Songs of Blue and Gold (2 page)

‘Try to live in the moment,' she would say.

It was certainly possible to imagine her in this place.

A lilac veil was poised to drop over the water between the island and the mountainous Albanian coast so close by. Julian Adie's description of its hulking nearness was more accurate than I had expected.

The Gates of Paradise
was his account of an idyllic sojourn by the Ionian Sea, first published at a time when Britain was ‘a place of thin greasy soup and shrivelled lips' and most people could only dream of sensuous escape, of unbroken sunshine and the freedom to swim each day in cobalt-blue seas, to eat fresh figs and drink wine, make love and write poetry under the sun. Sixty years ago, it was the book that made Julian Adie famous.

Near the end he writes of this very place, this fabled white house, after he and his first wife Grace had reluctantly sailed away in the teeth of imminent war: ‘It is never mentioned. The house is destroyed, and the lovely boat lies holed and upturned, a ribcage rotting in the sun. Only the shrine and the sacred pool are unchanged.'

Disingenuous, of course. All the biographical sources note, usually in a spirit of indulgence, that Adie was not to be trusted with the truth when it came to spinning
his literary web. Better to mesmerise with prose studded with poetic jewels, to conjure a yearning nostalgia by smashing up the beautiful landscape, setting it out of reach like a myth, than to tell it how it was.

Maybe the house was damaged, but it was never destroyed, for all that the Germans cruelly bombed the island. It still stands, solid as it ever was, at the southern end of the horseshoe bay. The boat had been sold before they left, according to other accounts, and if Grace and Julian never spoke of their idyll it was because by the time he came to write the words, she had left him, taking their baby daughter with her. By 1945 she was back in England, while he was rampaging through parties in Cairo.

Time and truth are elastic. I could feel that strongly here, sitting on the rocks where they once sat and which he described so alluringly, peeling away the layers of the present and the past. The slippage of years is like a strong undertow of the sea over steeply shelving beach. Could Julian Adie have been right all along, in his romantic claims? Was it possible to escape from the English way of death, and emerge in the blue light of a Greek island to collect and restructure the past, current and recurrent?

Between the bay's twin headlands where tall cypresses blackened into dark fringes, the sea was glassy. The looming foreign coastline was a bulge of rocky muscle, indigo-ridged on the horizon, as I strained the sinews of my own memory for the clues I must have missed.

There was no doubt in my mind that she had sent me here deliberately when she gave me the book of poetry and with it all the unanswered questions.

Collected Poems
by Julian Adie, published 1980. On the title page is an inscription by the author:
‘To Elizabeth, always remembering Corfu, what could have been and what we must both forget.'

To Elizabeth, my mother.

IT WAS A
photograph of a white house: dice-square, built low on a rocky shore. Behind it was a promontory speared by cypresses and in front, a dark blue sea glinting with sun diamonds.

Elizabeth traced the outline of the house with a finger. The picture was trembling in her hand. She had picked it out from a pile on the floor, tipped from a battered brown envelope – yet another diversion from the awful business in hand but one Melissa had allowed because it was too draining to argue over everything.

‘What have you got there?' asked Melissa.

‘His home.'

‘Whose home, Mum?'

She opened her mouth to reply but no words came. Her eyes filled as the silent seconds stretched. The expressive green-grey eyes sharpened with tears and the pupils shrank like a wince. The answer remained frozen.

Melissa stroked her mother's shoulder.

Home. It was a word they had been using tentatively.
For months it had been offered and retracted, reinterpreted and recast, until it was hard to know what it meant any more.

A hard, old-fashioned suitcase lay open, half-filled, on the bed. Melissa smoothed the top layer of clothes inside. It had taken hours to get this far.

Elizabeth eyed the suitcase suspiciously. She was putting the oddest things in it, and Melissa was taking them out. A cracked green vase, a Chinese doll, a camping saucepan and garden secateurs lay in limbo on the counterpane. Feeling sad and traitorous, as if by admitting she could not care for her she was failing both of them, Melissa removed a paintbrush and replaced it with three pressed nightdresses.

‘We're not packing everything,' Melissa said. ‘Only enough for a week or so. You know you can come back here if . . . if you don't like it.'

The nursing home was only an experiment. To see if she liked it enough to stay. It had to be her decision, even in this condition. Elizabeth Norden was still a strongminded, independent woman, no matter what was happening to her, the holes in her consciousness, the child-like panics and the words that remained frustratingly out of reach.

She wandered off down the corridor again. Melissa followed and waited more patiently than she felt. When Elizabeth emerged from a cupboard on the landing she was waving a screwdriver that Melissa was sure should have been in the kitchen tool drawer.

Elizabeth was smiling. The screwdriver was in her left hand, but she was hunched over to the right, holding something else with her elbow under the side of her cardigan.

‘What have you got there?'

No answer.

‘Do you want to put that in?'

Elizabeth shook her head. Her hair was still bright and thick, with streaks of the old blonde. Her lovely face was hardly lined. The devastation was all inside.

‘Let's get on then, Mum.'

Back in the bedroom there were several minutes of lucidity, during which Elizabeth sensibly decided that she would take her hairdryer and embroidered dressing gown and found them immediately, despite still having one shoulder hitched up to hold whatever it was she had hidden under her arm.

‘What have you got under there?'

Silence.

‘You can put it in, if you want.'

The stare again. ‘Is Richard here?'

Melissa shook her head.

‘Why not?' Elizabeth asked. ‘I thought he was downstairs.'

Clearly disappointed, she wrapped her arms tighter round her thin waist. She and Richard had always enjoyed each other's company. He had a knack of treating her as a friend, which she made easy, being as little like a mother-in-law as it's possible to imagine. They even flirted a little, which took Melissa by surprise at first. But there again, underneath the layers of self-containment, and with certain people, Elizabeth had always been rather gauchely young at heart.

‘No, Mum. He's at work.'

‘Later then.'

‘He's not coming. He's in London.'

Elizabeth looked at her shyly. Her hands were shaking as she unwrapped the object she had twisted into the inside of her cardigan. Then she held it out. It was a book, a hardback with a glossy dust jacket.

Melissa put it into the suitcase. But this time it was Elizabeth who threw the look of astonishment and pulled it out. ‘You need this,' she emphasised, and bustled out of the room.

It was a book of poetry. Melissa barely gave it a glance as she quickly put it on the chest of drawers with the paintbrush and all the other incongruous items. Taking some deep breaths she turned back to the work in hand.

The words ‘Alzheimer's disease' had finally been used. The doctor called it ‘AD', as though it were a new beginning and not a dreadful end. At first he would talk of ‘the loss of cognitive function' as though they were at a seminar. Perhaps it wasn't correct to call it dementia any more.

In any case it was only ‘probable AD'. He put it this way:

‘AD is defined by specific abnormalities of the brain, but these can only be ascertained by direct examination, that is, after death by means of an autopsy.' He was a nice man, the doctor. He seemed too young though, as if he could not possibly understand the emotional impact of what he was saying. But perhaps that was a misjudgement on her part, yet another one, Melissa conceded silently.

They had passed through the early symptoms: mild memory loss and occasional disorientation. Clearly these had not manifested themselves worryingly enough. In any case, who was she to judge what was normal? Over the past few months, Melissa had felt like that herself all too often.

‘Disorientation, changes in personality and judgement, moving on to anxiety, agitation, pacing and wandering, difficulty recognising family and friends, sleep disturbance,' Dr Stewart went on.

Steeling herself, she had asked.

‘You have to start thinking about what is going to be for the best – for both of you.'

Melissa said nothing.

‘Try the nursing home for a week.'

WITH ELIZABETH AWAY
– only twelve miles away, but far enough for her to have screamed that she would not go abroad again when they drove past the station at Tunbridge Wells – the house seemed eerily empty, the life sucked out of it.

Built of rose brick and weatherboarded in white, Bell Cottage was medieval at its heart, a large cottage sunk in a tousled garden. Elizabeth's daybed vacant by the window, the house hunkered down under the storm-grey seas of the sky.

Beyond the house, paths and bridleways crossed a landscape of quiet legends: no chalk giants strode over the roll of the hills here; no dragon bones stirred under the fields; nor the swords and cries of clashing chain-mailed battle. This was a countryside of calmer beauties: the medieval house and its royal ghosts; the furry apricots espaliered against garden walls; the blasted oak around which a Tudor queen had once danced; the gentle mounds and dips of cultivation; the skeletons of hop gardens; the confluence of two snaking and babbling rivers far upstream from their eventual grandeur at Rochester and Chatham.

Melissa stayed on. She told herself it was so that she could
visit her mother more easily, which was true. Also that she could not go back to London, which was not, necessarily. ‘I need some time to think,' she told Richard.

When she was not sitting with Elizabeth in her room at the home, she worked in the garden, trying to tidy it and cut back as best she could, to imitate what she imagined Elizabeth would be doing this time of year. Or she walked through the countryside, striding out strenuously.

The soil smelt of decay after heavy rains as the earth closed in on itself. It clogged the boots Melissa had found in the garden shed and weighed them down.

Ferns were already rusting under the trees, the acorns browning. The throaty sawing of pheasants croaked from the undergrowth. At every turn on Melissa's solitary marches there was evidence of other lives and incidents: a soggy woollen glove hanging from a branch at chest height by the path, lost and waiting to be claimed; the disembowelled badger which sprawled across the woodland path; the flurry of feathers where a struggle had taken place.

To the rhythm of her steps as she walked, old conversations, transcripts of arguments with Richard, filled Melissa's head. The words were lodged there, primed as always for any chance to demand a rerun.

‘I can't un-know what I know!'

‘Relationships change; you could change your perspective!'

‘See it from my point of view!'

‘It's like an ache that won't go away . . .'

‘You can't let go, you mean.'

One afternoon she stopped under the arch into the churchyard. On its crumbling plaster ceiling was a treasure trove of pencilled graffiti, some dating back to the nineteenth century.
Much of it was dated from the last war, though. Land-girls had once been billeted in the Guild House (an article in the parish magazine had stuck in her mind). It was a rickety construction with its origins in Tudor times, now dark and derelict. Scraps of dirty cotton curtains sagged at the diamond-paned windows. Plaster had fallen off leaving the skeleton of lath clearly exposed. Even a creeper growing up from the forgotten patch of garden to the side had died, suckers holding fast to black wormholes in the timber.

‘Roll on a long time' implored one message dated 16 September 1939. Whose stories were these, and what happened next?

By nightfall she was often physically tired, but that did not always help.

‘Imagine you are lying in a wooden boat on the sea, feeling it sway, feeling the pull from the currents in deep water underneath . . .' Elizabeth used to murmur, lightly stroking her forehead.

The child Melissa would float in blue, above and below: all shades of indigo and cobalt, turquoise, sky and aquamarine.

‘Imagine all the blues, catching the sunlight, changing and lightening. Feel the warmth on your skin. Feel yourself sinking down into the blue and the sun. Feel how magical it is, how your arms and legs seem to float . . .'

Melissa could visualise the scene so vividly she could make the mattress rock with the waves and feel drowsy in the heat. It would not take long before she fell asleep.

In the past weeks, it was a technique to which she had returned more and more often in the sleepless reaches of the night.

‘It's like being in no-man's-land – I can't go forward and I can't go back.'

Leonie listened, kindly, intently, head bent over the teapot. She filled their mugs again. It was Saturday afternoon, in her creamy, stone-flagged kitchen. Sunlight slanted in through floor-to-ceiling windows, brushing bronze and copper through her thick brown hair. Elizabeth had settled well enough for Melissa to allow herself a trip up to London.

‘I'm dragging my heels,' said Melissa. ‘But how can I make any decision about Richard when Mum is so ill?'