Their first day together was clumsy, peppered with overly polite apologies for disturbing each other and tentative questions about how they took their tea and where the sugar was and whether the guitar was too loud. The second day was a little more relaxed, the third even more so. Friday was actually pleasant.
By the start of the second week, Ross had learned that Olivia only took a splash of milk, that she liked silent movies and Fleetwood Mac, and that she stuck her tongue out when she was concentrating. What he hadn’t discovered was that she had a fiancé in London and a wedding dress fitting to reschedule. It hadn’t come up in conversation, and wasn’t something Olivia especially wanted to talk about. The more she and Ross conversed, the greater the omission of her marital situation became. The elephant made itself firmly at home between Children’s Books and Irish Folklore, waiting for Olivia to acknowledge it, while she hoped it would eventually get bored and go away.
For her part, Olivia discovered that Ross took his tea builder-strong with two sugars, that he liked fig rolls and Pink Floyd and was allergic to gooseberries. This Olivia found hilarious. “Who the hell is allergic to gooseberries? Who even eats gooseberries?” Ross conceded it was a fairly useless and bizarre thing to have an allergy to as far as allergies went, but still, he would appreciate it if she didn’t leave them lying around the place, just in case.
As the days passed, an easy friendship began to develop between them, and Olivia looked forward to the jangle of the shop bell at nine and the occasional strumming of the guitar upstairs. She even found that five o’clock on Friday came around too soon. Only once, in a cheap-white-wine-fueled moment of self-pity, did she entertain any romantic notions about Ross. To her enormous relief, the notions left after breakfast the next morning. Romantic notions confused and complicated things. Olivia had quite enough confusion and complication in her life already.
As much as she hadn’t been expecting to share the flat with anyone other than Hemingway, she grew fond of Ross being around. She liked that she could hear the scrape of chair legs and floorboards creaking, and the tap tap tap of his fingers against the laptop. She liked the sound of his guitar. She liked the serendipity of it all, that while he was writing a new book upstairs, she was selling old ones downstairs. However unexpectedly the arrangement had come about, there was something perfectly cyclical about it. It felt as natural as breathing in and out, and the coming and going of the tide.
As the hours slipped harmoniously by each day, Olivia occasionally glanced at the photograph of Frances and the fairies in the silver photo frame that now sat on the shop desk, and she smiled to herself. It was a reminder to her that impossible things could happen, that the narrative of our lives was constantly being rewritten, and none of us knew how our story would end until we turned the last page.
ON TUESDAY AND Friday afternoons, Olivia took time away from the bookshop to visit Nana. One of the benefits of having Ross around was that he could mind the shop while she was out. Annoyingly, he always sold more books when she wasn’t there than she ever sold on her own. Ross had a natural ease with the customers that Olivia couldn’t match. It had become something of a competition between them, but as long as money was going in the till, Olivia was happy to let her pride take a fall.
Tuesdays and Fridays were quieter days at St. Bridget’s, which meant Olivia could slip in and out without having to endure painful conversations with well-meaning relatives of other residents. She couldn’t bear the doleful expressions in their eyes, the endless discussion about treatments, and the sense of death and despair that clung to everyone like the support stockings that clung to the residents’ legs. There was still life left in Nana, and Olivia refused to become that relative, nibbling on custard creams, awaiting the inevitable.
On days when Nana was in a more restful mood, Olivia read to her from Frances’s book. Sometimes she would nod off. Sometimes she would listen intently, stopping Olivia midsentence to ask her to repeat something, or to explain something she couldn’t understand or a word she couldn’t remember the meaning of.
Today Nana was in her room, listening to the radio. She was dressed like a tiger in an orange-and-black-striped top and black trousers, so elegant and strong, and yet so fragile. Nana had difficulty swallowing and only ate very little as a result. She didn’t wear her clothes anymore. They wore her, the fabric folding in on itself in crumples and creases, trying to find a way to fit her better.
They spent a difficult hour together, talking about a job Olivia didn’t do and the time when Nana won the lottery and the newspapers came to take her photo and the visitors who came and went when Olivia wasn’t there: old friends and neighbors and “that terribly nice man.” Nonsense conversations and half-remembered fragments of memories about things that had never happened. It frustrated Olivia so much that she wanted to scream by the time Barbara came around with the tea.
A doctor had once explained Alzheimer’s to Olivia by telling her to think of the brain as an orange, the skin and pith peeled away first, and then the segments slowly being eaten, piece by piece, until there was nothing left. That, he told her, was when a patient would die, when the last segment of orange had gone. It was an inevitability now, a matter of time that neither Olivia nor Nana had any control over.
Olivia nodded along to Nana’s stories, her thoughts drifting further away from the suffocating room, her conscience ever more guilty with each retelling as she wished precious minutes away. Minutes that brought Nana that bit closer to the last segment of the orange.
In a brief moment of lucidity, Nana asked Olivia to fetch her memory book from the wardrobe, and they spent a pleasant half hour together looking at the photographs. Some of the faces Nana remembered immediately. Others were lost to her now. It was only when she saw her wedding photograph that she stopped turning the pages and started to cry.
“I’m so sorry, Nana. Let me put that away. We’ll go for a walk. Or a trip out, maybe. It’s a lovely day. We can look at the bluebells.”
Olivia started to take the book, but Nana shook her head and pushed Olivia’s hand gently away. She ran her fingertips across the photograph.