Paradise Lodge

by Nina Stibbe

  Mr Simmons spotted me reading Animal Farm shortly after that and was very interested in my new allegorical reading material and kept quoting from it—which made me feel doubly guilty and awful. I kept reminding myself, ‘Mr Simmons is tough—he’s from the modern age. He’s come through a world war on the winning side and worked for the BBC.’

  My sister had worked hard at school and I’d had to suffer teachers telling me how well they remembered her—meaning, I compared badly. Since my sister’s failed smoking ban in our shared bedroom and subsequent move to the living room we’d not got along very well and we’d annoyed each other. But that summer, while she hung around waiting to go off and study thinkers from the dawn of civilization to the modern day and across the globe and what it meant to be human, something happened to her that brought us close again. I’m not sure what exactly, but I know it started when she went on a camping holiday to Scarborough with her boyfriend, Eric Carter, and his family.

  A few days into the trip we received a postcard from her, which read:

  Having a nice time. Rode a Bucking Bronco at the rodeo yesterday—won £5 for being the only lady contestant. The campsite is a microcosm. This morning, we had a walk through splendid woodland to the remains of a glacial lake—except for Eric’s mother who spent all morning cooking a full Sunday roast on the camping stove—including trifle.

  She sounded typically philosophical.

  I was still in bed when she got home from the camping trip. Eric Carter’s dad had driven home through the night to avoid the traffic because he was towing a trailer with the camping equipment on it and he preferred the B roads. My sister came into our bedroom, got into her old bed and pulled the bedclothes over her head.

  It was strange—not only because she’d moved out of our room on account of the health risk posed by my cigarette smoke but because it was getting-up time in anyone’s book.

  ‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’ I said, but my sister didn’t answer. She just hid her face in her duvet and cried. I asked her what was wrong and even tugged the duvet off her.

  ‘How was the trip?’ I asked, but she didn’t answer and I could tell there was something wrong. I asked her to tell me what, but she couldn’t. I wondered if she’d had sex with Eric and hated it. Or had sex with Eric and he’d hated it. Or she’d heard Mr and Mrs Carter having sex in the tent next door. Or something embarrassing had happened with the chemical toilet.

  I was suddenly worried that something really bad had happened, so I called our mother and she came up.

  It wasn’t anything bad or really bad. It was an ‘epiphany’, which would usually be a good thing but, on this occasion, wasn’t—or maybe it was, she couldn’t decide. The camping trip with the Carters had made my sister terrified of a future in which she’d have to try to exist outside of our mad, smoky little family and get to grips with the greatest thinkers in the world and at the same time be normal and cook roasts and choose the B roads (so to speak).

  Seeing the family take for granted that Mrs Carter would miss the splendid woodlands and the glacial lake in order that she could cook a roast, and Mr Carter plumping to miss a whole night’s camping so that they could travel at a sensible time and on the B roads on account of the trailer rendering them a ‘slow vehicle’ (and even affixing a ‘slow vehicle’ notice to the back of the trailer alongside the spare registration plate), she suddenly felt blind panic about interacting with normal, sensible people—who were, of course, not normal because everything is relative.

  And she worried that people like her—who couldn’t cope in the real world—often ended up reclusive and institutionalized. And I thought to myself ‘like Lady Briggs’ plus, I felt, it seemed quite similar to our mother’s anxiety about malt loaf and trying to be like Mrs Goodchild across the road but I didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have helped. You don’t want to feel unoriginal.

  Over the next few days my sister deferred her place at Durham University and instead enrolled on a nursing course at Leicester Royal Infirmary so that she could at least have a career and do some good, and practical things would fill her mind and block out any troubling thoughts. She was suffering from tiny, infrequent panic attacks. Every now and then she’d do something like scrape the marmalade jar, and I’d wonder if she was having another one. Other times, I’d try and cause one by pretending I’d electrocuted myself or had seen something horrible in the hedges.

  Our mother spoke to me about my sister’s change of direction. She was very disappointed—she’d always believed my sister would become a modern-day philosopher (like, say, Judith Hann or Iris Murdoch) and be able to show us metaphorically where to go or, failing that, a vet. She thought every family, ideally, should have a doctor for when you’re sick, a vet for when your dog is, and a philosopher for when you’re confused. I had to remind my mother that neither I nor Little Jack was planning to become a doctor. My mother said she had hopes for Danny—hence putting his name on the Montessori waiting list and buying him educational toys.

  My mother wrote a short story entitled ‘Bird’s Trifle’, in which the mother of a family accidentally burns her chest area while heating milk for a trifle on a camping stove while the rest of the family visits an ancient penis-shaped monument. They return to the campsite to find the mother all decorated with Dream Topping, hundreds and thousands and glacé cherries. It was meant to be a tragedy but it really cheered my sister up.

  Not long after the proposal, my sister and I went with our mother in the Snowdrop van to Market Harborough Registry Office to book the marriage. The lady there told my mother she must bring the groom-to-be (Mr Holt) into the office before the actual day. My mother said she needn’t worry, he’d definitely turn up on the day, but the lady said she needed to see him—in the flesh—beforehand to check it wasn’t a bogus wedding. We were allowed to provisionally book the date, though, and my mother said she’d take the first available slot—whatever day of the week—as long as it was before ten if it was a weekday. I wished she hadn’t said that. It made it seem bogus.

  The lady went through the ledger, she turned page after page and then looked over her spectacles at us. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘nine-thirty.’

  My mother peered at the date and said, ‘Yes, fine, we’ll take it.’

  My sister and I looked at each other. This date was the anniversary of one of the saddest events in our mother’s life. A few years had passed but on that day every year since she had been quiet and deeply unhappy—sunk in regret and pain. And we were too. Had she really forgotten it? Had this forthcoming marriage buried it? Maybe it had, maybe that’s what a nice wedding could do. I felt my eyes fill with tears with the thought of the sad thing and knew that a marriage—however happy—would never cover the memory of the sad thing for me. I looked at my sister and I could see by the way she jiggled her leg and by the slight tremble in her lip that she’d remembered too. Neither of us said anything, though. If our mother had forgotten and the pain was gone, that was only a good thing.

  The marriage was scheduled to take place on this particular date, nice and early in the morning before Danny got crotchety—not that he often did get crotchety but he was definitely at his best early. And we sped off in the van.

  ‘Just think, girls,’ said our mother—and she said the date—‘on that day I’ll be Mrs Harry Holt.’

  ‘Yes,’ we said.

  It hit her then and she pulled in abruptly on to a gravelly bit of verge by Gartree Prison. She got out of the van and stumbled along with the wind whipping her hair about. And we got out too and stood beside her on the roadside, together in a little tripod, gripping each other’s arms, and cried for a few moments. If a prison guard had peered out they might have thought we were plotting to spring a murderer.

  ‘How could we have forgotten?’ our mother said through her tears. ‘How did we forget?’ And looking at us, she knew that we hadn’t. And then Danny banged his cloth octopus on the windscreen and we clambered back into the van.

  We talked about
the sad thing, our baby brother, who we had all longed to meet and get to know. But who’d died, almost four—or was it five?—years previously, just before he was supposed to be born. We talked about how awful things had been then, and how we’d pinned all our hopes on him, as if he was the answer to all our woes. And how we were trying to keep the pregnancy quiet for a while but because we were so excited we gave him the code name ‘Bluebell the baby donkey’ so we could talk about him. And how our mother wanted to call him Jack even though our little brother was already called Jack and would have to go back to being called James or Jimmy. We remembered how Bluebell dying like that had made our mother want to die herself and she’d drunk from the bottle and shouted and cursed God. And there wasn’t a soul in the world who cared about our mother—our loving her didn’t count—and we’d felt a mix of fear and uselessness because nothing was going to stop us falling down and down.

  And I found suddenly my sister and our mother had stopped crying and it was only me speaking, and I heard myself say the saddest things and cried into my open palms. And our mother said, ‘Lizzie, Lizzie.’

  My sister said how wonderfully things had turned out (considering) and how lucky we were now that Mr Holt had put a stop to the falling and our mother had cleverly tricked him into having another baby. And that baby being as beautiful as Bluebell would have been. None of us said Bluebell was in Heaven or anything spooky or weird, but we all knew the grief had faded. We sniffed and wiped our noses and eyes and I finished my crying.

  ‘Will you be able to go through with it,’ my sister asked, ‘on the anniversary?’

  ‘No,’ said our mother, ‘I shan’t.’

  So we went back to Market Harborough—all red-faced and wretched—to book the next available slot which was a few days later. And we were lucky to get it—it being the only one for weeks and weeks and, due to cancellation, a much sought-after Saturday morning.

  Mr Holt left it entirely up to my mother re all the arrangements and the wedding guest list. Just as long as she kept it minimal and didn’t invite his parents because they’d feel obliged and didn’t travel well out of Norfolk. My mother couldn’t decide who to invite and took about an hour and two cups of econo-coffee to come up with a list of approx eight people, including a nice couple from across the road called Alistair and Sarah (the only Liberals in a ten-mile radius), a couple called Jeff and Betty from the Snowdrop depot who weren’t Liberals but nice in other ways, Deano the van boy and Miss Kellogg, our ex-au pair Carrie Frost, and my mother’s much younger brother—who we all liked immensely.

  It didn’t seem to me to be enough people and I tried to add names. ‘Just invite your friends,’ I advised. And my mother said she hadn’t really got any since Celia Watson had gone into the menopause and could no longer be trusted.

  ‘What about Mrs Goodchild, across the road, and her husband and baby Bobbi?’ my sister said.

  This was a red rag to a bull. My mother shouted, ‘What is your fucking obsession with that woman?’

  It was strange her yelling at my sister like that because it was she who had the obsession.

  I suggested Melody Longlady but her punkishness seemed to fly in the face of a wedding and also, I’d then have to invite Miranda. And then the floodgates would be open—if Miranda, why not Sally-Anne, or (God forbid) Matron and Sister Saleem and then Carla bloody B with her navel showing? And though the idea of them all was quite cheering, the thought of them all at my house—looking at my mother’s drawings of horse’s heads (and now people) and pulling books off the bookshelves and throwing darts at the dartboard and commenting on the unusual patchwork carpet—was unbearable and to be avoided.

  Then there was the planning of the bunfight. My mother and sister and I called in at the Copper Kettle on the by-pass to ask for a quotation and when the proprietor told us the cost for their most basic cold finger buffet for fourteen—with a glass of Blue Nun or a bottle of Pony—was over a hundred pounds we almost fainted and my mother called it ‘preposterous’. Then my sister and I imagined we’d do the food ourselves and have it at home, and ask the Liberal woman across the road to do the meringue Pavlova she was always boasting about, but my mother groaned and said no, she couldn’t bear it. I toyed with the idea of asking Mike Yu to deliver sufficient egg fu yung and making a home-made juice and whisky-based punch with floating apple chunks but that seemed inappropriate and actually just imagining it gave me butterflies.

  20. The Liquid Cosh

  Sister Saleem went through the patients’ notes with Eileen and Sally-Anne. She questioned them about prescriptions, symptoms, pill dosages and contraindications, opioids, opiate antagonism, vasodilation and risk of overdose in patients with high blood pressure. It became clear that neither nurse knew much about the drugs—or, in fact, the patients, medically speaking.

  And then, when Sister Saleem saw the drug trolley under the stair bend, with brown pill bottles and canisters, just there—in the open—loose pills scattered like Smarties on a birthday cake, she exploded.

  Never in all her life had she seen such an unprofessional mess, she said. And she didn’t just mean the drug trolley, she meant the whole place, ‘the whole ruddy ball of wax’—a phrase she’d learned from Mr Simmons.

  She stood and looked up to the heavens and took a deep breath. Then the owner came shuffling round the corner and she had a go at him. ‘How could you let this happen?’ she asked, shouting.

  ‘I don’t know, Nurse Goolagong,’ he said, trembling, ‘it all got out of hand when my life left.’

  We all looked at each other and, thinking Sister Saleem must have noticed the Freudian slip, hoped she might go a bit easier on him—realizing the extent of his madness.

  ‘You’ve no right calling this place a nursing home,’ said Sister Saleem. ‘And stop calling me Nurse Goolagong.’

  Sister immediately instigated a modern drug-handling procedure, which required the pills to be kept in a locked cabinet and the key pinned to her belt (or Eileen’s), and gave us a crash course in drugs commonly prescribed to the elderly. There would be an official drug round at breakfast and just before coffee and again with bedtime drinks.

  Matron took it badly about the drugs. She’d been tolerant of Sister Saleem up to then—as mentioned—but this rattled her. ‘For the love of God, we’re not a great big, huge, bleddy hospital, we’re a residential home with a few poorly old folk on water tablets.’

  Thankfully, Sister Saleem had some happy news at the team talk the next morning. A new patient was coming. Mr Godrich (a GP referral) would be with us in approx a fortnight’s time to convalesce after a simple surgical procedure.

  ‘How long will he be staying?’ asked Matron, with a forced nonchalance.

  ‘Until he’s fully convalesced,’ said Sister Saleem, giving Matron a hard look. ‘If we manage not to give him an opiate overdose.’

  ‘How long is that likely to be?’ asked Eileen.

  ‘A couple of months at least,’ said Sister Saleem.

  It was good news, said Sister Saleem, and would almost single-handedly take us to where she wanted us to be, business-wise, and if Mr Godrich stayed longer, then that would really help turn our fortunes around, especially now some of the residents were helping and there was now no urgency in finding a cook or laundry lady.

  ‘And,’ added Sister, with a slight grimace, ‘we are entitled to charge slightly above the advertised tariff since he’ll be bringing a little dog.’

  We all squealed with delight. Sister Saleem was touched by our enthusiasm—failing to appreciate it was the little dog we were pleased about and not turning a profit. We clanked coffee cups and congratulated Sister Saleem on her successful negotiation. Matron gazed out of the window, in a world of her own.

  There was a slight issue that needed addressing before Mr Godrich arrived. And that was where to put him. Mr Godrich wanted peace and quiet in an upstairs room and needed an en-suite bathroom because of an incapacitation.

  ‘Some beds are worth more tha
n others,’ Sister reminded us.

  ‘Which would you say,’ she asked, looking at Eileen, ‘is the best room in the place?’

  We all chipped in. Eileen said she thought probably the little drawing room which had been turned into a two-bedded male ward. It had views of the garden and was a level walk to the day room. Miranda said she thought Room 8 with its bathroom and fireplace and view of the reservoir.

  ‘What about Room 9?’ said Sister Saleem.

  And we went silent. Room 9 was Lady Briggs’ room. It was a lovely room but it wasn’t to be thought of as a possible room. It was Lady Briggs’ room.

  ‘It’s Lady Briggs’ room,’ we all said.

  ‘Yes, but theoretically, is it the best room in the home?’ persisted Sister Saleem.

  ‘Yes,’ we all said, ‘it is.’

  And then Sister told us how much Lady Briggs was paying.

  ‘According to the paperwork,’ said Sister Saleem, ‘Lady Briggs is paying absolutely nothing.’

  ‘That can’t be right–’ said Nurse Eileen.

  ‘Yes,’ interrupted Matron, ‘the first patients came on advance payment programmes and she’ll have paid up, she’s been here years.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I don’t think we have any choice. We’re going to have to move Lady Briggs out,’ announced Sister. ‘She can go in the ladies’ ward, in the bed in the corner.’

  ‘Oh, Emma Mills’ old bed,’ said Miranda, looking at me and pulling a sad face.

  There was some mumbling and grimacing.

  ‘So, which member of staff will break the news to her?’ asked Sister Saleem.

  No one said anything. It was too awful a thought—Lady Briggs had that condition where you can’t leave the room for fear of something intangible.

  ‘Well, who gets along with Lady Briggs?’ Sister Saleem persisted.

  And the others said, all at once, ‘Lizzie.’