November
As autumn turned to winter, I spent most of my evenings continuing my research into my mother’s condition and its inevitable progression.
Noah was still in New York, and I was still dividing my time between London and Norfolk.
In the city, every evening I would come home and take off my coat and boots and check the heating.
It was always on, though the flat was always cold.
Despite the work Noah and I had done in the bathroom and the kitchen, we hadn’t got around to installing double-glazing.
Whenever I touched my fingers to the window overlooking the street, already shrouded in a cloak of darkness, an icy chill would gust through me.
The day I finished retouching the seascape, I arrived home and Tom immediately began to weave in and out of my legs in figures of eight, testing my balance.
One thing about living by myself was that I always knew whether he’d already been fed.
After tipping some kibble into his bowl, I pulled up a chair at the dining-room table and opened my laptop.
In the same way I did when I used to revise or write essays at university, I scraped my hair back from my face and up into a pile on the top of my head.
I waited for the Wi-Fi to kick in, my eyes on those three little bars, then I picked up where I’d left off to the sound of Tom happily chomping pellets between his teeth.
The scan had shown that my mother’s Alzheimer’s had begun like most cases, with damage in the hippocampus, the structure deep inside the brain that’s responsible for memory retrieval.
I read that with time, the damage would get worse, making it difficult for her to remember what she’d eaten for lunch that day.
Then it would spread into the cortex, stealing away her long-term memory, too.
Her childhood. Her parents. Her behaviour would begin to change.
Her thinking and her speaking. Her mood.
I thought back to the times over the past year when she’d seemed inexplicably irritable.
As well as advising my mother to get regular exercise and drink lots of water, Doctor Samuel had prescribed a drug called Aricept, which he said would increase the levels of chemical messengers in her brain.
I clicked on a link and tussled with the facts, trying to understand exactly how it would prevent an enzyme from breaking down acetylcholine, the chemical that helps to carry messages between nerve cells.
It would ease at least some of the symptoms of the Alzheimer’s, for a while.
I kept reading. At regular intervals, I was reminded that any reprieve from the symptoms would be short-lived, and that my mother’s unravelling was irretrievable.
During those evenings, when I would begin to feel the overload of scientific information pressing down on my own brain, I would pour myself a glass of wine and heat up whatever food I could find in the cupboards or the fridge.
That night, I opted for leftovers from the day before : vegetable stir-fry, which had tasted surprisingly good when I’d first made it, but now looked soggy and beige.
After Doctor Samuel had brought it up at the research centre, I’d spoken to Edna about what our options would be as and when things progressed.
She couldn’t say for sure when my mother would need full-time care, but she did say that she wasn’t far off needing someone in the house with her for at least a few hours each day.
I’d always been content being an only child.
I may have spent a fair amount of time by myself, but I’d learned early on how to keep myself entertained, drawing and painting.
My parents were happy to take part in my make-believe games occasionally, and Anna and her family had only lived half an hour away.
Now, for the first time, I found myself longing for a sibling.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties and had just started going out with Noah that I asked my mother why she and my father had never had another child. Of course, the thought had occurred to me before, but only in passing ; I’d never been curious enough to formulate it in words.
We were in John Lewis, on one of our semi-regular mother-daughter shopping trips, searching for a wedding gift for a family friend, when at last I asked the question.
It wasn’t entirely out of the blue ; we’d just been discussing the fact that this friend was one of three daughters, and that they would all no doubt want big white weddings.
The parents were traditional and quite well-off, as is a certain strain of Norfolk family, which meant they would probably be picking up the bills.
My mother was still shaking her head at the prospect when I said it.
She had a plain white roasting dish in her hands, and before answering she lifted it up over her head to get a look at the price tag stuck to the base.
She set it back down alongside a bunch of other almost identical dishes, then she looked at me and smiled.
‘You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she replied, brushing her fingers against a hand-painted serving plate with a coral design. ‘I’m just surprised it’s taken you this long to ask.’
She suggested we take a break from shopping and go and get some coffee, which we did at a sprawling café up on the department store’s fourth floor.
We rode each of the four escalators in silence and we still weren’t speaking when we joined the short queue.
As we sat down at a table overlooking the brightly lit atrium, a twisted intestine at the building’s core, I worried something terrible might have happened.
I told her again that she needn’t answer.
She blew on her cappuccino, then took a sip.
I drank some of my own and wished I’d saved this conversation for one of our walks on the beach.
‘It was simple, really,’ she said, still holding onto her mug. ‘After we’d had you, I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get pregnant again.’ My face must have crumpled because she told me it was all right.
‘But you wanted another baby?’
‘Not desperately, but yes, we thought it would be nice.’
Not desperately. I rolled the words around in my mouth and wondered if an absence of desperation would have made the absence of a child any less painful. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, that must have been difficult.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s in the past.’ When I didn’t respond, she added, ‘I actually think it turned out well this way.’
‘You do?’
‘I do. One of your best qualities is your independence.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I said, thinking of the way I’d always relied on her and was already starting to rely on Noah. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’m independent at all.’
She looked at me and smiled a little harder.
When at last the painting’s grand unveiling came around, I almost wished it hadn’t.
It had been a few weeks since I’d spent time with it one on one, alone in the conservation studios.
And yet, as soon as it was secure in its frame and hanging on the wall in one of the galleries for everyone to see, I felt like I’d been cheated.
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I wanted more time with it.
It had only been framed the week before.
After I’d sprayed on a final coat of protective varnish, Frank and I had got together with the curator and discussed what might work formally with the painting.
In the end, we’d opted for an original from the same period.
I’d accompanied it to the framing department, hidden from prying eyes in a wooden crate, and then – like a mother dropping off a child at the school gates – I’d waved it goodbye and, exercising all my efforts on not looking back, walked away.
It happens. Spending months, sometimes a year, with the same work of art can lead to a certain attachment – especially, I find, with works that contain people.
But I hadn’t experienced this kind of loss since the first painting I’d worked on unsupervised.
If I close my eyes, I can still picture every detail on its surface.
The ultramarine blue of the Virgin’s gown, hanging loose in soft, fluid folds.
The delicate pinpricks of light in her halo, glowing a golden yellow.
The way her toes graze the edge of the canvas, as if she’s testing the distance between us and capable of stepping out of her world and into mine at any moment.
There would be several unveilings of View of Scheveningen Sands , for patrons and other important people, the press, the public. First, though, came a slightly more informal debut for museum staff.
We gathered in the gallery to listen to a presentation by the director.
The air was vibrating with chatter and excitement, and when I heard the squeak of a speaker, I realised with a jolt of surprise that the last talk I’d attended was the one Doctor Day had given at the fertility clinic’s open evening.
My thoughts stumbled to my frozen eggs, and then to Robyn’s, less plentiful, her chances slim.
I could feel my palms getting clammy when Frank slipped a cold glass of wine into one of them.
‘Where did you get this?’ I asked, glancing around to see if anyone else was drinking and holding my glass down low, out of sight, when I realised the answer was no.
He tapped the side of his nose.
‘Frank?’
‘Fine, there was a function last night.’
My eyes flashed towards my glass. ‘It’s the good stuff?’
There’s a noticeable difference between the wine on offer at patrons’ events and what the staff get.
He took a long, slow sip, then smacked his lips together. ‘It is indeed.’ Less than discreetly, he moved his own glass towards mine.
I coughed in an effort to drown out the clinking sound, but there was no need : just as our glasses made contact, the director began speaking.