The sun sparkled on the rooftops and windows of north-west London as I dropped down the steep hill to the main road below. The care home had asked me not to come back for a couple of days. They wanted my dad to settle in and get used to his carers. It was his first weekend in the new place. I’d heard he had been moved to a slightly larger room and I was in good spirits as I went up in the lift, but as I knocked and went in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in almost exactly the same position as when I had left him in the previous room a few days earlier. For a moment it felt as though he hadn’t moved, had had no sleep, had sat upright for three days. On his bedside table was a heap of his things – clock, comb, biro, socks, a tube of toothpaste, all jumbled up and unsorted. It looked as though someone must have dumped them there in a hurry. I glanced in the wardrobe; two shirts had come off their hangers and were crumpled on top of his shoes at the bottom. The room appeared sparsely furnished. Four small indentations in the carpet showed where an armchair should have been.
‘No comfy chair, Dad?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a bit of a mess in here. What happened?’
‘Was like this when they put me in here.’
‘Where have you been sitting?’
‘Here.’ He gestured to the bed.
‘I’ll speak to someone on the way down. That’s not right. You need a chair.’
‘I’ve seen no one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No one has been here. I slept on the floor last night.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you fall?’
He looked up and met my eye. ‘I dressed myself,’ he said. ‘Very tiring.’
I had to wait until the morning to speak to the senior manager. She apologised for the missing chair and said it had been replaced, and that my dad had been very confused for a couple of days. She asked me not to read too much into what he said and that appropriate care had been provided on every day since his arrival. I told her there was no sign of his suitcase or his oxygen tank in his new room and that he had no memory of being given any of the medication I had left. She told me it was all in hand. I had no option but to take her at her word. That night I lay awake in my bed and couldn’t sleep and stared at the cracks of light at the window and wondered if he was safe and asleep, or awake too, in an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar cracks of light at an unfamiliar window. I also wondered if he was just lying on the floor.
I rang first thing in the morning. A carer – I didn’t recognise his voice – said he had had ‘a good night’ and had ‘eaten a good breakfast’. They were phrases I used to hear the nurses use in hospital to relatives, however unsettled a patient had been. I said I was pleased, and I wanted to believe him.
At home, Tracey made up the spare room: extra cushions and pillows; an armchair with a foot-stool; a tartan travel blanket; a portable television; some family photos; flowers cut from the garden. She was picturing little trips up the stairs during the day: a tray of food; some soup; a pot of tea; a slice of cake; a rerun of Poirot on TV.
But my mum was restless the first night. I could hear her turn over in the room upstairs, the soft footfall and faint creak from the floorboards as she went to the window and back. I’d taken her a tray of food in the evening but she had pulled a face. Among her cuttings I once found a light-hearted unpublished magazine feature she’d written about taking days off work, in which she said: ‘I was never brought up to be ill . . . I insist on soldiering on, spluttering all over everyone, sighing deeply, and making the family feel thoroughly guilty.’
The next evening, after we’d settled the kids down, she joined us for a meal downstairs but was unable to relax and went up to her room early. A couple of hours later – after I’d left to go out for a gig – Tracey was sitting alone in the kitchen when my mum appeared in the doorway in bare feet wearing only a white nightie with her grey hair down, as if she’d gone to bed but got herself up again. After the briefest of exchanges, she had suddenly made an unexpected grab for the kitchen cupboard, and pulling out a bottle of brandy, snatched out the cork, put the bottle to her lips and swigged with ostentatious insolence, before gruffly returning to her room.
‘I was stupefied,’ Tracey said. ‘It was just weird and embarrassing. I hardly had time to say anything. And you were out. And it was your mother.’
The next night she did the same in front of me.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, refusing to rise.
‘Well, you won’t offer me a drink,’ she responded crabbily.
‘You have just had a general anaesthetic and a major operation,’ I protested. ‘The doctor said take it easy for a couple of weeks.’
With her back in her room, I wondered why it all had to be so brilliantly operatic. I wanted to help and sympathise but I resented this engineering of feelings, this melodrama, this intense sense of grievance. I felt estranged. It was a kind of wildness. Disproportionate. Unmanageable. In retrospect I wonder why I didn’t put my arms around her, seek more help, but it felt like a storm that could upturn trees, as though I could do no good and I’d be brushed away, and she was the one who needed to change.
As the next couple of days unfolded, she seemed to find her own – and our – company excruciating. If she was unsettled in the room upstairs, she offered little when she came down – just long stares out to the garden, her thumb under her jaw, her index finger pressed against her lips as if she’d shushed her own mouth. The children skirted round her watchfully. She’d take Blake on her lap and read to him from a storybook with big print, but if he wriggled it was an excuse to put him down. The girls grew wary. It was like listening to a silent rage.
‘Now what, Mum?’ I asked after three nights.
‘You tell me.’ She seemed adrift and defensive.
‘Home?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Here.’
‘No.’
‘Some time with Dad?’ I suggested. ‘At . . . where he’s staying now.’ (I couldn’t say its name.) ‘A couple of weeks? Get your strength back.’
She stared at the wall. I could tell she couldn’t bring herself to say yes outright. It must have seemed to her like a defeat, the care home a step too far. Then I saw her eyes brighten, as though a thought had come clearly to her.
‘Would they let me visit like that?’ she asked. ‘Just for a short time?’
‘I’m sure they would,’ I said. She could be a ‘visitor’ if she wanted.
‘For Tom’s sake.’
‘For Dad’s sake.’
And so she joined him for a couple of weeks. We went via the flat to collect some clothes and belongings, and she chose to wear a smart raincoat knotted at the waist and a mustard woollen beret for her arrival. She was to be invincible. My dad was pleased to see her. He smiled passively as she hovered nervously in the lobby, his trousers held up by his clip-on braces. He had shaving nicks on his face. I thought he looked like an elderly Ernie Wise.
After a week she asked if I would pop back and check up on the flat and bring her a couple of her scrapbooks to show the carers.
‘Any in particular?’ I asked.
‘Make sure you bring the Burton one.’