September Starlings (69 page)

I pat his hand. ‘Which job is that, Ben?’

He is staring at one of the nurses. ‘She shouldn’t have gone in there, you know.’

I look at the door, still swinging after the nurse’s passage through it. ‘Why?’

‘They never come out.’

‘Ben, look at me.’ I turn his face towards me, push the hair from his eyes. He won’t let anyone near him with scissors. My Ben is terrified of scissors and dogs. ‘What job, Ben?’

The eyes are bright, brimming with moisture. ‘Why do you leave me here? Why can’t I come home? Remember the rubies and that square emerald in the top safe. I must have promised them to someone. My memory is so poor. They watch me all the time.’ He glances round the room again, shakes a finger at an empty space. ‘Over there,’ he mutters. ‘Go away from me now.’ Ben’s brief flirtation with near-normality is almost over.

‘Where are you, my love?’ I whisper. ‘The stove, the cow going to market, the hut you keep mentioning. Where did it all happen? Why are you so afraid? And what did you say to Tommo?’

He fixes his attention on me, though he seems not to recognize me completely. I am, perhaps, someone he knows vaguely, a face that is not quite familiar. ‘
Dove
?’ he says. The second syllable is extended, sounds like ‘vay’. Italian, then, the Italian for ‘where’. He rattles off some fluent French, slips into German, confuses the two. From a stream of unrecognizable words, I pick out ‘
nein, nein
’ and ‘
bitte
’, watch his face as it twists into a shape that must surely echo his inner torment. I can’t sit here and do this, can’t bear his pain, can’t bear my own fruitless agony.

He stops shouting, places a hand on mine. ‘We shall make no more noise.’

I mouth quietly, ‘Are you German, Swiss? Ben—’

‘I am Greek,’ he answers clearly, flooring me completely. ‘My mother was Jewish. I am now a Christian, just as my father and grandfather were.’ He blinks slowly, listens, his head on one side. ‘They are gone and we are safe for now.’

In his sleep, Ben used to punctuate his terrible snoring with words in a language I could never place. Is he telling me the truth, is he Greek? Or is the Greek just another symptom of a brilliant mind going to seed? He’s certainly a linguist, speaks better Paris French than any Englishman would trouble to learn. I knew he wasn’t English, thought he might be French or German.

‘Strawberry yoghurt,’ he announces loudly, back to his old routine now. He’s had a fixation with strawberry yoghurt for some time, though he never used to be terribly keen on dairy produce. ‘And cornflakes.’ Well, that’s a change.

‘Do you want more cornflakes, Ben?’

He is no longer with me. I lean back, watch his lips moving in time with thoughts that are seldom voiced. Ben is in another location, another time. I cannot reach him. I cannot find my husband.

‘Hello.’ A hand settles on my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, he’s been calmer this morning. Did you get your shopping done yesterday?’

‘Hello, Susan.’ I sniff, try to swallow the rising tide. Bereavement is never easy, is particularly difficult when there hasn’t been a funeral at all.

Nurse Jenkinson dries my tears on a tissue, stuffs it back into a side pocket of the blue dress. ‘No use you getting upset, love. They do hear things, you know. He might just remember your sadness after you’ve gone away.’

We shared everything, Ben and I. The grief, the joy, the tears, the laughter. ‘I feel so guilty,’ I say. ‘He should be at home with me, should be where he belongs.’

‘No.’

‘But I’m his wife, I ought to look after him.’

She drops to her hunkers, takes each of my hands in a grip that is firm but friendly. ‘You’ve been ill. Getting ill is nothing to feel guilty about. Why don’t you have some rest, rent a cottage somewhere, have a break and some fresh air?’

‘I can’t.’

She tugs at me, forces me to look at her. ‘Why not? He’s going nowhere. He gets all he needs here, food and warmth and a doctor just a phone call away. There’s nothing you can do to bring him back as he was. Making yourself worse won’t be any good to either of you.’

The ‘worse’ comes out as ‘werse’, reminds me of Ma Boswell in
Bread
. ‘He wasn’t so bad when I went away for the first lots of tests. Then when I … had the breakdown, I couldn’t even look after myself, so I had to leave him in here with the other lost souls. I drove him to this. I should have got a resident nurse, then Ben could have stayed in his own environment.’

She shakes her head, releases my hands, rises carefully because her weight is distributed unevenly over the wide frame. ‘Alzheimer’s goes its own way, Laura. It’s just that you noticed the deterioration because you’d been away from him. Your husband would have been just as ill, but you’d have come to terms with it gradually. Mr Starling stopped responding to most exterior stimuli years ago. None of this is your doing.’ They keep telling me the same things over and over, and I keep not listening.

She pats my shoulder, moves on to another group, two children, their parents and a frail man who smiles all the time. The vacant grin is not improved by threads of saliva that run down to a towelling bib under his chin. His son or son-in-law reaches out, catches a few of the dribbles on a tissue. Dear God, this is a kind of hell, a capsule trapped in some dark zone of another dimension. We sit with the living dead, then we go home and cry all over again. I won’t look. I won’t look at Ben, at the other stricken
family. Determinedly, I gaze round a room that is becoming almost as familiar as my own house.

It’s a nice enough place, lots of cheerful chintz, an open fireplace with a painted screen hiding the unused grate, coffee tables covered in
Country Life, Lancashire Life
, some daily papers, the odd
Merseymart
. Tea-trolleys sit sedately along walls, the pottery deliberately non-clinical – one of the Johnson’s, I think, possibly Eternal Beau, flowers and ribbons painted on earthenware. No china here, no crystal, no sharp-edged knives. The carpet is moss green, one of those American Shadow types, probably scrubbable. There’s a grandfather clock, a notice-board, some hardback books on a shelf with jigsaws and a compendium of games.

Nurse Susan Jenkinson is combing an old woman’s hair. This old lady sits here every day, never gets a visitor. Our nurse straddles the now slim divide between National Health and private, seems to treat all her clients equally well. She is part of the system that dictates to once-private homes, comes in here, works the district, covers both sides of the fence. She’ll get no OBE, no mention in the honours, yet she represents the true heroes among real people.

I walk to a table, flick through
Vogue
. These poor folk are probably Nurse Jenkinson’s only family. I picture her huddled over a gas fire in the evenings, beans on toast or Pot Noodles for supper, the TV doing its best to persuade her that she is not truly alone. There will be a photograph of her mother in a cheap frame. I could offer something, a pretty rug, some prints for her walls. But it doesn’t work that way. Giving is easy, receiving is hard.

I walk out along a corridor whose red and black Axminster shows some signs of wear. Shalom sits near a door, cleans his whiskers. The home cat is a huge beast, bigger than my Handel. I cannot imagine who gave him such a peaceful name, because he is not tranquil by nature. He takes my measure, rises up, stretches, announces his desire to be released. I let him out, keep an eye on him
while he bounces nimbly towards a tree. Should any stray feline come this way, Shalom will separate the intruder from at least six of its nine lives.

Ben’s room is like the others, small, clean, with neat hospital corners folded into the pale green bed cover. My image sits on top of a small television set. The three children are suspended from a picture rail, their faces frozen in yesteryear’s laughter. I sit in the cushioned wicker chair, listen to the soft ticking of Ben’s travel clock. Where have you been? I ask this timepiece. When you came out of his suitcase, when your face was uncovered at the end of a journey, what did you see?

The room does not smell of Ben. I know that, because I bent down once and buried my nose in his pillow. Nothing. No trace of him, just clean linen, a whiff of Daz, a hint of pine disinfectant. He would be better … yes, he would be better dead, because he’s not really alive. There’s a sickening pain in my chest, because I cannot bear to think of him dead, even though most of his brain has pre-deceased him. My husband has lost much of his mind, is tormented by the few grey cells that still sign on for work every morning. He has mislaid much of the present and most of the recent past. The clearest memories are bad ones. There is no comfort for him unless we have him sedated.

What shall I do? For five minutes, I have sat here, have found no solution. Can I leave him here? Can I leave him with well-intentioned and capable nurses, a twinkle-eyed matron, a killer cat called Shalom? If I bring him home, will I manage, will someone with medical training move in and sustain me until … until the end?

I look out on a garden that is neatly trimmed, square, sufficiently unimaginative to be easy. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I mouth to an inquisitive thrush. ‘He’s looked after your lot for years, so when are you going to help him?’ Am I going loopy? No, I think not. Strange, because I’ve been crazy before, and I wasn’t under pressure like this. Ben has been my strength, my suit of armour. Now, I must be his.

There’s a mist over the window, so I must be crying again. He doesn’t need me, doesn’t really know me. I am useless, stupid, incapable of patching up this one broken man. But no, he told me many times that I am not stupid. Tommo was the one who put me down, who finished off the job started by my mother. You did so much, Ben. Please tell me how I can help you.

‘Come into the light,’ Ben said to me many years ago. ‘Do not hide in the shadows, my lovely girl. You are clever and kind and your husband was a fool to let you go.’

My blouse is damp with salt water. I need him now. Ben, where are you? Self-pity, disgusting self-indulgent tears. I powder my face, go back to say goodbye.

He looks at me, his eyes narrowed, searching, groping for a clue. Then the face clears. ‘Laura?’

I sniff, smile, wait.

‘It’s in the bottom safe,’ he says softly.

‘’What is?’

‘Paper. Writing. The housemartin’s nest.’

I drop to my knees, rub his hands, will him to be warm and alive. ‘Ben. You are the only one who has the combination to the bottom safe. Can you remember it?’

He grins, grips my fingers. ‘Strawberry yoghurt,’ he whispers.

With this final piece of information, I am forced to be content.

Three times now I have driven past my mother’s place. Today, my resentment for her is active. I must therefore stay away from her. In her eighties, the woman displays more intactness of faculty and spirit than I do. But I won’t kick her, not even with words. She’s old, and temper seldom improves with time.

My car is parked outside the newsagent’s, has begun to grumble about its circular, boring route. With all this starting and stopping, Elsie will decide to have another coronary soon, will go down with a clogged carburettor
and dirty points. I enter the shop, pick up a handful of papers, pay a small fortune at the till.

The neo-Nazis in Germany have attacked a Berlin cemetery for Jews. We pulled down the wall, so it begins again. The Hitler Youth is alive, well, throwing petrol bombs. So I’ll do the crossword. Diana will be enjoying the run of the place, must be glad when her middle-aged landlady gives her some space. She’ll be in my living room eating my chocolates and watching
EastEnders
.

‘Laura.’ He pokes his head into my car. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’ I stab at the general knowledge quiz, make a hole with my angry ballpoint. ‘Go away.’

He opens the door, climbs into Elsie’s passenger seat, squashes my
Observer
. ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘Good holiday?’ The whole of Crosby is walking down Coronation Road, is watching me with the best-loved vet in these parts. They love him for his kindness to animals; I have loved him for the same quality, also for his goodness to me. No, that’s not strictly true. I’ve loved him because I’m selfish and he took away some of my pain by making love to me. Sex was not just an expression of love, not in my life. It became an essential like food and drink, it was necessary. It still is, but I’m staying on a diet. ‘How are the children?’ I ask.

‘OK.’ He pulls the newspaper from beneath his buttocks, smooths the creases, plays jig-saw with torn corners. ‘Is it over, Laura?’

‘Yes.’ Five down is beyond me. I need to go back into the shop for some Tippex, whiten my mistakes. Though I can’t blot out Robert with a little brush, can I? ‘We should never have started it.’

‘It was good,’ he whispers. His arm creeps across my shoulder. A current spills from his fingers, travels the length of my spine in a long, continuous and persuasive beat. It is a gentle, familiar pulse that attempts to waken my lazy, resting body. I sit forward. They all know him. There’s a gaggle of young parents, a tangle of prams outside the shop. They are standing in a queue, all waiting
for Daddy to come out with the Sunday ice-cream, the weekend toffees. ‘Sweets are delicious,’ I am inspired to say. ‘But they’re no good for you. Gratification of a base hunger doesn’t exactly strengthen the soul.’ God, I sound like Confetti used to before she got a bit of sense.

‘I won’t rot your teeth,’ he replies.

He is annoying me. I am annoying me. I want to jump out into the road, scream about my privacy being invaded by this handsome intruder, but I am trapped in a vice created by my own sins. Also, I don’t want to show myself up unduly. ‘Robert, I don’t want to see you again. Ever.’

‘OK.’ The door swings open and he gathers up his long legs, the muscle straining against black tracksuit bottoms. I am a lustful woman, have often studied men in the same way as I look at pieces of art. He looks right in crazy clothes, would look good in a flour sack. Most men don’t do justice to casuals, trainers, polo shirts, as they make the mistake of confusing ‘casual’ with ‘scruffy’. Robert is not merely handsome, he is beautiful, like something created by Michelangelo or another of those Italian oddballs. He has a superb body and I will not look at him.