Keeper

by Andrea Gillies

  Until the school holidays arrived, the outer doors were locked all day and the keys were left in them. When we arrived here, Nancy couldn’t manipulate a key. But now, apparently illogically, she can. She seems to have learned how, and retains the ability, day on day. She gets better and quicker at it, opens doors and is off. How, in someone lacking a functioning memory, is this possible? The answer may lie in the history of H.M., of whom we heard earlier, the epileptic research subject run down by a bike. He had his hippocampus removed and other bits of his brain modified, as a typically gung ho 1950s approach to defusing the extreme severity of his fits, and couldn’t remember things. But when scientists asked him to draw, to copy the image of a star, following its outline, and then do the exercise again and again and again in the days following, H. M.’s performance improved. He couldn’t ever remember, from one day to the next, that he’d seen the star before, but he got significantly better, progressively better, at drawing it. The answer lies in the cerebellum. The procedural memory appears to be able to learn, bypassing the conscious mind and the ordinary routes of memory. And this, I suppose, is what’s happening to Nancy.

  So now, official policy is that the key is taken out of the lock and hung on a hook. She can’t manage to get the key off the hook and into the lock; she doesn’t identify it, hanging on its hook, as the key to the door. It’s the school holidays, however, and the children are constantly in and out of the house. Neighboring children are in and out of the house. There are bikes piled on the lawn, alien sneakers and sweaters in the boot room, strange strident voices on the stairs. And the doors are hardly ever locked.

  Nancy’s escaping becomes a big part of our lives. It wouldn’t, of course, be an escape, if it weren’t imperative that somebody always be with her. How lovely it would be for us all if she could be left to saunter round the garden picking the tops off flowers and chewing random stalks of found rhubarb, shutting the hens in their house because they’ve been naughty, telling her troubles to horses. Alas, this isn’t possible. Thirty seconds after getting out of the door and into the world, anxiety descends. Some days we find her walking round the laundry green in ever diminishing circles, wailing; on other days, standing tightly, closely in to the elbow of a wall, chewing on her cardigan and paralyzed with fear. But then she starts leaving the garden. She begins to make a beeline for the road, charging down the driveway with whatever possessions she has judged vital to take home (cardigans, the address book, a singing toy kestrel I brought from the airport, the blue handbag) and out onto the lane, without pausing to look out for traffic. She is found one afternoon in our nearest neighbor’s garden, talking to workmen building his extension, asking them if they know where she lives. She is discovered on another afternoon lying on the road.

  On this occasion she is found before we realize that she’s lost. Her habit of going to her room to be alone, two, three times a day, and the taking of lengthy afternoon naps: these are to blame for our not noticing. Morris doesn’t raise the alarm if she disappears anymore, assuming, like the rest of us, that that’s where she’s gone. A stranger ringing at the doorbell is the first alert in this instance. Are we missing an old lady, she wonders. There’s a white-haired old lady in a red cardigan lying on the road by the farm, and they’ve already called 999. We rush down there, two hundred yards down the lane toward the beach, and sure enough, there’s an ambulance, parked; two ambulance personnel crouched by a seated figure, freshly cloaked in a tartan rug; and three cars pulled into the verge, with concerned (nosy) locals, waiting to see what happens next. They assume she’s been run over, although statistics suggest not: Their three cars amount to 60 percent of the local traffic, from houses on the headland beyond us, and they’re intimately related to the drivers of the other two cars. If somebody had bopped Nancy, word would be out by now. As Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, observed, “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” The ambulance people are just about to whisk Nancy off to hospital, when we come running up. We have to explain that dementia makes her do this kind of thing. She has no apparent injuries and is determined about not going anywhere. We bring her home and keep an eye on her as promised. The first hint of illness, and she’s to be whisked off to the emergency room.

  I bring her back into Morris’s orbit, the TV room, his occupied chair and her empty one, the afternoon movie in full flow, and tell Morris where we found her. Nancy interrupts me.

  “That’s just a pack of lies and you know it.”

  “Nancy. You were down on the road. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “You were lying on the road. The ambulance came along. They sat you up and put a blanket round you.”

  “Lies. It’s all lies.”

  “Look. You’ve got a scrape on the side of your hand. I’ll clean that up. I think you must have toppled off the sidewalk.”

  “It’s a load of nonsense. I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here the whole time.”

  The weather’s peculiar and the hens aren’t laying consistently. Some days there are five eggs, other days none. The trouble is that when both guest rooms are occupied, we need four eggs a day. On one particularly grim and windy morning, there are four Canadians to feed and no eggs at all: none in the fridge, all backups depleted. It’s too early for the shop. Before the guests appear downstairs, we nip off in the car to a neighbor’s roadside honesty box and are saved by the half dozen eggs sitting in it. It’s only later that afternoon, following Chris’s hunch, that we find a pile of fourteen eggs in the herbaceous border, and another pile of twenty-two among some brushwood on the lawn. I ask Nancy to help sort them, inventing a task I think she’ll enjoy. She crouches down in front of the hoard of twenty-two, sitting on her haunches, and talks her way through it. “Two piles,” I tell her. “Brown and white.” I start her off. “Brown in this pile, white in this. See?” She murmurs her assent. I clean the chickens out and watch, with horrified fascination, as Nancy fails to be able to do the task. She can’t seem to distinguish brown and white, can’t make two piles. The browns and whites are mixed up again. But she enjoys handling the eggs, so delicately and gently, in cupped hands, and seems absorbed in her task.

  AUGUST BRINGS NANCY’S eightieth birthday. I speak to Morris about this great event a week before the day. Would he like me to do some shopping on his behalf?

  “I don’t think so, dear, no.”

  “But Morris, her eightieth. Surely you want to get her a gift. Look at all these mail-order catalogs. Wouldn’t you like to choose something? A new cardigan, a bracelet, some of these Velcro slippers?”

  “Nup,” he says, not tearing his gaze from his television quiz show.

  I buy him a card to write and stand over him. His handwriting is affected by age, though only insofar as greater concentration on signing has exaggerated its sweeping ascenders and descenders. Nancy’s attempts to sign her name—on bank things, for instance, since she and Morris still have a joint account—have become stressful and also hilarious. She’s the one who’s amused, laughing till she cries as she tries and fails to write her name. I give her a practice few goes on a blank piece of paper, and these aren’t too bad. They don’t look like a name but at least they are done with brio. It’s when the form is produced that the trouble starts. No matter how many times I explain that the name has to go in the box, resting my fingertip as a guide, Nancy can’t get it in there. She signs above, below, or on the wrong part of the sheet entirely. Nor can she sign in a straight line. Morris doctors her signature afterward, adding vowels.

  “What shall I write?” Morris asks, his pen hovering over the card.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something about her birthday.” What does he mean?

  Happy Birthday Nancy, love Morris, x. That’s all she’s getting. Not that it really matters.

  Nancy enjoys opening her cards, but insists on putting them back in the envelopes afterw
ard, and needs help getting them in. She carries the stack of mail around with her all day. She admires her Fair Isle cardigan, her new necklace, but won’t try them on.

  “These aren’t my things.”

  “Yes. They’re new. We bought them for you. And the chocolates we ate earlier, remember? And the bath bubbles. For your birthday.”

  “Is it my birthday?”

  “Yes. You’re eighty.”

  “Am I? I’m not. You’re joking. You’re funny. Eighty, she says!”

  When we bring her cake in, crowded with candles, and sing to her, she claps her hands and her eyes fill with tears. “Oh! Look at that! It’s so beautiful. I haven’t seen anything that beautiful for many a long day.”

  She joins in with the singing, eats three pieces of lemon sponge, sips at her champagne, and sleeps most of the afternoon.

  BUT THE DAY after, she’s noticeably tired. And that evening, when I’ve taken supper through to Nancy and Morris, and have settled down to our own meal, there’s a sudden explosive ruckus from next door.

  “Just leave them to it,” Chris says, mid-potato.

  I eat a leaf of salad and hear the door from their sitting room out into the hall closing with a slam, Morris remonstrating, “Nancy! Please!”

  I rise from the chair. Chris puts his hand over mine. “Just leave it. Eat your supper,” he says.

  “Na-an-cy! Nancy!” Morris shouts. I put my head round the door. “What’s up? Nancy stomped off?”

  “Yes, and she’s taken her plate.”

  This is a first.

  I check the bedroom first. No Nancy. Nor is she in the bathroom. I go round the ground floor calling. No response. I can’t see her. She must have escaped, I think: Is there an eighty-year-old woman inching down the driveway with a plate? Then I hear a noise. Scraping. Coming from the library. Sure enough, there’s Nancy, standing in the dark tipping her supper into the bookcase. Sausages, potatoes, radicchio, off the plate and onto the paper tops of a row of novels. I’m only grateful there isn’t any gravy, though vinaigrette has already bled its way into Richard Ford and Edith Wharton.

  I take Nancy back into her sitting room by the elbow and the moment she sees Morris, before I can speak, she turns to me pointing her finger and says, “This woman’s a liar.” She sits and fumes. But when I take her to bed she’s all smiles.

  “You’re wonderful. You’re my friend,” she says.

  “Well, thanks, Nancy. That’s nice.”

  “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you look after me so well. You’re a lovely person. No, I mean it. A really lovely person and kind.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I say, smiling at her.

  “Not like those other ones. Those other people here. I don’t like them.”

  Chapter 24

  When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

  —GOETHE

  MORRIS IS CONFIDING IN CAREGIVERS BUT NOT IN US, and now the contrast has become explicit. His favorite stays on past her duties to talk and I overhear things I wish I hadn’t. Standing in the kitchen making a shopping list, I hear the aide’s voice from next door, raised slightly, arguing a point. “But it’s your home, too, Morris.” I’m beginning to wonder if factions are forming.

  He’s ill, with ongoing kidney problems, and has disappeared somewhere within himself that Prozac can’t reach. He no longer makes an effort to speak to the children. Any of the grandchildren who dare run the gauntlet of Nancy’s heckling and threats and go into their grandparents’ sitting room find that not even Granddad seems happy to see them. He has nothing to say to them and has lost all curiosity. On Millie’s birthday he is unforgivably morose. Nancy’s quite chipper: Presented with a slab of cake and a dog on the next sofa cushion, begging for a bit, she seems perfectly content. She has a lengthy conversation with the terrier about whether he’s a good boy and deserves pudding. Morris sits in his chair and looks at the carpet. He eats a bit of cake and leaves the rest. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t wish Millie a happy birthday until prompted. He pointedly doesn’t take an interest in her gifts. This makes the whole day seem heavy. It’s hard to rise above the heaviness set by such unwarranted indifference.

  Nancy’s nighttime restlessness has a new flavor to it, one of strident noncompliance. Nancy’s ranting into the wee small hours and Morris is at his wits’ end. We check up on them every half hour, standing outside their door and listening.

  9:30 P.M. Nancy’s voice, chivying Morris, trying to galvanize him to get out of bed.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, come on, we’ve got to get home. We need to go. We’ve got to get up and get dressed and go now. But you aren’t listening. No. You’re not listening to me. You never listen. You just lie there, a useless lump. All the people here hate you but you don’t know that. They hate you. They hate me, too, but that’s beside the point. I’m used to it. I don’t say anything. They tell me what to do all day. All day I have to do the work. They should do the work but I have to do it. You just sit there. And they—they have got you all wrapped up. All wrapped up. Yes, miss, whatever you say. She thinks she’s in charge but she isn’t. She’s going to get a shock. I’m going to surprise her one of these days. I’ll sort her out once and for all. She doesn’t know the first thing about it, not a thing.”

  10:00 P.M. Nancy is moving around. We can hear her dressing. She is pulling clothes out of the cupboard. The wire coat hangers tinkle and clank as they fall. We hear her walking, her heavy breathing, and her continuing monologue.

  “This is what we need. We need these things to go home. We need to go home now. I have the things, the things and the other things and the rest of the things. You have to get the other things now. But you won’t do that, will you? No. You just lie there, doing nothing. Doing nothing as usual. I have to do everything.”

  The door opens. I’m standing in the corridor. Nancy looks at me and closes it again.

  “She’s there. She’s standing there,” she says to Morris, who doesn’t respond. “I need more things to get the things. She is going to take them. She will take them away and sell them. She doesn’t want anything or anything but the money. She will take the money. That’s right. I know that. I have always said that but you won’t listen. You don’t say anything to her. It’s all left to me as usual.”

  The door opens cautiously and Nancy peers out.

  “Hello, Nancy,” I say. “Time for bed now, isn’t it?”

  “No,” she says. “It isn’t time for bed. I’m just going out for a walk.”

  I go in and open the curtain a little. “But look out there,” I say. “Look how dark it is.”

  “Oh. Oh dear.”

  “It’s very late and everybody’s going to bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “Time for you to go to bed now.”

  She gets into bed, muttering under her breath. I close the bedroom door and put an ear to it.

  “She’s such a bitch. A bitch, and you don’t say so. You don’t do anything about it ever.”

  10:30 P.M. Nancy is still talking, though more quietly. I can’t make out individual words but they pour out of her in a stream. She sounds as if she’s sitting up in bed.

  11:00 P.M. She’s out of bed again. I go in and take her to the bathroom—usually her bedtime cup of tea has caught up with her by now—and put her back to bed. “Good night, then, have a lovely sleep, see you in the morning,” I say, tucking her in firmer.

  She glares at me.

  “Don’t even talk to me. Don’t you dare even say a word.”

  I should walk away. Usually I do but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I mind having my evening fragmented. On those days I have to have the last word.

  “Well, that’s charming,” I chide. “That’s very good manners, isn’t it?” As I leave the room, the low monotone starts up again, the words “she” and “bitch” just audible.

  11:30 P.M. Nancy’s wandering the halls. She looms in her white nightdress out of unexpected directions in the dark like a ph
antom. She’s not keen on returning to her room. Morris speaks up. “For god’s sake, for pity’s sake, Nancy, shut up and get into bed. I’m not sleeping and I’m getting really fed up with you now.”

  “Oh right then. Oh fine,” she says, getting into bed and pulling the duvet over her nose. Two affronted rheumy blue eyes stare at me from the covers.

  Midnight is the fighting zone.

  MORRIS: Nancy, I’ve told you, I need to go to sleep now. Will you just shut up and go to sleep?

  NANCY: I certainly will not. Who the hell do you think you are?

  MORRIS: I’m your husband and what I say goes.

  NANCY: Oh are you. Are you indeed. Well, we’ll see about that.

  MORRIS: Be QUIET.

  NANCY: I’m going home. I can’t stand another minute of this place.

  MORRIS: Get back into bed RIGHT NOW. I mean it.

  NANCY: You’re a fine one to talk. You just do everything she says. She tells you what you can do and what you can’t do. She has everything she wants and you have nothing. You don’t have any of it anymore. You just lie there. You are never helpful to me. You never do what I say. But she. Oh she. She is ever so that way, and you know it. She has you wrapped round her finger.

  MORRIS: What are you talking about now? Who does?

  NANCY: You know very well.

  MORRIS: You’re talking rubbish. Shut up and go to sleep.

  NANCY: I won’t shut up. Not until you tell her. You must tell her, this is my house.

  MORRIS: Who? Who are you talking about?

  I know who she’s talking about. And so does he. But when he’s exasperated he can’t resist reminding her of her failing memory.

  NANCY: I don’t have to tell you her name.

  MORRIS: You don’t know it, do you? You don’t know anybody’s name.

  NANCY: Don’t be ridiculous.

  MORRIS: Go on then. What’s mine?

  NANCY: You know your name very well.

  MORRIS: I do. But you don’t, do you?