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time?”
    “I don’t know. But you’re not going to be out. You haven’t been out for a week.”
    “I might be. Miracles do happen. Besides, she may not be able to talk to me. I may not be at the door end of the van. I might be at the other end.”
    “So she can talk to you there.”
    “And what if I’m in the middle?”
    Miss C. thinks her heart is failing. She calls her Mary. I find this strange, though it is of course her name.
April 1989
    A staple of Miss S.’s shopping list these days is sherbet lemons. I have a stock of them in the house but she insists I invest in yet more so that a perpetual supply of sherbet lemons may never be in doubt.
    “I’m on them now. I don’t want to have to go off them.”
    I ask her if she would like a cup of coffee.
    “Well, I wouldn’t want you to go to all that trouble. I’ll just have half a cup.”
    ♦
    Towards the end of her life Miss S. was befriended by an ex-nurse who lived locally. She put me in touch with a day centre who agreed to take Miss Shepherd in, give her a bath and a medical examination and even a bed in a single room where she could stay if she wanted. In retrospect I see I should have done something on the same lines years before, except that it was only when age and illness had weakened Miss Shepherd that she would accept such help. Even now it was not easy.
April 27, 1989
    A red ambulance calls to take Miss S. to the day centre. Miss B. talks to her for a while in the van, gradually coaxing her out and into the wheelchair, shit streaks over her swollen feet, a piece of toilet roll clinging to one scaly ankle.
    “And if I don’t like it,” she keeps asking, “can I come back?”
    I reassure her but looking at the inside of the van and trying to cope with the stench, I find it hard to see how she can go on living here much longer. Once she sees the room they are offering her, the bath, the clean sheets, I can’t imagine her wanting to come back. And indeed she makes more fuss than usual about locking the van door, which suggests she accepts that she may not be returning. I note how, with none of my distaste, the ambulance driver bends over her as he puts her on the hoist, his careful rearrangement of her greasy clothing, pulling her skirt down over her knees in the interest of modesty. The chair goes on the hoist and slowly she rises and comes into view above the level of the garden wall and is wheeled into the ambulance. There is a certain distinction about her as she leaves, a Dorothy Hodgkin of vagabonds, a derelict Nobel Prize-winner, the heavy folds of her grimy face set in a kind of resigned satisfaction. She may even be enjoying herself.
    When she has gone I walk round the van noting the occasions of our old battles: the carpet tiles she managed to smuggle onto the roof, the blanket strapped on to muffle the sound of the rain, the black bags under the van stuffed with her old clothes – sites of skirmishes all of which I’d lost. Now I imagine her bathed and bandaged and cleanly clothed and starting a new life. I even see myself visiting and taking flowers.
    This fantasy rapidly fades when around 2.30 Miss S. reappears, washed and in clean clothes, it’s true, and with a long pair of white hospital socks over her shrunken legs, but obviously very pleased to be back. She has a telephone number where her new friends can be contacted and she gives it to me.
    “They can be reached,” she says, “any time, even over the holiday. They’re on a long-distance bleep.”
    As I am leaving for the theatre, she bangs on the door of the van with her stick. I open the door. She is lying wrapped in clean white sheets on a quilt laid over all the accumulated filth and rubbish of the van. She is still worrying that I will have her taken to hospital. I tell her there’s no question of it and that she can stay as long as she wants. I close the door, but there is another bang and I reassure her again. Once more I close the door but she bangs again.
    “Mr