The House on Fortune Street (12 page)

that my secret hope was true: my children, Dara and Fergus, would save me.

e had been living in Edinburgh for almost three years

when my father died of a heart attack. We had seen him only the week before when he came through to the city for a reunion of his engineering corps and insisted on tidying up our garden. “I’ll just get rid of these dandelions,” he had said.

Now when my mother phoned to break the news, I kept saying, “What do you mean dead?” He had no history of heart problems and had spent his last day in typically vigorous fashion: washing the car, doing the shopping, and, in the afternoon, going down to the bowling club. At the funeral his friend Hamish told me that he had had his fourth-highest score ever. He collapsed while returning his ball to the rack. I hope it was like the optimists claim—white light, a kindly figure waiting, arms outstretched—though I know that he himself, a firm agnostic, would have been surprised by such a welcome.

From then on I tried to visit my mother most weeks, with or without Fiona and the children. The first sign of her unraveling came a few months later when she served us tea in cups and saucers that didn’t match. The following week I went to get a glass for Dara’s juice and found a bag of onions in the cupboard. After we moved to Perth, my mother had seldom seen her own mother or her formidable aunts, but she lived her life as if they might drop in at any moment to run a finger along the tops of the picture frames or peer into her cutlery drawer. Once she even told me that a tidy cupboard was a sign of a tidy mind. Now the sugar bowl was in with the glasses, a tin of soup on top of the plates.

The neighbors began to meet her in the streets at odd hours. She always seemed so purposeful that at first they didn’t give these encounters another thought, but soon everyone realized that she had no purpose, or at least none that could be articulated. When they looked out of their windows and spotted her hurrying down the pavement, heed-less of rain or cold, they would head out to engage her in conversation and lead her home. The phone calls started. Her neighbor Agnes, who worked as a receptionist for a dentist, twice retrieved her from the bus station. But her most common destinations were our old flat, where we had lived until Lionel was eight, and the primary school where she had met Lionel and me every afternoon for six years.

In spite of all this I was slow to understand that she was not herself. When we visited we still arrived to find the table set for tea with freshly baked scones; she admired Dara’s drawings and played with Fergus’s cars. There seemed to be no connection between her sensible scone-making self and her disheveled, wandering self. Then one night when I was brushing my teeth the police rang. She had been picked up loitering on a bridge across the River Tay. “I was admiring the moonlight on the water,” she claimed when I collected her from the station at midnight.

After this incident I had a long talk with Agnes, who insisted that all my mother needed was a wee holiday. “Couldn’t you say you need help with the children,” she urged, “so that she’d feel she was doing you a favor?”

My mother agreed to come and stay for a couple of months and, for the first few weeks, everything was remarkably pleasant. She walked Dara to school, she minded Fergus, she cooked and cleaned. Fiona and I no longer had to juggle our schedules. When we arrived home, the house was tidy, supper was in the oven, and the children were playing happily. Fiona got on well with my mother—they shared a sly sense of the ridiculous—and she was pleased that the children would know

at least one grandparent; her own parents in Lancashire were too frail to travel. She took on more work, and we even went to the cinema a couple of times. Then one afternoon she came home to find Fergus alone, red-faced and screaming, rattling the front door. Dara, fortunately, was at a friend’s house.

“I could hear him from the bottom of the street,” Fiona said.

He was still whimpering half an hour later when I got home and started the search for my mother. Had she been in some kind of accident, hit by a car as she returned from a quick trip to the local shops? I called the police in Edinburgh and Perth; I called the hospitals. Then I set out to drive the nearby streets in ever widening circles, pausing whenever I spotted a woman of similar age and gait. After a couple of fruitless hours, I returned home to find that Agnes had phoned; my mother had shown up at the house and begun cleaning. By the time I reached Perth it was dusk and she was standing in the garden, polishing the windows.

“Cameron,” she said,“what are you doing here? Would you like a cup of tea?”

Inside she put away her duster and filled the kettle. As it came to the boil, she commented that the swallows were back; it was time to plant the peas. But when she went to the fridge, her face crumpled. “There’s no milk,” she exclaimed.

“You’ve been staying with us, in Edinburgh. Don’t you remember?” “We’ll have to have condensed.”

Tea with condensed milk had been a Sunday treat in childhood. Now, as I sat there in the chilly kitchen drinking the hot, sweet liquid, I remembered how Lionel and I had used to beg my mother for “special tea” and how slowly we had sipped the milky beverage, trying to make it last. When I drove home an hour later, I still had no answer as to why she had abandoned Fergus.

This incident revealed a side of Fiona previously hidden. One aspect of her optimism had always been a readiness to forgive—everyone was just about to behave better—but now she was adamant: under no cir-cumstances could my mother darken our door again. “I don’t care if she’s confused. No one leaves a four-year-old alone.”

The children were in bed and we were in the kitchen, making supper. I was peeling carrots and she was rinsing a sieve in which she had washed lentils. “It makes me think,” she went on, shaking the sieve fiercely, “that there’s something wrong with her. I don’t mean physically, I mean morally.”

I slid the peeler, very carefully, the length of the carrot.“Did you turn on the oven?” I asked.

fter several conversations with Agnes, and a consulta-tion with my mother’s doctor, I took an emergency leave from work and moved in with my mother until other arrangements could be made. Since going to university, I had barely spent a night beneath my parents’ roof. Now, except for my father’s absence, it was as if I had never left. I slept in the same narrow bed in my old room; I would not have been surprised to wake to find my school uniform lying on the chair. When I came downstairs in the morning, my mother had the table set for breakfast: cereal, toast, and marmalade, Nescafé. We read the newspaper and chatted while we ate. Afterward she went shopping. She seemed so much her old self that it did not occur to me to

go with her.

While she was out I worked steadily on getting the house ready to sell. I began in my room, where the cupboard was filled with schoolboy clothes and the bookcase still held the books I had owned between the

ages of ten and eighteen. The former I piled unceremoniously in the hall to go to the charity shop. The latter I started to go through, searching for evidence of my younger self. Who had I been before I became a husband and father? I leafed through Swallows and Amazons and set it aside for Dara, pondered a book about Byzantium. On the second or third morning I picked up Alice in Wonderland and read the opening chapter where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and drinks the potion— labeled “Drink Me”—which makes her ten inches high, then eats the cake which makes her grow again.

I was about to add the book to Dara’s collection when a photograph at the back caught my eye; I found myself looking at an intensely composed little girl with a bold, innocent gaze and bare feet. The photograph accompanied an essay about Charles Dodgson, and the caption explained that this was Alice Liddell, for whom the story was first told and later written down. Glancing through the pages I discovered half a dozen other little girls, staring at the camera or acting out some scene, but never smiling. I turned to the beginning of the essay.

The main facts of Dodgson’s life were unexceptionally Victorian. He was born in 1832, the third of eleven children, the son of a stern min-ister father and a gentle mother. He grew up entertaining his brothers and sisters with games, plays, and poems. He built a model railway in the garden and wrote an opera making fun of Bradshaw’s railway guide. At the age of sixteen, he went to Christchurch College in Oxford, where he became a don in mathematics and never left. In the midst of his lec-tures and social duties he assiduously, and quite publicly, cultivated his many friendships with children and especially with young girls.

The winter after I met Annabel I had purchased and read Lolita. Never, even for a page, did I identify with Humbert, and if Annabel had demonstrated a mere fraction of Lolita’s precocity I would have stopped my visits immediately. Like every parent, I was filled with disgust and fear by the news stories of kidnappings and child abuse. But now, as I

read about Dodgson and his passionate relationships—relationships that seemed to have no destination other than the giving and receiving of playful, rapt attention—I recognized myself. I put the book beside my bed to reread later.

n the afternoons, after a modest lunch, my mother and I

usually again went our separate ways. I took walks up Kinnoul Hill, or along the river. Meanwhile she visited her neighbors or, following my example, continued what she thought of as spring cleaning. Her cupboards were again immaculate, and we took more than a dozen loads to the charity shop. A couple of times I caught myself thinking that if I moved back home, she would be fine; she was only fifty-nine. She might have twenty more good years, even remarry. And I would become like Mr. Stevenson, an odd duck who took care of my mum.

Although I had lived in Perth for my entire childhood, the places I walked were mostly new to me. I took my camera on these expeditions and amused myself by photographing the landscape. One day by the river I came across three girls; they must have been a little older than Dara, maybe nine or ten. The tallest of them had taken off her shoes and jeans and was wading out into the water in her underwear. Her dark hair was flying in the wind and her skin was winter white. The other two girls—one had similar coloring, the other was fair—were urging her on. In their absorption none of them noticed my approach. Before I knew what I was doing I had raised my camera and taken several photographs. Only then did I call out, “Hello. Can I help?”

For reasons that were not clear the smallest girl’s shoes were in the water. I took off my own shoes, rolled up my jeans, and plunged in. When I returned to the bank, bearing the sodden shoes, the girls crowded around, thanking me. I asked if I could take their picture,

and obediently they lined up with their arms around each other. The younger two offered toothy smiles but the oldest gazed at me with a sullen intensity worthy of one of Dodgson’s subjects.

had been staying with my mother for nearly three weeks when the doctor rang to say they had secured a place for her in a nursing home that had facilities for coping with her condition. To my relief he suggested that I bring her in so that we could tell her together.

At lunchtime, as we ate our scotch broth, I explained that we had to go to the doctor’s that afternoon.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you ill?”

Since that first evening, when I had found her cleaning the windows in the garden, neither of us had mentioned the events that had brought me home. Now I said, “Mum, do you remember you were staying with us in Edinburgh?”

“Would you like some more soup?” She was blinking rapidly.

“You came to stay with us because you couldn’t manage here on your own. The neighbors kept finding you wandering in the streets.”

She blew on her broth and took another mouthful.

“The day you left Edinburgh,” I persisted, “you were meant to be watching Fergus. You left him all alone.”

She stood up abruptly. “I forgot the salt,” she said.

The doctor was no older than I was, but he was more accustomed to breaking this kind of news, or at least trying to. Finally, even he was defeated by my mother’s claims that she was fine; what was all this non-sense about moving into a home? He sent her out to wait with his nurse.

“Does she understand anything?” I said.

“Who can say? Terrible events are happening. Why would she want to acknowledge them?”

“She’s only fifty-nine,” I said. “Mightn’t she get better?”

The doctor tapped his pen. “You’re a scientist, aren’t you, Mr. MacLeod? Let me be frank. Alzheimer’s is destroying her brain; there is no cure. She’s probably had it for a while and the shock of losing your father, their routines together, made it worse.”

“But a lot of the time she is fine. I worry at the home they’ll make her into an invalid.” I remembered how the Victorians had insisted on being buried with a bell in their coffins so that if they woke up, they could ring for help. What if my mother rang and there was no one to hear?

The doctor stopped his tapping and looked me full in the face. “In an ideal world,” he said, “your mother would be cared for by kind, thoughtful people who had known her before she was ill.”

He paused, and I knew he was giving me the chance to say she could live with me. I pictured Fiona shaking the sieve and studied my dusty shoes. The doctor went on in brisker tones that the nurses would do their best and of course I would visit. Then he stood up and shook my hand. He was used to family members trying to make him feel bad about the things they ought to feel bad about themselves.

n our last day in the house I fetched my camera and, in

spite of my mother’s mild protests, insisted on photographing her in her armchair, at the kitchen table, in the garden; I even took a shot of her sitting on the edge of the double bed she had shared with my father. I had taken photographs of her before, snapshots of her with my father and the children, and she had always proved disastrously self-conscious. Now, after her initial demurral, she seemed to forget about the camera. Even as I took the elegiac pictures, I knew they would be among my best.