Yet for all that, as she slipped on her headset and dialled up the next telephone number on her list, she knew she would miss all this when the time came. She would even miss Kyle.

Chapter Forty-One

The call that Ellis had been dreading had come shortly after he and Naomi had been to see his mother.

There had been nothing out of the ordinary to indicate it would be the last time he would see Rose, although invariably when he drove away from the West View Care Home the thought would cross his mind that he might have just said goodbye for the final time. Yes, she had grown frailer as September drew to a close, and increasingly spent more time asleep, but then he had been observing those changes in her for a good while now.

The end when it came still shocked him. He was told that she had died peacefully in her sleep about the time he and Naomi arrived back at Anchor House after their visit. It was what he had feared would happen, that Rose would choose her moment to die when she was alone, as if she didn’t want to burden him with her departure, that she could manage quite well without him, thank you very much. She had never been a sentimental woman, she’d been a pragmatist to her core, and right to the last she had done things her way. Her final words to them had actually been to Naomi.

‘Take good care of my boy, won’t you?’ she’d said.

‘Mum,’ he’d protested, ‘I’m sixty-five, I’m hardly a boy!’

With a slight nod of her head, she’d tutted. ‘You’ll always be my boy, Ellis. Always.’

‘Of course I’ll take good care of him,’ Naomi had said. ‘I promise.’

With hindsight, that exchange should have alerted Ellis to what lay ahead. He had often heard that in many instances those close to death choose their moment to die, and often they want to die alone. They’ve said all their farewells and want to slip away on their own terms.

In contrast, Ellis’s wife had died in his arms. Diana hadn’t wanted to be alone at the end and he had vowed it wouldn’t happen. The minimal time he had not spent at her bedside, in the hospice while she was having palliative care for the remaining days of her life, had been a torture for him, filling him with the fear that he might break his promise to her. Death, when it came, was a welcome relief for Diana, for him too if he were honest. He had hated to see her beautiful body so utterly destroyed by cancer. She had fought so hard against it, but ultimately the disease had been the victor.

But thank God his mother had not had that type of battle to endure, just a slow but steady decline. Rose had frequently said that the last thing she wanted was a drawn-out deathbed scene. ‘I don’t want an audience,’ she’d said. ‘I want a quiet, dignified end.’