‘You don’t know that. You could have another fifty.’
She shakes her head. ‘I hope not.’
‘How are you feeling?’
She smiles as if I have told a joke.
‘Near the end. See, I’ve had a variety of ailments. When the doctor told me I only had a matter of weeks I realised I . . . I only have two more years. Three at the most. So I knew it was safe, you know, to come here. Safer . . .’
It doesn’t make sense. If she is still bothered about safety, then why did she talk openly to people here about her age?
There are other people in the room. Mainly sitting in chairs, lost in crosswords or memories.
‘You were Rose’s love. She spoke of nothing else but you. I had a flower stand next to where she and her little sister used to sell fruit. Tom this. Tom that. Tom everything. She came alive after she met you. She was a different girl.’
‘I loved her so much,’ I tell her. ‘She was so strong. She was the greatest person I ever knew.’
She smiles in faint sympathy. ‘I was a sad old thing in them days. Suffered my own heartache.’
She stares around the room. Someone switches on the TV. The opening credits of a show calledA New Life in the Sunstart to play. Then images of a couple inside their Spanish restaurant, the Blue Marlin, looking stressed as they rinse mussels in a pot.
When Mary’s face returns to mine she is pensive, almost trembling with thought. And then she tells me: ‘I met your daughter.’
It is so out of context that I don’t really understand what she has said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your child, Marion.’
‘Marion?’
‘Quite recent. We were in hospital together.’
My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, afeeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.
‘What?’
‘The psychiatric hospital in Southall. I was a day patient, just a mad old bird crying in a chair. She was there all the time. I came to know her. I had left before she had been born, hadn’t I?’
‘So how did you know it was my daughter?’
She looks at me as if it is a silly question. ‘She told me. She told everyone. That was one of the reasons she was there in the first place. No one believed her of course. She was mad. That’s what they thought . . . She used to talk in French sometimes, and she sang a lot.’
‘What did she sing?’
‘Old songs. Old,oldsongs. She used to cry when she sang.’
‘Is she still there?’
She shakes her head. ‘She left. It was strange, how it happened—’
‘Strange? How do you mean?’
‘One night she just went. People who were there said there was a lot of noise and commotion . . . Then, when I came in the next day she was gone.’
‘Where?Where?’
Mary sighs. She takes a moment. Looks sad and confused as she thinks about it. ‘No one knew. No one said. They just told us she’d been discharged. But we never knew for sure. That sounds strange, but we didn’t always know what was going on. That was the nature of the place.’
