Perhaps, though, I just can’t allow myself to believe she abandoned us. That’s what Maya says.
Mum took a flat in Exeter to make her commute to London easier, but her heart wasn’t in it, and after six months she moved fully toLondon, into the Lancaster Gate flat her mother had left her. On the occasions Dad was given no alternative but to allow Mum access to us, Maya and I had to be driven to London, to the city we both feared, by a father whose attempt at jolly chatter was no match for the resentment in his heart.
So thank God for Nicola Watkins, whom Dad met at the village pub quiz while she was on holiday in Devon. Nicola had grown up in Manchester and was then living in Wolverhampton. She and Dad got serious quite quickly, but Dad was tied to Devon, to his girls, so Nicola rented a flat in Bovey Tracey for a year or two before moving in.
We loved her from our first visit to her flat. She had glasses of orange squash and angel cake and welcomed us as if we were old friends. Within six months, Dad stopped paying Jilly-from-down-the-road who’d been picking us up from school, and Nicola started meeting us at the gate instead.
She changed Dad. Slowly but perceptibly, he came back to himself. After years of resentment and disappointment in his relationship with our mother, he softened. He started calling Mum by her name rather than “your mother,” and he paid for us to go and see her on the train whenever we asked. He returned to his beloved civil service, and by the time I graduated from medical school it was possible for them to be there at the ceremony together.
None of that could have happened without Nicola.
But now Dad is slowly fading, miles from the cut and thrust of his life in government affairs, and we have long since passed the limits of our capacity to care for him. I know what’s happening to him neurologically, systemically, but it is near impossible to match that knowledge with my father—the living, breathing body that houses so many glimmers of Dad, yet often seems not to contain him at all.
Yesterday, Nicola texted me a photo of him reading a paper—or, at least, looking at it, while a finger of winter sun rested on his shoulder from the window. For a few blissful hours, I basked in the warmth of that illusion; allowed myself to believe he was really reading the words on the page. Then at 6 p.m. Robin had had to leave the dinner table and drive to Dad’s because Dad had slid off his chair and Nicola couldn’t get him up.
I end the call, thanking Maya for her stern warnings about Stockholm. I write to Yanika’s secretary to cancel our lunch and then go about canceling the flights and insurance. I email Robin, telling him I won’t need that posh hotel room after all.
It is terrifying to me that had it not been for this conversation with my sister, I could have gone off to the conference and found myself in a lecture theater with Johan. Just turned around and seen him sitting two rows back, taking notes.
—
It’s the next day, evening time, and I’m on the sofa watching telly with the kids. The usual fight over who chooses the program tonight was ended when I finally found a parcel from my mother that a courier had left in a “safe place.” (The safe place turned out, after a long hunt, to be the wheelie bin.) Mum only makes it down here once in a blue moon and she never invites us to stay in London, but she does send Raffy and Maeve sporadic parcels of Malaysian treats, which they love. Tonight it’s a NIM’s Crispy Choco Tub each, which they would choose over a one-million-pound check any day.
They’re both now watching something awful calledUnicorn Power. Maeve is bouncing on the trampette that was recommended to us because of her “constant need to be in motion” and Raffy has made himself a cocoon of cushions, out of which poke his feet, resting in my lap.
Robin’s next to me, working on his laptop, but from time to time he says, “Give me that foot. I want that foot,” which makes Raffy shoot his feet back into the cocoon, giggling delightedly.
While this game takes place across me, I’m messaging with Nicola about Dad and flicking through my emails, which breaks the rule I set about not being on phones in front of our children. An email has just arrived from Yanika.
My secretary tells me you’ve canceled our meeting,she’s written. What’s up? I do need to see you if this placement is going ahead, Carrie. I can give it to any number of trainee surgeons but I’d like it to be you. All our cases are traumas, which was always your strength.
If I do want to go ahead with the clinical attachment, she’s proposed meeting at a Lebanese restaurant near her hospital and the training institute. I look it up on a map. It’s two large blocks away, which is quite a long way for a surgeon to be straying. She really must be important. No bleepers for her anymore.
Then: a sharp blow to my head, from behind.
I yell out in pain and shock, cradling my head.
Maeve sniggers, as if this is funny, and jumps back onto her trampette. She seems to have used it as a springboard to fire herself directly at me.
“Maeve! That really hurt! What are youdoing?”
“Oh,” she says, “I was trying to do a roundoff.”
Unbelievably, she does the same thing again, only this time she’s successful—both feet, rather than just one, land directly on me. “Ow! That’s myhair! STOP IT!”
Maeve climbs over me, again pulling my hair with her foot, and jumps into Raffy’s pile of cushions, squashing his willy. Raffy screams and bursts into tears, and I yell at Maeve to “Just STOP!”
Robin’s shouting now too, even though we made a pact not to shoutat our kids, and Maeve, whose tolerance for being told off is poor after a lifetime ofMaeve, stop that!, begins to turn. She’s a highly explosive device once that defensiveness is triggered.
“Just going to do some bouncing,” she says airily, pinging up and down around Raffy’s cushions, but her lovely little face has gone red now.
Raffy, crying, tries to escape but she’s bouncing all around him, so he starts screaming. Robin gets up and moves Maeve from Raffy’s space, but he manages to dump her on the coffee table, which knocks my cooling tea over.
It spills in all directions, dripping down onto the rug Robin told me I shouldn’t buy.The kids will ruin it. Wait a couple more years before you buy nice things like that.I run out to the kitchen to get a tea towel but they’re all wet because Maeve tried to fill her own cup with milk at dinner time and poured half a liter of it all over the floor. In her shame she went through every single tea towel we own to prove that she was more than capable of clearing up her own mess.
Instead, I get a dirty school jumper out of the laundry basket by the kitchen door and race back to the sitting room. Raffy and Maeve are yelling at each other, and Robin is making everything ten times worse by shouting at them himself.
I move Raffy out of the way so I can try to soak up as much tea as possible, but I move him clumsily and he ends up knocking the empty tea cup sideways and onto the flagstone floor on the other side of the rug, where it shatters.
