I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The greatest blasphemy of my life to date. God forgive me my sin, I thought.
The dreadful tension subsided in the old man. The rheumy near-blind eyes closed. The grip on my wrist loosened: the old hand fell away. His face relaxed. He faintly smiled, and then grew still.
Alarmed, I felt for a pulse under his jaw and was relieved to feel the threadlike beat. He didn’t move under my touch. I shook him a little, but he didn’t wake. After five minutes I shook him again, more strongly, without results. Indecisively then I got up from my seat beside him and, crossing to the telephone, dialled the number prominently written on a notepad nearby, to get through to his doctor.
The medicine man was less than pleased.
‘I’ve told the old fool he should be in hospital,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep running out to hold his hand. Who are you, anyway? And where’s Mrs Pannier?’
‘I’m a visitor,’ I said. ‘Mrs Pannier is out shopping.’
‘Is he groaning?’ demanded the doctor.
‘He was, earlier. Mrs Pannier gave him some painkiller before she went out. Then he was talking. Now he’s in a sort of sleep from which I can’t seem to wake him.’
The doctor growled a smothered curse and crashed his receiver into its cradle, leaving me to guess his intentions.
I hoped that he wouldn’t send a wailing ambulance with busy figures and stretchers and all the rough paraphernalia of making the terminally ill feel worse. Old Valentine had wanted to die quietly in his own bed. Waiting there, I regretted my call to the doctor, thinking that I’d probably set in motion, in my anxiety, precisely what Valentine had most wanted to avoid.
Feeling stupid and remorseful, I sat opposite the steadily sleeping man, no longer on a stool beside him but in a more comfortable armchair.
The room was warm. He wore blue cotton pyjamas, with a rug over his knees. He sat near the window, bare branched trees outside giving promise of a spring he wouldn’t know.
The study-like room, intensely his own, charted an unusual journey through time that had begun in heavy manual labour and ended in journalism. Born the son of a farrier, he’d been apprenticed to the forge in childhood, working the bellows for his father, skinny arms straining, young eyes excited by the noise and the fire. There had never been any question that he would follow in the trade, nor had he in fact veered towards anything else until his working pattern had long been settled.
Framed fading photographs on his walls showed a young Valentine with the biceps and pectorals of a giant, a prizewinning wielder of brute power with the wide happy grin of an innocent. But the idyll of the village smithy under the chestnut tree had already long gone. Valentine in his maturity had driven from job to job with his tools and portable brazier in a mobile working van.
He had for years shod a stableful of racehorses trained by my grandfather. He’d looked after the feet of the ponies I’d been given to ride. He had seemed to me to be already a wise man of incredible age, though I knew now he’d been barely sixty-five when I was ten.
His education had consisted of reading (the racing newspapers), writing (bills for his customers) and arithmetic (costing the work and materials so that he made a profit). Not until his forties had his mental capacity expanded to match his muscles. Not until, he’d told me during the past debilitated weeks, not decisively until in his job he was no longer expected to make individual shoes to fit the hooves of horses, but to trim the hooves to fit mass-produced uniform shoes. No longer was he expected to hammer white-hot iron bars into shape, but to tap softer metals cold.
He had begun to read history and biography, at first all to do with racing but later with wider horizons. He had begun in shy anonymity to submit observations and anecdotes to the newspapers he daily studied. He wrote about horses, people, events, opinions. One of the papers had given him a regular column with a regular salary and room to grow a reputation. While still plying his original trade, Valentine had become an honoured institution in print, truly admired and enjoyed for his insights and his wit.