by Melvyn Bragg
CHAPTER NINE
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I was here yesterday.’
‘You weren’t.’
‘I was. You won’t remember.’
‘My memory’s terrible sometimes. It’s just terrible.’
She put her hands to her head. Her expression was normal and unclouded. It was the lapses into normality that made John most sorry for her. Did she look around, in those moments, and see the wreckage and know it for what it was? Did this brief emergence show her what had been and could never be again? The pain of that. It was not just that her memory returned although it was a bit stronger. It was that she spoke coherently, held a conversation for a while, cut her way through the spreading tendrils of destruction that were strangling the cells of memory, feeding on her past and leaving her starved of it. Did she have a clear intimation of this? If so, how could she bear it? How could anyone bear it?
‘I won’t get better, will I?’
‘Well . . . there are some days you . . .’
‘I won’t get better.’ She looked away from him and then said, emphatically, ‘They should put us down.’
He was winded. So matter-of-fact. So meant.
‘Come on, then, what are we going to talk about?’ she said briskly. ‘None of them talk round here. They just sit.’
‘The nurses talk.’
‘They do. I’ll give them that. You talk now.’
‘When you married Dad you had to leave the factory, Redmayne’s, didn’t you?’
‘We all had to. All the women had to leave when they got married.’
‘Did you like the factory?’
‘I liked the women. We’d all been at school together. I liked being with them. You had to wait to get a job there. It took me six months. But I didn’t like our boss. He would walk up and down between the machines like a slave driver. ‘Hurry up now, girls!’ ‘Don’t do this.’ ‘Why are you doing that?’ None of us liked him. But you couldn’t say anything. We would sing in the dinner break and he didn’t like that but we got up a deputation to Mr Redmayne himself and he was a gentleman and he said, ‘Let the girls sing. It will exercise their lungs!’ Mary laughed, a clear, untroubled laugh, and John felt an ice-melt of recognition. ‘?“It will exercise their lungs!”?’ she repeated happily.
He so rarely could ask her questions beyond ‘How are you?’ or ‘Do you feel well today?’ A desert. This was a sudden oasis. It was like it had been, times past. He could ask her about herself. And yet he had never wanted to or perhaps never dared to ask her personal questions. Or any, come to think. There was that about her private personality which was irrevealable. Anything that threatened to draw her into a confidential expression or an explanation of herself was not to be raised. She was easy and casual with issues and the events of the day; she liked the gossip of the town, which was her fiction; but now, about to open an innocent line of enquiry, John felt that he must tread very carefully.
She was still alert: eager, upright in the bed, her white nightgown like a surplice around her neck, her hair just ‘done’ that morning, a helmet of silver white.
‘Well, then?’
He risked it. ‘When you left the factory, why did you choose to have fish knives?’
‘You were offered a set of fish knives or a prodded rug,’ she said. ‘That was what you got for going.’
‘Why didn’t you choose the prodded rug?’
She might have sensed or invented that John was being critical of her rejection of that undoubtedly more common item. Prodded rugs were mats or, pushing it, carpets of varying sizes. They were made from remnants of any old scraps of material, which were prodded, with a bodkin, through a hessian base. Few ordinary homes were without them. Most people made their own, the rug hanging behind the door, reminding any visitors they could bring a few scraps and prod them in with the bodkin. There were women who were very talented at this craft and they could produce patterned rugs and even figurative rugs – a cockerel, an eagle – rugs you would be proud to keep. Redmayne’s would order one of these for the young female who was to be fired for matrimony. Mary took John’s enquiry to be a criticism: that somehow, by not choosing a prodded rug, she was committing the sin of ‘getting above herself’.
‘I like a prodded rug,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with a prodded rug.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘Everybody likes them.’
‘They do. I do. Everybody does.’
Usually he would have backed off. But today he was encouraged by the coherence of her attention. ‘But you chose the fish knives and forks.’
‘I did,’ she said, after a few moments, which might have been reflection.
John remembered those knives and forks. He had first come across them when he was four or five. They were tucked away at the bottom of a bed-linen chest he was excavating at the time. He pulled out the green case as if he had stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave.
The cheap imitation green leather, pocked like crocodile skin, was clearly, to him, a casket fit to hold treasure. He found the little gold-looking hooks and snapped them open and there they were, displayed before him. Six forks, very thin but exotic, and six things that looked like knives but had no real blade and were very easy to bend. Silver, he was sure of that. Each one was secured in two slots in the casket, head and tail, and the set of twelve rested on a soft purple material. His mother told him that they were fish knives and that they were special.
From then on and as the years passed by he kept encountering them. Once when he was about thirteen and off school with some infectious complaint, he tried to kill the boredom by opening every drawer in his parents’ bedroom, trying on clothes, puzzled by some of his discoveries, aroused to a rather agreeable state of guilty excitement, and he came across them again. This time they were with the gloves and scarves. And again he looked in and again they intrigued him and still they had never been used.
Later in his adolescent reading he found that the poet John Betjeman thought that fish knives were common. That puzzled him. They were, he thought, unmistakably grand. Later he learned that Betjeman’s aped upper-class snobbery was contradicted by the real aristocrats, whose dinner tables had long been furnished with fish knives. He felt his mother had been vindicated. He was ridiculously pleased that his mother’s taste was upheld at that high court.
The last time he had seen them was when he was in the bathroom looking for a razor blade in the old chest of drawers to which everything that might come in useful in the future was condemned. Once more he opened the green box, which was by now to him something of a sacred object. The knives and forks had fallen on hard times. The damp of the bathroom had rusted them, the velvet was faded, the little snip catches were broken. They were of no further use.
They had never once been put on the table.
The only fish he could remember them eating in his childhood had come from the fish-and-chip shop and was so coated in an armour of batter that the puny forks would have buckled in any attempt to break through to the cod.
‘Why did you choose the fish knives?’
She did not like the interrogation but there was still some energy left. ‘I like fish,’ she said.
‘But we never used them for fish. And if we had used them for the fish from Josie’s . . . Josie’s fish needed proper knives.’
‘You never know,’ she said, ‘we might have had guests.’
John knew he should have left it at that. He could not remember any guests who had ever come to eat. ‘Guests’ was too grand a word. People dropped in for a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit. ‘Guests’ was a blind. Both of them knew it. He was sitting at the end of the bed. She had lowered her head, all but hiding her face. A lock of her hair swung down across her brow and when, defiantly, she looked up at him, her slim face, he would have sworn, had a look, sweet, mischievous, that took it back to the day she had been presented with that set of fish knives.
‘So why,’ he asked, and it would be for the last time, ‘did you choose the fish knives?’
Suddenly, she smiled, and swung her head, with a gesture that was both old and young, and said, ‘Swank! Just swank!’
He clapped his hands, he wanted to cheer: she was back! And there was more. Surfing on the wave, she held out her left arm and began to sing. Her actions followed the words of the simple song they would all sing together at the socials, the whole room, all ages, in a circle, like a primitive ritual chant.
‘You put your left arm in,
Your left arm out,
In out, in out,
You shake it all about.’
She shook her arm vigorously. John joined in.
‘You do the hokey-cokey
And you turn around.’
She swayed from side to side in her bed.
‘That’s what it’s all about.’
Their voices rose and the nurse who had stopped outside beckoned a fellow nurse and her patient in a wheelchair to listen.
‘Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Knees bent, arms stretch
Arm in, arm out,
Rah! rah! rah!’
The eavesdropping audience in the corridor took up the song.
‘You put your right arm in,
Your right arm out,
In out, in out,
You shake it all about.
You do the hokey-cokey
And you turn around.
That’s what it’s all about.’
The audience and the chorus swelled along the corridors of the nursing home as they all sang.
‘Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Knees bent, arms stretch
Arm in, arm out,
Rah! rah! rah!’
‘I don’t think we can do the legs bit,’ said Mary, looking down at the blankets that covered them.
‘That was fine,’ he said. That was wonderful! he thought. That was the best time we have had for weeks! he thought. And fish knives and ‘Swank!’ But she did not like compliments. So, ‘Fine,’ he repeated, and let it go.
Outside, the audience dispersed, taking a cheerful singing mood to the next destination.
John went on to the beach for an hour to let the pleasure settle, to bask in it; even to hope. The flat dullness of the day only made more vivid the almost absurd intoxication he felt. What if, in time for her, the research on Alzheimer’s could make sufficient progress? If she could snap back like that for about twenty minutes, perhaps in some ways she could be again as she had been. Could they not freeze-photograph her mind in those minutes and find a way to re-create it, to use that lucidity as a basis?
He lit a cigarette and walked swiftly over the wet flat sands, loving the whip of wind on his face, the chill and bite of it. It was ‘only’ an illness, after all. Other illnesses, diseases, plagues had been cured. Every year new science brought new cures. Why not for this? He would go on to the Internet again when he got back to London in a few hours.
But to be alive, he thought, as he strode beside the incoming sea and looked at the cargoes of heavy cloud, just to breathe in the air, to look at and recognise what you saw, to know that you were here, now, and to have the good fortune to enjoy it. Just to be. That was what he wanted for her. To be and to know it.
The journey south would take about five hours, depending on the traffic. He loaded up a CD selection and drove back into the metropolis with its rolling crises, back to the drip, drip, drip of unanswerable questions and his own ageing problems of health murmurs and pensions and downsizing and what future for his children. Yet for John the city was still intoxicating. When it finally swallowed him and he was on automatic in the last streets, he raked over the best things of the day, and laughed out loud, as the headlights sliced through the over-lit streets.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
Oh! Hokey-cokey-cokey.
In out, in out,
Rah! rah! rah!
‘Just swank!’ he said aloud. ‘Just swank.’ And he loved her for it.
He turned into his London street after midnight, a few lights, shine on the road from recent rain, a sudden exhaustion.
CHAPTER TEN
They kept her on the farm. It was not a decision taken with the long term in mind, it just fell out that way. All of them were shaken by the incident at the school gates. Wilson gave little sign but Grace was aware of a hesitation over her now, so slight, so very slight, but she knew him well. Sarah’s reaction was to be more energetic in her dealings with her granddaughter, and rather more encouraging than before. Belle, for weeks, trod in her sister’s footsteps and feared to let her out of her sight.
Grace felt that she was no longer her old self but what she had become she did not know. ‘Out of sorts’ was the phrase that Sarah used to Wilson when they talked about her. He would not demur but in a way that he could not articulate he thought the incident showed that there was something deeply worrying in her. She would find life very difficult, he thought. She had snapped and there was now seen to be a flaw in her character.
The pupil-teacher dream had pushed aside the need for planning what she should do on finishing school. Now, when asked, she was not helpful or even sensible. It seemed to Wilson that she was determined to annoy him. Her answers had included ‘Run away to sea’ and ‘Work in the flour mills in Silloth with the other girls’. She had to be reined in, he thought; and perhaps that included the notion that she had to be broken in. So they kept her on the farm, kept her under surveillance.
Mr Walker had failed to save Grace and he found it hard to forgive himself. He had a partiality for her, viewed closely and rather jealously by Miss Errington.
He had let it settle and then the minister had gone to the school to make a last plea to Miss Errington. He spoke of forgiveness and cited Christ’s tolerance of sinners and pointed out the power of repentance. But Miss Errington would not be moved. It was not so much the violence as the lack of that repentance he spoke about. She feared that Grace had a devil in her and, although she put this very tentatively, she was surprised that the minister had not noticed it. The pupil-teacher arrangement would be far too great a risk. Miss Errington was obdurate.
He left the schoolroom and made his way to the river. Sometimes he feared for the future of his religion. It was too harsh, he thought. What would not bend would surely break. He saw all around him the lush, yielding fertility of the plain and he felt a fear that the stoniness of the path he preached did not reflect the rich and varied world of God. But his mission was to serve and he prayed aloud and returned home more resolute.
The months, from summer when she left school until the closing down of late autumn, from the hay turning and harvest to potato picking, were always the busiest span. She was scarcely in the house and the long days both tested and tired her. She worked alongside the hired men, and now that she was hour by hour with them, they let her harness and lead the horses. They were impressed as the sheaves of hay she swung on to the cart grew in volume over the haymaking time and soon little competitions grew between them. There was a cheerfulness on the farm that Wilson had not known before and the effect Grace had on everyone eased his anxiety.
She was a young woman now. Sarah was on the lookout for the beginning of Grace’s periods and helped her cope with the onset. When ‘the time of the month’ arrived, Grace was soon able to steer herself through it. Through these and other physical confidences, Sarah’s trust began to be restored.
She wanted to make Grace feel needed. She decided that she would not wait for the spring to do her annual ‘clean through’, but give the house a once-in-a-lifetime scouring, painting, papering. Grace would be the perfect helper and Belle would be led to feel useful. Wilson, not at all keen, surrendered after Sarah’s glinting comment that ‘Best get it all sorted out while
we can.’ He yielded. But as a man embedded in the farmhouse, and well satisfied to see every article where it had always been, he braced himself.
So that Grace and Belle would not think of themselves any longer as schoolgirls, Wilson decided to give them a wage. He sat both of them down and told them what it would cost for him to hire women to do the work they were doing. He then deducted their ‘keep’, including clothes, and kept back a percentage that he would save for them, and when it reached a steady sum he would add it to their bank accounts, opened some years before and increased each year by the proceeds from the sale of their lambs. The modest sum that remained for their pocket was more or less the same as the other working girls and young women in the village received. Did they think it was fair? he asked. They agreed that it was and left the room a little gravely, feeling that they had experienced their first significant adult meeting. Belle said she would give her money to Grace to keep for her. She would tie it up in a handkerchief, she said, so that Grace would know which was hers.
Grace was to stay on the farm for the next three years. The incident at the school gates drifted into the byways of memory. There was a village choir and Grace never missed a practice. It was a time of competitions and the choir went to Wigton and Silloth and further afield to the industrial coast, to Whitehaven and Workington where the mining families prided themselves on their music. One year they got into the finals at the big festival in the market hall in the county town: Carlisle.
For Grace singing in the choir was almost a form of self-hypnosis, a forgetting of herself, another life. It was like lying deep in that goosefeather mattress with the merest sough of wind in the sycamores beyond the garden, the slightest rattle of the window panes, just a reminder there was a real world out there. The goosefeather mattress could wrap round her like a cocoon and so could the choir, other voices, her own scarcely heard but part of this flow, part of the sea of sound on which she seemed to float.
