I stepped down from the carriage on to the platform at Paddington and realised the last bit was now out of my hands. I pictured them in the new care home near Bristol. Someone else was looking in on them, putting new name tags on their laundry, wiping the custard off the table. The uneaten tray would be cleared away unconditionally. A new doctor would reassess their tablets. A new hairdresser would do their hair. And Roly, with all his courteous, muted fondness, would be there to usher them through the next doorway. Old age is a series of halting-places. From this flat to that room. From that room to this smaller room. From that chair to that bed. Furniture is slowly consolidated and sold off, possessions shrink, until the world – more than ever before – retreats, and we live inside our own head, where we increasingly become an unreliable witness to everything we’ve ever done. A life finally imagined.
I thought all of that on the platform walking to the barrier and I just wanted to get back on the train and travel back up the line and put my arms round both of them, and stay until it got dark, beyond the visiting hours, beyond the moment when all the trivial catching up is done, into the moments when you can just sit there quietly not speaking, just content to be in someone else’s presence who knows you, and you know them. But that stuff is so hard to get to. Life in all its awkwardness drops like a fallen tree across the track.
And even if I had pushed it, and made it happen – insisted on travelling, insisted on staying, insisted on being affectionate – there would still have been a moment when I would have had to get up and walk out and shut the door on them, and slip back into my own life. In the end, as in hospitals, the final visitors have to go home, and there will still be hours left in the day – and in the night – and the ones we leave behind have to get on with it. Each on their own.
It was six months before I went back. I went with Blake; he was three and a half. It was a warm late-summer’s day. We caught the same train, passed through the same stations, looked out over the same fields, the embankments invaded with dense thickets of lilac buddleia, the canal boats and launches and the swollen river at Tilehurst, the sewage works, the railway workers in their orange jackets trudging, sheep and cattle unmoved near the line.
I took photos of us to show we were enjoying ourselves. Blake had had his hair cropped close for the summer – a little suedehead – and, after putting his fingers in his ears and sticking his tongue out for the camera, he sat back reflectively and silently watched the fields pass by, his favourite bear under his nose. I sat and watched with him for a bit: the open bags of aggregate, rusting unused rails in the long grass, the copses on the hilltops, the paddocks with the pony jumps and pole fences, wildflowers in the cuttings, barbed wire around the superstore, the steaming cooling towers, a Union Jack in a cottage garden, skips and pallets in the business park, cartwheeling wind turbines. Everywhere the light was hitting the green undulating land bright and clear beyond the sealed windows of our carriage. And all the while, I couldn’t shake off a feeling of dread and sadness that this journey would be the one I would be making and remaking from now until I didn’t have to make it any more.
At the care home, my mum and dad were surprised to see us. Roly had warned them twice and someone had looked in to remind them earlier in the morning, but when I pushed the door open to my dad’s room he was dozing on his bed and my mum was at the window, her arms splayed across the sill, her face pressed to the glass as though she might be estimating how high it was to jump.
‘Mum . . .’
I saw her start, then turn stiffly. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me. Ben. I’ve brought Blake to see you too.’
My dad lifted his head off the pillow. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.
‘Oh, goodness, you startled me,’ my mum said. ‘I thought you were coming tomorrow.’
I could feel Blake push in close to my leg and take the fold of my jeans in his hand. ‘Didn’t Roly tell you? Well, never mind. We’re here now. Brought you some chocolate truffles.’
Within five minutes I had helped my dad up and over to his chair, and we were all seated in a group. Blake spoke in a clear small piping voice.
‘Is that your real hair?’
‘What’s left of it,’ my dad said.
‘Are you old?’
‘Yes. Too old.’
On the table was a framed photograph. A crisp blue-swept day. My dad in a wheelchair in an Everything But The Girl baseball cap; it looked as though it had been put on his head by someone else, but he was beaming straightforwardly into the lens. My mum was on the handles behind, no hat, shoulders back, tight-lipped and withdrawn. Weston-super-Mare’s iron promenade railings and wide sandy beach rolled out behind. Roly had warned me they might be going. It seemed implausible, as though they had been Photoshopped on to the background and had never really been.
‘How was it?’ I asked them, gesturing to the photograph.
‘Ludicrous,’ my dad said.
Fifteen minutes later he had chosen to climb back on to his bed while the rest of us went down to the garden. Clouds had drifted in from the west and the sun was gone. An autumnal coldness was in the air.
‘Chase me,’ Blake cried, spying a small ornamental rose garden surrounded by a tall yew hedge.
‘I think Granny is too tired to chase you.’
‘Chase me!’ He darted towards the roses.
As if responding to a challenge, my mum unlinked her arm from mine and padded towards the hedge.
‘You OK, Mum?’ I said. ‘You don’t need to.’
She walked on heedless. ‘I’ll catch you! I’ll catch you, I will!’ she said loudly. It sounded almost stentorian.
‘Granny’s chasing me!’
And I had an image of myself in the garden in Barnes – a little boy. The rockery rose up at the back. I could run up the steps past the low firs to the poplars along the back wall and hide behind the trunk of the one by the compost heap, and I saw Nunu in a straw bucket hat creakily clambering up towards me to find me, and me counting out loud to ten and thinking she was too slow, and it would be more fun if it was my dad and he was roaring like a lion.
My mum picked her way along the back of the hedge then appeared in the archway on the opposite side of the rose garden unexpectedly. ‘I can see you!’ she cried abrasively. She had lifted her arms up and had crooked all her fingers into claws and contorted her face into an awful grimace.
Blake squealed. He hadn’t seen her. He span round. ‘No! Not that. Not that! Not a monster, Granny.’
The game was spoiled.
Never quite the appropriate gesture or response: how many times had I said that to myself about her over the years? Too much this. Too much that. Too much effort. Too little effort.
‘Is the old man still up there?’ Blake said, his face still damp with tears, as we were walking back.
‘Yes, the old man is still up there,’ I said. ‘He’s my daddy, you know.’
‘Oh,’ said Blake, not raising his head.
The three of us slipped back into the lobby, into the miasma of ammonia and cooking oil and air fresheners. I helped my mum up the stairs, her body all squidgy and heavy under my hands.
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ she said as we made it back to the room. This was her way of saying she’d had enough already, however brief a visit might have been. It was as if returning to her own thoughts were more preferable and less exerting than having to share them with other people.
‘We’re in no hurry, Mum.’
‘Oh. I thought you’d gone,’ my dad said from the bed, as we pushed the door open. ‘Did you miss the train?’
‘We were just down in the garden for a few minutes, Dad.’
‘Were you now. How very civil.’ He was still lying looking up at the ceiling, the back of his hand against his forehead, as though we’d caught him in the middle of a deep reflection on something.
‘They’re just leaving, Tom,’ said my mum loudly.
I looked at my watch. We had been there for thirty-nine minutes.
‘Thirty-nine,’ said Roly later, as he gave Blake and me a lift to the station. ‘That’s good going. They kicked Jennie out after twenty last week.’
In 2005 they moved into rooms together. The care home had a ground-floor suite for couples that gave them a small bedroom each and a shared sitting room overlooking the garden. Another halting-place, I thought. And my dad’s chest got a little worse. And my mum’s eyesight got a little worse. Roly would take my dad to the local memory clinic for pep talks on ‘functioning better’. (As opposed to getting better, perhaps.) I learned new words like ‘personhood’ and phrases like ‘empowerment through advocacy’. I started to think about having to officially take over all the important stuff – the paperwork, the bank accounts. It starts with the furniture, and ends with the bank accounts, I thought. The courses of antibiotics for chest infections came and went like vitamin supplements.
And I wanted to applaud and respect the wholehearted efforts of the care home – the emphasis on human dignity, the wry humour mixed with compassion – but every time I arrived I struggled with everything I saw although I tried not to show it. I’d slip along the corridors, mouthing the first names and last names on the residents’ nameplates on the doors, and glance uneasily into any rooms with the doors held open. A figure stationary in a chair. A shape in a bed with the curtains half drawn. A room with nobody there. And I hovered at the door to my mum and dad’s room not wanting to knock and push it open for fear of seeing stripped beds and their belongings gone and someone replacing the carpet.
One morning I woke from a dream in which all the residents were slumped in the chairs in the lounge, wearing white T-shirts with the words I may have dementia, but I still have a life and my dad was playing the piano for them but his fingers were splintering on the keys while my mum was loudly reciting from the poems of John Betjeman: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!’ I lay in bed and wondered if I should be there with them, and got up and started looking up train times until I recognised it as the absentee’s guilt. In such moods I felt I could agree to anything that would ease their pain, as really I would be easing my own.
Yet somehow as I pushed the door to their room open each time it was like the volume in my head dropped, as if a car with bass bins pumping had finally moved off down the road, and a new quiet descended, everything muffled by the soft furnishings and the double-glazing, and in my head I heard the slow ticking of the pendulum of an imaginary clock, and there they were, my mother in the chair and my father on the bed, in a silent limbo. And I would open my mouth to speak, and our worlds would merge again.
‘Don’t rush,’ I’d say to myself. ‘Don’t rush. Go at their speed. Take your time.’