These navigational skills convinced my father that here was a man who could steer his daughter on the right path. He happily allowed himself to be a passenger and to be chauffeured, having previously always insisted on being at the wheel. It was a surrender made in deference to age, but also an acknowledgement of David’s mastery. The car was literally the vehicle for a rapprochement. If my father had still owned a Jaguar, he would have let David drive it.
My mother, too, was not predisposed to David. I played it badly, announcing that we were going to marry before she’d met him and then informing her that he would be coming to London with me to visit. Never keen on houseguests, making an exception only for the Russians, she dreaded having a stranger under her roof who was also a fait accompli fiancé. Even worse, this meant it was highly unlikely that I would ever return to the UK to live.
When they met, she was thin-lipped and stern. But that lasted about twenty minutes. We were in the kitchen on our first evening, on our best behaviour, self-conscious and awkward in attempts to be falsely jolly. We were setting the table, which meant David was opening kitchen drawers looking for cutlery. What he found instead was my mother’s remarkable, possibly definitive, collection of obscure, but globally comprehensive, cooking utensils. At first my mother looked faintly embarrassed, her guilty secret exposed, as if he’d been rootling through her underwear and found racy boudoir thongs mixed in with the sensible girdles.
Confident that he would rise to the occasion, I held up exhibit after exhibit, challenging David to guess their use. To my mother’s astonishment and increasing delight, he identified them correctly. He got the cherry pitter, egg slice, decorative butter mould, zester, jar openers, grapefruit knife, even the nutmeg grater. As in any quiz show where the stakes are high, the questions got harder and harder. Some objects stumped us both completely. ‘Oh, those are mussel holders,’ said my mother, blithely demonstrating their steely castanet motion as if their function were self-evident. And this? ‘A Dutch biscuit maker.’ Of course. By now each implement prompted such mirth that within an hour, the table still unset, we were helplessly convulsed.
The bond between David and my mother grew and grew. When we took my mother to Istanbul for Christmas, we were alarmed at how uneven the cobbled streets were. In some cases, they were punctuated with large unmarked holes and vicious protruding spikes. David gallantly offered a slightly unsteady Maman his elbow to hang onto during our explorations. ‘Elbow’ has since become her permanent nickname for him.
One strange, strange thing: they look alike. David and I are often mistaken for siblings. Or, as I put it since we have both gone grey, a pair of schnauzers. The resemblance between us has grown stronger. He looks much more like my mother than like his own. Their skins are equally olive, their eyes equally deep set, brown and velvety, their foreheads high, their noses strong. I see Maman’s features in David, especially in profile, and it gives me comfort to think that when she is no longer there an essence of her will linger in his face.
CHAPTER 27
The unglazed heart
At Nightingale House my father dozes like Alice in Wonderland’s dormouse most of the day. His dementia is too severe for him to participate in any of the social activities. Sometimes they include him, wheeling him into a room for a drama workshop where he stares vacantly but cannot follow any directions to copy movements or gestures. Or they take him on a picnic where he does not notice his surroundings.
One determined volunteer comes in regularly to give a craft class. She brings bags of moist clay and terracotta for residents to shape and model, and wheels her trolley between each floor so that residents who cannot make it down to the well-equipped arts and craft centre are not left out. Some make lopsided plates and misshapen bowls, enjoying the slippery wet sensation of the material being shaped between their fingers, perhaps taking them back to the days of sandcastles and mud pies. The best works are displayed in the foyer.
Every time the craft volunteer invites my father to make something, he waves her away as if she were a buzzing insect. But she is not easily discouraged and always returns. My mother feels sorry for her, and tells her the situation is hopeless and not to waste her time. Papa had neither interest nor aptitude in his previous life for anything creative, so he will not develop them now.
When I was eight or nine, I caught a brief craft craze. It filled in solitary holiday longueurs and suited my non-sporty nature. At the time, making things was big for kids. On Blue Peter, the UK’s most beloved children’s program, born the same year as me, presenters were endlessly demonstrating things you could make with a loo-roll tube and a plastic bottle. The show was the first in the UK to use the phrase, ‘Here’s one I made earlier.’ I was constantly asking Maman to save me empty bleach and detergent bottles to be recycled into something I’d seen on television, but my execution always let me down and left me feeling inadequate.
Inspiration came to me one day, however, after finishing a box of Cadbury’s Dairy Chocolate Fingers. I decided to make something with it. Today we would call that recycling. I had noticed that my mother’s evening clutch purse of crocodile skin was exactly the same shape as the biscuit pack: a shallow slim rectangle. I found an off-cut of felted dark-red material in her fabric box and wrapped the scrap around the box, tucking it into the inside lid and gluing it down around the sides. The effect was neat and pleasing. It opened and shut smoothly and I imagined her tucking a lipstick and powder compact in there for a night at the theatre. Thinking it looked perhaps a little bare as an evening accessory (the lizard bag had a gold and lapis clasp), I rummaged in her sewing kit and found a few sparkling beads that I stuck down on the centre of the lid in a circle, their facets catching the light like raindrops in sunshine. Perfect.
I presented the bag to my mother and she accepted it with just the right amount of surprise and delight. A few evenings later, proud of my handiwork, I watched her leave for the opera in her appropriately chocolate-coloured mink stole, clutching my bag in her jewelled hand. So I was devastated when I later found it shoved at the back of the glove compartment, understanding in a flash that she had never used it.
My mother’s manual accomplishments were discouraging. She had endless patience and skill, excelling at needlework, tapestry, knitting and all crafts. I tried to copy her, but anything that required counting and a regular repeated gesture following a pattern defeated me. My mother blamed it on my being left-handed, saying it made everything awkward, being done back to front. Still, she encouraged me to find practical hobbies, buying me a book that became my constant companion. A paperback published by Penguin called Something To Do became a substitute friend. Divided into twelve chapters, one for each month, it suggested various projects, half of them indoors and half outdoors. Many were quite tricky and required a level of manual coordination and precision I could not manage. I rarely did the outdoor ones unless they involved collecting shells, leaves or feathers.
Next came a kit that supplied moulds, with different-coloured clear and opaque resins to pour into and set, like buttons or shells. I made pendants with it and sold them at school. A year later I was given a miniature kiln and some cut-out copper jewellery bases, together with a set of enamels that came in little shakers like salt. You created stencilled patterns and made your own designs and then fired them. They came out molten, glazed shiny and hard like glossy jam tarts. I made rings and pendants and again sold them at school. They were so popular I even took orders, showing precocious entrepreneurial flair. There was high demand for one design: a disc pendant on a white background with a scarlet heart at its centre. It was bold and graphic, and I managed to perfect the enamelling technique so that it didn’t bubble or craze.
The weeks at the nursing home pass without incident. Except that one day, my mother is stopped by the craft volunteer.
‘Your husband has made something,’ she says with evident satisfaction.
My mother does not believe her. There must have been some mistake.
‘Oh no, most definitely Harry Baum, he made something last week.’
My mother asks what it is.
‘A terracotta heart. Unglazed. When it’s been fired I will give it to you. I’m sure he means it to be a gift to you.’
An unglazed heart. Which is what mine feels like these days. Exposed. Fragile. Breakable.
I think of my father’s stumpy spatula fingers shaping the mineral mud. It’s hard to imagine. I remember my little glazed heart from the kiln-firing days, a small red pumping organ, stylised into a shape we recognise globally as symbolising love, now devalued as a graphic used in countless commercial promotions and transactions and even turned into a verb, deforming the language in a way my father would call an abomination: ‘I heart NY.’
As a child who suffered from a lack of dexterity, I strained for mastery of a skill that comes with practice. Awkward and clumsy, my first attempts had been thrown in the bin, lopsided, off-centre, imperfect. I try to imagine my father making something wonky and unfinished, something in which, as his former self, he would have taken no pride or pleasure. He hated to get his hands dirty. But in the end, conscious or not, the heart is all that matters. Even though he was lost to us, wrapped in a thick blanket of fog, however briefly, some part of him knew that. And now I know it too.
CHAPTER 28
The memory box
Six years after his diagnosis, my father is a husk. He can no longer speak intelligibly. He barely opens his eyes to sip from a cup or be fed. He is incontinent and wears pads. He drools from his medication. His utterances are gobbledegook, mostly noises, sometimes rising in volume and resembling the revving of a car engine. When he sees me, sometimes these incoherent sounds become more urgent and deliberate, as if he is straining to say something important. He grips my hand, crushing my knuckles. From the cadence of these unformed utterances I recognise that he is asking me about money, the urgency of his tone exactly the same as it would have been when he could articulate concern about my use of credit cards and levels of debt.
Once I left home, the opening gambit of our conversations was never ‘How are you?’ but ‘How’s your bank balance?’ or ‘How’s the mortgage?’ or ‘Have you paid off your credit card?’ Instead of praise for anything I had published he would say, ‘I hope they paid you well.’
When I was a student and first began managing the monthly allowance my father gave me, he required me to undertake an audit whenever I came back to London. I was expected to show evidence that I could balance my chequebook, presenting the stubs for scrutiny just as I had once had to present my bitten nails. If I overspent he would quote Polonius from Hamlet—‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’—and chastise me. Then, once I promised to do better, he would top up my account. There were annual lessons in budgeting that I tuned out of with showy yawns, resenting these demonstrations of control. Later, he signed me up to investment policies I did not request, committing me to long-terms saving plans without consulting me. I protested his interference by pretending to be cavalier about earning and spending.
My mother was totally financially dependent on him. Until my father became demented she had never used her credit card to pay for a meal. Now in her eighties, she was suddenly forced to disentangle his complicated arrangements and multiple squirrelling of gold coins here, bonds there. My father’s savings were byzantine in their complexity and scattered through dozens of different portfolios. Partly due to bad luck, they yielded disappointingly little for all his efforts, his dream of wealth and of passing on a large sum never realised. He knew this before his health failed him, and it was the cause of gnawing bitterness and corrosive regret. If one word were to sum up the second half of my father’s life, it would be ‘disappointment’.
My mother’s unflagging devotion to the shell of her husband earns the admiration of the carers at Nightingale House. She visits every second day without fail, greeting my father with a cheery ‘Hello, HB’ though he fails to acknowledge her in any way. She combs my father’s few remaining strands of hair, kissing his forehead, holding and stroking his hand, feeding him, making a fuss when he has not been shaved or dressed by lunchtime or is wearing someone else’s clothes. She is ferociously vigilant of his dignity, and vocal about any aspects of his care that are neglected or substandard. Always searching for a way to unlock my father, she reads all the literature on the latest research into dementia and buys him a soft toy to cuddle, hoping it might give him pleasure. It soon falls from his lap, but she tucks it back into the crook of his elbow, over and over again, lifting his hand to stroke its synthetic coat.
It is soul-destroying to watch and is taking its toll on her. She is increasingly frail, fearful, frugal and yet still capable of moments of ferocity on my father’s behalf, like a tigress suddenly roused to snarling anger in defence of her cubs. Her world has shrunk to the scale of necessity, reduced to bare basics. In moments of devastating candour, she admits that she is lonely and has no confidence socially. She joins a carers’ support group in the hope of meeting people in similar circumstances. I admire her bravery and praise her for venturing out on this late quest. A few months later she is jubilant on Skype, announcing with great pride that she has made a friend and cannot wait for me to meet her. The implied need for approval in her voice echoes my own, many years before.
I think back to her petty jealousy of my friends when they got too close and threatened to steal me from her. Her dislikes were sudden, irrational and ferocious. One minute she was enthusiastic about Sabine, a sparky, outgoing girl I met at university, because she was French: she enjoyed hearing her language being well spoken by a compatriot from a cultured Parisian family; it soothed her homesickness to compare notes with Sabine about Britain’s failings and strange customs; they bonded over shared frustrations, such as the lack of minced veal at British butchers. But then, one holiday, when Sabine came to stay and her large, boisterous personality filled the house (and for once, charmed my father), my mother announced without warning that Sabine would have to leave, immediately. She could not stand to have her in the house one second longer. Going upstairs to tell Sabine, whose family had extended open-ended hospitality to me in Paris on several occasions, that she was no longer welcome and must pack her bags was one of the most awkward moments of my life. Now I ask myself why I didn’t refuse point-blank to do my mother’s bidding or tell her to do it herself. Why I didn’t march out of the house with my friend and not come back? I was too compliant, like a Stockholm syndrome hostage.
My friendship with Sabine survived, strengthened by her forgiving nature and persistent efforts to win my mother over. Ten years later, in tears, my mother apologised for her juvenile jealousy. Her pride had been wounded when Sabine teased her about her French being out of date, and she had lashed out in revenge.
I am determined to like any friend my mother makes. I watch with almost parental delight as this fellow carer becomes her confidante. At the age of eighty-three, she is discovering that it can be more fun to go to the cinema with someone than on your own and that going out for a pizza can be the highlight of your week.
As a long-term resident of the nursing home, my father is one of the first to be moved to a new wing and given a brighter, more spacious room with a view of the gardens to which he never looks out. It is the equivalent of an upgrade to a suite in a posh hotel.
‘He won’t notice,’ says my mother with a shrug.
From the very beginning of my father’s institutional life, she has refused to bring anything personal from home to decorate his walls and shelves in case it gets stolen by other wandering residents. As a result, his bedroom is bare and spartan by comparison with those of others, whose families have brought in cushions, furniture, photographs and tchotchkes to add homey cheer and personality to counter the nursing-home decor. She tracks his few possessions with the fervour of a drug sniffer dog, retrieving them triumphantly from other rooms and constantly sewing name tags into new clothes, as if sending him off to boarding school, fearful lest one sock
go missing.
Now, there is to be a memory box outside each room, to give a sense of each resident’s identity and interests. A small lockable perspex container with a single shelf and a light so that its contents can be clearly seen even at night. My mother struggles to find things to put in it, worrying that they will be misplaced.
‘I’m not sure it’s secure,’ she says, as if a safe or strongbox were preferable for his few modest possessions.
I come up with a list of objects of little or no value, to illustrate my father’s few tangible enthusiasms.
‘What about a Toblerone, the giant ones he liked to buy in bulk?’ I suggest via our daily Skype call, remembering the way he could eat a whole block in one sitting.
‘He has no teeth anymore.’
‘No, I mean just the packaging.’
‘Maybe …’ she says, resistant to any purchase.
‘And a CD of one of his favourites, Bach or Beethoven?’
‘He never played them, he didn’t know how to turn on the machine. And besides, someone will pinch the disc.’
‘Well, just the box then,’ I say encouragingly.
‘Or a photograph of us at Buckingham Palace when he got his MBE?’
I wonder if that was his proudest day. At lunch afterwards in a restaurant on Park Lane in his pale-grey morning suit, his top hat tucked under his chair, he could not stop beaming. ‘Not bad for a refugee,’ he said softly, almost to himself, as we raised our glasses of champagne in a toast.
‘Perhaps …’
‘What about a couple of maps and a Michelin Guide?’
She does not argue with this. Instead it prompts a suggestion of her own: his passport. A poignant document, proof of an identity remade and now lost. No visas necessary for where he is now or will eventually be going.
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