I’m a little in awe of her. At least I think it is awe. What is she now, 103 or 104? Profoundly deaf and virtually blind she must be cocooned against much of this present world. What does she think about? I asked him yesterday after we’d met her by the car park. She’d been out on her daily tour of the estate. She knows him, though he has to tell her his name and very loudly, but not me. He told her I was his wife. Oh, yes, she said. And then she asked if the little girl she’d seen was his. What little girl? he asked.
I think she meant me, I told him afterwards. Yes, I think so, he said. I don’t know why I thought that. It was a hunch. I sometimes see things that aren’t there, she’d told us, and sometimes I don’t see what is. She is untroubled by this. Or that is how it appears to me. Her looks and her voice have become mannish. When he told her we’d been to Yorkshire she said that she’d been married in Leeds and honeymooned in York. I cannot square the notion of a honeymoon with the being that she is now, and yet she has, or had, five children, so why not? Because she has gone beyond it? And the little girl? I sense it was me. She saw me but she didn’t.
And the little girl? She is ever present and just as scared.
