’s - she hops cautiously into her living room.
“Which chair is yours?” Nikki asks.
Mum looks guarded. Is this question meant to trap her? She studies the chair on the right behind the door. Lin has covered it with a blue drape, giving it a stylishness it never had under my mum’s previous tenancy. I can tell she’s confused.
“This one?” she queries.
Heads nod. At the OT’s invitation, she settles into the chair. It needs to be higher. Up on chocks, it will make getting vertical much easier.
From the kitchen, mum hops into the bedroom. Once again, the seeming newness of everything takes her by surprise. Mum can’t believe it. The room is bathed in soft pinks, her favourite colour. A beach scene in water colours, hanging over the chest of drawers, reminds her of Clacton while another picture, over the bed, features a spray of her cherished carnations. There are vases of fresh flowers, too, puddled in sunshine. The makeover brings tears to my mother’s eyes, an extremely rare event. She can’t believe it. All this fuss. All this trouble. Just for her.
Back in the kitchen, she struggles towards the sink beneath the window. Movement is plainly difficult, and painful too, but she never once complains. When Nikki inquires whether she thinks she’s up to cooking herself a meal. she doesn’t turn a hair.
“If I have to” she says, “Then of course I will. It can’t be that hard.”
I try and signal to Nikki that we’ll be doing all the cooking. Discretion is the essence of this particular exchange because my mother has never been less than independent, and cast adrift on one leg in her own kitchen I’m sure she’d have a go at braised beef or shoulder of lamb. The fact that she won’t have to is neither here nor there. Her spirit and her stoicism are a lesson to us all.
Moments before Nikki and the student nurse leave, my mother gazes down at her yellowing leg, still swollen after the operation. She’s under strict orders not to put any weight on it - thus the hopping - but she’s increasingly forgetful, as well as stubborn, and Nikki is far from convinced that she’ll keep to the script.
Mum is still peering at the leg.
“Funny” she says, “It feels further away than the other one.”
Twenty Five
Later that afternoon, I go swimming. It’s a brisk, windy day with showers racing down the Solent from the west. The sea is a deep green, one of my favourite colours, and I bury my fatigue under the pummelling waves. When the sun goes in I swim back to the tiny triangle of pebbly beach. Ten minutes later, hair still wet, I’m ringing the bell at the nursing home. It’s obvious from half way down the str
eet that dad’s in a state again. The prospect of the next hour or so fills me with dread.
As the front door opens, I can hear his voice.
“Peg! Peg!” he roars.
Evelina is the other partner who runs the home, a no-nonsense Australian with years of experience in intensive care. She looks at me a moment.
“Perfect timing” she says drily, “Maybe you can calm him down.”
She looks uncharacteristically harrassed. Everyone has a tether and I suspect my father has stretched hers to breaking point. He’s lying in a funny position in the blue recliner, his body somehow twisted sideways. The catheter bag hangs from the bottom of his left trouser leg, fatly yellow. He squints up at me, his face contorted. He’s in a terrible state, as bad as I’ve ever seen him. Everything hurts. Nobody cares. Peg and Lin said they’d be round. Where are they?
As gently as I can, I explain that mum’s only just got back from hospital. She needs to rest for a while.
“She should be here.” He shouts, waving at the clock, “She said she’d be here.”
This is plainly nonsense and it rapidly gets worse. He thinks Lin and I have been at Goodwood all day. He thinks we’ve been to the races and not told him. We’re selfish and we don’t care. Just like everyone else.
The notion of a day at Goodwood races is deeply novel. I’ve never been to the races in my life.
“Who’s gone to the races?”
“Graham. Graham and Lin.”
“But I’m Graham. And I’m here.”
“They went to the races.”
“I didn’t. Honestly.”
He gives me a sudden look.
“Where’s Peg?”
Evelina and I are exchanging glances. She holds his hand and tries to comfort him. He plucks at his trousers. He wants them off. Evelina suggests a cup of tea and a paracetamol. She’s trying to get the GP to prescribe a new course of tranquillisers but so far without success. Every time the doctor comes round, my father is sanity personified.
Estuary Page 9