Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's Read Online Free PDF Page B

dress and undress her, for example, and get her toileted and into the shower, and would find myself, in consequence of this, adopting the nice-nurseish patter that theoretically I hate. “Righto, Nancy, let’s get you sorted for bed, shall we? Cardigan first.” When I get her into her nightie and take her trousers off, her feet are bluish: white and blue and mauve, her toenails thickened, opaque and yellowed like smokers’ fingers, her shins crocodile-skinned. Proximity . That’s the key word. Up close and disturbingly personal. There’s emptiness behind her eyes, something missing that used to be there. It’s sinister. It seems sometimes, in fanciful moments, that it’s Nancy who’s missing, though her body continues to live and breathe and walk around in the world, redundantly.
    I HAVE A new role, a new identity. Mothering somebody’s mother, and being thanked for it effusively. Nancy comes into the kitchen when I’m cooking and wants to help. I find something for her to do and then she bursts into tears.
    “Oh no. What on earth is it?” I put my arm round her and she cries harder.
    “It’s just that you’re so-o g-good to me,” she blubbers. “You’re so good and kind and you do everything for me. I wish I could do something for you. Tell me what I can do. I want to give you something. A present. Will you take my money out of the bank and get yourself a present?”
    “There’s no need, really. I don’t need anything. Really,” I tell her.
    She goes back into her sitting room.
    “Oh god, what is it now?” I hear Morris asking.
    What exactly is my new relationship with my in-laws? I am their housekeeper, something approximating their parent, their perpetual hostess, but also a servant. I send Morris a pot of Earl Grey and a warm Victoria sponge, feeling as if I have visitors and need to provide afternoon tea, and in return he gives Jack a penny and says, “Here, give this to the waitress.”
    We begin to integrate ourselves a little into peninsula society. First into commerce, then into other people’s kitchens. Professions here are often of the multiple kind. Paul, the gas fitter, installs an eight-burner stove in place of the inherited curly-plate electric, then makes new stable doors for the yard, and is turning out to be a very nifty tiler. Though tradesmen aren’t easy to find. At the end of the week I scissor the local paper, cutting out announcements for the pinboard. The newspaper’s being read everywhere we go on publication day, by shopkeepers, office and health workers, people at the wholesalers and in boatyards, people in tea shops. Ordinary routine comes to a halt. There’s a piece about new Neolithic finds made farther up the coast. Someone has been shooting seals and the public is appealed to for tip-offs. Wrecks have been plundered by treasure seekers, and a diver’s brought up dead. A man’s airlifted from an uninhabited island, injured while birding. A skipper’s been charged with being drunk in charge of a boat. There’s been another suicide, someone who came from England on holiday and leapt off our cliffs to his death. There’s been a country dance, and intoxicated teenagers hospitalized. All this is absorbing enough, but I’m more interested in the advertising. The advertisements are a godsend. Not every trader has a shop or even a sign, and lots of the smaller businesses are done anonymously from home. Thus it is that we find ourselves in a barn one morning, choosing tiles, while being watched intently by heifers.
    We take afternoon walks on the beach, going down in the car so that Morris can come. He can’t make it over the strip of pebbles, nor manage the low grassy dune, so he sits in the car with the door open, watching and smoking. I take the dogs to the water’s edge and throw sticks toward America, the retriever plunging in after them and the Jack Russell barking at him from the shallows. Chris walks his mother up and down the length of the sand, Nancy