Page 74 of Waiting for a Bright New Future

She stepped into the room and he moved towards her. Somehow they ended up in an awkward embrace. The transfer of electricity between them was immediate and unexpected. Stuart had learned enough over the past few months to know that hugging Florence shouldn’t feel like this. Especially now he was engaged to Jayne. He moved away and looked at the floor.

“It’s the least I can do. I don’t want the three of you sleeping on a park bench. Tibby wouldn’t be very impressed at such living conditions.” He tried to force lightness into the last sentence but it sounded more like someone in pain.

Florence laughed anyway. “Jim told me you were looking for me last night. He thought you were a stalker.”

“I only wanted to know what to do with . . .” He gestured at the cat who’d just walked into the room, her tail held high and making little vibrating movements as she wound herself around Stuart’s legs wanting food. “I’ll be moving in with Jayne soon and I can’t keep her then.”

“Of course.” Florence was suddenly businesslike. “I’ll talk to the council tomorrow and, as a last resort, we could squash in with Jim. It’d be a tight squeeze but we don’t have any plans to swing Tibby.”

“What?”

“It was a joke. I was trying to say that at Jim’s there won’t be room to swing a cat.” For a moment Florence looked like her old exuberant self and then her face dropped.

“Why didn’t you answer any of my texts?” Stuart suddenly remembered the way he’d been stonewalled.

“Anger at first. About Slowcoach. Then I realised I’d overreacted and I didn’t know how to apologise.” She looked away from him. “Then delaying tactics — I had no home for Tibby. Confusion about the children and their future. It hasn’t been a good time for me. I didn’t have the headspace for everything.”

Stuart squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The council put Florence on a housing list but wouldn’t act immediately because she had a roof over her head for the short term. The local school agreed to take Eunice and Shayne. Despite Stuart’s offers to babysit, Florence didn’t return to the band because she wanted to be around for the children in the evenings.

“They’ve lost all the stability they ever had.Ican’t neglect them as well.”

Living with youngsters was unchartered territory. Stuart kept out of their way as much as possible, not wanting to impose on their family unit or influence their activities. But he couldn’t get used to sitting down and finding a painful piece of his old Lego digging its way into his butt cheek. Or finding half-empty glasses of squash abandoned on random surfaces around the house. When he picked these glasses up there’d be a momentary resistance from the glue of spilled cordial, which left a sticky circle ready to attach itself to whatever book or paper Stuart placed there next. He had to acclimatise to the constant television blare of the multi-coloured cartoons that Eunice and Shayne devoured.

One day he came back from William’s with a headache. The old man still wasn’t on top form and Stuart had been trying to persuade him to allow the doctor to visit. But William had refused, putting forward the argument that sometimes you just knew when your life had run its course and, as an ex-GP, he was adamant that he knew better than most.

“I don’t want to stay alive for the sake of it. Quality is better than quantity and I’ve had some good quality in my life.”

The William problem made Stuart knock on Lillian’s door when he got back.

“Stuart! How lovely but Jayne’s not back from work yet.”

He was in luck — his old neighbour was on the ball today. “It’s you that I want to see.”

“Ooh!” Lillian’s smile grew and she gestured him inside.

“I don’t know what to do about William. There’s something not right with him but he won’t let me call a doctor.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s not an emergency, just a general air of malaise and tiredness. He doesn’t want me to bother anyone. He says he’s had his share of life.”

“I can understand that.”

“Really?” Stuart sat forward in his chair.

“Things wear out, usually at different rates. Sometimes it’s the mind.” The old lady smiled ruefully. “Sometimes it’s our legs or our eyes or our ears. If we’re lucky, we cope with what’s missing and our quality of life remains. If we’re unlucky, what’s left feels like mere existence. Take your William. His brain is sharp but physically he’s dependent on others and that must be constantly frustrating. He knows that no doctor can improve his situation, only prolong it.”

“But isn’t staying alive what we all want? Surely it’s instinctive to want to keep a grip on life?”

Lillian smiled. “I’m glad that’s how you feel, Stuart, but in thirty years you might have a different view. Days spent alone in the same four walls are endless. They merge into one long black corridor and it’s a one-way corridor with no U-turns allowed.”

“Do you think depression is William’s problem?”

“Possibly that’s part of it.” The old lady spoke more slowly now and a frown was crawling across her forehead as though she was struggling to keep her concentration.

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