Chapter 78: Voluntary or Unpaid
I want to explain how I had managed to see something for three years without ever once looking at it.
It is not stupidity.
I have been asked, since, by people who were kind about it and by one person who was not.
The honest answer is arithmetic.
A week has seven days.
On five of those days I lived in a house where the rules were not written down and had to be worked out fresh every morning from the way a woman put down a cup.
Margot did not shout. Nobody in that family ever raised a voice.
What she did was set a standard in the afternoon that had not existed at breakfast.
Then she was disappointed at dinner.
You cannot plan for that. You can only stay switched on.
So I stayed switched on, every day, for three years, at a level I had previously only used in the last thirty seconds of a contest.
There is a cost to that. Nobody tells you the cost.
The cost is that you have nothing left over.
You have no spare room in your head for a fact that does not belong to the immediate problem of getting through the evening.
I would come out of Willow Bank at four o'clock on a Wednesday with a thing in my hand.
The way you carry a stone up from a beach without noticing you have picked it up.
And then I would drive back to Marlow End and by the time I had parked, the stone was gone.
Not thrown away. Put down.
I have counted up what I actually knew about the four companies, and I did it properly, on paper, that Thursday morning.
Marlow Grange. Nothing. I had heard the name at a table.
Sancroft Lodge. Nothing. I once saw a Christmas card from its manager on a hall shelf.
Ashford Coastal. Nothing. I did not know which coast.
Then Willow Bank.
I filled two pages.
The reception desk is on the left as you come in.
The visitors' book lives on a lectern to the right of it, and the pen is on a string that is too short.
The woman on reception is Bernie.
She has a grandson at a school with a bad reputation and a good orchestra.
The main corridor runs from the front hall to the fire door at the far end.
It is longer than it looks, because the floor is laid in one piece, without a seam to catch a wheel.
There is a bend in it, about two-thirds along, of maybe fifteen degrees, so you cannot see the fire door from the hall.
The lounge is on the right, past the bend.
The treatment room is on the left, before the bend, with a keypad on it.
The code was four digits and had not changed in three years.
The laundry is downstairs and the chute smells of hot cotton.
Two hours a week.
Two hundred and forty Wednesdays, near enough. Less holidays. Less the fortnight I had shingles.
I knew that building better than I knew the house I was married into.
And that is the whole of it. That is the answer to the question everybody asks.
Damon Ashford ran four care homes and there was exactly one of them that had a member of his family walking through it every week with nothing to do but push a chair and listen.
Not an inspector. Not an auditor. Not a commissioner with an appointment and a lanyard and a visit announced three days in advance.
A woman with two free hours who knew everybody's name.
I sat at the laminate table and read clause 9.2 again.
The thirtieth time, at least.
Any information acquired by me in a voluntary or unpaid capacity.
It was not a clause about a wife.
It had never been a clause about a wife.
The family were in the document because they had to be, the way you put your own name on a list you are actually writing about somebody else.
I thought: they are frightened of something I know.
Then I thought, more carefully, because I have learned to distrust the version that flatters me: they are frightened of something I could know.
Those are different things. The difference matters.
I did not have the second thought until my third cup of tea.
I turned to a clean page in the notebook.
I did not write a question this time. Questions had got me nowhere for a week.
I wrote a heading instead, and the heading was the only honest tool I had.
WEDNESDAY. TWO O'CLOCK. FRONT DOOR.
Then I closed my eyes, put both feet flat on the lino, and started walking the corridor from the beginning, at the speed I used to walk it, counting the doors.