Emily met Kate’s questioning gaze fiercely; the answers she sought would have to wait. ‘I’ll find it for you,’ she called out, hurrying after Lena, bumping the suitcase behind her. Perplexed, Kate followed.
The downstairs hallway had not changed in all the years Kate had been away. The walls were apple green and covered with framed pictures of Cottons through the ages: Emily and the brothers, their parents, Jonathon and Melanie, photos of Jonathon and his sister Val as children, a sepia snap of Lena’s brother Austin in military uniform, a smiling couple on their wedding day some eighty years ago, Lena’s own wedding to James, now twenty years dead. Kate traced the dusty generations along the wall with a wistful fingertip.
Then she spotted a photograph of herself. She and Emily were squeezed onto a rock with Rigg Bay resplendent behind them, squinting and staring at the camera and dangling their dirty bare feet. Their arms were wrapped around each other, heads pressed close – Kate’s honey-blonde plaits and Emily’s wiry curls intermingling. Emily was grinning into the lens; Kate looked unrelentingly serious. She stopped short and stared at the picture and suddenly Emily was beside her, unhooking it from the wall, carrying it into the kitchen. Kate stepped over her abandoned suitcase and followed.
Lena stood at the counter heaping tea bags into a pot, her immediate need of her hat forgotten. ‘Look, Lena.’ Emily tapped her on the shoulder, pushed the picture in front of her and gestured from the photograph Kate to the real life version lurking anxiously in the doorway. The dog wagged and weaved between them, tongue lolling.
Lena looked from Kate to the picture version, recognition dawning like an opening bud at first sun. ‘It’s you,’ she said, wonderingly. Something changed in her face and she was the Lena Kate remembered. ‘The bangle girl.’ The realisation brightened her immeasurably, but there was strain there still, a moment of uncertainty, a veneer of lingering pretence.
For a second, Kate was baffled, then Lena pointed to the picture and held it out to Kate with a grunt. When she looked more closely, Kate noticed them: numerous plastic bands in fluorescent pink, yellow, green, looped around her wrist. Emily gave them to her for her twelfth birthday and she refused to take them off, even when she slept. They were just pocket money toys from the paper shop in Wigtown, but they were as precious to Kate as diamonds. The first piece of jewellery anyone ever bought for her. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried. ‘I’d forgotten those. I still have them somewhere.’
‘Sit down. Sit down.’ Lena flapped a big, bony hand, directing them both to the scrubbed refectory table in the midst of the big, untidy kitchen. She sounded more resolutely herself.
Kate sat. Emily took the chair opposite her and set the photograph between them. ‘Thanks.’ She accepted a cup from Lena and sloshed in some milk, took a sip, winced as it burned her tongue. ‘Kate’s come to help me set up the bookshop.’
Lena banged a tin of biscuits down on the table and gave a grunt which might have been encouragement. Emily continued, describing their plans. She was eager, a child spinning dreams, and Kate felt the weight of her impending success or failure resting squarely on her own shoulders. Several minutes into the conversation, Lena’s eyes clouded over and her face changed, adopting a baffled smile, nodding politely. At the next mention of the shop, Lena said; ‘A bookshop? How lovely.’ As if it was the first she’d heard of it. Kate’s anxiety ratcheted up another notch.
They finished their tea and custard creams, then Emily pushed back her chair. She plucked Lena’s ancient hat from the dresser where it rested on a hook meant for cups and handed it to her. ‘Why don’t you go and potter in the garden with Bracken? I’ll show Kate to her room and then make dinner.’
Lena put on the hat, the wide brim of it almost concealing her face entirely. She stood up obediently, whistled to the dog who was curled up under the table waiting hopefully for crumbs, and they both departed through the back door. Kate could hear her voice as she proceeded down the path, a gruff, comforting hum, and through the open door she could see the dog wagging his tail in response as he trotted faithfully at her side. Emily got up and started to clear the tea things. ‘I guess you remember Bracken, he was probably just a pup last time you saw him.’ Her tone was guarded, overshadowed by words she didn’t say.
Without warning Kate found herself overwhelmed by exhaustion, the flight catching up with her at once; she was in no mood for Emily’s prevarication. ‘What’s going on, Em?’
Emily dumped the cups into the sink with a jarring clatter of china. ‘All right. Not here. Let’s go upstairs.’ Between them they lugged Kate’s suitcase up the creaking stairs and sat side by side on Emily’s bed in a room almost entirely overlooked by time. Emily had yet to make the mark of her adult self on a room that still anchored her securely to her childhood.
‘So?’ Kate prompted, kicking off her boots and drawing her legs up beneath her, feeling the jet lag tug at her like the pull of a strong current as soon as the softness of the bed embraced her.
Emily stroked the seams of her patchwork quilt and took a deep breath, looking as if she was about to make a dire confession. She fixed Kate with a solemn, grey-eyed gaze. ‘Lena has Alzheimer’s,’ she said.
The thought of Lena being sick was a blow to Kate, and she reeled from the impact. Lena was one of the formative pillars of her childhood, the foundation upon which she had crafted herself. Six lost years … so much of Lena gone, and continuing to be lost – moment by moment, slipping away.
‘Mostly, she’s frightened about forgetting,’ Emily said softly. ‘It’s little things: beginning a sentence and forgetting the end, losing words for ordinary things, forgetting the names of people she knows, or recent conversations. Older stuff she’s better with. It was easier to introduce you as if she’d never met you because she’d be upset if she thought she should know you and didn’t. Sometimes photographs help her to make the connections. And sometimes you just have to accept that she doesn’t remember, and ride out the episode until she comes back. She always comes back.’ Emily met Kate’s eyes with a fierce flare of defiance, then dropped her gaze to her hands, knotting them into fists. ‘So far she has, anyway. Suddenly, there she is … and then gone again.’ Emily’s voice was careful and controlled now, but Kate could hear the pain flexing beneath the surface.
Kate was silent for a long time, thoughts and questions spinning too fast; everything she knew about the condition – admittedly, not much – was depressing and inevitable. A slow, indecorous decline: was that to be Lena’s future? ‘When did you find out?’ she asked, when she couldn’t think of anything more helpful to say.
Emily picked at her bitten, unloved fingernails and heaved a sigh. ‘She was diagnosed about a year ago. She was living alone and my parents were worried it might not be safe in the long term. There were other options, such as selling the house and taking her to live with them in Edinburgh, or … a home. But …’
Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘I can’t imagine Lena being very happy with either of those options.’
Emily shook her head. ‘We didn’t even suggest them to her. I had just quit teaching – I was terrible at it! – and had no idea what I was going to do and I needed a place to stay. It was convenient for me too – I wasn’t being entirely altruistic. It puts Mum and Dad’s minds at rest having me here keeping an eye on her. And we rub along together all right. We play scrabble and do crosswords and keep her garden going and sell her vegetables at the market. Just trying to keep everything normal for as long as possible. We’re lucky, at the moment she’s mostly still Lena. Sometimes it feels like there are bits of her missing, but mostly she’s the same. And she’s physically very well. We have to accept that will change in the future, though. She will get worse, and when she loses her sense of self entirely … I guess it’s something we have to be ready for.’
Kate frowned; Emily might have resigned herself to Lena’s illness, but this was all new to Kate and it eroded some of the joy of reunion. ‘How do you prepare for something like that?’
Emily’s mouth wobbled in a pale smile. ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I have it figured out.’