Non Fiction

Marjorie

A tiny figure, half-hidden in an armchair. Stick-like legs, wispy white hair and a voice like the whisper of a passing breeze.  She was like a living mummy - all skin and bone; something from another world.  There she sat, surrounded by shelves of paperbacks and chairs containing vacant, staring, muttering figures.  The "Mother of the Home".

My father venerated her as though she were a monument or statue; something erected to the glory of the family and left to stand forever.  She was a genealogist's dream.  He told stories of her in a hushed voice, full of awe.  Perhaps because of this, he resented her when his father, her younger brother, died.

I didn't like it.  Marjorie was a person, not some statue made of stone.  Her great age came as much through chance and luck as wisdom and good living.  She had quite a life. Such stories...

She had two husbands.  The first, Henry, she nursed through the final stages of tuberculosis.  The second was Polish; Bolak.  He played with me when I was a toddler. My father said he would always bolt dinner - a habit from his flight during the war.

Henry was extremely handsome.  They say his brother liked Marjorie too, but married her sister when he found he could not have her.

She was beautiful, in her youth.  There's a photo of her in her twenties - a stunning flapper in bucket hat and coat.   Men found her charming and it was rumoured she had many lovers.  She drove a car in the 1920s and had a successful career as a physiotherapist.

She outlived both husbands.  She didn't want children.  And then, she couldn't.

"She kept your picture in her room," the matron told me over tea, after the funeral."  She talked about you all the time, her ‘little friend’."

I saw Marjorie only a few times.   She was a bright, cheerful woman, well-spoken, with a wonderful smile and such a laugh...

"Would you like something of hers, to keep?" the matron asked, as we stood in the little room with its little window, little bed and ornate antique cabinet - the only stamp of a powerful personality.

"No," I answered hesitantly, and struggled to explain. "I barely saw her. It..."  I looked at the non-descript cardboard box, brimming with miscellaneous possessions."  All these things... they're still hers."  And they were.  And I realised that I really didn't know her at all.  The matron's eyes were politely baffled.  They reflected my hypocrisy.

She went mad for a little while, when she was younger.  My Dad told me.  She went into Harrod's and bought armfuls of dresses; disappeared for days on end with no explanation; 'visited' her friends until they not-so-politely asked her to leave.  Like she was running away...

"She had a wonderful laugh," I had remembered, as I poured the tea.  That I knew.  That was true.

The matron's eyes seemed to reflect disappointment.  Mine or hers or someone else’s.  I looked at my photo, displayed prominently on the windowsill, and felt that I had said something terribly wrong.  An affront.  A denial.

And yet, it was the truth.

My grandfather loved her dearly, until the end.  'Little Jack'; the baby of the family.  He visited her, come what may, and provided for her.  He was devoted to the degree that his wife became jealous, sending Marjorie money, right up to the week before the first stroke.

My father left immediately, when he got the call.  He and my grandmother called the doctor, but things happened very fast.  I saw Grandpop in the ward.  He was playing with chess pieces and murmuring like a lost summer breeze.  I was Beryl, he told my father, in response to his constant questioning, and so was my mother (we must look alike).  I was Beryl - the girl he had played with as a child.  He smiled sweetly and looked so lost, unnerved by all the questions.  They reminded him of what was gone.

"You look just like him," the florist told me, staring, as we chose the flowers for the funeral.  I stood awkwardly, avoiding my grandmother's gaze.  But she smiled, and so did the florist.  "He came here often," she said, and everything smelled like carnations.

After that, they all said it.  As though I were his living face.  My Dad seemed proud, but whether it helped or not I don't know.  There I was, a constant reminder.  Even to myself.

My Dad was there, at the last.  The strokes continued. Grandpop was completely paralysed, or almost. He could kick one leg. And did.  The doctors asked them to choose... And then he died.  My Dad said that he thought he knew, at the last.  That the body trapped the brain.

Marjorie lived on.  Past the funeral, past the little plaque, past the flowers and the letters. Past the mourning into acceptance.

She lost Norman, too.  Her other brother.

An empty flat with a staring window.   He was so untidy. Books and vitamins and notepaper...

His mother sat upon the bed, watching new children mourn the old.  She never left him.  I clung to my father's leg and stared at her knees.  She was so sad. I dragged my Dad out of the room by his hand, away from the woman he couldn't see.  My uncle followed, past the relatives hunting for shillings, obscurely hidden in the bindings of books.  Past the dingy kitchen.  I wanted to leave that flat, where the shadows hid the past and times merged. There were things there that shouldn't have been.  Things that had forgotten they were dead.

Marjorie lived on; to her one-hundredth birthday, no less.

There she was, a photo in the paper.  There we all were with the nurses and the cake.  The journalists ran the story because of Dad's spin.  "Secret to a long life is a good man" the subtitle read. Marjorie had told him that, when she entered the home.  "What I need is a good man," he told us she had chuckled. I think he admired her.  Her catchphrase was: "Be naughty!"  At least, by his account. I didn't see her often enough to know.

I like to think Marjorie would have liked the funeral. My Dad led us up the wrong aisle and it was difficult to avoid giggling oh-so-inappropriately as the entire family trooped across to the other side of the chapel, Jeremy the undertaker helpfully waving his top hat. We watched the vicar squirm his way through the highly erotic 'Song of Solomon', which Dad said was absolutely appropriate. There weren't many people there. There aren't many of us left. I thanked Susan, Marjorie’s nurse. It isn't easy to come into a roomful of strangers. She came voluntarily because she liked Marjorie and I felt she had more right to be there than any of us.

The flowers were beautiful. The weather was cold.

"Divided by eighty years," my father told me when I was a child, "but you are linked. Marjorie was the last girl to be born in the family before you." And now there's just me.

We went back to the home for tea, on invitation. I knelt and poured. It felt ritual, as though I were the geisha at a tea ceremony. Fifteen pairs of eyes didn't watch us. Fifteen pairs of eyes stared into the past. Did they even know she was gone? Marjorie's chair remained, empty. I avoided it.

"She was a clever and methodical woman," my dad observed, "who pretended to be scatty."

He underestimated her. We all did.

"She was a clever and methodical woman, who pretended to be scatty"

My dad thought she did this because she was lazy.  I'm not so sure.  He never got my psyche, either.

This woman I never knew... maybe I understand her only too well.

She thought of me often, they said.

Maybe, today, I can return the favour.

Sarah Glover