Read The Girl from Station X for Free Online Page A

was my mother treated like a queen?
    The day after her eightieth birthday, 1 July 1994, Nicholas and I went to see her. My son had made her a pavlova, as a birthday cake. She complimented me, all of a sudden, for
being ‘straightforward and honest’. Mr Mainwaring said: ‘You’re pleased to see Elisa, aren’t you?’
    Nicholas went to the kitchen with a very nice Greek girl to put candles on his pavlova. My mother wanted to walk with me up and down the hall, into the kitchen, upstairs to her bedroom, then
down again. When Nicholas brought in the pavlova with its candles, she seemed genuinely delighted. Nicholas kept feeding his grandmother strawberries and bits of meringue from his pavlova. This
seemed to be the right instinct, because her mouth kept opening obediently, and she would eat each morsel.
    Nicholas and I then went with her into her garden where, earlier, she hadn’t wanted to go. We went past the fishponds, whose netting had been removed years ago, then by her border full of
pink and blue flowers, and urns full of lavender.
    I thought that it would seem to most people a beautiful English garden. Was I ever happy there as a child? There was always that undercurrent of fear, of something bad waiting for us, and this
must have emanated from my mother. I thought of her poorer friends, such as Russian Olga, who used to visit us from London, often in summer, with their young children; to them, our home must have
seemed like paradise.
    My mother kept hitching up her trousers, saying that the waist was too loose, and Mr Mainwaring told me that she didn’t like to eat. Once, she clasped my own hand, then put it to her
breast, which seemed to have shrunk, and I noticed that she no longer wore a bra. We passed the little tower; she had once sunbathed on its roof with her friend Audrey, and I recalled how my father
had informed me, aged nine, that the two women were naked. I thought to myself now that there was something humiliating in being married to a woman who preferred her own sex.

Chapter 4
    M y first book was published in April 1995 and was received favourably. But concern about my mother marred the pleasure I should have felt and a few
weeks after publication, despite it being summer, I developed bronchitis verging on pneumonia, and was ill for six weeks.
    My immune system had been weakened by chemotherapy, but my illness may have been exacerbated by anxiety about my mother. At first I had been relieved that her Alzheimer’s meant that she
could no longer get alcohol, but now her condition gave rise to other worries: should she be moved to an old people’s home and, if so, what should happen to her house and her possessions? Was
she on the right medication, and should I try to get Power of Attorney? Indeed, it seemed to me that I would always be eaten up with worry about her – unless I went first, of a recurrence of
breast cancer! I asked advice and sought medical opinion, and, just before falling ill, I visited with a kind friend an old people’s home in Sussex, run by nuns especially for those with
Alzheimer’s. It had been recommended by various friends who had had, or still had, close relatives in there.
    The ‘home’ was actually two sister homes. In the first one, near a road, we waited in the hall. Coming downstairs was a woman who looked distressed. She had a red
mark on the bridge of her nose. We said hello and she glanced nervously at us. She started to speak hesitantly, murmuring about it being ‘embarrassing’ not being in her own house. The
nun who then appeared did not seem particularly sympathetic to her plight, and when I asked her how she could be prevented from walking out on to the road and being hit by a car, she looked
troubled and did not answer. I asked how long that woman had been there and the nun said two months. Normally, she explained, it took a few weeks for a new patient to settle down.
    We chatted to the nun on our tour of the building. She showed us the