Rough Music by Patrick Gale Page A

Narnia-fashion, from one small corner of his study. Now if he had any query, about the safety of a rose spray or the timetable for trains to Haverfordwest, he switched on his computer. Not only were there documents out there, but people, helpful if opinionated people. An intensely private man, moved on repeatedly through most of his working life, John had never been a great one for chatting over the garden fence but the Internet was like having neighbors one could switch off.
    The family nettle-grasper, Poppy, had taken action after her shock at bringing the grandsons to a long-arranged birthday lunch only to find that Frances had laid in preposterous quantities of knock-down Rioja and nothing else.
    “I’m bringing Jude Farson round to look at her. We’ll keep it very casual. He’s a friend, after all, as well as a specialist. So you can just pretend we were passing and dropped in.”
    Jude and she came and went, then Jude rang up a discreet hour or two later and said that he feared it looked like early-onset Alzheimer’s. He had called on one of Frances’s bad days.
    “What can we do?” John asked.
    “Not a great deal. I mean we can run some tests, even book her in for a scan to check there’s no other cause, but …” The doctor was not hopeful.
    Frances was watching television very loudly. John retreated to his study, turned on his computer, logged on to the Internet and ran a search on
early-onset Alzheimer’s
. He found a welter of references to Alzheimer’s, many of them humorous, and a surprisingly high number of articles on potato cultivation, then a direct hit.
Early-Onset Alzheimer’s—A Wife’s Story.
In three bleak pages, someone described how her husband had become more than usually absentminded soon after his fiftieth birthday. Forgetfulness progressed to the point where he would make a telephone call then forget who he was calling or even who he was. He also suffered terrible depressions, in which he became wordless and withdrawn and which he described, in a lucid moment, as
entering a black pit with no certainty of return
. He became doubly confused when losing his job forced the pair to move to a cheaper neighborhood and wandering was added to his list of problems.
    The prognosis is never good
, the writer finished.
Depending on how
early the diagnosis was made, the patient (not the sufferer—you are
both
going to suffer here) will have ten to fifteen years. Decline will be steady and, this being a disorder of the central nervous system, double incontinence is a treat in store, along with irrational terrors, violent mood swings, and the knowledge that your loved one is going somewhere you cannot follow. Or at least you can and may follow, God help you, but it will be as a fellow patient, not as a traveling companion. But to be reading this you are probably still young and feel cheated of the retirement you expected. You are not alone. To prove it, you can e-mail me and I promise to get back to you or to have a colleague do so. Just click here.
    John e-mailed her, outlining his situation. She e-mailed him swiftly back, giving the telephone number of the Alzheimer’s Society and attaching her standard help pack of advice. E-mailing her to thank her, he felt he must relieve the one-track nature of their doomy correspondence so added some personal details, mentioning his wife’s name, his son’s bookshop and that he lived just outside Barrowcester and was a keen yachtsman on the river. This in turn inspired a more chatty reply from her and soon they were corresponding every few days, always with their partners’ conditions as a pretext or opening gambit. Once she admitted that she lived in nearby Arkfield it was merely a matter of days before he found the courage to suggest they meet.
    She was about Frances’s age, perhaps a little younger, and had retired as a personnel manager in local government so as to care for her husband. She had the flat vowels and nasal twang of the local accent,