Only

by Caroline Baum

  What would I put in my box? A pair of earrings, seashells, a poem and an artwork by David, a luggage tag, my wedding ring, a phial of saffron threads to remind me of sunny flavours. The condolence-card reply from Jackie Kennedy. Photographs of my parents, images of friends. This book.

  Possessions say so little, in the end. We cherish them, invest them with meaning, but their eloquence becomes muted with time. At a certain point, the things you want are not things. They are people and sensations. The sound of rolling thunder approaching, the folding ripple of a small wave in a sheltered bay, the feeling of large warm drops of rain on your forearm, the smell of basil, coffee, garlic, baking bread. Laughter. Love. Friendship. Beauty. Kindness. Music. The creative spark and flair of making a bouquet of flowers, or a meal eaten in fellowship, or finding the right words to put on the page.

  While we haggle over the contents of the memory box, I notice that my mother is more graciously resigned to my father holding her hostage than I expected. Ever hopeful that he will respond with some small sign of appreciation, she makes sure he is taken on outings with other residents, hoping to stimulate any part of his brain that remains undamaged. She pushes his wheelchair through parks and gardens and points things out to him from the window of the Nightingale bus, returning exhausted but often uplifted by the tiniest sign. ‘I think he really enjoyed himself,’ she says later, and I am amazed at her new capacity to find the positive in even the slightest flicker of his eye.

  ‘He seems to like the hand massages,’ she says of a program of new treatments being trialled, though he still chews his fingers raw in unchecked compulsion. Therapists confirm her observations, saying they have glimpsed fleeting smiles. He is less agitated, more peaceful. There are still flashes of anger, rare outbursts that appear out of nowhere. Being pushed along an unfamiliar corridor to the terrace, he cries for no apparent reason, as if suddenly afraid. While he is visibly declining, my mother is ageing more imperceptibly. No one notices because her skin remains unlined and her child-like manner deceives strangers into believing she is a decade younger.

  And that’s not all. At Nightingale House, she receives unexpected compliments. When a carer describes her as ‘good with people’, she repeats the phrase to me frequently. She has also learned to see comedy in her visits and its absurdities. One day she see my father holding hands with a woman. When my mother bends to kiss him on the forehead, the woman asks tartly, ‘And who are you?’

  To which my mother replies, ‘I’m Harry’s wife.’

  The woman, who is rather well groomed and nicely dressed, becomes rattled: ‘No, you’re not. I’m his wife.’

  Instead of arguing, my mother laughs. ‘If you say so.’

  On her next visit, she discovers she has an admirer of her own. A resident in the same wing greets her with a polite salutation, and then, moving along rather faster than propriety would suggest, touches her on the breast and announces himself as her husband. Instead of getting flustered and offended, my mother recounts the episode with a flirtatious smile in her voice. ‘So now I have two, too,’ she says.

  I could not do what she does. I’m ashamed to admit that on some visits to my father, I found the experience such an ordeal that I just sat in the car rather than face what waited for me on the second floor.

  Forty per cent of the nursing home’s residents have no visitors whatsoever, and are entirely dependent on the goodwill of volunteers who do not reach everyone on their rounds. When my mother sees a new face, she has the confidence to approach in greeting, setting aside her natural timidity and reserve. She is stronger and steelier than either of us knew.

  Which comes in handy. In an attempt to reduce costs due to severe budget cuts, within days of my father’s move to the new wing the NHS threatens to withdraw the funding for his care.

  Just as I fought the system to get him admitted, my mother decides she will take up the struggle to keep him there. Energised by defiance rather than cowed by officialdom, she swings into action with method: she studies all the official literature to understand the assessment criteria and launches a carefully considered counterattack in a comprehensive report stating her case, rebutting the arguments with calm reasoning and judicious observations from staff.

  The wait for a decision stretches over two agonising months, during which she eats less and sleeps little. On Skype I notice that her cheeks are hollow. Her world shrinks to one and only one concern. She is under siege. Every decision, however small, is put on hold. ‘I can’t think about that now,’ is her stock answer to any question. Finally, an official letter arrives. To everyone’s amazement, she’s won.

  The triumph in her voice via Skype is almost palpable. The confidence boost acts like a power surge, prompting her to quit the antidepressants she has been taking since my father was admitted. Bursting with pride, she cannot wait to tell me that other carer visitors at the facility have asked if she would be an advocate on their behalf.

  As a tentative mature-age student who never completed a basic education, my mother dreaded writing essays when she took high-school level Russian exams in her fifties. It put her off studying for a degree, despite her natural aptitude and her passion for the literature. Now here she is, in her mid-eighties, able to mount a cogent argument and defeat a powerful authority. It is never too late for victory.

  CHAPTER 29

  Long-distance death

  In the end, the call I had dreaded since moving to Australia was not a call at all. It was an email from my mother’s friend in London telling me my father had suddenly been taken to hospital with acute pneumonia and was not responding to treatment. My mother was with him and had been told to expect the worst.

  Taking a break from her vigil by his side, Maman had later left an uncharacteristically garbled message on my mobile. She sounded marooned, disoriented with shock. Alone in the middle of the night, words deserted her: ‘He’s got … oh … what is it … what do you call it … ? Anyway, it’s not looking good … so there you are …’ She abandoned the sentence in mid-air, leaving meaning to drift like smoke.

  I reached her at the hospital, where they had no bed to offer but had volunteered a sofa for her to rest on. She sounded dazed, like someone wounded wandering around the scene of an accident who has not yet been attended to by emergency services.

  ‘Shall I come now?’ I asked, trying to sound upbeat and helpful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, sincerely forlorn and bewildered. ‘I can’t make a decision.’

  Six hours later, my father was dead.

  My mother had been by his side, watching and above all hearing him struggle for every breath.

  ‘It was terrible. The nurse said he was in pain,’ she told me, sparing me nothing. ‘He made noises like a hot water bottle.’ I thought about the slooshing sound the water makes when it is moving around in its rubber sheath. Until then I had found it vaguely comforting. Was that what she meant? Then I thought of the sound the hot water bottle makes when you expel the air before turning the stopper tight. A breath.

  Why did he die in pain? I had a sanitised view of death, imagining morphine would be given in any situation. But it turns out that pneumonia is an exception, because the opiate narrows the airways, making it even harder to breathe. Surely, if someone was dying anyway, that wouldn’t matter, and morphine could make their decline gentler, easier? Apparently not. Perhaps my mother was not sure what to ask for or wasn’t aware how medical staff use euphemisms like ‘We can give him something to make him more comfortable’. Every time the nurse asked her if she would like to be alone with her husband for his final moments, Maman begged her to stay.

  Listening to my mother talk about my father’s death, I wondered how much of her helplessness as a child by her grandfather’s bedside haunted her in my father’s final hours. Except that now she was an adult and, to my mind at least, waiting to be released from years of being hostage to a man who had long since vanished. When I Skyped her, she did not turn the camera on, preferring to r
emain invisible in her distress.

  ‘Did you hold his hand? Did you tell him it was alright to go?’ I asked, lamely resorting to movie clichés.

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t listening,’ she snapped. ‘His eyes were open but not focusing on anything. He had no idea I was there.’ She sounded accusing. But really the right word is aggrieved.

  ‘Still, perhaps he could hear you,’ I insisted. Who was I trying to comfort? My mother or myself?

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. In her pain and trauma, I think she wanted me to suffer a little of what she had endured, rather than make it easier in my imagination. Perhaps so she would not have to feel so alone with it all. I wanted to hear her sound relieved that it was over. But there was no relief.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  You say you’ll jump on a plane, but it’s not that simple. Flights from Australia do not depart hourly like European shuttles. They are full at short notice. It takes a day to disengage from life, cancel work, think about what to pack, organise technology. I had no idea how long I would be gone for or what the weather would do. It was technically autumn, but the temperatures I read online suggested an Indian summer. How long would that last?

  I felt calm. Detached. It had happened. At last, at last. And at least I was not in the air, racing to get there, uncertain. At least I knew the outcome. That made it easier, didn’t it? Within minutes, it was as if I was enclosed under a bell jar, sealed into a vacuum by a special kind of loneliness that stole up on me like a predator. Intellectually, I knew I was not alone. David was beside me, literally as well as figuratively. He would follow me to London within a matter of days. But meanwhile it was as if a vapour had seeped into the air, making me feel apart, disconnected, as if the molecular structure of the atmosphere had changed.

  Seeking to escape that toxicity, I went for a walk on the beach and experienced another strange sensation: while I was stepping over the soft sand I felt myself ageing, as though I could detect it at a cellular level, as if my skin were leathering and becoming a reptilian carapace I would never shed. So this is how it is, from now on, I heard deep, deep inside in a voice I did not recognise. My older self had taken possession, an unwelcome squatter who had moved into the basement and was not going to budge anytime soon.

  I went into efficiency mode. I would organise the funeral on the plane and start on the eulogy. I would make a list of people to contact. I would not waste the flight time. I launched myself into Competent Caroline mode, a state I knew brought out the best in me. Efficient, practical, calm, in control. In a crisis, I was my father’s daughter. But when I got to the airport I was not quite so assured. Waves of tears crashed over me at the check-in counter—enough to earn me access to the business club lounge. No upgrade on compassionate grounds, but still, something.

  ‘We’re full, I’m sorry,’ said the ground staff supervisor. Every crumb of kindness made me feel so grateful I only wept more.

  Even at an airport, always a place of heightened emotions, there are prescribed zones for crying. You are supposed to do it all before you go through to Departures and have pulled yourself together by the time you get to Immigration. No one cries at Passport Control, Security and beyond. You shop, you eat, you buy a magazine and some nuts, you people-watch, but you do not sob. If you do, you feel you are letting the side down, failing the team. You are spreading unnecessary alarm like germs. In these times of heightened vigilance, someone might report your distress and complain.

  On the plane, I kept to myself. Normally chatty to help time pass in a more bearable way, I’d make basic conversation with a neighbour when meals were served. But not this time. I had no desire to impose my feelings on anyone or take an interest in their reasons for travelling. No film or book could hold my attention.

  David had arranged for a driver to meet me at Heathrow. We chatted a little. I called my mother to say I was minutes away. I told the driver the reason for my visit. He nodded to me in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘I lost my daughter last year,’ he said, jolting me as abruptly as if we’d hit another car. He said it so calmly. ‘She was thirteen.’

  I asked how it happened. ‘An accident,’ he replied, matter-of-factly. ‘She was on a ski lift and she fell off it and died of internal injuries.’

  By now we were at the gates to my mother’s home.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I stammered as he unloaded my suitcase. He shook my hand and smiled the smile of the permanently wounded.

  ‘She was my favourite.’ That confession pierced my heart. Perhaps only a stranger could be told such a painfully intimate admission.

  My mother opened the door to me in a cobalt-blue waffle-weave dressing gown that I would see her wear for the next three weeks, its yoke uncharacteristically grubby. Catching my focus immediately and anticipating criticism, she lobbed a pre-emptive explanation: ‘It’s toothpaste, it doesn’t come out.’

  Beneath her defiant ferocity I sensed fear and alarm, panic and dread. She had obtained a death certificate, but now, with that one formality processed, she had no idea what to do next. She had the name of a funeral director, but wanted me to take charge.

  ‘I don’t care what you do, it means nothing to me,’ she said with the Gallic shrug that punctuates so many of her statements. One day, I would like to investigate how the French have turned that sudden movement of raising and dropping the shoulders into a gesture of national eloquence, expressing everything from contempt to acceptance.

  Wandsworth is as unlovely and unloved a part of south London today as it was in my childhood. It has resisted gentrification or perhaps not been offered the option, unlike Clapham and Battersea. As a child, I remember passing these rows of identical narrow red-brick Coronation Street–style terraces on the way to school and seeing small children with sooty faces playing barefoot like Dickensian urchins around the back of Young’s brewery, the area’s main employer. Its headquarters on the Wandle, a waterway feeding into the Thames, looked like a Victorian poorhouse. The company delivered its cargo of barrels to pubs around the city on carts pulled by heavy-limbed dray horses. The industrial revolution did not appear to have lifted the prosperity or working conditions of the borough in two centuries, despite the proliferation of high-street chains and shopping centres with branches of Uniqlo and Wagamama. Why would anyone want to linger here? Gillman Funeral Directors defied the drab streetscape with its dazzling white façade and interiors, blindingly bright in their denial of decay, like a row of perfect teeth in an otherwise ravaged face.

  The first shock was how long it takes to get a date at a London crematorium. The city is busy dying and you enter a queue, just as you do everywhere else. We could not find a venue any earlier than ten days hence. How would we fill all that time, I wondered. With so little family and such a small social circle, arrangements would only take up so many hours.

  ‘What do you like about your job?’ I asked Kelly, our funeral organiser, slipping into journalist mode to cope and for the benefit of my mother, who could not even bear to look at the list of services available. I noticed Kelly’s tattoos as well as her long spatula-like acrylic nails, which prevented her from holding her pen normally, forcing her hand into a peculiarly awkward, almost simian clench.

  ‘Customer satisfaction,’ replied Kelly with cheery conviction.

  Not this customer. I had imagined we could choose a cardboard coffin (known in the trade as a Barbara Cartland, which I am sure she would have loathed, given that she was not one for plain packaging of any kind) as a budget option. But the eco options (water hyacinth, bamboo, cardboard) cost exactly double the more traditional timber options. So we settled on a coffin called Rippon (but which would have been more aptly called Rip-off). No trimmings. No flowers. We would choose the music and I would conduct the service.

  ‘You are very brave,’ said Kelly admiringly.

  Overconfident, I missed the warning in her comment. I thought back to hosting my father-in-law’s fune
ral at which the role of MC had fallen to me by default. I had, if I am totally honest, enjoyed the role—being emotionally detached I had revelled in using the skills of my working life to welcome the congregation at that modest family gathering and settle them into a mood that was not too sombre, for the benefit of the young children present. I did not want their first experience of this rite to be frightening. The only thing that shocked us all was my mother-in-law’s sobbing the moment she saw the coffin. It was like her laughter, completely uninhibited and full-throated. Impolite in volume. There was no stopping it, no matter how much her son and daughter squeezed her from both sides as if applied pressure could contain her grief, like a tourniquet on a bleeding wound.

  At home I wrote a list of my father’s colleagues to call and email. Back in her dressing gown, my mother sighed, becoming more and more agitated.

  ‘I don’t want to see these people. Where have they been for the past six years?’ she said, her voice catching with resentment. If she had a shopfront, she could advertise: ‘Long-term grudges a speciality’. Once again, as it had six years before and more mildly ever since, the apartment smelled of sour milk. She was curdled with sorrow and anger, interspersed with flashes of unsparing self-awareness. ‘I know I’m only feeling sorry for myself,’ she would say hotly, as if someone was arguing with her.

  Sometimes her behaviour embarrassed me. When she met a fellow resident of her building in the elevator or foyer, she would barrel up to them, ignoring the proprieties of personal space and say, ‘Do you know my husband died?’, waiting for a reaction that was never up to the standard she expected. If she savoured their discomfiture, it was short-lived. Ultimately, everyone disappointed her. ‘I don’t know how to be,’ she said, flinging her arms from her sides in a gesture of helplessness.

  The next day, we went to Nightingale House to empty my father’s room. But within thirty seconds of crossing the threshold, my mother bolted like a spooked horse.