Everything had gone wrong for him lately, said Mr Beaumont. He was going blind. His prostate trouble had worsened. His dear wife of 60 years had passed away just a fortnight before, following a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. And the day before she’d died, she’d fallen on him, breaking his leg.
We were standing in the tidy living room of his bungalow. He was leaning heavily on his stick with both hands and telling me all this because I was about to have a look at his car, with a view to buying it. His point, presumably, being that it was this succession of disasters, rather than any fault of the car, which had decided him to part with it.
‘You’ll love him. He’s an absolute poppet,’ said the private-care company supervisor when she told me about her elderly client with a dust-covered car in the garage for sale at a giveaway price. She knew about the car because she’d helped nurse the wife towards the end and one gets to know these things. She also knew that, under the coating of dust, the car was immaculate, with only 24,000 miles on the clock and a full service history. She’d have had it herself, she said, but she was too attached to her own at the moment.
But it was admiration rather than affection I felt for Mr Beaumont when I met him. I looked at him and wondered how he managed to get out of bed in the morning now that his life was effectively over. Yet here he was, just after nine, up, washed, shaved and wearing a suit and tie with a pale-blue V-necked pullover under the jacket. Reinforcing the impression of decency and doggedness was his north-country accent — though at the mention of his departed wife, the clean-shaven chin wobbled and the pale-blue eyes liquefied with grief.
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