Chapter thirteen #2
‘Originally, yes,’ said Pam. ‘His goddaughter dropped him off here about a year ago. He’d been living independently for a long time, but there was an accident .
. .’ Pam’s expression indicated that there’d been more than one accident before he’d agreed to move.
‘Nigel’s got no immediate family, sadly, so she’s his next of kin.
His cousin’s daughter, I think. It was decided that he’d be best moving closer to her. ’
‘They don’t sound particularly close.’
Kemi snorted again. ‘I would not like to be close to Nigel.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Because he has not been improved by a solitary life. A man like Nigel needs companionship, like some meats need a lot of spice. Or salt. And a bold cook.’
‘Kemi . . .’ Pam attempted to sound disapproving, but couldn’t.
‘Don’t let him tell you he used to be a spy, like Ken.’ She made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘A spy! Ken!’
‘Ladies, I’m afraid I must push on,’ said Lewis ruefully. ‘Kemi, did you want to see me about something?’
‘Yes,’ said Kemi. ‘But inside the office, please.’
Lewis raised a hand of farewell in my direction. ‘I look forward to shaking Tomsk’s paw when he’s passed his test with flying colours.’
Lewis was trying so hard, I thought. As he mentioned Tomsk, I detected a ripple underneath his habitual sunniness, despite his efforts to conceal it. A stiffening of resolve. I was touched that he was making that effort for Tomsk. And, I guessed, for me.
‘Let me take you down to Nigel’s room,’ said Pam. ‘I’ll get you some refreshments to take with you first, though. You’ll need them, even if he doesn’t.’
Nigel had a suite on the second floor, in what Pam told me had once been the snooker room.
As we went up through the house, she did the same auto-tidying as Lewis: straightening curtains, pocketing loose cutlery, switching off lights, knocking on doors, and so on.
I felt exhausted just walking next to her with the tray.
She knocked at Nigel’s door, with her brisk housekeeper’s triplet, and muttered, ‘Wait for it.’
‘Sod off,’ came a voice from inside the room. ‘Unless you’re Helen Mirren.’
Pam rolled her eyes, and knocked again. ‘Nigel, it’s Pam, can I have a word?’
‘Is the building alight?’
‘No.’
‘Have we been invaded?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Is it absolutely necessary?’
‘I have a tray of tea and some French fancies?’
There was a pause. ‘If you must.’
Pam turned back to me and muttered, as she shouldered the door open, ‘If we didn’t have the French fancies we’d never get in.’
I followed her at a short distance.
It was the emptiest room I’d seen so far.
A bed, made neatly with a blanket and sheets. A mahogany sideboard with a single Chinese vase on it. The main feature of the room was a full-height bookshelf filled with books, battered and well read. In one deep wing armchair sat an old man, doing a crossword, a cup of tea by his side.
He did not look up from the crossword when we walked in.
‘Nigel, this is Beth, she’s one of our Life Story volunteers,’ said Pam.
‘I’ve done the Life Story project.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Yes, I have. I filled in that questionnaire when I moved in. Intrusive bloody thing.’
‘This is different,’ she said patiently. ‘That was about basic care. This is about getting to know you properly.’
‘Well, I don’t want to tell you anything.’ He filled in a clue. ‘Much more interesting for you to guess.’
‘Nigel, you’ve told me several times that we don’t do enough to stimulate our residents mentally. This is your chance to tell us how we can. I’ll leave you to it.’ Pam took the tray off me, and placed it on the side table, pulled a ‘do your best’ face, and closed the door behind her.
Thanks, I thought, but Nigel didn’t tell me to leave, and instead sighed heavily, folded his newspaper and indicated the chair in the corner, which I brought over and set opposite his.
‘So,’ I said brightly. ‘Where shall we start? What did you do before you retired?’
‘Documentary film-making,’ he said. ‘Talked myself on to a training scheme after dithering about for a few years, ended up working across the world.’ He put a whole French fancy in his mouth and chewed slowly, his intelligent eyes fixed on me.
‘What an incredible job. What would you say was the most memorable moment you experienced?’
The response took a while, on account of the cake. ‘Memorable in what way?’
‘Well . . . memorable.’ There’d been literally no memorable moments in my working life. Not even the time I managed to get someone’s Botox passed as an office expense.
Nigel shrugged. ‘Have you seen documentaries about the Munich Olympics? The IRA in London? That sort of memorable? I could tell you about that but I’d just be telling you what was already in the film.’
‘But I’d love to hear how you felt when that was happening. What it was like to be there when history was unfolding?’
‘It wasn’t my job to feel anything, I was there to record the facts. Most of the time I was scared, if you want to know the truth. Scared of the bombs, scared of not getting the report for my editor in time. Scared of not doing it justice.’
Something about the way Nigel said that made me wonder if I’d hit a nerve. I parked it for later.
‘Personally memorable moments then. Not work ones.’
As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
Scanning the room for the usual gallery of wedding photographs, portraits, baby pictures, and the like, I realised that there was nothing, not a shred of anyone else.
If he’d been less spiky, and I’d had more time to think, I probably wouldn’t have asked that, but the unusual speed – for Rosemount – of his responses was throwing me off.
Nigel sat back in his chair. ‘The whole point of having a portfolio of stories about the Berlin Wall is that you don’t have to maintain an amusing set of anecdotes about your own life.’
‘But you’re not telling me those either,’ I pointed out.
Nigel acknowledged this.
‘I suppose my problem, Beth, is that the really special memories, the ones you treasure . . . Sometimes the reasons you remember them are too subtle for this sort of Memory Lane cheesiness. If you pin them down,’ he made a fluttering gesture, ‘they’re gone.
They’re not the same as they were when they were in your head.
And then you can never get them back the same way, when they were lovely and loose, floating around in the back of your mind.
Like pinning down a butterfly. You must know what I mean? ’
I flinched.
In her coaching, Gayle had suggested that we practise what we were asking the residents to do, so we’d be able to offer better help. The previous night, I’d sat down with the pages of questions, shut my eyes, and chosen one at random.
‘Tell me about a turning point in your life.’
That was easy, I thought: the night I met Fraser.
The second of June, 2014. I was on a hen night, and he was on a stag; our groups collided in a cocktail bar called Cinderella’s, at a point in the long, long, plastic-penis-themed evening when I’d already seriously considered going home twice.
But then Fraser crashed into our booth, dressed as Baby Spice (literally, he fell off his platform trainers) and before the Long Island Iced Tea had dried on my jeans, my life had changed. Two became one.
I’d told the story so many times, and it always got a laugh and an ahhhhh.
But writing it down was different. In the space of the first sentence, in black and white, on the screen, I could see the minor tweaks, the small omissions.
My fingers hesitated over details that spooled out easily when I told people: details that I glossed over, or buffed up into bigger significance.
For instance, I liked to say how random it had been, ‘of all the bars in all the world . . .’ but it wasn’t random.
The maid of honour, Sadie, lived with one of Fraser’s friends and she’d deliberately picked the same bar as the one they were going to, so she could make sure Andy wasn’t up to anything.
(He was, unfortunately, and several drinks were thrown while the bride was singing ‘You’re The One That I Want’ with the best man, with whom Sadie later went home.
I missed that out of my anecdote. It was both focus-pulling and inauspicious.)
My fingers also hesitated when I started to type, ‘It was love at first sight for me and Fraser . . .’ because if I was being honest, it took him three days to call, and when he did, he called me Meg, not Beth.
I’d always had the faint suspicion that he thought I was Mali – now I wrote it down, that leaped out at me again.
And he hadn’t been dressed as Baby Spice, specifically; he just had Sharpie freckles and a bra padded with gym socks. Something that now felt quite problematic but had been fine at the time.
But apart from that . . .
‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ Nigel observed.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about what you said. How memories change when you write them down. But sometimes factual inaccuracy in the telling is just capturing the spirit of the memory.’
‘And that’s as important as the facts?’
‘I think so.’
‘Interesting,’ said Nigel, and indicated for me to pass the plate of cakes. ‘You might want to dig into why that is.’
I offered him a French fancy, then took one too, to give myself a moment. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one asking the questions here?
If I was being honest, I knew why my How We Met story had evolved into a more romcom-friendly version over the years.
The Hendersons were natural storytellers with an endless supply of anecdotes – even Fraser, who was hardly Michael McIntyre, could reduce an audience to hysterics with tales of the time a bored Cara had floated baby Fraser’s sunhat across a pond and told their babysitting grandparents he’d drowned.
(I was aghast.) Or the time Fraser and his siblings attended Heather’s first cello recital wearing T-shirts with her face on. (Ditto.)