Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's by Andrea Gillies Read Free Book Online

e-mail. “Had a look at the flights situation. Possible, if not exactly cheap. And I could get a little boat for weekends. Tempting. But the running costs will be horrendous.”
    “Well, I could turn part of it into a bed-and-breakfast,” I replied. “There’s a separate apartment, up a separate stairway.”
    W E MADE THE family visit to the house on April 1 and a second visit the following afternoon, invited to tea by the charming eighty-year-old owners, last of the line. Not literally the last of the line, in fact, but the last who could countenance living here, a long way from proper jobs and department stores. The house set its trap with care. It was a perfect spring day, warm, with barely a breath of wind. The beach down the lane shone out yellow and blue. Spring birds were all atwitter. Children romped around the garden, their distant shouts brought closer by the reverberating of voices off old stone. Away from the formal lawn, down the drive toward the sea, wilder areas of garden beckoned, tall grasses mown into paths, and a secretive wood, where sycamores stunted by wind, venturing only tentatively above the line of coping stones, huddled, heads down, arms linked above their heads like a rugby scrum. Pools of sunlight fell among them. I sat on a mossy bench and the sun was warm on my face. A tame turkey sat at the base of a tree looking back. Once the heart is lost, the head can only throw in the towel.
    Perhaps this should be known as the Lichen Peninsula. Lichen’s everywhere in pale green mats, curly fingered, densely layered. The air smells different here. Linen fresh, ozoney, briny, undercut by something earthy and sappy. When the tide is out and the sun is warm, there’s a rank drying seaweed note. In summer—and summer is short, sweet, cherished—the air is full of dry grass aromas, sweet hay scents mixed in with the brine, and the light, sea bounced, is dazzling, jabbing in unprotected eyes. Everything seems vividly colored. There’s a soaring pale wash of blue above, with a quality about it that’s nostalgic: the kind of soft and summery depth that childhood skies had once, the kind that small airplanes leave trails in. The grass is the brightest kind of green. The sea is clear and painterly: the royal blue and azure and turquoise marking shallowness on clean sand, the dark green and brown patches indicating depth and weed. There are three beaches within a five-minute walk, all different: estuary and pebble and sand. The sand beach is closest, just down from the house, and the pebble beach is at right angles to it, round the corner of the headland. The estuary, on the road toward the village, is huge and golden and puddley. Comical oyster catchers stride briskly about on drinking straw legs, then stand together crouched over, round-shouldered in black coats like old men in a bar.
    I’d thought that Nancy might respond to the history of the house. It was a foolish thought. But I’ve always liked buildings with a strong sense of identity. Houses that don’t need you, their character already made and set by other, more interesting people who pushed their experiences, their thoughts, into the stone of walls and wood of floors, the faded wallpapers and paneled doors. That’s what original features have always signified, to me at least. It’s relaxing to feel yourself peripheral to another era, a ghost from the future in a house where the past is still present. I had a peculiar idea that Nancy would respond to this. Her early life was spent at a castle—a real one, with acres of lawns and walled warm corners where pineapples and peaches were grown under glass. Her father was head gardener at a great estate, one that’s now a hotel, wedding venue, and conference center with depressingly corporate Web pages. Added to which, Nancy’s early married life and her child-raising years were spent in Victorian city surroundings. I thought she’d feel at home.
    On our second day, excitedly, I take her on a