The next morning Nancy was her old self again. She took me into her shady book-lined study, pointing out a book she’d written, pulling it from the shelf.
‘When was it published?’ I asked her, sitting on the edge of her chair.
The image on the book jacket looked like some kind of obscure fertility symbol and the whole cover was in shades of purple. She showed me the flyleaf and looked at me, slightly startled.
‘Last week, was it? It’s all here,’ she said.
I started to read it aloud with her behind me, resting her chin on my shoulder. ‘Tell me that bit again,’ she said. The fresh thinking and boundless enthusiasm for feminism were purely her.
When she got tired of listening she took it from me and put it back on the shelf.
‘Why did you have a break from writing?’ I asked her – I’d wondered about that a lot.
She frowned. ‘I didn’t have the authority to carry on with it,’ she said.
‘In what way?’
To divert me, she handed me a black and white photograph of Rosamunde Pilcher from her desk.
‘This is my mother, I think. And this boy’ – she smiled and looked at it closely – ‘I know him well.’
‘Yes, you do.’
It was Jack, aged about thirteen, facing into the sun and half shielding his eyes, wincing with embarrassment at having his photograph taken.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and it was Jack. We hadn’t spoken since he’d walked out of class. I went on to the landing to talk to him.
‘Morning,’ he said. He sounded weary. ‘How’s Nancy today?’
‘Fine. Why?’
He let out a long sigh. ‘Carol Burrows,’ he said.
My heart sank as I realised what he was talking about. ‘Oh. She called you?’
He paused. ‘Worse than that. She called social services. They’ve assigned her a new social worker, fresh out of uni, talking about care homes again,’ he said. ‘Ranya feels that she shouldn’t stay in her own home and she’s got others to back up her argument. They’re having a “Best Interests” meeting tomorrow.’
‘Why can’t she have Caroline Carter back as her social worker?’
‘Yeah. Doesn’t work like that, apparently. Once they signed off on a case, that’s it. It’s back to square one.’
Suddenly all my energy was back. ‘You know Nancy will hate being made to feel bad!’ I lowered my voice. ‘And things are working out fine here, generally.’
‘You can tell them that at the meeting tomorrow if you want to come?’
‘Yes, I do.’
His voice softened. ‘Thanks, Lana. We’ll give it our best shot.’
I glanced inside the study. Nancy was still looking at the photographs and I went into the hall to continue the conversation out of earshot.
‘Jack, how can social services and the doctors have the right to make decisions about a person they barely know? It’s a travesty.’
‘Yeah; you don’t have to tell me. We’ll see how it goes.’
‘Okay.’
I put my phone in my pocket and went back into the study. Nancy was holding a picture of Richard Buchanan. ‘Que sera, sera! Sing it!’
‘Que sera, sera! Whatever will be, will be!’ We were both on surer ground, but I felt my chest tighten. ‘We’re going to Wembley!’ I sang.
‘That’s not it,’ she said.
We went to the best interests meeting, which was held in a social services office, a bleak, concrete building. We got there on time but we had to wait in the dull entrance hall for over half an hour and Nancy began to get irritable and restless, which didn’t help.
Eventually we were taken to the small meeting room. To my dismay, Claudia, the PCSO with the short dark hair, was there, with a district nurse called Jan and a young geriatric consultant called Tom Broadhurst. Ranya, the new blonde social worker, was sitting with Nancy’s GP, an Irish woman with red hair.
Tom Broadhurst had a baby face and an officious attitude to offset it. He started by asking Nancy her date of birth.
We willed her to give the right answers, feeling like anxious parents at an entrance exam.
Nancy stood up to answer. ‘1910,’ she said. And then added with aplomb, ‘1938.’
‘And your full name?’
‘Nancy May Ellis Hall, no hyphen.’
‘What day is it?’ he asked her.
She frowned at him irritably. ‘If you’re so clever, you tell me.’
‘But I want you to answer,’ he told her. ‘I want to hear what you’ve got to say.’
‘It’s one of the days of the week, obviously,’ she said.
‘And what’s the date today?’
‘Ten!’
Broadhurst made a note and went on to his next question. ‘What is the name of our current Prime Minister?’
Never short of confidence, Nancy answered this with great authority. ‘Lloyd Brown.’ And this was how the meeting progressed. Nancy employed a lot of creativity. She didn’t remember having a husband, and she wasn’t sure Tom Broadhurst was suitable to be asking her questions because his face was too young. She told Ranya she was fat. She berated Claudia for not smiling. As for the seasons, they were very variable, sometimes cold, and sometimes warm, ‘Like this – like this – like this!’ she said, demonstrating the nature of the weather with her hands.
Tom Broadhurst pressed his lips together and glanced at Jack. ‘You say she has a live-in companion?’
‘Yes, Lana.’
I raised my hand.
‘This is not a job for one person,’ he said, ‘or even a couple of you.’ He looked at his notes. ‘Her behaviour can be challenging.’ He turned to me. ‘How do you deal with that, Lana?’
‘I try not to frustrate her,’ I said. ‘I think about the way I speak to her. I used to be quite abrasive but she responds really well to kindness and we enjoy each other’s company.’
‘But that doesn’t always work, does it?’
‘It mostly does.’
He looked at his notes again. ‘We understand that she occasionally resorts to physical aggression. There was an incident in the college, and a woman she was recently in close contact with had to have medical treatment. She’s also presenting with memory problems.’
Nancy’s GP took over and said that she had anterograde and retrograde memory loss, she was vague about whether she’d ever been married and her last scans showed higher executive frontal lobe problems.
Claudia the CPSO said that Nancy tended to habitually engage with young people in the community.
‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Jack asked sharply.
‘It makes her vulnerable.’
Jack shook his head in despair.
The consultant turned his attention onto him. ‘And you’re in full-time employment?’
Jack nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own business.’
‘And there aren’t enough days in the week,’ the consultant said sympathetically.
Jack avoided the trap. ‘She’s been a lot happier since Lana moved in. She’s calmer and she’s stopped going to pubs.’
‘And yet you still can’t manage to control her behaviour at times.’
I glanced anxiously at Jack – he was keeping his cool although they seemed determined to catch him out.
Nancy was suddenly aware of the change of atmosphere and that our attention had drifted away from her. ‘Who’s dead?’ she asked brightly. She pointed at Jack. ‘Tell me!’
It seemed quite a broad remit.
‘Do you mean who in our family?’ Jack asked her.
‘How about Jesus?’
And while our attention was completely back on her she cheerfully raised her skirt and showed Tom Broadhurst her legs for him to admire.
I had never loved her so much as I did then, when my heart was breaking. She looked at me and saw the tears in my eyes.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said to me sternly. ‘You are ruining the moment, look at me. You can do this!’ She wiggled her fingers up and down in front of the doctor’s impassive face.
And that settled it.
Tom Broadhurst reached a conclusion. ‘I am recommending the considerable benefits to Nancy of residential care. She will be in a safe environment, and she will be given occupational therapy to keep her engaged and stimulated.’
And so the best interests meeting was concluded. Nancy needed to go into a care home to live out the rest of her days.
The next day we went to look at a place nearby called Greenacres Lodge. We drove there with Nancy. It was a large, detached house in Belsize Park, on the hill, only about a mile from her own home, and from the front it really did look like a hotel except for the banner reading ‘Greenacres Lodge Nursing Home’, advertising for staff.
We had to ring a bell. A smiling woman named Virginia let us in. She was wearing a white coat, which looked authoritarian and vaguely medical. She glanced at Nancy, but spoke to us.
‘It’s a closed facility,’ she said, leading us down the passageway, ‘especially for dementia patients. We give them a good quality of life here. This is the bar where we serve non-alcoholic drinks.’
‘Non-alcoholic drinks?’ Nancy asked. ‘I like to have Harveys Bristol Cream in the evenings.’
‘I think we have some of that,’ Virginia said with a wink.
‘Why are you winking?’ Nancy asked her.
‘She’s a sharp one!’
‘Don’t talk to her, talk to me,’ Nancy said.
I could imagine her sitting at the bar complaining that the fake drinks weren’t strong enough, and getting into a fight as a result.
‘And this is the bus stop.’ Virginia showed us the wooden bus stop in the main hallway, with a wooden bench next to it. ‘When residents want to go home, we tell them to come here and wait for a bus. After a while they forget all about it and wander off again.’
‘Fools,’ Nancy said disapprovingly.
Really, it was heartbreaking because Nancy was nowhere near that bad. I could imagine her demanding to be let out so that she could put the bus stop sign on the street where it belonged.
‘And here,’ Virginia said, ‘we have the cuddle room.’ It was a small room with sofas pressed up against the walls and soft toys propped up, glassy-eyed. ‘And this is the communal lounge where residents are free to take up any pastimes that they like, or to play bingo or snap in the afternoons.’
None of the residents was playing bingo or snap. I have never seen people so ill, yet still alive. They all stared into their own bit of space, as glassy-eyed as the toys.
I thought about the spin that the doctors, the consultant geriatrician, the social workers and the community health nurses had put on the wonders of a care home; pushing us into a decision that we didn’t believe was right for Nancy but that we desperately hoped we were wrong about.
We trudged after Virginia as she showed us the bedroom that was available. It was big, with an ensuite bathroom.
‘You can bring Nancy’s furniture with her. And make a book about her life so that we can talk to her about things she might remember from her past, like pets. We can play music that she likes. And if you have photographs, they’re always helpful too.’
The window opened onto a large garden. Birdfeeders hung from the trees and a magpie flew off as we walked across the lawn, casting hour-long thin shadows as far as the flower beds.
Virginia smiled at us. ‘Once she’s settled, she’ll be happy here,’ she said. ‘She won’t want to leave. Take your time and look around again.’
I waited until she’d left, and I looked up at Jack. ‘She’s going to hate it,’ I said. ‘How are we going to tell her?’
‘If we had a choice it would be different, but we don’t. What’s the answer, except for a miracle?’
He was a good guy, was Jack.
It was impossible to shake off the guilt.
If we were better people, if we’d fought harder at the meeting, if Nancy had been calmer, maybe things could have gone on for longer as they were. So yes, as we looked out at the empty chairs and the swinging birdfeeders, we felt sick at heart. We weren’t just letting her down, we were betraying her. It was impossible to get away from.
Virginia came back a few minutes later and reminded us that Greenacres Lodge had a waiting list and if Nancy wasn’t moving in then they would contact the next person.
Just then, Nancy reappeared, full of excitement. ‘Come into my parlour! Follow me!’
She beckoned us down the long carpeted corridor and opened the door into a large bathroom with a plastic seat, grab bars and a hoist.
‘Lovely,’ Jack said.
Satisfied, Nancy turned around and led us back to the office where she showed us the late book, took a certificate off the wall and tucked it under her arm, and answered the phone most charmingly.
Back home she and I stood in the green bedroom looking out of the window.
‘That,’ she explained, waving a hand at the sky, ‘that blue up there and you see, it’s got those bits on it.’ She had seen a lot of that lately, all that, and the bits. And after marvelling at the clouds she told me that the trees on the Heath needed cutting.
I agreed that they did and I said I would organise it.
I had learnt by now how flexible I could be with the truth.
After years of believing in the importance of honesty, living with Nancy I saw things differently. The truth wasn’t import-ant. How could it be; it was always subjective. If Nancy’s truth was that there were five cats on the roof, what difference did it make that they were pigeons? What did I gain from arguing about it? She saw pigeons and said cats, and I knew what she meant. Language is just a means of communication, and she could communicate and I could understand her.
Nancy went downstairs and I stayed in my room a little longer. I loved this place. This was Nancy’s house, where she belonged. This furniture, these photographs, the little rugs so beautifully chosen to match the colour scheme.
I reminded myself that even if she left this house, she hadn’t died. She was still here and lots of people sell their homes and move somewhere smaller, newer, more manageable, and they keep the things that they like and create a new home in a new environment.
It was downsizing.
It was a change, that’s what it was.
I sat on the bed and found myself listening to Nancy and Jack talking in the kitchen. And I was thinking of the leather, gilt-edged notebook she brought to the class which so intrigued me. I wondered exactly how she’d go about putting a story together out of the snippets that she’d read out in the class. I wondered if there even was a story.
This might be my last chance to find out, and I went into her bedroom.
I’m not proud of it. I was full of nervous excitement. There is something strange about looking in a person’s bedroom when they’re not there. It’s like looking into a part of them that you wouldn’t normally see and you never know what you might find.
Nancy’s room was neat. The bed was made and apart from the baskets of papers in the window the surfaces were clear. There were a couple of oil paintings on the wall; a hunting scene and an apple orchard.
Generally I am an honest person with an averagely robust conscience. What I’d imagined was that the little leather book would be next to her bed and I could have a quick look and put it back. Having to actually search for it was a completely different proposition.
I pulled my sleeve over my shaking hand to open her bedside drawer – personally I think this is the kind of knowledge that gives crime novels their educational value. It contained paper napkins, some loose change in a shower cap, and a large quantity of knee-high socks.
I went over to the wardrobe and opened it. Her pink coat was on the hanger and I patted it down, fingers closing over what could have been a wallet, but which could also be the book I was looking for. And it was. My heart was thumping. It was the little black leather notebook with the gilt-edged pages; quite possibly literature’s Holy Grail.
I opened the book. It wasn’t a book, it was a diary – an old one.
I flicked through it. The poem was in it, just as she’d read it: remember me is all I ask, repeated over and over with various underlinings. There were shopping lists and the complaint about an imaginary man making a noise upstairs. Quotes from the Bible with verse numbers – the same quotes that I’d thought were hers – Neveen had been right. I was forced to comprehend the obvious.
There was no story, no biographical notes, no insights into why she’d ruined a marriage.
I had a familiar feeling, like one of those nightmares where you get chased and chased but you still keep running even though you know that eventually the thing that is chasing you is going to catch up with you and get you.
It’s not a fear of death, it’s a fear of there being no redemption, and whatever comes after that is a different worry.
The following day Jack came in the early afternoon and we packed a suitcase and the rugs, her books and some photographs and we drove up to Greenacres Lodge and the staff came out to welcome her.
Nancy wasn’t happy. She kicked the bus stop in the hall with great irritation and we carried her suitcase to her room and added her possessions to it feeling very subdued.
Nancy had some lively ideas about how we could all get out of there and her embroidery scissors were moments later swiftly confiscated by the manager.
She was upset when we stood up to go. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said plaintively. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
So we stayed a bit longer and left about an hour later when her food was brought to her room, distracting her.
Jack and I didn’t talk on the drive back. There wasn’t much to say and no consolation we could offer each other. Jack dropped me off and I let myself in the house under Old Mother Hubbard’s hungry glare.
I sat in the parlour with my head in my hands. The empty silence was total. The guilt pressed against my chest, making it hard to breathe. All I could see in my mind’s eye was Nancy’s face. All I could hear was her voice: I haven’t done anything wrong. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in an unfamiliar place, without us.
At six o’clock, Jack turned up at the house again. ‘Hey.’ He looked terrible. ‘Can we talk?’
‘Of course,’ I said but my heart sank at that early warning signal – Can we talk. I held the door open for him to come in. ‘You want me to leave,’ I said, to make it easier for him.
‘What?’ He looked confused. ‘No, it’s not that.’ Under the glittering chandelier, his eyes burned into mine. ‘It’s not right, is it? What are we saving her from, Lana? What are we saving her for? So that she can live a long old age locked up in a place that’s not her own? That’s not what she needs. She needs to be accepted and involved. Nancy’s always taken her chances in life.’
‘I know.’ I nodded although I still wasn’t sure what he meant. I stared back at him, confused.
‘So tell me, what’s your opinion?’ His eyes searched mine. ‘Did leaving her there feel right to you?’
‘God, no.’
‘Okay, then. I need to know what you think because you see her more than I do and this depends on you agreeing to it. I know it’s a lot to ask but I want to bring her home again. When the time comes and there’s no other choice, we’ll take her back there, but it’s not now, is it?’
Hope flared up in me. ‘No, it’s not now. But I thought we didn’t have any choice?’
‘They’ll have to apply to the Court of Protection for a full deprivation of liberty order and that’s going to take a while. Until then, she can come back here where she belongs. Agreed?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Right. I wish I’d never taken her there. I’m going to fetch her. You coming with me?’ he asked.
The weight lifted off me and I grabbed my jacket.
And that’s how we made the decision.
When we got to Greenacres Lodge, Nancy was sitting in the porch wearing her coat and yellow hat. She had tied the net curtains into a knot so that she could see out. It was hard to know how long she’d been there but she got to her feet eagerly when she saw us.
‘There you are! I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said.
A woman started screaming wildly in another room. Nancy said, wide-eyed, ‘It’s quite an exciting place, don’t you think so?’
‘Very.’
Our decision to take her home didn’t go down very well and Jack had to pay a month’s fees to cover it, but we packed her belongings while the staff looked on, much to Nancy’s indignation. She couldn’t stop talking.
‘The people here are wordying all the time,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be seventy any more, I’m going to be sixty-seven. It’s half-past six. Which world would it be? Our decision.’
We brought her home again.
Home.
She was happy to be back, dancing in the parlour in her yellow hat while Jack and I sipped Harveys Bristol Cream in front of the fire.
He caught my eye and touched my glass with his, giving me the faintest trace of a smile.
And suddenly it came to me in an epiphany. We’d been pursuing the hero thing all wrong.
He already was one; I just hadn’t recognised it before now.