She was so young, only sixty, most people lived into their eighties or nineties now. But Peggy had never been strong health-wise: asthma all her life and then the emphysema and the heart trouble, problems to do with her weight, too. She tried to lose some, countless times, diets and Weight Watchers, eating Ryvita and cottage cheese after making hot pot or pie and chips for Roy. Roy had gained weight too, and more since he stopped work to look after Peggy. At the warehouse he probably used to walk a few miles a day, overseeing the packers, dealing with snarl-ups in the system when incoming stock didn’t match the dockets or the goods were faulty.
Now and then, as a young man, he used to go out hiking in the countryside, down to the peaks in Derbyshire. After he met Peggy, walks were gentler, on the level, along riversides or through country parks, the deer park at Dunham Massey, that sort of thing.
Peggy still had a pretty face, round cheeked, warm brown eyes, even though the grey had replaced her chestnut curls.
She stirred a little, made a croaking note as she inhaled, but her eyes didn’t open. It was two hours until her next dose was due, though if she woke sooner and asked for it she could have some of the Oramorph. He wouldn’t see her suffer. He was clear on that. And the doctor had said there’d be no need.
He’d have to see if she’d take some Movicol as well to help with the constipation. She’d not eaten today. He’d made her Weetabix and warm milk but she couldn’t have swallowed more than a teaspoonful.
He left the room quietly and went into the kitchen. The parish bulletin was pinned up on the notice board. Roy took it down and turned it over to read the phone number then keyed it in, ready to speak to Father McDovey.
Father McDovey put out his hands, took Roy’s between them and grasped tightly.
‘How are you bearing up?’
‘I’m OK,’ Roy said, ‘thank you, Father. Come through. Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thank you,’ the priest said, ‘I’ve been plied with tea and biscuits all morning.’ He smiled. ‘Now.’ He set his briefcase down on the kitchen table. ‘In here I have an order of service for you, so you can follow what I’m doing.’ He drew out a laminated card and passed it to Roy. ‘Is Peggy awake?’
‘She’s drifting in and out,’ Roy said, ‘but never awake very long now.’
‘So Communion?’ the priest asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Roy said.
‘She can swallow?’
‘Yes, small amounts.’
‘Well, we’ll see how it goes. It’s a sad time but she has the love of God and his mercy.’
Roy nodded, a lump in his throat.
As the priest began his ministrations, touching Peggy’s eyes and nose and mouth with the oil and reciting the prayers for the ceremony, Roy held her hand. He had first met Peggy at church. Roy and Ann, his wife, had separated by then. Roy was still driving the wagon.
During his marriage he’d be away for days at a time, and it got so he dreaded coming home what with Ann complaining about everything, wanting him to be different, to be something he wasn’t. He never really understood what she wanted from him. She complained of his silence, his ignoring her, said she wanted holidays, so they went on holidays and then she complained that he was a miserable sod.
‘Why did you marry me, then?’ he blurted out one day when Ann was having a go.
‘I thought I loved you,’ she said, ‘and I thought you’d change. Wrong on both counts.’
That hurt and she knew it. She looked away and shook her head and said, ‘I think it was a mistake, Roy, I’m sorry. I’m just so unhappy.’
So they had parted ways and split the money from the sale of the house. She’d never tried to claim maintenance, at least that was something. Ann moved away, she met a man who was taking over a salon in Alicante and set up with him.
Roy started going to St Agnes’s, near his new digs – though his visits were irregular, depending on his schedule. Peggy went too. She got chatting to him one day after mass. Their mothers had known each other, Peggy said. Peggy and he had been to the same primary school, though she’d been three years ahead of him so she would never have noticed him back then.
