Laura needs the loo. She and Henry head down the lawn toward the lake, where the toilet block stands.
“Well?” she says.
“I don’t know what to think,” he says.
“You don’t have to think. It’s just a tea party.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s something else.”
“So you’re not sorry you came?”
“No. Not at all.”
While he waits for Laura to get to the front of the loo queue, Henry walks round the lake, and stands gazing back across the water at the great mass of guests on the lawn, and the palace beyond. He finds himself feeling uncharacteristically warmly toward these overdressed strangers. He tries to analyze the source of this feeling. Partly it’s the friendliness of the crowd, and the curious sense he’s noted already that each one feels excited and special. Simply by receiving this invitation, eight thousand people across a wide social range have been made to feel equal. Then there’s that social range itself. The multiracial crowd, drawn from all regions, actually does give the appearance of being a microcosm of the nation. Here in the gardens of Buckingham Palace Henry is a citizen of modern Britain in a way he can never be at home in Sussex. Even the pantomime pageantry plays its part. The well-oiled machinery of what is, after all, a very minor royal occasion has succeeded in making him proud of being British.
But why should I feel moved?
It’s more than nostalgia for a lost patriotism. It’s something to do with the honor accorded to people who are in the normal course of public life invisible. Joan, who plans to frame her invitation and hang it on the wall, an enthusiast whose unalloyed delight in the day has given Henry too the gift of delight. Peter, whose father was in the Welsh Guards, and arriving today finds the regiment standing to attention in his honor. Sukhjit, who refuses to wear a hat, who looks more beautiful than every woman there, whose socialist father stood up to racist thugs. The boys from the RAF, who will go to war laughing that they’ve no idea who or what they’re fighting, even as they risk their lives.
How magnificent people are. How resilient, and generous, and unexpected.
Henry has been struggling with dark thoughts ever since his meeting at Channel 4. His shame over his lie about Alain de Botton, his fear of being found out, has come to represent for him the moment at which his career ended. And when you’re judged too old to go on doing the thing you’ve learned to do, what happens to the rest of your life?
Now in a sudden clear light he sees the question quite differently. The regret that torments him, the failure he dreads, is not the loss of function or purpose, but the loss of status. His pitch to Justin is only half the story. Yes, we manufacture our declared tastes in order to gain status. But that’s hardly important. That’s just a frill, an accessory. There’s something here, something that’s been revealed to him this afternoon, that’s infinitely more significant.
In our insecurity, we seek ways to make others feel insecure. We’re like shipwrecked sailors all struggling to climb onto a life raft. We believe that each person who gets onto the raft lessens our own chances of survival, so even as we fight for a handhold, we push our companions back into the water. And then, safe on the raft, we survivors eye each other warily, knowing that supplies are limited, and each sip of fresh water drunk by another is a mouthful less for ourselves. A cruel existence, a reality-TV-show world, where each week one of the group must lose and be sent away into obscurity. There’s no friendship possible in such a world, only alliances of mutual convenience. Kindness is replaced by charm, and all we understand of love is the manipulative power of seduction. This, we tell ourselves, is the harsh reality. If you want to succeed in life you have to look out for yourself.
And it’s all nonsense.
This is what presents itself to Henry this afternoon with the force of revelation. This nightmare existence is self-created and self-perpetuated, an intellectually lazy borrowing from a misunderstanding of Darwin. The fittest survive, yes: but why should the fittest be the most selfish? Pursue your own goals at the expense of others and you survive, but you survive alone. There is another world, where people form and nurture bonds with each other; where the success of one is the success of all. The revelation is that so many people actively want those round them to be happy.
Why should this be revealed to him here, in the palace gardens? Why is it not evident in his own life? Because the people he mixes with are high achievers, greedy for attention, vain of their image in the eyes of others. People who see humility as a weakness.
I have been one of them. I’ve had my day in the sun. I’ve taken my bow, I’ve heard the applause. And ever since, the silence that follows has been working its slow poison. Once a star, forever a has-been.
But what if that spotlit stage is not the pinnacle of dreams, but a windowless dungeon where the single light burns day and night? And what if the door to the dungeon is locked, but only on the inside? We’re free to open the door and walk out into a different world. All it takes is a little humility.
Laura returns.
“We should go soon,” she says. “You know there’s that black hole after six when there are no trains for an hour.”
“Yes, sure.”
They cross the lawn to say goodbye to their new friends.
“See how the rain held off!” says Joan, as if even the weather is in awe of their special day.
“Actually, it’s Jaspal’s birthday,” says Sukhjit.
They all offer their congratulations. They joke that the garden party has been Jaspal’s birthday party all along. Then Laura and Henry make their farewells.
As they leave by the Grosvenor Gate exit the first spots of rain begin to fall.
30
Mrs. Dickinson is not quite clear how long she’s been alone. There has certainly been one whole night, and quite possibly two. Because she no longer has what might be called meals, the passage of time is hard to gauge. Of course she does eat from time to time, when she realizes she’s hungry, but just a little muesli with milk, or some soup heated up on the stove. No, not soup. That’s run out. She last had soup when Bridget was here. But none of that matters. Meals are a lot of unnecessary fuss. She can cope.
The real difficulty turns out to be the dressing and undressing. Buttons are a challenge. With her arthritic fingers, and thumbs that have lost their power to press, the undoing of buttons is a matter of long fumbling, and the doing up of buttons is an impossibility. The fingers must locate and position the button and the buttonhole at the same time, and hold both accurately in place while forcing through the button. This requires a control she no longer commands.
Why do people make clothes that are so hard to do up and undo?
Then there’s sleeves. One arm can be got into a sleeve with little trouble, but getting the second arm in—well, arms just don’t bend that far back and up. How do other people manage it?
On her first night on her own Mrs. Dickinson succeeded in undressing herself and in getting into her nightdress. Since then she has not changed her clothes. She wears a bathrobe over her nightdress and slippers on her feet, as if she’s living on a hospital ward. In itself, this doesn’t trouble her, because there’s no one to see. But there are a few things she needs, and it’s quite out of the question to go to the village shop in a bathrobe.
A solution will present itself. For now, the important point is that she’s coping on her own. She does not need a carer. Her daughter walked out on her in a rage. Very well, let her go. She doesn’t need a daughter either. How does Elizabeth imagine she coped all these years without a husband? You learn to look after yourself.
She sits in the small armchair by the open window, looking out at her garden. Elizabeth spent so much time in the garden when she was a little girl, especially in summer. She had a game called Visiting. She would go visiting imaginary families in make-believe houses under the magnolia, in the big box bush, behind the crab apple tree. As she remembers, the old lady falls into a confusion and supposes that
her daughter is out there now.
“Teatime, Elizabeth,” she calls. “Your tea’s on the table.”
Except of course it isn’t. There’s no tea on the table because she’s not been to the shop. Will the shop be open? She looks at the clock, and remembers with a start that she agreed to pick Alice up from school. She must be terribly late. She becomes flustered. My goodness! She’d better ring the school and tell them she’s on her way. She reaches for the phone, only to realize she can no longer remember the school’s number, even though she must have rung it countless times. She turns to the telephone book to look the number up, then lets her hand fall again. She’s forgotten the name of the school.
Oh, I am hopeless, she sighs. I’ll have to ring Elizabeth and tell her I’ve forgotten to collect Alice. So she picks up the phone and dials Elizabeth’s number. That at least she knows by heart. But she gets a strange high-pitched tone.
Of course, how silly of me. That’s not where Elizabeth is. She’s in the garden, playing at Visiting.
She wants to see her. All of a sudden she wants to see Elizabeth very much indeed. She wants to call her in from the garden and see her come running to her. She wants to hold her in her arms and make her promise never to leave her.
She shuffles her bottom to the edge of the chair and pulls herself up, holding on to the side of the dresser. She reaches for her walking stick. Slowly, carefully, she crosses the kitchen to the back door. As she emerges into the warm overcast afternoon she remembers that her daughter is grown up now, and married, with children of her own.
She stands in the back doorway looking out at the weed-clogged garden, overwhelmed by desolation.
Why has this been done to me? Why is it so hard to walk? Why don’t my fingers do what I tell them? Why am I all alone? It must be my own fault, but truly I do not know what I did wrong.
She turns back to the kitchen, meaning to call Elizabeth again, but then she thinks of the guinea pigs. Has Bridget fed them properly? Bridget will just give them their dry food, when what they really like is salad. Lettuce, carrot, cucumber, tomatoes. But Bridget never listens, she goes her own way. How can you call someone like that a carer? She’s a don’t-carer. But try telling Elizabeth. She won’t hear a word against the woman. And you know why? Because so long as she can tell herself Bridget’s looking after me she can forget all about me. How often does she come to visit me? Once a fortnight if I’m lucky. My own daughter. My only child.
She stands staring into the kitchen. It strikes her that it’s in a terrible mess. That’s Bridget’s job, clearing up. I can’t do it. If I bend down to pick something up I fall over, and then I can’t get up again. So it’s your wonderful Bridget you’ve got to blame if there’s unopened letters on the floor, and unwashed dishes in the sink.
But Bridget didn’t come today. Did she come yesterday? Did she make sure the guinea pigs were safely tucked up in their hutch for the night?
Then she remembers. There was a disagreement. A row. She told Bridget to go and never come back.
Bridget is gone! There’s a victory. If she’d stayed much longer she’d have seen me off into a home and got the house for herself. That was always her plan. But she wasn’t reckoning on me. I’ve looked after myself all my life. I’m no pushover.
She feels an ominous stirring in her bowels. Hurriedly, almost recklessly, she makes for the downstairs lavatory. She has just managed to hitch up her nightdress and lower herself toward the toilet seat when a great eruption takes place. Most of it, but not all, goes into the toilet. The eruption ends as suddenly as it began, leaving her weak and dizzy. She remains sitting there, drained of all energy. Her phone starts to ring. She knows she has no chance of getting to the phone in time, so she lets it ring until it falls silent.
Then slowly, wearily, she cleans herself up as best as she can; also the sides of the toilet. She dare not stoop or kneel to clean the floor for fear she’ll never be able to get up. The smell remains after she’s flushed, but there’s nothing to be done.
She hobbles to the phone. The caller must have been Elizabeth. She dials Elizabeth’s number, and once again gets the high-pitched tone. She puts the phone down with an exclamation of anger. Elizabeth should answer. It’s very wrong of her to place herself out of reach in this way. Just because she employs Bridget as a so-called carer she thinks she can carry on as if I don’t exist.
Is that what you want, Elizabeth? Do you want me to die?
It comes to her then that this matter must be sorted out once and for all. It’s been allowed to go on for too long. If Elizabeth has walked out on me the way Rex did, then let her say so. Let her say it to my face.
In the garage outside there is an electric buggy that she uses for short trips, to church, to the shop. It doesn’t go very fast, but so long as it’s fully charged it can go for up to twenty miles. Elizabeth’s house is just the other side of town.
The old lady sets off at once for the front door. Now that she has made this decision she feels a little less desolate. Of course she must see Elizabeth. Not because she can’t cope on her own. Not because she needs a carer. But because there are issues between them that can only be resolved face to face.
The garage doors are open, as they always are these days. Elizabeth says, “That’s an invitation to thieves,” but what can you do? There’s no way she can open the garage doors by herself. “Bridget can help you,” Elizabeth says. Of course! Bridget can do everything! Bridget is wonderful! But now the wonderful Bridget is gone.
The old lady unplugs the buggy from the charger and lowers herself into its seat. She sets its speed to the slowest setting, and inches backward out of the garage. Now that she’s underway she feels so much more positive. She pictures her daughter’s face when she opens her front door and sees her there. So I need a carer, do I?
She reverses in a semi-circle, switches to forward drive, and trundles out onto the street. After a few yards she sees ahead of her a mother with a small boy approaching on the pavement. The small boy stares at her and points. “Mum! Mum! Look!” Only then does the old lady realize that she’s wearing nothing but a nightdress, and that one side of its skirt is stained ginger-brown.
Mortified, aghast, she makes a full turn in the street, causing the car coming up behind her to brake hard and honk loudly. Her eyes resolutely cast down, she trundles back to her entrance, and returns the buggy to its place in the garage. She hobbles with her stick from the garage to the front door, and finds she has failed to bring the front door key with her.
Shivering now, not with cold but with shame and helplessness, she hobbles round the house to the back. Her strength is failing her fast. Seeing the bench outside the back door, she lowers herself down to sit on it. Broken, frightened, bewildered, she closes her eyes and slips into a shallow sleep.
When she wakes she doesn’t know at first where she is or why. Before her is the guinea pigs’ run, with the hutch in which they sleep at the far side. The hutch door is open, as it should be by day. There are two guinea pigs. One is running up and down as if looking for a way out of the fenced enclosure. The other is lying by the hutch door.
Have the guinea pigs been given their salad? Bridget never gives them their salad. Even Elizabeth doesn’t understand. “You spoil those guinea pigs,” she says. “Do you think they eat chopped salad in the Andes?” But they’re not in the Andes now, are they? They’re here with me. As a matter of fact, Elizabeth, the guinea pigs are the only living creatures that are here with me. They’re my company. When I go Visiting, they’re the friends I visit. I expect that appears quite funny to you. Well, go ahead, laugh if you like. But they don’t criticize me, or tell me what to do and when I’m to do it, and they’re always glad to see me. They lead quite a busy little life, you know, always scampering about, always looking for something to eat or somewhere to snuggle up. Sometimes I just sit and watch them for hours.
She’s sitting and watching them now. The one lying by the hutch is very still. Almost too still. She ge
ts up from the bench, staggering a little, and goes closer. She reaches out her walking stick and gives the guinea pig a little nudge. No response. Worried now, she shuffles right up to the low fence that encloses the guinea pigs’ run.
“Guinea guinea!” she calls, in the special high voice she uses to call them when she’s feeding them. “Guinea guinea!”
The other guinea pig runs toward her.
“What’s the matter with your sister?” she says. “She must wake up.”
But the motionless guinea pig does not wake up.
Mrs. Dickinson executes a controlled fall to her knees. Once on the ground, she reaches her walking stick into the run, handle first, and pulls the guinea pig toward her. She knows then from the way the soft body offers no resistance that the guinea pig is dead.
She picks up the little furry creature and holds it in her arms. Its brown button eyes are open but unmoving. Its nose, always the busiest part, is still. In every other way the animal is perfect: there are no signs of a wound.
“Oh, guinea,” she says sorrowfully. “What happened?”
But she knows what has happened. The guinea pigs were not put to bed last night. They were left with the hutch open, exposed to predators, vulnerable to night chills. Bridget should have shut them up, but Bridget is gone.
Still holding the dead guinea pig in the crook of one arm, she levers herself upright again by pulling on the hutch. She makes her way, step by trembling step, into the kitchen. Here she sinks down into her chair by the window. She arranges the dead guinea pig in her lap, and strokes the unresisting fur.
Is it my fault you died? Did I kill you? You asked for so little, only shelter, safety, a little food. Not so hard to give. And did I fail you even in this?
The little animal’s needs, which have not been met, become confused in her exhausted mind with her own needs. The guinea pig is innocent as she is innocent. Both of them have suffered neglect. Both have died.
So am I dead now? If so, in whose lap am I resting? And whose hand is it that strokes me?