A house is not a Home
Anita Brookner
HAVE THE MEN HAD ENOUGH? by Margaret Forster Chatto, £12.95, pp.251 Mrs McKay is old. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mrs McKay is senile. She is not yet incontinent, but she will become so, in the course of this novel in fact. However, she has a loving family: sons Charlie and Stuart, daughter Bridget, daughters-in-law Jenny and Paula, and grandchildren Hannah and Adrian. There is therefore no problem about looking after her at home. Charlie rents a flat for her, and also one in the same house for Bridget, on whom the main burden falls. Jenny and Hannah take turns in helping out, when Bridget is on duty (she is a nurse) or when she is engaged in one of her transient love affairs, or, more important, when the helpers, Lola and Susan and Mildred and later Mary, are held up. Luckily Charlie is rich, which is just as well since he calcu- lates that providing all this support over the past five years has cost him in the region of £140,000. And the support is not even adequate, for Grandma needs to be watched 24 hours a day, fed, changed, taken to the chiropodist, and assessed by the geriatrician. She is a nice little earner for someone who can tolerate all this, such as Susan, who is also a childminder and sometimes takes a couple of her charges along with her, anchoring their push-chair in the middle of Grandma's kitchen, where Grandma can, and does, fall over it.
They are a loving family, or are they? The problem of Grandma imposes such a burden on them that they can never think of anything else. Who, in their position, could do otherwise? The one thing they never fail in is their duty, although there comes a time when the dreaded solution of a Home must be considered. This they resist. Unfortunately, senility has not im- proved Mrs McKay's character or de- meanour. She no longer makes sense, wanders out into the road in her night- gown, animadverts, in meaningless sent- ences, against everyone, recognises no one, and enquires, from time to time, whether the men have had enough. It is, in fact, the women who have had enough, too much, in fact, as Jenny, Bridget and Hannah constantly pound along the road to feed Grandma, change her or pick her up when she falls out of bed. Charlie pays and Stuart stays out of it.
Stuart is the only one not afflicted by guilt. He loved his mother once, he says, but has not done so recently. He is all for putting her in a Home, and Charlie is forced to agree with him. But here a new problem arises: where to find a Home for such a Grandma? Most Homes will not take the senile incontinent. The only place for people such as Grandma is the psycho- geriatric ward of the local hospital, if there is room. The last resort is the insane asylum, although they are not called that anymore. But that is what they are. That is where people like Grandma are allowed to die, and are not badly looked after either, provided they are too far gone to notice the blaring television, the patients clipped into their chairs, the second-hand clothing, and the smell of urine. That is where Grandma catches her fatal and beneficent pneumo- nia and dies, just as loving Bridget plans to bring her home, where she might last another decade.
But Grandma does not die until every permutation has been wrung out of the situation: the helpers who come and go, unable to face up to the problem that Grandma has become, the farce of family meals at which most of Grandma's food goes astray, the utter disruption of normal life, and the distorted vision of Grandma as kindly, loving, responsive and endearing.
Grandma was not even very nice when she was well; now she is dirty, animated, and totally devoid of reason. What happens in old age is not childishness — the myth of second childhood is relatively benign.
What happens is complete loss of every- thing that could once be considered lov- able. And there is no guarantee that this is not recognised in lucid moments by the sufferer. What else can account for that occasional look of bewilderment, the look that undermines every rational decision taken by those nearly broken by the task of ministering to a body deserted by a mind that has become empty of all that it once contained?
Margaret Forster has written an ex- tremely skilful and angry novel, and one which, although beautifully written, is not easy to read. She has touched on this theme before, in The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury, which dealt with it in rather more pathetic terms and with extraordin- ary insight. There is not an ounce of pathos in Have the Men Had Enough?, which carries a warning about the way we live now. If no one is prepared, or indeed able, to look after the senile elderly, how shall we ensure that they receive care at the end? Opportunistic nursing homes abound, and not much is done about them; social services are underfunded; day cen- tres fear too much disruption. And the old do not cooperate. Grandma insists on going home and does not recognise home when she gets there.
The punishing narrative, which carries one helplessly and unwillingly along, veers cleverly into fiction in the last couple of chapters. Bridget, voluble and devoted, has quite clearly inherited many of her mother's characteristics. Swearing eternal love, yet staying away from the hospital in which her mother is dying, Bridget is half mad herself and likely to go the whole distance in due course. What then does Jenny, the daughter-in-law and thus pre- served from the hereditary taint, do if she does not want to undergo the same martyr- dom when she herself is old? For it is Margaret Forster's contention that the women shoulder the burden, while the men write the cheques. Hence the satirical edge to the question that forms the title. One can only applaud the author's indigna- tion, and hope that it will not go unnoticed and unrewarded.
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