The Art of Forgetting (8 page)

The rest of the visit passes without incident. They have tea in the increasing sunshine and then Laura takes her mother down to her room, where they go through the contents of the box and she decides where to place each photograph. She is very good at identifying the people in the older photographs but hopeless with her grandchildren, so Laura sits on the bed beside her and tells her their names and ages as if they had never met. It is a strange thing to be doing, but not as painful as she might have thought. This part of her memory has almost gone and there is no helping that.

Now only the ornaments remain in the box, but Laura knows her mother will be called for lunch any minute, so she decides to leave her to finish the task on her own. She can’t help with the history of most of the little figures anyway.

“I’m going now, Mum,” she says, giving her shoulders a squeeze and kissing her on the cheek. “You can finish this off without me, can’t you?”

Her mother does not reply at first. She is holding the little vase, turning it round and round in her hands.

“Oh, yes, thank you, I’ll be fine,” she says. “I remember this. Laura gave it to me.”

Laura is still numb by the time she gets home. This is the first time she has known for certain that her mother didn’t recognise her. Either that, or she did, but remembered Laura’s younger self as a different person. In either case she is obviously completely out of touch with reality and that is a hard fact to assimilate. It all seems to be happening at once, the deterioration they knew would take place eventually, and she is not prepared for it. The specialist had said that the progress might be faster than in some cases, given her relatively young age, but had also said that it could be years before she moved into the later stages of the disease, especially as they have started the medication now.

Laura wonders what to do. Should she tell the others and make them anxious too, or should she keep it to herself in case it is just a blip? The specialist had also said that the progress of the disease was by no means regular and that there would be good times and bad within the general decline. Maybe the last couple of days are nothing to worry about.

She is still pondering this when the phone rings. It is the house phone, not her mobile, and she thinks about not answering it. Almost certainly it will be somebody wanting to compensate her for an accident she never had or sell her solar panels. However, this caller does not give up after a few rings, so Laura sighs and picks up the handset.

“Hello, is that Mrs Rowan?”

“Yes, who’s calling?”

“Ah, hello, Mrs Rowan. It’s Candy here, from Foxdean Kennels. I’m sorry, but I need to talk to you about Jip.”

Laura’s heart misses a beat. Surely not more bad news. Jip isn’t a young dog, but he was perfectly fine the last time they visited him. Admittedly that was some time ago, as they agreed it was unsettling for him to see them for an hour or so and then watch as they left again without taking him with them. Poor Jip. He has sunk to the bottom of my list of priorities, thinks Laura.

“No, there’s nothing to worry about,” replies Candy to Laura’s anxious query. “It’s just that we can’t continue to keep him at the same low rate, now the holiday season is starting. We’re having to turn people away and, well, we are a business after all.”

Laura understands. Of course she does. There is nobody more reasonable than Laura. She agrees to talk to Patrick and the other family members to decide what to do, and get back to Candy as soon as possible. When they placed Jip in the kennels it was supposed to be for a few weeks, but now it is clear that he will never go home either. For some reason, this is the tipping point for Laura and she stands at the sink watching as her tears splash onto the shiny stainless steel. Jip is only a dog, but the thought of his soft, brown eyes looking sadly at her as she left him the last time wrenches her gut, more than the fact that her mother appears to have forgotten who she is.

By the time Patrick comes home, Laura has decided. This is one thing they can do; one thing that will make a difference, however small, and bring some happiness into a situation that is looking increasingly bleak. They will have Jip here. He will be no trouble, as he is old enough to be fairly quiet and will not need a lot of exercise. He loves the children, and her mother had him perfectly trained, at least until she started to decline. Added to that, they will be able to bring him to see Mum and bring her to see him here. They’ve hardly taken her out recently, but it is encouraged and it will provide a focus for her visits. Yes, it is the perfect solution, and Laura can hardly wait until the children are in bed so she can confirm it with Patrick.

“You’re not serious?” Patrick asks, when Laura pauses in the rather breathless account of her plan. He has actually put his iPad down on the coffee table.

“Yes, I am serious,” she says. “I don’t see what the problem would be. I’m at home, so he wouldn’t have to be left for long periods, the kids would love it, and Mum could still see him.” She doesn’t add the bit about it being nice for Jip too.

“And what about when you go back to work?” says Patrick. “That dog could live for another five or six years. It could well outlive your mother. Unless you’re intending to retire permanently?”

Laura is thrown by Patrick’s words. It isn’t just the remark about her not working – she hadn’t picked up that he is obviously unhappy about that after all – but the way he spoke about Jip. ‘That dog.’ And to talk about Mum dying in such a detached way.

“What’s the matter with you, Patrick?” she asks, trying without success to make her voice sound normal and calm.

“There’s nothing the matter with me. I come home from a long day at work, I’m knackered and all I want to do is sit down and chill out for an hour or two, and suddenly I’m presented with what appears to be a fait accompli which would involve us adopting your mother’s dog and effectively chaining you to the house for an indefinite period. And you wonder why I don’t jump up and down with enthusiasm? I don’t want a dog. Not just that dog, even if it didn’t stink to high heaven. I don’t like dogs and I’ve never wanted one. What happens when we want to go on holiday? What happens if we want to go and stay with someone for a weekend? You haven’t thought this through, Laura, and it’s just typical of what you’re like at the moment. Impulsive. Well, it’s not happening so you might as well forget it.”

Laura cannot remember Patrick delivering a speech as long or impassioned as this for a very long time, if at all. He is a man of few words, and that is why she decides not to reply. She needs to think this over. Has she been unreasonable? She is wondering whether to stay where she is or to find something to do in another room, when Patrick starts again.

“I hope you haven’t told the bloody kids about this!” he says. “If you have, and I have them pestering me too, I tell you I won’t …”

“I haven’t! For God’s sake, Patrick, will you calm down? It’s OK. I get it. You don’t want Jip to come here and it’s not going to happen.”

With that, she jumps up and runs upstairs where she throws herself on the bed and cries again. I seem to be doing nothing but cry these days, she thinks, and that burst of self-pity only increases the flow of tears. She wonders if Patrick will come and find her and they will make up. She wonders if he will change his mind, but he doesn’t, and she can see him watching the sports channel when she creeps downstairs and looks through the banisters into the lounge.

“I’m going to have a bath,” she calls, but he either doesn’t hear or ignores her.

Laura finds it very tempting to let the children know that it was Patrick’s decision to abandon poor Jip, not hers. That’s how it feels, although she knows it sounds melodramatic. As soon as they hear that he is to be re-homed, they naturally want him to live with them. It would be so easy to start her explanation with
“Daddy says …”
and thus exonerate herself from the whole thing, including the blame in their eyes. But she doesn’t. She has always remembered her mother’s advice to present a united front at all times, regardless of anything that has happened behind the scenes, and she knows this is one of the reasons her own childhood was so happy and secure. But it is so difficult! She hates what they are doing and yet she is the one who has to explain it to them as if she believes that it will somehow be better for Jip. She will be going back to work soon and he would hate being left alone all day. He’s getting old now, so he needs a quiet house without children running around. It’s all nonsense and they know it, just as she does.

“We’ll find somebody nice for him to live with,” she says, hugging Lily who is taking it badly.

“But we won’t be able to see him,” she sobs. “He’ll wonder why we don’t love him any more.”

Laura tries to explain that dogs don’t have the same feelings as humans and that he will soon grow to love his new owners. Part of her even believes what she says, but another part of her has already rehearsed a heart-wrenching goodbye scene that she still believes could be avoided. She has a tight knot of anger at Patrick’s intransigence and heartlessness. Sometimes you have to do things that are not necessarily the most logical or cost-effective. Sometimes you have to do things because they are the right thing to do, but he can’t see that and she has to give in. She tries not to be frosty to Patrick in front of the kids, but when they are alone the effort of not bringing up the issue, knowing she will only hit the same brick wall, means that she hardly talks to him at all.

She has already consulted, at length, with Kelly and Robin, but neither is in a position to take Jip. Nor do they know anybody suitable, so Laura puts a card in the vet’s and another in the farm shop near to her mother’s house. She also asks Candy to keep her ears open for anyone who might like a ten year old collie cross with soulful brown eyes and the habit of showing his front teeth when he is pleased to see you. Candy is devastated that her phone call has prompted this decision and wishes she could take Jip herself, but promises to ask around. In the meantime, of course he can stay as long as necessary, and Laura makes sure they visit the next weekend.

It is around this time that Laura first starts to go to her mother’s house in the evening, after Patrick comes home and the children are in bed. The evenings are light and she would rather be there than sitting in an uncomfortable silence, with Patrick dividing his attention between various arms of the media or working in the dining room. It also means that she has more time during the day to visit Mum as well as keeping on top of her domestic duties.

After several two-hour sessions, she has completed the lounge. There is one more box of bits and pieces that may trigger some memories for her mother, a stack of books for charity shops and another for Kelly and Robin to look through. The rubbish has all gone, weeks ago. This is as far as she can go here, so she decides to make a start on her old bedroom.

She has been putting this off. Of course, it has not been her room for many a long year, and none of her possessions are in there. But it remains, in her mind, her room. If she closes her eyes before opening the door, she can see it as it was when she left for university. The silvery-grey paint that didn’t quite cover the patterns on the wallpaper beneath. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. The novelty cushion she had made at school, proudly displayed on the bed. Clothes all over the place and a dark smudge on the carpet where she had dropped a bottle of nail varnish.

Now it is completely different. As the guest room, it is decorated in the obligatory neutral tones of house renovation TV programmes and has minimal furniture, despite its size. There is a pine double bed flanked by matching pine bedside tables and chest of drawers. It is bland in the extreme, and Laura guesses her mother will have used the extensive storage space under the eaves but kept the rest of the room largely empty. A quick check of the drawers tells her how wrong she is. Each one is crammed with what she can only describe as ‘stuff.’ Sewing materials and scraps of fabric are muddled up with papers and catalogues in the first, whilst the second appears to be full of takeaway menus and old bus timetables. Her heart sinks as she realises that she will have to go through all of this too. In all likelihood it could go straight into the recycling or rubbish bin, but there is always the chance that something important is hiding away in there and she cannot take the risk.

Sighing, she pulls out the top drawer and tips the contents onto the bed. She will have to be careful, as there are pins and needles embedded in the jumble of threads, ribbons and bits of old zips. She decides to separate the papers from this chaos first.

And that is when she finds it. Part of a pad of lined paper, with no cover or cardboard back and held together only by the glue at the top. It is full of her mother’s writing and it clear from the start what it is.

One day I will understand what makes people think they can just walk into your house and start shouting the odds. I’ve lived here for more than thirty years so you’d think it would give me a certain amount of respect in the neighbourhood, but that busybody next door! Lydia she calls herself, and the way she says it – as if the name itself carries some kind of weight – to knock on the door and walk straight in before I have a chance to say anything, and it is nothing to do with her whether I choose to stay in my dressing gown all morning, but I could see her expression. I’ve seen people in the supermarket wearing their pyjamas, but I wouldn’t do that. I’m not that far gone.

And then she marches into the kitchen and turns off the tap. I suppose I had left it running for a while, but this new boiler that the kids insisted I have because it looks after itself apparently, it sometimes takes a while before it runs hot, so you have to leave the hot tap running, and I’d just sat down for a minute to watch a bit of that house auction programme. There’s nothing wrong with that, and of course I don’t believe in wasting water but we’ve had enough rain this year. It wasn’t that anyway. She would never have known if the drain outside hadn’t been blocked, but all the water was running over my path and under the fence onto her patio. Honestly, you’d think it was raw sewage, not clean, warm water and I did get a bit cross with her. She said she’d been phoning me, but I didn’t hear the phone ring so I told her I didn’t believe her, and then she was about to say something, I could tell, but she stopped and walked back to the front door.

“I’m sorry Judy,” she said, “but this isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m not saying it’s your fault, but it can’t go on.” Something like that.

The woman’s either mad or she’s got some kind of vendetta against me, although I can’t think why, as I’ve never been anything other than polite to her and I invited them in for tea when they first moved in. They seemed very nice then, if a bit stuck up, but I wasn’t having her marching in here and telling lies, so I followed her, and told her she was no longer welcome in my house and I know she heard, as I saw the way she was fumbling with her key to get back inside. Hopefully that will be the end of it. We weren’t friends or anything, and I can live with a frosty silence.

It seems that there was never any chance of me being prosecuted for blackmail, so all that stuff that Paul said at the time was nonsense. There could have possibly have been a case for Linda to answer if she had carried it on, but nobody knew at that time whether she had. The worst thing for me was Mum and Dad finding out, and I probably could have kept quiet, but I had no way of knowing what the police would do. The policeman thanked me and said they would deal with it now, and I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d filed it away and done nothing, but in my new spirit of clearing out all the skeletons from my closet, I told them, chapter and verse.

I suppose their response was tempered by the passing of time. They were shocked, but it was that other Judy they were shocked about, and if there was a prevailing emotion after I’d finished it was probably sadness.

“Oh, Judy,” said my mum, and she came to sit next to me on the sofa and pulled me to her. “You’ve had an awful lot to deal with in your little life, haven’t you?”

Well, yes I had, and it wasn’t over yet. My parents may have been sympathetic and ready to understand but that certainly wasn’t the case where Linda’s mother was concerned. It was only a few days later that there was a huge hammering on the door just as we’d finished eating. I was upstairs packing, as I was due to start my first term in a week or so, and when my dad opened it, she barged in and stood at the bottom of the stairs, shouting.

“Where’s that daughter of yours? I need a few words with her!”

There was a lot more, but I couldn’t bear to listen as she shouted and cried. I closed my bedroom door and lay on the bed, my hands over my ears, but it didn’t make any difference as I knew what she’d be saying. How could I have kept all this to myself? How could I have lied, bare-faced to her when she came to me on her knees, asking for help? How could I have let the trail go so cold that the evidence would probably be worthless now? How could I have ruined her life?

She was drunk again, and quite difficult to manage, but my parents were calm and kind and they didn’t throw her out and they didn’t call the police. Instead, they sat her down and gave her strong coffee, and they told her their version of what I’d told them, and what I’d been through to get to that point. They understood her pain and, although they wouldn’t let her see me, they promised her that I’d told the police everything now and, eventually, she accepted it and cried some more. That’s what they told me later, after she’d gone and my dad had tapped on the bedroom door and opened it, just enough to look inside.

“Are you OK?” he said, and then, when I told him no, not really, he agreed that was a silly question and came in to sit on the bed beside me.

“But I do think that’s the worst of it over now,” he said, and if only that had been true.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I don’t know why I am writing that, as the date is clear enough on the digital clock. It must be new, and I think Robin may have brought it round and shown me how to use it. I seem to remember something like that, but then Robin always thinks the answer to problems lies in buying something. I would like it better if he stayed a bit longer, like the girls do, but he’s always in a hurry, just popping in, can’t stay, things to do.

That’s the other thing I have to remember. My birthday, and that woman who came round. I don’t know who she was, and I don’t think she’s local as she came in a car. She wanted to come in, said she wanted to help me, but I wasn’t falling for that. I’ve not forgotten the man and the new windows, and all the trouble that caused. Kelly was so angry I thought she was going to hit him. “Preying on the vulnerable,” she said, to him, “you should be ashamed of yourself,” and although I wasn’t very happy at the idea that I was apparently vulnerable, Laura explained that any single woman can be a target. I let her think that I believed her, but actually I was shocked. Shocked at myself for letting in a stranger and letting him persuade me to buy horrible plastic windows and doors. It made me think, a lot, and I haven’t forgotten that, even though I’ve probably forgotten many other things since then.

That’s why I need to tell Laura when she comes. I thought there might be someone else I could tell, but I couldn’t find my phone book, which is really annoying as the mobile is out of battery and I have to use the landline. Thank goodness I still have that! That mobile seems to run out of battery every day, and it’s such a pain to find the charger, plug it in, wait for it to charge.

I don’t even know why Paul came. He didn’t like him, although I couldn’t understand why, and he had to travel back and miss lectures. Nobody would have thought it strange if he’d stayed away, but I think Mum and Dad may have put pressure on him. Those days between the phone call and the funeral are all a complete blur, but I know it didn’t happen quickly because of the inquest and everything.

They were very nice about it at work. Obviously I’d talked about him, as you do, but they’d never met him and I don’t know whether they realised how serious it was, but I was allowed compassionate leave more or less on an open-ended basis. The world wouldn’t stop turning if a few technical documents remained unamended after all. I spent most of the time in my room, either crying or sleeping, and Mum and Dad were so worried about me after a couple of weeks that they called Doctor Harrison to see me. I had barely eaten a thing, barely left the house and I was showing no signs of coming to terms with it. None at all.

I suppose I could have refused. I was well past the age when parents can interfere with your medical issues, but I didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. They could have wheeled in the complete staff of the local hospital to come and look at me and I wouldn’t have cared. I don’t know how to describe what it felt like and I know now that grief can come in different ways, but the thing I remember most was the pain. If I’d thought about it at all, before I actually felt it, I guess I would have thought people were using the word metaphorically. The pain of grief. That’s why nothing could have prepared me for the fact that it was real, actual pain that I felt. It was in my stomach and it doubled me up. I would sleep for a while, sometimes dreaming about him being alive, finding out that it had all been a mistake after all, or that he was dead but could somehow still talk to me, be with me, that we would muddle along together even though he was dead so it wasn’t all that bad, and then I would wake up and remember and POW! There it would be, a great surge of pain right in my middle. It would take my breath away.

The doctor prescribed something and I think I took it, mostly, but I don’t think it made a lot of difference really, apart from the fact that I slept even more. It didn’t mean that he was still alive, and that was what I wanted and couldn’t have. By the day of the funeral, I was like a wraith. I had already been quite slim in those days, but now my clothes were falling off me and I was pale and sickly-looking. Everything looked strange; not blurry exactly, but as if it were being filmed through some kind of fine gauze. As if I was looking in from the outside, not really there. That didn’t stop me seeing people looking at me though. The shock on their faces when they saw me. And I heard conversations.

“Did you see Judy? Poor girl, she’s taken it badly, hasn’t she?”

Well of course I’d taken it badly. What did they expect? That I would shrug my shoulders and think about the fact that I was young and there would be other boyfriends? In fact, nobody had been stupid enough to say anything like that to me, but if they had, I almost certainly would have punched them. It was probably more surprising to outsiders how it had affected my whole family. My parents had become very fond of him, especially as they could see how happy he made me, and Wendy positively idolised him. He had been so nice to her, like the big brother that Paul didn’t seem to be by that time, that I’m sure she had been more than a little in love with him herself. So it wasn’t surprising to me that she and Mum were in tears at times during the funeral, or that Dad looked so sad, but I wasn’t expecting it to affect Paul quite so deeply. He’d appeared to be calm during the church service, but later, while we were waiting for the cars to take us to the crematorium, he was pale and jittery. In fact, I think he had left by the time Dad had to deal with Linda’s mother, and that was the last time we saw him until we got home.

“What happened to you? We were worried,” said Dad. “You might have let us know you were leaving.”

“Sorry, it all got on top of me. I didn’t think anyone would notice,” he replied, then looked up at me. I was standing just inside the doorway, trying to decide whether to force myself to stay downstairs or give in to the overwhelming urge to curl up in my bed.

“Sorry, kiddo,” he said, and the use of this term of endearment, once so familiar when we were younger but rarely heard these days, caught me off balance and the tears, always close to the surface, flowed again. Where was she now, that funny little girl, and where was the big brother who would tease her mercilessly but stick up for her at school as if she were the most precious thing in the world? The years seemed to have made strangers of us and I had lost him part of him too.

That’s the thing with families. One minute you’ve got them, and you don’t have a minute to spare, not a minute to yourself; you’re so busy loving them, sorting them out, keeping track of who’s happy and who’s sad, who’s doing OK and who needs to nudged back on track. And then you wake up one morning and they’re gone. Just like that. No-one to cook for, no-one to get cross with you when you suggest it may be time to get up, no-one to worry about when it starts to get late. That’s why it’s quite nice to have them here, to hear them moving around upstairs or even just to call out to them when I’m taking Jip out, or walking up to the shop. The thought that somebody might miss you is quite comforting, and this house is too big for one person anyway. Not that I see much of them, but that isn’t so important.

I’ve just remembered her, as clearly as if she were standing here beside me. Isn’t that odd? She was a strange little thing. Well, I say little – she was probably the same height as me – but she was elfin, like some sort of pre-Raphaelite nymph, with long, curly, wild auburn hair and translucent skin. Pink rosebud lips, huge blue-grey eyes.

“You’re Paul’s sister, aren’t you?” she said, and I didn’t see any reason to deny it, so I said yes or nodded; I don’t know, it’s all a long time ago now, isn’t it? And she didn’t glare, or shout, or show any outward sign of emotion which was odd, but she gripped my arm really tightly and said, in that same calm voice, “Well, you can tell him from me that … that … no, actually, don’t tell him anything. Don’t tell him anything at all.” And she turned on her heel and walked away without another word. I can’t remember if it was before he was ill or after, but it was around that time.

“Who the hell was that?” I said.

“Oh, that’s Penny Grayling,” said Monica. Monica had been in my class at school, and we were both at the bus stop. “Your brother dumped her a while back. Or did he? Come to think of it, it may have been that she found out he was two-timing her. Yes, that was it, I’m sure.”

Luckily, the bus came along then and she went upstairs to smoke so I didn’t have to reply. I didn’t like to think of Paul cheating on someone. I never went upstairs on the bus unless I had to, as it always smelled disgusting even if nobody was smoking at the time. I remember once it was packed, and I had to sit right behind a man who chain-smoked and coughed, deep, alarming, barking coughs, all the way into town and I decided, there and then, that I would never smoke, however tempting it might be. Not that I kept to that, but it wasn’t for long and