Viola fell into (an admittedly self-indulgent) existential gloom and was only pulled out of it when her father started to choke. She panicked and tried to help him sit up. There was hardly any water in the jug on his table even though it was supposed to be kept topped up. The “residents” (a ridiculous word, as if they had chosen to live here) were probably all suffering from dehydration. Not to mention starvation. “Three nutritious meals a day” it said on the Poplar Hill website. There were menus pinned to a noticeboard every day—shepherd’s pie, fish and sautéed potatoes, chicken casserole. They made it sound like real food, when in fact every meal that Viola had seen was a kind of beige slop and jelly for afters. Her father didn’t seem to eat any more, a Breatharian by default. Viola had been briefly (very briefly, obviously) attracted to Breatharianism, as she was to all things cultish. Living on air had seemed like a good way to lose weight. It was an absurd idea and in her defence—she turned to the jury—she had been going through a particularly “bad patch” in her life. That was before she discovered that all you had to do to lose weight was to eat less. (“Svelte,” according to the Mail on Sunday, “and still the proud possessor of a good pair of pins, even though she’s got a bus pass now.” She hadn’t. She took taxis. And chauffeur-driven cars. And she would have preferred it if the “good” had been “great.”)
Viola poured the dregs of the water jug into a plastic cup and stirred in the thickener that turned any liquid into disgusting gloop but was supposed to prevent her father from choking. She held the cup to his lips so that he could take a sip of the gloop.
“Do you find old age in itself repellent,” Gregory asked, “or just your father’s?” “Both,” she said. “And your own?” Yes, all right, she was terrified of growing old. (“You are old,” Bertie said.) Was this going to be her fate too when she reached the endgame? Lunch clubs and chairs for the elderly and then finally being administered gloop by someone who spoke Tagalog? Not someone who truly cared. You reap what you sow, her father used to say. Bertie certainly wouldn’t take her in. Perhaps she could go and live in Bali with Sunny. He was a Buddhist, his religion obliged him to be compassionate, didn’t it? “It’s more a state of mind than a religion,” Bertie said.
Imagine if that was a law and everyone had to obey it. Smiley, concerned faces everywhere asking if you were all right. Would it be utopian or just rather irritating?
It was ten years since she had seen Sunny. A decade! How had that happened? What kind of mother let a decade go by without seeing her child? She had tried a couple of times over the years. When she was on a book tour in Australia, for instance, but he said he was “going to be in Thailand” while she was there. Perhaps she could stop off in Thailand on the way out, she suggested? He was “hiking in the north,” she wouldn’t be able to get to him, he said. “I wouldn’t call that trying hard,” Bertie said. Righteous, like her grandfather, of course.
“You gave him up,” Bertie said. It was true, she had handed him over to the vile Villierses. “But in my defence—” But the members of the jury were not listening.
The Spirit of Chartwell had moored near Tower Bridge. “The Queen’s stopped,” Viola informed her father. “It’s still raining cats and dogs. You, in particular, would admire her stoicism if you could see her.”
He mumbled something. It sounded as if his mouth was full of stones. He could no longer see well enough to watch television and even if he had been able to see he found it difficult to connect one moment to the next, as if everything fragmented in the moment of trying to hold on to it. Books were out of the question. Before the last bout of pneumonia, when he’d still been able to see large-print books, she discovered that he’d been reading the first chapter of Barchester Towers over and over again, looping round and coming to it fresh each time. Perhaps his brain was becoming economical with time, conserving what little was left as it approached its last days. But time was an artificial construct, wasn’t it? Zeno’s arrow staggering and stuttering its way to some fictional end point in the future. In reality that arrow had no target, they weren’t on a journey and there was no final destination where everything would suddenly fall transcendentally into place, the mysteries revealed. They were all just lost souls, wandering the halls, gathering silently at the exit. No promised land, no paradise regained. “It’s all so pointless,” she said to her father, but he seemed to have nodded off. Viola sighed and replaced the untouched gloop on his overbed table.
And now it’s just boats, ships, passing in front of her. All kinds of different ones. Quite boring ones.” Viola’s phone rang. “Bertie” the screen said. Viola thought about not answering, answered.
“Are you watching the Thames Pageant with Grandpa Ted?” Bertie asked.
“Yes, I’m in his room.”
“It’s rubbish, isn’t it? And the poor Queen, she’s almost as old as Grandpa Ted and she’s having to suffer all this.”
“She’ll catch her death in all that rain,” Viola said. She had spouted socialism and republicanism most of her adult life, but lately had revealed a strange affection for the royal family. And she had voted Tory in the last election, although it would have taken torture to drag that fact out into the open. “In my defence, it was a tactical vote,” she explained to the jury. They were not convinced. UKIP were still beyond the pale, but never say never. People didn’t mellow in old age, they simply decomposed, as far as Viola could see.
“Anyway,” Bertie said, indicating she had already run out of things to say to her mother, “can you put me on to Grandpa Ted?”
“He won’t understand you.”