September #3
‘Maybe I can come and visit one weekend? You know, depending on your movements.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ I said, my mind skipping forward over the days, weeks, months aching out in front of me, all of which were suddenly blurred.
My mother was dressed and sitting at the kitchen table with her handbag on her knee when I came down for breakfast. She’d made an effort, blow-drying her hair and lining her lower lids with kohl.
Beneath her plum-coloured coat she was wearing a silky white shirt printed with blue feathers. Plain silver studs pierced her lobes.
‘I like that shirt, Mum,’ I said, glancing at the clock and wondering how long she’d been waiting. I’d managed to get an appointment for midday, and it had only just gone half past ten. ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen it before.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
‘Have you had breakfast?’ Before she had a chance to answer, I added, ‘I could make us some eggs if you like?’
‘I’ve eaten, thank you.’
‘What about some tea or coffee? We’re in good time – Peggy won’t be here for another hour.’
‘I know, Catherine.’
I couldn’t work out if the use of my full name was yet another sign of her forgetfulness or simply a symptom of her frustration at my fussing.
Either way, I opened the door to the fridge and took a moment, gathering my thoughts.
Then I closed it again and opened the breadbin, fishing out a single slice to make myself some toast.
‘Do make your mind up,’ my mother mumbled.
I was taken aback, but I tried my hardest to smile.
Peggy drove, with my mother in the passenger seat and me in the back.
The surgery was only fifteen minutes away, and for the entirety of the journey my mother faced the window, her nose close to the glass.
I suggested we listen to Radio 4, her station of choice, but she said she needed some quiet time to think.
I wanted to ask her what she was thinking about, to say that we could talk it through together, like we used to do, but I resisted.
She’d been going to the same doctor for the past thirty years, the same doctor my father had gone to.
By this point we all referred to her by her first name, Edna.
She was a slight woman, with sculptural features that were more malleable than they looked, softening as she spoke.
Her hair, the colour of straw, was always scraped back from her face and her wide-set eyes were shaped like almonds.
She greeted us personally and invited us to follow her into her office.
To begin with, Edna carried out some checks that, if the purpose of our visit had been different, might have passed for preamble.
‘How have you been spending your time lately?’ she asked my mother.
‘Are you still managing to get out into the garden despite the cold and the wet? What have you been reading over the past couple of months?’ That sort of thing.
My mother did a fairly good job of recounting her days, even if she couldn’t remember the author of the book that was currently sitting on her bedside table, or the name of a particularly gripping TV drama she’d seen.
‘I sowed some spring cabbage and spinach seeds last week,’ she said, adding that she would soon need to cover them with fleece.
My eyes flickered between hers and Edna’s, alert to anything that could pass as a reaction, positive or negative.
When she was done, Edna asked how she was feeling in herself. She asked how she’d been sleeping – ‘sometimes good, sometimes bad’ – and whether she would consider herself to be depressed.
My mother parted her lips to say something, then closed them again and pulled her shoulders back. When she reopened them : ‘I would not.’
Then : ‘Do you have any worries about your memory, Janey, or complaints?’
At this point, my mother’s posture crumbled. She looked at me.
Edna nodded and followed her gaze. ‘Go ahead, Cathy,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you share your concerns?’
I felt my throat close up and quickly swallowed some air.
‘Anything you’ve noticed over the past few months? Changes in mental abilities, behaviour, mood?’
I shifted in my seat, a little uncomfortable talking about my mother with her sitting right beside me, recalling how cross I used to get when, as a child, she spoke openly with other adults about me. At dinner parties and parent-teacher conferences. This time, she was the one being graded.
‘When did these changes begin?’
‘May I?’ Sensing my discomfort, Peggy came to my rescue, and I told her, too quickly, to go ahead.
‘It’s been quite gradual, I think.’ She looked at my mother, who dipped her head in agreement.
‘To begin with, we didn’t think much of it – the forgetting, I mean.
After all, it happens to the best of us! ’
I recalled her saying the same thing to me a couple of months ago.
‘But recently it’s been more than just little things.’
‘Can you give me some examples?’ asked Edna, jotting down a few notes in a lined notepad. When her biro appeared to dry up, and scribbling didn’t help, she touched its tip to her tongue and the ink started flowing again.
‘I didn’t know where I was,’ my mother interjected, wrinkling her nose as she tried to explain how it felt. ‘It wasn’t like forgetting the name of something, or not recognising someone. I really thought …’ She trailed off like a loose piece of thread.
I reached for her hand. ‘This was when you went to the farm shop, wasn’t it, Mum?’
She nodded sadly, and said in a quiet voice, ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘And a similar thing happened on the beach just yesterday, didn’t it?’ I asked, squeezing her hand.
Silently, she nodded.
‘Well, I think we should run some tests,’ said Edna, giving a small smile of encouragement.
‘I would like to take a blood sample and I’m also going to test your vision and hearing, Janey, if that’s all right?
’ My mother must have looked nervous because she added that there was no need to be. ‘We’re just ruling things out.’
My mother uttered an almost inaudible ‘OK’.
‘Perhaps you could take a seat in the waiting room, Peggy?’ Turning to me, she said, ‘It might be nice for your mum to have you stay.’
‘Of course,’ I said, trying to keep check of my own nerves, which I could feel quivering beneath my skin.
I hadn’t anticipated it – that being in a surgery would bring up the feelings I’d experienced at the fertility clinic.
But it was no wonder, really, especially when Edna started to talk us through the next stages and share her initial findings, using words such as ‘time’ and ‘deterioration’.
Like triggers, those words turned my thoughts to my body and my frozen eggs and what would happen if, as I still hoped, I never needed to use them.
Hurtling through my mind immediately after those thoughts was another about how self-centred I was to be thinking about anything but my mother at this moment.
Edna booked her in for a second appointment.
She wanted to conduct one or two more mental ability tests, including a memory test with a pen and paper.
She asked if I would be able to accompany my mother each time, and without hesitation I replied, ‘Of course.’ As we left her office and rejoined Peggy in the waiting room, I found myself contemplating the future again and how we would cope.
Maybe it was a good thing that Noah was away ; I didn’t feel torn about where I needed to be.
On the journey home, my mother said she would like to listen to Radio 4 now, and when Peggy turned it on there was a segment on the value of solitude.
As we listened to a group of writers talk about finding inspiration in isolation, I imagined my mother’s reaction to having a carer in the house.
The days and weeks that followed were out of control, bleeding into one another like the liquid shades of a watercolour.
I spent half my time in London, the other half in Norfolk.
When I was in London, Peggy all but moved into the house under the pretence that her boiler was on the blink ; if my mother was suspicious, she didn’t show it.
Every evening, I would call when I got back from work, and the two of them would be watching some TV show together, eating their dinner on trays like an old married couple.
Peggy’s own husband, a grumpy but good-hearted man called Ted, had died just a few years before my father.
I got to know the view from the train by heart, a blurred backdrop imprinted on my brain : brick tunnels, tower blocks of flats, golden-brown hedges and trees, electricity pylons marching towards the horizon like malnourished giants.
As we peeled away from London and its industrial outskirts, I would recognise, just briefly, the familiar feeling that used to settle over me whenever I headed home from the city.
Body relaxing. Mind slowing. By the time we were cutting a smooth and uninterrupted path through the fields – the farmers hard at work ploughing, cultivating and drilling – my thoughts were racing, and I felt feverish.
I convinced HR to let me go down to four days at the museum, and every Friday morning I would drag myself to Liverpool Street, my limbs sluggish from lack of sleep.
There was too much empty space in our bed without Noah beside me, too much quiet without his heavy breathing.
I remember perfectly clearly the feeling I had lying alone on the mattress, wide awake in the middle of the night : it was as if I was adrift at sea, far from the shore, the water green and cloudy.