Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  Imagine, if you will, the external scene. The mist coming off the path and rising into the beech trees, stroking the cypresses like smoke. And across the road at the private school the boys arriving in twos and threes, their pink faces under their grey caps taking on shades of that same grey. All this seen through the eyes of a man who has had little sleep. And there on his doorstep stands a boy of colours, red, blond and blue, who says: ‘If you can use another pair of hands around here, then I’m your man.’

  An American in Highgate at eight in the morning. Clean, strong and cheerful. Mr Fox has had a hard night. Two of his overnight staff, to wit, Dale and Sally, have not shown up. Dale had called in but only to resign, in his querulous New Zealand accent. ‘I’m off, Mr Fox, true as true. It’s back to the sheep for old Dales.’ Never trust a New Zealander, Mr Fox reflected bitterly. Only in matters of rugby and mutton are they sound.

  Mr Fox asked about a work permit.

  Jack said: ‘What’s that?’

  Mr Fox was pleased. Would Jack be happy to be paid in cash?

  ‘What else is there?’ said happy Jack.

  Government regulations insist that there should be one trained nurse on duty for every four patients during the day. The ratio of patients to a nurse rises to eight to one by night. In other words, you can get away with more after dark. By then the patients are supposed to be asleep. Trouble is that in private establishments (and there was none more private than Serenity House) you get no overlap as you do in the state homes when the day shift clocks off and the night shift clocks on, a little human leeway, a little extra nursing cover. The day staff clock off. If the night shift don’t show up then there’s nothing for it but to call the nursing agencies and that can be very expensive. That’s if you can get nurses at such short notice. Otherwise, if two of your carers simply don’t turn up, then all you can do is to roll up your sleeves. No wonder so many people running small Homes suffer from what they call in the trade ‘proprietor burn-out’.

  Well, Cledwyn Fox was too tough to burn out but he’d been very badly scorched by long hours and late nights when staff did a vanishing trick. Last night had been very long indeed. The very least he could get away with was a single nurse on duty, Night Matron plus a helper. And even then he thought that the nurses sometimes passed around the sedatives rather too freely. That was the trouble. When the staff were run off their feet they tended to use any method possible of subduing a patient. It was much the same in prisons. The only place you didn’t have trouble with an overly large intake and too few staff by night was the morgue.

  Daytimes he managed the staff rotas not too badly. There were Crispin, Audrey, Cissie, Bert, the nurse-aide Imelda and four or five auxiliaries under the firm command of Mrs Trump and by golly did they not make a solid team? His domestic cleaners, two women who came from the school where they worked across the road, were happy enough to do the honours because he paid them an incontinence allowance, which doubled their average hourly rates.

  But nights, oh, God, the nights! They were the real killers. So when an American boy with a wide smile offered his services, ‘Morning, noon and night – I really don’t scare easy, boss,’ Mr Fox uttered a silent prayer of gratitude to the patron saint of nursing home proprietors and never hesitated.

  ‘You mean you’ll do nights?’

  ‘Day and night – and day.’

  ‘There’s a six-week induction course. During that time you will be taken around by one of the other carers. Learn the ropes.’

  ‘Ropes?’

  ‘It’s an expression. It means getting to know your way around.’

  ‘I like it!’ Jack said, repeating the word, ‘Ropes! Weird. You’ve got a whole lot of old people. You’ve got these ropes. My friend Josh, he had a rope. He went swinging. Do they go swinging? Skinny old Tarzans, yelling all over the place.’

  Mr Fox looked stern. ‘We never use that word here.’

  ‘Swinging?’

  Mr Fox dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Old. I don’t care what sort of language is used for the rest. Be as rude as you like. In fact you’ve got to have a pretty tough skin to work in an eventide refuge. Elders, you see, are supposed to be another race. They live in a world we don’t believe in. The grey archipelago. Oldies, wrinklies, they’re nothing of the sort, Jack. They’re just young people who’ve lived for a long time. Survivors. Now we’re going to go on a little tour of Serenity House, Jack. And at the end of the tour I’m going to ask you one question. So I want you to look very hard at the people here and think about what you see. Then afterwards you answer a simple straightforward question I’m going to ask you.’

  *

  Jack’s first hours in Serenity House were an absolute treat. He loved it from the start and when snoring Sandra woke unexpectedly during lunch and attempted to stab Lady Divina with her fish-knife and Lady Divina expertly disabled her with a sharp blow to the knee-cap, and it took at least two carers to separate the women, Jack could not have been happier. He met the nurses, he met the carers, he met the auxiliaries, he met the elders, and he did all he could to still his impatience till Max arrived.

  As day turned to evening in Serenity House, he met Matron Two, who was sitting in her little office – the only private room in the house was reserved for Matrons One and Two. Night Matron was reading a copy of Immortality Now, a newsletter issued by the Female Friends of God, one of the new religious movements. Night Matron had belonged to FFOG for some ten years now and, although Mr Fox would have preferred her to have given Jack an introduction to the cares and joys of the everyday life of an employee of Serenity House, she preferred to talk about God. It was Jack’s American connection that did it. It was the fact that without America there would have been no Female Friends of God. And one sometimes had the feeling that without America there would have been no God. Anyway, as somebody had told somebody else – had it been Saddam Hussein? – anyway whoever said whatever it was to whoever he said it to, what he had said was that this was the ‘American century’. And there seemed no arguing with that.

  ‘Our magazine’s produced in Wyoming,’ said Matron Two proudly, as if Wyoming was an especially superior brand name of something. ‘That’s probably down your way.’

  ‘Give or take a couple of thousand miles,’ smiled Jack, who, in truth, had no idea where Wyoming was. But then it didn’t sound familiar so he knew it couldn’t be in Orange County.

  ‘The Female Friends of God is one of the most modern and the most enlightened movements in the world,’ she assured him. ‘It’s based on a close reading of the New Testament and the words of Jesus which very clearly show that we can expect life everlasting, not later, but now. Everyone’s capable of immortality.’ Night Matron was on her feet now. ‘It’s a matter of getting in touch with the immortality quotient within your own cell structure. FFOG believes that death is a physical limitation that cannot be accepted any longer. Death results from the collusion of bad cellular forces within the body. Stop the conspiracy and find immortality.’

  ‘I wish you a whole heap of luck,’ said Jack.

  ‘Thank you, dear. And God bless you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Jack.

  And who can be surprised that they didn’t all take to him? Or almost all of them. That incongruous American accent, the odd, mismatched eyes. Two tone. The lively happiness of the boy at all he was shown and heard was infectious.

  There was Bert who was to help him in his first six weeks. Bert pointed out to Jack the Five Incontinents, sending a five-fold stream into five large chamber pots placed beneath the high chairs into which they had been strapped. Strapped? Certainly not! said Bert. Strapped would not be the word in Serenity House. ‘Don’t look glum, boy. We don’t go in for restraining procedures here. That’s the American way.’ No, the ‘leather rigging’, as he called it (and gave Jack goose flesh) was simply there to support and comfort the individual elder. Bert was full of the most remarkably useful advice. What to do when under attack. ‘Call the Manager,�
�� said Bert. ‘Look now – here’s Major Bobbno,’ he continued. ‘He fits the profile of our elders pretty closely. Remember, what you’ll find is that they either go in the legs or in the head. That’s the common run of things. The Major is partially sighted and suffers slightly from osteo-arthritis. He’s also inclined to be a bit skittish. Even in a wheelchair. Come over here with me and meet him. Careful how you approach him. A hand on the shoulder if you approach him from behind will warn him that someone is here.’

  Bert pushed Jack forward into the ambit of Major Bobbno who sat in his wheelchair sucking his moustache and working out how to take a particular hill where the enemy was well dug in and protected by enfilading machine-gun fire. Military fashion, beneath his arm he carried a long plastic claw.

  ‘Morning, Major.’ Bert touched the Major’s shoulder lightly. ‘I’d like you to meet a new man on the staff. This is Jack.’

  ‘Spratt, Frost or Robinson?’ the Major demanded.

  ‘Jack Robinson,’ said Jack unhesitatingly, liking this game.

  ‘Look, his shoelaces are undone. Kneel down and tie them up for him,’ Bert whispered. ‘He’ll like that.’

  Jack knelt and began to tie the Major’s shoelaces. He felt a sharp blow on his shoulder. Major Bobbno grinned and replaced the plastic claw beneath his arm. It hurt. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘He’s just having a bit of fun with his hand-reacher. Go on, do his laces for him. I’ll keep an eye on him,’ said Bert. ‘Now, now, Major – that was naughty of us.’

  ‘Arise, Sir Jack,’ chirruped Major Bobbno.

  ‘He likes you,’ whispered Bert, ‘and that’s good. He can be a real old devil. Yet you know, love ’em or loathe ’em, you’ll find out, Jack, as time goes by, that it’s very hard when they die. No matter how many times you’ve seen it. And I’ve seen it often. The new ones come in and they’ve been married a lifetime and suddenly they find they’re sleeping in a single bed and you hear them crying at night. Not much you can do. Maybe they’ll hold your hand and tell you they’re lonely and want to go home. Or they’re scared you’re going to treat them like a child or a cabbage. I can tell you, young Jack, that some don’t survive the shock of transplant. They leave the house they know and come to Serenity. But the shock’s that great they’re gone within a few weeks. The CV, that’s the collection vehicle, is backing up to the ramp at the back door and off they go. You’ll hear the elders sometimes talk of the ramp. “Oh, she went down the ramp,” they’ll say. I know it sounds callous, but it isn’t really.’

  Jack wasn’t really listening to that. Jack was watching Major Bobbno leaving his wheelchair. The Major stood up, took a step forward and fell on his face. ‘Goodbye, sucker!’ said Jack who’d knotted the Major’s laces together. ‘Nobody fucks with Jack. Nobody!’

  Jack met old Maudie who kept putting on her coat and asking if it was time to go home, and when Bert pointed out to her that there was trifle for lunch she took off her coat and said she might as well stay for lunch.

  ‘She’ll stay for supper too. And breakfast tomorrow. And lunch. In other words – she’ll stay. But she won’t stop putting on her coat and getting ready to go. That’s the way it is,’ said Bert.

  He met Beryl the Beard and Bert taught him ‘standard waking procedure’. ‘She’s a confused person. Right? Don’t just barge in and shout, “Wakey, wakey,” in the morning. Come in quietly and say to her: “Good morning, my name is Jack and your name is Beryl. It’s time for your breakfast, Beryl.” And don’t be surprised if ten minutes later she can’t remember your name. Introduce yourself again.’

  He saw the great circle of chairs facing the TV. ‘Try as you might,’ Bert explained, ‘that’s where most of them usually end up. Give ’em painting classes, give ’em flower arranging. Or senior karate for strengthening the muscles. But the bloody box still wins hands down.’

  Two days later Mr Fox brought Jack to see Max.

  He sat reading in his room. A copy of Fealty. Princess of Wales’s exercise regime. Readers Special Offer of a replica of the Royal Leotard. Max smelt him before he entered the room. Nose sharp, he sniffed. What was the boy enveloped in? Salt? Soy?

  ‘You two new boys should get to know each other’, said Mr Fox.

  The new boys eyed each other.

  Jack stuck out his hand. ‘Friend of yours, she said – “Say hi to the giant.”’

  Say hi? Max pondered this. Chinese, perhaps? He had it now. Monosodium glutamate. The boy reeked of Chinese food.

  ‘Friend in common?’ Mr Fox enquired kindly. ‘Jack’s all the way from Florida, Mr Montfalcon. He partook in the entertainment business. In one of their famous theme parks. You go on stage, don’t you, Jack, when you go to work? You don’t wear a uniform, it’s a costume.’

  ‘Not work. Entertainment!’ Jack added.

  ‘Imagine that, Mr Montfalcon. You have to hand it to the Americans when it comes to making work fun. Of course we’re pretty small beer compared with Jack’s previous experience of dealing with the public.’

  ‘Fifteen to twenty million a year,’ said Jack.

  ‘Their chef cooked his way through fifty thousand meals a day. Five million pounds of meat from Monday to Friday. And Jack knows a friend of yours. Isn’t it a small world, Mr Montfalcon?’

  ‘I have no friends,’ said Max.

  ‘Everyone,’ said Mr Fox cheerily, ‘has a friend.’

  ‘They’re all dead. My friends are history.’

  Jack beamed. ‘Doesn’t stop ’em being your friends. Just because they’re dead.’

  When Max’s cupboard arrived a few days later, roped to the roof of the silver Jag, it was Jack who helped Night Matron shift it into position in Max’s room. Ran his hand affectionately over its polished oaken face. Max, who watched the gesture, immediately arranged to fit a new lock.

  ‘Well, now.’ Mr Fox’s golden earring swung from his lobe, a musical pendulum, beginning the countdown. ‘You’ve met our elders. Now for that question I promised you: who would you say they are?’

  Videos made flesh? Better than anything the Aardvark Emporium had to offer? Pure happiness? Fame and fortune? Jack did not say a word.

  Mr Fox’s musical pendulum counted him out. ‘You and me, that’s who they are, Jack. They’re us!’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Max and The Broad Pelvis

  The trouble, Max decided, was that people knew little history.

  Consider young von F, that bright German who had come to Oxford in the thirties, direct from Göttingen. A Rhodes Scholar. The sort of chap one regarded as a ‘thinking German’. And a patriot. How strange and distant that boy seemed now. Today people looked at the fall of the Berlin Wall and said that the unification of Germany was a good thing. Well, even back in the thirties, young von F had had his doubts about displaced Germans and their lonely remoteness in the Sudetenland.

  ‘I tell you, Montfalcon, this chap Hitler is quite something. I mean he has energy like billyo. I watched him in Munich, back in ’twenty-seven. Marched his men through the English Garden and into Kaulbachstrasse and held an impromptu meeting. There were boots, belts, masses of brown. The odd moustache or two. I can’t tell you what that brown colour did to some of us. It was so ugly, so vulgar! One felt ill. Even though one knew that one’s reaction was – how shall I say? – somewhat patrician. But there was no doubting the sheer verve of the man. And his picture of the lost Sudentenlanders, that struck a chord. Unity! It was a hunger among Germans. Now I don’t claim that I saw any of this as particularly historical, that afternoon in the rather gracious surroundings of Kaulbachstrasse. I didn’t. It never occurred to me that I was witnessing the beginning of the end.’

  And here Max had gently corrected his young German friend on the use of the word ‘historical’.

  ‘I think what you want to say is “historic”, meaning memorable – certain to take its place in history. That’s what you saw, something historic. I’m following the great master of modern English usage H. W. Fowler. N
ow “historical” means something more ordinary. Something occurring within that unfolding sequence of events which we call history. To fail to distinguish between an historic moment – which is to say the sight of the German dictator addressing members of his party in a Munich street – and the mere passage of moments in the past is the sort of sloppiness which Fowler deplores. He calls it “backsliding”.’

  How long ago all that was. And what had happened to his young friend, von F? They had been to the same school. Von F loved to recall his happy school days in England.

  ‘School Road from Churtseigh to Guildford. A fabulous entrance gate. The pillars were crowned with griffins and there was a long curved drive, a stretch of forest and a hundred rooms. It was a real noble mansion, an estate. The chapel doubled as a laundry and was originally used as a boiler room. It was carefully dilapidated. You looked out over the lawns and in the distance there was a lake. Slightly muddy, but it didn’t matter. The woods dotted around included a few lovely cedars. There were sheep in the far distance keeping the grass down, a formal flower garden to the right of the house. We were taught how to hold a teacup. How to sit down without spilling the tea. We wore grey flannels and blue blazers with a lion on the pocket. The headmaster’s wife’s sitting-room was covered in chintz, there were comfortable chairs, the windows were often open. I was a prefect once. We toasted muffins in front of the fire. There were no fags. I failed my exam.

  ‘My Berlin school was built pre-First World War. It comprised six villas in the grounds of a large house. Many of the boarders came from Pomerania. They were the sons of landed gentry. There were some nobility. The name of the place was the Dahlem “Arndt Gymnasium”. Our classes numbered thirty boys and they were all unruly. Punishment meant that you had to make a cat’s paw of your fist and you got hit on it with a ruler. There was nothing free and easy about it. It was run in Prussian style. “Guten Morgen, Herr Lehrer!” I didn’t do well. I hated it. I was bloody glad to get away. It was a Sunday because father was at home for a change. Sunday late spring and my father said, “There are only two possibilities now, either we shall be Communists or we shall accept Hitler.” We were in town somewhere, my father was with me and a woman came up to us and said, “They are going to start shooting at any moment now.” I heard a shot from across the square. It was in the twenties sometime and it went on for four or five years. I remember horses and carriages, I remember the Marschstall riding school which was later converted into two indoor tennis courts. At our school we had to learn to play tennis and to swim. We also had to learn good manners. All such things were part of the gentleman’s education. The money in Germany was being continually devalued. The prices were incredible. A million marks for one egg. Once a week the driver came in the car with a basketful of money, a laundry basket, and my mother shot off and bought whatever she could get.