The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind you might wear under hiking trousers, completely hidden, dropped down the back of this bedroom armchair and camouflaged against the taupe coloured carpet.
I cursed myself for not moving the chair, which I normally do, and bolted back down the main staircase to tell the guest it really wasn’t knickers, but their car was already making its way around the fountain. Off it went down the driveway as I stood there shouting: ‘It’s not knickers!’
Darn it, I thought. I really don’t want a review mentioning a pair of old pants. Newly renovated en suite room with mountain views… relax in front of an open fire in the drawing room every night… enjoy a complimentary pair of long johns belonging to a marine from Virginia, if you want to hang over an armchair to retrieve them. You don’t get that at the Ritz-Carlton where they probably move all the furniture after every booking.
I can’t be expected to, although I will now, obviously. I trooped back upstairs to start getting the room ready for the next guest when I got a text from the lady who looks after my parents: ‘Call me, it’s urgent.’ My father had had a stroke.
He has only just recovered from a heart attack caused by a blood clot so the doctors at the hospital he was rushed to were looking for another blood clot, or a bleed in his head. He couldn’t talk much, or walk, and had lost the use of his left side, said the nurse who eventually called me. I had done the bedrooms and was on to the horse barns by then.
Holding the phone with one hand and flipping the muck rake with the other, I managed to exchange a few words with my father on the phone, as he lay in his hospital bed. He could barely string a sentence together, very slowly.
My mother was taken with him in the ambulance and also admitted, because she has dementia and can’t be left alone. All this is starting to feel overwhelming. They didn’t want to come and live with us in West Cork but their decision only counts as sensible on another plane of existence where they are not bodily falling to pieces suddenly. I’m not saying old people don’t get ill and incapacitated. Of course they do. What I am saying is that in the past four years my parents have both simultaneously gone from being totally healthy to having so many things wrong with them that I ought not to be called subversive for questioning whether something is amiss.
But it’s as though one is not allowed to question it. The inevitable ‘shut up, you lunatic, you’re not a scientist’ is still the response of so many people whenever I so much as hiccup the merest suggestion that I might not agree that all this illness everywhere is normal, not even for two oldies.
Off the guest’s car went down the driveway as I stood there shouting: ‘It’s not knickers!’
My parents were two pre-Boomers in rude health before lockdown. Since then, a heart attack, a stroke, a tumour, bleeding joints, bleeding from assorted organs, dementia… what on earth have they been doing to themselves while they’ve been locked in that house avoiding Covid, which they got anyway? Can the mystery be solved? Does any expert have any ideas?
The NHS kept telephoning me to ask what I proposed to do about my mother. The lady who goes in twice a day said she couldn’t move into my parents’ house full time, so my mother couldn’t go home. She has so little short-term memory that between visits she would panic, not remembering why my father isn’t there.
I flipped the muck of the stables into a barrow with one hand as I made call after call. If only I didn’t have four horses, two dogs and a packed calendar of B&B bookings. If only the builder boyfriend wasn’t in London on a roof doing a job he cannot walk away from.
The nurse exuded an air of disapproval as I explained I would have to arrange a live-in carer. That would be £1,000 a week or more, she said curtly.
She suggested I pick my mother up and take her to stay with me. I said I would. Somehow I would come to get her. Shortly after she phoned me back. They had told my mother I was coming to get her and she had become distressed.
Charming, I thought. But you have to get over yourself when your mother has dementia. ‘I’ll come and get her anyway,’ I told the nurse and then I remembered. My father, perhaps pre-empting such a move, because he doesn’t want me to take my mother to Ireland, even in an emergency, had let my mother’s passport run out.
‘I don’t think they want me to do anything,’ I told the nurse. She stuttered that she didn’t understand. ‘The thing is,’ I explained, ‘they trust the NHS so much, they kind of prefer you lot to me.’
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