Agnes and Lucy sat in the gathering dusk, two bowls lying empty upon the table.
‘When will Wilma move in?’ asked Lucy, sleepily
‘When she’s ready’
They could just about hear each other breathing if they cared to listen.
‘How will she know when to come?’
‘She’ll just know People like Wilma have a very different sense of time. Appointments, arrangements don’t mean anything. She doesn’t follow clocks. She just lives in each day’
Lucy rose and cleared the table. Agnes spoke out of the shade:
‘Forget Victor.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lucy stopping arid looking down at her.
‘Nothing. It’s all right.’
Lucy put out her arm and Agnes took it with both hands, as if it were a railing. With a nod she dismissed further help, making her way towards the bathroom to get ready for bed. She walked deliberately, touching now to the right and then to the left, finding objects placed in position for the purpose. Lucy remained in the kitchen, hearing the click of a switch and the faint run of water, simple noises that begin and end the day; and, presumably, a life.
Lucy looked up. Agnes stood motionless, like an apparition, framed by the doorway in a long dressing gown and red furry slippers, a hand on each jamb. Evening light, all but gone, traced out her nose, a parted lip; and to Lucy it was as though Agnes had died and this was a final, wilful resurgence of flesh, a last insistent request to see Lucy just one more time before she fluttered into memory.
At that moment the hall clock struck the hour. Brass wheels turned, meshing intricately Time, no longer suspended, seemed to ground itself and move. They looked at one another across a divide, hearing the slow, brutal counting from afar taking slices off all that remained between them. Lucy and Agnes stood helpless, waiting.
‘Gran, please don’t go,’ said Lucy, in a voice from their quiet days in the back room when everyone else had left them to it.
‘I have to, Lucy Death is like the past. We can’t change either of them. We have to make friends with them both.’
Tears filled Lucy’s eyes to overflowing. Thunder groaned far off to the east and the room darkened abruptly, as though a great hand had fallen over the sun.