When they step out into a corridor, she turns away to her left and he has to put his hand on her narrow shoulder to guide her back. 'Here it is. Do you recognise your door?'
'I've never been out this way before.'
He opens her door and hands her in. The room is about eight feet by ten, with a glazed door giving on to a small back garden. The single bed is covered by a floral eiderdown
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and various soft toys that were part of her life long before her illness. Some of her remaining ornaments - a robin on a log, two comically exaggerated glass squirrels - are in a glazed corner cupboard. Others are ranged about a sideboard close to the door. On the wall near the handbasin is a framed photograph of Lily and Jack, Henry's father, standing on a lawn. Just in shot is the handle of a pram, presumably in which lies the oblivious Henry. She's pretty in a white summer dress and has her head cocked in that shy, quizzical way he remembers well. The young man is smoking a cigarette and wears a blazer and open-necked white shirt. He's tall, with a stoop, and has big hands like his son. His grin is wide and untroubled. It's always useful to have solid proof that the old have had their go at being young. But there is also an element of derision in photography. The couple appear vulnerable, easily mocked for appearing not to know that their youth is merely an episode, or that the tasty smouldering item in Jack's right hand will contribute - Henry's theory later that same year to his sudden death.
Having failed to remember its existence, Lily isn't surprised to find herself in her room. She instantly forgets that she didn't know about it. However, she dithers, uncertain of where she should sit. Henry shows her into her high backed chair by the French window, and sits facing her on the edge of the bed. It's ferociously hot, even hotter than his own bedroom. Perhaps his blood is still stirred by the game, and the hot shower and the warmth of the car. He'd be content to stretch out on the oversprung bed and start to think about the day, and perhaps doze a little. How interesting his life suddenly appears from the confines of this room. At that moment, with the eiderdown beneath him, and the heat, he feels a heaviness in his eyes and can't stop them closing. And his visit has hardly begun. To revive himself, he pulls off his sweater, then he shows Lily the plant he has brought.
'Look,' he says. 'It's an orchid for your room.'
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As he holds it out towards her, and the frail white flower bobs between them, she recoils.
'Why have you got that?'
'It's yours. It'll keep flowering through the winter. Isn't it pretty? It's for you.'
'It's not mine,' Lily says firmly. 'I've never seen it before.'
He had the same baffling conversation last time. The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets. She unravels in little steps. Now she's lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure. Adopting again the tone of the cheerful nurse, he says, 'I'll put it up here where you can see it.'
She's about to protest, but her attention wanders. She has seen some decorative china pieces on a display shelf above her bed, right behind her son. Her mood is suddenly conciliatory.
'I've got plenty of them cups and saucers. So I can always go out with one of them. But the thing is, the space between people is so tiny' - she brings up two wavering hands to show him a gap - 'that there's hardly enough space to squeeze through. There's too much binding.'
The agree/ Henry says as he settles back on the bed. 'There's far too much binding.'
Damage from the small-vessel clotting tends to accumulate in the white matter and destroy the mind's connectivity. Along the way, well before the process is complete, Lily is able to deliver her rambling treatises, her nonsense monologues with touching seriousness. She doesn't doubt herself at all. Nor does she think that he's unable to follow her. The structure of her sentences is intact, and the moods which inflect her various descriptions make sense. It pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time.
She isn't looking at him as she gathers her thoughts, but past him, concentrating on an elusive matter, staring as though through a window at an unbounded view. She goes
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to speak, but remains silent. Her pale green eyes, sunk deep in bowls of finely folded light brown skin, have a flat, dulled quality, like dusty stones under glass. They give an accurate impression of understanding nothing. He can't bring her news of the family - the mention of strange names, any names, can alarm her. So although she won't understand, he often talks to her about work. What she warms to is the sound, the emotional tone of a friendly conversation.
He is about to describe to her the Chapman girl, and how well she's come through, when Lily suddenly speaks up. Her mood is anxious, even a little querulous. 'And you know that this . . . you know, Aunty, what people put on their shoes to make them . . . you know?'
'Shoe polish?' He never understands why she calls him Aunty, or which of her many aunts is haunting her.
'No, no. They put it all over their shoes and rub it with a cloth. Well, anyway, it's a bit like shoe polish. It's that sort of thing. We had side plates and God knows what, all along the street. We had everything but the right thing because we were in the wrong place.'
Then she suddenly laughs. It's become clearer to her.
'If you turn the picture round and take the back off like I did you get such a lot of pleasure out of it. It's all what it meant. And the laugh we had out of it!'
And she laughs gaily, just like she used to, and he laughs too. It's all what it meant. Now she's away, describing what might be a disintegrated memory of a street party, and a little watercolour she once bought in a jumble sale.
Some time later, when Jenny arrives with the refreshments, Lily stares at her without recognition. Perowne stands and clears space on a low table. He notices the suspicion Lily is showing towards what she takes to be a complete stranger, and so, as soon as Jenny leaves, and before Lily can speak, he says, 'What a lovely girl she is. Always helpful.'
'She's marvellous,' Lily agrees.
The memory of whoever was in the room is already fading.
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His emotional cue is irresistible and she immediately smiles and begins to elaborate while he spoons all six tea bags out of the metal pot.
'She always comes running, even if it's narrow all the way down. She wants to come on one of them long things but she doesn't have the fare. I sent her the money, but she doesn't have it in her hand. She wants some music, and I said you might as well make up a little band and play it yourself. I worry about her though. I said to her, why do you put all the slices in one bowl when no one's standing up? You can't do it yourself.'
He knows who she's talking about, and waits for more. Then he says, 'You should go and see her.'
It's a long time since he last tried to explain to her that her mother died in 1970. It is easier now to support the delusion and keep the conversation moving along. Everything belongs in the present. His immediate concern is to prevent her eating a tea bag, the way she almost did last time. He piles them onto a saucer which he places on the floor by his foot. He puts a half-filled cup within her reach and offers her a biscuit and a napkin. She spreads it over her lap and carefully places the biscuit in its centre. She raises the cup to her lips and drinks. At moments like these, when she's skilful in the long-established routines, and looks demure in her colour-matched clothes, a perfectly well-looking 77year old with amazing legs for her age, athlete's legs, he can imagine that it's all been a mistake, a bad dream, and that she'll leave her tiny room and come away with him into the heart of the city and eat fish stew with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren and stay a while.
Lily says, 'I was there last week, Aunty, on the bus and my mum was in the garden. I said to her, You can walk down there, see what you're going to get, and the next thing is the balancing of everything you've got. She's not well. Her feet. I'll go there in a minute and I can't help losing her a jersey.'
How strange it would have been for Lily's mother, an
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aloof, unmaternal woman, to have known that the little girl at her skirts would one day, in a remote future, a science fiction date in the next century, talk of her all the time and long to be home with her. Would that have softened her?
Now Lily is set, she'll talk on for as long as he sits there. It's hard to tell if she's actually happy. Sometimes she laughs, at others she describes shadowy disputes and grievances, and her voice becomes indignant. In many of the situations she conjures, she's remonstrating with a man who won't see sense.
'} fold him anything that's going for a liberty and he said, I don't care. You can give it away, and I said don't let it waste in the fire. And all the new stuff that's going to be picked up.'
If she becomes too agitated by the story she's telling, Henry will cut in and laugh loudly and say, 'Mum, that's really very funny!' Being suggestible, she'll laugh too and her mood will shift, and the story she tells then will be happier. For now, she's in neutral mode - there's a clock, and a jersey again, and again, a space too narrow to pass through - and Henry, sipping the thick brown tea, half listening, half asleep in the small room's airless warmth, thinks how in thirty-five years or less it could be him, stripped of everything he does and owns, a shrivelled figure meandering in front of Theo or Daisy, while they wait to leave and return to a life of which he'll have no comprehension. High blood pressure is one good predictor of strokes. A hundred and twenty-two over sixty-five last time. The systolic could be lower. Total cholesterol, five point two. Not good enough. Elevated levels of lipoprotein-a are said to have a robust association with multi infarct dementia. He'll eat no more eggs, and have only semi skimmed milk in his coffee, and coffee too will have to go one day. He isn't ready to die, and nor is he ready to half die. He wants his prodigiously connected myelin-rich white matter intact, like an unsullied snowfield. No cheese then. He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate. Mental death.
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'I put sap in the clock/ she's telling him, 'to make it moist.'
An hour passes, and then he forces himself fully awake and stands up, too quickly perhaps, because he feels a sudden dizziness. Not a good sign. He extends both hands towards her, feeling immense and unstable as he looms over her tiny form.
'Come on now, Mum/ he says gently, 'it's time for me to go. And I'd like you to see me to the door/
Childlike in her obedience, she takes his hands and he helps her from her chair. He piles up the tray and puts it outside the room, then remembers the tea bags, half concealed ^ under the bed, and puts them out too. She might have feasted on them. He guides her into the corridor, reassuring her all the while, aware that she's stepping into an alien world. She has no idea which way to turn as they leave her room. She doesn't comment on the unfamiliar surroundings, but she grips his hand tighter. In the first of the sitting rooms two women, one with snowy hair in braids, the other completely bald, are watching television with the sound off. Approaching from the middle room is Cyril, as always in cravat and sports jacket, and today carrying a cane and wearing a deerstalker. He's the home's resident gent, sweet-mannered, marooned in one particular, well-defined fantasy: he believes he owns a large estate and is obliged to go around visiting his tenants and be scrupulously polite. Perowne has never seen him unhappy.
Cyril raises his hat at Lily and calls, 'Good morning, my dear. Everything well? Any complaints?'
Her face tightens and she looks away. On the screen above her head Perowne sees the march - Hyde Park still, a vast crowd before a temporary stage, and in the far distance a tiny figure at a microphone, then the aerial shot of the same, and then the marchers in columns with their banners, still arriving through the park gates. He and Lily stop to let Cyril pass. There's a shot of the newsreader at her space-age desk, then the plane as he saw it in the early hours, the blackened
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fuselage vivid in a lake of foam, like a tasteless ornament on an iced cake. Now, Paddington police station - said to be secure against terrorist attack. A reporter is standing outside, speaking into a microphone. There's a development. Are the Russian pilots really radical Muslims? Perowne is reaching up for the volume control, but Lily is suddenly agitated and trying to tell him something important.
'If it gets too dry it will curl up again. I told him, and 1 told him you have to water it, but he wouldn't put it down.'
'It's all right,' he tells her. 'He will put it down. I'll tell him to. i promise you.'
He decides against the television and they come away. He needs to concentrate on his leavetaking, for he knows that she'll think she's coming with him. He'll be standing once more at the front door, with his meaningless explanation that he'll return soon. Jenny or one of the other girls will have to distract her as he steps outside.
Together they walk back through the first sitting room. Tea and crustless sandwiches are being served to the ladies at the round table with the chenille cloth. He calls a greeting to them, but they seem too distracted to reply. Lily is happier now, and leans her head against his arm. As they come into the hall they see Jenny Lavin by the door, already raising her hand to the high double security lock and smiling in their direction. Just then his mother pats his hand with a feathery touch and says, 'Out here it only looks like a garden, Aunty, but it's the countryside really and you can go for miles. When you walk here you feel lifted up, right high across the counter. I can't manage all them plates without a brush, but God will take care of you and see what you're going to get because it's a swimming race. You'll squeeze through somehow.'