‘I think it’s a very nice place,’ he said, and paused to let a pleased smile form on my lips before adding: ‘for old people who haven’t got a home of their own.’
‘Oh, a lot of our residents had very nice homes before they came here,’ she said. ‘But we all get to a point where running a house is too much for us.’
‘Yes, well I haven’t got to that stage, yet,’ he said, and turned to me. ‘Can we go now, son?’
On our way out I apologised to Mrs Wilson for Dad’s churlishness. ‘Don’t worry about it, old folk don’t like to leave their own homes, it’s natural,’ she said. I asked her if I could put Dad’s name on a waiting list. ‘We don’t have a waiting list as such,’ she said. ‘Get in touch again if he changes his mind.Vacancies occur fairly frequently.’
In a way I understood his resistance. Blydale House is a decent place, clean, bright and well run, but I couldn’t look round that lounge without feeling a strong desire to be out of it, and the little bed-sitting room we peered into, though comfortably furnished, seemed more like a cell than a home. However, as I pointed out on the way back to Rectory Road (we stopped at a chemist’s on the way to get liquid paraffin for him and batteries for me), living near us he wouldn’t be trapped in the place all day, he could always hop on a bus and call in and see us.
‘You’d soon get sick of that,’ he said, with disconcerting candour.
He’s right, of course. I feel a guilty relief that he doesn’t want to move into Blydale House immediately. I could sense that Fred and Cecilia shared this feeling when I reported the upshot of our visit, but I’m afraid that all of us, having altruistically done our duty in urging him to move, now accused him of stubborn ingratitude for refusing to do so.
‘You’re only postponing the inevitable, Harry,’ Fred told him. ‘If you don’t move into a home up here, you’ll have to move into one in London.’
‘I don’t see why I’ve got to move at all,’ Dad said sullenly.
‘Because you can’t cope, Dad,’ I said. ‘You’re a danger to yourself in that house. You won’t even wear a panic alarm.’
‘What’s a panic alarm?’
‘You know what it is, I told you. A thing you wear round your neck.’
‘Oh, that. I don’t need that. I might press it by accident and have the police or the fire brigade breaking down my door in the middle of the night.’
‘If you were in supervised accommodation, you wouldn’t need to wear one, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia, who occupies a superior type of apartment for the elderly in Cheltenham. ‘In the flat where I live there’s a button in every room which I can use to summon the Warden.’
Dad now shifted his defence to his favourite ground. ‘Anyway, how much does that place cost?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t remember off-hand,’ I prevaricated. ‘Quite a bit, but you could afford it, and if not we -’
‘It’s two hundred and seventy-five pounds a week, Harry,’ Fred interpolated.
‘What?’ Dad exclaimed. ‘How am I supposed to find that sort of money?’
‘It’s very simple. You sell your house,’ Fred said. ‘Given London property prices, it would fetch enough to keep you at Blydale for as long as . . .’ Fred hesitated, and Dad completed the sentence for her.
‘As long as I need it, you mean? Which wouldn’t be very long, living up here, I can tell you.Then you would all inherit my money.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry!’ Fred said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I can assure you I have no designs on your money, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia. ‘My late husband left me well provided for.’
‘Yes, I bet he did,’ Dad muttered darkly.
Afterwards, when we were on our own, I told Fred I thought she had been hard on Dad, frightening him with the cost of Blydale House.
‘There’s no point in beating about the bush,’ she said. ‘He’s got to face the facts. If he’s taken into a state care home they’ll confiscate his house to pay for it.’
‘You’ve really put him off the idea of moving up here now,’ I said. ‘But perhaps that’s what you intended to do.’
It was a mean thing to say. Why did I say it? I don’t know. Put it down to the curdled spirit of Christmas.