SHE’S CHEWING MY PEN, I’m sorry to see. It has already spattered on the sheet; of course that bed will absorb anything. I like this word processor of hers and am looking forward to polishing it up, so to speak; there must be some way of smartening up even a computer chip. It was she who suggested we swap. I’d forgotten how machines cheer me. En avant!

Last entry, Gemma? As agreed. Or will I lie, and keep up my side of our story secretly, pretending to myself as well as to you—that it is as good to do as new poetry? For the last little lies have indeed surfaced, haven’t they? Like the acorns one kept in a pencil case as a boy—and throws out one attic day, as a man.

What Gertrude’s lies to herself were I will never know. But I do not now believe, as I did once, that there were none. Two days after her death, a letter on the Plaza’s stationery came to me from Nurses McClellan and Bond. Although Mr Quinn would certainly have classed it as one for his special attention, he could not do so, having had a relapse.

The nephew, while ‘a caring person,’ as he himself told us, proved also to be a hypochondriac of many nervous intentions kept simmering. His mother had been Mr Quinn’s twin—‘and also a very declarative person.’ Reared between those two stalwarts, his own powers of decision have obviously been done in. He runs a small editorial service of some sort and, like his uncle, is on Social Security. ‘About my uncle—’ he said, ‘anything you two say to do. Doctor recommends a nursing home where he can decline quietly,’ he said, twitching away from that, and from us.

Gemma has dubbed him Quinling, adding that he clearly prefers to think that all the old couples in the world who live together like us are really brother and sister, possibly twins. ‘It thins the blood, to be only a nephew, even at seventy,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to decide about his uncle. He’ll sign for whatever, if we can get him to look us in the eyes. The poor man seems to live his whole life in bas-relief.’ It was he who had slipped the Plaza envelope under our door, Gemma being out at the time.

For the past two weeks she has been back at the community board. I urged her there, though for a reason of my own I don’t want her to get in too deep.

‘They love me there,’ she says. ‘For being so lively. At my age. I’m practically a cult. With the young women especially … Rupert—how have we been living for so long, without any young people in our life? Worse than fusty. Deformed. You know—I look at them and I could almost cannibalize them. Those cheeks like fondant. Teeth like sharkbone. And the girls—sometimes I almost am the one I’m looking at. I know what she says to her hairbrush at night. Or how she puts on her stockings, musing at all that’s coming toward her. I feel that lazy vigor; I am it. Then I see—she’s not wearing stockings.’

As for me, without sons, I have to think it’s still possible to be a man. Because of the infant Gemma lost—even so long ago and not mine—we don’t speak of that. Some secrets are mere silences.

Get thee to the letter, Rupert.

In it the Sisters thanked us, reported that they hoped to come back in order to establish a hospice in a building now undergoing purchase ‘in your town of Yonkers, New York.’ If they themselves were unable to return, others would be sent in their place, they said, adding: ‘It does not have to be us personally.’ Meanwhile we might like to know, before Gertrude’s estate lets us know formally, that Mrs Acker’s will was establishing several benefices at the Wandsworth hospice—and that one of them, to the value of total care for one dying person, would in her will be earmarked for our disposal, to be taken up at any time.

I admired the grocery-list calm of that item: One Dying Person, underlined. Over the signatures Ada McClellan, Enid Bond.

I neither admired nor condemned Gertrude for trying, even from the grave, to separate Gemma and me. As always, one accepted her, even at the party to which she could not come.

And when, on the heels of that letter, a notice to me of the bequest came from the executors, as luck would have it, I was not at home.

‘Where were you?’ Gemma said, not quite idly. Does she suspect what I am up to? I can scarcely think not. ‘Look what’s come.’ She barely gave me time to look, as if I must already know. Maybe I had left the Sisters’ letter lying about? I honestly didn’t know. She and I are indeed so inextricable.

‘A benefice for one,’ she said, squinting at me. When she does that, the eyes return to their old Umbrian blue. She is not going to let Gertrude affect her in our own house. ‘And just in time. We’ll use it for dear old Quinn.’

And so we shall. When we bring him the news it turns out he’s more than willing. ‘I always meant to go abroad again.’ He and his nephew will pool funds, so that Quinn can be escorted, which he will need. Nephew, who has never seen Europe, will travel across the Channel afterward, to see Paris.

‘As every younger man should,’ Quinn says, his long bathrobe neatly arranged over the footstool the visiting nurse has set up for him. The bathrobe—a relic of Munich ‘when one could still go there’—conceals the catheter he has to use, which is why Gemma is not allowed to visit him just now. But he is fondling a bunch of organic carrots she has sent him and is wearing the new ascot she has had me bring. I see that this seventy-two-year-old nephew of his quite acquiesces to being thought a youngish man; of course I have never heard Mr Quinn say the word ‘old.’

Perhaps he will find the hospice’s custom of having the word ‘dying’ spoken aloud at least once a day a breach of taste, if not worse, but his manners will carry him—and them—through their joint ordeal. His world’s not perfect in any case. ‘I could wish,’ he says, ‘that they had such a hospice at—say—Deauville.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Gemma says. She has barged in anyway. ‘We shall see to your wine. And perhaps, when you’re up to it, they’ll take you to a match at Wimbledon.’ She will see to all this herself, she says. ‘For of course I’ll visit you. Very soon.’

As we leave, she doesn’t look at me. Normally we take that elevator back upstairs, slow as it is, but I suggest we walk. Slow as we are.

‘Gemma?’ I find it hard to speak as I climb. ‘You’re not—ill?’

‘Never felt better in my life.’ She flashes me a side-long smile. ‘This part of my life.’

I see that at the moment she is spryer than me. We used to be evenly matched. But these days we alternate.

‘Then what are you doing—messing with that charnel house in Wandsworth!’

‘I’m not. And it’s no charnel. Be fair to them. You only think so because of Gertrude.’ She mounts another step and looks down at me. ‘No—I’m flying to Saudi.’ She laughs with a catch in her throat. ‘Flying, yes. And to see Christina.’ Above me the light from our old hall fixture and the mother light that used to flood her face seem equally blended. ‘Have you forgotten Christina?’

You of all people, her tone says. How the small resentments we were never sure of do rise now, in a sudden plague of all the minor boils and warts that middle age kept at bay. So she has harbored what she only once or twice twitted me with—that I was a little in love with my own stepdaughter? Yes, I’m dotty about her, I replied at the time. But only as a father.

Under the steady glow of the hall light, my hand on the baluster, I believe that to be true. So I can answer lightly. ‘Do you know—I had. Forgotten. For the moment. But only as fathers do.’

And she believes me. But on the landing she stops. ‘Now you tell me. What you’ve been up to. I’ve told you. What I.’

So I tell her—if only part of it. ‘I’ve bought some land. Not far from where the farm used to be. Of course that’s all built over now, that near to town. But there was a patch—not too many miles north of it.’

She smiles—and says softly: ‘Ducks?’ And when I answer: ‘River. Not lake,’ She nods. That is all, positively all. She is wonderful. I have the sense that at times like these, moving back and forth between innuendo commanded from a lifetime of dual experience, we are each other’s bootstraps. By which we shall lift and lift one another. And fall. But not do worse than—fall.