In Her Mothers' Shoes (38 page)

Slowly, she pulled over to the side of the road, waited for the following car to get onto the main road then u-turned and drove the few hundred metres back home, parking the car in the garage, its door still wide open.

She sat there, unable to move, her hands wrapped around the top of the steering wheel. She was a nurse. A trained nurse. She could never run away from a patient in need of nursing. Those three years of training, learning the devotion required to her duty, the importance of the patient and of meeting their every need – what did she think she was doing? What would Matron say? Images of the late Miss Widdowson flashed into her mind – the stern-faced stickler for the rules, whose regime at Public had taught her everything she knew, not just about medicine and treatments, but about care of the patient, about putting the patient first. Miss Widdowson would never countenance running away from a nursing task because it was too hard, because she was sick of it.

Suddenly, Rose felt incredibly calm, as if she were watching herself through the car windscreen. She didn’t feel like Rose; she wondered if perhaps she’d gone mad, if this dissociation she was experiencing was the first sign she was losing her mind. Or was she simply coming to her senses?

Calmly, she opened the car door and got out, walked through the garage door to the laundry, picked up the paper towels and bath towels, cloths, disinfectant, washbasin, apron and a clean set of George’s underwear off yesterday’s pile of clean clothes and marched herself down to the bedroom. The sight of George, lying helplessly in his own mess made her weak with shame. How could she do this to him?

‘Where’ve you been, Rose? I thought you’d driven away.’ George looked away. ‘I thought you’d left me.’

She struggled with the guilt threatening to overwhelm her. She wanted to apologise, to confess, but that would only make George feel worse. ‘No, George, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ She blushed at her duplicity. ‘I just had to move the car to get something out of the garage. You know how crowded it is in there.’

‘I don’t do this on purpose, you know,’ he said quietly, still looking at the closed curtains. ‘Do you think I do? Do you think I can help myself?’

She shook her head. ‘No, of course not,’ she said brusquely. ‘I’m sorry about the delay, but I’m here now. Let’s get started, shall we?’

Covering her nightdress with the blue plastic Harrods’ apron, Rose approached George’s bed and, from then on, didn’t allow herself to think about what she was doing until it was over and George was sitting in his chair, dressed, his razor in his good hand as he set about shaving in front of the magnifying mirror on his tray-table. He remained cool, distant. She understood; he wasn’t a fool.

The washing machine agitator marked time in the adjacent laundry as she sat at the kitchen table and thought about what she’d done – or nearly done. She decided to ring Joan and confess.

Joan tried to soothe, to minimise the offence. ‘You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, old girl,’ she said. ‘We’ve all wanted to run away at times.’

‘But I actually did it. I got to the end of the street…’

‘And then you turned round and did your duty,’ Joan said. ‘Tell you what, I’ll pop round for a cuppa this afternoon and we can…’

‘I can’t,’ Rose cried. ‘I’d love to talk to you, but I’m going on a tramp today. In fact, I’ve got to be off very soon or I won’t make it.’

‘Then I’ll be round at half past five when you’re back from your day trip,’ Joan said firmly. ‘You can pour me a gin and we’ll talk.’ Then, before Rose could protest, she was saying goodbye and was gone.

Hastily, Rose laid out everything George would need for the day while she was away. No need for his pickle bottle any longer now he had a catheter, but there was still his lunch to prepare, just the right amount of tea in the thermos flask, the paper, phone, pens, notepaper and other paraphernalia he needed to occupy his day. Each time she took something to him, he turned away and occupied himself with the radio, the newspaper, anything he could find. She was relieved; she was still upset – at herself and at his condition. As the multiple sclerosis ate away at him, so it was eating away her freedom and her enjoyment of life.

She could work it through when she was out in the fresh air on the hills – because she was determined to go.

But with eleven of them out tramping together there was always someone wanting to walk beside her and talk; she hardly had a moment to herself. But the dread she’d expected to feel returning home at the end of the day was gone; the claustrophobia she’d feared had vanished. Feigning cheeriness, pretending nothing had happened that morning, she breezed into George’s study and launched into an account of the tramp, filling the air with anecdotes and reported conversations until the tension between them loosened.

Then Joan arrived with both gin and tonic and took Rose off into the other room for a private discussion, suggesting Rose talk to the doctor about the selective colostomy surgery that many people with long-term MS underwent to solve the incontinence problem.

‘And you should be able to get a nurse,’ Joan said.

‘But we can’t afford one.’ She thought bitterly about Aunt Doris’s inheritance and how there hadn’t been enough to pay for a nurse to help her – not even three mornings a week.

‘No, not a private nurse. You should qualify for a district nurse.’

The next day, Rose phoned the doctor, who applied to Nurse Maude and, before too long, nurses were rostered to visit every morning, even weekends, to get George up, washed and dressed. There were no more early-morning escape attempts.

Rose still experienced frustration, anger even at George’s dependence on her. But she made sure she got out of the house at least once a week to tramp the hills – the daily nurse visits made her mornings a lot easier – and for three weeks every year, she could go on longer tramps, staying overnight while George went into respite hospital care.

She still missed Woodchester, the men and women she’d befriended there and the sense of purpose to her day. At Woodchester, she could make a difference to the lives of forty-two frail and ailing people, could bring a smile to their faces, could give them comfort when their children failed to visit and could return dignity to their day if they soiled themselves. She missed the routine, the gratitude, the camaraderie.

She imagined it must have been the same for George after he gave up work – worse even. After twenty years working for the bank, most of that time in the cavernous ANZ banking chamber in Hereford Street, he would have been desolate having to give it up while still comparatively young at the age of fifty. But he’d never said, had remained stoic and cheerful, as he always did in adversity. He had inherited his father’s ability to say nothing, especially when something was really troubling him. Stubbornly, he refused to be drawn, even as the years passed; as if giving up work in your prime was something everybody did.

At first, though, the loss of the daily bus trip into town with his packed lunch and the interaction with his colleagues would have scarcely been noticed, because they’d travelled the world – their one and only OE, as Kate called it.

They’d both known the trip had to be taken then while George was still comparatively mobile. Within a few years, the doctors had warned, his mobility, along with a lot of his physical functions, would go. They were both in their late fifties and were both novices at travelling. George’s service in the Pacific had been the only overseas travel; Rose had never been out of the country. This was to be their one and only chance to see the world. So Rose took unpaid leave from the hospital and embarked with George on a four-month trip to all the places they’d dreamed of going.

She’d managed to get George on his two walking sticks almost anywhere an able-bodied man could go – up the lift in the Eiffel Tower, into a boat underneath the Niagara Falls, into a plane over the Grand Canyon; they’d got tipsy on ouzo in Greece, eaten snails in France, stayed in Florence Nightingale’s house in London, surveyed the field of Waterloo in Belgium and, in Pennsylvania, the site of Lincoln’s Gettysberg address (which George could still recite in total – however useless his limbs might become, his mind remained fully honed), kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland, visited countless Roman ruins and English castles. In Scotland, George had come down with a fever. She blamed the hectic schedule for exhausting him; until Scotland, he’d been fine. He was admitted to the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary for six weeks while they checked him over; to fill the time, she’d worked at Jenner’s department store behind the glove counter.

The Infirmary’s diagnosis had been the same as twenty years earlier when George’s multiple sclerosis was discovered
.
But there was one bit of good news: there would be occasional periods of remission, such as at that time, when they’d travelled the world.

Returning home had been hard. It was as if he’d used up all his extra energy while away because within weeks, George’s MS had regressed and his mood with it. Unusually for him, he was grumpy and tired and Rose put it down to grieving for his old way of life, his daily routine at the bank, the numerous people he came into contact with there, the stimulation that had nourished him.

She’d tried to make up for it by inviting his friends around, by keeping him occupied with his hobbies, his banknotes, his American Civil War books. After a time, his humour returned. Rose kept herself busy tramping, making George’s life as comfortable as she could and looking after baby James on the occasional weekdays when Kate was called into work.

~   ~  ~

It was on one of those days, when Kate came in from work to pick up James, that she thrust a letter into Rose’s hand. They’d gone into the spare room, where James was asleep in his carrycot.

‘This came in the mail today.’ She looked unaccountably guilty as she handed over the envelope, as if she should be ashamed of something.

‘What is it?’

Kate went over to James’ carrycot, checked him then looked back at her mother. ‘It’s a letter from my birth mother.’

Rose drew in her breath and steadied herself on the dresser.

‘I wrote to her a few days ago. I didn’t want to worry you, in case I never heard back. But she’s written this.’

Rose let go the dresser and studied the envelope. A Wellington postmark. Smooth, rounded, nicely slanted, neat handwriting. She opened it and looked at the letter – much neater handwriting than her own, which Kate often complained was almost impossible to read. Good spelling.

‘Are you sure you want me to read this?’

‘Yes, Mum, of course.’

November 25, 1987.

Dear Katharine

Well, that was certainly a bolt out of the blue getting a letter from you. Luckily I have a strong constitution and made a quick recovery, and decided to reply quickly to you and perhaps find some answers for both of us after all these years. I have often wondered what became of you and now I know.

First you must understand that when I was a girl it was not the accepted thing for anyone to keep what they called an illegitimate baby. I was not given a choice like they are today and was whisked away to a home for unmarried mothers in Christchurch where I waited for the birth of my baby. Afterwards we were not allowed to see the baby or even hold her, and were not allowed to make contact with the baby’s family. It seems cruel and heartless the way girls were pressured into parting with their babies. We were told we would be giving a childless couple the chance to become parents and the child would have a better upbringing, which is possibly true, but of course the blood tie is terribly important.