The Carer Read online

  ‘No fucking way,’ she said.

  She and Buffy ran the Myrtle House Hotel, further down the High Street. Phoebe was sitting in the kitchen. She liked entering the swing door marked ‘Staff Only’; it felt mildly transgressive.

  ‘I used to think of all those women,’ Monica said, ‘and whether they were better at it than me. I used to torture myself by picturing them, and thinking that whatever he was doing he had done it a thousand times before.’ She sloshed more wine into their glasses. ‘I used to think I’ve shared this body with so many other people it’s hardly mine at all. I know it’s stupid – who am I to talk – but it’s not rational, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it’s not so funny with you and Mr Dreadlocks. It’s just so utterly, coruscatingly painful to think of them with somebody else. Anybody else. Even if you hardly love them at all. Which you don’t seem to do. Do you?’

  The back door opened and Buffy came in, stamping his feet from the cold.

  ‘Hello, Phoebe! What are you talking about, anything interesting?’

  ‘Lidl,’ said Monica. ‘The campaign strategy.’

  ‘I’ll be off then.’ He hurried out, the swing door sighing.

  ‘He wouldn’t be interested anyway,’ Phoebe said. ‘Being a bloke.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Monica rolled her eyes. ‘He’d be absolutely riveted. We talk about relationships all day long.’

  Suddenly desolated, Phoebe gazed at the row of saucepans hanging above the cooker. Their bottoms were scorched from years of use. Nobody wanted to embark on marriage with her – the long haul, the launch into the dark, the chats and squabbles and foolish, retrospective jealousies. The talking about relationships all day long, if you were lucky enough to be Monica, and married to a man who liked that sort of thing. All Phoebe was good for was a fumble in a shed. How undignified was that?

  Monica gave her a level look. ‘You’re beautiful, Phoebe, and funny, and talented—’

  ‘I’m so not.’

  ‘Shut up! Your problem is low self-esteem. Where on earth does that come from?’

  Draining her glass, Phoebe thought of her father. So warm and charming, so beloved by everyone, yet somehow never there when she was growing up, and needed him. Always called away, always on the phone, always getting into a taxi to go somewhere more interesting than the place where she happened to be.

  Her parents bought Hafod when she and Robert were children. It was a remote cottage near the Black Mountains and it always took longer than expected to get there. Wales was like that; everywhere was further than you thought. Even when they finally turned off the road there was still a mile to go, up a winding track with cattle grids. The nearest town, Crickhowell, was ten miles away, and during the first year the cottage didn’t even have a phone.

  Phoebe could still feel the rush of joy when she stumbled out of the car. Oh, the rapture of being six, the summer holidays stretching into infinity! It was probably raining but who cared? She and Robert were free. And they had their parents to themselves.

  Not that they bothered with them. One whole summer they spent rolling tyres down a hill. They poked sticks into the crust of cowpats and dammed the stream. Basically, they just mucked about. But they knew he was there, their father, and nobody could get at him.

  He certainly seemed pretty contented. He said the place was heaven on earth and sat beside the fire reciting poetry to them while their mother wrestled with the Raeburn in the kitchen. She did most of the chores. Whether she was resentful about this didn’t cross their minds. They were children; they didn’t think that way. Dad’s efforts to be practical were a family joke and they presumed, then, that she simply indulged him. They remembered him wearing, for reasons best known to himself, brown overalls like a Pickford’s removal man. He’d wander around the cottage, prodding at the dry rot and tssking through his teeth, then do nothing about it. His attempt at unblocking the sink resulted in a legendary flood, and his gardening was restricted to stabbing ineffectually at the weeds that grew around the back door, still within earshot of the Home Service.

  He was known locally as the Nutty Professor. In those days their neighbours were mostly farmers and regarded him with affectionate bemusement. There was none of the animosity towards English weekenders that was around at the time. It was just another tribute to his charm.

  There was another reason Phoebe was so happy there. Buying Hafod coincided with Dad finding her more interesting. Mostly, in fact, it was him talking but she didn’t mind, she was being treated as an equal. A sounding-board, really, for his idle musings.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about dogs,’ he said as they lay on the grass. ‘A walk for them is another map completely, a map of a million smells. How superior to us! And yet they can only bark. While the budgie is lower down the scale but, how amazing, a budgie can talk! Apparently there’s a budgie called Puck who can speak 1,728 words. And why do we rate both those creatures above flies, whose eyes have 6,000 little lenses so they can see movement all round? And another eye in between, which works as their compass? Yet we swat them without a thought. Make sense of that, my chickadee.’

  ‘Flies are bottom of the heap because they eat poo,’ she said.

  ‘So do dogs.’

  They both burst out laughing. He lay there gazing at her, his head propped in his hand. ‘I’m so glad you’re six and we can have a proper conversation.’

  His hair was dark, then, wild and wiry. He wasn’t exactly handsome, even she could see that, but very dear. Loose, generous features, a face that creased deliciously when he smiled – which he did, a lot. A greed for life and a startling laugh that could make passers-by jump. Phoebe was so proud to be seen with him, not because he was distinguished – she knew nothing about that – but because he lit up those around him and made everything fun.

  Hafod, and their life in Wales, came up in a conversation with Mandy. It was a chilly day in March and Phoebe had driven down for lunch. She was feeling guilty that she hadn’t visited for a month but when she arrived her father looked the picture of contentment. He was sitting in his armchair, blanket over his knees, listening to Tristram Shandy on his headphones and scraping away at a scratchcard. He’d caught the gambling bug from Mandy and they were addicted to the lottery, tuning in to the telly when the results were announced. ‘The high spot of our day, isn’t it, Mandy?’

  There was something different about the room. It took Phoebe a moment to spot it. White cotton bibs, edged with lace, were now draped over the back of the armchairs. The arm-rests, too. Antimacassars! A word that had never passed her lips.

  ‘We bought them in Dunelm,’ said Mandy, following her gaze. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but they’ll save on those cleaning bills.’

  Then Phoebe noticed a cream, fluffy hearthrug. Mandy said that on her day off she had gone up to Solihull and collected it from her parents’ house, to replace the existing one, which was old and stained with scorch-marks. ‘I haven’t thrown it away, of course,’ she said. ‘It’s in the cupboard under the stairs.’

  Phoebe didn’t mind, not at that stage. Her father certainly didn’t, but then he’d never had any taste; that was her mother’s department. The room just looked slightly less theirs – cosier, more suburban.

  Over lunch they talked about Hafod. Her father told Mandy about the bats, yet again. Mandy responded as if this was new to her, nodding her head and encouraging him. This went with the job, of course. Phoebe remembered the story about Mrs Klein and her endless conversational loop. Mandy was paid to indulge her clients’ foibles and needs, however wearily repetitive, and make it fresh each time – like a prostitute, thought Phoebe. Though anyone less like a prostitute would be hard to imagine.

  Phoebe looked around the room. Mandy had put up net curtains in the front window to stop people peering in. It was becoming their home, Dad’s and hers. The back view of the two armchairs, wedged together at the window, made this plain. His carer was his companion now. She might not be the per
son he would choose, in his prime, but he was an enfeebled old man and it was Mandy who was meeting his needs. Scratchcards and all.

  After lunch, while he dozed in the living room, the two women did the washing-up. As so often happens, standing there side by side, engaged in a communal task, released confidences.

  At first they chatted about Hafod.

  ‘It sounds a lovely spot,’ Mandy said.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘All the family together.’

  ‘Yes, except Dad kept going away.’ With sudden venom, Phoebe rubbed a knife dry. ‘He said he’d be there for the summer and three days later he’d be gone.’

  She opened the cutlery drawer and stopped. It was filled with tea towels.

  ‘Knives and forks in there now.’ Mandy pointed to another drawer. ‘It’s handier.’

  Phoebe shoved them in with a clatter. She realised she was drunk from the white wine at lunch. ‘He promised, you see. He promised we’d all be together. We had these trips planned – going to Aberystwyth, going canoeing. Then he’d get a phone call – God, how I hated that phone! – and we’d see the taxi coming up the hill to take him to the station.’ Her voice rose, bitterly. ‘That bloody taxi!’

  ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Mandy shrugged. ‘He probably had important work to do.’

  ‘More important than us ? We were his children!’ Phoebe slammed the drawer shut. ‘It was bad enough at home, in Oxford, him being away half the time, never being there for sports day, even when he was there not being there, being shut away in his study.’ She paused for breath. ‘But this was the holidays.’

  Mandy pulled off her rubber gloves. ‘How old are you, love?’

  ‘Sixty.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be over this by now?’ Her voice was cold. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I speak as I find. Haven’t you got anything better to worry about?’

  Phoebe was speechless. Mandy turned. Her glasses were steamed up. Phoebe couldn’t read her expression.

  ‘Nobody likes a Moaning Minnie.’

  Mandy laid her rubber gloves side by side on the draining board and rested her hands on top of them, breathing heavily. Phoebe noticed, for the first time, that Mandy had bitten her fingernails down to the quick, the skin red and raw. For some reason this surprised her.

  Then she did a funny thing. She butted Phoebe with her hip – a sort of playful nudge, as if they were heifers. Phoebe couldn’t decide if she was moving her out of the way or indicating that she’d only been joking.

  Then she pulled off her apron and left.

  ‘I’m not sure about Mandy,’ Phoebe said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Robert’s voice was sharp. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing really. She was rather sarky with me today and then she pretty well pushed me out of the house.’

  ‘Pushed you?’

  ‘She just said that as Dad was asleep didn’t I want to get back home before it got dark? It wasn’t dark, it was only half-past three.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Phoebe heard a sigh. ‘Aren’t you being a little bit . . .’

  ‘A bit what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over-reactive ?’ He paused. ‘I mean, you sometimes do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Well, make a bit of a drama.’

  ‘That’s so unfair! I’m just telling you what I felt. She has this funny look in her eyes.’

  ‘Well I’ve never noticed it. She seems a perfectly nice, rather boring woman to me. She might have some views we don’t agree with but then so does half the country. We just never meet them.’

  They finished their conversation. Phoebe’s window was open; across the yard, in the back of the butcher’s shop, she heard the clunk-clunk of the meat cleaver. Needless to say, Robert’s tone annoyed her. He’d always done this: turning everything round, turning it into an attack.

  She also suspected that he didn’t want to rock the boat – anything for a quiet life. If he had misgivings about Mandy he was keeping them to himself. After all, she was by far the best carer they’d had. Great references too: We can’t rate Mandy too highly . . . Cheerful, efficient, hard-working . . . Our mother’s last months were transformed by Mandy’s compassion . . . Mandy was our Angel.

  Maybe it was she herself who was sarky. Had she thought of that? Maybe somewhere, lurking deep down, there was a nasty little worm of resentment – even, God forbid, jealousy – that Mandy had planted herself in the centre of their father’s affections. Mandy, the cuckoo in the nest, nudging the real children out with her great buttocks, the way she’d nudged Phoebe in the kitchen.

  What a ludicrous image! Phoebe blushed. Despite Robert’s accusation she was no drama queen. She just had a vivid imagination. After all, she was an artist.

  This reminded her of something else Mandy said, something that needled her. It was during lunch and she was describing her tumbler paintings, the cow parsley ones.

  ‘What happens when you put them in the dishwasher?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘You’ve got to wash them up by hand?’

  ‘You can’t wash them up at all.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘They’re not to be used.’

  Mandy looked at her. ‘You mean you can’t drink from them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘No.’

  She paused. ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’re art objects,’ Phoebe said irritably. ‘Collectors’ items.’

  She didn’t know why she felt rattled. There was something about that pale, doughy face, challenging her in some indefinable way. The woman knew nothing about art, she didn’t have a clue. Her father just smiled his vague smile.

  Phoebe pulled out her easel. But she couldn’t concentrate. She gazed across the yard, at the back of the butcher’s shop. At the boy, Karl, who was skinning a rabbit, peeling it like a glove. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin, to wrap the baby Bunting in.

  Robert

  Robert was watching his wife through the window. They were at a party in Notting Hill and he was skulking in the garden. Farida, as usual, was at the centre of an adoring huddle. Moths, flames. She wore her yellow silk dress. Robert was loitering behind one of those obligatory olive trees in its obligatory terracotta pot. There were eight of the bastards, bloody enormous, shipped from Tuscany, no doubt, like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. His host was a newspaper magnate who had addressed him as Richard before swinging round to shake the hand of a Tory minister.

  In the old days Robert could smoke. His excuse, now, was the mobile clamped to his ear. He tilted his head attentively, listening to its non-existent messages. God, he hated these parties. Farida used to catch his eye through the crowd but those days were long gone. I don’t do dote. Others did, however. She was beautiful and brainy and famous. Funny, too, unless you happened to be at the sharp end. He was used to being ignored, watching the crowd around her roaring with laughter while he was stuck with the host’s personal trainer. Or their accountant. Or even, on one occasion, the mother of the caterer, who had been called in to help with the washing-up.

  Actually this had always happened, even in the old days when he was, ostensibly, Somebody. Mentioning that he worked in the City would result in a flickering of the eyes round the room and a disappearance in search of a refill. Farida would be the magnet, Farida the reason they had been invited in the first place.

  In the early years Robert didn’t mind. He was proud of her. But as nobody spoke to him he felt he had less and less to say. Even, weirdly, to himself. His lack of confidence, Phoebe would say, stemmed from their childhood. Absent father, resentful mother who found it difficult to show affection, that sort of thing. No doubt his sister explored this in her various therapy groups. The last he heard it was qigong, whatever that was.
Knockton was full of that sort of nonsense.

  A man burst out of the house, bellowing into his mobile, and strode around the garden. ‘Where’s my fucking jacket?’ he yelled. From what Robert could tell, coffee had been spilled on it during a flight from LA and the airline seemed to have lost it.

  Robert took no notice, standing there with an attentive expression, the dead phone to his ear.

  And then it actually rang. He jumped.

  ‘Dad?’

  It was Alice, his daughter.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  He told her whose party it was but she hadn’t heard of them. ‘The PM’s right-hand chap is here too, apparently,’ he said. ‘Someone saw him coming out of the bog.’

  Alice wasn’t interested in that either. She knew nothing about current affairs, despite her mother’s job. Nothing about his and Farida’s world. In fact, he could hardly remember her reading a book. She was sporty, that was why. Never happier than when running some marathon and sucking protein drinks from those strangely infantile plastic bottles, the ones with the teats. He loved her, of course, but sometimes she didn’t seem like his child at all.

  ‘I wanted to try out this new bike,’ Alice was saying. ‘The one I told you about, the Fuji SL. So yesterday I took it on the train to Charlbury, to get off there and ride it to Cheltenham. That was my plan, it was such a lovely day. So I was just riding through Burford when I thought – duh, why don’t I drop in on Granddad? I tried to phone but I couldn’t get a signal, so just pitched up there.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Fine. They were watching some game show. I was bursting so I ran upstairs to the bathroom – I didn’t go to the downstairs loo because you can hear everything. Anyway, so I ran upstairs and Granddad’s door was ajar – the door to his old bedroom. And I saw this funny thing—’