MADAME BLANCHARD WILL HAVE HAD her lunch by the time I arrive at La Residence Dernière Rose. Lunch is at noon, supper at five, bedtime at nine thirty. Wakeup at eight and a boiled egg with tea tasting of chlorine at eight thirty. By arriving in the afternoon I’ll avoid having to interrupt her meal.

When I last visited Madame Blanchard—is Sophie right, can it really have been two years ago?—the nurses had moved her to a smaller room. At least she still had a window: it looked out on a golf course and poplars that waved their tops like overgrown woolly pipe cleaners. The dark trees absorbed light from the sky, while the golf course flared a hot lime, but her view was an improvement on that of her previous room that had faced the parking lot.

How eager she’d been to struggle with me around that gravel lot, gripping her walker, bent over it, determined to make the full circle, though no one had planted so much as a clump of daylilies at its border. For an English war bride to be without her garden is, I think, a cruel fate. A bell warned staff we’d gone outside. They seemed to ignore it. I had the feeling Madame Blanchard could disappear onto Boulevard de Salaberry and none of them would notice.

With her war-bride cheer she made her circuit as if enjoying a day in Connaught Park. Her high voice, her wispy hair and house-dress, and the loafers that did not sting her bunions—no one outside her tiny domain saw the woman I knew. For a glimpse of that, one had to be admitted to her room, with its lemon geranium, her ceramic dormice, made in her childhood home of Staffordshire, and books all over the floor. The staff was forever devising tricks to rid her of those books. Dust traps, they said. You’ll break the other hip.

In her own house she’d tended gooseberries, brambles, and a weeping birch under whose branches I read all afternoon concealed from crow or gull or any human other than herself as she brought me something nice to drink. She remained obliviously English despite half a lifetime in the New World. Her rock garden. Her sage and onion stuffing. Neighbours had a little laugh about this behind her back. Now the staff at the home hardly noticed it. When a woman reaches her nineties no one sees what came before her diapers, her sleeping pills, the ghost-white cup-ring on her night table.

—

TODAY, SUZETTE CROUCHES OVER THE reception desk eating a whistle-dog from the A&W down the hill. A stink of liver bathes the corridor, it being Friday. Madame Blanchard does not eat liver. Instead she has the staff prepare her a chicken fillet.

“I’ll see myself in…” I turn toward room 219 but Suzette waves no and the supervisor with striped hair comes out of her office.