The wind was thumping at the walls and shouting down the chimneys as she made her precarious way back to the relative warmth of the sitting room. Ninety-three. What stupid kind of age was ninety-three? Supernumerary! Not bad. The memory wasn't entirely shot. But she was so very old, and cold, bone-marrow cold. Horribly appropriate, that rhyme of old and cold. The tiny kitchen, at the back of the flat, was positively frigid now that winter had come; so too was the hall as she struggled with her walking stick and plate of cooling food towards the welcoming door....
With a meal inside her, and drawn up close to the meagre bars of the fire, the cold in her bones began to fade. The wind had given up shouting, and was only crooning and whispering now, with the soothing voice of someone half-remembered; her tired, worn out eyes and ears transformed the faces on her television into murmuring ghosts. She couldn't be bothered to turn the volume up. And the gentle conspiracy of vagueness gradually lulled her to sleep. And she dreamed....
No longer old, blind, cold, incontinent, sparrow-skeletoned and tired as hope, she drifted at will, light as thistle-down on a summer breeze, through only her finest of times and best of places. Aberfeldy, Ardnamurchan, Tobermory, Oban. Singapore, Darjeeling, Calcutta, Simla. And HE was there; the dashing, gregarious, brave, feckless, loving he who had shockingly ruined everything by sending himself to permanent sleep fifty years ago, because....
But that was all in the past - the future! - and had no place in this golden lantern show of memory and dream.
Anyas and ayahs and punka-wallahs; slow gins on the verandah; sly cats everywhere else; special meals with the staff in the kitchen; parties, present, prestige: status as the wife of an important man. And, most treasured, genuine respect; because, unlike most memsahibs, she had cared enough to learn sufficient Hindi and Urdu to hold a conversation, rather than just knowing how to give peremptory orders, she was liked, and treated differently. Hence those special meals of 'real' curry in the kitchen....
She drifted into a vividly remembered day, when her wee daughter was sick with a fever. They were on the verandah; the baby was hot and irritable, resisting all attempts by her mother and ayah to coax her into eating, by turning her head away whenever food was proferred. Durinig this performance the old sweeper walked past.
He wasn't really old, just fifty or so, but he was toothless, white-haired and stick thin, wearing a greyish-white dhoti hitched up between his legs to show brown bony knees. He looked seventy. He was low caste, ineffably humble, expecting no favours from life and receiving none. His feet were broad, the toes widely spread; he had never known the luxury of shoes.
He stopped to look at the scene unfolding on the verandah, and diffidently asked, "Baba nahin kata hai, memsahib?" Then, suddenly and unselfconsciously, he started to play the fool, falling down, pulling outrageous faces, laughing and chattering incomprehensibly. The baby, her discomfort forgotten, began to take some food as she giggled at his antics, holding out her little fat hand, trying to touch him. The sweeper kept up his clowning until she had finished her meal and then, without another word, resumed his duties....
Once more she drifted, and was with HIM again. It was the height of summer, viciously hot and, as always at that time of year, they had escaped with all the other sahibs and memsahibs to the cool of the mountains. The usual faces, the usual parties and attitudes, all simply translated northwards for the summer. But not today. A fine white lie had been conjured, and they were alone. Nestled on a secret slope of the hill, cradled in the shade of a complaisant tree, silently and perfectly they savoured being together. they were lying in a patch of tiny, vibrantly blue flowers, her head resting on his shoulder. With his free hand he picked a single flower and delicately slipped it betweeen her half-closed fingers. She grasped it lightly and smiled....
The doorbell rattled and clanged against the old wooden frame. No answer. Knowing how deaf she was now, her son rang again, louder and longer. Still no answer. He dropped his cumbersome holdall onto the landing with an echoing thud, and scrabbled through his shoulder bag for the spare keys.
He let himself in and shouted. Mum! Nothing. He tried the bedroom. No. The kitchen was quiet, so she must be in the sitting room, but there wasn't the usual noise from the television. Mum? He opened the sitting room door, and there she was, in her favourite chair under the standard lamp, a little nearer the fire than was stricly safe. Not that that mattered now. With a muted song the wind left the chimney.
There was no sign of distress; and he thought he saw the merest suggestion of a smile. She looked - much younger than she should. And in her hand was a tiny, seven-petalled flower of a somehow too vibrant blue.