‘It is like old times,’ she said.
They said she would not get better; they said that she was too old. She might last a few weeks, not more, the doctor said.
And so I stayed with her, and she talked a great deal to me, mostly about my father when he was a little boy, and all that had happened then, nearly sixty years before, and when she was first married, and about my grandfather, when he was young.
And I thought:
‘Time does not matter. There is no time for her.’
And I thought:
‘It will be like that for me too, before long.’
Two days before she died, I was sitting in her room, her sitting-room upstairs, where she always used to sit, and she was by the fire, in her own big armchair, for she would not stay in bed, and she began to talk of much more recent things, of the War, and of Hugo, and then of Walter and me.
‘Dear child,’ she said, ‘I am glad that you married him. . . . I have wondered, but I am glad. He will always be the same . . . you know the worst of him, and it is not a bad worst.’
I don’t know what I said. I was on the floor beside her, and she stroked my head as she talked.