Seni Glaister - Mr Doubler Begins Again

‘Drink this.’

He tried to lift the hot drink to his lips but found himself quite unable to grasp the cup with enough force to raise it. He looked at Gracie’s daughter.

‘Poorly. What sort of poorly?’

‘Oh, the worst you can imagine, I’m afraid.’ She reached forward and spooned some sugar into his tea, stirring it, and then she sipped at her own. She smiled a small, sorrowful smile, one that, irrationally in Doubler’s eyes, carried a trace of sadness for him as well as a multitude of sadnesses of her own. ‘She’s had it before, of course, but I’m afraid it’s back again with sharper teeth.’

Doubler found himself unable to swallow, as if the disease’s sharp teeth had sunk themselves into his own fleshy neck.

‘When? When did she have it before?’ he asked, once he had found his voice. This was all news to him. The first toothless episode and then the second, fanged one.

‘A good while back. She was younger then, much more able to deal with it and she’s been well for such a long time now, we really thought she’d beaten it.’

Doubler imagined Mrs Millwood beating a sharp-toothed thing with a stick. Or a mop. Or a broom. Surely it wouldn’t stand a chance. And he remembered, now, her absence. She had taken some time off and he had resented it enormously through a cloud of other resentments, and the combined force of his upset and all the other upsets had somehow obscured the reason for her absence. He had been at the lowest point of his life. He had settled into the routine of life without Marie, but nothing had made much sense to him still. He tried to remember how long Mrs Millwood had been absent for.

‘How long?’ he said. Using two hands, he lifted the cup unsteadily to his lips.

A sharp pain flashed across the face of Gracie’s daughter and Doubler realized what she might think he was asking.

‘Until she’s back here , I mean. Back at work, until she’s not poorly again.’ The word ‘poorly’ stuck in his mouth like fluff, getting tangled there and drying his tongue and lips until he thought they might never work again. It had been the daughter’s language, the daughter’s choice of words. But of course it wasn’t a big enough word to describe this thing with savage teeth.

Gracie reached across the table and took his hand in hers. ‘Mum’s really sick this time. We’re taking it one day at a time. She is going to fight it, and the doctors are going to throw everything at it. But the treatment’s going to be awful, so she’ll feel a lot worse before she feels better. If she feels better at all.’

Doubler was horrified by his own selfish thoughts and yet all he could think of was the absence he would be left with. Not the threat of the ultimate absence (this, he hadn’t even begun to process as a possibility) but the absence of the next few days and weeks. Without her visits giving his day some structure and purpose, he wasn’t sure he would cope. He felt his stomach cave in.

‘Will you cope, do you think?’ Gracie’s daughter asked, kindly.

Doubler was taken aback, completely, as if she had seen into his soul. He stumbled to find the words to express how utterly bereft he felt not to be sitting down for lunch with Mrs Millwood today, let alone the terror he felt when he tried to contemplate the bleakness of the horizon ahead of him.

‘There’s the day-to-day cleaning, I suppose. It’ll probably be easy enough to find somebody to help you keep on top of that,’ Gracie’s daughter said, looking around her at the kitchen. ‘I’m amazed she didn’t want to talk this through with you herself. She may be poorly but she has you on her mind, you know.’

Doubler swallowed back his thoughts. To cope with the housework didn’t even touch the surface of the loss he was feeling. And yet, somehow, a conversation seemed to be happening to him, around him, and Gracie’s daughter was covering both sides.

‘I tell you what. How about I find somebody to fill her shoes in the short term? I’d be happy to place some ads and do the first round of interviews if that would help. Shall I?’

Doubler nodded slowly, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to. He didn’t want somebody to fill Mrs Millwood’s shoes. Not in the short term, not in the longer term. He wanted her own outdoor shoes left under the bench by the kitchen door, and he wanted her own stockinged feet to slip into her indoor shoes, which she wore to dart around the house. The point of Mrs Millwood was that she barely wore shoes. She simply floated from room to room just above the surface. She only became substantial, a human form that might need shoes, when she sat down at lunchtime, and then they talked and talked. Nobody would fill those shoes; the footwear wasn’t the point .

‘I won’t hire anybody until you’ve met them, of course. I’ll just do the preliminary interviews and you can make the final decision. How does that sound? I think it will make Mum happy to know that somebody is taking care of things here. She worries a bit, you see, and I don’t want her distracted. I want her mind firmly focused on getting better. She’s strong in that she’s vital and vigorous, but there’s so little of her she’s going to have to use every ounce of her physical strength to deal with the chemo.’

There. She’d said it. Doubler had known that the language of Mrs Millwood’s poorliness would need to be upgraded to incorporate the technicalities of the practical. ‘Poorliness’ was too vague a word to describe her symptoms, and ‘treatment’ was too vague a word to tackle the solution. And here it was in black and white, a word that conjured up body-wracking drugs, tubes, needles, poison and pain. It didn’t sound like a treatment; it sounded like a penance.

Gracie’s daughter noticed Doubler wince and wondered, for the first time since she had arrived, whether Doubler was taking the news of her mother quite badly. She had assumed until now that his silence was born out of a taciturn nature, so she reached for his hand once more.

‘We’re all going to help each other through this. I need to make sure Mum has all the peace and quiet she needs to get better, so I’m going to shoulder her responsibilities. That means I’m here for you. You will do your bit, I’m sure, and it’s just that none of us can know what that might mean yet. I don’t, you don’t, and Mum certainly doesn’t. But I suspect you’ll be there to support her if you’re needed. Is that right?’

Doubler felt hope through the possibility of purpose. ‘Of course. Anything. I don’t really leave the house much. Certainly not since . . . not since Marie went. But, yes, I’ll do what is asked of me. Tell her that, will you?’ He closed his eyes briefly and allowed himself to imagine climbing into the car to leave the farm for the first time in years. ‘Tell her I’ll visit. She might be bored. She might like a bit of company.’

‘Well, that’s a very sweet offer, but I can’t imagine she’ll feel up to much – as it is, I’ll be fighting to keep her friends away. Golly, my mum’s amassed a few of those along the way! There’s the church lot, her knitting circle, the animal-shelter lot. Not to mention that gaggle of buddies she’s known all her life. They’re a good bunch, her school chums. They’re always there for each other, but they’re getting to an age where they have to offer this sort of support to one another all the time. They’re a marvel, though, really, quite an inspiration actually. But still, that’s a very nice thought and I will make sure she knows you offered. She’ll be most touched.’

Doubler recoiled. He knew about the knitting circle. He knew she went to church. He knew she volunteered at an animal rescue centre. But he had assumed when she talked about these different pockets of interest that they were mere pastimes, mere distractions to avoid having to stare intense loneliness in the face the way he had to every single time he looked in the mirror. A gaggle of buddies ? He scrolled back through countless lunchtime conversations. Jean? Her name had come up often. Dot? Was she part of a gaggle? Mabel?