Chapter 6
6
One of the things Gwen loved most about her volunteering role at St Piran’s was doing the rounds with the hospital trolley. It meant she got to visit lots of different wards and had the chance to chat with all kinds of people. Barry had always teased her about being incurably nosey, but she preferred to think of it as inquisitive. She was just interested in other people’s lives and in hearing their stories, and over the years she’d made some good friends as a result of chance encounters that had sparked the start of a conversation. She’d never had as much time for reading as she would have liked, mainly because her determination to be on the go all the time meant she didn’t have the concentration it took to focus on much more than a magazine when she finally sat down. Instead she got her fix for stories from the lives of the people she met.
As a midwife she’d been trusted with patients’ secrets, and aspects of their lives they hadn’t even told their loved ones. More than once she’d supported women whose partners thought they were pregnant with their first child, when in truth it was only the man’s first child. Gwen had always thought it was sad that these women, who were about to share the most intimate experience possible with the person they professed to love, hadn’t felt able to tell their partners about their past. She’d always been an open book when it came to Barry; there’d never been anything she hadn’t felt able to tell him about her past, and no subject affecting their present that had felt taboo to broach. But just recently he’d been pushing her to revisit one of the most difficult parts of her past, and suddenly it felt like every conversation with him was loaded. She didn’t want to confront all the feelings it would rake up and she was nowhere near ready to face the ‘what ifs’ about their future if she ended up sharing her mother’s fate. One thing Gwen hated more than anything was the idea of losing control of her own life, and a progressive and debilitating illness was her worst nightmare, not least because she’d witnessed it first hand. It was far easier to bury herself in work, listening to the patchwork of stories and problems that made up other people’s lives. There were other volunteers running the shop today, but she was in no hurry to finish her round and head home, where Barry would be waiting. Her casual chats with the patients could draw out all day long as far as she was concerned.
St Michael’s had always been one of Gwen’s favourite wards. The patients were all under the care of the specialist geriatric team, and had a range of medical conditions, including both physical and cognitive illnesses.
Camilla Armstrong had been in St Michael’s Ward for several days, after a chest infection had turned into pneumonia. She was out of danger by the time Gwen first met her, having spent the first two days in intensive care, but she’d still been tearful and stressed. Camilla’s concerns weren’t about her illness. She’d been panicking about when she could get home to her dogs and, perhaps more surprisingly, to her horse. When Camilla had told Gwen about the horse, whose name was Bojangles, all of the assumptions she’d had about the frail, older woman sitting in the bed in front of her had to be questioned. She’d spoken about riding Bojangles through the fields near her cottage, and Gwen had found herself wondering for a moment whether Camilla was living in a different place and time inside her mind. She’d seen it often enough before: elderly patients talking about needing to buy school shoes for their children, or even calling out for their own mum and dad. Sometimes it was nothing less than tragic, but at other times she tried to hold on to the idea that it gave those patients comfort. One thing Gwen tried never to do was picture herself in those same circumstances, it was too close to home. She didn’t know if her mother had ever reached the stage where she’d forgotten who she was, but she’d lost the ability to express her thoughts, even the sort of jumbled memories some patients shared with Gwen, and in many ways that seemed even worse.
‘Camilla keeps talking about having a horse.’ Gwen had looked at one of the nurses quizzically, gesturing towards Camilla, but the nurse had nodded in response.
‘Oh yes, Bojangles.’ The young nurse smiled. ‘We thought Cami might be a bit confused at first, but she asked me to call Kirsty, the woman who keeps her horse in one of the stables at Cami’s place, in return for helping with Bojangles, and he definitely isn’t a figment of her imagination! She’s horse mad. It’s been her whole life apparently.’
Afterwards Gwen had gone back to chat to Camilla, who’d insisted that Gwen call her Cami, as all the people she liked apparently did.
‘Only my father ever called me Camilla, and a lot of the time he was terribly cross with me for something or other. So now it feels like I’m being told off whenever I hear someone say it.’
Gwen had happily ignored the end of her shift so that Cami could tell her more about her beloved animals, and the others she’d owned right back to when she was growing up at Portharren Manor, a sprawling country estate to the west of Port Kara. It was like someone had turned a light on inside of Cami, and Gwen had felt terrible for doing the thing she’d sworn she’d never do, making sweeping assumptions on the basis of the person’s age alone. Today she wanted to try and make amends. She’d bought a copy of Horse and Hound magazine, and had placed it casually on top of the other magazines on the trolley, just before she got to the ward. They didn’t stock it in the shop, and she wasn’t sure if it was something Cami enjoyed reading, but she decided it was worth a gamble.
‘Hello again Cami, how are you doing now?’ Gwen stopped by her bed and the other woman wrinkled her nose.
‘It’s a frightful bore being trapped in here.’ Cami announced her status in a cut-glass accent, so refined she made the Duchess of Cambridge sound as though she could audition for a role in EastEnders . ‘I know I’m horribly ungrateful, when all the nurses work so hard, but it’s terribly dull and I loathe being stuck indoors.’
Gwen had to press her lips together for a moment to stop herself from laughing. There was a flamboyance about Cami that verged on the theatrical. It reminded Gwen of when her daughter had made very over-the-top pronouncements as a child about just how unbearable life could be when it wasn’t going her way. Gwen’s daughter had ended up being a big fan of amateur dramatics and it seemed Cami might have some untapped talent too.
‘At least you’re not missing any good weather. It’s blowing a gale out there today.’ Gwen smiled and lifted a couple of the magazines up from the trolley. ‘Maybe you could think of this as an opportunity to catch up on some reading, I bet you never get the chance to do that when you’re at home.’
‘That’s true.’ Cami’s response didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic, but then her eyes rested on the copy of the magazine that Gwen had bought especially for her. ‘Oh gosh, I didn’t dream you’d stock the Horse and Hound. How marvellous, and it’s got just the article I need.’
As Gwen passed her the magazine, Cami jabbed a finger against the front cover which detailed various articles, included one entitled ‘joint care made easy’.
‘Is that for you or the horse?’ The joke had come out of Gwen’s mouth before she’d had the chance to stop it. That sort of thing happened a lot, and she knew she had a reputation for having a cheeky sense of humour. She might not want to write people off on the basis of their age, but there was nothing Gwen wouldn’t make a joke out of if the situation and the timing were right. It was the only way to get through the tough times. The trouble was, she barely knew Cami, and she had no idea whether the other woman would find it funny or offensive. For just a moment there was silence, and then Cami started to laugh.
‘I should probably get the vet to put us both out of our misery! Perhaps she’ll give me a good deal, one of those where you buy one and then you get another one free.’ She laughed again and Gwen couldn’t help joining in, partly because of the way she’d worded it, but then Cami started coughing.
‘Are you okay? Sorry, I shouldn’t have made you laugh when you’re not feeling well.’ Gwen looked to see if she could spot one of the nurses, but none of them seemed to be around. She handed Cami a drink from the table in front of her, but the coughing had already eased and she shook her head.
‘Nonsense, whoever said laughter’s the best medicine was absolutely right.’ Cami leaned towards the locker at the side of her bed. ‘How much do I owe for the magazine? It’s going to be a life saver having something decent to read, I just know it.’
‘It’s my treat, you made me laugh too.’ A twinge of regret twisted in Gwen’s gut. She didn’t usually need a reason to laugh, it came easily to her, but lately it was just one more thing that seemed to be drifting further and further out of reach.
‘I couldn’t possibly let you pay for it.’
‘It’s fine, honestly, it was a free sample for the shop, to see whether it might be something we’d consider stocking in future.’ Even as she told the lie, Gwen wasn’t sure why she was doing it. There was something about Cami, though, an echo in her faded blue eyes of Gwen’s mother, who’d been just as tearful and panicked during her early admissions to hospital as Cami had been the first time they’d met.
Gwen went above and beyond for lots of people, but the pull she felt towards Cami was even stronger than her usual desire to make patients’ lives a little bit better. She wanted the outcome to be different this time around. She didn’t want her new friend to fade away until she was barely more than a shadow of the woman she used to be, just like her mother had done. It was stupid, the situations were so different, but she knew that wouldn’t stop her coming back tomorrow with something else she thought might perk Cami up. If there could just be a happy outcome this time around for the woman with the pale blue eyes, then perhaps there’d be a happy ever after for Gwen too.
* * *
Gwen was bone tired and all she wanted to do was flop on to the sofa and watch TV, but she couldn’t. She was hosting a get together for the Mrs Adventures club after work. It was one of the groups she’d started since retiring and she usually loved getting together with the other women. Sometimes they’d catch up just to chat and talk about their lives, the good bits, the bad bits, and everything in between. At other times they’d get together for a specific event, or to plan their next adventure, hence the name of the group. So far there’d been zorbing, clay pigeon shooting, quad biking and even a tandem handglide with qualified instructors. It was a rebellion of sorts, and proof that just because you were a woman of a certain age the adventures didn’t have to stop.
Tonight there was no specific agenda for the meeting, but they were overdue another adventure. Normally by now she would have planned one; she often had the next idea brewing even before they’d completed the latest one. Right now, she couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm and it had crossed her mind to cancel the get together, but she couldn’t do that. It wasn’t because her friends would have held it against her. They’d probably have been happy to meet elsewhere, or just to give the meeting a miss this time. The reason she couldn’t cancel had nothing to do with letting them down, it was because she was scared. If she started pulling out of things it would become a slippery slope. She already felt as though she’d lost her zest for life and it terrified her.
That sort of apathy had plagued her once before, and it had terrified her then too. She’d been convinced it was a sign of the illness she dreaded, the illness that had robbed her mother of who she was, before eventually robbing her of her life too. Alys Evans had been a power house, who’d had six children including Gwen, and had run a sheep farm with her husband, Ivor, a few miles outside Porthmadog. Growing up in Wales had been idyllic for Gwen, but when Barry’s job had taken him and Gwen to Cornwall, it had become their adopted home and these days she considered herself a proud Cornishwoman, not even her accent gave her away.
Despite her love for her adopted home, Gwen had missed Wales, and her siblings, but most of all her mum and dad. There’d been a couple of times she’d even considered moving back. The first had been when Gwen had become a mother herself, and had felt the draw to be back near her own mum, leaning on her for support, particularly in the early months when she’d felt lonely and isolated. But Gwen had done what she always did, taking matters into her own hands and starting up a mother and toddler group, long before every village had one of its own. The second time she’d felt the pull to go home, had been when her father had died, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Alys had been fifty-five years old when she’d lost her husband, who’d been ten years older than she was. She’d stated her intention to continue running the farm, and had brushed away the concerns of her children. Gwen’s eldest brother, Rhodri, had offered to join their mother on the farm full time and Gwen’s misgivings had begun to fade. There were three hundred miles between Porthmadog and Port Kara, and, with a young family, Gwen didn’t manage to get back to the farm nearly as often as she would have liked. By the time her mother’s fifty-seventh birthday came around, it had been almost six months since they’d seen one another.
‘Mam seems to be ageing fast these days.’ Rhodri’s warning on the phone before Gwen arrived for her visit should have prepared her for what she saw on her return to Wales, but it didn’t. Alys was barely recognisable as the feisty force of nature she had always been and, when she’d turned to look at Gwen and the grandchildren, for one terrifying moment Gwen had thought her own mother didn’t recognise her. Then Alys had suddenly given a physical jolt of recognition. Despite Gwen’s initial relief, the changes in her mother were evident; she seemed to be struggling with how to phrase things, and had developed repetitive patterns of behaviour, which included folding and refolding the stack of tea towels she kept under the sink hundreds of times during Gwen’s visit.
Gwen’s youngest sister, Elena, had moved in by then to help Rhodri out. She’d told Gwen that Alys’s GP had dismissed her behaviours as symptoms of ‘the change’, but had confided her fear that things seemed to be getting worse, even though she should have gone through the menopause by now. Much to Alys’s displeasure, Gwen and her sister had insisted on taking their mother to the doctors again. There’d been a series of tests and some dead ends, before Alys had finally been diagnosed with primary progress aphasia, a form of dementia that eventually left her a shell of the woman she’d once been.
Barry had supported Gwen’s decision to return to Porthmadog to help care for her mother, but Elena and Rhodri wouldn’t hear of it, telling Gwen that nothing had made Alys prouder than the success of her daughter’s career as a midwife. Instead, she’d visited as often as she could, and had used all her holiday allowance to stay at the farm and provide respite so that her sister and Rhodri could take a break. It was almost five years to the day of diagnosis that Alys had succumbed to her illness. She’d been sixty-two when she’d died and Gwen hadn’t been sure whether she’d feel anything at all when she finally lost her mum, because she’d already been grieving her for years. To her surprise, a wave of devastation had hit her harder than she’d ever have imagined possible and for a while her grief seemed to swallow her whole. She wasn’t just grieving for the loss of her mother, she was grieving for the loss of those final years, when Alys had no longer been Alys, and for everything the family had been robbed of as a result.
When Gwen had started to struggle with her memory in her early fifties, and had found herself trying to grasp words that felt fully formed in her brain, but which for some reason wouldn’t come out of her mouth, she’d been devastated all over again, convinced she was about to receive the same diagnosis as her mother. When tests had revealed that in her case the symptoms really had been down to the menopause, Gwen’s whole body had flooded with relief. She’d had a horrible couple of years, but it had been manageable, knowing that it would pass, and she’d been convinced that she’d escaped the possibility of inheriting her mother’s condition. Except in the last few weeks, the words of the consultant she’d seen back then seemed to be ringing in her ears.
‘Having a parent with primary progressive aphasia does make it more likely that you’ll inherit the disease.’
Gwen couldn’t blame the symptoms she’d been experiencing lately on menopause, and she’d been too afraid to even google them. A voice inside her head had kept up a running commentary instead, telling her that she didn’t need tests, she knew what this was, and that no one could expect a lucky escape twice over. There was no denying the symptoms either. She seemed to lose her train of thought at times, her motivation and energy levels had fallen through the floor and sometimes she struggled to focus on what other people were saying. She just didn’t feel like herself any more, but she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else realising, so she put on an act of being the same old Gwen. She might be laughing and joking the way she always had, but on the inside it was as though something had already died, her joie de vivre snuffed out like the flame on a candle.
Thankfully no one at the Mrs Adventures club seemed to have realised that Gwen was there in body alone. There’d been animated chat between the rest of the group, and Gwen had thrown in a few of her usual one liners. She’d laughed when everyone else did, and made sure she kept the drinks flowing. She just wasn’t feeling any of the things she usually felt during a night in with the girls, and it was almost as if she was watching herself from above, rather than actually being there.
‘My cousin who lives in Kent is doing a wing walk to raise money for her local hospital and I was wondering if that could be our next adventure?’ Caroline was the mother of one of the A&E nurses at St Piran’s, Esther, and she and Gwen had become good friends over the past couple of years, especially since she’d started volunteering in the hospital shop.
‘Exactly how sturdy are these wings?’ Frankie, Gwen’s best friend, who was also a midwife, raised her eyebrows. ‘When I went into the village shop last night, all of the drinks in the refrigerator cabinet started rattling when I stomped past. It was like I was creating my own reading on the Richter scale.’
‘Oh shut up.’ Wendy laughed as she gave Frankie a gentle nudge in the ribs. ‘As a member of staff, I know I should support the idea of raising money for the hospital, but I’m about to marry the love of my life after more than two decades of living with a total knob. So can we at least wait until after the wedding?’
‘Good idea.’ Connie nodded. She’d been a patient at the hospital when Gwen had first met her, and she’d made a remarkable recovery after a serious accident, but it turned out she was still willing to play up her injuries when it suited her. ‘I’m just not quite sure I’ve got the strength for something like that any more. Not after the accident.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve got the right pants for it.’ Frankie wrinkled her nose. ‘I have problems holding on to the contents of my bladder if I drive round a corner too fast.’
For the first time that evening, Gwen’s laughter was genuine and the conversation quickly derailed into an exchange of experiences about just how much of challenge it was to be a woman of a certain age.
‘I should probably have done more pelvic floor exercises after I had Esther.’ Caroline lowered her voice as she shared the hushed confession. ‘But I remember trying to do them one day when I was sitting on the bus, just like my midwife had advised. Ten minutes into the journey, the bus suddenly pulled over and the driver shot upstairs. He’d seen me in the mirror up there, you know the one they use to keep an eye on the passengers, and he thought I was having a funny turn because of the pained expression on my face. Turns out I can’t clench anything down there , without clenching the muscles in my face too!’
‘I bet Gwen knows some techniques.’ Wendy looked in her direction.
‘I think I might have left it a bit too late.’ Caroline frowned, but Gwen shook her head.
‘It’s never too late. I helped a patient once whose pelvic floor was so far gone, she almost turned her daughter’s birthday trip to a trampoline park into a pool party.’ Everyone was laughing so much by then, that they wouldn’t have heard the technique Gwen recommended, even if she’d tried to share it with them. It felt so good to just laugh with her friends, and forget about the nagging voice in her head for a little while.
‘Did you have a good night?’ Barry came up behind her as she stood in the kitchen once the others had left, and slid his arms around her waist. ‘I could hear you all laughing from upstairs.’
‘Probably best not to ask what about.’ She smiled, leaning back into him and feeling better than she had in weeks. Maybe she really had just been tired, and all she’d needed was a night in with the girls to pep her up.
‘Any gossip you can pass on?’ Barry’s tone was teasing and she turned around in the circle of his arms so they were face to face.
‘Not gossip exactly, but Wendy has worked out where she wants to go on…’ The next word had been on the tip of Gwen’s tongue, ready to spill out of her mouth, but now it felt like a rock wedged in her throat. She could picture the image of what she wanted to say, see it so clearly, a red bridge and an island in the distance, but it was like the connection between her brain and her voice had suddenly snapped.
‘On your next adventure?’ There was concern on Barry’s face as he watched Gwen, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, but she was shaking her head.
‘It’s where you go on an aeroplane. You know, after there’s a wedding.’ Panic was washing over Gwen now and her eyes filled with tears as she looked at Barry again.
‘A honeymoon?’ She tried to nod in response, but the tears were rolling down her cheeks. How could she have forgotten the words to tell Barry that Wendy wanted to go to San Franciso on her honeymoon?
‘It’s okay darling, it’s okay.’ As he pulled her closer, her heartbeat thudded in her ears, but it still didn’t drown out the voice that was back, telling her she could no longer deny it. If she couldn’t even conjure up a simple word like honeymoon, there had to be something seriously wrong, and she was terrified the aphasia that had so cruelly taken her mother wasn’t going to let her get away a second time.