“Do I know you?”
Roz sat awkwardly in an armchair, weighing the ethics of questioning a vulnerable old woman with senile dementia.
“I’m a friend of Olive Martin,” she prompted.
“Gwen and Robert’s daughter.” She studied the vacant blue eyes but there was no reaction. She was relieved. Ethics became irrelevant when asking questions was a nonsense. She smiled encouragingly.
“Tell me about Salisbury. Do you like living here?”
Their conversation was an exhausting one, filled with silences, chanting repetition, and strange inconsequential references that left Roz struggling to follow the thread. Twice, she had to divert Mrs.
Clarke from a sudden realisation that she was a stranger, fearing that if she left she would find it impossible to get back in to talk to Edward. With part of her mind she wondered how he coped. Could you go on loving an empty shell when your love was neither reciprocated nor appreciated? Could there ever be enough flashes of lucidity to make the loneliness of caring worthwhile?
Her eye was drawn again and again to the wedding photograph above the mantelpiece. They had married comparatively late, she thought, judging by their ages. He looked to be in his forties, with most of his hair already missing. She looked a little older. But they stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing together out of the frame, two happy, healthy people, with not a care in the world, unaware and how could they be? that she carried the seeds of dementia. It was cruel to make a comparison but Roz couldn’t help herself.
Beside the celluloid woman, so alive, so vivid, so substantial, the real Mrs. Clarke was a colourless, trembling shadow. Was this, Roz wondered, why Edward and Robert Martin had become lovers? She found the whole experience immensely depressing and when, at last, the sound of a key grated in the lock, it came like the welcome patter of rain on drought hardened earth.
“Mary’s come to see us,” said Mrs. Clarke brightly as her husband entered the room.
“We’ve been waiting for cakes.”
Roz stood up and handed Mr. Clarke one of her cards.
“I did tell her who I was,” she said quietly, ‘but it seemed kinder tobeMary.”
He was old, like his wife, and entirely bald, but he still carried himself erect with shoulders squared. He towered above the woman on the sofa who shrank away from him in sudden fear, muttering to herself.
Roz wondered if he ever lost his temper with her.
“I really don’t leave her alone very often,” he answered defensively, as if she had accused him of it, ‘but the shopping has to be done.
Everyone’s so busy and it’s not fair to keep asking the neighbours.” He ran a hand across his bald head and read the card.
“I thought you were Social Services,” he said, this time accusing her.
“Author? We don’t want an author. What good would an author be to us?”
“I was hoping you could help me.”
“I don’t know the first thing about writing. Who gave you my name?”
“Olive did,” said Mrs. Clarke.
“She’s a friend of Olive’s.”
He was shocked.
“Oh, no!” he said.
“No, no, no! You’ll have to leave. I’m not having that dragged up again. It’s an outrage.
How did you get hold of this address?”
“No, no, no!” chanted his wife.
“It’s an outrage. No, no, no!”
Roz held her breath and counted to ten, not sure if her sanity or her control would slip first.
“How on earth do you cope?” The words tumbled out as involuntarily as Mrs. Clarke’s did.
“I’m sorry.” She saw the strain in his face.
“That was unforgivably rude.”
“It’s not so bad when we’re alone. I just switch off.” He sighed.
“Why have you come? I thought we’d put all that behind us. There’s nothing I can do for Olive. Robert tried to help her at the time but it was all thrown back in his face. Why has she sent you here?”
“It’s an outrage,” muttered the old woman.
“She hasn’t. I’m here off my own bat. Look,” she said, glancing at Mrs. Clarke, ‘is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“But there is,” she said.
“You were a friend of Robert’s. You must have known the family better than anyone. I’m writing a book’ she remembered belatedly that her explanations had been given to Mrs. Clarke ‘and I can’t do it if no one will tell me about Gwen and Robert.”
