At night, when Hannah was putting her son to bed, Arthur often stood outside the nursery door listening to the familiar argument over which stuffed animal deserved a place beside the pillow.
He had spent years imagining that old age would be quiet.
He had not expected to love the noise so much.
The first unmistakable warning came three weeks after the biscuit incident.
Arthur was making porridge when he placed an empty saucepan on the cooker, turned on the gas, and walked into the garden.
He had gone outside to bring in the washing.
By the time Hannah came downstairs, the pan was scorching.
She turned off the cooker and opened the window.
“Dad?”
Arthur appeared at the back door carrying a basket of damp towels.
“What?”
“Did you leave the hob on?”
He frowned.
“No.”
Hannah pointed.
The saucepan was blackened at the bottom.
Arthur looked at it.
“I must have been distracted.”
“You could have started a fire.”
“I was only outside for a minute.”
“That’s not the point.”
He put the basket down.
“Hannah, I’ve been cooking longer than you’ve been alive.”
“And you’ve just left an empty pan burning.”
Arthur looked offended.
“People forget things.”
“Yes, they do. But lately you’ve been forgetting quite a lot.”
He stared at her.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
Hannah regretted the phrasing immediately.
“Dad, I’m worried.”
“About a saucepan?”
“About you.”
His expression closed.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
He carried the towels upstairs.
Hannah remained in the kitchen, staring at the scorched pan.
It wasn’t the first incident.
Arthur had misplaced his wallet twice, forgotten an appointment with the optician, and become confused about whether a neighbour had paid for a trouser alteration.
Individually, the events seemed ordinary.
Together, they frightened her.
That evening, she called his GP practice.
Arthur agreed to attend an appointment only after Hannah promised she would stop treating him like an invalid.
He was irritable in the waiting room.
When the doctor asked about his memory, he said it was perfectly adequate.
When asked the date, he hesitated.
When asked to recall a short list of words several minutes after hearing them, he remembered only one.
The doctor’s expression remained professional.
Further assessments followed.
Blood tests.
Questions about daily functioning.
Cognitive screening.
A referral to a specialist memory service.
Arthur disliked the entire process.
He particularly disliked being asked to draw the face of a clock.
“I have a clock at home,” he said. “I don’t need to draw one.”
The clinician smiled.
“It’s just part of the assessment.”
Arthur took the pencil.
He drew a circle.
Then he stared at it.
For a moment, he could not decide where the numbers belonged.
He knew perfectly well how a clock worked.
He had repaired the mechanism of the grandfather clock in his hallway more than once.
Yet the numbers seemed to slip away each time he tried to place them.
When the clinician gently moved on to another task, Arthur set down the pencil.
He did not speak again for several minutes.
The eventual diagnosis was early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.
