Keeper Read online

  The landscape here is people dwarfing. A succession of headlands rise vast cliffed. The Sublime is here if it’s anywhere. Wordsworth is its chief prophet, in my library at least. I have tried to look at my surroundings with his eyes, feel bolstered in his near-supernatural manner. Look at this, from “Tintern Abbey”:

  And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit, that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

  And rolls through all things.

  We expect this of wild places, because we are all Romantics in our way. We still live in the Romantic age, the age of will and the individual, seeking some anthropomorphic godlike power in immensity, perhaps, as we park the car at the cliff-top walk and stand, coat blowing, looking out at nothingness, everythingness, somethingness: whatever it is that rolls through all things, it’s ill defined. Or something more mysterious. Here’s Wordsworth in The Prelude:

  … and I would stand …

  Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are

  The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

  Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

  Thence did I drink the visionary power.

  Visionary power. That’s what I came looking for. For writing, but also as a corrective to the person that caring for the in-laws might make me; a balance, a bulwark, a reasserted sense of perspective. But what is it, this spirit that impels all thinking things? It might be God, it might be Gaia, or it might be the effect that immensity, despite its inanimate nonconsciousness, has on the mind, and that’s what I take the Sublime properly to be. Whatever the case, people come to live here with just the same kind of impulses, expectations, needs. The wilderness knows nothing about us. Self-reinvention isn’t only possible here; it’s provoked, nurtured, made flesh.

  The Sublime, it turns out, is disappointingly elusive. Which is to say that I don’t often feel it, almost never; I more often find I’m feeling nothing, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are things that stop us from being properly present in the landscape, that stop me, at any rate. The self intrudes on the Sublime; the past and future intrude, and worse, much worse, the banal considerations of domesticity, the lists. The lists follow me out to the cliff tops and onto the beach. I go there hoping for, at the least, the experience of a kind of self-dilution, but instead the strip of sand becomes just another venue for the things that bothered me at home. In addition to which, I’m cold, it’s too windy to breathe easily, my ears hurt. My feet are wet from the thick dew of the dunes I had to cross to get here, my ankle turning painfully on the smooth pink landslip of pebbles. I’m distracted. The risk, now, is that the landscape will become peopled by my own mind. The sea, its restlessness. The wind, its stubbornness. The gulls, their superficiality. The Romantic poets went out into the Sublime, sublimity bagging, as a response to the encroaching materialism of their times, the Industrial Revolution and the mystery-extinguishing age of science. I go in order to feel stronger, strong enough to deal with Nancy and Morris and their constant neediness. Wordsworth would have enjoyed the peninsula. He’d have been out all day, returning unhungry, unthirsty—he was possessed of extraordinary unworldly stamina—and would have settled in a fireside chair to write about it, barely aware of numb fingers, cold ears, wet socks. The experience would have suffused him with his reportedly “lofty thoughts”; it would have convinced him that despite the “dreary intercourse of daily life … all which we behold [i]s full of blessings.” Which is how we all want to feel.

  Wild and desolate beauty is, it turns out, not a backdrop to life that works for Alzheimer’s. Nancy seems barely to register the landscape, and when it’s pointed out to her—a stunning lighting effect over the hills, a sunset over the bay—she seems not to notice, or at least not to see it properly. Her admiration comes across as forced, something done to humor me. Perhaps beauty, aesthetic sense, is lodged deep in the memory, and for Nancy that memory is lost. Perhaps beauty is something we’re taught and must remember, and now that Nancy’s lost her bearings intellectually, she’s also lost the idea that a golden hill is preferable to a cloudy one, a red sun prettier than a yellow one. Perhaps our aesthetic sense is as much autobiographical as innate. Mistakenly I’d thought that the Sublime would make itself felt in Nancy’s circumscribed life, that its primitive kind of language of symbols and feelings (the feeling, simultaneously, of being nothing in the universe and at its dead center) would speak to her, digging deeper in than language can, or that at the very least she’d find the wildness stimulating. I thought she’d love the cliffs and the views, the walks and the seabird colonies, the seal families pulled out on the estuary rocks. But Nancy sees the hills and headlands, seas and skies, as a backdrop to nothing happening, an absence, a stage set where no play will take place. Only people interest her now. Alzheimer’s sufferers like cities, bustle, noise, a person-made world. Or at least this one does.

  We made the decision to take Morris and Nancy in some six months before it happened. We decided that the answer to the problems proliferating with their living alone was that we should find a much bigger house, one with an annex or a cottage, a project Nancy and Morris would make a contribution to, an agreement put on a formal footing with a solicitor. It was either that or get them urgently into residential care, and Morris was miserable about that prospect (this is an understatement—throat cutting was mentioned, as I recall). But all the contenders that came up in our own area were way out of our league. They were the kind of houses that had their own brochure. Nevertheless we went to see some of them. The ones we could almost (but not quite) afford were in grotty surroundings, by main roads or cheek by jowl with stalag-style chicken farms, encircled by council estates and dead cars. Realizing that this was the reality of our budget took a lot of legwork and a lot of driving. We drove a long way and made Nancy very carsick. Then we spent two months almost buying a ruined farmhouse, drawing up plans for the conversion of outbuildings, but the projected costs spiraled out of control and we abandoned the plan.

  Faced with a dead end, I cast the Internet net wider, including anything big in any location. And that is how I came to see the house, on a Web site, and send the fateful e-mail to Chris, who was working in the next room.

  The answer flashed back.

  “Far too remote. How would I get to meetings? Need to be practical about this.” And then hard on its heels, another e-mail. “Had a look at the flights situation. Possible, if not exactly cheap. And I could get a little boat for weekends. Tempting. But the running costs will be horrendous.”

  “Well, I could turn part of it into a bed-and-breakfast,” I replied. “There’s a separate apartment, up a separate stairway.”

  WE MADE THE family visit to the house on April 1 and a second visit the following afternoon, invited to tea by the charming eighty-year-old owners, last of the line. Not literally the last of the line, in fact, but the last who could countenance living here, a long way from proper jobs and department stores. The house set its trap with care. It was a perfect spring day, warm, with barely a breath of wind. The beach down the lane shone out yellow and blue. Spring birds were all atwitter. Children romped around the garden, their distant shouts brought closer by the reverberating of voices off old stone. Away from the formal lawn, down the drive toward the sea, wilder areas of garden beckoned, tall grasses mown into paths, and a secretive wood, where sycamores stunted by wind, venturing only tentatively above the line of coping stones, huddled, heads down, arms linked above their heads like a rugby scrum. Pools of sunlight fell among them. I sat on a mossy bench and the sun was warm on my face. A tame turkey sat at the base of a tree looking back. Once the heart is lost, the head
can only throw in the towel.

  Perhaps this should be known as the Lichen Peninsula. Lichen’s everywhere in pale green mats, curly fingered, densely layered. The air smells different here. Linen fresh, ozoney, briny, undercut by something earthy and sappy. When the tide is out and the sun is warm, there’s a rank drying seaweed note. In summer—and summer is short, sweet, cherished—the air is full of dry grass aromas, sweet hay scents mixed in with the brine, and the light, sea bounced, is dazzling, jabbing in unprotected eyes. Everything seems vividly colored. There’s a soaring pale wash of blue above, with a quality about it that’s nostalgic: the kind of soft and summery depth that childhood skies had once, the kind that small airplanes leave trails in. The grass is the brightest kind of green. The sea is clear and painterly: the royal blue and azure and turquoise marking shallowness on clean sand, the dark green and brown patches indicating depth and weed. There are three beaches within a five-minute walk, all different: estuary and pebble and sand. The sand beach is closest, just down from the house, and the pebble beach is at right angles to it, round the corner of the headland. The estuary, on the road toward the village, is huge and golden and puddley. Comical oyster catchers stride briskly about on drinking straw legs, then stand together crouched over, round-shouldered in black coats like old men in a bar.

  I’d thought that Nancy might respond to the history of the house. It was a foolish thought. But I’ve always liked buildings with a strong sense of identity. Houses that don’t need you, their character already made and set by other, more interesting people who pushed their experiences, their thoughts, into the stone of walls and wood of floors, the faded wallpapers and paneled doors. That’s what original features have always signified, to me at least. It’s relaxing to feel yourself peripheral to another era, a ghost from the future in a house where the past is still present. I had a peculiar idea that Nancy would respond to this. Her early life was spent at a castle—a real one, with acres of lawns and walled warm corners where pineapples and peaches were grown under glass. Her father was head gardener at a great estate, one that’s now a hotel, wedding venue, and conference center with depressingly corporate Web pages. Added to which, Nancy’s early married life and her child-raising years were spent in Victorian city surroundings. I thought she’d feel at home.

  On our second day, excitedly, I take her on a tour of the outbuildings. The main yard has an L shape of them, incorporating tractor shed, coach house, garage, stables, a quaint row of low outhouses bordering the drying green beyond. The gardens are charming, though romantically gone to ruin, with wide herbaceous borders, extensive shrubbery areas with paths behind, and elephantine hummocks of Escallonia and Hebe. Generations of family dogs and cats are buried in the wood and in the vegetable garden, with headstones and names and dates.

  I take Morris on the tour, too, and we move at his slow, stick-aided pace round the grounds. Morris had been typically gung-ho about the move. He was going to learn to sea fish, and go sailing with Chris. He was going to get one of those electric buggies. He was going to plan and oversee the planting of the kitchen garden. But the truth is that he’s no longer good with outdoors. Outdoors taunts him with everything that he’s lost. His life today consists of the achievement of selfhood through television. Pictorial absorption. Mind meld. A domestic annihilation that invokes Nancy’s presence, perhaps, in healthier and younger days, when all the adult comings and goings of television pictures mirrored their own busy lives, their powers, their choices, and was restfully vicarious. Now it’s as if he disappears down a wormhole out of the present. Nancy’s presence is preferred, the two of them driving the spaceship together, like they did in their heyday at the family house, when they converted a tiny study into a private TV room, two armchairs and a television squeezed into a pod. But now that she’s ill, Nancy isn’t content any longer to sit in her armchair all day with the TV on, and why should she be? There has to be more to life. Even she, standing at the doorway that leads from moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease, can see that.

  Morris wants to be indoors, and Nancy wants to be out. She comes into the garden with me half a dozen times a day, and every time we go I point out the view. Ordinarily she’ll say “Oh, ye-es,” drawing the word out as if impressed, but her attention flickering. I’m not convinced she really sees it. So I persist. “Look at the next headland, Nancy—do you see the lighthouse?”

  “It’s wonderful. Look at that! And really not very much traffic at all.” She’s pink faced because it’s humid today, and because she isn’t good with the heat.

  She seems to know what I’m thinking. “I’m not good with the heat at all, never have been to be quite truthful.”

  The short-term memory is shot. The long-term memory is failing, but parts of it are still intact. Fewer of these memories—records stored up on the higher ground, the flood waters lapping against their green hillock—present themselves as autobiographical lately, though random instances of likes and dislikes remain, and rise casually to the surface at unexpected moments.

  “You’re hot. Maybe you should take some of your cardigans off, then,” I tell her.

  She looks down, holds her arms out from her body. “Oh. Yes. I didn’t think of that.”

  I help her to take the three extra ones off. But when I see her a few minutes later she’s got them all on again, and is just in the act of buttoning the top one, badly and askew.

  WITHIN A FEW short weeks we fall into a sort of pattern that we should probably call a life. It’s my in-laws’ life, at least. The challenge for us is not to let it be all of ours. For now, there is optimism. The new life is full of structure. Structure and comforting sameness, that’s what The Book says Nancy needs, and I am, at least for now, keen to do things by The Book. We get Nancy and Morris up once the children are off to school, put them back to bed at night when Morris is ready, and in between the days unfold almost identically. Only meals remind them of the time—meals and the television, their lives parceled out in programming. The day begins with the delivery of breakfast to their sitting room. Morris announces his arrival and his readiness for the teapot by means of several penetrating coughs. He’ll stay there all day, politely accepting lunch and supper like a passenger on a long-haul flight. They’ve elected to eat all their meals there, on lap trays with padded bases.

  Nancy will sit down for short periods, but the rest of the day she follows me around. She comes with me to walk the dogs in the morning, dawdling along and bending to look at things like a young child does.

  “Don’t pick that up, Nancy. It’s dirty.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s perfectly clean.”

  She brings sticks home, the tops of ineptly picked flowers, sprigs of dried grass, a stone, a leaf she liked the look of, and puts them on the table. Within five minutes, she’ll be complaining about them—“Who left these horrible things here?”—and ferrying them individually to the wastepaper basket.

  After the dog walk, we come in and have a cup of tea and deliver one to Morris with cake. Cake’s become a big part of the day. The dishwasher’s kept busy with teacups, and I am learning to measure out my life in coffee spoons. The chirpy drone of a home-improvement show burbles through the kitchen door. Nancy helps load the dishwasher, handing me things one by one, wiping the jam from knife to hands to trousers. We put some washing on, and then, because Nancy loves housework, we zip round the ground floor vacuuming and dusting. Nancy is delegated little jobs. She gets to tidy the newspapers and magazines and does this conscientiously, glancing at me to ensure I’m happy. She is given a duster and some spray polish and sings as she polishes: “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” This is her song. Since we got here she’s sung nothing else. The trouble is, she doesn’t know the words and fills her own into the stanzas, experimentally.

  “When all the things are lovely, dee dee, dee deeee de dee, And I am a milkmaid and I have a car, de dee, de deee, de deeeeeee.”

  OUR MEMORIES FOR music are stored in a different part of the
brain from the ordinary language memory, and tunes survive longer in Alzheimer’s than words do. Capitalizing on this, dementia singing groups are springing up around the world. One reports great success with the Beatles songbook. What’s interesting is that the music memory appears to bring the words along with it, unlocking the language block. These groups have reported success with quite advanced dementia, citing cases of people with very little residual language who find, after a few sessions, that they can recall and sing lyrics without trouble.

  Music professionals with dementia make for interesting case histories. The American composer Aaron Copland (1900–1990), who died of Alzheimer’s, seems to have had a slow fade, having first developed symptoms in the early 1970s. He didn’t compose much after 1973 other than for reworking a couple of old pieces, but was still conducting his best-known work, Appalachian Spring, almost to the end—though critics complained that he lost the thread in the very last performances. Conducting is done from a different part of the brain again—squirreled away in the cerebellum, where our highly practiced, automatic gestures are delegated and stored. The cerebellum is one of the last places reached by Alzheimer’s disease.

  Copland seems to have had a lonely end. He was dropped by old friends as dementia took hold; two such who ventured to his home on his ninetieth birthday, three weeks before his death, expecting there to be a gathering, a party and a cake, found there were no other visitors. People are afraid of this disease. I know of people who find that when their parent becomes demented, the rest of the family and all the old friends cut them off. One of the people I have “met” on Internet Alzheimer’s forums, an American who’s returned from her city life to live with her ill and widowed mother, tells me that not only have people stopped calling or visiting, but when challenged about it they grow hostile, pointing out that it’s her mother’s “bad behavior” and “madness” that are to blame for their absence. People act as if dementia were contagious, she says, and the social stigma is as strong as ever. It can’t help if you’re a gay man, like Copland, without even the grudgingly given support of family. When things get difficult for old colleagues and fans, it’s easier for them to turn away, untroubled by duty.