Rough Music (11 page)

“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 He also suffered terrible depressions, in which he became wordless and withdrawn and which he described, in a lucid moment, as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.”

“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.

Deep in her second gin, Sylvia had raised the old theory, much discussed in Alzheimer’s chat rooms and fund-raisers, that early onset of the disease was particularly common in people whose lives had been basically unhappy, even traumatic; the bereaved, mothers of murdered children, survivors of persecution. Publicly he scorned the theory, finding it as crudely metaphorical as the insulting myth that sad, repressed personalities were more prone to cancer than sunnily open ones, so that child-blessed wives were favored over unloved virgins. In private, however, he had lately found the theory like a mental burr that stuck and chafed however hard he tried to dislodge it with reason.

He had always thought of Frances as someone who had led a happy life. All or most of his images of her were happy. The image he had carried in his mental wallet all these years was of her grinning, in a swimsuit, on a sandy beach. But perhaps he was confusing her feelings with the ones she evoked in him? She always spoke of herself as happy, basically happy, fortunate too. Could it be that she was trying to convince herself? Repeat the statement often enough and it became true? Had she been protecting him or had he been fooling himself? Certainly they had undergone their trials—what long-married couple had not?—but theirs was a sound marriage and, he had just learned from Sylvia, to be counted a successful one. “You’re still together forty-one years on? It’s a successful marriage.”

Frances looked up and, seeing him loitering on the pavement, waved.

Julian would have been perfectly happy to be left alone. He was happy with his room with its lookout window and its sounds and smells of the sea. He was happy with the beach, especially when the tide cut it off from the bigger one around the corner and it became
Our Beach
. He was happy sitting among the rocks reading
The Story of Troy
, making sand castles, fishing in rock pools, buying cornets from the ice-cream van that drove around the bay twice a day. In the evenings he could barely keep his eyes open long enough to eat and in the mornings made himself a picnic breakfast rather than wait for his parents to appear. The grown-ups, however, seemed to feel that his happiness could not be complete unless it directly involved them and kept pestering him to swim, to go for a walk to visit some old church or another beach not nearly as nice as the perfect one on their doorstep. He knew his parents liked peace and quiet—“Ah! Peace and quiet!” was a typical exclamation of theirs on returning from some excursion—and by the same token that they enjoyed doing nothing at all because leaving their deck chairs or beach towels was always accompanied by such protestations of effort and a sort of nasty-medicine insistence upon doing what they believed to be the right thing. They baffled him.

When it was announced that his uncle and cousin were coming to join them for a few days, Julian had been excited. The mystery cousin was especially intriguing. He had become accustomed to obedient signings of Christmas and birthday cards to the enigmatic Skip and sensed, from people’s reactions, that it was unusual and therefore faintly glamorous to be able to talk of
my cousin in California
, but she remained unreal to him, less real even than a character in a book because she entered his life supplied with fewer telling details. He sensed from the way his parents dismissed certain television programs and their thinlyveiled disgust when a well-meaning but distant relative gave him some Charlie Brown books for his last birthday that there was something
not quite right
about American culture. Judged against the things they did value—Bach, Rievaulx Abbey, Shakespeare—it must have seemed too new, too brightly colored. The romantic matinées he watched with his mother were usually American (at least the best ones were) but it was understood they were an indulgence not to be discussed in his father’s hearing, like the chocolate bars they sometimes wolfed between meals,
all the better for being secret.

Julian could tell his parents were unhappy about the unexpected visit from the over-bright way, all smiles, in which his mother announced it to him. “And you’ll be able to play with Skip! Won’t that be fun!”