‘Does it matter?’ Stephen asks her kindly. ‘I can see in your eyes that it’s true. I mean, I knew it was true, but I’m glad, I suppose, to see you confirm it. Let me carry on – it’s not a long letter.’
‘I have to write this letter now, because, Stephen, if that bell is ringing for you, I need you to do two things. I need you to read this letter aloud to Elizabeth, and I need you to make her promise that she will let you read this letter every day, should you forget it. Which, from what I understand, you will.’
Elizabeth knows now who wrote the letter, of course she does.
‘You wrote the letter to yourself?’ she says to Stephen.
‘It seems I did, yes,’ says Stephen. ‘A year ago to the day.’
It’s the least Elizabeth should have expected. ‘What did you do? Send the envelope to your solicitors, and tell them to post it to you in a year’s time?’
‘I must have done,’ says Stephen. ‘I must have done. But, more to the point, I assume it’s all true?’
‘It’s all true,’ says Elizabeth.
‘And it’s getting worse?’
‘Much worse, Stephen. This is a rare good day. We are clinging on.’
Stephen nods. ‘And what is to be done?’
‘That’s up to you,’ says Elizabeth. ‘That will always be up to you.’
Stephen smiles. ‘What rot. Up to me. It’s up to us, and it sounds like we have rather small windows left open to us. Should I be living here? Is it impossible?’
‘It is difficult,’ says Elizabeth. ‘But not impossible.’
‘Soon it will be impossible.’
‘I don’t care about soon,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I care about now.’
‘Lovely though that thought is, I feel perhaps I don’t have that luxury,’ says Stephen. ‘There are places, I am sure, where I could receive care. Where you would be given some respite? I still have some money, I hope? Haven’t gambled it away?’
‘You do have money,’ says Elizabeth.
‘I sold some books recently,’ says Stephen. ‘Expensive ones.’
Stephen must have seen something cross her eyes.
‘I didn’t sell any books?’
‘You didn’t,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Though you helped to solve a murder by tracking some down.’
‘Did I indeed? I have quite the hinterland.’
‘Do you want to finish the letter?’
‘Yes,’ says Stephen, ‘I would like to.’ He picks up the page again.
‘Stephen, what a life you have led. You have filled every unforgiving minute and what a woman you have found in Elizabeth. You have led what they call a charmed life. What luck you have had, what opportunities, what sights you have seen. You are a lucky bugger, and you were probably due a sticky patch. And here it is. You must deal with it however you choose, and this letter is my gift to you, to let you know what you are facing, if everything else has failed. I am reading about dementia every day now, trying to cram while I can, and they say that in time you forget even the people closest to you. I am reading time and again of families where husbands forget wives, where mothers forget children, but, after the names and the faces disappear from your memory, what seems to hold on the longest is love. So whatever position you are in, I hope you know you are loved. Elizabeth will not send you away, we both know that. She will not lock you in a home, however bad you get, and however difficult things become. But you must persuade her that this is the right course of action. She cannot continue to care for you, for her sake or for yours. Elizabeth is not your nurse; she is your lover. Read her this letter, please, and then ignore her objections. I have left a page of suggestions tucked inside The Handbook of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, on the third shelf to your right. I hope that something there should fit the bill.
‘Stephen, I am losing my mind – I feel it slipping away daily. I send you my love, dear man, a year into the future. I hope you are able to do something with this letter. I love you and, assuming you have done what you’re told and read this to Elizabeth, then, Elizabeth, I love you too. Yours faithfully, Stephen.’
Stephen puts down the letter. ‘So there we have it.’
‘There we have it,’ agrees Elizabeth.
‘Feels like we both should be crying?’
‘I think we both might need cool heads for a moment,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Crying can come later.’
‘And have we had this conversation before?’ Stephen asks. ‘Have we spoken about dementia?’
‘From time to time,’ says Elizabeth. ‘You certainly know something is up.’
‘And how long, impossible question I know, but how long until we’re not capable of having this discussion? How many windows like this do we have left?’
Elizabeth can fool herself no more, can keep Stephen to herself no longer. The day she knew must arrive is here. She has been losing him a paragraph at a time, but the chapter is done. And the book is close to its end.
Stephen, fully dressed and shaved, stands among his books. The urns and sculptures from his travels, things he found significant and beautiful, gathered over a lifetime. The awards, the photographs, old friends smiling on boats, boys at school dressed like men, Stephen on mountains, on desert digs, raising a glass in a far-off bar, kissing his wife on their wedding day. This room, this cocoon, every inch of it is his brain, his smile, his kindness, his friendships, his lovers, his jokes. His mind, fully on display.
And he knows it is now lost.
‘Not many,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Your good days are further apart, and your bad days are getting worse.’
Stephen puffs out his cheeks as his options dwindle. ‘You need to send me somewhere, Elizabeth. Somewhere they can care for me properly, twenty-four hours a day. I will look at my list of suggestions.’
‘I can care for you properly,’ says Elizabeth.
‘No,’ says Stephen. ‘I won’t have it.’
‘I hope I might have a say in the matter too.’
Stephen reaches across the desk and takes Elizabeth’s hand. ‘I need you to promise me you won’t destroy this letter.’
‘I won’t make a promise I can’t keep,’ says Elizabeth. My God, his hand, my hand, she thinks, the way they fit together, the two of them.
‘I need you to show me this letter every day,’ says Stephen. ‘Do you understand?’
Elizabeth looks at her husband. Then she looks at the letter that this clever man wrote to himself a year ago. What must he have been going through? One of those days of galumphing typing had been this letter. Probably came back into the living room with a big smile on his face. ‘Cup of tea, old girl?’
To show Stephen this letter every day would be to lose him. But to not show him would be to betray him. And that is no choice at all.
‘I promise,’ she says.
Now the tears come from Stephen. They stand and they embrace. Stephen is shaking and sobbing. He is saying ‘sorry’, she is saying ‘sorry’, but to whom, and for what, is lost on them both.
Elizabeth realizes what the smell was when she had walked into the flat, fifteen minutes earlier, a whole lifetime ago. She knew she had recognized it.
It was fear. Cold-blooded, sweat-soaked fear.
Part Two. WHATEVER YOU’RE LOOKING FOR YOU’RE SURE TO FIND IT HERE!
17
In theory Ron was all for keeping an eye on a major heroin importation hub, and trying to find a murderer.
However, thus far, in practice, it has largely involved sitting in the back of his Daihatsu, looking through some binoculars he bought from Lidl, at a hangar that no one had entered or exited for an hour, while listening to Ibrahim reading Joyce an article about Ecuador from the Economist.