The Last Tenant

I get up at seven o'clock. I go to the kitchen. I make coffee. I drink the coffee in my chair. I look out of the window.

My grandmother lived in a small house in the country. From the kitchen window, you could see the apple tree in the garden. There was a wooden table and four chairs. She used to make coffee every morning at seven. She put the cups on the table. The radio was always on. She used to sit by the window and look at the birds. The kitchen always smelled of bread.

Mrs Singh was seventy-eight. She had lived in the same house in East London for forty-three years. She had moved there with her husband from the Punjab, on a cold November morning in 1980. Her husband had been gone for fifteen years now.

Every morning, she came down the stairs slowly. She put the kettle on. She made tea the way her mother had made it — with milk, cardamom, and a little black pepper. She drank it from the same cup she had used for as long as she could remember.

On the kitchen table, there was a small radio. She turned it on. She listened to the news in English, and then to the Punjabi service from the BBC. The announcer's voice was familiar.

Her son had asked her, three or four times this year, whether she might consider moving to a flat closer to him. He had a wife and two children, and a spare bedroom. He worried about her, alone in the house. She had thanked him each time.

The house was old. The windows did not close properly. The garden had become too much for her to manage. She had paid a young man from down the road to cut the grass twice a year.

But every morning, when she came into the kitchen and turned on the radio and made the tea the way her mother had taught her, she could feel her husband behind her, reading the paper at the table. She could feel her mother in the cup. The house was full of people. She could not, she thought, leave them all.

Not yet.

Mr Akande had been a nurse for twenty-two years. By his own count, he had made thousands of routine calls to patients about their medication. He had a script.

Mrs Carney was eighty-one and lived alone in a flat above a betting shop in Camberwell. She had been on the warfarin clinic for seven years. The script said that she was, this Wednesday, twelve days late for her INR test, and that twelve-day delays were the threshold at which the clinic was required to issue a formal letter, a phone call, and, if necessary, a visit from the safeguarding team. The script said, in its own words, that she was being managed.

Mr Akande dialled. She answered on the third ring.

'Hello.'

'Mrs Carney. It's John from the warfarin clinic. How are you, my love?'

There was a pause. He had known her long enough to read the pause.

'Are you all right, Mrs Carney?'

'I'm fine,' she said.

The script asked him to confirm her medication adherence and arrange a transport-assisted appointment within seventy-two hours. He looked at the script. He looked at his watch. He had four other calls before lunch, two of which were also overdue. The clinic's manager, who was new and earnest, had been clear that the clinic's targets this quarter were not, in her words, optional.

'Mrs Carney,' he said, 'when did you last leave the flat?'

There was another pause. A longer one.

'I think it was last Tuesday,' she said. 'Or possibly the Tuesday before.'

'Have you got food in?'

'I have biscuits.'

'How are the biscuits doing?'

'They are not many.'

Mr Akande had a script. The script did not, anywhere in its three pages, contain the word 'biscuits'. He thought about his manager, who would be reasonable. He thought about his manager's manager, who would not.

'Mrs Carney,' he said. 'I'm going to do something I am not, strictly speaking, supposed to do. I'm going to come round at lunchtime today with the testing kit and a cheese sandwich. Is that all right?'

She did not answer immediately. He heard, on her end, the small sound of a person breathing out — the breath of a person who has not been spoken to in several days, or who has been spoken to only by people speaking from a script.

'A cheese sandwich,' she said.

'Yes.'

'That would be very nice, John.'

He wrote the address on a sticky note and put it on the corner of his monitor. He noted, in the system, that the call had been completed and the patient was compliant. He moved on to the next name on the list.

In the meantime, in a flat above a betting shop in Camberwell, Mrs Carney sat down on the chair by the window. She had not, until now, planned to put any biscuits out for visitors. She thought she might, after all, brush her hair.

Mrs Carney was eighty-one and had lived in the flat above the betting shop in Camberwell for thirty-six years. The flat had two rooms and a kitchen and a window that looked onto the side of a bus stop. The bus stop, when Mr Carney had been alive, had not been there.

She had been on the warfarin clinic at the surgery for seven years. The clinic — by which was meant, in the surgery's vocabulary, a phone call once a fortnight, a visit from a nurse once every three months, and a blood test on the second Wednesday — was, in principle, the structure that kept her safe at home. In practice, the structure was John Akande, the lead nurse on the warfarin team, who had known her since she had first been put on the medication and who had, over those years, registered, without comment, the small narrowing of her life. The radio was on less than it had been. Her shopping was lighter. The flat smelled, in winter, of damp.

Mr Akande had a script. The script said that, this morning, Mrs Carney was twelve days late for her INR test, and that twelve-day delays were the threshold at which the clinic was required to issue a formal letter, a phone call, and, if necessary, a visit from the safeguarding team. The script said, in its own clean vocabulary, that she was being managed. The clinic's manager had been clear, in the preceding weeks, that the clinic's targets this quarter were not, in her phrase, optional, and that the safeguarding pathway was not, by current guidance, a route to be deferred for reasons of relationship. The phrase 'reasons of relationship' had been, Mr Akande had thought at the time, an interesting one.

He dialled. She answered on the third ring.

'Mrs Carney. It's John from the warfarin clinic.'

'Hello, John.'

There was a pause. He had known her long enough to read the pause; the pause was not the same as last month's pause.

'How are you, my love?'

'I'm fine.'

The script asked him to confirm her medication adherence and arrange a transport-assisted appointment within seventy-two hours. He looked at the script. He looked at his watch. Outside the window of his consulting room a sparrow had been investigating, for some minutes, a discarded sandwich wrapper, and Mr Akande had been watching it without registering that he was watching it.

'Mrs Carney,' he said, 'when did you last leave the flat?'

There was a longer pause. The pause contained, he thought, several things.

'I think it was last Tuesday,' she said. 'Or possibly the Tuesday before.'

'Have you got food in?'

'I have biscuits.'

'How are the biscuits doing?'

'They are not many.'

Mr Akande had a script. The script did not, anywhere in its three pages, contain the word 'biscuits'. He thought about his manager, who would be reasonable. He thought about his manager's manager, who probably would not be, but who might, if only because he had four other calls before lunch, accept the outcome without inquiring too closely into how it had been arrived at. He thought about Mrs Carney, in a flat above a betting shop, with a small number of biscuits.

'Mrs Carney,' he said. 'I'm going to do something I really shouldn't. I'm going to come round at lunchtime today with the testing kit and a cheese sandwich. Is that all right?'

She did not answer immediately. He heard, on her end, the small sound of a woman breathing out — the breath of a person who has not, for some days, been spoken to by anyone who was not reading from a script.

'A cheese sandwich,' she said.

'Yes.'

'That would be very nice, John.'

He wrote the address on a sticky note and put it on the corner of his monitor. He noted, in the system, that the call had been completed and that the patient was compliant. He moved on to the next name on the list.

In the meantime, in a flat above a betting shop in Camberwell, Mrs Carney sat down, slowly, on the chair by the window. She had not, until now, planned to put any biscuits out for visitors; on inspection there were not, in fact, enough biscuits to put out. She thought she might, at any rate, brush her hair. The radio, which had been off for some days, was, in some sense she would not have been able to articulate, on.

The Lighthouse Off-Season

A note before the story. The events I am about to describe did not occur, in this configuration, in any single year. Pieces of them occurred to a friend's grandmother, in the late nineties, on a small Norwegian island whose name I have decided not to use. Pieces of them occurred to a coastal-services administrator I sat next to at a wedding in 2019. Pieces of them are constructed from the kinds of regulations I am not qualified to comment on. I have made the configuration up. I would like the reader to know this before we begin.

Mrs Solberg was seventy-nine years old and had been the keeper of the Frøya light for forty-one years. The light had been automated, in a phased programme of automations across the Norwegian coast, in two thousand and four; her position had, since then, been technically that of a 'maintenance liaison', a role created for the small number of keepers whom the directorate had not, at the relevant moment, been able to bring itself to retire. The directorate's decision had been described, in the relevant memorandum, as a 'compassionate transitional measure'. Mrs Solberg had read the memorandum twice. She had not, at any point in the subsequent two decades, considered herself transitional.

She lived in the keeper's cottage, which was a small white building thirty metres from the light, with a view of the sea on three sides and the cliff on the fourth. She had moved into the cottage with her husband in nineteen eighty-three. Erik had died of a stroke, on the kitchen floor, in two thousand and eleven, while making coffee for them both. The coffee pot had been on the stove for forty minutes before the visiting nurse — who had come up the path on her usual Wednesday round and who had let herself in when the door had not been answered — had switched it off.

This story, like the previous one, is one I am uncertain I have the standing to tell. I am going to tell it anyway, with what care I can.

The directorate had decided, eighteen months before the morning I am describing, to discontinue the maintenance liaison role, and to repurpose the keeper's cottage as a 'remote heritage interpretation point' — a phrase whose specific meaning I have been unable, despite some research, to fully establish. Mrs Solberg had been offered an apartment in Trondheim, near the harbour, with a small balcony from which the sea was, in fair weather, visible. She had been visited by a series of cultural-heritage officers, by the directorate's transitions specialist, and by a young man whose name badge had read PETTER and whose role appeared, from his behaviour, to involve smiling at her sympathetically while she made tea. Each of them had explained that the change was, technically, going ahead regardless of her position on it. Each of them had been kind. She had thanked each of them. She had refused each of them.

I am aware, at this point, that I am borrowing the structure of another story. The borrowing is, in part, a homage and, in part, an admission that there are only certain shapes such situations come in. There are other shapes. I have not chosen one of them. The reader will draw their own conclusions about whether this is laziness, recognition, or theft; I would only ask that the conclusion be drawn with some attention to what the borrowing is doing, which is to make the situation feel less unique than it would, in a different telling, falsely seem.

On the morning the directorate's representative was scheduled to arrive — a Wednesday, in the thin light of late October — Mrs Solberg got up at half past five. She put on the brown wool jumper Erik had bought her in nineteen eighty-eight, in the small shop in Trondheim that had since closed. She made coffee in the same coffee pot that had been on the stove on the morning of his stroke; she had cleaned it thoroughly that afternoon, in two thousand and eleven, and had used it every morning since, in a daily act whose meaning she could not have explained to anyone, including herself.

She drank her coffee at the small table by the window. From the table, you could see the lighthouse, and the cliff, and on certain mornings — though not this one — the gannets that nested in the spring on the western face. The light was, by now, on a separate timer; it had not required her attendance for two decades. She had, however, gone out to it every morning, in the way other people walk dogs, and stood for some minutes with her hand on the iron of the door. The iron was cold in winter and warm in summer and had, over forty-one years, taken on the precise temperature of whatever the weather had been doing for the previous half-hour. It was, in this respect, the most reliable thermometer she had ever owned.

At seven, she went out to the light, in her old anorak, and stood with her hand on the iron of the door for the usual three minutes. The iron was cold. The wind was from the north. She came back. She refilled her coffee.

At nine, the directorate's representative arrived, on the small ferry that came up from Sistranda twice a week. He was a man in his fifties, in a green waterproof jacket, and he was carrying a folder. He stood at the gate of the cottage for some time before knocking, and Mrs Solberg watched him through the kitchen window without moving from the table, and she thought about how a person in his profession learns, eventually, to dread the threshold rather than the conversation itself.

When he knocked, she got up, slowly, and opened the door.

I want to interrupt, here, before the conversation that follows, because I have been told by readers of an earlier draft of this story that the conversation, as I had originally written it, was either too sentimental or too cold — opinions had divided between two camps, and the camps had not been able to agree on which version of the conversation was the problem and which the solution. I have rewritten the conversation three times since. The current version is, I think, the least dishonest of the four; it is also the least dramatically satisfying, and I have come to suspect that this is not a coincidence. I would like the reader, at this point, to imagine the conversation themselves, taking into account what they now know about Mrs Solberg, the iron of the door, the coffee pot, the brown jumper, and the young man PETTER, who had not been the one sent today. The conversation lasted forty minutes. At the end of it, the man in the green jacket left, and Mrs Solberg closed the door, and went back to the table by the window, and refilled her coffee from the pot.

I cannot tell you whether she stayed. I have written three endings, of which one had her stay, one had her go, and one had the directorate, after a small private intervention by a sympathetic civil servant, defer the matter for a further calendar year. I do not know which of these is true. The thing I would like to assert, however, is the smallest one. Mrs Solberg, that morning, having watched the man in the green jacket go down the path to the ferry, drank her coffee. The coffee, in the cup Erik had given her on her sixty-fifth birthday, was hot. It was the same temperature it had been every morning for fourteen years.

I would like the reader to leave her there.