The Carer Read online

  ‘Robert!’

  He swung round. Farida stood there, breathing heavily.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She glared at him. ‘It’s so rude.’

  ‘I’m talking to our daughter.’

  ‘You’ve been out here for ages.’

  ‘I’ll come in a sec.’

  She gave him one of her looks, turned and went back into the house, her heels clacking on the flagstones.

  ‘What funny thing?’ he asked Alice.

  ‘His desk drawers were open, and there were some papers spread out on the floor – papers and photographs.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t go in, I was dying for a crap. And when I came out of the bathroom the door was closed.’ She paused. ‘I mean, he can’t get upstairs any more, can he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything because it didn’t strike me at the time. I’d forgotten he couldn’t get upstairs. I just thought about it later, when I was biking along. That it was a bit funny. And the door being open when I went in and closed when I came out. That was a bit odd too.’

  Maybe he should have told Phoebe. The trouble was, his sister was so nervy. She’d already expressed unease about Mandy and he didn’t want to spook her. And there was probably a perfectly rational explanation. Dad had asked Mandy to search for something in his desk, what was wrong with that? And she’d hurried upstairs to close the door . . .

  Now why would she do that ?

  He decided to put it out of his mind. He needed every ounce of concentration for his novel. It was now thickly peppered with dialect words. Whole phrases, too. He’d emailed another list to his sister, who had given it to Torren. He was no longer her fuckbuddy – the fellow deserved more respect than that – he was Torren now. Though he’d never set eyes on the chap, Robert felt a bond with him, not just because of his help, invaluable though that was. No, it was a stronger, more intimate connection, woven deeply into the characters he had brought so thrillingly to life. And the book was rattling along. By mid-April Robert had written 10,000 words. This was enough, he reckoned, to be submitted to a publisher, with a synopsis of the rest.

  He already had an agent, of sorts. This was an amiable old soak called Barnaby Rivers, one of the last of the legendary Soho hell-raisers and now in his dotage. Robert had met him in Knockton some years earlier, when he was visiting his sister. Barnaby was an old drinking buddy of the chap who ran the hotel there. He should have been put out to grass years ago, but he kept on a few clients for old times’ sake. Robert suspected that he had taken him on, a new author, due to his rural theme; some novel set in the wilds of Lincolnshire had just been shortlisted for the Booker.

  Robert pressed send and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head. Needless to say, he felt a profound sense of satisfaction. In the garden a host of golden daffodils were fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Roll over, Wordsworth! Make way for one more!

  To be perfectly honest, he couldn’t actually picture his characters’ faces. They existed in a sort of blur. What he could picture, however, was Farida’s expression when his novel was accepted. On her lovely features was a look of surprise – yes, he would expect that. But there would also be something he hadn’t seen for years – well, not directed at himself, anyway. A look of admiration and respect. Even, just maybe, awe. That would be a new one.

  Robert was still vaguely puzzled, however, by what Alice had said and decided to ask his father about it on his next visit. Trouble was, he couldn’t get him alone. Mandy fussed around him, or remained within earshot. ‘Your father’s a little out of sorts,’ she said, ‘aren’t you, Jimmy?’

  One of the reasons was the start of the tourist invasion. It was the Easter holidays and the lane outside was jammed with coaches, their engines idling. His dad, when shuffling past on the way to the donkeys, had thwacked one of the coaches with his stick and had woken the slumbering driver who had told him to fuck off.

  World events were also getting him down. A lifelong leftie, he was horrified by the rise of right-wing xenophobia and intolerance all over Europe. He couldn’t discuss this with Mandy, of course. She’d already made plain her opinion about foreigners.

  ‘I miss your mother,’ he said to Robert, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Spring is so cruel.’

  His wife’s daffodils were coming up in the flowerbeds – always later than London. She had loved this garden, though now it looked sadly neglected. During their retirement years she had transformed it, lugging back loads of plants and damp, leaden, Swiss rolls of turf from the local nursery. As he’d once observed: ‘A gardener’s handiest tool is his wallet.’

  He missed his wife humming to herself as she dug and watered, wearing her ancient denim dungarees, her grey hair escaping from its scarf. Never one for exercise, he had sat in the love-seat they had bought for their golden wedding anniversary, reading the newspaper to her as she toiled.

  But most of all he missed the conversation. The two of them talked non-stop – about politics, books, big things. They were intellectual soulmates, and though they often quarrelled it never descended into the needling personal attacks, the chronic war of attrition and occasional eruptions of resentful venom with which Robert was only too familiar. It was about things that mattered. His mother was highly intelligent and he knew she was frustrated but she loved her husband dearly and theirs really was a marriage of true minds. Maybe it was a generational thing, a certain acceptance and compromise that was now more or less extinct. Or maybe they were just lucky.

  On this visit Robert failed to get his father alone. Mandy was always around. She seemed watchful – in fact, downright tense. This was unlike her. The old man told a rambling story about a conference in Prague and she caught Robert’s eye as if to say, He’s losing the plot. He had, indeed, already complained twice about a crowd of paparazzi who had descended on the local shop when some celebrity was visiting, but that didn’t seem too worrying. According to Robert’s family he, too, was always repeating himself.

  Besides, it gave him the chance to broach the subject.

  ‘Talking about photos,’ he turned to Dad, ‘I was wondering if you’ve got that one of Jack and his first car. He wants to show it to his girlfriend.’

  ‘Probably,’ he replied. ‘It’ll be in my desk, bottom drawer.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Mandy said: ‘I saw some photos the other day, now you mention it.’ She turned to his father. ‘Remember, love, you asked me to go through some papers for you.’

  He looked confused. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, pet.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘Some old bills,’ she said. ‘Council Tax bills.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ She massaged his cuticles. ‘They’d been putting you in the wrong band, but I rang them and sorted it out. Don’t worry.’

  He still seemed confused. She gave Robert a significant look. See what I mean?

  A cascade of song came from the kitchen. Three o’clock: the blackbird.

  ‘Time for your nap,’ said Mandy.

  His father didn’t move. He was gazing at the garden, now blurred by rain. ‘It’s funny,’ he mused. ‘I can remember the past so clearly. Every inch of the garden in Hampstead, when I was a child. The damp moss around the water butt, the smell of the privet in the shrubbery where I used to hide. So vivid, even though it was nearly eighty years ago. And yet, what happened last week . . .’ His voice trailed away as he gazed at his legs. Nowadays he wore tracksuit bottoms. Mandy said this was more comfortable as he spent most of the day in his armchair, but they made him look as if he had relinquished hope. ‘People say about childbirth, nobody could describe it, and if they did, nobody could bear to go through with it.’ He raised his head and looked at them, his eyes moist. ‘None of us know about that, of course. Childbirth. But I do know about this, and you can take my word for it. The same applies.’

  ‘I think
Mandy’s been snooping around,’ Robert told his sister. ‘There was a funny look in her eye.’

  ‘What sort of look?’

  ‘Just . . . funny. I mean, it seemed perfectly plausible that Dad had forgotten. He’s forgetting a lot of things nowadays. But then I went upstairs to the loo, and checked in his desk. He doesn’t have bills in there, nothing like that. It’s photos and letters and personal stuff – marriage certificates, his will, our old school reports. The bills and Council Tax demands are in his filing cabinet on the landing.’

  There was a silence the other end. Then she said: ‘Doesn’t sound that suspicious to me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She could have been looking in his desk and not found it, whatever it was. The Council Tax thing.’

  Her reaction surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to be so unconcerned. After all, she had been the one who’d first voiced doubts about the woman.

  ‘Maybe next time you visit you could keep your eyes open, watch out for anything odd,’ Robert said. ‘When are you going down, by the way?’

  ‘Not for a couple of weeks,’ she said. ‘I’m awfully busy.’

  Ah, Robert thought. She doesn’t want to be bothered. Everything’s fine, don’t poke around. Imagine the kerfuffle of trying to find somebody new. One of them would have to uproot their lives and move in with their father, miles away in that mausoleum of a village, shopping and cooking and taking care of him. Then they would have to start that whole exhausting process all over again – interviews, references, trial runs, disappointments and sackings. It could take weeks. Months.

  Robert realised, as he put the phone down, that Phoebe had reacted in just the way she’d accused him of reacting on that earlier occasion. Better the devil you know.

  Though devil seemed an inappropriate way of describing their dumpy little godsend – Mandy from Solihull, with her bobble hat and cheery laugh – Mandy, without whom their lives would fall apart. More like an angel, in fact, than a devil.

  Phoebe

  Of course Phoebe was busy. She’d decided to have another go at internet dating. She hadn’t done it for a couple of years but she’d been encouraged by Angie, who ran the eponymous Angie’s Bistro in the High Street. Like Phoebe, Angie was no spring chicken. Terrific bone-structure, though, and masses of blond hair, which she piled up on top of her head and fixed with a plastic gardenia. Hungry mouth, tanned and wrinkled cleavage. She was the widow of a famous rock ’n’ roll guitarist and had brought some much-needed glamour into their community of beardies and herbalists. Phoebe suspect the bistro was just a hobby.

  Angie had recently started an affair with a man she’d met online and said Phoebe should have another bash, darling. Phoebe had bumped into her in Costcutter. ‘He’s dynamite in the sack,’ she said, ‘despite the gammy leg. And I don’t want to die alone, being eaten by rats.’ The queue was silenced by this. Even the cashier paused to listen.

  Phoebe couldn’t imagine Torren at her deathbed, so she took her advice and logged onto Soulmates. Perhaps unwisely she’d been honest about her age and the only response she’d got so far was a man called Arnold who lived in Leominster. He said he liked golf but Phoebe didn’t hold that against him, remembering Bob Dylan did too. And Obama. Arnold’s wife had died and he lived in a bungalow with two Alsatians.

  As she drove there Phoebe thought about her parents’ marriage. Sixty-four years they had been together. Sixty-four years of rock-solid adoration since meeting at Oxford. Never wavering, never straying, an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

  And there was she, with a trail of disastrous relationships behind her and still flailing around, still out there in the jungle – literally so, in the case of Torren. There was no way she could compete; she had long ago given up trying. For she had realised that both she and Robert were casualties of their parents’ devotion and had spent their lives trying to provoke a reaction.

  She herself had gone the traditional route – drugs, sex, the usual teenage stuff. A brief marriage to an alcoholic who’d turned out to be a serial philanderer. Various entanglements with men so unsuitable that even her mild and tolerant father, much to her gratification, had voiced his concern. They’re not good enough for you, darling. She was a free spirit, a rebel! Indeed, she sometimes snorted the odd line with Torren, just to show she could still do it. What on earth was she trying to prove?

  Her brother had taken another route. The brash, willy-waving City route. It really wasn’t his thing at all. No wonder he came a cropper. But she knew why he did it. He wanted to be a real man. He wanted their dad to be startled into some kind of respect. Their dear, left-wing Dad, safe in the arms of academia, had no idea of the testosterone-driven insanity of the trading floor. Nor, as it turned out, had Robert.

  And now their father was an enfeebled old man who had become an enthusiastic reader of the Daily Mail, surely a sign of senility. Their mother was dead. They didn’t have to prove themselves any more. Which seemed to make no difference at all.

  Arnold had suggested they meet at Starbucks in the High Street. When she saw him Phoebe’s heart sank. She was faced with a shrivelled old gnome, barely recognisable from his photo. This plummeting sensation, familiar for anyone engaged in internet dating, worsens with age, for she was slap up against the mirror of her own mortality. She was that old? He could barely struggle to his feet to shake her hand.

  I don’t want to die alone, being eaten by rats. We all need to be cared for at the end of our lives. More often than not, this person will be a stranger. When Rejoice from Zimbabwe was living with him, her father whispered: ‘A black face sees us into this world and a black face will see us out.’ Phoebe was startled at the time but she understood what he meant.

  Arnold, like her father, needed a carer. He had only recently been widowed. When Phoebe helped him home with his shopping there was still a box of his wife’s incontinence pads in the hallway. He was utterly helpless and the Alsatians couldn’t cook his dinner so he had wasted no time in trying to find somebody as a replacement. He practically asked her, When can you start? before she made her excuses and left.

  This encounter was curiously upsetting. Phoebe thought: I should be with my dad. Suddenly, she missed him so sharply it took away her breath. How could she leave him to a professional when she was his child? Leominster was on the way to the Cotswolds; it would only take an hour to drive to his house.

  When she phoned the landline, however, there was no answer. She rang Mandy’s mobile.

  ‘We’re on one of our jaunts, aren’t we, Jimmy?’ Mandy said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘We’re having a smoothie in Kenilworth,’ she said. ‘At the Hedgehog Rescue Centre. They’re ever so nice, the people who run it, and they’ve all come out of hibernation now.’

  Phoebe’s father said something and Mandy burst out laughing.

  ‘I mean the hedgehogs!’ she spluttered. ‘Silly me!’

  They murmured together again. Phoebe heard her father’s chuckles. For a moment, ridiculously, she felt excluded.

  Her father came on the line. ‘We’ve been having a lovely day,’ he said. ‘Mandy has such marvellous ideas. This place is a real tonic. There’s good in the world, you see. The way they care for these little creatures, some of them arrive in a terrible state. Janice and Don, the owners, they’re filled with such love and compassion. They’re carers, you see, just like our Mandy here.’

  Tears suddenly filled Phoebe’s eyes – fierce, jealous tears. ‘I’m longing to see you,’ she said. ‘Shall I come next Saturday?’

  ‘Of course! We’re not doing anything, are we, Mandy?’

  On Friday, however, Torren phoned. Phoebe was watching her sister-in-law on the breakfast news, the morning’s atrocities pouring from her lips. She was pleased to see that Farida was wearing a turquoise pendant she’d given her at Christmas.

  ‘You free on Saturday?’ Torren asked. ‘Want to come to a motorbike show at Stafford?’
r />   Phoebe was stunned. He’d never asked her out, ever.

  He explained that he needed a part for his bike, and his van was on the blink. In other words, would Phoebe give him a lift? She was still flattered, her stupid heart thumping as she put down the phone.

  So she cancelled her father and found herself in a damp field somewhere in the Midlands looking at boxes of rusting motorbike entrails. Exhausts, sprockets, pistons.

  Torren’s bike was apparently a BSA A65. ‘The carburettors need re-jetting,’ he said. ‘The float chambers are gunged up something chronic.’

  He rummaged in the boxes. Leaning against him, Phoebe felt a sexual throb. She was his date, his biker chick. Ageing, but so what? There were plenty of equally raddled females there with their grizzled old Hell’s Angels, several of whom were in wheelchairs and, in one case, minus a leg. Torren himself was apparently the survivor of several legendary smashes. ‘Had a Yamaha XS-2, went like fuck but the handling was rubbish on corners.’

  They squelched across the grass to look at rows of motorbikes. Men squatted on their haunches, inspecting and prodding them as if they were livestock. Torren started talking to a group of them and, as it had started to rain, Phoebe told him she would wait for him in the café.

  It was in a vast hangar filled with stalls of leather clothing and biking paraphernalia. Phoebe sat down with a mug of tea and tried to phone her father but there was no signal. Actually he hadn’t sounded too upset when she’d cancelled her visit. Besides, it was Robert’s turn. Apparently he’d sent off his novel – some chapters and a synopsis – so he no longer had an excuse to stay away, pretending to be busy.

  Phoebe imagined him on tenterhooks, waiting for a response. Of course she hoped his book would be published. He’d been working on it for years, and it would restore his beleaguered self-respect. Even his children, nowadays, treated him with vaguely amiable contempt. His novel sounded pretty turgid to her but some people might like that sort of thing – rapes and castrations and lots of mud. According to Robert, the Radnorshire vocabulary had transformed it into something blisteringly real, and he had Torren to thank for that. No longer did he sneer at him for being her bit of rough. Torren was now that rarest of creatures: a genuine local with his roots deep in the vernacular.