Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Read Online Free PDF Page A

heartily wished that she had never mentioned him at the Claremont. She began to feel pitied. All the other residents had visitors – even quite distant relations did their duty occasionally; they came for a while, over-praised the comfort of the hotel, and went relievedly away. It was inconceivable to Mrs Palfrey that her only grandchild – her heir, for that matter – should be so negligent.
    Mrs Arbuthnot, on one of her worst arthritis days, condoled with her spitefully, and that night Mrs Palfrey could not sleep. She fretted through the small hours, feeling panic at her loneliness.
    I must
not
get fussed, she warned herself. Getting fussed was bad for her heart. She put on the light and took a pill, and wondered if the morning would never come. She tried to read, but her heart lurched so uncertainly that its throbbing rang in her head. At these times, she felt that anything would be better than being alone – a nursing-home, where someone else would be awake at night, even living with her daughter, supposing such had ever been suggested. In the morning – asshe now promised herself – courage would return, the certainty that she would not give in. She would stay at the Claremont for as long as she could, and from there, at last, be taken to hospital and hope to die as soon as possible, with no trouble but to those who were paid to deal with her.
    ‘The young are very heartless,’ Mrs Arbuthnot had dared to say.
    ‘He would come if he could,’ Mrs Palfrey had replied, pressing her lips together, for they had trembled.
    ‘We poor old women have lived too long,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said with a smile.
    Her very tone of voice when speaking of her husband, Mrs Palfrey had noticed, blamed him for dying, for leaving her in the lurch. He would have been so useful to her in the circumstances, have helped her to get about, fetched and carried: she might still have had a home of her own. But she was not alone like Mrs Palfrey. She had sisters who came and went, who sometimes called for her in cars and took her for drives, or to see her old friend Miss Benson in hospital. Miss Benson had lived at the Claremont before her illness.
    ‘She had no one,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, meaning no one but Mrs Arbuthnot. ‘Not a soul in the world. She was entirely alone.’ Her eyes rested on Mrs Palfrey. ‘No one ever came to see her. In all our years together here. Although she had been a well-known woman in her time.’
    ‘I have been abroad a great deal,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘One gets out of touch.’
    ‘One probably does. We need to keep our friendships in repair. I think Doctor Johnson said that. But you, of course, you have your grandson.’
    ‘Yes, I have Desmond.’ I am not really like that poor Miss Benson, she assured herself. To Mrs Arbuthnot she explained, ‘My daughter is so far off, in Scotland.’
    ‘And you wouldn’t care to live in the North?’ Mrs Arbuthnot asked, probing.
    Mrs Palfrey had not been invited to, and she did not get on well with her daughter, who was noisy and boisterous and spent most of her time either playing golf or talking about it. ‘I doubt if I could stand that climate,’ she replied. In London, the rain was pouring down: in Scotland, it was coming down more steadily, as snow. They had watched it on the television that evening.
    ‘No, of course not,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said quietly, with her eyes on Mrs Palfrey once more. They were such very pale blue eyes as to make Mrs Palfrey uneasy. She thought that blue eyes get paler and madder as the years go by. But brown eyes remain steady, she decided, with a little pride.

    In some desperation (for she had not yet discovered that her fellow guests talked a great deal more about visitors than was warranted) Mrs Palfrey wrote to one of her old school-friends, who lived in Hampstead. She knew her address, as they had exchanged Christmas cards for sixty years, although that was perhaps hardlywhat either Mrs Arbuthnot or Doctor Johnson would have called