Tess
‘Right, then, I’ll see about getting us some teas, shall I?’
Donna always did this the moment they arrived. It was as if she couldn’t bear just to be in the room with Iris. She had to be busy. Once the tea had been drunk, she’d collect up the cups and saucers, chattering about helping out the staff, them being so busy and all, and be off again. She’d tidy the drawers, smooth the counterpane, rearrange the photographs. Fidget and fuss until it was time to go. Which was ironic, since at home those small tasks never occurred to her, and went entirely undone. Tess knew she couldn’t help it, that it was her coping mechanism, but nonetheless she usually ended up wishing she’d come alone.
The nurse who’d brought them in stood with her hand on the handle of the open door. Tess hadn’t met her before. Her badge said her name was Sandy. She looked kind. Iris’s thin white hair had been combed recently: she looked fresh and sweet. Tess felt the rush of gratitude she always felt for the tenderness of these carers for people they didn’t love.
Tess sat down in the armchair next to Iris’s, taking her grandmother’s cool, powdery hand in her own. Iris gave it willingly without acknowledging Tess. The hand felt tiny and ineffectual in her own, the skin almost translucent, the veins prominent. Iris’s engagement ring was twisted so that the small stones were facing into her palm. Tess gently turned it on Iris’s finger. Iris looked from the ring to her face, and then back at the ring.
‘She’s been chatty this afternoon, haven’t you, Iris? We had a bath, a lovely clean-up. And she was chatting away the whole time.’
Despite her gratitude, Tess bridled slightly at Sandy’s tone of voice – undoubtedly gentle but too childlike. The use of ‘we’. It seemed as inevitable as the smell in places like this.
Iris ignored the question, still staring at the ring.
‘Yes, very chatty. Been talking about a Tom.’
‘Tom?’
‘Is that your grandad?’
‘No. My granddad was Wilf.’
‘Is he …’
Tess shook her head quickly. ‘I never knew him. He died the year before I was born.’
‘Well, it’s definitely Tom she’s been talking about today. Do you know who that is?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Not to worry. That happens.’
I know, Tess thought. I know that happens. Someone like Iris – their brain can alight on any moment of their entire lives, real or imaginary, true or false. Their minds are kaleidoscopes. Their histories are tessellated. ‘What’s she been saying about Tom?’
Iris, who had been sitting staring ahead, her expression vacant, broke into a broad smile at hearing the name again, not entirely kind somehow, and now looked directly at Tess. Her eyes were suddenly alive.
‘He didn’t mean it. He didn’t. He was trying to explain. That’s all. He loved me. He loved me so much. And I loved him …’
She knew she shouldn’t, she knew there was no point, but Tess gently corrected her. ‘You mean, Wilf, Gran. You were married to Wilf. Not Tom. Remember?’
There was a crack in the door of Iris’s memory, and she could see the light through it. She wanted to push the door further open.
‘Not my husband, you silly goose. I know that. He was very handsome you know. He had that limp. But he was still so upright …’
‘Yes, yes. He limped. That’s right.’ Iris had told her. An injury from his time in the army, during the war. She felt almost excited.
‘And do you know, he could still dance. Foxtrot. Waltz. He was a beautiful dancer, before. But he still danced afterwards. He used to take me to the Roxy, before you were born.’
‘Before my mum … before Donna.’
Iris’s brow furrowed. ‘Donna.’ But there was no recognition.
Tess felt desperate to keep Iris in whatever memory it was. ‘Were you a good dancer?’
Iris looked out of the window and moved her head as though she was listening to music. ‘Only with him to lead me …’
For a moment, Iris danced in her imagination, young again. Tess watched the unfamiliar movements, enchanted, and smiled.
Then, when the silent music stopped, she looked into Iris’s face and immediately felt her own enchantment turn to sadness. Where are you, Gran? Where are you today, hey? And why can’t you be here, with me?
Sitting quietly in the late-afternoon sunshine, Iris’s hand in her own, Tess’s memory strayed to the holidays when she’d been a child, and staying with Iris at her home in Salisbury. She had spent at least a month each summer there since she was seven or eight, and odd weeks in other school holidays, and God how she’d loved those long holidays – looked forward to them through the long, slow winters and interminable school terms, counting down the days after May half-term. Donna always bought the train tickets a few weeks ahead of their departure date – to get the best deal – and once the tickets were displayed on the small mantelpiece in their sitting room, Tess could let her excitement build. They spoke on the telephone, of course, and Iris sent cards and letters in the post, but there was nothing like actually being with her.
Even as a small girl, she had understood that her mother needed time by herself. For as long as she could remember, she had carried the knowledge that she exhausted her mother. That of all the balls her mother juggled, and talked about juggling in wearied tones at home, she was the heaviest and most difficult. She was too young to understand guilt, but she recognized that she was lighter at Gran’s, where she didn’t feel it. They had different smiles, Mum and Gran. Mum’s had no teeth in it – her lips were pressed tightly together and the quick smile often didn’t have time to reach her eyes. Iris beamed broadly, especially at her.
She used to feel a fizz of joyfulness, deep in her tummy, on the train on the way down, counting off the stations en route – Basingstoke, Overton, Whitchurch, Andover – while her mum read Rolling Stone and dozed … After the train pulled out of Grately Station she would pack her comics and colouring book and pencils away in her bag and sit with her knees jiggling on the edge of her seat, staring out of the window at the fields and villages flashing by. The last quarter of an hour was the longest – endless.
Then she’d be on the platform, and Iris was always there waiting, her arms spread wide for Tess to run into. Sometimes her mother stayed for one night, but most often the three of them would walk into the town centre and have lunch at a café where the market was and then Donna would return to London. Tess never recalled missing her mother, but she did remember wanting her to get on that train and leave the two of them by themselves. When she was twelve, her mum declared that she was old enough to travel alone, and she’d put her on the train with a packed lunch and a piece of notepaper on which she had written all her details, and all of Iris’s.
Iris was available to her for almost all of Tess’s sentient childhood, and the sheer heady marvellousness of having an adult devoted only to her – with nothing else pulling at her time – was the most wonderful thing in Tess’s life then. Not even domesticity took her away – they did those chores together, and thus they were really a part of the play.
Her grandmother’s house was on a nice, tidy street about ten minutes from the centre of town. Tess remembered when the window boxes used to be planted with lavender that she liked to run her fingers through, to release a waft of their fragrance. She could still smell them now, and the scent always made her nostalgic, and sometimes melancholy.
She could clearly remember the waking-up feeling of every morning. She’d wake naturally – no alarms or time pressures – in the big bed in Iris’s spare room, with its yellow sprigged wallpaper from Laura Ashley, experiencing the delicious feeling that today, like yesterday and tomorrow, would most definitely be fun. She’d run into Iris’s room and climb into her grandmother’s even bigger bed for a cuddle, until Tess was quite old. Iris was always awake before her, it seemed, sitting up in bed with a cup of tea from the Teasmade, her glasses on and a book or yesterday’s newspaper in her hands. She said old people didn’t need as much sleep as young people. She would look at Tess over the top of her glasses as she opened the door and beam at her: ‘Good morning, my angel.’ Over breakfast – always, always with hot chocolate and Terry Wogan on Radio 2 – they planned … It might be a bus to the seaside, a trip to the market, a picnic by the river. Most often, though, they stayed at home.
Iris had a whole room in her house devoted to crafts. It was technically the dining room, but since she and Tess only ate at the small square table in the kitchen, or sometimes on trays with cushiony bottoms in the front room, when they were watching a film on the television, Iris said it was a sad and wasted room if you just kept it for that once-in-a-blue-moon stuff. She said it just reminded her of all the people who had sat and eaten with her and no longer could. On what must have been her dining table, there was a sewing machine, and a big green mat that it was safe to cut on, and usually some newspapers were spread out to contain mess, on the table, and on the floor underneath. On the dark-wood sideboard opposite the fireplace, alongside a photograph in a gold frame of her granddad, there were loads of boxes of amazing things: embroidery threads and small plastic tubes of glitter and buttons and bugle beads and fat quarters for quilting.
The two of them always had a project – they made up their minds what it would be on the first day, poring over Iris’s crafting magazines, and then spent the whole summer trip working at it. One year they made a farmyard of animals – a cow, a pig, a chicken and a sheep – layering newspapers on to balloons to make the papier-mâché shapes and then, once they’d dried, painting on the details. Another year they learnt how to make mosaics out of coloured glass and shells, sticking them on to wooden boxes and mirror frames. There was the summer of knitting and crochet – long, colourful scarves and baby blankets. And one year Iris had bought an old doll’s house before Tess got there and they had done it up – wallpapering the bedrooms, and tiling the roof with tiny terracotta tiles they’d sent off for in the post.
It had seemed, to a young Tess, that Iris knew everything, could remember everything. She knew the answer to every question Tess had ever asked her, at least until GCSE maths and science homework, and she’d been able to explain so many things. Tess had thought of her as the smartest, wisest, most interesting person she had ever known, not just the most loving.
Iris had a small greenhouse in her back garden with a thrillingly exotic grapevine in it, which produced a small but delicious crop of grapes, and they also grew tomatoes and lettuce for their salad lunches. Iris would send Tess out with a glass bowl to pick what they needed.
If she was ever tired, or bored, Iris never showed it. She seemed, then, to have boundless energy, and limitless enthusiasm for whatever they were doing. In the playground she could sit on the seesaw and keep going until Tess was tired of bouncing. She never said no to a game of Operation or Mousetrap after supper.
And always there was chatter. They talked all day. Laughing at nothing much. ‘Look at us! We’d laugh to see a pudding crawl,’ she’d say, so they’d giggle all over again, because that was so ridiculous. Tess had grown up thinking everyone said that. Somewhere across the years of their friendship, Holly had started repeating it.
Played now, in this room, they were a reel of pure, golden memories – vivid and powerful and the absolute happiest of Tess’s life.
This silent, still person whose hand she held now was reduced, in every conceivable way, to a husk of that person whom she had loved so much. But she loved her still, and the pain of missing someone who was alive and breathing next to you was so sharp it caught in Tess’s chest, just below her throat, and when her mother came noisily back into the room with a tray of tea, muttering about something inconsequential, it was a sheer relief to have her there to distract her from the ache.
There was a gentle knock on the open door.
‘Come in.’
It was Gigi, the woman from the day room, that first day. ‘I thought it was you. I’m the nosiest of the nosy. I saw your grandmother’s name on the board – they always put a new resident’s name up there – and I remembered you’d said she was Iris. I’m so glad.’
Tess smiled. ‘Mum, this is –’
‘I’m Gigi. Gigi Gilbert. I met Tess when she was looking around.’
‘Donna. Pleased to meet you.’ They must be about the same age, Tess thought. But there the similarities between them seemed to end. Gigi was round and soft; Donna angular and sharp. Gigi emanated an open warmth; Donna seemed guarded and careful beside her.
Gigi took Iris’s hand in her own. ‘Hello, Iris.’ Her soft voice was kind and patient, but not patronizing. ‘Welcome.’
‘Gigi visits her father-in-law,’ Tess offered by way of explanation. ‘James, was it?’
‘That’s right. Four doors down, on the left. I won’t stay any longer. I just wanted to say hello. And that I’m here if you need anything. At all …’
‘That’s so kind.’
‘I’ll see you again. You too, Donna.’
Iris had dozed off in the chair, her head back against the headrest, her mouth slightly open. Tess wondered about moving her, but she didn’t look uncomfortable. Donna was leaning on the windowsill, looking out at the gardens.
‘It’s nice here, really, isn’t it? You could just imagine it, how it must have been once … beautiful. The gardens are lovely. That’s a pond over there, isn’t it? More of a lake, really.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you know who Tom is?’
Donna thought for a moment, her forehead furrowed. ‘Nope. Can’t think of one. Why?’
‘The nurse said Iris had been talking about a Tom. I think she must have been talking about Grandad. But she said she wasn’t.’
‘She doesn’t really know, though, right?’
‘She seemed adamant.’
Donna shrugged. ‘I don’t know …’
Tess thought for a moment. ‘Is there stuff you wish you’d asked her, or told her … you know, before?’
Tess laughed. ‘I don’t know. Nothing specific. But all kinds of things. I keep thinking of things I don’t know about her. I had all those years, and I never asked. Not big important stuff. Not just that. Little things. I think it’s just that you know you can’t now …’
Donna came over and squeezed her shoulder, her voice soft and gentle. ‘You loved her. She loved you.’
‘She loved you too.’
Donna sighed, and took a moment to answer. ‘I know she did. You’ve gotta let it go, sweetheart.’
‘I know that.’
‘You’ve had too much time to think, sat by this bed.’
‘That’s probably true. But it’s where I want to be.’
Week 15. Apple sized. And now your head is just a head, and not all prehistoric and Garpy any more. There’s a proper neck, and a chin. You look just like a baby now. Two arms, two legs, bendy knees and elbows, ten fingers and toes, ears and a nose. You’re still soft around the edges – but you’re all there. Inside your eyelids – still shut – it’s all about your eyes this week. Apparently, you can make facial expressions now – you know, scowl, smile, gurn. I wish I had a scan machine at home. I’d like to see you every day.