Twenty Years

I have a whole day with absolutely nothing to do, thought Marilyn. Of course there were things to do, the washing-up, a bit of grocery shopping, but they hardly counted.

     She wasn’t used to having nothing to do. Even for the last couple of weeks there had been preparing for the funeral and giving Oliver’s clothes, well, most of them, to the local homeless shelter. Now she wasn’t sure if she wished she had kept more back or given every last one. What would he have wanted? For the last couple of years he wouldn’t have been able to tell her. Perhaps she should have donated his clothes to the Alzheimer’s Society. But they didn’t have a shop in her area. 

     I suppose I should watch the news, she thought. She had never been obsessed with the news, but had liked to keep in touch with it. But for months if she watched any TV at all, it was some mindless wallpaper programme, finding that the silence she longed for while Oliver finally slept was not what she wanted after all. She supposed that if anything earth-shattering happened she would find out anyway. Without concentrating she could barely remember who was Prime Minister, or whether the economy was in poor or good shape. 

     Even when she knew why, not remembering made her nervous. She put the TV news on, and there was a report about a young carer, an inspirational teenage girl who looked after her disabled mother and her younger siblings too and said it was an honour and a labour of love. 

     She flicked the channel over but it was too late. Could it make her feel any more guilty and inadequate than she already did? The child put her to shame. She had hated it, hated it so much she dreaded getting up in the morning and dreaded the cries in the night even more. And a labour of love? She felt her nails pressing into her palms without being aware she had done it. Oh, Olly, I did love you, she thought, but I doubt I loved you enough. Not when it got hard. 

     Of course there had been warnings, well-meant ones, when she announced she was marrying a much older man, and the main one, all the more glaring because it was usually only skirted round, was that she would outlive him by many years. She hadn’t been so sure. He had been so vibrant and energetic that, especially in the early days, nobody would have guessed at the 20 year age gap. Still, she had always accepted that it might be so. But she hoped, though using the word “hope” in the context of his demise seemed all wrong, it would be after a quick illness and with loving words of farewell. Not after his mind had been rotted away by that cruel thief of a disease and when he didn’t even recognise her and could be aggressive. 

     She’d had some help from the local social services. But it was generally agreed that as she didn’t work (her writing apparently didn’t count) and was in robust health herself, she could do most of the caring. Only the family GP, Dr Rachel Marsden, also a family friend, seemed to understand, and had said quietly, “There’s no shame in admitting you’re not coping, Marilyn.” She told her about a local care home with special facilities and trained staff for people with Alzheimer’s. But the waiting list was long. I suppose at least that proves I’m not the only one who can’t cope, thought Marilyn. 

     But try as she might, she could not wish that her day was filled, once more, with caring for Oliver. She could not stop feeling relieved at not having to deal with incontinence pads, and arms, surprisingly strong, flailing, and speech, when it came, a travesty of his warm, droll conversation. I had already lost him, thought Marilyn. But that was the kind of glib phrase you used when you wanted to make the guilt, if not go away, retreat a little. 

     At least Rachel wasn’t one of those doctors who were puritanical on the matter of pills. But she had still made it plain that they were only to get her through those first few weeks, and were not going to turn into a repeat prescription. She took a couple now, and they made things a little duller, a little greyer, a little more distant for a while, but only on the thinnest surface veneer. 

     She wondered how long it would be before people suggested she look for what they always called a “little job”, even if it were only volunteering. To get her out of the house. To stop her dwelling on things. 

     She didn’t need the money. She wasn’t rich, but was comfortably off.  While he was still capable of seeing to such things, Oliver had left her well provided for. She supposed at some point she would have to go round to their solicitor and see to that. Living off other people’s money, she thought, with self-contempt. But she wished that were the only reason for self-contempt. 

     She had not always been useless. It was hard to believe it now, sometimes, but she had been a librarian, and had loved the work. It seemed like another life. Then she had taken up writing herself, and nobody had been prouder than Oliver when she got some stories published. “I could never do it in a million years,” he said. But he had been a civil engineer, and one of the best. He worked after the usual retiring age, though he was never one of those people who was married to his job. 

     That capable, skilled, respected man was like a distant dream to Marilyn. It was as if, in a different way, her memories had been destroyed, too. 

     It might be better if I did need to look for a job, thought Marilyn. But no, that was another of those things you were supposed to think. 

     She could not pinpoint the exact day, not even the month, when she stopped writing. It was not switched off, it guttered and spluttered, and she lost interest, and there seemed no point to it. For a while after she stopped sending in her work, she kept a diary of sorts, scribbling it in spider scrawl handwriting in cheap notebooks, interspersed with bad, navel-gazing poetry. But that went, too, and she put the books in the recycling bin, hoping that nobody would read them (she had heard of people rifling through bins), but not really caring. She did not regret not having kept them.

     She did not entirely put her pen down. She had spells of doing puzzles, perhaps in some hope that they preserved your brain function (though God knows why, she thought, as Olly had been better at them than she was!) partly just to pass the time with something that demanded some transient, superficial, engagement of the intellect, but none of the emotions. 

     Alongside the little job there were also suggestions that a little holiday might be no bad idea. Why on earth, wondered Marilyn, did being bereaved make those who met you suddenly develop a fixation on the adjective little?  But she supposed she was by no means guiltless herself when it came to that.

     Pacing restlessly around the lounge she decided that perhaps the little holiday might be no bad idea. But not a holiday, not really. Just a few days somewhere else. Just some different walls around her and a place where there wouldn’t be the risk of bumping into people who thought of her as poor Marilyn. 

     She booked in for a long weekend at a quiet, rather featureless hotel in a market town about 50 miles away. So far as she could remember, though it was close by, she and Olly had never been there. It was better that way. There was a very handsome Victorian church with rightly famous stained windows, and a rather lovely park with statues in it (though she didn’t know if she’d get round to visiting either) but it was, for the most part, just a quiet market town going about its own business, and welcoming the few visitors who came its way, but not making a song and dance about it. 

     Having ascertained that there were a couple of charity shops in the town, she didn’t take any books – she could supply herself easily enough, without needing to carry them. I suppose at least I should be glad I can get into a book sometimes, she thought, though not like I used to. 

     After she had checked in at Holcombe House, she went round to the animal refuge shop to browse the books. The lady behind the counter was pleasant, a bit too chatty for Marilyn’s current liking, but not taking it to extremes. On finding that Marilyn was staying at Holcombe House she smiled and said, “My hubby and I had our Ruby Anniversary dinner in the restaurant there last month. It might not necessarily be that much from the outside, but they do put on a good spread.”

     “That’s nice,” said Marilyn on autopilot, knowing it was pointless trying not to think about their last Wedding Anniversary. She had still given a card to Oliver, thinking it didn’t seem right not to, but ended up wishing she hadn’t. The previous year there had been at least some flicker, at least some vestige. He had looked at it, briefly, in a puzzled way, then swept it off the mantelpiece, taking a little glass model of a cat he had given Marilyn ten years ago with it. They had both been huge cat lovers, and though they would have said it was too glib to say their cats were their child substitutes when no children had come along, there was some truth in it. Their last cat, Caesar, had died just as she was beginning to realise – and so was he – that Oliver wasn’t just getting a bit forgetful. He did not like things to be changed, to be altered, to be added to, even as his memory was rotted and eroded. That was the awful paradox. The cat shattered into thousands of pieces on the hearth. 

     She picked a couple of books by authors she enjoyed (sometimes just using a word like “enjoyed” seemed wholly wrong) and before leaving the shop noticed a pile of magazines. Giving them a perfunctory page-flick she established that there were quite a lot of unfinished or not even started puzzles in them, and added five or six of them to her purchases, too. With the books it came to £4.50, and she gave the lady behind the counter a fiver, telling her to put the change in the collection box. Even as she made the short journey back to the hotel, she wondered if there were any articles in the magazines about those wonderful, selfless carers who made her feel so callous and inadequate. 

     She checked the index and turned to a page with a safe Su-Doku on it. Or that’s what she thought she was doing. But the magazine was a bit older than she had realised, and two of the pages had stuck together. What she saw was not a real life article about carers or Alzheimer’s or anything else, but a story. A story called Chaos Cottage, about someone who discovered that their dream holiday home was not all it appeared to be – and the author was Marilyn Curbishley. Not one of my best, she thought. I laid it on with a trowel a bit too much – I’ve stayed in some pretty grotty holiday lets, but none of them were quite that bad! All the same, she felt something stirring in her that had not for so long. It might not be one of her best, but it was still a funny story and if the state of dereliction of the cottage wasn’t quite believable, the characters were. She’d never had any illusions that she was a great writer, but she had a knack of her own. I enjoyed writing that, she thought. Perhaps a bit too much. That’s why it comes over as a bit self-indulgent and overdone. 

     She didn’t have her laptop with her, nor a notebook, but she guessed – correctly – that Holcombe House was the kind of slightly old-fashioned hotel that provided its guests with a couple of sheets of headed notepaper and a couple of envelopes. They would do. 

     And the idea came to her with as much pain as pleasure, but she knew it was what she must write. At least, how she must start. She had a working title of Twenty Years and it would be about a couple who had been happy for twenty years, with flashbacks to when their relatives warned them about the risks of a twenty year age difference.

     The Su-Doku could wait!