A Lost Wife's Tale by Marion McGilvary

Author:Marion McGilvary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141908830
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

16

In Plantation Road, ice cubes snapped like gunshots in the freshly brewed mint tea cooling on the gas stove. I only needed to drop the needle on to the waiting record to hear Ray croon that Georgia was, once again, on his mind; but I was more concerned with the pale blue envelope I had found in the porter’s lodge. It was still lurking in the buried depths of the manila circulars and foolscap conference invitations that I had dumped on the kitchen table.

I tried to ignore it, but the body was beginning to smell. There was no way to avoid the fact that, soon, I would have to exhume it. Why on earth was the nursing home writing to me? My mother had lived alone for several years after my father had died, becoming more and more isolated and disorientated until she began calling me in the middle of the night asking where the fridge was, or why God had turned all the lights off. After she almost blew herself up trying to put the milk inside the central‐heating boiler, I was forced to make my second visit to Scotland in two decades.

With Maisie in Australia and Geordie sleeping under his desk in Singapore, it was left to me to make all the arrangements. I emptied my childhood out of the cabin trunk, filled it with some of my mother’s clothes and ornaments, and moved her into a nursing home I found in Edinburgh, where she had remained ever since, slipping ever more surely into the milky waters of her own dementia.

She passed her time in a high‐backed chair, staring into the middle distance under the illusion, on her good days, that she was sitting on a runway in Jakarta, waiting to take off on a long‐haul flight to Adelaide. The nurses told me she was rarely lucid and hardly spoke, but then who would she speak to? Nobody visited her.

Since the money from the sale of her house had run out, Geordie was the only one of us who had the means to take care of the bills, but he usually dealt directly with the lawyer, and Maisie, though too far away to be of much use, made all the major decisions about her general care. If there had been a medical emergency, the nursing home would have telephoned to let me know, but otherwise there was absolutely no need for them to get in touch; all of which only made the letter addressed to me from the Bluebell Rest Home even more disturbing.

I poured myself a glass of tepid tea, turned on the record, which coughed out static until the scratchy bars of the first track kicked in, and then, unable to put the dreaded moment off any longer, I reached for the envelope.

I sliced it open with a vegetable knife and shook out the contents. To my surprise there was just a compliments slip from the Matron’s Office with a couple of lines scrawled across it in biro, and another pale blue envelope that had been opened and inexpertly resealed with Sellotape.

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