He leant forwards in his chair, resting his elbows on his denimed knees.
‘I haven’t known what to do with myself since I retired. I feel like I’m …’ He paused. ‘Lost.’
‘Did you like working here?’ I asked.
‘I loved it.’
‘Then come back.’
‘I can’t. My job has gone to Derek and he’s a nice young man, it wouldn’t be right. I’m far too old anyway. Oh Lenni, please forgive me for being so self-involved when it’s you who’s the patient and I’m meant to be the visitor.’
‘Come back,’ I said again.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can. Maybe not as Chief Priest, but as something else – you could volunteer, you could read to people, you could help Pippa in the art room.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Not perhaps, definitely.’
‘Do you really think?’
‘It’s like you’re my silverfish.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m just dusting the bathroom and you’re already over by the sink! You should come back to the skirting board by the door, come back where you belong.’
I Have Loved the Stars Too Fondly
West Midlands, February 1998
Margot James is Sixty-Seven Years Old
We made a deal, Humphrey and I, shortly after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. And the deal was this: on the occasion that Humphrey forgot who I was, I was to bid him goodnight, give him an unreasonably large kiss, and never return. At first, I’d resisted. I told him I’d never leave him and I’d stay until the very end, no matter if we were strangers by then.
But he’d persisted. He made me sign a contract. He wrote it up himself, so of course it was barely legible. ‘It would mean the world to me, Margot,’ he said, ‘to know you won’t spend months, or years, toiling with me when I’m already up somewhere with the stars.’
And I’d cried. And he’d cried. And I signed it.
We were lucky, in the end: there were eleven good months where memories and certain things eluded him but I did not. Only at the end of those good months did he start to slip. Sometimes he was Humphrey, sometimes he was not.
The contract also stipulated at what point he was to be moved into a care home. And the day came far too soon. I wasn’t allowed to go with him when he moved. I was to help them pack up his things and let him go on ahead. I stood in the house surrounded by him and yet without him and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went to the attic and I stared up at the sky through his biggest telescope – the one that the care home said was far too big to fit into his new single bedroom.
He’d been there for three days when he permitted me to visit.
‘My window looks onto the courtyard,’ he said as I was buzzed into the centre. He was sitting on a waiting chair with his cane in his hand, seeming out of place.
I signed the visitors’ log and went to him. I was expecting a hug, but he didn’t give me one.
‘The courtyard!’ he said again, as though I hadn’t heard.
‘Shall we sit somewhere?’ I asked, and he led me down a long corridor. We’d viewed the place together when we were deliberating which care home would be for him, but it felt completely different then, like we’d sneaked into school after it was closed – like neither of us should have been there.
‘This is the best room in the place,’ he said, taking me into a small day room called ‘The Field’。 ‘The main day room stinks,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why people pretend it doesn’t. It’s like rotting cabbage – it’s full of farts and cups of tea that have been forgotten about. No matter where you go in this damn place, you can’t escape the smell of shepherd’s pie, even though we are yet’ – he sat down in one of the high-backed armchairs – ‘to actually be served shepherd’s pie.’
I couldn’t help laughing. I had known, or at least hoped, he’d be out of place here.
‘Everyone is so old,’ he said.
‘We’re old!’
‘We’re not that old. We’ll never be that old. We’re never going to give up,’ he said, ‘that’s the difference.’
We were alone in The Field – there were six or seven armchairs and a few coffee tables scattered about. Everything was yellow or green – the walls, the chairs, the carpet. And it had one big window that looked out, unlike the rest of the windows, onto the field next to the care home – which was wide and bordered by a long line of trees.