Meredith took out a shirt she knew to be one of her father’s favourites, a soft blue cotton. She held it up, examining it. It had been buttoned up, but the buttons didn’t match their buttonholes, and it, too, was grubby. She tossed it in the wash basket. Another, white with a pale green stripe. Also dirty.
How come?
she thought, and suddenly had a picture of the washing line in the backyard and how it looked each time she’d visited lately: just two or three items pegged there, underclothing and a pair of socks, or maybe a set of gardening clothes. She had assumed without really thinking about it that her father was simply saving time by washing out the odd thing by hand.
He’s not using the washing machine at all
, she realised now, and then hard on the heels of that thought came the revelation,
He’s
forgotten
how to use the washing machine.
Meredith felt woozy with shock. Although she quickly found a clean shirt and they went off to the matinee, she hardly heard a note the string quartet played. She needed to have a drink very badly. She dropped her father back at his place, drove to her own home and had a gin and tonic so stiff that the first sip made her stomach clench. Even as it did, though, she knew this one drink wouldn’t
be enough. And she had to leave for work in a couple of hours and she was super-cautious about driving when she might be over the limit… well, but if she left a little earlier she could take a tram in, and have a second G&T before she left. Reassured by the alcohol now sprinting through her bloodstream, she felt able to sit down and think.
So this is what dementia means.
She had resisted her father’s diagnosis till that moment. She’d thought it was all a mistake: just Robert, dear Robert, believing in whatever official people told him, and Deborah being mean, as usual. Her father couldn’t get old; especially, he couldn’t get sick and need looking after, because his job was to look after
her
.
Meredith looked at her watch: it was getting on for four o’clock. Could she call Robert? She knew he was always busy at the end of the school day but she
had
to talk to him, tell him what she had realised about Daddy. Robert would know how to make her feel better about this.
She was still staring at her watch when something new occurred to her. Slowly, she lowered her forearm.
They’ll want to put him in a home.
If Daddy couldn’t look after himself, that’s what they would think was best, Deborah because she was such a horrible cow, Robert and Vesna because they were always so busy and besides, they were used to schools and hospitals and those places that Meredith never felt okay in, so they would think a nursing home was the best place for him. And James because – well, because he wouldn’t think of anything else, that’s all, he’d just go along with what the older ones organised because that’s what James did, he went along with things.
But Daddy would hate that. I know he would.
Images of her father’s house and garden rushed through Meredith’s mind. The warmth of the unfashionable kitchen, his big daggy chair in front of the telly. The way he knew each tree and shrub and plant, talked to them – he did, she’d heard him! The day they buried old Banjo down in the bottom end of the backyard, and planted a white peach tree on the spot. It had only had its first scanty crop, but this summer it would
be bursting with fruit. How could Daddy leave the place where old Banjo was buried? He couldn’t! It would kill him!
Then she thought,
If his memory’s going, maybe someday he won’t remember Banjo.
Another belt of shock, to imagine that. How awful! Well, but that’s just it, she argued with herself. If someone’s having memory problems, then it’s all the more important that they stay in the place that’s most familiar to them. Didn’t that seem sensible? But the others just wouldn’t get it.
It’s up to me. It’s up to me.
Meredith tried to take another big swig of her gin but somehow only the icecubes were left. Should she have that second one now? No, better really if she went in to work early and had one there, before her shift started. But even as she decided this, she was standing at the fridge, taking out the gin and the bottle of tonic water.
But it can’t be up to ME!
The notion seemed immense, unreal.
The next morning she rang her father and asked him brightly if she could drop in for a visit. Alex was welcoming as ever; he was always delighted to see his little girl.
Almost the moment she arrived Meredith announced, ‘You know what I want to do today, Daddy? I want to do a great big spring-clean!’
‘Oh, poppet,’ said Alex, ‘what on earth for? You don’t want to be stuck inside doing housework on a gorgeous day like this.’
‘I won’t be stuck inside all day, don’t you worry. I’ll just do little bits and I’ll come outside and watch you in the garden. And you know, Daddy, it
is
a gorgeous day, a perfect day for drying clothes. That’s what I’ll start with, spring-cleaning your wardrobe.’
‘You don’t have to do that, darl.’
‘Oh, Daddy!
Let
me!’ she pouted, and her father laughed.
‘If that’s what you want to do, then you go ahead.’
She did. She went ahead, bit by bit, that day and in the weeks that followed. No one who came to visit her father, to
inspect
him, would find a single thing out of place. This was the goal Meredith
determinedly reached for. She did it gracefully, in such a way that Alex never suspected for a moment what her larger plan was; never suspected that his standards could have slipped and be found wanting.
She washed his clothes, or took them to the drycleaner. She bought food and put it away in the appropriate places, and returned it to those places again and again, since Alex seemed a little unclear these days about what went where. (Rather a lot of ice-cream was found melted in the fridge, or even in the pantry, and surreptitiously disposed of.) She cooked meals that could be reheated easily. She cleaned every nook and cranny of the kitchen and bathroom till they sparkled.
James came by one afternoon; he was thinking, he said vaguely, of putting together some information for a family tree. As soon as he started pulling things out of the cupboards in the living room, and then dipping in to the mass of stuff in Alex’s spare room, Meredith realised what an incredible muddle was lying in wait there, too.
‘Boy, it’s hard to know where to start,’ James said, peering warily into a drawer jammed almost shut with paper and bric-a-brac. ‘What is all this, do you reckon?’
‘Haven’t got a clue!’ Meredith said brightly.
James had worked a couple of sheets free. ‘Looks like old accounts from Dad’s engineering firm. Sheesh.’
‘Tell you what, I’ll see if I can get Daddy onto sorting this stuff out. It’s not urgent, this family tree thing, is it, James?’
‘No,’ he said, shoving the drawer more or less closed. ‘No, I guess not.’
Meredith and Alex went through all the cupboards together one by one. As they pulled out unused and neglected objects, Alex might launch into a detailed history of one item, and yet another which Meredith remembered from childhood and exclaimed over he regarded with total indifference, as though he’d never seen it before. He would happily have thrown a lot out, but Meredith was reluctant.
What if one of the others – Deborah, say – went looking for something and it was nowhere to be found? That’d be just the thing to set her on the warpath! Instead, Meredith sorted and rearranged, and stored things carefully in labelled boxes in the spare room or the shed.
It was like a campaign, and it took a lot out of her. She was at Alex’s house every second day, and while she was busy there she felt calm and purposeful, but when she got home mid-afternoon she was so desperate for a drink that she would
run
into her kitchen and squirt the wine from its cask into the biggest glass she could lay her hands on, and take the first few gulps just standing there. Her campaign was working, though: it gratified her that these days Daddy was always well dressed, and he had filled out, too. He looked so
well
– and only she knew why.
Meredith kept all this to herself. Even Laurence took a while to tumble to what his mother had taken on. She swore him to secrecy, which he protested was ridiculous. But she insisted. That’s how scared she was of what would happen to Daddy if the truth got out.
CHAPTER 15
Near the edge of a pretty dell in the woods of Somerset, James and Rose stood on tiptoes, stretching to gather the last of the sloe berries from their tall straggly bushes. It was getting close to Christmas and they both wore gloves and woollen hats against the cold. Pheasants, elegant and brainless, strutted amongst the trees and occasionally took flight, clapping their wings dramatically.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sloe before,’ said James, dropping the densely black little berries into the plastic container his mother had given him. ‘I always thought the drink was called
slow
gin, s-l-o-w. A laid-back cousin of the tequila slammer.’
Rose laughed. ‘Oh, sloe gin is wonderful. We’re lucky there are still some berries left, they’re usually all gone by now. Delicious, it is! You’ll see.’
‘Good-oh.’ James kept picking. ‘Always something new and different to look forward to, here in the wilds of deepest Somerset. Like being on safari really.’
‘James,’ said his mother in a serious voice. He glanced at her enquiringly, but she was looking into the branches, not at him.
‘Yes?’
‘James, why haven’t you told the others about me yet?’
He felt a blush prickle along his jawbone. ‘I – I thought I might find some of your letters first. I thought that would be a good way to, sort of… introduce you.’
‘Yes, you said you wanted to look for them. But you haven’t found any?’
‘No.’ After a little silence he added, ‘Well, I haven’t looked properly yet. It was all a bit of a muddle at Dad’s place. But when I get back, I will.’
Rose nodded. They went on picking. After a while James said, ‘I’m sorry, Rose. I don’t really… I don’t know why I haven’t told them. It’s harder than I thought.’
She had intended to take this further, tell him it was time for her to talk to her other children, but seeing her son’s beautiful face suddenly troubled caught at Rose’s heart, and she couldn’t bear to push him. Indeed, it was complicated for her, too. Quietly she said, ‘To tell you the truth, I’m rather enjoying having you to myself. It’s been such a big thing. And it will all be different once the others know.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. His voice was also very quiet.
‘When we get back to the house, though, I want to show you something.’
A few hours later, after the sloe berries and the gin had been put together to work their magic, Rose asked James to come up to her studio. She sat him down at her work table with a big book covered in worn green silk.
‘It’s not a proper photo album, really,’ she said quickly, sounding a little apologetic. ‘It’s just an oversized sketchbook that someone gave me. But it suited. I covered it myself. It’s the same fabric as that green chair in the garden room. The pink is this silk slub, too.’
‘I see,’ James said, nodding reassuringly. He’d already learned that when his mother spoke like this, it meant she was nervous. He opened the album.
Most of the photos were familiar. Copies, or similar shots, were in the photo albums at his father’s house back in Melbourne. They were all of the four kids, doing typical kid things over the years: fooling around in the backyard, playing with pets, on holidays, in school plays. The earlier pictures were black and white, then colour took over. Growing up: Deborah in a mini-skirt halfway up her thighs and an expression of studied sulkiness; the boys and their pals with soft beards and long hair – even Robert! Deborah and then Robert in their graduation gowns; some that James had sent home from his first overseas trip, to South-East Asia. The last picture in the album was of Meredith in a netball uniform, skinny but athletic, her hair skinned back in a ponytail, triumphantly brandishing a trophy with the other girls from her team. Under each photo there were a few words of description, handwritten. James leafed through the pages, exclaiming here and there while Rose sat by him, watching. When he looked up he saw that she had grown melancholy.
‘How did you get all these?’ he asked gently.
‘Alex sent them to me, usually in a bundle once a year. Around Christmas time. It was part of a… deal, I suppose, that we had. Or that I thought we had.’
‘But he didn’t stick to that deal, did he? He didn’t give us your letters.’
‘No. But I never knew that for sure. He
said
he did.’
‘It’s so incredible,’ said James, starting to flip back through the photos with some agitation, as though he was looking for something. ‘Why didn’t you, I don’t know, write directly? To us kids?’
‘Well, you’d moved, and he wouldn’t give me the new home address. All the correspondence was via his office. The one in North Melbourne. I wrote care of that address for years and then my letters started coming back unopened.
Return to Sender
. So I suppose the office moved, too, and the redirection lapsed. Or just didn’t happen. I don’t know. And after that I suppose I… gave up.’
James sat, staring at the open album but not seeing; his forehead
was creased in puzzlement. He had forgotten his mother’s sadness.
Are these just excuses?
he wondered.
‘How come you just…
let him do that
?’ he burst out. ‘I don’t get it. I never would’ve thought Dad would
be
like that.’
Rose looked even more downcast. ‘I know. Back then… how can I explain? For a mother to do what I did, to leave her children… It’s still a shocking thing even these days. But
then
! In a way Alex was very civilised, really. I know a lot of people would’ve been happy to see me hung, drawn and quartered.’
‘But why didn’t he think what it would do to
us?
Never to know
anything
?’