Joe Bennett: The couple down my street

The couple seemed complete unto themselves, at ease with the world, not subject to many of its sorrows. Photo / Getty Images

"When sorrows come," said Hamlet's uncle, "they come not single spies but in battalions." It's a common notion, that when you're down the world tends to give you an extra kicking, just for the fun of it. But is it true or mere perception? Well, here's a story.

He was a modest fellow, avid gardener, not much of a talker, and married for 60 years. I knew both him and his wife to nod to in the street, no more than that, and only after their kids had grown up and left (two sons, I believe, both gone overseas, though I don't know where).

They had stayed on in the same house and become an old couple in the place they'd started as a young couple. And they seemed complete unto themselves, at ease with the world, not subject to many of its sorrows. Though that was only my impression. As I say I barely knew them.

She shopped and cooked and cleaned. He mended and gardened. And how. Every inch of the garden was planted. In summer they lived amid a riot of flowers and shrubs and especially roses. Roses that had grown huge, that had to be trimmed back from the house. The paths through their garden were cut like tunnels and walled with flowers.

It is hard to know how others live. Did they still talk, or did they no longer need to? Had they resolved everything between them so that were effectively now a single organism? In bed at night, did they hear each other's breathing, or did they sleep as a single unit, dependent on the presence of the other for ease of mind? I can only guess, but however it was between them it seemed they had a sufficiency of the world from having each other.

Then she fell sick. What of, I don't know. Cancer in all probability, but cancer can be just another name for dying of old age. I knew it was serious when I saw him shopping for groceries. Away from his garden empire he looked shrunken, as though his wife's sickness had begun to eat at him as well.

I hope she was at home when she died. I hope he was with her. I hope she could see the roses from her window. But I don't know if those things were so. Neither of them had ever asked for much but that makes no difference. Fairness isn't written into the contract.

He was stricken by her death. The will went out of him. His spine hunched. And he neglected the garden, perhaps because it reminded him of her, perhaps because he lacked the strength, perhaps because he couldn't see the point, or perhaps a bit of all three. Motives are rarely as simple as words.

Order did not take long to go. The roses grew tall and rubbed against the guttering. Shrubs sprouted, their dead heads untrimmed. The paths through the garden narrowed from two persons wide to one. He shuffled from house to gate, the roses catching at his sleeve.

Then came the fire. I don't know how it started but I expect it was the stove, with which he'd been unfamiliar all his long life. Neighbours noticed smoke and got him out and found a seat for him on the pavement and women put a blanket around his shoulders and brought him tea and knelt beside him as one would with a child, while their husbands found a garden hose and enjoyed training it on the kitchen.

The old man just sat with his head down. The sound of the fire engine brought kids running from along the street. One boy of perhaps 7 ran alongside the engine as it drew to a halt and watched open-mouthed with wonder as the firemen jumped out in their heavy gear and boots and helmets and plugged a hose into the truck and ran it down the flower-walled path to the house. And when they turned the hose on, the beaming boy, who was standing only feet from the hunched old man with the blanket over his shoulders, exclaimed out loud for all the world to know: "This is the best day of my life!"

The fire was minor, the house easily saved. But I'm not sure that the old man ever went back inside. An ambulance took him away. The fire brigade left tape across the door. The house has since been sold. I don't know if the old man is still alive but I suspect not. I suspect he'd had enough.