The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

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.

‘So that’s why you like this room,’ I said. ‘Have you seen anything good?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘If I’m to get my telescope down the corridor without being ushered back to bed like a schoolboy, I’ll need to know their night staff rotations.’

‘You know, you could just ask if they’ll let you take it in.’

‘And have them need to fill in a health and safety form? No chance.’

‘Have you met anyone nice?’ I asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’ I gave his knee a squeeze.

He looked into my eyes and there was a moment that I couldn’t identify or define, but I know that it didn’t feel good. His beard was neater than it was when he left. I wanted to ask if they’d done that for him, but I knew that if they had, it would be the last thing he’d want to talk about.

‘So,’ I said, ‘your bedroom faces the courtyard?’

‘There are two floodlights that light it up from six p.m. to six a.m. I can’t see a bloody thing.’

‘Could you ask to be moved?’

‘I did. Not for three months, they said. Three months without seeing the stars. I’m going to go mad.’

‘Come home, then,’ I said, before I had time to think about whether it was a good idea. This, I thought, must be how parents who send their children to boarding school feel when they visit. Guilty and sad, and like each time you see your child they’ve become someone else, and the next time you visit they’ll be another someone else entirely.

I waited for him to reply, but he didn’t.

‘It’s fine. Shall we play dominoes?’ he asked, and I wanted to cry.

‘What if,’ I said, once he’d finished gloating about winning at dominoes, ‘I watched the stars for you?’

‘Hm.’

I pushed on, regardless. ‘I’ve got the big telescope still set up. You tell me what to look for and I’ll do it, and then I’ll—’

‘Telephone me,’ he said. ‘Describe what you see.’

‘Shall we try?’

‘Yes. I’ll be like an alcoholic getting calls from his sommelier.’

So every evening, I sat down and telephoned Humphrey’s bedroom and reported as carefully and accurately as I could everything I saw in the sky. He would ask me questions, tell me to move the telescope a degree here or there, or remind him if something had been in the same place in one of our last calls. I could always hear the scratching of his pencil as he wrote. Even once he’d been moved to a room with a much better view of the sky, at seven thirty on the dot I’d call him and tell him what I could see, and he would tell me if he could see it too. We were connected because we were looking at the same point, millions of miles away.

And then, on a Tuesday in February, I called and he didn’t answer. So I called again.

‘Hello?’ a young woman answered.

‘Yes, I’m trying to speak to Humphrey. Humphrey James?’

‘Oh, who am I speaking to?’

‘Margot … I’m his wife.’

‘Margot, Mrs James, I was just about to call you. Humphrey had a bit of a fall when he was getting out of the bath. He’s with the doctor now; we’ll update you as soon as we can.’

‘Should I come and see him? Do you need me to come over?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs James, visiting