‘They want to take our picture, Dorothy.’ Mrs Farr leaned towards her friend and sister inmate. Inmate was Mrs Farr’s word: the matron (I wish you would call me Nancy, dear) liked her charges to think of themselves as Residents (It’s what you are, dear, what we all are, Residents in Homelyside).
‘Who, the Clarion?’ Dolly Partridge’s voice was pitched slightly higher and louder than was necessary, indicating deafness.
‘No, the Guardian. And do an interview.’
‘The Manchester Guardian?’
‘“Monday Women”. It’s a feature…’
‘I know what it is, I’m not senile – only deaf. What do they want pictures of us for?’ Her body shook and wheezed slightly with amusement. ‘Is the Guardian starting a page three?’
‘No, it’s a series on old wrecks.’
‘You’re fishing for compliments, Ursula. You know you don’t look a day over a hundred.’
‘You don’t look bad yourself, Dorothy.’
‘So I should, I’m younger than you.’
And neither did they look so bad for their century of hard wear, as they walked at the pace of Dolly’s legs in the Homelyside garden.
Ursula Farr was thin and wiry from a lifetime of sensible eating and brisk daily walking, and she still swam. Her thick white hair she wore cut in the same Twenties bob she had worn it in since the Twenties. These days, her reading glasses lenses were thick, even so, she didn’t miss much and her eyes were as intelligent as when Dolly Partridge had first met her in 1939.
Dorothy Partridge was plumper than her friend of fifty years’ duration, deaf without her hearing-aid, and her legs didn’t work at all well, but then Dolly had had four children, a poor diet for all her young years, and stood and knelt on more stone floors than she cared to remember. For a woman of her great age, with her sparse, fluffy hair and unself-conscious smile, she would make a good photograph for the papers. They both would.
After a few minutes’ pause, Dolly asked, ‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said we’d do it. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘I thought you went off the Guardian. It makes my arms ache. Good cartoons.’
The postman, taking a short cut through the garden, saw the two old ladies helping one another slowly, and made a mental note to put them down in his Writer’sjournal and do a characterization piece to read out at the group meeting. ‘Shuffling, ancient, walking with two sticks, hearing-aid. Hair like dandelion clock. Companion wearing ethnic dress, shrivelled – ripe granadilla – contrasting hair like Jean Harlow.’
He winked at them as he passed. ‘Morning, Girls.’