Chapter Four
An enormous pile of kibble clattered into Fletcher’s bowl, and then, after a moment of hesitation, I added even more. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be at the care home, or if Gordon Baker would even be willing to see me.
I guessed it would depend on how much Josh had shared with him about our ‘falling out’. I wrinkled my nose at the expression but could think of no other substitute.
I’d looked up the home online as soon as I returned from my parents last weekend. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but the luxurious, almost hotel-like accommodation and facilities came as a big surprise. I’d stayed at five-star resorts that weren’t so fancy.
As my phone navigated me to my destination, I tried to remember everything I knew about the Bakers. It turned out teenage me had paid very little attention to the family next door. I knew they’d had no children of their own, and had become foster parents quite late in life, choosing only to care for older children, ones with more complex issues or troubled backgrounds. My hands tightened on the wheel, because they’d certainly had their work cut out for them with Josh – or at least they had in the early days. If there was a rule, it was only there to be broken, or so he’d delighted in telling me. I think more than anything, he liked to shock me.
It was only years later that it occurred to me that, although he’d talked the talk, I couldn’t actually remember Josh doing anything particularly terrible. Unless you counted breaking someone’s heart a crime, that is. Because if you did . . . well, then Josh was a repeat offender.
Wrought-iron gates flanked a meandering driveway that led to the main entrance of Redmount Care Home. The main building kept materialising and then disappearing behind an avenue of trees that bordered the driveway. The brief glimpses I got of it looked impressive.
I followed the arrows to an area designated for visitor parking and pulled into a vacant bay. Through the windscreen I studied the building, which looked much like a stately home in a period drama, with its neatly trimmed ivy clinging to the brickwork. The early afternoon sun hung low in the sky, turning the glass at every window molten orange.
As I climbed out of the car, I immediately regretted the casual black jeans and jumper I’d chosen. Every vehicle in the car park – except mine – looked expensive. I smiled, thinking how close I’d come to driving here in the small white van we used for deliveries. As it was, my five-year-old Fiesta was seriously out of its league.
What I hadn’t got wrong, however, was the timing of my visit. The car park was rapidly filling up; Saturday afternoon was clearly a popular time for visitors. I was halfway across the deeply gravelled forecourt when my steps faltered. What if, out of all the days he could have picked, Josh has chosen today to visit his foster father? It was a cool day, but that didn’t stop a faint sheen of perspiration from suddenly erupting on my top lip.
I was ready to meet my old neighbour again. I’d rehearsed what I would say to him and was confident I could pull off the air of nonchalance I wanted to convey. But bumping into the boy who’d stolen my heart, who’d grown up to be the man who broke it – not just once, but twice – well, that was a different prospect altogether.
The impression that this wasn’t a care home at all, but an exclusive country club hotel, the kind you might attend for a wedding, only got stronger when I entered the building. There was nothing cold or clinical about the foyer, with its elegant period furniture and impressive mahogany reception desk. The feeling that I ought to be wearing a fancy hat and carrying a box of confetti was only reinforced.
‘Good afternoon. Can I help you?’
I plastered on a smile that almost covered my anxiety.
‘Yes. I hope so. I’ve come to visit one of your residents. A Mr Gordon Baker.’
The woman smiled as she reached for a clipboard on the desk. ‘Is he expecting you?’
‘Um . . . no. Not exactly.’ I wondered if she could tell that actually translated into not at all . ‘I’m sorry. It’s the first time I’ve been here. I didn’t realise I had to make an appointment.’
The receptionist’s smile didn’t waver. ‘You don’t. We have an open-door visiting policy for family and friends.’ She was looking at me expectantly, and I could see she was waiting for clarification as to which category I fell into. Truthfully the answer was neither.
‘I’m an old neighbour of his,’ I said, which was entirely true. ‘And I happened to be in the area this afternoon.’ Which was a barefaced lie. I’d driven for two hours to get here, but she didn’t need to know that.
‘I thought I would surprise him, but if it’s not convenient, please don’t worry. I can always come back another time,’ I said, already knowing that I would never return. At least I could say I had tried to make contact with Josh. I’d given it my best shot.
Mentally I was already halfway back to my car when the young woman passed me the clipboard from the desk. ‘Oh no. Of course you must see Mr Baker. It will be a real treat for him. To be honest, he doesn’t get that many visitors.’ She added the last in a half whisper as though spilling secrets.
I took the pen she was holding and the clipboard. It looked as though I was doing this after all.
‘Do all visitors sign in?’ I asked, slowing down how long it took me to write my name so I could scan the list of arrivals who’d filled in the form before me today.
‘Yes. It’s company policy.’
I had neither wanted nor expected to see the name Josh Metcalf on the list of today’s visitors. So there was no reason to feel disappointed as I passed the clipboard back across the desk. But I did.
‘Mr Baker is in our Wintergreen wing,’ advised the young care worker who’d been summoned to accompany me to his room. She swiped the card hanging from a lanyard around her neck across a discreetly positioned pad beside the door. I heard an inner mechanism click to release a lock.
‘Some of the Wintergreen residents have a tendency to go walkabout,’ she explained. ‘They’re not locked in. We just have the doors shut to keep them safe.’
I was still wrestling with the semantics of that statement when we paused at a door. Beside it was a neatly engraved plate bearing the name of Josh’s foster father. No scribbled-on piece of card slotted into a holder here.
‘Most of the residents in Wintergreen feel more comfortable receiving visitors in their own rooms. They find it less unsettling.’
I wasn’t sure about Mr Baker, but I was starting to feel more than a little unsettled myself. Was I doing the wrong thing here?
The door to the room had been left ajar by a few inches. It was too late to back out now because the assistant was already knocking softly on the wooden panels. ‘Gordon? Can we come in? I have a visitor for you.’
There was a mumbled comment from the other side of the door, too low and indistinct to know if he’d said yes or no to that one. The assistant pushed open the door and then stood back, allowing me to enter the room first.
I had become very good at training my face not to express shock or dismay when Adam had been in hospital and then later in the hospice. No one wants their visitors to look horrified when they first set eyes on you. But it took me a moment or two before I could school my features not to react to the frail-looking man seated in a brocade wingback armchair in front of me. He looked nothing like the Mr Baker from my memory. His hands were clenched on the armrests, with thin, claw-like bony fingers, covered with concertinaed wrinkles and age spots. I saw them tighten their hold on the upholstery as he prepared to stand, and a lump unexpectedly rose at the back of my throat. Mr Baker had always had impeccable manners. He would unfailingly get to his feet whenever my mum or I came into a room. How could I have forgotten that?
To be honest, that was one of only a few things I recognised about the elderly gentleman in the bright and spacious room. His hair had been thinning even when I had last seen him, and it was now sparse enough to count the strands. His face was the same, and yet entirely different. It was as though someone had made a latex mask of Mr Baker and then left it out in the sun, where it had somehow melted out of shape.
His eyes were watery, and although I couldn’t remember their original colour, whatever it had been had long since faded. His lips were moving soundlessly in the way that old people’s do.
‘Please don’t get up,’ I urged, holding out a hand as though I was on traffic control, and stepped closer to his chair. ‘I’m not sure if you’ll remember me, Mr Baker – Gordon,’ I corrected, feeling embarrassed at the formality. ‘I’m Lily. Lily . . . Williams ,’ I said, reverting to the surname I’d not used in six years. ‘You used to live next door to us in Elm Close. My parents are Tony and Barbara.’
That was a lot of information I’d thrown at him in the space of a few seconds, and I could see him trying to process it . . . and failing.
‘Why don’t I go and prepare you a little tea tray?’ the woman who’d brought me to the room suggested. I looked back at her over my shoulder, suddenly not sure I was ready to be left alone with someone who looked as though a gust from the slightly open window could blow him off his armchair.
‘Please don’t bother on my account,’ I said, but the woman was already halfway out the door.
‘Oh, it’s no bother. We usually bring Gordon a cuppa at around this time of day.’
Then she was gone, and for a moment I felt like a child who’d been dropped off at a party she hadn’t really wanted to attend. I turned slowly back around. Gordon’s lips were still moving as though he’d been given a particularly challenging toffee just before I arrived. He lifted a shaky hand and pointed towards a chair a short distance from his own. I did as I was instructed and perched on the seat, not relaxed enough to sit back against its cushions.
‘Do I know you?’ he asked suddenly.
I swallowed uncomfortably. There was no way this sweet, old, confused man was going to suddenly rattle off an address or a telephone number of a teenager he’d fostered twenty years ago. Really, what on earth had I been thinking?
‘My name is Lily,’ I repeated. This time without the backstory.
Gordon Baker nodded, a small smile on his thin lips. ‘I knew a lass called Lily once. Proper little tearaway she was. Always climbing trees.’
I sat up straighter in my chair. ‘That was me,’ I cried in delight. ‘I was that Lily. I used to climb the old sycamore tree in your back garden.’
Mr Baker looked at me and then shook his head as though he was sorry to be the one to have to tell me this, but I was sadly deluded.
‘No. The Lily I knew was nothing but a lass. Couldn’t have been more than twelve or so. Skinny little thing she was, but she had a good heart.’
It was too much of a quantum leap for his failing memory to match his recollections of eleven-year-old me with the woman in her thirties who sat before him now. So I decided I too would refer to younger me as though she and I were completely unrelated.
‘Do you remember Lily being friends with one of the boys you and Janette fostered?’
Too late I realised my mistake. At the mention of his late wife’s name, Mr Baker’s face crumbled.
‘Do you know my Janette? Have you seen her recently? I keep asking them why she hasn’t come to see me, but they won’t tell me anything.’
I looked around helplessly. Did he not know that his wife had died? Could he not remember being at her funeral – which I too had attended? I didn’t want to have to tell him any of that.
Fortunately, I was saved from having to say anything by the clink of crockery and the sound of wheels trundling over the wooden-floored corridor. I turned around with relief as the young woman re-entered the room, carrying a tray loaded with a teapot, cups and saucers, and a plate of custard creams.
‘Ah. Is it time for tea already?’ Gordon asked, with a note of happy expectation in his voice. My head swivelled back at lightning speed. There was nothing on his face to indicate the sorrow that had been there just seconds earlier, when he was asking me about his wife.
‘I think I’ll just use the little boys’ room,’ the elderly man said, heaving himself to his feet and shuffling off to a room that I assumed was his ensuite bathroom.
I waited until he had clicked the door closed before turning back to the woman who had finished setting down the tea tray.
‘He . . . he seems rather confused. He asked me about his wife, and why she hadn’t been to see him. Does he not know that she died?’
The young assistant didn’t look anywhere near as troubled by my words as I felt about saying them.
‘Some days he does. And some days he doesn’t. His memory is like an old pair of binoculars that look into the past. Sometimes – on a good day – it will be able to focus sharply for a moment or two, but most of the time what he sees is fuzzy at best.’
‘So, asking him for something like an email address or a mobile phone number is going to be beyond him?’
The woman raised both her eyebrows eloquently.
I shook my head. ‘Sorry. Stupid question. I knew he was suffering from dementia, but I wasn’t aware how that presented itself.’
‘No two cases are ever the same. And no two days are alike. Their memories fade in and out faster than you could possibly believe. The thing to remember is that when we’re telling Gordon that his wife has died, it’s like he’s hearing it for the very first time and he’s grieving for her as though it was only yesterday that she was standing right there beside him.’
Her words hit me like a blow. I was one year on from having lost my husband and I was still a long way from recovering from the first devastating wound of being without him. Imagine having to go through that agony again and again. It was unthinkable.
Gordon emerged, and after a quick check that everything that should have been buttoned or zipped had been, the kindly assistant left us alone again.
Gordon seemed to have entirely forgotten the sadness of the past during his bathroom break, and the last thing I wanted to do was to bring those thoughts back into his head. Maybe somewhere in the faulty vaults of his memory he did know Josh’s current whereabouts, but memories of Josh would be inextricably tangled up with those of his late wife. And despite my promise to Adam, I wasn’t about to do anything to cause this gentle old man any further pain. And Adam would never have wanted me to.
We drank the tea, and Gordon polished off the entire plate of biscuits. We spoke about gardens – something I knew scarcely a thing about, living as I did in the top-floor flat of a mansion house.
‘Built a little platform in that old sycamore for young Lily and my lad, you know,’ Gordon said, leaning over and spilling biscuit crumbs on to the floor.
I craned forward, excited that a door to the past had unexpectedly opened.
‘ You did . You nailed some planks on to one of the upper branches.’
Gordon Baker’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who told you about that? Have you been talking to my boy? Have you seen him?’
‘Josh? Is that who you mean? Josh was the young boy you fostered back in 2005. He came to live with you because . . . well, he didn’t have a very happy life in his old home.’
‘That poor laddie had it worse than most. Just about broke my heart knowing what he’d been through. Terrible thing what some folks will do to their kiddies.’
I swallowed a new obstruction in my throat. ‘It is, Gordon. It is. But Josh was lucky; he had you and—’ I stopped myself before I fell back into that abyss. ‘He had you to look after him,’ I completed.
‘Would you like to see a photograph?’ Gordon Baker asked, getting to his feet and crossing to a heavy oak dresser that had caught my eye when I first entered the room, not just for its rustic charm but because of the collection of framed photographs clustered on its surface. The majority appeared to be of a much younger Gordon and Janette. They ranged back through the decades, depicting an array of fashion styles.
The old man’s hand wove through the frames, seeking the one he wanted to share with me, and while it did, I looked among them for any that might depict a dark-haired man with high cheekbones and the most intense brown eyes I had ever seen. No one in any of the frames matched that description.
‘Here she is. There’s that Lily lass I was telling you about.’
He passed me a gilt-framed photograph that had been at the very back of the group. I stared down for a long moment at a photograph I hadn’t seen for almost twenty years. It had been taken at a summer barbecue about two years after Josh had moved in with the Bakers. Many other neighbours were also in the photo – including my own parents, who looked younger than I ever remembered them being. I was standing to one side of the main group, with a hot dog in my hand and Josh’s arm thrown casually around my shoulders.
Gordon had come to stand beside me and was looking down at the photograph with an expression of confusion. ‘There she is. There’s that Lily. Not sure who that boy beside her is though.’
He took the photograph back from me and lifted it close to his face until his nose was almost grazing the glass.
‘And there’s my Janette,’ he said, lowering the frame and cradling it against him as though he was trying to press the image of his late wife into his heart. ‘Do you know where she is? She hasn’t been to see me for a really long time.’