28 november

It is difficult for Mum to visit Dad. Low on energy, hobbled by arthritis, mentally adrift and much more fearful than she was as a younger woman, she finds it an ordeal just to leave her home let alone travel the ten or so miles to the hospital. But the fact remains that she needs to see him and so on Thursday evening Pete and Helen came round and helped me to walk Mum up the slippery stone pathway to the car and lift the old wheelchair into the boot. Pete drove while I sat in the back holding Mum’s hand and listening to her constant stream of talk. She never goes out after dark now. The route looks different – are those buildings new? How does Dad look – will she have a shock when she sees him? She could stay in a B&B near the hospital. (No.) She hasn’t got a present for him. She never goes out after dark now. The route looks different – are those buildings new? How did Dad look yesterday?

Pete stops outside the building labelled ‘Women and Children’. Why is the stroke ward in the same place as Obs and Gynae? Women and Children first. Make way you bloody coward and be a man.

It takes time to help Mum out of the car and into the chair (which barely fitted into the boot). The traffic has been more congested than usual and we have just fifteen minutes before visiting ends at 19.00. I’m fairly confident that, if I explain, they will give us an extra half hour but my heart is pounding and I feel like a character in some cinematic ‘race against time’. Will they get there before the bomb explodes? Before she gets on the plane and our hero loses her for ever? And of course we do. (The bomb never explodes. The hero always gets the girl.) We take the lift up, Mum staring at the mirrored back wall because I’m not so good at turning the chair. I wheel her onto the ward and look to the right, towards the little bay where the sight of my Dad in the bed by the window has become powerfully familiar in just a matter of days. He isn’t there. The room is empty. For a moment I feel as if something atrocious has happened. Enemy soldiers have taken the hospital and turned the patients out into the dark. Is he crawling along the dual carriageway, heading for home through the belting rain? But no – he has been moved to another bay and in we go. He is there to the left of the doorway. I push Mum to his bedside.

The reunion moves me. They seem so small. (They are, I suppose. Eighty-something Welsh people tend not to be giants.) The emotion is on the surface. (It always is but, for once, it feels right and good to me.) Mum stares into Dad’s face and satisfies herself that he is still himself – he hasn’t changed beyond recognition. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she says, struggling to get out of the chair and go to him. There are obstacles between them – physical ones: the foot-rests on the chair, the bars across the side of the hospital bed, bodies that don’t do what they are willed to do, furniture that is positioned more with medics than visitors in mind. But they manage and for a moment I think, ‘This is going well – much better than I’d imagined.’

But then he breaks the mood. ‘I want to talk to Rich about some practical things,’ he says. ‘Maybe you should sit with Pete and Helen.’

My heart is in my mouth as I wheel her out into the corridor (where she will work herself into a storm of suspicion and, after all, why wouldn’t she?) I leave her with my friends and I head back towards the bed to face the music.