The Quiet Half-Hour

Every Saturday morning, at ten o'clock exactly, I rang the doorbell of number forty-seven Brunswick Road. I had been doing this for nearly two years. The door was opened, every Saturday, by Mrs Doray — who was eighty-three years old, lived alone except for a small bad-tempered cat called Pickle, and could no longer read very small print without growing tired.

The reason I rang the doorbell was that I read to her. Half an hour. Out loud. One chapter at a time. We had started, in November of Year 4, with a children's edition of "The Wind in the Willows", because Mrs Doray said it had been her favourite book at the age of nine and she would like, very much, to hear it again before her eyes gave out completely. We had finished it before Christmas.

Since then we had read fourteen more books. We had read about pony clubs and ghost ships, about three sisters who ran a bakery in 1950s Wales, about a boy who befriended a hedgehog he found inside an organ pipe. Mrs Doray chose every book herself, weeks in advance, and waited for them to arrive in a small brown parcel from the bookshop on the high street.

This Saturday, however, was different.

This Saturday, we had reached the final chapter of the longest book Mrs Doray had ever chosen. It was a story about a Polish girl who had walked across half a continent to find her grandmother during the Second World War. The book had taken us eleven weeks of half-hours to read. Eighty-eight pages remained yesterday; today, only twelve.

I sat in the same green velvet armchair I always sat in. I had brought, as I always brought, a glass of water, in case my voice grew tired. Mrs Doray sat in her own chair opposite, with Pickle curled across her feet and a thin tartan blanket across her knees. She closed her eyes, as she always did when I read, and I began the final chapter.

I read for fifteen minutes. I read past the moment the girl saw the smoke from her grandmother's chimney. I read past the moment she ran the last mile in her broken boots. I read past the moment she knocked, with the back of her hand, on the small green door at the end of the lane.

It was then that I realised Mrs Doray had not moved for some minutes.

I stopped. I lifted my eyes from the book. Pickle was still purring softly across her feet. Mrs Doray's hands were folded, very neatly, on top of the tartan blanket. Her chest rose and fell in the slow, even rhythm of sleep — or something close to it.

The chapter had four pages left. I could finish it. The story was so nearly done.

Or I could close the book gently, slide it back into its place on the small shelf beside her chair, and let her finish it, by herself, in her own quiet half-hour, when she was ready.

I looked at the four pages. I looked at the soft folded hands. I knew her well enough, after eighty-eight Saturdays, to know what she would have wanted me to do.