I take a deep breath, inhale the air.
Ash Grange Residential Care Home. The logo is a falling leaf. A generic leaf. The sign is pastel-yellow and blue. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. The building itself is nearly as bad. Probably only twenty years old. Light orange brick and tinted windows and a muted quality. The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.
I go inside.
‘Hello,’ I say to the woman in the office after she has slid the Perspex window open for me to speak. ‘I’m here to see Mary Peters.’
She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. The kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.
‘Oh yes, you called a short while ago, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. That was me. Tom Hazard. I knew her when she was younger, in Hackney.’
She stares at her computer screen and clicks the mouse. ‘Oh yes. She wants to see you. Through there.’
‘Oh good,’ I say, and as I walk over the carpet tiles I almost feel like I am walking backwards through time.
Mary Peters looks at me with eyes made pink and weak by time. Her grey hair is as frail as dandelion seeds and the veins under her skin like routes on a secret map, but she is recognisably the woman I met in Hackney, four centuries ago.
‘I remember you,’ she says. ‘The day you came into the market. The fight you had with that slimy bastard.’
‘Mr Willow,’ I say, remembering him disappear in a cloud of spice.
‘Yes.’
There is a rattle to her breath. A kind of scraping sound on every in-breath. She winces a little, and her crooked fingers faintly caress her brow.
‘I get headaches. It’s what happens.’
‘I’m starting to get them too.’
‘They come and go. Mine have come back recently.’
I marvel at her. How she can still care enough to speak. She must have been an old woman for two hundred years now.
‘I don’t have long,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘That is why I came here. There is no risk for me.’
‘No risk?’
‘I only have about two years left.’
‘You don’t know that. You could have another fifty.’
She shakes her head. ‘I hope not.’
‘How are you feeling?’
She smiles as if I have told a joke.
‘Near the end. See, I’ve had a variety of ailments. When the doctor told me I only had a matter of weeks I realised I . . . I only have two more years. Three at the most. So I knew it was safe, you know, to come here. Safer . . .’
It doesn’t make sense. If she is still bothered about safety, then why did she talk openly to people here about her age?
There are other people in the room. Mainly sitting in chairs, lost in crosswords or memories.
‘You were Rose’s love. She spoke of nothing else but you. I had a flower stand next to where she and her little sister used to sell fruit. Tom this. Tom that. Tom everything. She came alive after she met you. She was a different girl.’
‘I loved her so much,’ I tell her. ‘She was so strong. She was the greatest person I ever knew.’
She smiles in faint sympathy. ‘I was a sad old thing in them days. Suffered my own heartache.’
She stares around the room. Someone switches on the TV. The opening credits of a show called A New Life in the Sun start to play. Then images of a couple inside their Spanish restaurant, the Blue Marlin, looking stressed as they rinse mussels in a pot.
When Mary’s face returns to mine she is pensive, almost trembling with thought. And then she tells me: ‘I met your daughter.’
It is so out of context that I don’t really understand what she has said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your child, Marion.’
‘Marion?’
‘Quite recent. We were in hospital together.’
My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.
‘What?’
‘The psychiatric hospital in Southall. I was a day patient, just a mad old bird crying in a chair. She was there all the time. I came to know her. I had left before she had been born, hadn’t I?’
‘So how did you know it was my daughter?’
She looks at me as if it is a silly question. ‘She told me. She told everyone. That was one of the reasons she was there in the first place. No one believed her of course. She was mad. That’s what they thought . . . She used to talk in French sometimes, and she sang a lot.’
‘What did she sing?’
‘Old songs. Old, old songs. She used to cry when she sang.’
‘Is she still there?’
She shakes her head. ‘She left. It was strange, how it happened—’
‘Strange? How do you mean?’
‘One night she just went. People who were there said there was a lot of noise and commotion . . . Then, when I came in the next day she was gone.’
‘Where? Where?’
Mary sighs. She takes a moment. Looks sad and confused as she thinks about it. ‘No one knew. No one said. They just told us she’d been discharged. But we never knew for sure. That sounds strange, but we didn’t always know what was going on. That was the nature of the place.’
I can’t let go. For so long I have been waiting for hope, and then hope has come along for ten seconds only to be dashed again. ‘Where would she have gone? Did she ever give you any clues as to where she might end up? She must have.’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.’
‘Did she talk about places?’
‘She’d travelled. She talked about places she’d been. She’d been to Canada.’
‘Canada? Where? Toronto? I was in Toronto.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She’d also spent a lot of time in Scotland, I think. Her voice was very Scottish. I think she’d travelled around, though. Through Europe.’
‘Do you think she’s in London?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
I sit back. Try to think. I am simultaneously relieved that Marion is still alive – or had been until recently – and worried for whatever torments she has known.
I wonder if the society has caught up with her. I wonder if someone has tried to silence her. I wonder if Hendrich knows about this and hasn’t told me. I wonder if someone has taken her. The institute in Berlin. Or someone else.
‘Listen, Mary,’ I say, before I leave, ‘I think it’s important that you don’t talk about the past any more. It may have been dangerous for Marion, and it is dangerous for you. You can think about it. But it’s dangerous to talk about your age.’