No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses!

by Virginia Ironside

  I fed Hardy who’d been inside all morning and was so desperate to get out he’d done a poo on the kitchen floor. So I cleared it up. I made lunch and got out the cutlery and plates to lay the table, but when I opened the cupboards, I found that dirty plates had simply been stacked up as if they were clean, and there was congealed food on every one of them. I knew Mrs Evans wouldn’t have left things in such a state, but she usually comes on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and today was Friday, so obviously Archie had just piled the plates away without washing them up. There were clean knives and forks in the drawers – but also ones with butter smeared on them, and bits of cabbage attached.

  Just as I was staring at these revolting specimens, Archie came into the kitchen, having got dressed and, peculiarly, as we were in the house, wearing his loden coat. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘These,’ I said, pointing to the dirty plates. ‘How did they get put away like this?’

  Archie appeared amazed. ‘Well, that’s disgusting,’ he said. ‘Who can have done that? Mrs Evans … oh, dear. She’s not up to her usual standards. I’m thinking of sacking her, you know.’

  After lunch, Archie made the coffee – I only just prevented him from putting salt into his – and we decided to go into the library and do The Times crossword, which Archie is very good at. We got to the word – ‘amphora’, and Archie said he’d look it up in the dictionary. He got up and pulled it down from the bookshelf and sat down.

  ‘It’s a Roman vessel,’ he said, as he opened the book.

  ‘I know it is,’ I said. ‘And so do you. It’s a well-worn crossword answer, like “retsina”. Why are you looking it up?’

  But he’d started poring over words.

  ‘It’s Greek,’ he said. ‘A two-handled vessel for holding wine, oil, etc…. amphitheatre … amphibian … yes, amphi means double … can live on sea and land … but ampho … that’s different … amphitryon … the host, giver of dinners … that’s interesting … you see “amphi” meaning double, where is the meaning in that … “ampho” on the other hand … ah, the two handles …’

  ‘Yes, but what’s 6 across, now beginning with “p”?’ I asked, tetchily. But Archie wasn’t to be deflected from his task. It was as if he’d forgotten about the crossword puzzle altogether. He started looking up ‘Double … ah, yes, from the Latin here, Duo meaning “two” …’

  I couldn’t tear him away, and even though I got up and suggested we went for a walk while it was still light, he seemed transfixed. He pushed me away rather crossly when I tried to take the dictionary from him, and just carried on reading out the words like an automaton.

  Eventually I gave up and went out on my own, feeling very lonely. It was nice that Hardy came with me, and licked my hand as if he knew something was wrong. We didn’t go far – just to the end of the field outside the house and back, and I felt sad that Gene would miss all the wonderful English countryside when he was in New York, the damp aroma of the fields and leaves, the snowdrops, the faint smell of wood smoke, the sound of pigeons chuckling to themselves as they settled down for the night …

  When I got back, half an hour later, Archie was still studying the dictionary, now on to ‘mitriform … shaped like a mitre … from the Greek “mitra” a type of headdress worn by a woman …’

  Eventually he stopped, but he’d been preoccupied for far longer than usual.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk!’ he said, brightly. I didn’t think it was worth explaining that I’d just come back from one, so out we went again, even though it was now getting quite dark. ‘Doesn’t seem as if Hardy wants to go out,’ he said as he tried to persuade him through the door. ‘That’s odd. He usually loves a walk about this time.’

  I didn’t say I’d just taken him out, but after moving around a bit in the open air, Archie seemed a bit more like his old self. Although we’d been silent as we wandered down an avenue of beeches, he started singing ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’.

  ‘Our song, Philippa,’ he said affectionately squeezing my hand. But of course it wasn’t our song. I just smiled at him. We walked on, over the stile and into the darkening wood. We sat on a bench.

  ‘Our tree, darling,’ he said.

  And there he was right. That old beech was indeed ‘our tree’. It was here, several years ago, that we’d sat one glorious summer’s day, and he’d put his arm round me and we’d just sat, staring out, happy to be together, when he’d said, ‘Would you like to get married, Marie? To me, I mean!’

  I hadn’t known what to say. I was so touched at his suggestion and yet at the same time I felt a wave of anxiety. Marriage hadn’t been very happy for me, and I didn’t want to do anything that would rock the boat with Archie. I must have blushed and stammered because he looked at me, affectionately and then said, ‘Don’t worry. If you wanted to, of course we could. I just wanted you to know that of course it’s in my mind. If you want.’

  ‘Well, it’s not that I don’t want to be married to you,’ I said. ‘But marriage is really for people when they’re going to have children, isn’t it? And then we’d have to remake all our wills … making sure that our children would still get what they should get … and to be honest, I don’t know how Sylvie or Jack would react …’

  ‘Sylvie would hate it,’ laughed Archie. ‘She’s a daddy’s girl. And she’s never got over her mother’s death. So it’s probably best not. But I just wanted you to know, darling, that I feel married to you, even if we’re not.’

  ‘And I feel married to you, even though we’re not,’ I said.

  ‘At least until one of us goes bonkers,’ added Archie realistically. ‘Any moment I start going funny, I do not want you devoting your life to me, and you’ve got to make me a promise that if it happens, you won’t. I don’t want any sacrifices, okay?’

  ‘I’d find it hard not to,’ I remembered saying. ‘But I’ll promise, if you promise me the same if I start losing my marbles.’

  ‘Our special marriage tree!’ Archie had said, looking up at the branches, pulling me close and turning, reaching down, and pulling a stalk from the ground. ‘With this weed,’ he’d said, winding it round the third finger of my left hand, ‘I thee wed.’

  But the good years had passed and now I wondered if he remembered our conversation. He just squeezed my hand, and finally we got up and walked quietly back home.

  On the way back, he seemed so nearly normal that I told him that I’d found the brooch and wanted to sell it: even though he’d said in the past that it would be fine, I just wanted to make sure.

  ‘Very good idea,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a facelift, though, darling. But if it’ll make you happy, then I’d love to think I was contributing in some way. I’d forgotten about that brooch. I had no idea I’d given it to you. I thought you’d lost it. It’s a pity you can’t find it.’

  I didn’t want to go over it all again, but I was extremely worried. And when, the next morning, Mrs Evans came in, I waited till Archie had gone out of the kitchen and then asked her directly how she thought he was. I added that I was very worried about him, and this news seemed to come to her as a great relief.

  ‘Oh Mrs Marie!’ she said, sitting down and putting her duster on the table. ‘I can’t tell you how anxious I am! He’s forgotten to pay me these last months, and then when he does, he forgets and gives me twice as much, and yet the other day he accused me of stealing. Mr Archie! Me, who’s known him since he was a young man! Stealing! He’s not right, no, he isn’t. He’s got demania or Alzenstein, or whatever it is. And the other day for some reason he took all the light bulbs out of their sockets and put them in a drawer. I don’t know why. I had go to behind his back and put them back, or there’d have been no light for him to read in the night. I’ve told his daughter, Mrs Sylvie, I’m worried, but she won’t hear a word about it. I think she’s living in denial or whatever it is people live in these days when they don’t want to hear the truth, and I can’t blame her. Her father!
Her lovely father!’

  ‘I’ll have a word,’ I promised.

  But, oh dear, I don’t fancy broaching the subject.

  18 February

  I talked to Penny about my weekend after we’d been to see the most ghastly film. It was on up the road at one of those lovely old cinemas that everyone’s so keen on tearing down these days, and we went early to take advantage of the cut-price tickets for pensioners. The woman at the box office didn’t query my age at all, which made me even more determined to have a facelift.

  Anyway, it was the movie James and all our friends had been raving about, Bitter Quinces, Poisoned Souls, the one that all the critics have declared a masterpiece, but after about half an hour Penny whispered to me, ‘I don’t understand any of this, do you?’ and I whispered back, ‘It’s total rubbish. Shall we go?’ and we got up and left and crossed the road to have a jolly good supper at one of those Japanese places where you pick your food off a moving conveyor belt.

  ‘Sometimes I think that as I’ve only got ten years left, or something like that,’ said Penny, as she took off her coat and sat down, ‘I don’t want to waste two and a half hours of it staring at a film that’s total crap. Time is precious these days.’

  ‘What on earth was that woman doing, staring into space in that blighted underground car park?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I thought she was a character in someone else’s computer game,’ said Penny. ‘And was it really necessary to show us that poor man’s fingers being cut off one by one?’

  We both shuddered and started choosing little bowls of raw fish to tuck into.

  Then I told her about Archie, and even she thought it sounded as if there might be a problem.

  ‘He can’t be left on his own if he’s getting locked out, and the poor dog … what if he forgets to feed him?’ she said, helping herself to a tiny dish full of raw salmon. ‘Maybe someone could stay with him.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I said, wrestling with some noodles. ‘I’m not married to him, thank goodness. I love him dearly, but that was always the deal. No marriage and no commitment if one or other went off their heads. He always said if he ever got peculiar I was just to push him off a cliff. He made me promise I’d never waste my life looking after him.’

  ‘Would it be a waste of life? Looking after him, I mean?’ asked Penny.

  ‘While I will do all I can to make everything as happy and comfortable for him as I possibly can, I’m not going to incarcerate myself down in Devon with a man who’s starting to think I’m his dead wife,’ I said firmly. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t manage it. He might go wandering off in the fields in the middle of the night and then what would I do?’

  We chatted some more and then we paid the bill and started to leave, but at the door the manager came over to us and asked us to pay extra for two dishes he claimed we’d had after we’d settled the bill.

  ‘One of my staff saw you taking them, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  We were outraged.

  ‘For heaven’s sake do we look like two women who need to steal sushi dishes for kicks? How dare you!’ we said.

  He reluctantly let us go, but we were left with a nasty feeling. ‘He probably thinks we’re two barmy old ladies who pinch marinated tuna for the hell of it,’ said Penny. ‘Oh dear, we should never have left that film early.’

  When we were young we couldn’t be trusted because we were young and irresponsible and now we can’t be trusted because we’re old and mad. Well, I’ll never go there again. Though their chicken teriyaki is, of course, totally scrummy.

  As we walked back, Penny and I congratulated each other on living in Shepherd’s Bush. Not only is it an extremely ‘diverse’ area – i.e. every nationality under the sun lives here in apparently perfect harmony – but it’s one of the few boroughs that is, in the summer, incredibly green. Each street is lined with enormous trees and at the top of our road there’s even a small patch of grass on which flourish not only a huge old plane tree but a really beautiful false acacia. If you’re very clever, on a particularly balmy day, and if you stand in a particular spot outside my house, and half-close your eyes and gaze up towards this bit of greenery, you can almost imagine you’re looking at a picture by Claude. Or Poussin.

  ‘Not,’ as Penny pointed out when I mentioned this to her, ‘that anyone has ever heard of Claude or Poussin these days.’

  I wondered whether it might not be worth having a crack at trying to reproduce this oddly romantic piece of urban landscape as a picture.

  Spent a happy hour rereading Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. Now there’s a diarist and a half.

  19 February

  Today I took my courage in both hands and gave Sylvie a ring. That’s Archie’s daughter. Much as I love Sylvie and we have a lot of laughs together, I’m never certain quite how much she loves me because I can’t imagine any daughter, even a grown-up one, particularly likes a new woman in her father’s life. Luckily Archie and I had reassured her early on that we had no intention of getting married, and that eased things a lot – I think she’d been nervous that the family millions (not that there are many millions but presumably the estate is worth a fortune) would be left, on his death, not to her but to me.

  Still, we are very civilised with each other. But civilised enough to have a conversation about her father’s deteriorating mental condition? I wasn’t so sure. And anyway the last thing she wants to be burdened with is someone like me telling her that she thinks her father’s losing his mind.

  We went through the usual hellos and how are yous on the phone and then I said, ‘Look, I wanted to ring because I’m a bit worried about your father.’ I don’t think I’ve ever uttered quite such a grown-up phrase in my life. I usually feel about eight, forty-five or fifty-three or any age except the one I am now. But after hearing myself intone this grave sentence I felt every inch of sixty-five. I’m not sure I didn’t actually feel ninety. I was sure that even my voice had lowered itself in order to convey how important I thought it was.

  ‘Well, what about him?’ she said, and I thought I detected a snap in her voice.

  ‘He does seem to be getting a bit forgetful,’ I replied.

  ‘Well of course he is!’ she retorted, tetchily. ‘He’s seventy-five. Everyone gets forgetful when they’re old. I should think you’re getting a bit forgetful, aren’t you?’

  ‘This is slightly different, Sylvie,’ I said. Using her first name added a bit more gravitas to it all. ‘Even Mrs Evans has noticed.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t listen to what Mrs Evans says. She’s as mad as a hatter! Not only that but my father rang yesterday to say she’d stolen a brooch of yours. She’s obviously gone barmy. She’d never do a thing like that unless she was off her head.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t stolen a brooch,’ I said, gently. ‘I think your father got a little confused. I really think you ought to take him to see a doctor and see what he thinks,’ I added, finally, but realising I was unlikely to get anywhere.

  ‘Our doctor’s a woman!’ she snapped.

  Oh dear. When I was young doctors were always ‘him’ so I often forget, even though my own GP is a woman, to add ‘or her’ when I’m talking about professionals who used in the sixties, always to be men. Or rather, whenever I hear myself saying the word ‘him’ I involuntarily add the phrase ‘or her’ – so often it makes no sense at all. (The last time I mentioned a hitman, I heard myself adding ‘or her’, which was of course ludicrous. It’s because I’m so paranoid that someone like Penny – or, now, Sylvie – will jump on me and accuse me of being sexist.)

  Quite apart from being outraged by my assumption that the doctor was a man, Sylvie was clearly furious about my suggesting there was anything wrong with her father. But she did concede that Harry, her husband, had expressed the same misgivings, at the same time claiming that she ‘knew daddy better than anyone’ and that he was perfectly fine, but if I insisted she’d take him to the doctor, not that there would be anything she – and sh
e emphasised the ‘she’ – would be able to do if there were.

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ I said, decisively. ‘There are, in some cases, things that can be done at least, before … er … whatever it is—’ I didn’t like to say ‘dementia’ or ‘Alzheimer’s’ though we both knew what I was talking about, ‘—gets a grip. Things that can prolong …’ – I was getting flustered – ‘er, stupidity and memory … I mean,’ I added, even more anxious and confused, ‘lucidity and memory … senior moment.’

  ‘Senior Moment. Exactly.’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Just like daddy. Nothing to worry about.’

  No wonder Sylvie ended our phone call with the sarcastic words, ‘Well, thank you very much – Doctor Sharp.’

  MARCH

  4 March

  Had a ghastly dream last night that I was in group therapy and the therapist said she didn’t trust me an inch and that I was two-faced and devious, and after she finished the entire group burst into applause, shouting ‘Hear hear!’ I thought it was pretty mean of whoever it is who creates my dreams, just after I’d just taken a very brave and honest and up-front step in bearding Sylvie. Sometimes I’d like to meet my dream-weavers and give them a good talking-to. I’d like to ask them for something light and amusing, full of jokes and songs, threaded through with a general feel-good atmosphere. Something on the lines of Mamma Mia!, perhaps. Or if they’d simply give me the name of the Derby winner, that would be fine. That would save them the trouble of constructing all these blackly complicated scenarios. But I doubt if they’d listen. I suspect the director of Bitter Quinces, Poisoned Souls has a say in most of my dreams. They’re almost always X-rated horror stories or psychological thrillers steeped in what is known as ‘the dark side’.

  Oh, crikey! We’re at the beginning of March and I still haven’t done any of the things on my list except write a diary! Will make an appointment with the acupuncturist today – I gather they’re very good with joints – and scout around for a cosmetic surgeon. I need a jolly good brush-up.