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blackcurrant bushes.’
    The nurse was shocked. Karen explained how she’d wondered where the old lady did her business and had been totally horrified when she first spotted her crouching outside. She’d tried talking to Slavek about it, but he’d been unwilling to broach the subject with his mother.
    ‘Well, she can’t do that sort of thing now. She will have to have a chamber pot. Have you got one?’ Karen shook her head. ‘Then I will get one from NHS Supplies.’
    The nurse packed up her bag. She was kindly, and saw Karen’s agonised expression.
    ‘Don’t worry, my dear. The first few days are always the worst, and I’ll be popping in every day. You’ll soon get used to it.’
    Karen went upstairs to her bedroom, and threw herself on the bed, and cried as she had never cried before.
    The days stretched into weeks, and Karen never did get used to it. She could not bring herself to touch the colostomy, so Slavek did. He did not find the task difficult or nauseating. He had cared for farm animals in his youth, had attended birthings, squeezed teats, cut abscesses, applied poultices, and a colostomy was much the same. Added to which, he wanted to spare Karen the burden. The district nurse was true to her word, and came in twice a day, often three times.
    Karen kept the children away from their grandmother as much as possible. After school they went up to their bedroom to play, and she joined them. To reach the garden they had to pass through the living room and kitchen, so she discouraged this, taking them to the park instead. Slavek did not like it, and thought her determination to keep the children away from his mother was wrong, so he asked her why she did it.
    ‘I don’t want my girls to see that sort of thing. They are too young.’
    ‘They’re not. Children need to see everything in life. Old age, sickness, birth, death, everything.’
    ‘It upsets them.’
    ‘That’s only because you tell them not to be upset.
You
put the idea into their minds first. If you said nothing, they would take it in their stride. Children always do.’
    Karen changed tactics.
    ‘Well, anyway, they can’t talk to her.’
    ‘But if you let them they would learn some Latvian.’
    But she wouldn’t. He watched with sadness as Karen shepherded the girls carefully around the opposite side of the living room, as far away from their grandmother as possible, and upstairs to their bedroom.
    One day she said: ‘I’m going to ask the nurse to get a screen from supplies.’
    ‘Whatfor?’
    ‘To put around the bed, so I don’t have to see her using that chamber pot. And I don’t think the girls should have to see it, either.’
    He sighed. ‘You’ll do more harm than good trying to protect them like this.’
    But in the evening he came home to find screens around the bed, and his mother completely hidden from the life going on around her. The girls, being children and endlessly curious, would peep behind the screens and stare at their grandmother, as though she were an animal in a cage. Then they would giggle and run away.
    He could see that Karen was growing increasingly resentful, and discussed it with the nurse. He felt guilty, and was bewildered by his feelings of guilt. Even though he and the nurse attended to the colostomy Karen had a lot of extra work, with washing, changing the bed, emptying the chamber pot, cooking. He was a practical man, and saw life in practical terms. What he did not see was that Karen’s main resentment was that she did not have the house to herself. He had been brought up in a large, gregarious family. They had had only one large room for everything – living, sleeping, cooking, eating. Babies were born in that room. Illness was nursed there, and he remembered, from long ago, his grandfather – his mother’s father – dying in the room. And now, here was his own mother dying in
his
room, but completely cut off from his family. He felt guilty about it. Guilt seemed to come at him from all