Читать книгу The Personals - Brian O’Connell - Страница 10

Vintage wedding and engagement ring for sale; €2,000 or nearest offer. Comes with valuation. DoneDeal, July 2018

I’m early and have parked outside a house in the west of Ireland. I’m sitting in my car waiting for the owner of the above rings to arrive home. Someone is knocking on my car window and wants to lead me into the house. As I follow, a large Alsatian appears and eyes me from inside the open front door. Just then a Land Rover pulls into the drive and a woman gets out, brushes past me and quickly closes the door before the Alsatian bolts. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, before adding casually, ‘That dog bites.’ She half chides the man who let the dog out, before asking if I want tea or coffee and clearing a space at the kitchen table for us to sit.

I notice that the man is quite self-conscious and I also notice that she’s overseeing his tea making, or at least subtly checking each step while trying not to make it obvious that she is doing so. The kitchen is cluttered – managed clutter, I’d call it – and even though the house is on a main road in a village, outside are a collection of sheds and outbuildings, bales of hay and fields. I’m guessing that they grew up on farms, and this is their way of keeping one foot in the fields, living on the side of a busy road, yet constructing a mini farmyard out back.

There’s a nervousness in the room and some tension. I don’t sense that it’s caused by me or my microphone. I think it’s more the fact that their space is now shared with someone else and they’re very conscious of that. As cups of coffee are served the man gets closer to me without saying anything, as if he is afraid to say the wrong thing. And then I notice the box on the windowsill behind the sink. Every day of the month has a little window and some are open, advent calendar like, while others are unopened. Inside are red and white pills, and the day and date is printed on each little portal.

Something clicks, and I’m taken back to an interview I’d done years earlier beside a mountain in Tipperary, with a man and his mother, who was in the final stages of dementia. She kept pleading with me to take her away because she believed he was poisoning her. He wasn’t, of course. In reality he was keeping her alive, and had sacrificed much of his own life to ensure his mother could stay in her own home as long as possible. Her illness meant that she took her anger and frustration out on him every day. She kept saying to me over and over, pointing to imaginary marks on her body: ‘Look what he did to me ... look.’ And there they lived, together and alone at the foot of a mountain; mother and adult son entwined in their love and false hate, their reality and their fiction. Long after I’d driven away from the house they were still with me. They are in my mind now in this half farmhouse, where two adults are reframing their relationship, forgotten fragment by forgotten fragment.

The man’s wife tells me that his dementia and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been a relatively recent discovery, or more accurately, that she didn’t know her husband had been diagnosed until recently. ‘I felt there was something going on,’ she says. ‘He was short-tempered and not totally focused on certain chores we would share. He wouldn’t do them, or he would forget where the keys were. Those things didn’t come in one day – it was over a period of a week. The biggest thing that made me go to the doctor with him was the fact that he wasn’t concerned about how he was dressed. He would forget things. More and more he would forget where keys were or that he put milk in the fridge without using it; silly little things really.’

Throughout these changes her husband didn’t seem particularly bothered, she says. When he got frustrated, he would lose his temper a little and it could be over the smallest of things. For example, if she asked him if he’d put the kettle on and make coffee, he might get a little hot-tempered and react by saying he was always doing it. She believes now that he has had dementia since 2016, and that Alzheimer’s developed after that. He is aware that he has Alzheimer’s, but doesn’t accept that the change in his life is due to the condition. There should be a lot more help and support for families like theirs, she says, and sometimes she feels alone and abandoned by state services. There are practical things that need to be done, such as signing the house over to their children, which he is reluctant to do.

‘He is changing into someone else,’ she says. ‘I could put my arms around him today and say, “I love you”. I could whisper in his ear that we had a great life and sometimes his response will be more measured. He might agree and say, “Remind me again how many years we are together?” But I could do the same thing later in the day, especially in bed, and he will push me away and say, “Stop that now, I have to sleep.” It’s hard to know how he will react sometimes.’

She says he can be very curt and sharp with her, and often if she is upset or crying he won’t stop what he’s doing to ask how she is and will simply walk by, oblivious to her feelings. She tries to continue to treat him as normally as she can, especially in front of other people. It would hurt him if she treated him any differently. Increasingly, she has been taking him with her when she has to leave the house. This is partly because it’s good for him to get out and about and not isolate himself, but also, at least when he is with her she knows he is safe and won’t wander down the road or leave the door open.

Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’

She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.

‘He was the kind of man that if anything in the house needed mending, he was on top of it,’ she says. ‘Now, if a radiator leaks, he will say, “I will fix it” and often it will be leaking even more afterwards. If I say anything, he will blame me for it and tell me to do it myself. I’m telling you all this because it’s not easy and there are significant challenges, and it’s heart-breaking to see someone you love change so much.’

As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’

The box contained two rings. One was an engagement ring made of 18 carat white gold. To my untrained eye it looked more like yellow gold, but most people would describe it simply as a diamond cluster ring. The wedding ring was also 18 carats, again white gold, and it was more modest than the engagement ring. Both came with their certificates and valuation forms. While she’s connected to them emotionally, I don’t get the sense that they are treasured deeply. There’s something in the way she holds them in her hand – the casualness perhaps, or the fact that there’s a firm-handedness in her movements with the rings. When I suggest this, she corrects me. ‘They do mean an awful lot to me,’ she says, ‘but I can’t keep them because I think they are better off on somebody’s finger, rather than just shutting them away in a safe.’

When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t live together. The marriage was very difficult when they were living together but they became best of friends after they divorced.’

We’re talking here about the mid-1970s, when the seller’s mother had remarried. At that stage, she had been separated from her first husband for about six years. Sadly, she passed away some years ago in a nursing home in England, while the seller’s father moved to Eastern Europe, where he also remarried. While they were both alive, they had kept in touch. And the last time her mother and father actually met each other? ‘It was at my brother’s funeral,’ she tells me. ‘He had a heart attack and died suddenly. My father came home and he stayed alongside my mother at the funeral, sitting really close beside her. It was clear the connection was still there. I think they both had the same type of character and personality – the same type of short fuse.’

Telling me the story of her parents’ divorce and their subsequent friendliness towards each other, she says she doesn’t want to over-romanticise it. It’s not just the story of two people thrown together and then pulled apart and yet still there for each other at the end. Her parents had separated after a period of time when the arguments between them became worse as their children moved through their teenage years. She doesn’t want to go into it too much, but those years left their mark and did have an impact on her in later years. Luckily, when her mother remarried, her daughter always got on very well with her stepfather. She describes him as a fantastic man, and totally in love with her mother.

‘He was a gentleman. A small man. Very, very polite and very gentle,’ she says. ‘He loved my mother so much. He would do anything for her. When she started getting ill, he gave up his job and he waited on her hand and foot. He would buy her anything, take her wherever she wanted to go. And when she had to go to a nursing home, he gave up work and went and sat with her every single day. He absolutely idolised her.’

When the man had given her mother the engagement and wedding rings now on the table in front of me, what did she do with them if she didn’t wear them? ‘She had a chain,’ her daughter tells me, ‘which I have, and she put the two rings on a silver chain and put it around her neck. And she went through the rest of her life with no rings on her fingers. I also have her first wedding rings. These ones are too valuable to be just left in a safe. To me these two rings are beautiful but I don’t feel the same connection with them as her first wedding rings. I idolised my stepfather but he has also given me the right and the blessing to sell them.’

The rings are now for sale for €2,000. She would be thrilled to get €1,500 for them and to know that they have been given a new lease of life. I tell her I admire her for putting them up for sale. Her mother had made a defiant stance in not wearing them and she is now making another by selling them. Why be weighed down by the past? If she does succeed in selling them, the money is already accounted for, she tells me. ‘I will buy my mother a little plaque which has a mother’s verse on it and I want to put it on her grave from her children.’

So far she’s had a few offers but won’t let the rings go for much below the asking price. I ask her finally whether she’d ever talked to her parents about the years she lived with them when they were having difficulties in their marriage. ‘I did,’ she tells me, ‘I spoke to my father. I didn’t get a chance to speak to my mother. He always said he would keep a special place in his heart for my mother and he respected her and he said it was such a pity they could not live together. He is 86 years old now and lives in a different country, but he always advised me to never go to bed on a row.’

She keeps this in mind, even with the added difficulty of caring for her husband during his illness. The years ahead will be uncertain, so now feels the right time to break with the past, and move on. She’s hoping for the right buyer and will be slow to let the rings go to a dealer or speculator. ‘Even though my mother never wore these rings, there is a lot of happiness in them,’ she tells me. ‘They just need to find a home now.’