The Last Time He Saw Her

1.

The duty nurse – so young she could have been his grand-daughter - warned Robert not to expect too much.

’Recognition might be a problem’ she said ’and walking is difficult after the most recent fall.’

A face rash was mentioned – ’a side effect of new medication’ – along with a sudden loss of appetite the previous week. Robert heard the words resistance, stubbornness and anger – abstract nouns he’d never once associated with the gentle woman known to him all his life as grandmother.

He’d travelled to England in June – his first visit in over a year – to help pack the contents of his grandmother’s cottage and to visit her in her new home. During a period of eighteen months she had deteriorated from a fiercely independent eighty five year old who cooked, cleaned, weeded, washed, and regularly manned the Lifeboat Association stall, to a confused and helpless child who put her laundry to wash in the fridge and her dinners to cook in the bathtub. The daily contact by phone with Robert’s mother and aunt had slowly given way to daily visits and by the autumn the old woman’s daughters were taking it in turns to sleep over. By Christmas, unable to cope with even the most basic of everyday human chores, it was decided that Robert’s grandmother should be relieved of all legal authority over her life. Her pension was signed over, the bills she’d been stuffing behind the radiator for months were settled, and a living will was drawn up entrusting Robert’s mother and aunt with the power to switch off a life support machine should the need arise. Then one night, left on her own for two imprecise hours as one daughter struggled to replace the other, Robert’s grandmother was found wandering around in her nightdress near the main road. After three months of trying to cope – three months of upset, frustration, recrimination and tears – the sisters finally bowed to the inevitable and called in an assessor from the Social Services. It took barely ten minutes for the well-groomed woman carrying a briefcase to suggest that if Robert’s mother and aunt valued their sanity then the talkative eighty five year old who couldn’t remember either the day, month or year should be placed in care ’as soon as possible.’

2.

Robert’s mother sent him a leaflet of the care home – helpless as he was two thousand miles away in northern Europe – and he carried it with him in his jacket pocket, pulling it out occasionally to view the soft focus pictures of able-bodied residents who were either stroking cats, reading newspapers, or being presented with freshly cut flowers by smiling members of staff. One morning he found himself staring at the leaflet during a tutorial class at the minor Scandinavian university where he taught. The student who was speaking stopped abruptly and a silence lingered in the cramped, second floor room where Literature Subsidiary 1 met for two hours of each week. Alerted by this silence – and embarrassed by his own inattentiveness - Robert suddenly realised that his class was waiting for him to impart the leaflet’s wisdom. And so, not being a person who liked to disappoint, he readily obliged.

To his bemused group of Danish, Norwegian and Finnish students Robert gave a potted history of his grandmother’s life. As if determined to prove that human truth could be found even in something as simple and mundane as a nursing home leaflet, he told them about how she single-handedly raised her five brothers in one of the poorest quarters of Birmingham…..about how she met and fell in love with Robert’s grandfather, accepting, in the summer of 1933, his holiday invitation to ride pillion to Scotland (the only time in her life that she – the most devoted of daughters – had ever dared disobey her mother’s wishes), about how, in 1941, Robert’s grandfather was shipped to Burma, returning four years later, his skin as dark and brittle as the nightmares that plagued him…..about how she struggled to repair a husband who, in the killing jungles of the Far East, had been broken almost beyond repair….. about how she with-held from everyone the seriousness of his final illness, her sense of duty proclaiming that she alone should bear the burden of his suffering and untimely death, aged 61.

Robert also explained how his grandmother, and others of her generation, expected little in the way of gratitude for their labours – were content to lead honest, unremarkable lives - and why, for this reason alone, he had always considered her remarkable in every way. He even told them about his last meeting with his grandfather, a memory that was still as clear to him as the faces of his own children. The meeting had occurred in January, 1976. Close to death the old soldier had lifted himself up off his heavy mahogany bed (the mattress discarded upon his return to the UK in 1945 and replaced with a piece of chipboard) and painfully made his way down the stairs to greet Robert during his regular Saturday afternoon visit.

’I was fourteen at the time’ Robert told the class. ’Ever since I could remember my only wish had been to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps – to sign up and take the salute, like he did, in a passing out parade. But it was at the age of fourteen that I began formulating my own ideas about the British Army – about all armies, in fact - ideas which had come to me through my new passion, books…..ideas which I knew ran counter to my grandfather’s. Maybe that was why I felt so overwhelmed by guilt when I left him that day. Or maybe it was just the realisation that he was close to death – something my youthful antenna picked up on as soon as I walked through the door.’

Robert’s literature class listened quietly, patiently and with much understanding. And for the rest of the tutorial they asked their pale, bespectacled tutor the kind of penetrating questions ordinarily reserved for the work of Tolstoy.

Later, riding the bus back to his small mid-town apartment, Robert considered a remarkable fact: for the first time his grandmother had been deemed a more worthy subject of discussion than Anna Karenina.

3.

He discovered her sitting in the corner of the television room, coiled up in a wheelchair like a broken spring. The nurse introduced him and made heavy weather of the bouquet of flowers Robert had been carrying now for over an hour.

’I’ll put them in some water’ she said with a smile and Robert couldn’t help but marvel at this young woman’s cheerfulness in the face of such overwhelming stagnation.

He kissed his grandmother on the cheek and, as an act of courtesy, sank to one knee. Beside her he felt as if he’d descended into a primordial, unchartered world – a feeling heightened as he looked around him. The home was different from the soft focus photos in the leaflet. None of the other residents was smiling or reading a newspaper – many of them were either asleep or wandering rather aimlessly from room to room. And Robert was acutely aware of the smell of urine, something else that the leaflet had held secret.

He took hold of his grandmother’s hands – hands that were stiff with arthritis, hands that were once as familiar to him as his own – and began to knead her swollen knuckles. Looking into her rheumy eyes he asked her, clumsily, how she was feeling. When she answered – a baffling shibboleth of words and subordinate clauses - it was all he could do to stop himself from unclamping the chair and wheeling her back to the empty seaside cottage which had once been her home.

Instead, following the young nurse’s suggestion, he wheeled her into her room. It was bright and airy and contained a vast array of knick-knacks that Robert remembered from his childhood: a brass tortoise whose shell flipped open to reveal an ash-tray; a porcelain figurine of a shoemaker sewing a shoe; and, next to the mahogany box containing his grandfather’s watch and Burma Star, two tiny brass men – no taller than an inch - hands in pockets, slightly bent at the knees. The younger Robert used to manipulate these men on the window sill each Saturday afternoon as his grandmother cooked stew and his grandfather marked off his pools coupon. Their imaginary conversations were always comical, occasionally lapsing into the bawdy, much to his grandfather’s amusement. And when his grandmother took a break from the stove to check if fate had blessed them all with a fortune Robert would hide the two tiny men beneath a cushion, the duplicity shared with his grandfather. ’Where are they?’ his grandmother would ask, feigning ignorance. ’Those men - they were here a moment ago, I’m sure…’ and Robert, loving every second of this game, would curl up beside his grandfather, loudly proclaiming his innocence.

Should he hide the brass men now? Should he march them across her bed and into the cave beneath her pillow?

During his flight from Scandinavia Robert had read an article about dementia, the article explaining, rather poetically, how the frontal cortex is like a vast temple, containing our most precious memories, and how sometimes, when the temple doors seize up, help is needed to prise them open.

But no matter how many times he tried – no matter how hard he pushed - his grandmother paid no attention to the tiny brass men: nor to the picture frame containing photographs of Robert, his estranged wife and their two children. All knowledge of Josh and Amy, her beloved great-grandchildren, seemed to have been buried among the temple ruins. Only one photograph initiated a response: when he held up a fading print of his grandmother’s wedding day, the old woman smiled and mouthed something that might have been her late husband’s name.

After making tea in the kitchen, and after securing a blanket and a sombrero from the young nurse, Robert wheeled his grandmother out into the nursing home’s spacious garden. A good deal of her time had been spent caring for plants and shrubs. Her tiny cottage was always vivid with colour and it pleased him that they should sit together like this before he left, drinking their tea in sight of chrysanthemums, fuschias and roses…Robert spooning the lukewarm liquid into her mouth…his grandmother offering occasional flickers of recognition, as though the great temple was on the verge of being miraculously re-built – a distant torch burning in the late afternoon light.