“Let them.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she asked, “Did you tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“About the nine o’clock conversations.”
I went still.
“No.”
“Good.”
She turned her face toward the window.
“Some things should be heard by the person who needs to hear them. Not by the people who want to use them.”
I didn’t understand what she meant.
Not then.
To understand what happened next, you need to know how Enid ended up in my spare bedroom in the first place.
It started with a loaf of bread.
Three weeks earlier, I’d noticed that the curtains at number nine hadn’t opened for two days.
Enid was usually up before eight. She watered the little rosebush beside her front door, collected her newspaper, and waved at me whenever I left for work.
When I knocked, there was no answer.
I knocked again.
Then I heard a faint voice.
“Come in, love. I can’t get up.”
I found her on the kitchen floor, wrapped in a cardigan, with an untouched cup of tea on the table.
She’d fallen while trying to reach the telephone.
The ambulance came. The hospital did its checks. And by late afternoon, Enid was back home with a diagnosis that nobody wanted to say plainly.
The cancer had spread.
She didn’t have long.
A social worker discussed care arrangements with her. Enid listened politely, thanked everyone, and then asked me to stay after they left.
“There’s something I need to ask you,” she said.
I sat beside her.
“Anything.”
“Would you mind staying tonight?”
I agreed.
The following morning, she asked me to stay another night.
Then another.
Her pain increased. She struggled to get out of bed. Sometimes she woke confused and called for her husband, Arthur, who had died eleven years earlier.
I began bringing groceries, cooking soup, and checking on her before work.
But one evening, I found her sitting in the dark, clutching her telephone.
“I called my nephew,” she said.
“Did he answer?”
“He said he’d call me back.”
“Will he?”
She smiled sadly.
“He’s been saying that for five years.”
That was when I understood.
Enid wasn’t simply afraid of dying.
She was afraid of being forgotten while she was still alive.
I offered to contact the local care service again. We discussed what she wanted, what I could realistically provide, and how to make sure she had appropriate medical support.
