Sex and Stravinsky (27 page)

Caroline is shaking all over. She can hardly believe what she’s just heard; nor that her sister has simply terminated the exchange. Can this really be Janet; her whiny little invalid sister? Can she have morphed over the years into this judgemental, smug middle age? Why is she being so cruel? What for? No wonder she was so heartless with their poor mother all those years ago.

In some agitation, Caroline tries again to contact Josh. No response. She judges herself too upset to unload on Zoe, who is, after all, just a child, but she’s feeling distinctly inadequate, not to say frightened. Caroline concentrates on sleep, but tosses and turns in bed. She sucks her fingers. She tries reading detective fiction. Finally, she manages three hours’ sleep until, at 5 a.m., she leaps from bed, remembering the sanding machine. Oh God! She has left the wretched roaring machine in the living room of the little new house, during which time it will have clocked up four days of unscheduled hire charge. Oh shit and double shit! This is not the sort of oversight that Caroline expects of herself. She makes herself a cafetière of coffee and goes outside to calm down, cup in hand. She watches the sun rise over her vegetable garden. She plucks off the odd busy snail. Then she gets herself ready to collect the sander and drive it back to the hire firm, hoping that by putting in an extra-early appearance she’ll persuade the firm to waive a day of the fee.

In the hospital her mother is imbibing nothing but coaxed teaspoons of Lucozade and she’s barely opening her eyes.

‘Jam,’ she says impassively, when Caroline kisses her.

This time, Caroline tells herself firmly that her mother, who has a sweet tooth, is simply asking for jam.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring in some jam for you today.’

‘Jam,’ the old woman says.

The neurosurgeon is concerned that Caroline’s mother is excessively lethargic and arranges for another brain scan. Then, two days later and with no prior warning, Caroline arrives to find that the old woman has been moved out of the gleaming neuroscience ward, with its generous supply of committed and highly skilled nurses. She has gone far down the food chain, into a slovenly and understaffed geriatric ward, where hollow-eyed and hopeless oldies are groaning feebly, calling out in vain for commodes, or shuffling on Zimmer frames in fluffy dressing gowns to a lavatory that’s doing its damnedest to scream a warning to all potential users. ‘Attention! Superbug! Please Do Not Enter!’ The whole ward reeks of diarrhoea. Beds are unmade, there are balls of stained cotton wool and discarded adhesive dressings dotted about the cracked linoleum floor and – try indefatigably as Caroline does, day after day, from now on – no senior doctor is ever available to discuss her mother’s case. No one appears conversant with her mother’s medical history, nor with the neurosurgeon’s previously stated intentions. The neurosurgeon himself is as if teleported to Planet Zorg.

Caroline’s mother, who is kept permanently attached to a somewhat grubby-looking catheter, is very soon found to have a urinary infection for which she is given antibiotics. For a day she appears to pick up a bit and even begins to eat; two sultanas and one quarter of a small sawdust biscuit, but she promptly vomits everything she eats. At this point, although she is still on holiday, Caroline arranges six weeks’ compassionate leave from her job and, after another week, lobbies to take her mother home as soon as possible. She is confident that her own twenty-four-hour, hands-on nursing care, away from the soiled dressings and the constant threat of infection, could provide the old woman with a better chance of recovery.

In anticipation of her new role, Caroline moves her mother’s bed downstairs and researches less dehumanising alternatives to the patient’s clumpy, in-dwelling catheter. She goes to Boots, where, for a gasp-inducing eighty-five pounds the box, she acquires two dozen single-use catheters that look like narrow drinking straws, and she teaches herself to use them. She has also researched various rehab techniques for stroke victims, in response to which she’s spent hours making picture cards – house, tree, apple, flower, dog, cat, et cetera – and has stuck white name cards on several household items in clear, bold lower case: fridge, door, table, chair, window, lamp, kettle, bed, mug. In between her visits to the hospital, she barely goes home to the bus. Nor does she visit the new house for further home improvements. She beds down, exhausted, night after night, in her mother’s house at Garden Haven, begging a God, in whom she no longer believes, to make the old woman well.

Over the days, she continues her attempts to contact her husband and her daughter, asking them please to ring her, or please to leave her a message, but she’s getting no response. Neither, of course, has a mobile phone. In between, she calms her nerves by embarking on a Garden Haven spring-clean. She sorts out her mother’s fridge. She squares up the clutter of old magazines. She removes the collection of china ornaments to soak in washing-up liquid – the hideous miscellany of shire horses and shepherdesses; the coy Hummel figurines, with their unpleasing crusty matt glaze. Only one little pair escapes Caroline’s clean-up: the dainty china lady on her china bed, with her devoted china gentleman standing alongside her, his little china hand in hers. She wonders idly where it can have gone. Caroline dusts her mother’s shelves. She neatens the bookcase with the large-print Catherine Cooksons and the copy of
Codependent No More
. Then, having previously rifled the desk drawers, jammed as they are, with old diaries, household clutter, junk leaflets and bank statements, in a frantic search for some sign of Janet’s contact details, she now turns her attention to sorting the desk.

There are no half-measures with Caroline and her efforts are nothing if not rigorous, so it is not all that long before a wallet file has fallen from her hands and spewed its contents to the floor. The file contains Catriona McCleod’s ‘Last Will and Testament’, dated 19 August of the previous year – 1994. Curiosity overcomes Caroline. First, the document contains her mother’s instructions for burial. No cremation, thank you. She desires that her body be conveyed to Australia and laid in a plot she has evidently purchased, near the domicile of her younger daughter Janet. In the will, Caroline notes that her mother has left all her property to Janet. That is to say, all her ‘capital’, as contained in an unexpected medley of ISAs and savings accounts, all duly enumerated, including an instant-access higher-rate account worth sixty thousand pounds. It’s with the same bank that holds her mother’s current account.

Caroline’s mother has bequeathed the Garden Haven house exclusively to Janet; the house bought and paid for by Caroline, who has done so by the sacrifice of all her own and her husband’s first savings. Pretty well all of it went to providing the Garden Haven deposit, while a twenty-year mortgage made up the rest, taken out in Caroline’s name and payable by monthly direct debit from Caroline’s bank account. Thus, though the ownership of the property is in Mrs McCleod’s name – a thing that her mother had been adamant about – Caroline has been footing the bill for the previous eleven years. She has nine years still to go. Yet the house, as she now takes note, will belong to Janet. If her mother were to die and the house be rented out, any rental income would presumably be Janet’s. Mark would doubtless find those fat monthly rental cheques a useful bolster to his ‘important work’. The cheques will all be for Jesus, while Caroline will be stuck paying off the mortgage. And were she to renege on paying it? Well then, she presumes that the mortgage provider would be within his rights to repossess her property. That is to say, not the one in Garden Haven, but the darling little terraced house with its newly sanded floorboards and its prettily renovated kitchen. The Last Will and Testament has started to swim before her eyes as Wonder Girl, can-do Caroline begins to feel ever smaller and more hurt. In fact it is easily ten minutes before she is able to read on. That is when she discovers she is not to be left entirely empty-handed.

‘To my adopted daughter, Caroline,’ says the will, ‘I leave all the contents of my house.’ The said ‘contents’ doubtless to include the large-print Catherine Cooksons and
Codependent No More
, the Hummel figurines currently soaking in Fairy Liquid, the mustard Dralon ‘suite’ and the two busily-patterned, Indian-sweatshop rugs. But worldly goods are, for the moment, not the primary focus of Caroline’s attention. ‘My adopted daughter,’ she reads. Then she reads it again. ‘My adopted daughter.’ ‘My adopted’ –

She stares and stares at the document. Her eyes brim with tears. Caroline, who has never allowed herself even a moment’s self-pity; Caroline, who never cries, now finds that the floodgates open. She weeps until she’s soaked through her sleeves. Then she gets up and fetches a roll of kitchen towel.

Caroline throws herself on the sofa, where the crying becomes a sort of howl. In between the wails and howls, she emits pitiful hiccups and sobs. The sky has gone dark around her. Shivering with cold, she hugs herself in a foetal ball and starts to rock back and forth. She has always so terribly – perhaps excessively – wanted her mother to love her; to admire and value her. And now, for eleven of her adult years – no, fifteen counting the four years before little Zoe’s appearance – she has bitten down her longing to have children; has obliged her family to do without holidays; to do without stuff; to live in a bus; has obliged them all, in spite of hard work, talent and two professional salaries, to do nothing but make do and mend. All for the sake of her mother. Caroline has been incessantly, relentlessly ingenious, with scraps of home-grown cabbage and handfuls of dried beans; with old linen sheets and recycled union cloth; with items found in jumble sales and dumped on skips. She has given up her Oxford DPhil along with her beckoning career in academe. Worst of all – oh, unforgivable! – she has consistently, confidently denied her own daughter, her sweet, good and only child, all those things that her girlfriends have; the things that little girls want and need; Barbie dolls, ballet lessons, riding lessons, gym club and mobile phones, Topshop clothes and music players. She has brooked no opposition; has always been firmly, know-it-all put-down – that’s if ever Josh has ventured to query the austerity of her regime. Let us, as always, count our blessings. Caroline Clever-Clogs. Problem-Solver Extraordinaire, who has never stopped laying down the law.

Caroline has been cutting her own hair for the last sixteen years. She cuts Josh and Zoe’s hair as well. And hasn’t she done an excellent job? Oh my, yes! She has never bought herself new clothes, not beyond her M & S basic-range knickers. Even her bras have come from charity shops. And now her cleverness, her triumphs of thrift, have all turned to ash in her mouth. How could her mother have done this to her? And why? Because she was ‘adopted’? Did her mother simply fall out of love with her when a biological daughter came along? More than that, does her mother actively dislike her? Resent her existence? Her brains? Her markedly better looks? Has she, all along, been wishing her older daughter ill?

‘I bought you this
fucking
house, you bitch, you witch!’ she says suddenly, right out loud, raising her voice to full volume, pitching it against the farthest wall. ‘This ugly, revolting house! And the monthly allowance – what a con!’ She bangs her fist hard on the wooden arm of the sofa and lets out a wail of pain.

Two hours have passed before Caroline has stopped crying. She has moved from misery to rage. She gets up and goes through to the kitchen, where, one by one, she removes the Hummel figurines from their washing-up water and throws them against the wall. Since the wretched things will not oblige and shatter, she smashes them to pieces with a meat mallet, grinding them into the floor. Finally, she is once more in control as rage gives way to calculation.

She has tried Josh yet again, this time not bothering to use the cheap-rate Teledial number, because – what the hell – any debts incurred will be for Janet to pick up. And, on her visit to the hospital next evening, she is gratified to see that her mother is, once again, looking worse – or is it her imagination? It seems to Caroline that her mother’s abdomen is swollen, but this time she makes no attempt to seek out the duty doctor for information.

She leans over and whispers into the old woman’s ear.

‘I’ve read your will,’ she says. ‘And shall I tell you something? You are a poisonous bitch and I really hope you die.’

The old woman’s eyelids flutter feebly.

‘Jam,’ she says, in a tiny whisper.

‘Oh no!’ Caroline says. ‘No jam for you. Why don’t we rather start thinking about fudge? Janet’s “scrumptious Grudge Fudge”. Now there’s a thing. Or perhaps we should call it tablet, since Bonnie Scotland is your heritage? Make a batch of toxic Scottish tablet and give it to someone you hate. That’s dear Janet’s personal advice and she’s got Jesus on the board.’

The old woman appears to have tears in her eyes, or is it just a rheumy ooze?

‘Jam,’ she says pathetically, clawing the sheet with her one still-functioning hand. ‘Jam.’

Caroline, before she leaves the ward, takes note that her mother’s catheter bag is now so full that it’s in danger of backing up. This time she makes no effort to buttonhole a nurse. Neither does she undertake the task of emptying it into the bowl of the Superbug lav. She takes herself straight home – home to the bus – and falls into a deep sleep. Before the dawn she is up and doing, filled with vigour and resolution. She knows exactly what she’s going to do.

Caroline returns by first light to Garden Haven, where, once again at her mother’s desk, she arranges all the old woman’s bank statements, policies and chequebooks in a line across the floor. She observes from checking the current-account statements that her mother, contrary to her constant claims of indigence, has evidently been in receipt of a monthly private pension which goes back sixteen years.