She was putting a brave face on it, attempting to maintain her dignity, but I knew from her carers that her agitation had been more extreme than she was letting on. She was also more lucid than I’d expected, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or not.
‘He wanted to try chess club,’ I said. ‘I was planning to bring him over here after it finished, but he was feeling poorly when I collected him. I’m sorry. I should have phoned.’
‘You should have,’ she said. Manners mattered to Ruth. ‘I thought it was half-term, that I’d forgotten, I’m a little forgetful nowadays you know,’ she told me, as if this were news, as if I hadn’t been minutely tracking the destructive progress of her dementia since her original diagnosis, ‘but Sister told me she was sure it was next week.’
I’d forgotten that half-term was about to start, of course I had.
‘What was wrong?’ Ruth asked.
‘He had a sore throat, a bit of a temperature, I think it was a virus.’
‘Should he be back at school? Is he wrapped up warm?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and the lie felt as though it might wind its way around my throat, and tighten.
‘Is he working hard?’ she said. Her eyes were milky, and the impotence of her condition wandered around their depths. ‘At the hospital?’
She was confusing Ben and John. It happened often, and I went with it.
‘Not too hard. He’s doing well.’
‘He must practise, when he’s better, because when he is big enough and good enough he must have the Testore.’
The Testore was Ruth’s violin: a beautiful instrument, made in eighteenth-century Milan, her most valued and valuable possession.
‘He’s not showing any signs of growing out of his half-size yet,’ I said.
‘No, but he will. They do, you know.’ A half-smile played on her lips, a memory, and then died away again.
‘What’s he playing?’
‘Oskar Rieding. Concerto in B minor.’
‘The whole thing?’
‘Just the third movement for now.’
‘He must be careful with his bow control. In this passage in particular.’
Ruth began to hum the Rieding concerto, her hand beating time. She had an extraordinary memory for music. Each note she’d ever played, or taught, seemed to have found a place to lodge in her head, all its resonance still alive to her. She’d started Ben on the violin when he was six, insisted on paying for his lessons. He was showing promise, some of the musicality that had travelled from Vienna, through her family, and that thrilled Ruth.
She stopped abruptly. ‘Have you got that?’ she asked, as if I was her pupil myself.
‘Yes. I’ll remind him.’
She pulled herself forwards. Her dress shifted over her skeletal knees, catching on the surgical stockings that she wore on her calves. I noticed a small stain on her pretty yellow scarf. On a table, just within her reach, a shiny golden sweet sat in the middle of a crocheted doily. Her hands scrabbled uselessly to grasp it, but I knew better than to offer to help because that would have upset her. Finally, her fingers got a purchase on it.
‘For Ben,’ she said. ‘I saved it.’
On the rare occasions that Ruth took part in the communal activities in the home, she was ruthless about acquiring the sweets that were sometimes offered as prizes. She hoarded them for Ben.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She went through the same rigmarole to reach something else, a book. She passed it to me. ‘Look at this. I got it from the library. Does it remind you of anything?’ A smile passed across her lips, a rare sight nowadays, usually only bestowed on Ben.
I took the book, ran my hand over its shiny cover, and felt the dog-eared edges. It was a monograph, and its subject was the artist Odilon Redon.
‘The museum,’ I said. ‘When we took Ben to see the dinosaurs and ended up looking at the paintings.’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I’ve marked the page. Can you see?’
I opened the book where she’d inserted a bookmark. It was a garish yellow strip of leather with a design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge embossed in it in gold. Ruth didn’t have many ugly possessions, but this was one of them and she kept it because Ben had bought it for her on a school trip.
‘We looked at the William Scott painting first, do you remember?’ said Ruth.
I did. It was a huge canvas, wall-sized, with an ink-black background and four large formless abstract shapes floating within it, in white, darker black and a complex shade of blue that brought to mind a sunlit Cornish coastline. ‘What is it?’ Ben had asked me, his hand nestled in mine. ‘It’s whatever you want it to be,’ I’d said. ‘I like it,’ he replied. ‘It’s random.’ ‘Random’ was a new word that Ben had learned at school and he used it whenever he could.
In the next gallery Ben had been drawn to a small canvas by Odilon Redon, and a copy of this was revealed when I opened the book. In the museum, Ben had stood in front of it, just inches from it, while Ruth and I stood behind him.
‘What is this one?’ he asked us. In the centre of the painting was a white figure, mounted on a rearing white horse and holding aloft a long stick with a green flag at the top of it, which looked to be fluttering in a hot breeze. Behind the figure were two boats, barely emerging from the thickly painted background, with its suggestions of land, sea, clouds and sky in dusty shades of brown and blue.
‘It’s a bit messy,’ said Ben.
‘The artist has done that on purpose,’ Ruth told him. ‘He wants to suggest a dream to you, a world where stories take place and where you can use your imagination.’
‘What is the story?’
‘Like your mummy said about the other painting, the story is anything you want it to be. It’s everything or nothing.’
‘I would like to have a green flag,’ said Ben.
‘Then you could be an adventurer too, like the person in this painting. Would you like a white horse?’
Ben nodded.
‘And what about a boat?’ Ruth asked him.
‘No thank you,’ he said, and I knew he would say that, because Ben had a fear of the sea.
‘Do you know what I see in this painting?’ Ruth asked him.
He looked up at her.
‘I see a brave person riding a magnificent horse and I wonder where that person is going and where they’ve been,’ she told him. ‘And I also see music.’
‘Where is the music?’ he asked.
‘It’s in there. It’s in the paint, and the sea and the sky and in the story of the person and their horse and the ships,’ said Ruth. ‘All those things give me the idea of music, and then I can hear it in my head.’
‘And for me too,’ he said. He smiled at her, his face lit up. ‘It’s lots of fast notes, like an adventure.’
‘And slow ones too,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you see here – that thick bit of paint, where you can see how the painter smeared it on with his brush? That’s a slow note for me.’
Ben considered that. ‘Can you hear it, Mummy?’
‘Definitely,’ I told him, and in that moment just the sound of his voice, the innocence ringing in it, the eagerness to listen, was music enough. On that day, my son was seven years old, and I suspected already that he might not be the kind of child who could win a running race, or triumph on a rugby pitch, so to see him respond in this way to the paintings was a joy. It gave me so much hope for his future, that sensitivity he had, the way that he might be able to respond so positively to beauty and to ideas. I felt it would enable him to create reserves that he could draw on when he needed to, and I knew I could guide him through that, or at least set him off on his way.
What I hadn’t realised on that day, as Ruth and I took him downstairs to find tea and cake, was that he might need to draw on his reserves so soon. Before he would be ready. Or that he might never get a chance to build them up before they were shattered for ever.
‘Do you want to borrow the book?’ Ruth asked. I was lost on the page, in the image, and her voice pulled me back to now. ‘Ben might like to see it.’