Keeper Page 3

  Sometimes I think I can see them myself. The house doesn’t feel haunted—some big old houses do, but this one doesn’t—though there have been sightings, I’m told, in years past, of Victorians paused on the stairs, their eyes oblivious to the present. The first day we were here and went to the pub for supper, a fisherman propping up the bar asked how we were getting on with the spooks. I haven’t seen anything or heard spectral footsteps, but the whole property is soaked in what I can only describe as pastfulness. It’s pastful, and sometimes, even though I know it’s just this, I’ve half believed there are women in rustling silk frocks in that part of the wood that was once the rose garden, have half heard brief melodious laughter in the paddock that was once a tennis court. Who are these people, the friends Nancy talks about? It’s occurred to me that the altered perceptions of Alzheimer’s might allow people to see ghosts.

  The house sits out in near seclusion at the neck of the headland, at the point where the neck joins the shoulder of a second, bigger peninsula, two miles from a village, fifteen miles from a small town, and far, far away from everything. It’s a great, four-square Victorian house with sash windows, crenellations, and crowstep gables, its overgrown walled garden framed in lichen-covered stone. It’s the kind of house that, while not grand enough for Manderley or Gothic enough for Walter Scott or English enough for Jane Austen, might serve as the scene of a death at the vicarage in Agatha Christie. It sticks up high on the low, gently undulating profile of this wind-scoured green promontory like a church, the sea rushing up the cliff faces around it. Building upward in this climate is an act of faith, almost of defiance. The architectural vernacular hereabouts favors single-story longhouses, long and low and hugging the ground, though a good many of these have been weathered into rubble, with kit-built bungalows parked alongside. After the longhouses fell from fashion, the local style favored one-and-a-half-story cottages, high enough to be provided with an upper floor snuggled into the eaves, low enough to brace themselves against the weather. The eighteenth-century terraced housing that lines the two principal streets of the village is fully double story, held in a self-protective loop around a deep harbor.

  The house and neighboring farm were once one property, and together they owned all the land that can be seen from the single third-floor window, the attic window that leads out onto a precarious half balcony. The original farmhouse is two hundred yards down the hill, across the lane, enfolded by its barns and cattle courtyard into a wind-resistant square. The building of the big house in 1860 marked the achievement of wealth and status, a move up from the cottage to a grander residence on higher ground, one gleefully elaborate in its luxurious details. All that remains of the estate are the four garden acres inside the high wall, the privacy-giving wall, marking off the domestic world from the working one, separating peasant from gentry, keeping the bullocks and harvest workers in the adjoining fields out of the sight of the strolling, tea-taking, tennis-playing manor dwellers within.

  The house layout is ideal for an extended family. The kitchen has two doors: one into Morris and Nancy’s sitting room, and one into the rear corridor, where their bedroom and private bathroom were converted from two former maids’ rooms. Off their sitting room in the other direction is a small lobby, which leads into their private daytime bathroom. So Nancy and Morris have, in effect, their own suite of rooms, with only the kitchen shared, and even that is two-family friendly, having two stoves and two full-size tables along its double length. The original thinking was that Nancy and Morris would self-cater, up to a point and with our assistance. They were keen, Morris said, to have as much independence as possible. They brought what remained of their marital past in packing crates, everything that had survived successive years of downsizing: their 1960s crockery and pastel-colored kitchenware; tarnished silver cutlery with worn bone handles; old pillows, duvets, blankets, marital linens smelling of cedar wood; boxes of clothes and miscellaneous items dating back forty years; old toiletries, socks, lamp shades; wallets and watches, belts and business paper.

  With the exception of a daily excursion into the conservatory for coffee, their world has shrunk into this little sitting room by the kitchen: its two armchairs, a 1960s coffee table, a partner’s desk, a television, a dresser laden with ornaments—unused steak knives and ancient paperwork idling in its drawers—and a bookcase scantily furnished with photograph albums, thrillers, Reader’s Digests, the RAC Guide to Great Days Out, 1970s cookbooks whose pages are stuck together with cake mix.

  Nancy’s Alzheimer’s seems to advance in phases, as if we’re mining underground, into the unknown, toward obliteration. Currently we’ve hit the seam of lost prepositions. Morris gets exasperated with her lapses, her confusion, her failure to recognize what’s ordinary and deal with it in the old ordinary way. He has his own health problems: replacement hips that have worn out, poor circulation, numbed legs and feet. Walking is a struggle, and in the past he’s relied on his wife to be his legs. She has trouble with this role now.

  “No, no!” we hear him shouting. “The cup! The cup! In front of the book! No, not under it, in front of it! Now put the spoon in it. In it! In it! Not behind it! That’s a book! Not a book, a cup! Oh, for god’s sake, woman!” She can’t seem to distinguish between cup and book. Parietal lobe damage is responsible for this, apparently; for failing to match objects with words in that apparently simple but sneakily complex two-hander we call recognition. But telling Morris so and asking him to be less irritable makes no difference. Occasionally Nancy gets fed up with being yelled at and gets her coat and handbag. On one such day she finds me in the kitchen making soup.

  “Excuse me.” A plaintive little voice. She can’t any longer remember my name. “Excuse me, lady. I think I should tell you that I am going to have to find other accommodations.” This formal way of speaking is new. Perhaps it stems from uncertainty: her being a stranger in a strange land, needing the help of good Samaritans and needing to be polite to them. If you’re unsure who anybody is, or indeed who you are, come to that—their rank, your rank, what your relationship might be—then you’re likely to be deferential. Either that or bolshie, asserting your position. Bolshie will come later.

  When Nancy’s upset, distraction’s the only way out. Everything else, and especially reasoning, only escalates and intensifies the trouble. I take her outside, where flowers and butterflies and birds and trees do the job like nothing else, all upset forgotten. We go down to the road, down the long driveway between looming dark hedges of fuchsia, and stand between the entrance pillars and admire the view. She runs an appreciative finger over the house name, indented in brass set into the stone, and I’m shocked to find that she can’t read the word that’s the house name. She can’t recognize the letters and, even when I tell her what they are, can’t vocalize them into a run of sounds. She’s interested in them, though, as in something half remembered, on the tip of her tongue, running her fingers over the brass a second time, frowning and with concentration. Shocked, I go back to Chris in his office. “Your mother can’t read; she can’t read anymore,” I tell him. It’s stunning because it’s so absolute, so concrete a loss. Parietal lobe damage is to blame again, it seems, in that zone of the brain where visual impressions are organized and reading and writing are ordered and understood. I read about this on the Internet, which has become my personal guide, dementia caregivers’ network, MD, and hospital rolled into one handy package.

  It isn’t, any of it, a linear progression. Damage, or at least the symptoms of damage, can appear to waver like flickering wiring. Some days Nancy has vocabulary, some days not. She’s wandering the house looking for her shoes, and when I ask if I can help, she looks down at the floor, offering me a lifted socked foot. “The things, the things that go on the … that go on the things. I want to. I want the things that go on the end.” Perhaps this is a sign of parietal lobe damage again, failing to match word and object, or perhaps it has to do with the plaques/tangles invading Broca’s area, a patch on the left
side of the frontal lobe that was named after Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–1880), who had a patient in 1861 who could say only “tan.” It’s the zone charged specifically with talking. It’s fascinating, this physical loss of abilities in the departments of self, but in tracking Nancy’s neuronal failure, I face self-accusations of ghoulishness.

  Random stream-of-consciousness nonsense has become a feature in the mornings. Miscellaneous phrases from the past, from the long-term memory, fall out of the box in random order.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, “because I was worried about that.”

  “About what?”

  She looks at me appraisingly, as if making a decision about whether she can confide, before launching in. “It’s been a long time, and I didn’t always do it that way, oh no, don’t you believe him when he puts it off, because I can tell you, it’s all the other way, really, to be quite truthful, and he knows it is, and I could strangle him sometimes, but the woman said I was to go that way, so I went, and it wasn’t there. Did I tell you that? I said that before and you haven’t got it. I know that. I do know that. I’m not really as stupid as I look, but she says—oh the things I could tell you about her, but I won’t because you shouldn’t—and I have got to find the thing now or I won’t hear the end of it.”

  “Her?” I ask.

  “The woman,” Nancy says, rolling her eyes.

  “But it’s just you and me here,” I say. “We’re the only ones.”

  “No, no, no,” Nancy says briskly. “Not you. The other woman.”

  TAKING ON NANCY’S care, full time, seven days, twenty-four hours, has been … I wish I could find a better word than shock. It’s been a shock. The thesaurus offers “trauma,” but that isn’t remotely it. It hasn’t been a “blow” or an “upset,” a “bombshell” or a “jolt.” It’s more like the kind of experience that leaves you staring into space openmouthed. How on earth did I get here? you think. And how am I going to extricate myself? There’s no adequate preparation for the physical demands, the physical hour-after-hourness of full-time caregiving. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to dress and undress her, for example, and get her toileted and into the shower, and would find myself, in consequence of this, adopting the nice-nurseish patter that theoretically I hate. “Righto, Nancy, let’s get you sorted for bed, shall we? Cardigan first.” When I get her into her nightie and take her trousers off, her feet are bluish: white and blue and mauve, her toenails thickened, opaque and yellowed like smokers’ fingers, her shins crocodile-skinned. Proximity. That’s the key word. Up close and disturbingly personal. There’s emptiness behind her eyes, something missing that used to be there. It’s sinister. It seems sometimes, in fanciful moments, that it’s Nancy who’s missing, though her body continues to live and breathe and walk around in the world, redundantly.

  I HAVE A new role, a new identity. Mothering somebody’s mother, and being thanked for it effusively. Nancy comes into the kitchen when I’m cooking and wants to help. I find something for her to do and then she bursts into tears.

  “Oh no. What on earth is it?” I put my arm round her and she cries harder.

  “It’s just that you’re so-o g-good to me,” she blubbers. “You’re so good and kind and you do everything for me. I wish I could do something for you. Tell me what I can do. I want to give you something. A present. Will you take my money out of the bank and get yourself a present?”

  “There’s no need, really. I don’t need anything. Really,” I tell her.

  She goes back into her sitting room.

  “Oh god, what is it now?” I hear Morris asking.

  What exactly is my new relationship with my in-laws? I am their housekeeper, something approximating their parent, their perpetual hostess, but also a servant. I send Morris a pot of Earl Grey and a warm Victoria sponge, feeling as if I have visitors and need to provide afternoon tea, and in return he gives Jack a penny and says, “Here, give this to the waitress.”

  We begin to integrate ourselves a little into peninsula society. First into commerce, then into other people’s kitchens. Professions here are often of the multiple kind. Paul, the gas fitter, installs an eight-burner stove in place of the inherited curly-plate electric, then makes new stable doors for the yard, and is turning out to be a very nifty tiler. Though tradesmen aren’t easy to find. At the end of the week I scissor the local paper, cutting out announcements for the pinboard. The newspaper’s being read everywhere we go on publication day, by shopkeepers, office and health workers, people at the wholesalers and in boatyards, people in tea shops. Ordinary routine comes to a halt. There’s a piece about new Neolithic finds made farther up the coast. Someone has been shooting seals and the public is appealed to for tip-offs. Wrecks have been plundered by treasure seekers, and a diver’s brought up dead. A man’s airlifted from an uninhabited island, injured while birding. A skipper’s been charged with being drunk in charge of a boat. There’s been another suicide, someone who came from England on holiday and leapt off our cliffs to his death. There’s been a country dance, and intoxicated teenagers hospitalized. All this is absorbing enough, but I’m more interested in the advertising. The advertisements are a godsend. Not every trader has a shop or even a sign, and lots of the smaller businesses are done anonymously from home. Thus it is that we find ourselves in a barn one morning, choosing tiles, while being watched intently by heifers.

  We take afternoon walks on the beach, going down in the car so that Morris can come. He can’t make it over the strip of pebbles, nor manage the low grassy dune, so he sits in the car with the door open, watching and smoking. I take the dogs to the water’s edge and throw sticks toward America, the retriever plunging in after them and the Jack Russell barking at him from the shallows. Chris walks his mother up and down the length of the sand, Nancy holding on to his arm and striding along. She’s happy, just for this moment, radiant, smiling into the sun. Sometimes a change in the weather is enough to restore our optimism, and this seems truer for those with Alzheimer’s than the rest of us. Nancy’s world is re-created every minute. She lives in the moment, and therein lies the problem. The minute we get back indoors, she’s lobbying to go out for a walk. The walk she’s just had is rendered down into an idea, one that persists and nags at her. Perhaps the best thing for Alzheimer’s sufferers might be nomadism of a kind. A permanent ambling trek in talkative company, with pauses only for meals and to sleep, would make her happy, I think. Everything, every moment, would be new, and everybody in her party would be on a more equal footing of constant change.

  It’s our wedding anniversary at the end of the month and Chris and I go to the village restaurant to celebrate, leaving the children in charge. We eat crab cakes, a fish and crustacean stew, a lemon tart with marmalade ice cream, delighting in everything but preoccupied with home, two mobile phones winking on the tablecloth.

  “The fish is wonderfully fresh,” Chris tells the owner. “Is it caught in the bay here?”

  “Actually no,” the owner says. “We can’t get the quality here. All the good stuff goes south. All our fish comes down from Shetland.”

  Chapter 2

  Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness, I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

  —AARON COPLAND

  WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD A TASTE FOR SEMIREMOTENESS. The short-drive-for-milk, long-drive-for-olives model is one Chris and I have honed and perfected. We thought we knew all about backwaters. But this, the peninsula, is a backwater in a different manner. Living here makes you question the terms of your disengagement with the Big World, something that thus far has been merely instinctive. In this society, almost as far north as it’s possible to be in Britain, the Big World becomes a catchall for everything that is wrong with life. The Big World is referred to as south. The question of whether, for instance, children will have to go south for work is much discussed, in worried terms. South is corrupt, spoiled, feared. We have a little kin
gdom here, a far-flung corner that prides itself on difference. It’s a Roman outpost. The barbarians are talked about partly with pity and partly with scorn. It’s Shakespeare: “This other Eden, demi-paradise, / this fortress built by Nature for herself / against infection and the hand of war. / This happy breed of men, this little world, / this precious stone set in the silver sea.”

  It’s easy to assume that there’ll be a natural camaraderie between those who choose the edge and not the center. It isn’t always true. The physical edge is easy to achieve—you just take up your bed and hand it to the furniture removal company. But what about the metaphysical edge? Edge dwellers are no more likely to be readers, to be articulate, to be interesting people with fulfilled creative impulses—all the usual stuff we hope for in our neighbors—than anyone else. They’re just as likely to watch bad television and talk about it. They’re just as likely to be unhappy. More so, probably. Unhappiness has driven a good number of the edge dwellers edgeward; unhappiness that morphs into reclusiveness. Utopianism brings others, and intense sociability, an aptitude for running things, starting things, galvanizing all of us disparate souls into community.

  Aside from the spatial demands of a two-family setup, Chris and I came here for the usual material reasons (big house, smallish price), for the particularly privileged reason that we work at home and can choose our location, but also, certainly in my case, looking for a new relationship: one with the Sublime. I came looking for inspiration (for work, yes, but also for life) as something concrete (the quality of the view), something engulfing and omnipresent (the quality and shape of clouds)—all of which is just outside the door and there at whim. It wasn’t really about clouds, of course, or views. It’s always about engaging with elementals. Mail-order catalogs find their sales rise if they choose backdrops of beaches, meadows, hillsides, riverbanks, and forests. Our visitors’ book is bulging with remarks about the spirituality of the location. If these things are emblematic, then we on the peninsula are emblem rich, emblem saturated. We have house, meadow, wood and wall, a vast panorama of sea and sky, steep drops and long beaches; we have weather and the tides at our disposal. Those with a lot of geography in their lives are envied. A person at one with geography is admired—the more extreme the geography, the more extremely.