Quilt

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In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it. First it is the hospital, then the police.

— These things happen from time to time, my father says.

He is lying on the bed, his single bed alongside the other which, still made up, was my mother’s, dying two years earlier, and the covers are off and I am trying to get him up and dressed, ready for hospital, but I’m weeping. Tears are streaming down my face making it difficult to see. Unenvisaged, embarrassing. Until now I have managed to remain quite calm, like him. I discussed the case over the phone with the doctor and agreed the best thing would be to get him into hospital where they could make him more comfortable.

— If it’s possible to persuade your dad, see what you can do, I know old folk don’t necessarily want to shift.

And for all the antiquarian power of his habits he could always amaze me, turn out to have been thinking or not, entirely elsewhere, for years impossible to get him to go somewhere, come out for a drink, walk by the sea, drive down the country lanes over the hills. I didn’t expect him to agree but he did without the faintest remonstrance:

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