She was in the big day room, surrounded by other residents in a similar state, all of whom seemed unable to do anything with their lives anymore, other than to stare endlessly into the middle distance with blank unseeing eyes. Margaret Meadows was sitting in her wheelchair, slumped forward over one steel armrest. Karen felt another stab of guilt. She always seemed to be like that when she visited, rather than in the comfortable electronically-reclining armchair Karen had bought her. The staff invariably told her that she had either just been put in the wheelchair or was just about to be lifted out of it. Karen did not feel she was in a position to argue. She had complied with strangers in order to look after her own mother. She had in effect washed her hands of this sometimes so charming, always so vulnerable, woman whom she knew, whatever else, had always loved her.
Therefore she did not consider herself able to question much of the treatment her mother received. Or maybe that was a cop-out, too. Karen wasn’t sure. Margaret Meadows had lost the ability to walk, for no apparent reason really, but in the way that people suffering from dementia are inclined to — Karen knew that it was as if they forgot to walk as well as forgetting so much else — and the various regulations covering what nursing staff could and could not do in their daily work sometimes had rather cruel results. Karen supposed that she understood why they could not be expected to manually lift her mother around, even though Margaret Meadows was so small and slight, but she hated the thought of her being lifted in and out of her bed and her chair by a mechanical hoist. The last time she had visited, Margaret had had an angry black bruise on her forehead. The staff had explained that she had knocked her head while fighting with the hoist.
The very thought of it made a little bit of Karen shrivel up and die.
She braced herself, leaned forward and touched her mother’s arm. Margaret Meadows did not move. She had never been a big woman, but it seemed to Karen that she had shrunk considerably since she’d been in the Old Manor. Karen stroked her hair. It was still soft and pretty and, with the help of a hairdresser, retained much of its natural pale gold colour. Karen’s mother had always been fussy about her appearance, except when she was into a heavy drinking bout, of course, and Karen paid for her to have her hair done twice a week. Such a small thing, when she knew there was so much else that she should do but didn’t.
Not for the first time she noticed that her mother was wearing somebody else’s clothes. However much she complained to the nursing staff this happened repeatedly. On this occasion Margaret Meadows was wearing a blouse Karen did not recognize.
Abruptly her mother sat up. Karen noticed then that not only was the blouse not hers but that two of the buttons were missing. You could clearly see her breasts, hanging low and encased in an inadequate bra.
Karen felt the tears welling, and fought them back. She had no right to cry. This was, after all, her fault, she felt. She was not equipped to look after her own mother, and she knew it, but that didn’t make her feel any better about not doing so. It wasn’t just the demands of her job and her desire, her need even, to have a life of her own. It was more than that. She was just not able to do it.
Margaret Meadows looked up at her daughter. Her eyes were very dark, surely much darker than they had been when she was well, and very bright. She wore no make-up but her cheeks had a pink and healthy shine to them. Her body, though emaciated with premature senility, was agile, and she still contrived to move in her chair in a quick, almost youthful fashion. Often she sat with her legs curled up in positions Karen thought most people half her age would probably be unable to achieve.
“Hello, Karen,” she said. “Have you come to take me home?”
Karen clenched her fists behind her back. The tears nearly broke through. Tears of guilt every bit as much as of pity. She mustn’t let them happen. She had on one or two previous occasions been unable to stop herself crying, and her mother had been bewildered and upset. This was, after all, only what her mother said to her every time she visited. She should be used to it by now. But she knew she would never get used to it. The words cut through her, cold and sharp as a knife, every time.
“Yes, darling,” she lied. And she hated herself for the lies. Hated herself for making a fool of her mother.
Margaret Meadows nodded contentedly and slumped back over the arm of her chair again. Visits were all too often like that. Her mother asleep in some contorted uncomfortable position, and Karen sitting quietly immersed in her own silent guilt.
She knew that when her mother woke again, in just a few minutes probably, she would either have forgotten what she had asked or would simply ask it again. The only replies you could give Margaret Meadows were those that she wanted to hear, the ones that would keep her quiet and moderately contented. If Karen had told her that she had not come to take her home, Margaret Meadows would have been distressed. And Karen knew that as long as she told her that was what she was going to do, all would be well. She never actually made a fuss about going with Karen. Indeed, she hardly knew where she was, and when she talked about home she was invariably referring to the little North Devon seaside village where she had been brought up. All the intervening years had disappeared into the indecipherable mists within her head.
Karen knew all that. It didn’t make any of it any better. Didn’t make what she felt she had done to her mother any less terrible. She knew that she had not really done anything to her mother. She knew that she was not responsible. She knew that she was not capable of coping with her mother in this state. She knew that she had done her best. And that at least she cared, cared deeply. It made no difference. The pain was a stabbing feeling in her heart, the pain was a contraction in her gut, the pain was inside her head, and ran through every vein in her body.
She was the only person in the world her mother still recognized and called by name, and sometimes she found herself actually wishing that this was no longer so, and that made her feel even guiltier than ever.
Margaret Meadows started to stir again. She sat bolt-upright in that sudden way she had and stared directly at her daughter. Then she gave a small weak smile. Karen felt like jelly. She forced herself to smile back, reached out and took her mother’s hand in hers. But what she wanted to do was to run. To take off. To hightail it out of the Old Manor and never return. Not ever.
“Have you been to see Mummy and Daddy?” asked her mother abruptly.
“Yes,” replied Karen immediately, embarking on another lie.
“And are they all right?”
“Oh yes, they’re fine.” Karen concentrated on smiling at her mother. Her grandparents had died almost twenty years earlier. Once she had told the truth, and reminded her mother that they were dead. Margaret Meadows had burst into tears and had sobbed uncontrollably until one of the nurses had come to the rescue by telling her that her daughter had made a silly mistake. Of course Mummy and Daddy were alive and well.
After that Karen had allowed herself to become immersed in the web of deceit which invariably seems to surround dementia sufferers. More often than not it is centred on kindness, its purpose only to keep the sufferers at peace within their troubled minds. It was still deceit, though. It was still lying to the people you were supposed to care most about. But the alternative was to create turmoil inside already tormented heads.
Karen stroked her mother’s hand.
“Do you remember Richard Marshall?” she enquired casually. It was, after all, however much she tried to convince herself that she also wanted just to visit her mother, the question she had come here to ask that morning. The first of so many questions concerning that time so long ago that she would like to ask.