The Carer Page 11

  All these were early signs of dementia, of course. The dreaded word they didn’t like to mention. Another sign, she’d read, was sexual disinhibition. Maybe her dad had been making sexually inappropriate remarks to Mandy, or bragging to her. This seemed difficult to imagine with her darling father, but age can have a coarsening effect on even the most civilised of minds.

  Or maybe it was Mandy herself who was going mad.

  When Phoebe got home she discovered there had been a power cut, and the High Street was plunged into darkness. Sodden from her dash across the yard, she blundered into the kitchen. The storm rattled the windowpanes as if it was giving the house a shake. She pictured it wrenched from its foundations and lifted, spinning, into the sky.

  Her own moorings had been loosened; she felt alone, and utterly adrift. Had her father really been unfaithful? Sixty-four years of marriage; it was not beyond the bounds of possibility, especially for such an irresistible man. Maybe he had briefly strayed. If so, he’d been like every man with whom she had ever been involved.

  But she didn’t want him to be like that. Not her dad. Surely he wasn’t the sort? And what on earth had Mandy meant about her mother? She was a cool woman – severe, sometimes – but that hardly meant she was frigid.

  Phoebe felt her childhood shifting beneath her. It was deeply disturbing, feeling the doubt spreading like poison into the past. How dare Mandy blunder into her family life like this and spread such stupid rumours? Maybe it was a class resentment thing and she wanted to prick their bubble of privilege. And then, almost worse, she’d back-tracked, all sickly-sweet and huggy-huggy. Cloying. Phoebe could still feel her pillowy flesh; the scent of TCP from dressing her father’s wound.

  Trapped in her grip, Phoebe had hated her. Hated her with a fury, for the very first time. But then she’d calmed down. Mustn’t take offence. Because how could they possibly cope without her?

  So they’d had lunch. Afterwards, while her father had his nap, Phoebe did some vigorous work in the garden, wrenching out weeds and slashing the nettles, taking out her aggression on the plants. It was surprisingly therapeutic. Then they had tea and played Boggle. Anyone looking through the windows – no longer possible, with the net curtains – they would have seen a charming and peaceful scene. And her father, of course, had been completely unaware that anything had happened.

  Sunday night and Knockton was dead, there was nobody around to come to her rescue. Phoebe rummaged blindly in the kitchen drawer, feeling for some candles. In the fridge, her food silently rotted. Shamefully, she longed for a man, even somebody elderly and boring from the internet. The sort of man who took photos of potholes and sent them to the council. The sort of man she deserved.

  Just for a moment she envied her father: that he was cared for day and night, that there was another warm human body in the house. She’d even put up with Mandy, not to feel so utterly alone.

  The next day her brother phoned.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ he said. ‘I’ve just found out that Dad went to see his solicitor last week, and changed his will.’

  Robert

  Robert had a private income. So what? Plenty of people did, it was nothing to be ashamed of. The money came from his mother’s side of the family – coal mines near Stockport, long ago. It wasn’t a vast amount, but enough to save him from stacking shelves in Tesco, which at his age would be a bit tragic. Farida was the money-earner in their marriage and, now his hopes of a novel were dashed, would continue to be for the foreseeable. But she too had had the benefit of a hefty leg-up in the past, thanks to her father. They had both been fortunate.

  But pity the poor kids. They’d been priced right out of the property market. London had become a pension-pot for foreign investors – Chinese, Malays, Russians, they were all at it, buying up flats in hideous skyscrapers that cast their neighbourhoods into darkness and destroyed their communities. Young people hadn’t a hope in hell of getting onto the housing ladder. Even rentals were way out of their reach.

  So he and Farida had been determined to help their children; it was one of the few topics on which they agreed. Alice wanted to buy into a flat-share in Homerton – once a Slough of Despond but now apparently a hipster hotspot. They needed to sort out the legal side, so Robert rang Jonty Cummings, his family’s solicitor in Oxford. They had been to the same school and had remained friends; nothing bonds two fellows like wanking together behind the bike sheds.

  Jonty was a jovial chap and, for a solicitor, gratifyingly indiscreet. After they’d discussed Alice’s flat he said that he’d seen Robert’s father only the other day.

  ‘Looking quite spry, I must say. Had a carer-person with him. Quite heroically plain, isn’t she? Big knockers, though.’ He paused. ‘And bigger tummy.’ Robert asked him why his father had come to see him and he replied breezily: ‘Oh, to fiddle with his will.’

  Robert’s heart hammered against his ribs. ‘Er, in what respect exactly?’

  ‘Ha! My lips are sealed.’

  Robert rang off. Oh God.

  His suspicions had been lurking, of course. The Droitwich business, the bedroom business. Mandy’s sometimes weird behaviour and probing questions. But the confirmation still shocked him to his bones. In fact he felt physically sick.

  Farida was in the kitchen unpacking an Ocado delivery. He heard the clack-clack of her heels as she walked from fridge to larder and back again, to and fro on the limestone floor. Her shoes beat a military tattoo that rallied his thoughts into marching order. I must find out more, I must find out more. I must talk to my sister.

  He went into the living room, out of earshot, and phoned Phoebe. Her gasp was gratifying. Suddenly they were conspirators. Their differences were forgotten in the face of the common enemy.

  She told him she’d seen their father the day before, and that Mandy had behaved oddly. ‘They were both odd, as if they had something to hide. I was going to ring you about it but there was a power cut, and then it came back on and I had to dash about reprogramming all those bloody lights winking everywhere. He mentioned the solicitors but Mandy shut him up, and then she started hinting that he’d had extra-marital affairs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know, I know. I wasn’t going to tell you because it was so ridiculous. It was just mischief-making. The woman’s borderline bonkers. I think it comes from sexual deprivation. I mean, who would even contemplate it?’

  ‘Big knockers, though.’

  ‘Rob!’

  It was then that he had an idea.

  The references.

  He ran upstairs and rummaged in his desk for the Mandy file.

  Phoebe burst out laughing. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘We just visit, and drop it casually into the conversation.’

  ‘What – Did your dead mother leave Mandy anything in her will?’

  ‘We’ll be subtler than that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll think of something.’

  ‘Why can’t we just phone?’

  ‘We need to see the whites of their eyes. Come on, sis, it’s only Enfield.’

  ‘Huh, it’s only Enfield to you. It’s two hundred miles to me.’

  But he could tell she was wavering. For all her faults, Phoebe had always been up for adventure. Alarmingly so, in her youth.

  And what did they have to lose? It wasn’t as if they had anything better to do. Robert had been brooding recently on the pointlessness of their creative endeavours, Phoebe’s as much as his own. As Mandy had tactlessly remarked, what was the use of glasses you couldn’t actually drink out of? As uselessly useless as his useless novel.

  Mandy has been a godsend, wrote Rowena Gayle from Enfield. Of the three referees, this woman had been the only one who’d responded to his email. She sounded mildly curious that they wanted to see her, but perfectly amenable.

  So now he and Phoebe were walking up the path of a substantial house in Thorpe Avenue, Enfield.

  ‘Stop giggling,’ he hissed.

  �
��It just seems so funny. Shall we ring the bell and run away, like we did when we were little?’

  It did seem preposterous. Robert’s nerves were tingling. He suddenly felt flooded with love for his fellow detective, who knew him better than anyone in the world. Phoebe had smartened herself up for this visit – loose red trousers, white top and cardigan, her bushy hair pulled back in a ponytail. Nothing hippie about her today. She could be carrying a clipboard.

  As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. Rowena Gayle was visibly drunk and, once she started talking, there was no stopping her. They sat in her conservatory while she poured them large glasses of wine and dismissed their polite commiserations with a hurrumph.

  ‘My mother was a bitch. An evil cow. She’s been dead for two years and every morning I thank my lucky stars she’s gone.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Sent us all to boarding school – my dad was a wimp – sent us away so she could flounce about having sex with half the married men in Middlesex. Is it any wonder that I have abandonment issues?’

  Robert could see that his sister was warming to her; she had always been drawn to neurotic women. Rowena was gimlet-eyed, sallow, and greyhound-thin. She’d recently retired from the Department of Work and Pensions.

  They asked about Mandy, who had looked after the old woman for the last few months of her life.

  ‘It was pretty hellish because she kept telling lies.’

  Phoebe stiffened. ‘Lies?’

  ‘Sneaky, nasty lies. Mischief-making.’

  Robert glanced at his sister. Her eyes flickered to his. This was getting interesting.

  It turned out, however, that Rowena was referring to her mother, who had dementia. She had nothing but praise for Mandy.

  ‘We all loved her. She was a godsend. Endlessly patient, putting up with Mother’s rages. Taking her out on little trips. Nothing was too much trouble. She told us not to worry, she said, I’ll take care of everything, that’s what I’m here for. The pain management, the morphine. You see, soon after she arrived my mother’s condition worsened and she went downhill very quickly. So we took Mandy at her word and left her to it. She was all alone with my mother when she died, she said it was very peaceful, which was more than that witch deserved.’

  ‘So you had no problems with her?’

  Rowena shook her head, smoke leaking from her nostrils. ‘She binged on my biscuits but who could blame her? Used to smuggle them into her room and leave crumbs around.’

  ‘Did she discuss any of the other people she looked after?’

  ‘Sometimes. An old lady who imagined she was living in a hotel – she mentioned her. I suppose I should have checked her references but to be perfectly honest I was just so glad to have her, I never bothered.’

  ‘Did she ever behave oddly, sort of nosing around?’

  ‘Not really,’ Rowena said. ‘Do you have problems with her, is this what this is all about?’

  Suddenly, a familiar chirrup came from the room behind them.

  ‘Blimey, did she buy your mother a clock?’ Robert asked.

  Rowena nodded. ‘A barmy bird thing. Thinking of my mother’s state of mind, it should’ve had a cuckoo.’ She snorted with laughter and started coughing. ‘I must take it to Oxfam.’

  ‘I know it sounds weird,’ said Phoebe, ‘but did your mother leave anything to Mandy in her will?’

  Rowena was too drunk to be startled. ‘God, no.’ She drained her glass. ‘Though, now you mention it, my mother did try to change it. She was always threatening to; it was a power thing. But I have no idea what she had in mind – in what was left of her mind – and the solicitor dismissed it as invalid.’

  After a large glass of wine Robert’s head was swimming. He gazed around at the bamboo furniture, the heaped cushions. Beyond the conservatory stretched an impressive garden – vast lawn, gazebo, weeping willow.

  Rowena watched him. ‘It’s all tainted money, my family’s money, all this.’ She waved her hand, ash falling from her cigarette. ‘It came from the Titanic.’

  ‘The Titanic ?’

  ‘My great-grandfather worked for Lloyd’s, the underwriters. He gambled on the insurance – I don’t know how he did it. But when the ship sank he never had to work again.’ She drained the bottle into her glass. ‘Do you know something, my dear new friends? That money caused nothing but misery. Greed, lies, divorce, family feuds. All from fifteen hundred drowned souls.’ She viciously stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Maybe we deserved it.’

  Robert and Phoebe sat on the tube. It was Saturday and some match was on; the carriage was rammed with bellowing fans, bumping into their knees and swigging cans of lager. They could smell the testosterone.

  ‘That was interesting,’ said Phoebe. She pulled out the band and shook her hair free.

  Robert wondered if she was thinking the same thing as him. They had been remarkably in tune recently.

  Soon after she arrived my mother’s condition worsened and she went downhill quickly.

  Their father was deteriorating, no doubt about that.

  He was right, because then Phoebe said: ‘Remember what Alice told us, about that weird conversation in the loo?’

  She looked at Robert, her eyebrows raised. The pitiless glare of the carriage drained the colour from her face.

  Morphine. Pills. Who knew? Anything could be going on in that cottage in the middle of nowhere.

  What if Mandy was not an angel of mercy, but an angel of death?

  Once lodged, suspicions are impossible to shift. Not until something happens that proves they’re groundless.

  Farida knew nothing of this. Robert hadn’t even told her about the visit to Enfield. He could imagine her shrivelling response. Don’t be an idiot. You two, honestly! Cooking up this stuff just because you feel guilty. So he’s left her something in his will, so what? Doesn’t she deserve it? If he was MY father he’d be living here with us. We’ve got masses of room; he’d even have his own ensuite. Isn’t that what families are supposed to be about? And you call MANDY weird.

  Farida the human drone, on target as always. Gazing at him, eyebrows raised, head tilted.

  His dreams were upsetting, those hot summer nights. He dreamed his shed had disappeared, leaving a patch of mud scored with tyre tracks. In its place was his parents’ love-seat, the original one with the delicate legs. He knew Farida had put it there to disguise the destruction of his hut. This was so real that he woke up and rolled over to accuse her, but the bed was empty: she had already gone to work. That morning there she was on the TV, fronting a report on a million starving Sudanese, their own huts stretching to infinity.

  He thought of his dad at the newt pond, longing to die. For millions it came too early but for him the moment was right. If only it could be that simple. Robert’s friends were already talking about Dignitas, and taking control of their own extinction. He had never been a hippie but that sixties vibe was travelling through the decades like a guinea pig swallowed by a python. We changed the way we live, so now we’re changing the way we die.

  So how did his father feel, who was a generation older? Did he really want to eke out his last years in that stifling room scratching away at his scratch-card, his final gamble and one he was bound to lose?

  Maybe he and Mandy had an understanding.

  Maybe she was killing him, very slowly so it would never be detected, in order to get her hands on his money. Presuming, of course, that she had become so indispensable to him, so deeply loved, that he had changed his will in her favour.

  Or so confused she had persuaded him.

  Or none of this had happened and both he and his sister had diseased minds. There were some people in the world who were simply good. They might have a noddy dog in their car but that simply meant they weren’t his type. And what was so great about his type anyway? Nobody he knew was a purely good person. Least of all himself.

  With some people it seemed to be simple. They were loved, and loved in return. So it went down the generations. For most of them, ho
wever, it was more complicated. He remembered what Rowena said about her mother. ‘Even when she was dead the bitch nearly killed me. She’d left instructions for her ashes to be scattered off the rocks in Cornwall where she used to go on holiday. So I clambered down with the urn and slipped. It was a sheer drop and I bloody nearly drowned. Which, in the circumstances, would have been appropriate.’ She’d snorted with laughter and lit another cigarette. ‘Our family’s comeuppance at last, after a hundred years.’

  The next time, he and Phoebe visited their father together. They didn’t discuss this; it just seemed inevitable. So many scenarios were swimming about in their heads that it seemed important for them both to be there, supporting each other, watching out for signs that might confirm their suspicions.

  Robert was feeling empty. His novel had gone; he hadn’t realised how central it had been to his life. All those characters he’d once loved; it was like having a cage of dead rabbits in the corner of the room. By now they were starting to smell. Farida’s lack of surprise had made it even more mortifying; she’d made it clear that she’d suspected all along he couldn’t hack it.

  He felt his father disappearing too – losing his personality, losing his wits, losing his interests, one by one, and retreating into his final refuge: Mandyworld. His connection to his children was loosening; Mandy had him now. Quite honestly, he seemed fonder of her than he was of them, his own flesh and blood.

  No wonder Robert was depressed. And now his own children had deserted him. Alice had gone to New Zealand for six months, some water-sports thing. Jack was on holiday, driving across America with his girlfriend, and wasn’t responding to emails.

  Farida was – well, Farida.

  God, he longed for a dog.

  So now he and Phoebe were parking their cars outside the church. Their father’s lane was blocked off because the village fête was being held in the nearby field. As they walked to his cottage a Tannoy announced the sack race. Robert looked over the hedge. The sparse local population had been bolstered by the weekenders who were patronising the fête’s retro charms before legging it back to W11. He glimpsed a couple of their ghastly children engrossed with their smartphones under a sagging string of bunting.