A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (15 page)

A moment later, her front door opened, and she came out with a leashed miniature bulldog. The dog was dressed in a plaid sweater that matched her own, and he had such little legs that he had to walk very, very fast to catch up with his curious mistress.

“Can I help you?” she called out in the sort of tone that always has so little to do with being helpful and everything to do with being a busybody.

“I’m looking for Simon Thorne,” I said. “I’m a friend of his. Do you know where he is?”

“Simon? Oh, he’s gone,” she said with a certain smug satisfaction. “Took ill and collapsed right here on the sidewalk. They carted him off to the hospital and he hasn’t been back since. His nephew came and took him to a care home, and sold the house.
My
daughter visits me every week,” she boasted, and at first I didn’t get the connection, until she added, “Sorry to think of Simon all alone now. It’s what comes of never marrying nor having children of his own.” This, I suspected, was her way of criticizing Simon not only for being gay, but for being an actor and, worst of all, just being
different
.

“Do you know the name of the nursing home?” I asked quickly, not wishing to encourage her to volunteer anything more of her esteemed opinion. Without hesitation she gave me the name, and I used my phone to locate it. The home wasn’t very far from here; if I took the Tube it would be only a few stops away.

 

The nursing home was on a street of several depressing grey concrete buildings that had been erected decades ago as public housing and designed by an architect who clearly never expected anyone he loved to occupy any of his creations. It was a utilitarian series of identical, dreary structures, which would serve only to remind you how hopeless your prospects for happiness were. The care home took up the three biggest of these buildings.

Some of the other buildings were apparently still residential units, for they displayed a few halfhearted attempts to make them bearable; one even had a series of concrete balconies, which sported folding chairs and a couple of barbecues. There were signs on the corner indicating that a hospital was just around the block, so I imagined that this was why the nursing home was located here. The ground floors of the buildings across the street housed the offices of a radiologist and an osteopath; and it also did not escape my notice that there were two competing funeral parlors there as well.

“I suppose it could be worse,” I thought to myself. “The home could overlook a graveyard.”

Things did not improve inside. It began with the smell, which reminded me of my high-school biology lab that reeked of things pickled in formaldehyde. The walls were painted a peculiar shade of institutional green, which makes you think of the worst pea soup you ever tasted. The lighting overhead was both glaring and yet cast a limited brownish-yellow glow that left parts of the corridors quite shadowy. I had to walk past two metal counters that looked as if they were meant to be reception desks, yet no one was there to greet me or stop me.

Finally, halfway down the long hallway, I came to another reception desk, this one occupied by a security guard in a grey uniform. He was on the telephone and did not put it aside when he saw me. I took this as permission to walk right past him. That roused him.

“Sign in, Miss!” he shouted, gesturing toward yet another steel-grey desk where two nurses’ aides were having an animated discussion over a lunch take-out menu. When I approached and gave them Simon’s name, they shoved a grubby guest book at me, where I had to sign my name and note the time of my arrival. They told me Simon’s room was number 302.

As I stepped into the elevator, I was joined by an aide pushing a wheelchair containing an elderly woman swaddled in blankets who was moaning incoherently and non-stop for the rest of the ride. I was glad to escape at the third floor, but now the corridor stank so strongly of antiseptic that I felt myself choking on it. I wondered how on earth anyone could bear to be here for an hour, let alone an entire workday or for life. As I hurried onward, I passed a janitor with his cart of dirty mops and buckets; and beyond him were several laundry trolleys loaded with soiled towels and bedding.

I turned the corner to another corridor, which was lined with various elderly people struggling to make their way with the assistance of metal walkers. One or two patients were accompanied by a nurse, and a few were attached to various feeding tubes and bags. There were some residents in wheelchairs that had been parked into corners, and as I passed, the poor souls looked up at me hopefully and then became visibly disappointed upon realizing that I had not come to see them.

I kept peering at the numbers on the doorways until I finally reached Simon’s room, which was actually a ward, filled with about a dozen metal beds. Each had a simple foldable chair for visitors nearby, and a small metal table with the kind of cheap lamp that has a bendable neck.

I did not recognize any of the sad grey faces that looked back at me with limited interest. A few occupants lay on their sides, resolutely asleep. As I passed the beds, I saw that several tables bore plastic cups with plastic sippy-straws, and the occasional tiny vase with wilting visitors’ flowers, and some half-eaten trays of a lunch that most of us wouldn’t feed a dog.

And then I spotted a figure at the far end, in a bed tucked into a corner. He had dozed while reading, so a book lay across his stomach. His reading light was still on, and there were two other books on his table, which lent him a dignified air, as if he had somehow, against all odds, carved out a little quiet world for himself. As I drew nearer, I saw a small paper cup of pills that had been left there, untaken. Hesitantly, I peered closer at his face, just as he stirred.

“Simon?” I whispered hopefully.

The eyes fluttered open sleepily, then widened in surprise, although he did not move a muscle when he whispered tentatively, “Penny Nichols? Can it be you?”

Then a tired smile spread across his wan little face. He had always been a thin, wiry man of medium height; but lying here in bed he seemed more shriveled, as if he weighed nearly nothing at all. Still, those hazel eyes were alert with intelligence, and his long narrow nose, high forehead and neat, balding head made his face seem extraordinarily long and soberly thoughtful.

“Little Penny Nichols!” he sighed, turning as I came closer and took the visitor’s chair beside him. “I haven’t seen you since your wedding, right, darling? How do you like being a married lady? Is Jeremy treating you well, I hope?”

He was teasing me as always, which I found reassuring. He clearly had all his marbles in place and had not been drugged into an alternative personality. But his voice was weak, a little tremulous, and I didn’t like the pallor of his skin. He’d always looked healthy and suntanned from his brisk walks around London; he was the kind of elderly gentleman who prided himself on being vigorous and self-sufficient. The mere fact that he’d gotten on a train to France last year to attend my wedding had won him the admiration of many; so I surmised that whatever happened to him had weakened him in a rather short period of time. He was, after all, in his mid-nineties, and perhaps he’d been more delicate than any of us knew, for he was the kind of man who carefully hid his ailments from his friends instead of complaining about them.

“Jeremy’s great, and I’m happy,” I reported, then asked tentatively, “and how are you, Simon?”

“I’d like to sit up,” he said instead of answering. “Can you get the pillow up against the headboard for me?”

I reached out behind him and arranged the pillow, managing to discreetly help him raise himself up without offending him by an offer of more assistance. He saw me glance at the cup of pills and he said wryly, “The new nurse is a bit dim. She’s supposed to wake me when it’s time to take those. Darling, do you think you could get me some water?”

I took my own unopened water bottle from my handbag, and poured some water into his cup. He quickly swallowed his pills.

“Good water,” he said when he was done. “You can’t imagine what the tap tastes like here.”

“Yes I can,” I found myself saying, and he glanced up at me with a more sharp-eyed smile of complicity. Simon is one of the few people I know who prefers the truth to a lie, despite his life’s long work in the artificial atmosphere of the theatre. “What happened?” I persisted.

“The old ticker, of course,” he replied, lying back on his pillow and coughing a bit, as if the mere thought exhausted him. “And naturally all those cigarettes from my smoky past didn’t help.”

He paused, then said thoughtfully, “I always thought they’d find me dead in my own parlor, in that nice chair by the fireplace. But no, they picked me up off the sidewalk like yesterday’s trash.”

“I ran into your neighbor from across the street,” I said forthrightly.

He rolled his eyes. “That poor creature has never had a single original thought of her own,” he sighed. “She and her wretched daughter. Mercifully the pair of them were not at home when I hit the deck. I at least deprived them of the pleasure of that spectacle. They had to get it all second-hand.”

While he was attempting to entertain me, I was covertly sizing up his situation. Despite his cheerful attitude, I sensed that he was depressed and a bit nervous, which was unusual for him. He’d always been full of high voltage in the way that actors often are—in fact, he was the kind of man who put energy into a room, not the type who drained it out.

But now he himself seemed drained in the way that a flower or an animal is when they haven’t had any nourishment or sunlight. I knew that Simon’s former tenants, who were mostly acting students, were what really kept him going; he’d often told me he leased rooms on a month-by-month basis just in order to see the new talent come and go, and to hear the theatre gossip. Stuck in this nursing home, I saw that he’d been deprived of the very things that, for him, made life worth living. And I wondered who could have thought that this was a good idea.

“Simon, are you very ill?” I asked, wanting to give the nephew the benefit of the doubt in case Simon was worse off than he appeared and required vigilant care; although, judging by the cup of pills that had been dumped here, I didn’t see that he was getting much useful supervision.

“I’m stuck here because I can’t walk,” Simon answered. “The minute you are unable to shower on your own, you’re done for. Make sure you and Jeremy go to the gym every week, darling. You want to stay ambulatory as long as possible.”

At this moment, a nurse entered the room. She had what I can only describe as dark-grey skin and a dour mouth that did not once attempt a smile, even when Simon introduced me to her as “the great-niece of my old dancing partner”.

Very perfunctorily, she took his blood pressure and his pulse, listened to his breathing and heart with a stethoscope, and noted a few things on his chart.

“When has he last seen the doctor?” I asked quietly. She didn’t answer right away and at first I thought she hadn’t heard me. “Nurse?” I said, rolling my eyes at Simon when she didn’t even look up.

It was the first time that Simon didn’t look amused; instead, he looked frightened, and even shrank back against his pillow when the nurse finally fixed him with a beady stare.

“Doctor will be in tomorrow morning,” she said shortly, and went on her way to her other luckless charges in the ward, most of whom appeared drugged into a stupor.

“She’s new. She won’t win any personality contests,” Simon whispered to me when she was out of earshot, “but at least she doesn’t give you the wrong pills or the wrong shot. You should see what the previous nurse did to the fellow who had that bed across the way last week.”

“Simon, what about your nephew?” I asked.

“What about him?” Simon said grimly. “The boy lives in Canada. He showed up when he thought I was at death’s door and on the verge of leaving him something. He talked me into selling my house because it would be too expensive for me to get home care. Said this is the best I could afford. That way, I still have a little bit of money left from the sale of the house. I call it my mad money. I’m sure my beastly nephew is hoping I’ll kick off before I find anything to spend it on. The boy won’t be back here until it’s time to bury me.”

His voice trailed off. “What brought you here, Penny darling?” he asked finally. When I told him about Trevor Branwhistle’s theory, Simon perked up for the first time today. He had met Trevor when he performed with Aunt Pen in Port St. Francis that one time in the 1970s, and Simon had enjoyed listening to Trevor’s radio shows on the BBC ever since.

“Shakespeare a lodger at Beryl’s house!” Simon breathed in awe. “Could it really be true?”

“I’m trying to find out,” I replied, just as the nurse returned.

“Simon Thorne?” she said, as if we all hadn’t even spoken before. She was checking a sheaf of printed-out computer pages and, without even looking up, said, “They’re moving you to the first floor tomorrow. Do you have any things you want sent down there?”

“No!” Simon cried in distress. “This is a nice bed. I get good light from the window. Why should I want to move? The first floor is all dark.”

“Orders,” said the nurse.

“But why?” Simon quavered. “I’m all right. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“They need to put someone else here,” was all she would say. I saw that Simon had begun to visibly tremble now. The nurse did not appear to notice.

“Why can’t you put your new arrival in the bed downstairs?” I asked bluntly. I didn’t want to get Simon in trouble with the people he must live with on a daily basis, but this was just too much.

“Because the new patient needs more supervision than he can get on one,” the nurse said incredulously, looking at me as if she were about to finish that sentence by saying, “
stupid!
”

Then she went off, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the dirty linoleum. Something else in motion on the floor caught my eye—it was a silverfish slithering across the linoleum until it disappeared into a crack in the wall. Simon hadn’t noticed.