by Terry Tyler
“Oh, I don’t know, they might want to do their own thing, or it could be useful for putting up the odd client. It’s not unreasonable,” I lied, suspecting that it was, in fact, very unreasonable indeed; I’d begun to hear rumours of his ‘amusements’. There was a girl in General Accounts called Layla who walked around looking very smug, according to Susan.
“I mean, does he want me to feel insecure?” Isabella ranted on, clearly not having listened to me. “He tells me that I’ve no reason to be, but what other married man keeps on a separate home, just in case? And I’m still not bloody pregnant—when’s it going to happen for me?”
“Perhaps you should just relax about it,” I suggested. “Just enjoy being together; there’s no hurry.”
“You don’t understand!” she almost yelled at me, as if it was my fault. “A child will be the glue that sticks us together, forever. Without our child, I’m not safe!”
“He did make his marriage vows, too, Izzy,” I said. “Just let this cottage thing go; let him keep it on if he wants to, and stop thinking the worst all the time.” Well, what could I say? Yes, you’re right, we think he’s already playing around? Maybe as a friend I should have, I don’t know. It’s a hard one, isn’t it? If she’d been less explosive, I might have done so, but I was scared of that ‘shoot the messenger’ thing. She was my employer too, don’t forget. If he denied it and she believed him (likely), I’d look like the biggest bitch in the world. Aside from that, though, I didn’t think she’d be able to bear it.
I couldn’t calm her down, and the silly girl resumed the argument that evening. The next morning neither of them came into work. I feared the worst; at around eleven I got a call from her to say that he’d left. Gone.
I was getting so worn out with the whole situation. I left messages with Susan, Will and Reggie to say that Isabella was not well and I’d gone to take care of her, and no, I had no idea where Philip was.
Pat the housekeeper let me in; I found Isabella in a sodden heap on the sofa. She lay on her side, clutching a cushion to her stomach.
“He knows I wasn’t really pregnant,” she told me. “He said he suspected I was having a period just after we got married, because I made excuses not to have sex, and I never do that. I swore he was wrong, but he said he went to my doctor and found out the truth. What could I do? I had to admit what I’d done, even the bit about sending him to Pontefract so I could fake the miscarriage. I felt such a fool, I begged him not to be angry, I tried to make him understand why I did it, but he’s furious, he says I tricked him into marrying me.”
Oh dear, I knew exactly what he’d done, the clever sod. I sat down on the sofa where she lay, and stroked her hair away from her face. “Hon, he was bluffing, and you fell for it,” I told her. “The doctor couldn’t have told him anything; medical records are confidential. Sure, he suspected, but he had no proof. You daft thing, he didn’t know anything for sure until you confirmed it.”
That made sit up and shriek in pain. “Oh, my God, what have I done?” she wailed. She was a mess. Her hair looked stringy, her face blotchy from crying. Her eyes were wild; she kept clutching at the sleeves of her dressing gown, clenching her fists.
I put my arm around her. “Where’s he gone?” I asked.
“To Rotterdam. Where he always escapes to,” she said, and blew her nose, loudly. “He said he needs time to think.” She looked up at me with such an agonised expression that I felt so sorry for her, whatever she’d done. “He said he would have married me anyway, in time, but by forcing his hand in such a way I’ve given him serious doubts about our future.”
“Listen,” I said, giving her a hug, “I’m sure when he’s cooled down everything will be all right. He’s just angry, but his mum will probably help him see things from your side. My advice is to do nothing, just leave him be. Let him work it out for himself; he’ll be back.”
She told me she couldn’t possibly go into the office, and that I was to tell Will he was in charge until she and Phil returned.
“Trouble at mill, eh?” said Will, when I told him that Phil had been called away to Holland because his mother was ill, and that Isabella, too, had come down with a sudden, bad bout of flu.
I tried to look as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he wasn’t fooled.
“Fear not, my dear,” he said, “I’ve spent half my life keeping the show on the road while the Lanchesters deal with their domestic dramas.” He sighed loudly. “I expect he’ll be back soon. He knows which side his bread’s buttered.”
And indeed he did return, in September, but not before Isabella spent what she told me were the worst three weeks of her life. I wanted to say, worse than when your brother and father died? Worse than when your parents divorced? But for Isabella there was nothing now but Philip. Most evenings I would go round to find her staring into space, drinking wine, or weeping over photographs of him. She was a wreck, even skinnier than usual, hollow-eyed and greasy-haired. In the third week I tried to shake her out of it.
“What if he comes back and finds you like this? It’ll be enough to make him turn round and head straight back again.” That actually worked, and she allowed me to make her eat and drive her to the hairdressers, shortly before she took a call from Phil to say that he was sorry, and was coming home.
The change in her was immediate. She started charging round all over the place, buying new underwear for herself and presents for Phil, ordering Pat and the part-time cleaner to clean the house from top to bottom and put flowers in every room. She did actually remember to thank me for taking care of her, and I used that moment as an opportunity to suggest that maybe she shouldn’t centre her life around Philip.
She smiled, looking bewildered, as if it was I who was the demented one. “But he’s my world,” she said. “He’s my husband, and soon he will be the father of my child.”
Oh God, we were back on that one. I went back to work and left her to it.
I rued the day I’d taken her over to Spain, I really did.
Despite my covering for her, people at work knew something was up, and many started questioning if Isabella was up to running the company. She’d done next to nothing since the pregnancy farce, and no one seemed to know exactly what Phil’s role was, now that he wasn’t actually advising her about much; all he did was stride around acting as if he owned the place, signing things on her behalf, which of course she’d authorised him to do. In the meantime individual project managers discussed problems with Will and Cecilia, while transport, purchasing and site queries went to Rob Dudley at Commercial, and anything to do with sales and marketing was dealt with by Nick Throckmorton or Erin, who was making quite an impression on the estate agency side of the company. My spies told me that she worked very hard, going in six days a week, setting in place simpler new procedures which worked so well that everyone wondered why nobody had thought of them before, and taking a hands-on approach. Aside from her being so popular, word on the streets was that Isabella knew exactly how capable she was, which was why she’d sent her away. Working within the estate agencies had long been seen as the poor relation, as opposed to being employed at Head Office, but (Will said) Erin used her personal charm to good effect with professional contacts, while retaining ‘the common touch’; she had a great handle on the end user, i.e. the property-buying public.
People suggested that the wrong Lanchester was running the show.
Philip was popular lower down the food chain, Susan told me, but many resented the way he’d just walked into the job, and didn’t see why they should defer to him.
I tried, very subtly, to make this apparent to Isabella, but she didn’t want to know. Now he was back, she returned to the subject of ensuring the company’s financial health for the benefit of her still-to-be conceived son. Yes, she was talking about laying people off.
Again.
She didn’t connect with the staff, because all she cared about was her dream of a houseful of children to bind Philip to her.
&
nbsp; She didn’t see that her redundancies plan was harmful to the company that existed now, in the real world, never mind some fantasy about the future.
No one could make her understand that she couldn’t treat her employees as dots on a chart, to be rubbed out if they were costing too much, which was exactly what she was doing.
She demanded timesheets from all the skilled manual workers (plumbers, electricians, et cetera), from which she instructed Reggie to construct yet another report detailing who was expendable.
“I wonder if it mightn’t be better to leave this until the New Year, maybe until we get the financial year end figures,” Will suggested in the meeting where this was announced; I was taking the minutes.
“I wonder if it mightn’t be better if people remembered who makes the decisions round here,” Isabella retorted.
Reggie was severely pissed off, because she’d produced similar information nine months before, only to have it cast aside by Isabella because she was too busy studying her wretched pregnancy websites.
Phil said nothing, he just sat back in his latest brand new suit, fiddled with his gold bracelet, and twiddled his pen.
“The sooner she gets pregnant, the better,” Will murmured to me, on his way out.
“Yeah,” said Cecilia Williams, “but who will be in charge? I’m guessing him, right?”
And then, one dismal day in November, she burst into my room to tell me that at last, finally, for real this time, she was expecting Philip Castillo’s baby.
She even brandished the pregnancy testing stick to prove it.
She looked wild-eyed, manic. It was then that I acknowledged to myself how worried I was about her emotional stability.
If I hadn’t seen the little blue cross in the window of the testing stick, I would have thought she’d begun to lie to me, too.
PART THREE
The Last Child
Chapter Ten
Robert and Amy
December 2012—April 2014
Robert
December 2012—April 2013
I heard via the grapevine that The Mad Axe-woman was expecting The Gigolo’s child before Erin told me; the jokes started doing the rounds immediately. One of the most popular ones was that Philip Castillo was having a baby; could he be sure it was Isabella’s? Which was a reference to the number of women he’d shagged since working at head office. I don’t know how many of the rumours were based on fact. When a woman as unpopular as Isabella Lanchester marries a charming younger man, such gossip is rife.
Usually I rather enjoy the more intelligent of these type of quips, but on the day I heard that this unfortunate group of cells had come into being I was too worried about my father to enter into the humour of the moment.
The evening before had been a trying one, with Mum ranting down the phone at me to ‘do something about it’, then Dad ringing me up and saying he didn’t know what was the matter with the wretched woman, then Mum ringing me up again and wailing that she didn’t know how she was expected to cope with all this on her own (she wasn’t), and finally Kirsty talking some sense, thank goodness.
Dad had been refusing to take his medication, on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with him.
Alas, the worst was yet to come, for the father who’d been my idol when I was growing up, and whom I’d long considered my best friend, was in the first stages of early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
It was Kirsty who noticed it first, I suppose because she’s at home all the time and probably takes more notice of him than Mum does or ever did. She first admitted her concerns when we were all in Spain that April, 2012. She and Dad had just watched a film together; Giles came in and asked him what it was about, and he’d been able to recall nothing about it whatsoever. Dad had always been so switched on, but that holiday he was quiet, vague. Kirsty thought it might have been going on for quite some time, and that we only noticed it during the holiday because we were spending so much time together, but she said that now she looked back, she could see that he’d been forgetting stuff for at least a year, far more than the average person does.
The next day he asked me if I fancied going for a pint in Berwick; he thought we were in Howden. In Northumberland. Giles said he was probably just pissed, and indeed Dad had been drinking rather too much ever since his affair with Raine Grey ended, but this was something else.
I wished he’d talked to me about her, but I guess tough Geordie men don’t discuss their feelings too easily; he tried to drink it away instead.
He broached the subject just once, about six months after he’d left Lanchesters, because he’d found out that I knew. Said he thought he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.
I said, “If you know that, why don’t you undo it?” He said it wasn’t that simple. I said it was, to which he replied that I was probably right and he was just being a coward. My dad wasn’t a coward; looking back I wonder if he’d felt his mind starting to let him down even then, and didn’t want a young woman like her to be saddled with a man whose brain was prematurely shutting down, however slowly. For that is what Alzheimer’s is: the shutting down of the brain.
Mum was in complete denial, which didn’t surprise me. When you’ve known nothing but ease and security all your life you don’t have the emotional tools to deal with adversity. Well, some people might, but Mum didn’t. Kirsty and I decided we should talk to him about it. Our worry was that he would be in denial, too, that his macho working class pride wouldn’t let him accept that he was anything other than his normal, razor-sharp self, but happily we were wrong.
“Oh dear,” he said. “I’ve been hoping no one would notice. I’m scared out of my wits.” He winked, and smiled. “At least I can still make jokes. But I can’t remember owt, half the time. Some days I can’t work out what happened the day before, however hard I think about it. Old J.Dud’s not the man he used to be, kids.” That made all three of us laugh; he’d loved Jasper’s nickname for him.
“It might be something they can cure with medication,” Kirsty said.
“Aye. Let’s hope so, eh, sweetheart.”
We had to approach these discussions with care because he floated in and out of his normal and his Alzheimer’s self. If we tried to talk about it at the wrong time he became stroppy and insisted there was nothing wrong with him, but ten minutes later he’d be fine. We both went to the doctor with him, he had the tests, and our worst fears were confirmed.
The worst thing for him was being told he mustn’t drive anymore; he really kicked off at the specialist, saying he was perfectly all right, that he wasn’t going to be driven around like some sort of fucking useless geriatric, he was only fifty-five, for fuck’s sake, but, alas, he was forced to comply.
When we sat Mum down to tell her the truth she didn’t want to hear about it. She went straight to Grandpa, of course, who said that he must be retired from his position within Guildford Enterprises immediately. Mustn’t cause embarrassment to the family, oh no. I thought it was too soon, because the specialist had said that the more his mental capabilities were stretched, the more his deterioration would be delayed, but apparently he’d already been acting rather strangely. Saying some weird shit in meetings, forgetting appointments.
And so it began. I was just glad I was back from Calais, though being up in Norfolk was inconvenience enough. Giles pretended it wasn’t happening, too; my brother is a Guildford, not a Dudley. He’s a spoilt mummy’s boy whose main concern was how soon Dad was going to start embarrassing him in front of his stupid friends.
He and Mum both, as it turned out. Kirsty and I tried to make Mum discuss the long-term plan. The specialist told us that as the progression of the illness had been so slow until now we could hope that it would continue to be so, but although at the moment, he was still functioning more or less as normal, over time he would be able to do less and less for himself.
“Well, they have places for this sort of thing, don’t they? Hospices, care homes,” Mum said. “I can’t be exp
ected to look after him, can I?” Of course not. The wonderful Jean Dudley who raised so much money for charity, right? I expect she even organised fundraisers for dementia sufferers, bless her heart.
“No, we’ll need to call in the professionals,” Kirsty agreed, “but Rob and I thought we could get a section of the house renovated to provide live-in care for him.”
Mum shut her eyes when this was suggested. “I really don’t think I could bear that,” she said. “I’m sorry, I know that sounds terribly selfish of me, but I couldn’t, I know I couldn’t.”
“He might not be bad enough to need that for a long time yet,” I said. “Years.”
“I’m only fifty-four! I don’t want to have to look after a—a husband who’s gone gaga!”
“You wouldn’t have to look after him. That’s what the live-in carer would be for.” Kirsty looked really upset. “He’s my dad, I want him at home.”
“Yes, but I’d still be expected to sit with him every day, wouldn’t I? And in the end he’ll just be some horrible, dribbling vegetable—”
She cried, and I felt angry. I tried to feel sympathy for her, because I knew she must be in shock, but right then I couldn’t. Her first reaction had been not concern or grief but disgust, and that said a lot to me. Kirsty wiped away her own tears, comforted Mum and admitted, quietly and sadly, that by the time Dad was bad enough for the question of care homes to arise, he probably wouldn’t know where he was, anyway. She’d done her research.
His deterioration was very slow, as predicted, and zig-zagged constantly; just when we thought he was on the way downhill, he would go through a phase of being his normal self for days at a time. He’d go down to the pub, and sometimes stay out for hours. I liked the thought of him still enjoying himself. Sometimes he was completely engaged with us, as sharp and witty as ever, other times he asked us the same questions over and over, or stared into space, away in another place.
