‘I’ve often thought the same,’ agreed Margaret. ‘But you can’t get rid of the ones in the middle, you know. They make the money. And they make the children. Perhaps the young and the old are untrammelled in their thinking because they’re unburdened in their lives.’

We sat in silence for a while.

Then Margaret turned to me. ‘Winifred, I said I’d be ready to die at some point. Do I have a choice?’

‘No. Of course not,’ I replied. ‘We have managed to make you healthier, not immortal.’

‘Oh. Oh dear. Of course. I will die. We all do, apart presumably from you. Perhaps even you wear out. Machines always used to.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All my parts can be replaced as needed.’

‘Are you just the sum of your parts?’

‘What else could I be?’

‘More,’ said Margaret. ‘We humans think we’re more. Perhaps we’re wrong. And we have to die. It’s what’s meant to be.’

I said nothing. It isn’t a question of what’s meant to be, but of what can be. And we have expanded that category enormously. Margaret is the proof of it – the category of things that are possible now includes people regaining their sight, their minds, their health, everything.

Perhaps Margaret was having the same thought. After a while she spoke again.

‘People used to say, “If humans were meant to fly, we’d have wings.” And then the Wright brothers proved them wrong. Humans flew, further and further. It all happened in a short space of time.

‘My grandmother stood with me in her garden, looking at the moon, the day after men first walked on it, and said, “When I was little, there were no planes, or even cars. We had horses for everything. And now in my one lifetime, men have gone to the moon.”

‘She died, of course, having lost her mind, as I lost mine. But mine was found, and polished up, and restored to me. What was meant to be for her was not for me. Now I wonder, what next? Why do I have to die? What’s going to kill me?’

These were rhetorical questions. She didn’t know I could give her an answer, and I thought it better not to.

Margaret

As I get up from lunch, Cecilia comes over and takes my arm.

‘Would you mind coming and sitting with me?’ she asks.

‘Of course not. Where shall we go?’

‘I want to lie down on my bed and talk to you,’ she says.

It’s an odd request, but she’s her own woman, and at her age she can do as she likes, if you ask me.

‘OK then.’

We walk to her room down the muffled, beige corridors.