What was the song? Mary couldn’t quite remember. It was one of Mr Pepper’s classics, certainly. A ballad. Possibly You Are My Sunshine? What did it matter; the point was the voice. Not Mr Pepper’s – she knew what he sounded like well enough, being one of Easterlea Rest Home’s regular afternoon entertainers. No, this voice was new, and belonged to a man who had sat down in the chair next to her and started to sing along. She was so stunned – by the way his voice seemed to pour out of him, by its fierce clarity and defiance of age – that she turned to stare.
The man winked at her. Cheeky bugger, thought Mary.
It’s not entirely clear when this was. Two years ago, maybe three? Timings, the order of things, time in general, can be confusing. But there are some things we know for sure. Mary is Mary Turrell, nearly 80 years old. She had been living at Easterlea Rest Home in Denmead, near Portsmouth, for a little while, a year or two, perhaps, when the man with the voice arrived. And his name was Derek Brown.
It’s funny, what sticks in the memory. The crystalline moments, mostly from childhood. Like building a telescope with her older brother, Ian, one summer. Or hiding in a bombed-out crater in the woods. Or having whooping cough, and the feeling of the crusty sore that developed on her upper lip. Her mother told her not to pick it, but it was so tempting.
Aged five, at primary school in Norbury, south London, Mary started winning races against the boys. When she was seven, a woman turned up on the doorstep, summoned Mary’s mother and said, “Your daughter’s a bully.” Mary had bashed the woman’s son in the head with a netball in a string bag. One of the string knots must have got him hard in the forehead, as a chunk had been gouged out. Well, the boy had been picking on Ian. She wasn’t going to let it lie.
Mary wanted to run faster. Her father told her to join an athletics club, and Mary wondered if she was brave enough to take the bus on her own. She was. They served hot Ribena at the club. It wasn’t long before she was running 100 metres, 400 metres, hurdles, then for the English schools’ national team. One time, she won a medal, a dull old thing: third place.
Her father, who worked for the Bank of Scotland, had rules. Mary would not wear trousers. She would go to the local school, not the paid-for one, like her brother. Mary’s mother would not have a job. It would be humiliating, suggesting that he couldn’t provide. Her father was the head of the household; he made the decisions. Oh, it was a fine thing to be a man. Mary was one, briefly, in a school play. She had to draw a sword. Her body felt different; a kind of uplift.
Instead of working, her mother stayed at home and made their clothes from old clothes. When they came back from school, she would be sitting in an immaculate living room with a freshly baked cake on a tea trolley and jam made from the fruit picked from the trees in their garden: cherry, pear, plum. She made their beds. She made apple pies. She made everything lovely.
She knew what she wanted to be: a PE teacher. She got a place at Chelsea College of Physical Education, in Eastbourne, and was packed off with instructions that her brother never received when he went to university. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t stay out after 10pm. Don’t work too hard. Because it didn’t really matter, did it, as she would only be playing at working until she married.
Well, that was rubbish, she thought, until it was true. Halfway through Chelsea she met Nicholas, who was studying at an agricultural college in Guildford. She felt divided: what mattered more, pursuing a career in sport or being with this man? She loved sport, but she had never felt for someone before; not properly.
They married, and she became a farmer’s wife. Nicholas was a contractor, working on other people’s farms. There was never much money, but there were perks: a cottage to live in, and free fruit and veg. A lot of potatoes. Mary knew nothing about farming. She had to get one of those Ladybird books to learn the different crops: corn stands up straight and barley bends over. A cow has an udder.
Early on, she set the terms. If he was working, she was working. She would do any job she could fit around their children, two little girls. Bits of nannying, a stint in a nursery school, caring for a woman with multiple sclerosis whose children used to climb out of their windows at night.
They were married 31 years, and then one evening Nicholas said he wasn’t feeling well. He had a funny neck. It had gone all scraggy, like Cliff Richard. He went to see the doctor, found out it was cancer, and died a few months later. Not long after, she married his best friend, Arthur, and raised his two young sons. Thirteen years later, Arthur died, and she was on her own again.
So much life, in a life.
After Mr Pepper’s singalong, after the wink, things moved quickly. Derek sat next to her every day. They chatted. A week later, he leaned over and kissed her, softly. Not long afterwards, he asked a question: Mary, will you be my woman? That’s how he put it: my woman.
Derek wasn’t shy. He had very good teeth and clear eyes. He was a big man, butch, but he was soft underneath. He’d give you the shirt off his back and forget about it five minutes later, said his niece, Kerry. He had grown up in Newcastle, one of a brace of kids. He was in the navy for years, and the stories he told: Christmas on the beach in Australia; diving into the Suez Canal from the bow of the ship. He used to buy a load of fags on shore, store them in his locker, wait for his shipmates to run out and then jack up the price and sell them on. He had some filthy jokes. Mary can’t repeat them. He was naughty, that’s what she’d say. Couldn’t help himself. He flirted with some of the carers at the home, the ladies, a little too much sometimes. He was a flirt to his marrow.
Derek had been married, divorced, then married again, but never had children. Over the years, he had fallen out of touch with his family. After his second wife died, he lived in Bognor Regis on his own. One of his half-sisters called from time to time, and when he stopped answering, she tracked him down through the police and discovered he had been in hospital for three weeks after a fall.
His family charged back in. Kerry, his niece, was tasked with dealing with him. Kerry was good at things like that: practically minded. She took Derek in, and it was lovely, at times: he taught her sons to fillet fish. But then he had a couple of falls. When he first arrived at Easterlea, he would call Kerry up five times a day, out of sorts.
Falls change everything. You don’t realise, when you’re young, what a fall can do. How much it can hurt, when you’re old. It’s not just your body but your mind. You start to think you can’t do things. You’re scared of moving about.
Mary’s happened at her daughter Jacquie’s house. She’d moved there after a few years living alone, then in assisted accommodation. Finally, at Jacquie’s, she fell on some hard slate tiles in the bathroom. Soon, she couldn’t get out of the bath, so Jacquie started bringing her into Easterlea once a week to wash.
Mary liked it immediately. The carers were kind and it was small, only 17 residents in a pretty, two-storey house with red slate roof tiles, white-framed windows and a garden with a patio and tall oaks stirring in the breeze at the back. Carol Boyce-Flowers, the manager, prided herself on it feeling like a home, not one of these new chain care homes that are more like hotels or fancy hospitals.
When a room came up, Carol offered it to Mary. It made sense. She didn’t want to be a burden to her daughter. And really, she couldn’t have asked for a nicer place than Easterlea. It didn’t smell of wee or bleach, as these places often do. Her room was at the front, with large windows that looked out on the car park, so she could see all the comings and goings from the real world, as she called it.
It wasn’t that the home didn’t feel real. It was more like a parallel society, where life moved a little slower and with greater gentleness, according to established routines. A cup of tea in bed at six, a wash, breakfast, coffee in the lounge at 10, lunch at 12, a cup of tea at two, an afternoon activity, high tea at four, telly, another wash, a hot drink, bed.
So yes, she had chosen to come in, but at the same time, it wasn’t quite how she had imagined this phase of her life. She had always thought she would end up in her own home, with people coming to see her and saying, “Hi Mum.” Still, she was lucky to have made the choice herself. Most people here, Mary thought, had been dumped, told it was for a holiday and then left to wonder quietly when their son or daughter would be back to pick them up and take them home.
Once Derek met Mary, the five calls a day to Kerry dried up. He and Mary felt as if they might never stop talking. He claimed the seat next to her in the Easterlea lounge, where everyone seemed to have their designated spot. Joyce and Doreen to the left, the lady with the beautiful hair to the right. People could be possessive about their chairs.
Mary wanted to know everything about him. What Newcastle was like; how life had been on board a ship. They sang together on Saturday mornings. They watched sport. Any sport. Football, men’s and women’s. She liked to point out how the women passed more. Athletics most of all.
They opened new, small worlds to each other. Mary got Derek reading, introduced him to Dan Brown, tickled by the link: Derek Brown reads Dan Brown. He got her into colouring, those books for adults, the ones that are supposed to be good for your mind. He loved drawing, loved painting. Everything he did, he seemed to do well. He did puzzles, meticulously. If a piece was missing, he would get down on the floor and scrabble around under the chairs until he found it. He was the tidiest man she had ever met. Every shirt and sweater folded and put away in drawers. That was the Navy’s doing. So was the way he looked at you: straight in the eye. She thought that was how he must have looked at his commanders.
It’s different, meeting someone late in life. You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent. It’s closer to first love, though it’s probably the last. There’s none of the logistics that can cloud a relationship in middle age: who’s doing what, who’s paying the bills, who’s cooking. Mary and Derek had nothing to do, or none of those things anyway.
All institutions offer some form of infantilisation, with their timetables and structures. In a care home, it is only more pronounced. The routines, the activities, craft sessions and singalongs, the tactful management of incontinence and naps: it is all a breath from nursery school. There are kind people, mostly women, doing things for you, sometimes talking to you as if you don’t fully understand, washing and feeding you, if you need it.
Mary and Derek hadn’t reached that point yet. In fact, Mary insisted on doing things for herself, and encouraged others to do the same. She had a little rule: she’d only help someone cut up their food if they’d attempted the task at least twice by themselves.
If it’s true that as we age we gradually regress, Mary and Derek had, perhaps, reached adolescence. It matched how Mary felt in her head. She often said she was a young person in a bashed-up body. In her mind, she could get up and dance for you. With Derek, they could play at being young again, in a way, mooning at each other all day long because they had no other obligations. They could fall in love like 16-year-olds: the love of people with no responsibility.
The days took on a new shape. Derek would sneak down to Mary’s room as early as he could. And yes, they were intimate. Not the whole way, but the desire was intense. You don’t stop feeling those things just because you’re old. Derek didn’t seem to mind her body’s various betrayals. She could give you a list:
Your teeth fall out.
Your throat constricts so it’s difficult to swallow.
Your knees give you hell and your feet swell up.
Your back hurts.
You have to use pads for incontinence. If they fill up they can slosh around, leak down your leg and get your shoes wet.
You can’t do your bra up, so you have to twiddle it round to the front.
You can get dizzy.
You can’t wash your own hair.
You get nasty bits on your skin, on your legs, like psoriasis.
You can’t rely on your body: a leg might suddenly give way without warning.
She’d said about the teeth already, hadn’t she?
Then there were the other, regular humiliations. Being washed, for one. Not being able to get out of a chair, or off the toilet. She often felt reduced. There was an unavoidable loss of status. People don’t tend to listen to the old.
With Derek, it all fell away. They were consumed by each other. They tried to be respectful. They were never found naked in the hall, at least, but they made noises once or twice. Other residents complained; the carers found it awkward. Jacquie and Kerry had to be drafted in to have some words with their respective elders: if you’re going to do things, shut your door and keep the volume down.
Most of the time, they glided around holding hands. They probably drove everyone crazy, Mary thought. Two almost-80-year-olds going barmy for each other. And he was loud, Derek: that geordie voice. He never stopped talking. They spent the mornings doing puzzles or chatting; lunch – too much lunch, they both put on pounds – then the afternoon entertainment if there was one, and back to Mary’s room for more chatting, or watching the television. They wanted to share a room, and Derek started looking at furniture, but Carol said there wasn’t a room big enough for them both. So eventually, after dinner, Derek would have to go back to his own room, to sleep.
In 35 years of running a care home, said Carol, they’d had maybe a handful of couples getting together, but it was usually just to sit with each other in the lounge, or at meals. More like a friendship; keeping each other company. Not like this.
Mary had so many metaphors for it. Derek was a blinding meteorite across her sky; it was like someone had lit a candle, or switched on the sun. She was knocked off her feet, smashed over the head with love.
Derek proposed. Just in her room one day, quietly. Did she want to get married? Yes please.
He bought her an amethyst engagement ring, because she had always wanted an amethyst.
If you’re going to do something, do it properly. Mary wrote invitations to friends and family. Carol and the carers set up the garden with gazebos and bunting, chairs and tables covered with pink tablecloths. The day turned out to be lovely, warm and sunny. There were sandwiches and two cakes, one made by Jacquie, the other by Kerry. Mary wore a new grey lace dress and carried a posy of pink roses. Derek bought a suit and ironed his trousers with a knife-edge crease down the front. The vicar came and gave a blessing, an acknowledgment of what they’d found in each other. They sang and ate an immense amount of cake and sat in two chairs next to each other on the patio. In one of the photographs, their heads tilted towards each other and they both looked down, as if holding the moment privately between themselves.
February, this year, a winter’s day, fish and chips for lunch, so it must have been Friday. Mary and Derek were sitting in their chairs, as usual, talking about something, probably what they’d watched on the television or read in the paper. Derek said he needed the loo, because they always told each other what they were doing, and he got up and said he had to see a man about a dog, because he was always saying things like that, funny sayings.
He had that look on his face, a kind of mischief. Often he was after one of the carers with a flirty word or a pat on the bum. Carol had spoken to him about it: she knew it was all for fun, but he couldn’t keep doing it, it wasn’t right. Anyway, he walked across the room and right there, just by Carol’s office, he fell. He was there and then he wasn’t. He went down with a crash, like a tree.
They knew it was bad. He couldn’t move. Carol called 999 and after what felt like hours the paramedics arrived. Mary couldn’t help getting upset with them: she had no one else to blame. They seemed so slow. But he was a big man, hard to move. They got him on a trolley and took him out to the ambulance. They said she could follow on, so Mary called Jacquie and they drove to the hospital, the Queen Alexandra in Portsmouth, where they found him on a ward.
Mary thought he’d be all right. She thought he was coming back. She sat with him as he came in and out of consciousness. He said a few nice things. The hours passed, and then he died at about 8 o’clock in the evening.
Mary knows she has been lucky. She’s had three men in her life, and they’ve all been good: 31 years with the first husband, 13 with the second, less than one with the third. And yet, how idiotic to have been widowed this many times.
Derek had changed everything, and now everything changed again. Just after he died, Mary thought, briefly, about saving up her pills and going out in a blaze of glory. But she quickly dismissed the idea. She had to go on. She had to keep doing all the things he would have done with her.
Now, she puts on a cheerful face, because that’s important. Just like her makeup: foundation, powder, eyeliner, mascara. Every day. You look nice and smile, because if you can convince others you’re all right then you’re halfway to convincing yourself.
The days are different now, without him to fill them. There is the space next to her where he used to sit. She feels he’s with her, the way the dead can be present in everything but physical space. It was so sudden. He was here, right here, and then he wasn’t.
Without him, without the distraction and company of him, she depends on other things to enliven the daily repetition. Spillages, stumbles, visitors. Someone will come in to see their mum. Everyone stops by Mary’s chair to have a chat. She’s the hungriest for interaction. Sometimes, the staff will put someone in the chair next to her because they know she’ll talk to them.
In the rectangle of chairs in the lounge, most of the ladies are quiet, or asleep. One to the right of Mary, the lady with the beautiful hair, comes in with her book, which she places carefully on the table in front of her before lowering her chin to her chest and closing her eyes.
Mary tries to think of the good things. Egg sandwiches. The pork chop she had for lunch, served with mashed or roast potatoes. They let her have both. All the potatoes. She couldn’t have the chocolate tart for pudding, though; the doctor has ordered a diet. People don’t realise how strong chocolate smells.
What happened to Derek shocked Mary out of an illusion she suspects they all share but never talk about. The illusion that this is temporary; that they will go home again.
Now she knows it’s possible to get up from your chair, walk across the room and die right there in the doorway. So she can’t indulge that illusion any more.
Alone, you start to live in your mind. On a blowy November afternoon, her lounge neighbour, Joyce, had her feet gently placed in a foot bath. Joyce looked out to the spot in the middle distance where she often looks, if she’s not talking. Mary looked at her. “Joycie’s at the seaside,” she said. “She’s got an imaginary knotted hankie on her head.” Joyce didn’t hear, or chose not to.
In her dreams, Mary goes backwards, to childhood, to the summers, to the telescope. She remembers the feeling of the telescope and its stand, which they balanced on her bed to point out of her window towards the sky. Sometimes she has bad dreams, but the bad dreams bear no relation to her day. She can have a wonderful day and then awful dreams, or a bad day and wonderful dreams.
In the daytime, awake, now, her thoughts are mostly of Derek. She has his old dressing gown, some of his ashes and a teddy Kerry had made for her out of one of his shirts. She has his diaries, too, so she can read about what they did together, and other things she didn’t know.
Before he arrived, she had been simply trying to survive. Do three new things a day, she’d been told, or was it three new things a week. Keep the mind going. Do puzzles. Move the body. Then suddenly there he was, singing.
Sometimes she feels very alone. Not quite well. Ian, her brother, said to her recently: I’m not surprised. You’ve been knocked sideways.
And yet, at the same time, it’s not all doom and gloom. She wants you to know that. There are upsides to growing old! You can be more outrageous, more outspoken, more honest. You don’t have to be pushed into things you don’t want to do. You don’t have to do anything. She has spent her life cooking and caring and cleaning and earning and making sure everyone was all right and there was shepherd’s pie on the table and cuffs turned over, and now she can finally relax. Today, she has nowhere pressing to be.
That’s her version, anyway. Everyone will be old in their own way. And what does anyone really know about being old until they are old themselves? It’s just how we are with children: imagining they’re all the same, until their individuality insists upon itself.
In truth, she had never expected anything like it. Her time with Derek had made her feel not just loved or young again, but distinct. He had blown life wide open, just when it seemed to be narrowing inescapably. What luck, really. To know, before the end, that such a thing is possible.
Sophie Elmhirst is a regular contributor to the long read. Her first book, Maurice and Maralyn, is out next year
The best stories take time. The Guardian Long Read magazine compiles the finest longform journalism the Guardian has to offer: from politics to technology, food to cosmology, literature to sex, there is something for everyone. Beautifully bound, this 100-page special edition is available to order from the Guardian bookshop and is on sale at selected WH Smith Travel stores.
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