Chapter twenty-three #2
He turned and met my gaze and I could see fear in his watery eyes.
It scared me. How did the nurses deal with the weight of residents’ emotions, as well as their physical well-being?
Bill’s unhappiness was almost enough to drive me out of the room, but I couldn’t bear the thought of him sitting here alone, so I made myself stay.
What could I do? I didn’t want to recap the stories Linda had told me, in case I got them wrong. Then I had an idea.
‘You know, I’ve been meaning to thank you, Bill,’ I said, as lightly as I could. ‘You and Linda have introduced me to some great new music. I wrote down your favourites so I could listen to them in the car. Shall I play that now?’
Bill’s anxious finger tapping stopped for a moment.
‘OK.’ I found the playlist on my phone, put it on the tray next to the French fancies and pressed shuffle. ‘I’ll put it on shuffle. If you don’t like a song, just let me know and I’ll skip on. Like that jukebox Linda used to love in the pub, eh?’
The first tinkling piano notes of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ by Georgie Fame rang out and I reached to change it to something more appropriate, less murderous.
But a tap from Bill’s chair stopped me in my tracks.
‘This.’ It was barely a word, more a breath. Then more definitely, ‘This.’ The ghost of a smile crossed his wrinkled face.
For a second, Bill’s eyes brightened, and the handsome young fruit wholesaler was here, again. My heart gave an almighty ache because, really, he’d never gone.
If I thought about that too much I knew I’d end up in tears, so I turned up my phone, and we sat back and listened to the Animals and Manfred Mann and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, which conjured up stock footage of Ready, Steady, Go!
for me, but, I hoped, full colour, real-life memories of sociable Saturday nights and Butlin’s holidays for Bill.
After a while, he seemed to settle in his chair, while Tomsk snored, and I started to relax.
If Lewis hadn’t started the Story of My Life project, I thought, watching the way Bill was slowly slipping into sleep, none of this would be possible.
Lewis and his positive energy had brought something precious to Rosemount.
He’d listened, and he’d helped people talk.
He’d healed Rosemount’s soul, the same way he’d mown the lawn and cleaned every window, not just the ones within easy reach.
As I thought about Lewis, a protective feeling bloomed in my chest, and when I was sure Bill had dropped off, I quietly retrieved my phone and looked again at what people were saying about Rosemount online.
My jaw dropped, and I could feel my blood pressure rising as I read – accusations of negligence, shocking claims about old people left to die in rooms .
. . it was libellous, surely? Could he sue?
Could Rosemount’s management sue? It was typical anonymous keyboard-warrior bollocks, but exactly the kind of ‘no smoke without fire’ allegations that made people rush in to take their elderly relatives away.
This wasn’t Lewis’s fault, I fumed. He was a decent man, a lovely man.
None of this should be laid at his door.
I wanted to help him, because I could tell this was going to get worse, not better.
And the fact that he’d been late to the drama because of me only added a nasty, shameful edge to my outrage.
Sadly, the good ideas refused to come, and I too let my brain drift away to a Waterloo Sunset, where it was paradise.
Pam knocked softly on the door a few songs later, with a nurse called Dawn.
‘Dawn’s going to give Bill his meds and sit with him for a bit,’ she whispered.
‘Pam mentioned Bill was in the fruit trade,’ murmured Dawn. ‘My grandad was too, so we can have a wee chat about Covent Garden market.’
I gave her a thumbs-up.
‘Lewis made a chart for the staff room,’ Pam whispered as we left. ‘We had a look at the stories to see if we could link up the staff with the residents when it came to birth places and grandparents’ jobs and whatnot.’
‘What a good idea,’ I whispered back.
‘Speaking of which, Gayle’s in reception, and I’m not sure what to do. She had a meeting scheduled with Lewis to discuss rolling out the story project in the other homes in the group, but obviously he’s not available now. She’s come all the way from Malvern.’
I still hadn’t made my appointment to talk to Gayle about my manuscript but any thought I had of swerving the conversation vanished when she spotted me and Pam approaching.
‘You!’ She pointed at me. ‘We are overdue a chat.’
‘This isn’t the best time . . .’
‘There’s never a best time.’ Gayle turned to Pam. ‘Beth and I will be in the library if Lewis manages to get out of his meeting. Can you let him know where we are?’
‘No problem.’ Pam had taken up her station at the reception desk with grim determination again, and I was being swept down the library by my creative writing coach.
Gayle sat down on the chairs that Kay and Hugh Lloyd usually sat in to do their crosswords, and launched straight into her critique of The Road to Love is Long (a title I’d pulled out of the air when I had to call it something to email it to her).
‘I like what you’ve written so far,’ she said. ‘But I know exactly why you can’t get it over that hump. It’s obvious, once you see it.’
‘Is it?’ I’d been working on this story on and off for about ten years, so I was hoping the problem might be a little more complicated than that.
‘Beth, who is this story about? Who is the central character driving the action?’
‘Isabella.’ Once I’d made the spontaneous decision to give my heroine a more normal name, she’d turned into a real person in my head: the blond hair, blue eyes description I’d put in my spreadsheet had solidified into a real face, with thick hair that went frizzy in the rain and dark eyebrows that could look unintentionally stern.
‘So tell me Isabella’s story.’
‘Isabella is in love with Arthur, the youngest son of the landowner next door,’ I recited.
I knew the set-up off by heart. ‘But she’s poor, and Arthur needs to marry into money, so when their fathers find out, Arthur is forced to seek his fortune in the gold fields of the Yukon for a year, and Isabella is sent north to look after her aunt. ’
Gayle tipped her head. ‘Go on.’
To be honest, it was hard to raise much enthusiasm for my manuscript, what with the events of the last twenty-four hours. It all felt stale. But I might never get the chance of an editorial critique like this again, so I did my best.
‘And then, well, I know how it finishes,’ I said.
‘Arthur returns from America or wherever he’s been, having spent months and months trying to track Isabella down, and they’re reunited.
It’s in the middle of a rainstorm, and he tells her he made a terrible mistake in not standing up to his father, and that he wants to marry her immediately.
’ I frowned. ‘I just can’t get past the bit in the middle. ’
To be fair, it was quite a big bit.
‘OK, so let’s brainstorm this.’
I didn’t really want to, but Gayle was being more enthusiastic about my story that I was, and I was hoping Lewis might emerge from his office before I left.
‘What does Isabella do in between? She doesn’t just sit there waiting for Arthur to come back, right?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So what does she do?’
Truthfully, I had no idea. The bit between the parting and reunion was unspecific beyond ‘they miss each other and Isabella writes him letters’ – the possibilities were too vast to pin down, and I ended up floundering in the infinity of it.
‘Um . . .’ I cast my eye around the library for inspiration and saw a pencil sketch of a horse. ‘She becomes an artist,’ I said. ‘She’s always been good at drawing so she starts sketching the neighbours’ horses. And children. She’s observant. People relax with her.’
‘Maybe she’s a little too realistic in some of her drawings,’ Gayle mused. ‘That could be funny!’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘A bit of controversy about someone’s big ears, or someone’s child who looks more like their godfather than their dad?’
‘Exactly! I like the symbolism of Isabella being a portraitist, it’s clever.’
‘Thank you!’ I angled my head subtly to see if I could spot Lewis in the corridor.
‘So what does she learn about people through doing it?’
‘How to read people’s faces? How to see beneath the surface and paint someone’s soul?
’ I don’t know where that came from, it just popped into my head.
‘And maybe she could do a self-portrait which helps her to look at herself more honestly . . . so I guess she learns about herself, while she’s observing other people. ’
Gayle pointed at me as if I’d just said something brilliant.
‘And she meets various neighbours, gets commissions from them, maybe the rugged local landowner with a mysterious past who could fall in love with her. Then when Arthur comes back from his travels,’ I went on, surprising myself with my own powers of invention, ‘she goes into her sketching room expecting to see the landowner, ready for his sitting, only to find Arthur sitting there! What?’
‘Why not the mysterious landowner? He sounds interesting.’
‘Because the whole point of the story is that Arthur comes back. He’s journeyed across the world for Isabella.’
‘So you’re setting half the book in the Gold Rush?’
God, no. That sounded like a lot of research. ‘No, but . . .’
‘So why should we care about Arthur’s journey?’
‘Because he has to go away to come back for Isabella.’
Gayle shrugged, as if I’d answered my own question. ‘That’s why you’re stuck. Isabella’s the hero, give her the journey. Even if she stays in a tiny village the whole time.’
I could see the logic of this, but it felt very at odds with the book in my head. Even though the book in my head had huge gaps in it.
‘Everything you need is already there. You just have to ask yourself what happens now? Ask it aloud, if it helps.’
I screwed up my nose. ‘What if Isabella doesn’t immediately recognise Arthur, after the travails of his journey, but as she carries on sketching and he talks, she realises that though his features are familiar, she doesn’t recognise his personality, because she hadn’t had time in their whirlwind romance to get to know the real him. ’
‘Every heroine needs a blind spot, an Achilles heel,’ said Gayle. ‘Maybe Isabella’s is Arthur? She can see everything clearly apart from what a bore he is. Sorry.’
‘But that’s not going to fit in with the end,’ I insisted. ‘Isabella and Arthur get married.’
‘Why? The end of the book is often the least interesting part. Stop thinking about the end of your story, think about the middle. You might find it ends somewhere completely different. You’ve intrigued me with this mysterious neighbour.’
Despite my attempts to keep Arthur and Isabella front and centre in my mind’s eye, new images were pushing their way forward.
Suddenly I could see Douglas, the neighbour, his old coat thrown over a chair, leaning on a fireplace pretending to stare out at the fields but covertly stealing glances at Isabella at her easel; I could see her frown of concentration as she filled in the detail of his face, her pencil hesitating over Douglas’s crooked front teeth, the smear of coffee above her lip that he’d been too polite to tell her about.
I could see them trying not to look at each other; I could even see the polished brass oil lamps and the patterned tiles on the fireplace in a room that I’d never imagined before in my life.
And actually, Douglas wasn’t a rich landowner, he was a farmer who bred shire horses and took in the ageing foxhounds when they couldn’t keep up with the pack, letting them sleep in his kitchen.
I stared at Gayle, stupefied. I’d never had such a rush of ideas.
She seemed pleased. ‘Go away and write whatever you’ve just seen in your head,’ she said. ‘I want the whole thing by the end of the month.’
That brought me back to earth with a bump. ‘What? No, that’s impossible.’
‘Beth, you’ve been working on this for how long now? Too much thinking time. Just write it.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Let Isabella tell her own story.’
I got up, feeling a bit dazed but also twitchy. I needed to get these ideas down before the inspiration faded.
‘Don’t forget, Isabella’s the hero of this story,’ she called, as I left. ‘Not Arthur.’
I thought about nothing else for the entire drive home, as Isabella and Douglas chatted in my head, as real as old friends, but when I pulled up outside Coleridge Drive, and wondered if I should tell Martine about Hugh and Linda, I was suddenly struck by a very different thought.
Life was so short, and so unpredictable.
Martine ought to know someone up at Rosemount had memories of her that still filled them with happy nostalgia; what she decided to do with that information was up to her.
We need never speak of it, but it wasn’t for me to come down in judgement about something that happened over sixty years ago.
Before I could change my mind, I went inside, put all the Nessy memories in an envelope with a brief note, and posted them through Martine’s door.