The Persian Room

“…..But the shops won’t be open at five, not today - will they?....” She looks at me for confirmation. I take a deep breath – it’s the third time we’ve been through this since I arrived a few hours ago.

“It isn’t Sunday today Marnie- it’s Wednesday.” She’s definitely getting worse.

We’re at the table – the long dining room table, sitting either side. She is surrounded by notebooks and diaries – Liberty mostly, with pretty, embossed leather covers. Glancing down at them, I can see pages and pages of lists. She says it helps her to be organised – writing down anything and everything. Most of it’s wrong though – telephone numbers, email addresses. I’m not sure if it’s her sight – or her hearing – or what. Whatever the reason, how awful it must be to live in this constant fog.

Zach fled a week ago–– said she was so incredibly rude to him it was doing his head in – and she treated him like a slave. He wasn’t exaggerating - I heard the way she spoke to him. He doesn’t know if he can come back – I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t.

He might still – have one more go. He’s in love with the countryside – the big skies, the beauty of it all. He isn’t sure if he can bear the squalor and the madness though. He’s told her he’s having a think – and in the meantime I am here to be horrible to her – at least that’s how it feels. I have to do it though. I am the only one;

“What it is Marnie, – you say one thing to him, one day – like you said you wanted him to burn the trunk and everything in it – so he did – and then the next morning you shouted at him – and asked why the fuck he’d burned the trunk – who he thought he was….

She looks at me aghast. I hate doing this – it’s like kicking someone when they’re down…

“ Did I do that?”

“Yes. And when he tried to explain, you just shouted louder. You didn’t listen. I was there. I heard you”

“ I have no memory of ….. oh god….I’m losing my mind aren’t I…”

She isn’t pretending. You can see it on her face. I feel terrible. I’m still not sure it’s dementia though. You can get like this if you have depression … and that’s what I’m here for, I’m the end result of the four way email exchange – me, Zach, Kit, and Kit’s mad American wife … “She listens to you – see if you can get her to the GP – we can’t do anything until she does.”

That’s why I’m staying at the cottage. Two nights – how bad can it get for two nights? My sons are having a party at home and that’s my excuse – some peace and quiet for me and would she mind putting me up – please? She is thrilled. Of course. No need for me to even ask – I can come for as long as I want whenever I want – it would be an absolute pleasure.

She would go mad if she knew we were going behind her back. She’d feel betrayed. I don’t like lying, but there’s no other way of doing it.

It’s simple in the end – to get her to make the appointment, because she is so genuinely horrified – and I just say perhaps she should get the memory thing checked out – it could be stress, perhaps they need to try some new anti-depressants – she has been taking the same ones for fifteen years. I can drive her up there – that won’t be a problem. She goes off to phone them. Result! How easy was that!

My room for the night - the Persian room –is so beautiful. It has wonderful paintings on the walls – including a portrait in oils of Marnie in the seventies, done in acid bright colours, some elaborate hangings, a poster of Nico in black and white and a fantastic baroque sofa, covered in eau de nil watered silk, draped with fringed shawls to cover the tattered bits. You couldn’t actually sit on it because the seat dips almost to the floor, but it looks amazing.

Huge old trunks with elaborate brass locks are stacked up all over – this is quite a big room but there’s only a small passage of clear floor to the bed, - and that’s the worst thing - it smells terrible. She says the linen is all freshly washed but I’m not sure which decade she’s talking about, because you can see it isn’t clean at all – there are odd stains all over it. The whole room reeks of dust and decay. It’s suffocatingly hot and stuffy. I can’t open a window either – there is secondary double glazing over the beautiful mullioned windows and it’s nailed shut. Through it I can see the wonderful summer night outside – if only I could get to it!

I take off my jeans – just my jeans though. I can hack it – I’ve spent the night in worse places than this before – not for ages though. On a side table is a lamp – topaz blue – and the part with the bulb in hangs drunkenly to one side. If you touch it, the whole thing bends right over and touches the surface of the table. Next to it is a pile of Vogue magazines from the sixties, but the lamp doesn’t actually turn on, so I can’t read them. I close my eyes and wait for the morning.