Eve was starting to dread walking through the front door of Three Elms. She’d only been coming here for a week, but already her nostrils were growing accustomed to the harsh smell of disinfectant that didn’t quite mask the combination of urine and stewed cabbage that seeped around corners and along corridors.
The care home smelt of something else as well: old age. Eve had never thought about it before, but now realised that many old people had their own smell – slightly grassy, musty like an unaired bathroom. She could sometimes smell it on Flora, beneath the Chanel No 5 her mother dabbed behind her ears every morning. She made a mental note to buy a reed diffuser to put on the windowsill in her room.
‘Good afternoon!’ called a man, standing behind the reception desk. Eve had seen him before, and felt she ought to know his name, but there were so many members of staff here and the shift patterns seemed to change all the time. She smiled and waved, immediately feeling foolish and turning the wave into a strange little flick, where she grabbed her own hair and threw it back over her shoulders. God, why did she do that? She was going to be the ultimate embarrassing mother when Daniel was old enough to be aware of these things. Poor kid.
The overhead light was broken in the corridor leading to the bedrooms, and a man was wobbling on a ladder, replacing the tube. It made a nice change not to be able to see the stains on the taupe carpet or have the white walls thrown into sharp relief by the harsh glare of the fluorescent bulb. On sunny days, the air along here was often full of dust motes, millions of flakes of ancient skin dancing in the rays of light.
Nathan suddenly appeared from a doorway, clutching a clipboard and frowning. Eve had bumped into him a couple of times now and had realised he was painfully shy. The abrupt exit he’d made on the day Flora moved in hadn’t been intentionally rude; he just didn’t know how to bring conversations to a conclusion – so he walked out before they ended.
‘Hi Nathan,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘We’ve lost six chairs!’ he said. ‘They’re on the spreadsheet but they’re not in the dining room.’
‘Oh dear,’ Eve said. ‘At least you haven’t lost six residents.’ But he was already scuttling away down the corridor.
Flora was sitting in her room, glaring at the door. ‘You’re very, very late.’
‘No, I’m not, Mum. It’s 4.32 – I’m precisely two minutes late.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that! You were meant to be here hours ago.’
Sometimes Flora had good days, sometimes bad. Today she was foul-tempered: refusing to answer questions, turning away to stare out of the window. It was impossible to know what had upset her, but this was happening all the time now.
On Saturday, Eve had arrived with arms full of flowers, which she spent ten minutes arranging in vases, putting a purple and white display on the chest of drawers, with a colourful bunch of red and yellow carnations beside the bed. When she came in the following day, there was no sign of any of them.
‘Where are your flowers?’ she asked.
‘They smelt of wee,’ said Flora. ‘I threw them out of the window.’
‘What about the vases?’
‘Them too.’
When Eve went across and looked out of the window, she’d seen the stems of the flowers lying on the grass outside, amongst shards of broken glass.
‘It’s a lovely day out there,’ she said now. ‘We can go and have a wander around the garden. I picked you up some magazines when I left the office – there’s the latest Good Housekeeping and I’ve got you next week’s Radio Times.’
‘Don’t want them,’ said Flora.
‘Fine.’ Eve put the magazines on the bed. ‘Maybe you’ll feel like looking at them later.’
‘I won’t!’ Her mother crossed her arms in front of her chest and shook her head angrily from side to side.
Eve was itching to answer back, but there was no point both of them behaving like children. ‘Oh, is that for me?’ She noticed a card on the bed, her mother’s handwriting skewed across the envelope.
Flora nodded, so Eve picked it up and opened it.
‘Mum, thank you, it’s… lovely!’
The picture on the front was an overly twee drawing of a little girl, dressed in pink, holding a balloon and a bunch of flowers. Not the sort of thing her mother would have chosen in a million years: clearly one of the care assistants had bought it on her behalf. Inside, Flora had written, To my dearest darling Eve, happy birthday xxx, the words wobbling and shaking across the card at an angle.
Eve suddenly wanted to cry.
The signs of Flora’s dementia had been there for more than a year. A series of little things at first: forgetting the names of friends, going out without her handbag, buying herself a new dress in completely the wrong size. Once Flora had got on a train to go and visit a friend, then forgotten where she was going and why, phoning Eve in tears from the ticket inspector’s office at Taunton Station.
A few weeks later, the staff at Marks & Spencer in the city centre had called the police when Flora shut herself in a changing room and refused to come out. When Eve finally got her back home, Flora had no idea where she’d been or what had happened.
‘I was frightened,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you’d left me. They were banging on the door so hard, it hurt my head.’
Eve had been frightened too. This was such strange behaviour, so erratic and unpredictable from a woman who had worked in social services for forty years, and had always been so organised. Flora had been a list-maker and a planner, keen that her efficiency would rub off onto her daughter. ‘Take control of life, before life takes control of you,’ she used to say. Even as a flaky teenager, Eve had recognised the sense in what she was being told and had grown up relying on the fact that her mother invariably knew what to do, and the best way to do it.
But now that confident woman was losing herself. Flora’s friends began to phone Eve to voice their concerns and one in particular, Deirdre, insisted they cancel a planned trip to Cornwall. ‘I don’t think I can cope,’ she’d confided to Eve. ‘Your mother seems confused most of the time now. She forgets everything I tell her. I’m too old to be any use to her in a crisis.’
Finally, there had been the incident with the gas fire. Eve had found it left on before – even on baking summer days – but one Sunday morning she opened the front door of Flora’s flat to be met by a searing wall of heat. The fire must have been on all night and the air was so stifling it was hard to breathe.
As Eve threw open the windows, she saw a towel hanging over the back of a chair, inches from the naked flame. The cream material was turning brown, the fibres starting to crisp and curl up. She dreaded to think what would have happened if she’d arrived an hour later.
‘I thought I’d dry some washing,’ Flora said.
Eve had sat down on the sofa beside her mother and picked up both her hands. Flora wouldn’t meet her eye and kept trying to pull her fingers out of her grasp.
‘Mum, we can’t carry on like this,’ Eve had said, hearing her voice tremble. ‘It’s not safe for you to be living here on your own anymore.’
As Flora finally looked at her, there was resignation in her eyes. Somewhere deep inside, what remained of the old Flora knew that none of this was right, none of it made sense. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d whispered.
Eve had begun to visit care homes the following week, booking appointments for whenever they could fit her in, sometimes dragging Daniel along after school. The cost of care shocked her, but she’d have to find a way of funding it until they could sell Flora’s flat.
She’d briefly wondered whether her mother could move in with them. But there were only three bedrooms in the house; if Granny came to live with them, Daniel would have to move into the tiny back room which was barely large enough for a single bed.
Eve also realised it would mean her giving up work: Flora couldn’t be left on her own for long periods. No sooner had that possibility entered her head, than she immediately discounted it. However much she might occasionally moan about her job, she loved everything that came with it. She’d grown up revelling in the fact that she could have a career, earn a living and be independent. Some sainted middle-aged daughters might be prepared to give up everything to care for their elderly parents – and Eve was full of admiration for them – but she was too selfish to count herself among them.
She’d visited five different care homes and Three Elms hadn’t been her first choice. But it wasn’t bottom of the list either, and there had been a room available immediately. Eve had done the right thing. She had to tell herself, constantly, that she really had done the right thing.
Now, she walked across the room and balanced the birthday card on the windowsill. ‘Let’s pop it up here for the moment,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought some cake – they gave it to me in the office this morning. Shall we go for a walk outside and find a bench somewhere? I’m starving, I didn’t have time for lunch.’
Flora slammed her hands down on the arms of her chair. ‘I don’t want to go out,’ she shouted. ‘There are boring old people everywhere in this place – I hate it.’
Her mother’s face was pink and she was breathing heavily and Eve felt her own heart rate increasing. She sat down on the bed and reached across to put her hand on Flora’s arm. ‘Okay, no problem. We won’t go out,’ she said. ‘It’s fine, we can stay here and have the cake.’
She’d read that this was a common symptom of dementia: a refusal to accept the onslaught of old age. On the surface it seemed ridiculous that white-haired Flora, with her shaking hands and unsteady gait, couldn’t understand that she herself was old. But Eve knew that, inside her mother’s head, there was a younger version of herself, struggling to understand why her mind and body were failing her, fighting desperately to prove she was in full charge of her faculties.
‘I know it’s hard meeting new people,’ she said gently. ‘But if you chat to some of them, you’ll find they’re very friendly and you may have things in common.’
‘Don’t tell me who I will or won’t like,’ said Flora. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’ Now she’d started weeping again, her face crumpled, tears glistening on her cheeks. ‘I want to die,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t go on being in this place. Please help me, Eve. Please do something. You can stop all this.’
Eve stroked her mother’s arm. There was a lump in her throat, but she mustn’t cry as well.
‘Do something!’ Flora pushed away Eve’s hand and started wailing. ‘Make it go away!’
Eve stood up suddenly. ‘I can’t! I bloody well can’t do that.’
‘This is all your fault!’ screamed Flora.
Eve clamped her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. ‘Jesus, Mum!’ she shouted back. ‘Stop it please! Just stop. Stop talking! Stop moaning!’ She opened her eyes again to see Flora staring at her wide-eyed and shocked. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘God, Mum, I’m so sorry. I know this isn’t your fault.’
And then, as suddenly as it had roared into life, Flora’s fury died away again. She looked up at Eve, frowning. ‘Why have you got your hands over your ears like that? What are you shouting about? I’d quite like some of that cake now.’
Eve sank onto the edge of the bed, her pulse racing. She felt drained, as if she’d run miles to get here.
‘Your father would have been so proud of you,’ said Flora, suddenly. ‘He always said you’d go far.’
Eve couldn’t help smiling. ‘Mum, I’m just a part-time estate agent. I don’t even sell many properties!’
‘Darling, you are so much more than that!’ Flora said. ‘We always knew you’d do well in life. I remember him bobbing you up and down on his knee, when you were a baby. There was that rhyme – do you know it? This is the way the gentlemen ride, clip clop, clip clop…’ She clapped her hands in front of her. ‘This is the way the farmers ride,’ she sang, her voice quavering. She laughed, even while the tears still glistened in her eyelashes, holding her hands out in front of her, grasping imaginary reins.
Eve smiled, as her heart ached. This was still her wonderful mother. But, at the same time, it was someone else entirely.
‘You used to love that song so much,’ Flora was saying. ‘You’d scream with excitement and he’d be jiggling you up and down on his knee.’
Eve’s father had died when she was very young and she had no memory of him; the image she carried around in her head was of the handsome, smiling face that stared out at her from the photograph that sat on her mother’s bedside table.
There was nothing else: no sense of how broad his shoulders had been, how warm his hand had felt when it had held hers, how deep and reassuring his voice had sounded. She had spent her entire life wishing for more, but nothing could fill the gaping hole in her memory where those reminiscences should have been; all she had were moments like this, when her mother shared her own memories.
‘Then he’d throw you into the air,’ she was saying now. ‘Toss you up so high it seemed like you were flying. It terrified me, but you screamed with laughter.’
Eve knew she had some of her mother’s traits – the same colour eyes, a shared sense of humour, a similar tone of voice. But she often wondered which bits of her had been donated by this mystery man.
‘Am I like him, Mum?’ she asked now, as she’d asked many times before. ‘Can you see anything of him in me?’
But Flora had closed herself off again. She stared at Eve, confused. ‘Are you like who?’
Eve sighed. ‘Never mind. Come on, let’s have some of that cake.’
She reached for her bag, pulling out the slices of carrot cake that Caroline had carefully wrapped in silver foil. As she started to unwrap the package, her mother turned towards the windowsill.
‘Who’s that birthday card for?’ she asked.