‘Mrs De Petter, please, this disease doesn’t care whose brain it is. It makes no distinction between smart and stupid. Your husband needs help. You must realise that. He’s confused, he’s lost the thread of his own thoughts, he’s actually incredibly lonely and afraid. That’s going to cause frustration and sometime soon maybe even aggression. He could lash out at you … And if he does he won’t hold back, you can rest assured of that …’
Oh, no! Oh, my!
The doctor continued, ‘Of course I understand all too well that receiving a diagnosis like this is far from pleasant. But I am a little taken aback that it can come as any kind of surprise to you, given how far the disease has already progressed. But it’s Mr Cordier who needs our support now. He can’t look after himself anymore. So please, make an effort and put yourself in second place. He’s the one we’re here for!’
And she turned away and continued the conversation with my daughter.
A memorable moment. And Moniek’s expression was unforgettable too, her aggrieved lower lip shooting down like a lead weight.
In the car it took a long while before someone said a word. And because silence has always confronted her with things she doesn’t have the character to bear, Moniek was the first to pipe up.
‘That cow’s on a nice little earner!’ she blurted from the back seat. ‘How long were we in there altogether? Half an hour? Forty minutes? She dishes up a few blatantly ridiculous questions for your father, then says, “He’s three bricks shy of a load, that’ll be 135 euros, thank you very much, bye!” and we just have to nod and smile. I’m sorry, but if I’d known it was that easy, I wouldn’t have spent my glory days doing the ironing — I’d have become a doctor instead.’
Ignoring her mother, Charlotte pretended to be concentrating on the first signs of the evening rush hour and then, after a while, asked, ‘Father, are you all right?’ Resting her hand on my knee for a moment while she spoke.
It would have been fair to say I was all right. Exceptionally well, in fact. Officially senile. And soon to be a pharmacist’s dream, a Memantine gobbler.
‘How did the exam go?’ I asked. ‘Did I pass?’
And that silence was back again, shorter but even less comfortable than the last time.
‘You passed,’ Charlotte said. Her eyes were damp.
‘What did I get?’
‘A distinction!’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Well, then it’s my treat. Come on, where shall we eat?’
Brasserie Vivaldi is a good place to celebrate a dementia diagnosis, even if claims like that are generally easier to make than explain.
When, after a difficult drive, Charlotte finally pulled up in that establishment’s car park, I crowed, ‘Huh? Are we eating out? What a brilliant idea!’ As happy as a child.
We sat down at a table next to the aquarium, which contained a sunken ship to remind the fish of their distant origins and a treasure chest with air bubbling up out of it.
Moniek’s expression seemed to say, What kind of nonsense is this, wasting money on a restaurant when somebody’s just had half a death sentence? And Charlotte, inspired by Dr Vancleemput’s rigorous approach, barked, ‘Look, Mother, if you want to deprive Father of any more pleasures, you’d better do it now, because you’re right, soon it’ll be too late!’
A cosy family outing, in other words.
Would we care for an aperitif?
I suggested a small glass of champagne and my daughter agreed, whereas my statutory consort stuck to water. ‘Water, please. A simple glass of water. Tap water will do.’
In just a few days I’d be in a home and she’d only have herself to make miserable. I had the impression she’d decided to get started straight away.
‘Happy birthday, Mother!’ I said raising the bubbly.
‘Happy birthday, Mum!’ Charlotte played along. ‘And many more to come!’
And so say all of us.
As usual, Charlotte hadn’t found anything to her taste on the menu and asked if the cook couldn’t come up with something vegetarian, it didn’t matter what. Whereupon her mother butted in, snarling in F major:
‘Can’t you act like everyone else just once in your life? Eating a little bit of meat’s not going to kill you!’
Charlotte must have been about sixteen when she ruined an ordinary family meal by announcing that she couldn’t see anything particularly appetising about mass slaughter and logistically optimised torture. Back in those days we’d hardly even heard of vegetarianism. Yes, in my professional capacity I had learnt that the writers Shelley and Shaw were not fond of our species’ carnivorous tendencies, but that was in the nineteenth century, when the belles and not quite so belles lettres were teeming with morbid nutcases, and it was also the only fact on the subject I was able to come up with. Sure, we’d seen a few naked protesters agitating against the use of fur, but we couldn’t help but notice that none of those politically committed wenches had been hard done by in the breast department. From our perspective on the sofa, it didn’t seem like they were making much of a sacrifice by publicly displaying their perfect female curves. But vegetarianism, no, that was something the film stars of the day hadn’t yet embraced. At least not as far as we knew. We attributed our daughter’s determination to her age, that helped us put it into some kind of perspective, but otherwise we, as concerned and uninformed parents, were at our wits’ end. Both Moniek and I, traditionally educated in the belief that meat kept you healthy and strong, tried to ward off TB and other dangers by eating steak as often as we could afford it; and now we were saddled with a child who had voluntarily renounced the benefits of beef. If anything our Hugo was the opposite: he had to force himself to stick his fork into a vegetable. But Charlotte … Anorexia, some people insisted. The spoilt generation, others pontificated. A whim of fashion, according to those in the know. And meanwhile we felt inadequate and were terrified that anaemia and vitamin deficiencies would soon have Charlotte shuffling from one hospital bed to the next.
It is one of my absolute lows as a father, and I fear Charlotte will never forget this particular scene, but it was around this time that I had the nerve to try to force her to eat a piece of meat — turkey breast — boldly asserting that I’d rather drop dead on the spot than tolerate her ruining her health with her adolescent rebellion.
She didn’t touch the turkey and I didn’t drop dead. Charlotte had won the battle and accepted the song and dance she got from then on every time we were invited somewhere to eat. She resigned herself to making do with a cheese croquette while the others couldn’t stop going on about how tender the duck was. Helpless cooks thought they were offering her an alternative by serving up half a bucket of iceberg lettuce. She patiently bore questions like ‘Are you allowed to eat fish?’ or ‘Are mussels animals too?’ and saw herself banned from numerous back gardens once barbecue season arrived and mankind was falsely united around a couple of kilos of sausages.
Many conflicts later we were in Brasserie Vivaldi and Moniek still hadn’t reconciled herself to the convictions of her long-grown-up daughter. ‘Just take the chicken, I’ve heard it tastes just like that Quorn of yours! Your metabolism will be so overjoyed it’ll be doing somersaults inside your body!’
But the waiter was able offer her a moussaka made with a meat substitute and that really was vastly superior to the eternal cheese croquette.
‘I’m not such a difficult character,’ Moniek told the young man. ‘The meatballs in tomato sauce will be just fine. Simple meatballs in simple tomato sauce.’