broke off and smoothed her brother’s unresponsive head fondly. ‘No. Me and Valentine, we set up home here together when his Cathy died and my Bill passed on. Well, you know all that… and we always liked each other, Valentine and me, and I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him something awful, but I’ll stay here.’ She swallowed. ‘I’ll get used to being alone, same as I did after Bill went.’
Dorothea, like many elderly women, it seemed to me, had a resolute independence that survived where youth quaked. With help once daily from the district nurse, she’d cared for her failing brother, taking on ever more personal tasks for him, exhausting herself to give him comfort and painkillers when he lay awake in the night. She might mourn him when he’d gone, but her dark-rimmed eyes showed she was much overdue on rest.
She sat down tiredly on the tapestry stool and held her brother’s hand. He breathed slowly, shallowly, the sound rasping. Fading daylight from the window beside Valentine fell softly on the aged couple, light and shadow emphasising the rounded commitment of the one and the skeletal dependence of the other, the hovering imminence of death as plain as if the scythe had hung above their heads.
I wished I had a camera. Wished indeed for a whole camera crew. My normal day to day life involved the catching of emotion on the wing, the recording of ephemeral images to illumine a bedrock of truth. I dealt with unreality to give illusion the insight of revelation.
I directed films.
Knowing that one day I would use and recreate the quiet drama before me, I looked at my watch and asked Dorothea if I might use her telephone.
‘Of course, dear. On the desk.’
I reached Ed, my earnest assistant, who as usual sounded flustered in my absence.
‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘I’m running late. Is everyone there? Well, get some drinks sent over. Keep them happy, but don’t let Jimmy have more than two G and Ts, and make sure we have enough copies of the script alterations. Right? Good. See you.’
I regretted having to leave Dorothea at such a time, but in fact I’d squeezed my visit into a day’s schedule that had made no provision for it, keeping the promise I’d given week after week.
Three months back, in the preliminary pre-production stage of the film I was currently engaged on, I’d called to see Valentine as a brief matter of courtesy, a gesture to tell him I remembered him in the old days in my grandfather’s time, and had always admired, even if from a distance, his emergence as a sage.
‘Sage my foot!’ He’d disclaimed the flattery but enjoyed it all the same. ‘I can’t see very well these days, boy. How about reading to me for a bit?’
He lived on the outer edge of Newmarket, the town long held to be the home and heart of the horseracing industry worldwide. ‘Headquarters’, the racing press called it. Fifteen hundred of the thoroughbred élite rocketed there over the windswept training gallops and over the wide difficult tracks, throwing up occasional prodigies that passed their glorious genes to flying generations of the future. An ancient wealth-producing business, the breeding of fast horses.
I was on the point of leaving when the front doorbell rang, and to save Dorothea’s tired feet I went to answer it.
A short thirtyish man stood there looking at his watch, impatient.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
He gave me a brief glance and called past me, ‘Dorothea?’
Regardless of fatigue, she appeared from Valentine’s room and said miserably, ‘He’s… in a coma, I think. Come in. This is Thomas Lyon who’s been reading to Valentine, like I told you.’ As if on an afterthought, she finished the introduction, flapping a hand and saying, ‘Robbie Gill, our doctor.’
Robbie Gill had red hair, a Scots accent, no small-talk and a poor bedside manner. He carried a medical bag into Valentine’s room and snapped it open. He rolled up the ill man’s eyelids with his thumb and pensively held one of the fragile wrists. Then he silently busied himself with stethoscope, syringes and swabs.
‘We’d better get him to bed,’ he said finally. No mention, I was glad to notice, of transportation to hospital.
‘Is he –?’ Dorothea asked anxiously, leaving the question hovering, not wanting an affirmative answer.
‘Dying?’ Robbie Gill said it kindly enough in his brusque way. ‘In a day or two, I’d say. Can’t tell. His old heart’s still fairly strong. I don’t really think