Winter of Discontent Read Online Free Page A

and you need to do some productive thinking.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Bill’s somewhere, and I don’t think the police are going to find him. I don’t think they’re looking in the right places. You’ve got to help me think where the right places are.”
    “Tried yesterday.”
    “Yesterday we didn’t know for sure he was missing.” The kettle shrieked. I made the tea and poured her a cup, with lots of sugar and milk. “Today we know. We can start to look in earnest, if you’ll help me work out where.”
    I made her drink the tea while I boiled an egg and made toast, and after she’d eaten she looked a little better. A little. Not much.
    As I cleared away the dishes, I began my pep talk. “Look, Jane, I know how you’re feeling, but—”
    “No.” She raised her head and looked me in the eye. “Anyone you cared for ever gone missing?”
    “Yes. My husband. And not just missing, but dead. Jane, the hours I spent in that hospital waiting to hear how Frank was doing after the heart attack … yes, I do know how worried and scared you are.”
    She held up a hand in a gesture of apology. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude, but … not just worried and scared. Helpless. Old.”
    That stopped me. I put the dishes in the sink, carefully, so I wouldn’t break them—or myself. I sat at the table. A silence fell.
    “You don’t know, yet,” said Jane after an eternity. “Not old enough. Don’t know how people look through you. Talk about you as if you weren’t there. Smile politely when you make a remark.” She spoke in a monotone.
    I found my voice. “I can’t imagine anyone treating you condescendingly, Jane. You’re so forceful, so vital.”
    “Never used to do,” said Jane. “Terrified them, I did.”
    I waited for a satisfied chuckle. It didn’t come.
    “Used to be a character, now I’m a nuisance. Haven’t had the decency to die. Worse for Bill out in that bloody awful place.”
    Jane never swears. I gulped. “Heatherwood House? It seems like a lovely place, and the staff—”
    “Kind. All of them. So bloody kind.”
    “Oh.” A chill ran through me.
    I’d tried not to think about what lay ahead for me and Alan. We were both healthy, we weren’t all that old, Alan had family to help out. I’d clung to those thoughts, tried to keep at bay the terror of old age.
    I’ve never been afraid of dying, but the thought of living too long does terrify me. When Frank died unexpectedly in his early sixties, I’d thought I faced a future entirely alone, childless and bereft. Then Alan came into my life, along with Alan’s family of children and grandchildren. I was able, for a while, to put off uncomfortable thoughts.
    But every day, every hour, brought us closer to the time of our lives when anything might happen. Physical weakness was more than a possibility. My knees were already in bad shape, and would only get worse. Knee replacement? Confinement, perhaps, to a wheelchair?
    Alan had always taken good care of himself, but one read every day about much younger men, fit and healthy, dying of heart attacks or strokes or undiagnosed cancer or a hundred other things. What if Alan became ill, too ill for me to care for him?
    Then there was my worst fear of all, mental decay. If I should begin to see the signs of Alzheimer’s in myself, or worse, in Alan, then what horrors faced us? Living in a place where people were kind and looked after all our needs? And treated us like sweet children?
    There were other sorts of places, of course. Places where the staff were not kind, where they neglected the inmates, treated them like naughty children. I had visited such places in the States, nursing homes reeking of stale urine. The residents lined the halls, slumped in their wheelchairs, tied in with bandages. Some dozed. Some cried out constantly, asking for help or calling for loved ones. The staff would tell me their cries were meaningless, that the “poor old souls” didn’t know what they were saying,