Every morning after all the rounds have been completed and the corridor returns to silence, I wait until I hear the familiar sound followed by the quavery "Bonjour."
The sound is the tap, tap, slap, slap of a walker interlaced with the shuffle of slippers. Each day the beat is firmer and faster but the voice will never become any stronger. It has settled into the uncertain swoops and dives that come with a great age of 86.
I first saw Madame Martine on my third day here and gave her a wave of encouragement as she tapped past my open door. With a tricky three-point turn she entered, introduced herself and sat with relief on my visitor’s chair.
Poised like a little sparrow with a shock of vigorous dark hair, her tiny eyes sparkled with mischief and intelligence – no dulling of the mind here.
Even her head cocked from side to side with birdlike movements, weighing up my interest and, possibly, worth, on that first day.
And so, over all the days as she reached my room, the second last on the dog-legged corridor, she would come in and pause before returning to her own at the far end.
A fall, a shattered hip, had brought her from hospital to re-education three months earlier but her leaving date has been settled for next week.
So her ‘walking’ has now become relentless and in the physio hall she takes up her elbow crutches and pushes herself further and further every day.
"Il faut," she says simply when I applaud her latest triumph. "I must" or "I have to" is what she’s saying.
She’s lucky, she tells me. Her little house in Castelsarrasin is all on one level – modern, in a cul-de-sac with little traffic, occupied by mainly young working couples. She enjoys her literal window on their world as they settle into their nighttime slumbers.
I picture a sort of Under Milk Wood where she sleeps and smiles, her mind roaming and soaring over her beloved town.
Her daughter lives in the Tarn and wants her to move but all she needs, and wants, is here. She worked in a pharmacie most of her life and knows everyone; has seen generations grow and die, her friends 'depart,’ the town slowly alter to cater for far more impatient, shallower needs.
Throughout our talks a firm independence shines through. Each step she takes is one step back from the retirement home, a place she has no intention of going.
The system here is such that the retirement home is used only when all else has failed. Everything possible is done to keep the old in their familiar surroundings.
Helpers will come early morning and last thing at night to ready a no longer supple body; meals are delivered twice a day; a cleaner will shop and take time simply to sit and chat, and nurses arrive to change dressings, give injections or sometimes just to check on their charges.
In the afternoons, the late summer sun still burning at 25 degrees, I sit wheelchair to wheelchair with another soul by the large ashtray in the corner of the entrance portico.
Old habits die hard and I like the company of smokers as I suck away on my e-fag. Damaged by a stroke, her speech ravaged, one hand is a claw which, nevertheless, and let no one preach, clutches a cigarette.
By notebook and repetition and in between her minutes-long trances, she tells me of her life in Toulouse where she worked for the same bank until retirement.
Her apartment was locked on the day of her stroke and she will never return. Her only child, a daughter, died aged 30, forty years ago in Australia.
Looking at her I find it hard to believe she must be, again, at least 86 but a nurse confirms it later.
Her face is strangely unlined, her hair still holds the line of an expensive cut and her clothes, though sagging around her scrawny frame, are equally chic and classic.
Two days ago I found her with tears falling, her good hand holding a shredded tissue.
"It’s over," she got out. "I’m going to the retirement home in Moissac tomorrow."
The clawed hand thumped her breast. "My heart is pounding. I cannot bear it."
Platitudes would be meaningless. She takes my hand in a surprisingly strong grip, and so we sit, silent in the comforting warmth of a southern sun.
I’m there to say goodbye and wish her courage as she leaves, stretchered, in an ambulance. A handbag, two carrier bags and a small case, her luggage for the journey and the future.
For a moment she rallies from her trance, and in formal, perfectly enunciated old French, says how happy she was to have made my acquaintance – and then she’s gone.
On my way back to my room, I pull to one side as Madame Martine taps by.
To my astonishment she utters the French equivalent of my mantra: Upwards and onwards.
I laugh and push on with renewed strength and pray that in her retirement home, the mind of the once chic woman roams as free as Mme Martine’s.
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