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I worried about my grandmother. She woul^ never even so much as snarl at Celia, but it was clear that having her there took a toll on her daily life. "When's she going home, Granny?" "Oh no. She can't go home and be alone. Fiskin's with her daughter now and she couldn't manage anyway. She must stay. You know she's become quite absent minded." Come to think of it, she had. Sometimes she would call me by my mother's name. And more, she would actually seem to think I was my mother. If I dared to correct her, a timid, bewildered look would cross her face, a look that I recognized forty years later, when my mother's dementia started to take hold. On afternoons, no matter what the weather. Great Aunt Celia would gather herself up, put on her brogues or her Wellington boots, take her walking stick or her umbrella from the Chinese urn in the dark front hall of my grandmother's house, put a hat on her head and go for a long walk. A certain tension would leave the house until she returned. "Yoo hoo! I'm ba-ack," she would sing-song as she pushed the heavy wooden door open. "I'd love a cup of tea." One afternoon, while Celia was out, the front door bell rang. "Who could that possibly be?" wondered my grandmother. It was a delegation of neighbors, three prim women who my grandmother knew "by sight" but not well. "Mrs. Hamilton," the tallest woman began, obviously well rehearsed. "We have a delicate matter to discuss." She glanced uneasily in my direction. "Bridget, dear, go to your room, would you mind?" I skittered upstairs. Delicate? What could it be? My grandmother called me down when the delegation had left. "Well, well." Granny was perplexed. "I never did. Oh, my goodness gracious." The neighbors had come tell my grandmother something that they thought she ought to know. For weeks now, my
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grandmother's sister had left the house whatever the weather, walked for a few hundred yards down the lane and then stopped in plain view and "relieved herself on the grass verge at the side of the lane. I immediately imagined her wobbling a few steps with her underpants down to reach a nice cluster of dock leaves, pulling one off, wiping herself delicately, pulling up her underpants, standing upright, tossing her hatted head, and proudly continuing her walk. I started to giggle. "Oh my goodness gracious," repeated my grandmother. "It's not really amusing, Bridget." "But Granny.. .Right in the lane?" That's all she needed. We laughed and laughed. Granny's tears streaming down her face, patted dry with her linen hand kerchief, until Celia came home from her daily excursion. A few days later, over the washing up, my grandmother conceded. "Something will have to be done." Great Aunt Celia went to live in Tumbridge Wells. Haddon Hall was called a nursing home, but it bore no com parison to the locked dementia unit of Candlewood Valley where my mother spent her last days in a bed next to Mrs. Brown, a stroke victim. Judging from her attention to Court TV, Mrs. Brown would surely have been the world's leading expert on the Scott Peterson trial if she could have spoken about it. Aunt Celia lived in a vast and ornately furnished Victorian mansion. It had a pipe organ and a grand piano in the massive reception hall. She had a beautiful room, antique furniture and a square oriental rug. A big curved bay window looked out over lavish and manicured gardens. But inevitably. Great Aunt Celia became more and more deluded. At one point she created a scandal at the nursing home and in the family when, now well into her eighties, she demanded that she be allowed to share a room with a man who called himself "The Admiral." I remember him standing at attention in his navy blue blazer, a silk cravat and a nice braided naval cap, binoculars hanging around his neck, staring out of Great Aunt Celia's bay window, saluting the rhododendron bushes outside
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