Chapter 18
Stourton Stout, the legend, comes up trumps. It’s barely lunchtime on Monday when David texts me apologising for not calling over the weekend but telling me that Margaret March, formerly of Saint Helen’s in Dunblane, moved to the HDU unit at Forth Valley from the Elms, in Kincardine.
“That’s quite a smile,” Chloe says. “What’s put that on your face?”
She sounds the tiniest bit put out and I suppose she’s got a point.
After all, she got three complete sets of different grades of acoustic panel and filler, delivered overnight, with free returns on the two unwanted packages, then she organised the fitting and whisked away every scrap of cardboard, plastic, tape, Bubble Wrap and paper, except the VAT receipt, which she offered to file for me.
And she did it all over a busy weekend when I didn’t actually see her, hence this weekday lunch date.
I’m sitting in her office perched on an upturned mop bucket, with two meal deals on the desk between us.
I called her on the off chance she was free to be taken out and spoiled and decided to go ahead even though she said she only had half an hour and didn’t want to leave HQ because of a big delivery of her own.
HQ, at the other end of Menstrie from Lord’s Yard, is more or less an oversized lock-up garage with this tiny office carved out at the back beside an even smaller staff toilet.
There’s room for the two vans she uses for major commercial cleaning jobs and a run of shelves where tools and products, uniforms, and car clingers are stored in meticulous order, with tick sheets to approve the removal of even a single pair of rubber gloves.
I’ve seen dentists’ surgeries grubbier than Chloe’s nerve centre. It’s as clean as David’s bedroom.
I unwrap my sandwich and flatten out the cardboard to make a plate, Chloe’s sharp eye watching for bits of cress dropping out.
“David’s helping me find my old lady,” I say.
Chloe snorts and then coughs. “Sorry, that sounded filthy.” I feel myself flush. True to form, Chloe takes that as permission to plough on. “How far have things advanced? I liked him from what I could tell the other morning. He seems . . . normal.”
“I thought you were going to say nice!”
“Normal’s much harder to find than nice,” she says. “I bet you’re being ‘nice’ to him at the moment too. Anyone can do nice. Did I tell you about Cling Film Clifford?”
I take a bite of sandwich and waggle my eyebrows. Chloe’s bad boyfriends are always an entertainment.
“He saved food,” she says. “He’d save half a pat of butter from a roll in a café. He saved teabags—used teabags, this is—from motorway services. He took home a sprig of parsley and a wedge of lemon from the side of a plate of scampi once.”
“Where the hell did you find scampi?” I say. “Was he a time traveller?”
“Okay, calamari,” says Chloe. “Not the point. The last straw was when he poured half a wee tub of long-life milk into a Ziploc bag and told me it freezes.”
“What was the upside?”
“Absolutely fantastic in bed,” Chloe says. “Attention to detail, if you catch my drift.”
“And was he really called Clifford?”
She pauses. I’m not sure if she’s reluctant to tell me, or if she’s building up my expectations. At last she says, “Lance.”
“Lancelot?”
“Short for Lawrence. Except it’s not, is it? So he had to deliberately choose it.”
“Better than Larry,” I point out, on my way out the door.
R U sure about Elms? I text back to David when I’m sitting in my car again. Cos I’m 90% certain I *asked* them when I first started. If it’s the big one with the steep bank down to the river just as you head into the town.
It’s the longest text I’ve ever sent.
He texts back a shrug made of dashes and brackets.
He can’t be very busy this afternoon. Anyway, it’s silly to imagine he’d know anything about the Elms one way or the other.
I roll my eyes at myself in the rearview mirror and head down to Kincardine to ask—again, I’m convinced—if Peggy March ever lived there.
David texts me again while I’m driving, and I read it off the display.
Yours tomorrow? it says. Otherwise I’ll have to go shopping.
It should be offensive but he makes such a bad job of hiding his enthusiasm under unconvincing casualness that I find it charming instead.
So I’m smiling when I slow down to turn into the nursing home drive.
And it is the same place where I met the now shave man who smelled like an ashtray.
I’m peering out at the slalom of shallow ramps and the net-muffled windows of the very nursing home where I got sent packing with a flea in my ear.
But this time I’m armed with information, not questions, and I come bearing gifts.
Or promises of gifts anyway. I march up the steps that are still there beside the lifts and ramps and walk inside.
It’s that same man I thought I recognised last time, sitting at the desk, still stinking of smoke, but dressed up like a country laird today instead of someone who’s come to fix the photocopier.
“Afternoon,” he says, blandly polite. He doesn’t remember me and he doesn’t know I overheard Nice save.
“Afternoon to you too,” I say. His shirt and sideburns are making me talk like someone from Monarch of the Glen. “I’m here about Peggy March.”
“Ah,” he says. “Well then, I’ve got some bad tidings for you. Mrs. March died, I’m afraid. It was sudden and painless but she’s gone. I’m sorry to have to break such sad news.”
I nod along with him while he’s speaking, managing not to let my lip curl.
It would be odd anyway that he doesn’t seem to care who I am this time, when he was so fierce before—although, I suppose, being generous, dead residents are hard to disturb—but Nice save changes everything and I can’t think of this guy as a straight dealer anymore.
“I heard that she had died,” I say, “and, the thing is, I want to make some sort of gesture in her memory. I’d like to donate.
To your home.” It’s not the residents’ fault he’s such a weirdo.
“To the Elms?” he says. “Donate what?”
“A bench?” I say. “A piano, if you need one.” That’s less generous than it sounds. Lord’s Yard is always full of old pianos. John would be delighted if I took one off his hands.
“Can you play?” the man asks. Then he tuts. “But where are my manners? Would you like to sit down and have a cup of tea?”
I glance at the frosted glass of the window that separates the front desk from the back office, at the vertical blinds three quarters closed.
“In the lounge,” he adds, pointing the other way.
I go through, expecting to see old people in high-set chairs and maybe a television on too loud, but the lounge is deserted and the chairs look like the ordinary comfortable kind that go with couches and end up in John’s front shed.
I glance around and see that there is already a piano, and an indoor quoits set, as well as the telly and a couple of desktop computers.
I look out at the garden and see that the Elms is well served for benches too. There’s no one sitting on any of them.
“Here we are.” He’s back, with an oval plastic tray set for one in a practised fashion: spoon, tiny milk jug, two straws of sugar, a saucer with a bulge that accommodates a single biscuit. “So you were saying: donation?”
“What sort of thing do you need?” I ask. “Streaming service subscription? Mobile nail technician?”
“We’re still on videos,” he tells me. “A lot of the residents bring their favourites with them. And it’s more likely to be a chiropodist they need, to be honest with you.”
“I also wondered about time,” I tell him.
“Visits. Or outings, even. A wee walk to a coffee shop. I was wondering if that wouldn’t be the best donation of all.
” I look around at the empty sitting room.
“Unless they’re all out right now, I mean.
Unless family and friends take them out as much as they want to go. ”
He points upwards, jabbing with both fingers, and for one wild moment I think he’s telling me that everyone who lived here has died.
“Nap time, Lindsay,” he says. “It’s much better for them to lie down and lift their feet than sleep in the chairs.
We encourage a proper nap in the afternoons and a wee wash and brush up afterwards. Makes dinner special.”
“And the idea of donating time?” I ask him.
“Sounds great,” he says. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a dog, have you? A visit from a friendly dog always goes down well.”
I tell him I don’t have a dog but, even as I’m speaking, I ask myself why not.
I work at home. I’ve no plans to travel much, for a while anyway.
I could have a dog. A big chilled-out one like a retriever or one of those enormous ones that looked after the kids in Peter Pan.
It would bark at night if people broke in.
Or rather it wouldn’t bark at night and I’d know for sure I was dreaming.
Not that I don’t know already. Because I do.
We chat back and forth for the length of time it takes me to drink the tea and finish the biscuit, then I stand up to leave. I sing out a casual goodbye in the direction he’s gone when he takes the tray away and make my escape.
I’m glad to be back outside, with the wind in the trees and the sound of birdsong and traffic.
It was so silent in there. You would think that a houseful of elderly people, at nap time, would produce at least one buzz for an attendant, or a loud snore.
And where were the attendants, by the way?
Do they have to take a nap too? Nice save.
Letting my imagination run riot, for a minute, I think that, if they make life easy by keeping the old people in their rooms all the time, there would still be noise. But if they sedated—