Dennis and Marigold returned home in high spirits. Daisy put the kettle on and the four of them sat round the kitchen table while Dennis told them how the weekend had gone. He shared all the stories, except the one about Marigold’s midnight wander. He decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about that. Marigold would not want him to, even though she had forgotten about it.
They were aware of Suze’s absence. The house felt imbalanced without her. They had got used to Daisy being at home, but her presence did not make up for the lack of Suze’s. They missed her wit and her laughter. They even missed her sulks. They never thought they’d miss those.
‘Have you heard from Suze?’ Marigold asked.
‘No, I think she’s busy being married,’ Daisy replied wryly.
‘Hasn’t she even popped in?’ Dennis remarked in surprise. ‘Surely there’s something she must want.’
‘Well, she has Batty’s mother to do her washing and ironing. I’ll give her a call. See how she is.’
‘I’m not very good on the telephone these days,’ said Marigold. ‘Perhaps she can pop over for a cup of tea. I’d like to hear how she’s getting on and I’m sure she’ll want to know how our weekend went. So clever of Dennis to think of it.’
Dennis caught Daisy’s eye. From the subtle look he gave her, she knew not to correct her.
But Nan didn’t. ‘It was Daisy and Suze’s idea,’ she said firmly.
‘Was it?’ Marigold flushed. ‘Of course it was,’ she said quickly. ‘That’s what I meant. How clever of Daisy and Suze to think of it. We had a wonderful time, didn’t we, Dennis?’
‘We did, my love,’ said Dennis, giving her a broad smile, hiding his irritation at Nan’s tactlessness.
‘It was their Christmas present to you,’ Nan continued. ‘Very generous of you, Daisy. I don’t imagine Suze contributed much.’
‘Oh, she did,’ Daisy lied. ‘She paid her share.’
‘How she makes any money is beyond me,’ said Nan. ‘She should get a proper job.’ And Daisy thought that if her mother was losing her memory, Nan was becoming very repetitive. She wondered whether Suze was avoiding coming home in order to keep clear of them both.
Suze did not want to go home. She knew she should. She knew her parents would be missing her, but she didn’t know how to behave around her mother. The truth was, Marigold’s decline frightened her. She’d rather avoid her altogether than witness her deterioration.
Suze was aware that she was being selfish, but she couldn’t help the way she was. After all, hadn’t her parents made her this way by doing everything for her? It really wasn’t her fault. The trouble was she had grown accustomed to her mother taking care of her. She wasn’t ready for this new shifting of roles, of suddenly having to take care of her mother. She wasn’t ready to be the adult in the relationship. Even though she was married and living with her in-laws, she wanted her dynamic with her mother to stay the same. She wanted the foundations of her home to remain reliably solid. She wanted her mother’s support when things weren’t going well, her ear when she needed to offload, her strength when she was feeling unsure. Suze just wanted Marigold to be the mother she had always been; but from now on she wasn’t going to get what she wanted.
Then there was Daisy. Daisy who was good at everything. Daisy who was even-tempered and genial. Everyone heaped praise on Daisy. No one heaped praise on Suze, they just rolled their eyes. Daisy knew how to look after their mother. She had patience, compassion and a strong sense of responsibility and duty. Suze had none of those things. She’d never had to acquire them. She’d been able to stand back and let Daisy do everything for her.
Dementia meant an end to Suze’s childhood. She was going to have to grow up.
Batty was now looking to rent a flat locally so they could have a space of their own. Suze was a little anxious about this because she knew she’d have to be responsible. She wasn’t used to tidying up after herself, or washing and ironing her own clothes, and she hated cooking. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do all those things, rather that she didn’t like to.
What if they decided to have a baby? Who would help if Marigold wasn’t capable? Suze liked her mother-in-law, but she wasn’t cosy like Marigold. She wasn’t as maternal as Marigold either, or as generous, and she was very busy with her job as a teacher. The mountain of homework she had to mark was horrendous. Suze realized, with a sinking feeling, that Marigold was irreplaceable.
Suze hadn’t telephoned her mother, because Daisy had told her that she found the telephone confusing. Suze couldn’t really understand why, but for some reason Marigold was unable to recognize her voice or follow the conversation without seeing her. So, a few weeks had gone by without contact. And because Suze felt guilty, she had ignored her sister’s calls. She had shut them out and justified her actions by telling herself that she was very busy with her blog and the articles she was writing and being a wife (which, in reality, wasn’t at all different from being a girlfriend). Therefore, it didn’t really come as a surprise when Daisy turned up at the house without prior warning. ‘Let’s go and get a coffee,’ she suggested, and Suze couldn’t very well decline, seeing as she had been caught in a pair of slippers, holding a copy of Vogue magazine.
They took a table in the local café by the window. A pair of enormous seagulls squabbled over an ice-cream cone discarded on the pavement. ‘They’re the size of dogs,’ said Suze with a smile. She hoped that humour would crack her sister’s scowl. But it didn’t. Suze asked the waitress for a caffè latte then began to pick at the scarlet polish which was peeling off her thumbnail.
Daisy ordered an espresso. ‘Why haven’t you been to see Mum?’ she asked, looking at her sister steadily.
Suze flinched at her hard tone and reproachful stare. ‘I’ve been busy,’ she answered curtly, looking at Daisy with the same steady gaze, hoping to stare her down.
‘You’ve been ignoring my calls as well. No one’s too busy to take a call or to reply to a text. Certainly not you, Suze. You spend your life on the phone. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ came the swift reply. But Suze knew her body language told a different story.
‘Mum and Dad are longing to tell you about their stay at the hotel. They loved it. It was the best present ever. Aren’t you even curious?’
Suze averted her gaze as the waitress returned with the coffees. She took the opportunity to gather her thoughts as the waitress placed the mugs in front of them. Turning her eyes to the window she noticed that the seagulls had flown away, leaving a large piece of cone. There was no such thing as a hungry seagull in this town.
Suze decided it was futile hiding her fears from Daisy. She’d prise them out of her in the end, one way or another. ‘I just can’t deal with this, Daisy,’ she said with a sigh.
‘With Mum’s illness?’
‘Apparently it’s not an illness.’
‘You’re splitting hairs, Suze.’
She sighed again and sipped her coffee, then looked at her sister with big, anxious eyes, now shining with tears. ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t cope with Mum’s decline.’
‘What do you mean, you can’t cope? This isn’t about you, Suze! Mum needs you. She needs all of us. You can’t just walk away because things get tough. Family look out for each other. Mum’s looked out for you all your life. Now it’s your turn to look out for her.’
‘I know. I hate myself for being scared. I’m such a loser.’
Daisy bit her tongue. It was so typical of Suze to play the self-pity card at this point in the argument. ‘You’re not a loser, Suze,’ she said with forced patience. ‘But you’re going to have to step up.’
‘You’re suggesting I’m selfish!’
And typical to put words into her mouth which Daisy hadn’t said.
‘Listen, can we just stop bringing this back to you. I’m scared too. We’re all scared. None of us wants to see Mum lose her memory, but we can’t desert her at the moment she needs us the most. What sort of people would we be if we abandoned the one person who has been there for us our whole lives, at the very time she needs us to be there for her?’
A tear trickled down Suze’s cheek. She brushed it away. ‘But dementia is awful. One day she won’t know who we are. She won’t remember. She’ll even forget how to breathe and then she’ll die.’ Suze clutched her throat. ‘I can’t bear to watch her suffer.’
Daisy’s chest grew tight and she fought tears of her own. ‘That’s a long way down the road, Suze,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t think of that. Remember what Grandad used to say?’
‘He said many things. Which one in particular are you thinking of?’
‘What’s wrong with now?’
Suze bit her lip. ‘Everything’s wrong with now, Daisy. Our mother has dementia.’
‘You’re missing the point. Right now you and I are sitting in a nice café having coffee. The point is to live in the moment and not project into a future that hasn’t happened yet. Right now, Mum knows who you are. She’s perfectly normal, most of the time. Dad is home and missing you, and so is Nan, who is saltier than ever, so I need you too. Why don’t you pop in for tea? Say you’ve been busy looking after Batty. Nan will approve of that.’
Suze managed a small grin. ‘I think it’s more the other way round.’
‘I know that,’ said Daisy, grinning back. ‘In fact, we all know that, even Nan. But it sounds good.’
Suze sighed and Daisy knew she had got through to her. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘I’ll come over this afternoon.’
‘Good. Mum will be really pleased.’
‘Can we talk about something else now?’
‘Sure. Whatever you want.’
‘Have you made any progress with Taran?’
‘About the land?’
‘Yes, about that. And, have you kissed him yet?’ Suze’s grin grew wider.
‘He’s still in Toronto and I haven’t made any progress in either area, but I’m only working on one.’
‘The kissing one,’ said Suze.
‘No, the land one,’ Daisy replied with emphasis.
‘If I were you, I’d kill them both with one stone.’
That afternoon, as Marigold was sitting in the garden with Dennis and Nan, listening to the birdsong and watching the shadows lengthen across the lawn, Suze stepped through the back door with Daisy. Dennis smiled in delight. ‘Ah, Suze. We haven’t seen you in a while!’
Marigold, who couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her daughter, smiled too. ‘How lovely,’ she said.
‘I’ve been so busy looking after my husband,’ Suze declared.
Nan nodded her approval, just as Daisy said she would. ‘Husbands are a full-time job,’ said Nan. ‘The trouble is their mothers spoil them, so when they get married their girlfriends turn into their mothers and they sit back and expect everything to be done for them.’
‘I think that’s a little harsh,’ said Daisy, pulling up a garden chair.
‘Oh, it’s all very well modern women claiming that men share the housework, but the truth is, they don’t. They’re not made for the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine. It’s just not in their DNA and you can’t change thousands of years of habit. Your grandfather never learned how to put his plate in a dishwasher and I’m not wrong in saying that Dennis hasn’t either. If Atticus loads the dishwasher, I’ll eat my hat.’
‘I’d be careful making promises you can’t keep,’ said Dennis. ‘I think Batty is the sort of man who knows how to make himself useful around the house.’
Suze sat next to her mother. ‘How are you, Mum?’ she asked, trying not to notice the small changes in Marigold’s appearance. There wasn’t anything major. Certainly nothing that anyone who didn’t know her would notice. But to Suze, the slightly dreamy look on her mother’s face was new and alarming.
‘Very well, dear,’ Marigold replied, smiling vaguely.
‘How was the hotel?’
There was a long pause while Marigold tried to work out what Suze had asked her. Something about a hotel, but which hotel?
Dennis intervened. He had become used to compensating for Marigold’s lapses in memory now and his interruptions were fast becoming habit. ‘We went to that lovely hotel by the sea, didn’t we, Goldie? The one with the blue-and-white decoration that you loved so much.’ Marigold narrowed her eyes a little, which betrayed the fact that their weekend away had been swallowed into the fog, but her smile tried to fool them all that she remembered. ‘We went for walks up and down the beach, and out for supper. The wine was very good and the service was excellent. Really, you two,’ he said to Daisy and Suze, ‘it was the best present ever. It really was.’
‘Yes, it was very sweet of you,’ Marigold agreed. She was getting good at dissembling when she didn’t remember something.
Dennis turned to Suze. ‘So tell us, Suze. How is married life? How is Batty—’
‘Atticus,’ Nan cut in firmly. ‘You can’t call a respectable married man a silly nickname like that, even if Suze has tattooed it onto her shoulder!’
Marigold sat up with a start. ‘You have a tattoo, Suze?’ she gasped.
Suze glanced at Daisy in panic. Hadn’t they already had this conversation?
‘Yes, Mum, she got it done before the wedding,’ said Daisy.
‘I told her she can’t divorce him now his name is tattooed onto her shoulder,’ Nan added. ‘You might regret that, Suze. You’ll never find another man called Batty.’
Daisy caught Suze’s eye and grinned. Really, with their grandmother repeating everything and their mother forgetting everything, they were turning into a right old comedy act. Perhaps the only way to deal with the situation was to see the funny side of it.
Daisy shook her head and laughed. Suze was only too ready to release her angst in the same way and laughed with her. Dennis looked at them both and chuckled. ‘What’s so funny, girls?’
‘Nan’s repeating everything,’ said Daisy, glancing at Nan and hoping not to offend her.
‘Am I?’ she asked incredulously. ‘I’m sure I’m not.’
Daisy nodded. ‘I’m afraid you are. And Mum’s forgetting everything,’ she added bravely, taking her mother’s hand and smiling at her lovingly.
Marigold smiled back, reassured by the gentle look in her daughter’s eyes. ‘I suppose it is funny, isn’t it,’ she said quietly.
Nan lifted her chin. ‘Well, we are getting older, aren’t we? So you shouldn’t be surprised.’
They all began to laugh, even Nan, albeit a little grudgingly.
‘What was it Grandad used to say?’ said Suze.
‘What’s wrong with now,’ said Marigold promptly, and everyone turned to look at her in surprise. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that,’ she added. Then she swept her eyes over them with gratitude. ‘There’s nothing wrong with now, is there?’