Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's (6 page)

Chapter 5

Here reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities
.

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

O
UR FIRST BED-AND-BREAKFAST GUESTS ARRIVE, A
foursome of young friends, three Scots and an Australian. It is a perfect golden day, windless and warm, and I serve their afternoon tea in the garden. As I’m handing out cups and setting down a plate of warm scones, I’m wondering what to say about Nancy. I may be guilty of being defensive about her. Should I warn people who come to stay about the potential for encounters with Alzheimer’s? That’s what is going through my mind as I pour tea. Nancy may well want to meet them. She’s at an insistently sociable stage. I put the teapot down, take a steadying breath, point out that I made the rhubarb jam, and leave them to it, Nancy’s name unspoken. It’s too difficult to pitch it. I need to give some thought to this.

Later, I find the visitors gathered in the hall, looking very much as if they want to waylay somebody with a query. A question about eating: How do I rate the pubs in the village? Before I can answer, a hesitant voice says, “Hello?”

“It’s all right, Nancy,” I say, “just houseguests.” And then, to our visitors, “This is Nancy, my mother-in-law.”

“Hello, Nancy,” they chorus.

“And how are you today?” the Australian asks her. “You have a beautiful house here. We’re just admiring the plaster-work.”

Nancy, beaming, shuffles forward. Some days she has an old-lady gait, uncertain of her footing. She has her arms outstretched as she comes, grinning. “Oh, it’s you! Hello!” she cries to the Australian, and for a horrified moment I think she’s going to kiss him.

“Let’s go into the morning room; this is where you’ll be having breakfast,” I say, taking Nancy’s hand and yanking her forward.

“Oh, you’ll be comfortable in here,” Nancy assures the visitors. “This is my house, you know. I was born here. I’ve always lived here. My father is here, too. He’s in the garden. He doesn’t mean to be rude.” She smacks her lips together. “Well, I don’t know, actually. Perhaps he does.” She’s giggling now.

The visitors are looking at Nancy in a new way. Wondering. I’m wondering, too. She’s determined that her father’s here, and perhaps he is.

“So is there anything you’d like or don’t like for breakfast?” I ask them. “Eggs, bacon, baked flat mushrooms, baked tomatoes, black pudding?”

“Oh, I don’t like black pudding,” Nancy says gravely. “I hope that won’t put you to too much trouble.”

“I’m not sure I know what black pudding is,” the Australian pipes up.

“It’s horrible,” Nancy tells him. “But I like tomatoes.”

Everybody laughs. It’s going to be fine.

A
T BREAKFAST TIME,
though, Nancy is having one of her restless mornings. This is difficult when I’m trying to cook the Full Hot Scottish. I come down at seven thirty and find her in the hall, stock-still in her pink nightdress, with a pensive expression and one shoe. I put her back to bed—she’s cold and has probably been wandering for a while—and go and start the cooking. Then I go and check on Nancy. She’s lying in bed flat on her back with her arms crossed over her chest like a medieval marble tomb effigy, eyes open and unblinking. I return to the kitchen. Apples are fried up in butter for the black pudding eaters, and then I go and check on Nancy again. She seems to be asleep. Chris swings into action, cooking up pancakes and collecting the eggs. I take dishes of grapefruit salad through and encounter the guests, who are just coming down. “Good morning,” they bellow, and I wince, because they’ll wake her. I go to make the coffee and when I come back, I see Nancy, naked other than for a large pair of lilac-colored underpants, coming out of the dining room, followed by a suppressed burst of laughter.

“She’s quite a character, isn’t she?” the Australian says.

B
Y THE END
of the first summer we have the measure of the house. It is only late in August, as the light begins to fail and the first cold snaps descend, that measuring announces itself and the charming dark green of every inner wall is revealed as algal, the invoker of Stygian gloom. When it rains, water comes into the library. The chimneys are blocked by decades of nests. There are three kinds of heating, all expensive and inadequate. When the wind blows in a certain direction, the rain is driven under the roof and the children are called to bucket duty. When the wind blows in a certain direction, the kitchen stove and central heating are snuffed out and all the fireplaces puff out choking smoke. Needless to say, the wind blows in that certain direction quite a lot. And before you wonder aloud what all this has got to do with September, believe me, even August can be cold. Not cold as in chilly out of the sun. Cold as in
hailing
. Summer happens on about May 20 (with the occasional parting of clouds, an increase in the temperature of the wind) and if you’re lucky will stutter through, notwithstanding the occasional storm, a surprise snow shower or two, the odd monsoon, until the final week of July. August marks the start of autumn. On the twelfth, when ice cream’s dripping down the hands of children at the southern English resorts, the north of Scotland’s putting on its tweed for the beginning of the field sports year.

Despite this hard-won knowledge, the peninsula agricultural show is held in August. It doesn’t always rain. It isn’t always freezing. The show’s sprawling and immensely competitive, whether you’re entering a bullock, a Labrador, or a bouquet of onions. Also, Boots the chemist runs out of hair dryers. I know this because I went to buy two for the B and B rooms. “You’ll not get one in show week,” the assistant told me. I must have looked blank. “They wash the beasts, you see, and then they need to dry them.” And indeed, when idling round the stalls on Saturday afternoon, the penned-up, fed-up-looking sheep are unnaturally white and fluffy, fat clouds anchored on legs.

Among the promotional goodies on offer there’s free local steak and also rather good beer, in unlimited, plastic pint-glass quantity. I join the steak queue and Chris gets in line for the beers. We notice that some people are eating steak and drinking beer while queuing for another. I, not driving that day (a nondriver, in fact), get back in the beer queue three or five times. After this, I am fearless about breaking the ice. And this is how we come to order the chickens.

We’ve never kept hens before and I expect to be able to take them home immediately, have already wondered aloud whether they’ll stay put on the backseat or, like a Jack Russell, indicate a preference for driving, but alas, the chickens on view are representative only of style and color:
display
chickens, not for sale. We order six: two Dutch Blacks (good layers, we’re told), two Marans (delicious brown eggs), and a pair of French Bluebells (pretty), plus henhouse and accoutrements.

Two weeks later they arrive, dealt out from a vanload of identical hole-punctured cartons. There inside are murmuring little chicken bodies, fluffed up and warm and faintly disgusting smelling. Poor Audrey, a Dutch Black, dies on day three, found slumped on the henhouse floor, and is buried with full state honors in the wood. As in Hollywood, so in the henhouse: Ava and Bette are sworn enemies, plotting behind each other’s backs. Doris is chirpy, Lauren sardonic, Marilyn the one that can’t find the door (ouch). Nancy enjoys the chickens. Ava turns out the tamest and will crouch low to be stroked, or consent to be tucked under an arm and petted. Nancy bends to touch, her gnarled hand strikingly discolored as it moves very softly and with concentration along the dark feathers of Ava’s back. For a few minutes after this triumphant rural experience, I feel vindicated in bringing Nancy here and confident in everything that semiremoteness can offer her.

I
DECIDE
I need to crack on with the garden, which now, as summer’s turning, is gloriously profuse, though the weeds are as profuse as the flowers. There are thistles, docks, a firm infiltration of giant dandelion, and even—horrors—abundant patches of nettle lurking at the back. Morris is supposed to be helping with the garden, if only in an advisory capacity. He kept an allotment for thirty years. But Morris seems to have lost interest. The August wind is shockingly cold, but at least in the separate pair of formal gardens, high walled and south facing, it’s still possible to work without a coat. I help him outside, and take chairs out, and make a point of asking his advice about the care and pruning of various shrubs. I’m hoping that sitting in the flower garden will engage him a little. There’s a lot to do here, its former grandeur overgrown and tatty, but it could be wonderful.

“It could be wonderful, couldn’t it?” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he agrees.

Poor Morris seems more depressed than ever. Nothing we do to try to cheer him up—outings, lunches, tea parties, lavish amounts of grandchild attention—seems to make any difference. Several times I almost embark on a conversation designed to let him talk about his sadness—about how he feels now, deprived of his last remnants of independence, brought into our lives and his own effectively over, the two of them smothered by our inept attempts at kindness, unable to salvage anything meaningful from it all. Nancy, her condition, her deterioration, must be overwhelming for him, and it’s inescapable that his role now as husband is to accompany her with as much strength as he can muster to the end. He must feel like the oarsman directing the rowboat across the Styx. What would you wish for in his situation, that the current would pull faster or that it would linger longer? It’s an impossible question. The impossibility of things getting better, ever, of this being the final slow descent to the end of time—that must haunt him every waking minute, mustn’t it? Though I don’t know if that’s how he feels. We don’t have the conversation. I’m not sure why. I can only suppose it is out of some instinct that he wouldn’t be glad of it, would find it intrusive and final. Once darkness is admitted, self-consciously, to our situation, then all hope of lightness will be lost. I can’t bear to introduce this intensity to all our lives. And so I talk to him about the garden.

Morris must see that the garden could be lovely. It’s just that he’s found himself on holiday in the valley of the shadow of death and so, understandably, can’t speak enthusiastically of such temporal things. Loveliness may offend him, and our happy, irreverent family silliness offend him also. He does, increasingly, seem to offer an unspoken opinion that our continuing, apparently undaunted and unaffected, to be a cheery child-parental group is somehow a failure of tact. Pushing this to the back of my mind, I press on with discussing the planting. The bare bones of loveliness are all here. The walls are of the most beautiful old stone, patina-rich in grayish cream, luxuriant in places with ivy. The trees along the west wall are twisted and furry with lichen. In the center of the garden there’s a horseshoe-shaped pond, green with weed, and four borders bracketing it in an interrupted circle, each of them matted tightly with grass. There’s a lot to do. The Victorian greenhouse has broken and jagged glass, its roof open to the weather. The grapevine inside has tiny pips of grapes, and its interior raised bed is dense with shell-pink poppies. I am trying to talk to Morris about the plants, but it isn’t easy. He is gray, sullen, chain-smoking, and much more interested in what Nancy’s doing. It reminds me of conversations with a girlfriend in my then-kitchen, way back, when our children were small and she couldn’t focus on anything but toddler discipline.

“What do you think about this
Pulmonaria?”
I say to him.

Nancy offers him six blades of grass in her hand. “What do I do with this?”

M
ORRIS:
It’s just a bit of grass, you silly woman! Put it down! Put it down, Nancy!

She turns to me, holding the six blades at arm’s length as if they will bite. “What will I do with it?”

M
E:
Just put it in the wheelbarrow. Look. Over there. See? Wheelbarrow. With all the grass in it.

She looks around helplessly and I take her to the wheelbarrow. She starts to rearrange the weeds, talking to them. “Now you’re a nice yellow one. And, oh look, you have a friend.”

I return to the digging. After a while I see that Nancy has gone to the paved area by the greenhouse and is moving stones about.

M
ORRIS:
Nancy, will you stop doing that! Leave the gravel alone!

N
ANCY:
I’m just tidying it; it’s my day to sort it out.

M
ORRIS:
What are you talking about, your
day
?

M
E:
Morris, do you think these primroses will survive if I move them over there?

N
ANCY:
The people who live here want me to do it so I’d better do it.

M
ORRIS:
What are you talking about? You live here. We
are
the people who live here.

N
ANCY:
Don’t be silly. I never heard such nonsense. You say that to all the people but they know who you really are. (She stalks off, through the archway and out.)

M
E:
I’ll fetch her. Shall I get you some tea? A hat? The sun’s quite warm.

M
ORRIS:
That would be lovely, dear. I really don’t understand what Nancy was on about.

M
E:
She has Alzheimer’s, Morris. You do know that, don’t you? You know what Alzheimer’s is?

M
ORRIS:
Oh yes, yes. But she talks such rubbish now. I worry she might really be ill.

I return with Nancy and with a tray of tea and biscuits. Tea and biscuits are consoling for Morris and work also as a sort of Nancy-sedative. Then I resume the gardening. I start at one of the borders that frame the pond, digging out deep-rooted mats of trespassing lawn. Jack comes in his Wellies and shorts to help, and gets into the water, a foot or so deep in its concrete mold, pulling out great green ropes of smelly weed and shrieking. The dogs rush about chasing birds into bushes.