Saturday (20 page)

 

In the twenties and thirties, great tracts of agricultural land to the west of London disappeared before an onslaught of high-speed housing development, and even now the streets of frowning, respectable two-storey houses haven't quite shaken off their air of suddenness. Each near-identical house has an uneasy, provisional look, as if it knows how readily the land would revert to cereal crops and grazing. Lily now lives only a few minutes away from the old Perivale family home. Henry likes to think that in the misty landscape of her dementia, a sense of familiarity breaks through occasionally and reassures her. By the standards of old people's homes, Suffolk Place is minute – three houses have been knocked through to make one, and an annexe has been added. Out front, privet hedges still mark the old garden boundaries and two laburnum trees survive. One of the three front gardens has been cemented over to make parking space for two cars. The oversized dustbins behind a lattice fence are the only institutional clues.

Perowne parks and takes the potted plant from the back seat. He pauses a moment before ringing the bell – there's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness. As usual, Jenny opens the door. She's a large, cheerful Irish girl in a blue gingham tabard who's due to start nurse's training in September. Henry receives special consideration on account of his medical connection – an extra three tea bags in the brew she'll bring soon to his mother's room, and perhaps a plate of chocolate fingers. Without knowing much at all about each other, they've settled on teasing forms of address.

‘If it isn't the good doctor!'

‘How's my fair colleen?'

Off the narrow space of the suburban hallway, tinted yellow by the front door's leaded glass, is a kitchen of fluorescent light and stainless steel. From there comes a clammy aroma of the lunch the residents ate two hours earlier. After a lifetime's exposure, Perowne has a mild fondness, or at least a complete lack of disgust, for institutional food. On the other side of the entrance hall is a narrower door that leads through into the three interconnecting sitting rooms of three houses. He can hear the bottled sound of televisions in other rooms.

‘She's waiting for you,' Jenny says. They both know this to be a neurological impossibility. Even boredom is beyond his mother's reach.

He pushes the door open and goes through. She is right in front of him, sitting on a wooden chair at a round table covered with a chenille cloth. There's a window at her back, and beyond it, a window of the house next door, ten feet away. There are other women ranged around the edges of the room sitting in high-backed chairs with curved wooden arms. Some are watching, or looking in the direction of, the television mounted on the wall, out of reach. Others are staring at the floor. They stir or seem to sway as he enters, as if gently buffeted by the air the door displaces. There's a general, cheery response to his ‘Good afternoon, ladies' and they watch him with interest. At this stage they can't be sure he isn't one of their own close relatives. To his right, in the farthest of the connecting sitting rooms, is Annie, a woman with wild grey hair which radiates from her head in fluffy spokes. She's shuffling unsupported towards him at speed. When she reaches the end of the third sitting room she'll turn back, and keep moving back and forwards all day until she's guided towards a meal, or bed.

His mother is watching him closely, pleased and anxious all at once. She thinks she knows his face – he might be the doctor, or the odd-job man. She's waiting for a cue. He kneels
by her chair and takes her hand, which is smooth and dry and very light.

‘Hello Mum, Lily. It's Henry, your son Henry.'

‘Hello darling. Where are you going?'

‘I've come to see you. We'll go and sit in your room.'

‘I'm sorry dear. I don't have a room. I'm waiting to go home. I'm getting the bus.'

It pains him whenever she says that, even though he knows she's referring to her childhood home where she thinks her mother is waiting for her. He kisses her cheek and helps her out of her chair, feeling the tremors of effort or nervousness in her arms. As always, in the first dismaying moments of seeing her again, his eyes prick.

She protests feebly. ‘I don't know where we can go.'

He dislikes speaking with the forced cheerfulness nurses use on the wards, even on adult patients with no mental impairment.
Just pop this in your mouth for me.
But he does it anyway, partly to disguise his feelings. ‘You've got a lovely little room. As soon as you see it, you'll remember. This way now.'

Arm in arm, they walk slowly through the other sitting rooms, standing aside to let Annie pass. It's reassuring that Lily is decently dressed. The helpers knew he was coming. She wears a deep red skirt with a matching brushed-cotton blouse, black tights and black leather shoes. She always dressed well. Hers must have been the last generation to care as a matter of course about hats. There used to be dark rows of them, almost identical, on the top shelf of her wardrobe, cocooned in a whiff of mothball.

When they step out into a corridor, she turns away to her left and he has to put his hand on her narrow shoulder to guide her back. ‘Here it is. Do you recognise your door?'

‘I've never been out this way before.'

He opens her door and hands her in. The room is about eight feet by ten, with a glazed door giving on to a small back garden. The single bed is covered by a floral eiderdown
and various soft toys that were part of her life long before her illness. Some of her remaining ornaments – a robin on a log, two comically exaggerated glass squirrels – are in a glazed corner cupboard. Others are ranged about a sideboard close to the door. On the wall near the handbasin is a framed photograph of Lily and Jack, Henry's father, standing on a lawn. Just in shot is the handle of a pram, presumably in which lies the oblivious Henry. She's pretty in a white summer dress and has her head cocked in that shy, quizzical way he remembers well. The young man is smoking a cigarette and wears a blazer and open-necked white shirt. He's tall, with a stoop, and has big hands like his son. His grin is wide and untroubled. It's always useful to have solid proof that the old have had their go at being young. But there is also an element of derision in photography. The couple appear vulnerable, easily mocked for appearing not to know that their youth is merely an episode, or that the tasty smouldering item in Jack's right hand will contribute – Henry's theory – later that same year to his sudden death.

Having failed to remember its existence, Lily isn't surprised to find herself in her room. She instantly forgets that she didn't know about it. However, she dithers, uncertain of where she should sit. Henry shows her into her high-backed chair by the French window, and sits facing her on the edge of the bed. It's ferociously hot, even hotter than his own bedroom. Perhaps his blood is still stirred by the game, and the hot shower and the warmth of the car. He'd be content to stretch out on the oversprung bed and start to think about the day, and perhaps doze a little. How interesting his life suddenly appears from the confines of this room. At that moment, with the eiderdown beneath him, and the heat, he feels a heaviness in his eyes and can't stop them closing. And his visit has hardly begun. To revive himself, he pulls off his sweater, then he shows Lily the plant he has brought.

‘Look,' he says. ‘It's an orchid for your room.'

As he holds it out towards her, and the frail white flower bobs between them, she recoils.

‘Why have you got that?'

‘It's yours. It'll keep flowering through the winter. Isn't it pretty? It's for you.'

‘It's not mine,' Lily says firmly. ‘I've never seen it before.'

He had the same baffling conversation last time. The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets. She unravels in little steps. Now she's lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure. Adopting again the tone of the cheerful nurse, he says, ‘I'll put it up here where you can see it.'

She's about to protest, but her attention wanders. She has seen some decorative china pieces on a display shelf above her bed, right behind her son. Her mood is suddenly conciliatory.

‘I've got plenty of them cups and saucers. So I can always go out with one of them. But the thing is, the space between people is so tiny' – she brings up two wavering hands to show him a gap – ‘that there's hardly enough space to squeeze through. There's too much binding.'

‘I agree,' Henry says as he settles back on the bed. ‘There's far too much binding.'

Damage from the small-vessel clotting tends to accumulate in the white matter and destroy the mind's connectivity. Along the way, well before the process is complete, Lily is able to deliver her rambling treatises, her nonsense monologues with touching seriousness. She doesn't doubt herself at all. Nor does she think that he's unable to follow her. The structure of her sentences is intact, and the moods which inflect her various descriptions make sense. It pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time.

She isn't looking at him as she gathers her thoughts, but past him, concentrating on an elusive matter, staring as though through a window at an unbounded view. She goes
to speak, but remains silent. Her pale green eyes, sunk deep in bowls of finely folded light brown skin, have a flat, dulled quality, like dusty stones under glass. They give an accurate impression of understanding nothing. He can't bring her news of the family – the mention of strange names, any names, can alarm her. So although she won't understand, he often talks to her about work. What she warms to is the sound, the emotional tone of a friendly conversation.

He is about to describe to her the Chapman girl, and how well she's come through, when Lily suddenly speaks up. Her mood is anxious, even a little querulous. ‘And you know that this…you know, Aunty, what people put on their shoes to make them…you know?'

‘Shoe polish?' He never understands why she calls him Aunty, or which of her many aunts is haunting her.

‘No, no. They put it all over their shoes and rub it with a cloth. Well, anyway, it's a bit like shoe polish. It's that sort of thing. We had side plates and God knows what, all along the street. We had everything but the right thing because we were in the wrong place.'

Then she suddenly laughs. It's become clearer to her.

‘If you turn the picture round and take the back off like I did you get such a lot of pleasure out of it. It's all what it meant. And the laugh we had out of it!'

And she laughs gaily, just like she used to, and he laughs too. It's all what it meant. Now she's away, describing what might be a disintegrated memory of a street party, and a little watercolour she once bought in a jumble sale.

Some time later, when Jenny arrives with the refreshments, Lily stares at her without recognition. Perowne stands and clears space on a low table. He notices the suspicion Lily is showing towards what she takes to be a complete stranger, and so, as soon as Jenny leaves, and before Lily can speak, he says, ‘What a lovely girl she is. Always helpful.'

‘She's marvellous,' Lily agrees.

The memory of whoever was in the room is already fading.
His emotional cue is irresistible and she immediately smiles and begins to elaborate while he spoons all six tea bags out of the metal pot.

‘She always comes running, even if it's narrow all the way down. She wants to come on one of them long things but she doesn't have the fare. I sent her the money, but she doesn't have it in her hand. She wants some music, and I said you might as well make up a little band and play it yourself. I worry about her though. I said to her, why do you put all the slices in one bowl when no one's standing up? You can't do it yourself.'

He knows who she's talking about, and waits for more. Then he says, ‘You should go and see her.'

It's a long time since he last tried to explain to her that her mother died in 1970. It is easier now to support the delusion and keep the conversation moving along. Everything belongs in the present. His immediate concern is to prevent her eating a tea bag, the way she almost did last time. He piles them onto a saucer which he places on the floor by his foot. He puts a half-filled cup within her reach and offers her a biscuit and a napkin. She spreads it over her lap and carefully places the biscuit in its centre. She raises the cup to her lips and drinks. At moments like these, when she's skilful in the long-established routines, and looks demure in her colour-matched clothes, a perfectly well-looking 77-year-old with amazing legs for her age, athlete's legs, he can imagine that it's all been a mistake, a bad dream, and that she'll leave her tiny room and come away with him into the heart of the city and eat fish stew with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren and stay a while.

Lily says, ‘I was there last week, Aunty, on the bus and my mum was in the garden. I said to her, You can walk down there, see what you're going to get, and the next thing is the balancing of everything you've got. She's not well. Her feet. I'll go there in a minute and I can't help losing her a jersey.'

How strange it would have been for Lily's mother, an
aloof, unmaternal woman, to have known that the little girl at her skirts would one day, in a remote future, a science fiction date in the next century, talk of her all the time and long to be home with her. Would that have softened her?

Now Lily is set, she'll talk on for as long as he sits there. It's hard to tell if she's actually happy. Sometimes she laughs, at others she describes shadowy disputes and grievances, and her voice becomes indignant. In many of the situations she conjures, she's remonstrating with a man who won't see sense.