because — he told me this in the December, cheerfully, as though it were obvious — “there wasn’t much point getting known, was there.”
That is what nine months of being told not to worry had done to a man. He had quietly concluded that he was a problem waiting to be processed, and had started making himself small in advance.
And once it was in an envelope he took the hump about the heating, and complained about the fish on Fridays, and taught a woman called Ivy to play chess so badly that he described it to me as a public service.
On the fourteenth of February he had a glass of sherry and told the whole day room, at volume, that he had sorted his own funeral out and that the rest of them were “leaving it to chance like a lot of amateurs.”
Four of those residents asked me
