The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (40 page)

Her character was such a strange mixture of stoicism and complaint that we found it hard to tell how she was feeling in her last days at Bryn, before she and Joyce decided she couldn't cope
on her own any more. She used to get very cross with us if we didn't ring at the usual time on a Sunday, which made me cross, because it wasn't always possible to stick to the appointed hour, and I felt I was doing my best. I thought she was just being difficult, and only later did I realize that she was now finding it physically so hard to get from the front room to the telephone a few feet away in the hall that she would go and sit in the hall and wait there for the phone to ring. Of course she was cross if she had to sit there in the cold and narrow gloom for half an hour or more. This problem could have been resolved by moving the telephone, but somehow this never happened, partly because she didn't make the situation clear to us. She didn't like to ask for help.

The last few occasions on which I visited her in Newark were a horror to me and I do not think they gave much pleasure to her. But I continued to make the old Belisha journey up the Great North Road and to comfort myself with a night in the Ram Jam, listening to the slipstream. What else could I do? I did not want her to think we had forgotten her, and I wanted to see for myself that she was not being neglected, although we hoped Joyce would have let us know if anything seriously bad was happening. Though Joyce, too, is a stoic and doesn't like to complain.

The subject of ageing has been addressed by many writers, and I do not know whether I ought to add to the volume. Accounts that lodge uncomfortably in my mind include Simone de Beauvoir's book about the death of her mother, Blake Morrison's book about the death of his father, John Bayley's painfully frank descriptions of how his wife Iris Murdoch succumbed to Alzheimer's, and Polly Toynbee's matter-of-fact chapter in
Hard Work
on the experience of working in a home for the elderly. And I also remember stories by friends who have looked after dying relatives, and stories by friends who have since died. One of these friends, in her last illness, after many strokes and various kidney
malfunctions, told me that it was strangely comic to be congratulated by the nursing staff for wetting the bed. 'Well done!' the nurses would cry, when they discovered that she had peed into the mattress. This is second childhood, when we are praised for actions that were forbidden when we were young. And it takes a brave woman to find that amusing, and she was nothing if not brave. Ann was an oak of a woman, rather like Auntie Phyl.

Visits to Auntie Phyl in Newark initiated me into care home ways. I learned that gifts of flowers were a nuisance to the staff, and would be left to rot in vases of greening and slimy water. I learned that many old women of her age were called Phyllis. (I have since learned the meaning of that name: it means 'leaf', a concept too light for Auntie Phyl's robust physique.) I learned that objects used to disappear into the communal storehouse. While she was interned there I bought her as a birthday or Christmas gift a black, Oriental, kimono-style, silky dressing gown with a pattern of pink and red butterflies, which she seemed to like very much. I'd chosen it with care because it reminded me of some of the clothes she'd worn in the 1930s. It vanished after a week or two and she rang me to complain. I in turn complained to the staff, who said they knew nothing about it. So I trailed heavy-footed, back into Oxford Street and bought her another, not quite but almost identical, and took it up to her on my next visit. This persistence was greeted with what I can only describe as cynical incredulity, not by her but by everybody around her. Why on earth had I bothered to replace a garment that would probably vanish like its predecessor? And what did an old woman at death's door want with a pretty dressing gown?

What indeed?

But it stayed in her room, a tribute to her honest indignation and my resistance to the system. When she died I took it home with me and wore it for a while before I gave it to Oxfam. I gave it away because it was depressing me.

Another object that stayed in her room till the end was a little jar of brandy butter I made and took up for her at Christmas. I thought she could have some on a mince pie. But I don't think she understood what it was, and I don't suppose anyone offered her any, so it sat there, week after week, month after month, on the shelf. I just let it be there. I'd lost the will to intervene.

The activities in the home did not appeal to her much. She did not play bingo and she stopped watching the television because the channels were always going wrong and the faces of the presenters were bright orange. Sitting in a circle of old women whom she did not even know and throwing a ball around struck her as deeply pointless. What was it for? To keep the fingers moving. What for? To be able to eat more easily. What for? To stay alive. What for? No answer.

Playing fivestones as a child is fun, but throwing and catching a ball as an old woman is silly.

She had been distressed some thirty years earlier by the old age of her Aunt Thyrza, always the favourite of that generation of aunts. Thyrza had been a kind, plain-faced, dignified woman, famed within the family for her beautiful embroidery, which was much finer than Auntie Phyl's or Grandma's. She often went to stay at Bryn, and my mother liked her well enough to invite her to stay with us. (We rarely had guests.) But in old age she suffered a personality change, according to Auntie Phyl, and became malicious and resentful and maybe even worse. Auntie Phyl found this very upsetting. She knew that such things happened, and that it wasn't anyone's fault, but nevertheless she thought it was very unfair that it had happened to such a good person. And she was also annoyed to discover that Aunt Thyrza, in her care home, had been bullied into doing sewing as a form of occupational therapy. Angry child's sewing, with a big needle, when she had sewn the finest seam of all. It was a bitter ending to a good life.

Auntie Phyl worried that she herself might 'turn nasty'. I think that may have been the phrase she used. But she didn't. She had often been grumpy and rude when younger, but her manners didn't deteriorate, and when she was grumpy in old age she had good reason to be so.

She was confronting, as I was through her, the pointlessness of survival, the uselessness of all the little strategies by which we manage to stay alive and fill our time and get through our days – gardening, playing patience, doing jigsaws or crosswords, embroidering, watching snooker, reading, trying to learn a new language, listening to
The Archers,
collecting little bits of scholarship about the history of games and pastimes.

She wasn't really one for self-deception. And she didn't like
The Archers.
She didn't like it when people assumed that she listened to it, just because she lived in a village. She thought it was inauthentic.

On one of my earlier visits to the Oaks, I took with me a ball of cheerful scarlet wool and a crochet hook and asked her to teach me how to crochet. I had never mastered this art when I was a child. I could knit, once upon a time, very badly, but never managed to make any object or garment that was useful or wearable. (My gros point cushions and rugs are, as I have indicated, more satisfactory, indeed almost pleasing.) Auntie Phyl used to crochet a good deal, and I still have and wear several of the scarves she made for me. Surely, I thought, I could learn to crochet, even though I was in my sixties. I wanted to learn, and she wanted to teach me. But I simply couldn't get the hang of it. She began to get annoyed with me, as I sat there by her institutional bed, and I began to get annoyed with myself. She was still a good teacher, but I had become a bad learner. I was too old to learn a new trick. I gave up, promising her I'd try to practise by myself when I got home. But I didn't bother.

I wish now that I had persevered. It might have been good for my bad thumb, might even have prevented it from getting so bad in the first place. The thumb joint of my left hand is now afflicted by De Quervain's tenosynovitis, sometimes known as washerwoman's thumb. It's annoying. No worse than annoying, but annoying. I don't know who De Quervain was. My doctor tells me that she doesn't approve of naming maladies after dead men.

Michael, who was very ill when I started to write this book and is now not so ill, claims from time to time that he is the new Auntie Phyl. In this role he has taken to watching
The Antiques Roadshow,
and has been known to watch the same episode more than once. He likes the soothing repetition. Like Auntie Phyl, he has allowed himself to be bullied into employing people who knock casually at the door and demand to be allowed to resurface the front steps or clean the windows. The mixture of menace and pathos with which they present themselves on his doorstep gets him down, and he lets them do things that don't really need doing. He is sorry for them. They always do their work very badly and demand to be paid in cash.

And I am going that way myself. The young mercenary from Rupert Murdoch's army who jumped around recently like an ibex all over my roof at Porlock, adjusting the dish to stop it speaking Welsh, said he wanted to be paid in cash. Luckily I hadn't got enough on me, and the nearest bank is many miles away, so he had to accept an old-fashioned cheque. (I did tip him £20, in conciliation. He had been up there for hours.) The week after, I weakly agreed to pay hundreds of pounds in advance for someone to
come and inspect my electrical installations – not to fix them, just to inspect them – because I couldn't work out how to get out of the transaction, once my enquiry had been set in motion. I've forgotten how to say, bugger off, I'm not paying something for nothing, do you think I'm a fool? As we grow older, we become more vulnerable to these pressures. The salesman or the antique dealer or the itinerant cowboy builder or the utilities company smells weakness, scents blood, goes for the kill. The victim kneels, bows the neck and surrenders. It is easier to surrender than to struggle.

I won't mention the pseudo-leather jackets purchased from a con man on a motorway service station forecourt, or the excessive supplies of ironing board covers and yellow dusters and unsatisfactory tea towels and strangely textured absorbent cloths that pile up in the utility room. I forget they are there, and recently went out to purchase an ironing board cover from a shop (which is not easy), forgetting that I'd bought enough from Gary to last me until death.

No, I don't think I want to write much more about ageing. Telling horror stories is too easy. My worst memories of events surrounding Auntie Phyl's last days still have the power to make me very angry, and I don't want to write out of anger. The avoidance of anger has been my self-imposed Oulipean constraint while writing this. It has not been as difficult as trying to avoid the letter E, but it has been taxing. There may be one or two little splinters and signifiers of anger remaining in my text, but they are so deeply buried and coded that not even I can be sure of finding them. I'm still angry with my mother, of course, that's obvious, but that doesn't count any more. It is past cure, past hope, and almost past regret. Doris Lessing wrote recently that she hated her mother, a comment that was perceived as shocking. I didn't hate mine. She filled me with pity and fear as well as anger. But never with hatred.

Jigsaws are a useful antidote to anger.

I ask myself: do I believe in the jigsaw model of the universe, or do I believe in the open ending, the ever evolving and ever undetermined future, the future with pieces that even the physicists cannot number, although the physicists say they cannot be infinite? If I could claim anything as grand as a world-view, towards which of these two would I look? I thought that by writing this book I might find the answer.

I used to think I had a teleological sense of life, in which we moved towards a fore-ordained, apocalyptic illumination. All the lost and buried tesserae of memory would rush together to form part of a bright and dazzling pattern, a complete picture, which would explain, perhaps at the very moment of death, everything that had gone before, if not everything that was to come. I did not believe in an afterlife, merely in an enlightenment. The fragments of the True Cross would at last be united, and all the whispers, rumours and muddled legends of history would be made plain, transforming themselves into the Golden Legend. They would come together, the Stone Age children playing with coloured pebbles on the cave floor, the Greek children with their knucklebones, the children of Brueghel and Long Bennington and East
Hardwick School, little Tom Malkin who died at the age of six, and the village children playing ducks and drakes and fishing with a pin. Not one of them would be lost, for all would equally be part of the grand design.

This hope, I suppose, represents the religious strain that I inherited from my father. 'If with all your hearts ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me.' He liked those words from
Elijah,
and used to chant them a little tunelessly as he walked round his Suffolk garden in the cool of the evening. None of us could sing.

As I watched my aunt nearing death, it was more the meaningless dignity and indignity of endurance that impressed me. She stuck it out to the end. She was not a believer.

The concept of life as a journey, a pilgrimage, a quest, a ladder, or a spiral track may be attractive to some, but to me the notion of a goal is not. The very word 'goal' has unpleasing associations. Board games, unlike jigsaw puzzles, necessarily admit elements of competition and victory, and the notion of winners and losers, sheep and goats, the saved and the damned. Whereas the Greek
telos
can mean an end, an aim, an ultimate purpose, a final cause, and need not embrace the concept of competition. In the larger pattern, all the solitary journeys combine, and we arrive together.

The jigsaw, with its frame, is a simulacrum of meaning, order and design. As Nick Tucker said, if you try hard enough, you can complete it. That galactic scatter of inert and inept fragments of wood or cardboard will come together and make a picture.