And then an old man came in with a green backpack.
Seventy-eight, stick, three-piece suit in August.
“Are you Tess? I’m your husband’s solicitor. He left you this.”
He put it in my hands and it nearly went straight to the floor.
It weighs about eleven kilos.
And he looked at me for a second and then lowered his voice and said:
“He wasn’t who you thought he was, my dear. He wanted you to know.”
In that backpack there are twenty-two notebooks and a box file.
And the notebooks are the same scheme.
Walter Pryce did what I do for nineteen years.
From 2005 until the January of 2024, when he got too ill. At St Ansgar’s, and at two other hospitals across this county, and for four years at a hospice in Corran.
He sat with people who had nobody.
Four hundred and eleven of them.
And he kept a notebook for every single one.
Name. Dates. What they talked about. What they wanted said and who to. Whether they had a pet and what happened to it.
There is a woman in the 2011 notebook whose only request was that somebody ring a shop in Halbrook and cancel a standing order for a magazine, and it is ticked, and there is a date.
Four hundred and eleven people, in twenty-two notebooks, in a bag he kept under a bed in a bedsit.
And the man I thought was a lonely stranger who did not want to die alone was, by a distance, the most experienced person in that building at the thing I had been doing for fourteen months.
He knew exactly what he was asking me for. He had done it four hundred and eleven times.
And now the second thing, which is the reason the solicitor said “the truth” and not “a surprise.”
Walter Pryce has two children.
Lorcan is forty-eight. Fenella is forty-five.
They are alive. They live about two hours away. They have four children between them.
And neither of them knew he was in that hospital.
Nadine.
His wife. She died in 2004, in that building, at forty-nine.
And she was the volunteer first.
She started in 1998. It was her scheme, her Tuesdays, her notebooks — there are three in that bag that are not his handwriting, from 1998 to 2003, and they are hers.
