Meyers is fascinated by the physiognomy of the elderly, regarding them with a forensic writerly eye. I thought of the powerful description of involuntary solitude, and the shame that can cling to it, in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal: “I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground.” Loneliness is not, after all, the preserve of the elderly. Mrs Palfrey loves to see wedding cakes appear in a shop window: “Such a sign of spring.” A short walk from the Claremont lives Ludovic Meyers, a young writer repelled by the thought of “long, lonely hours behind his basement bars”. We are privy to Mrs Arbuthnot’s agonising indecision about whether to make another painful trip to the lavatory: secret feelings, too shameful to be shared with anyone else.Īlthough the casual cruelty of the young is prominent in the novel, it is not, in the end, a story that pits the generations against one another. The glimpses that we get of the residents alone in their rooms are powerful invitations to empathy. alarmed at the threat of her own depression”. Driving up to the entrance of the Claremont, Mrs Palfrey struggles to “banish terror from her heart. In contrast, Taylor shows us older people acutely conscious of their destination. There is a squeamishness to Larkin’s poem, and a good deal of fury (“Why aren’t they screaming?”). They are not the cruel depictions of Philip Larkin’s “Old Fools”, although the two authors share a willingness to stare down mortality. But her descriptions, while detached and factual, are not unkind. Taylor does not shy away from the realities of age: frailty, incontinence, and chronic pain are all present. The Claremont is a hotel in South Kensington where a small group of elderly residents have chosen to spend their almost-last days. But it also features two beautiful portraits: one of a happy marriage viewed in retrospect, and one of an unexpected springtime friendship that rescues two people - one very young, one very old - from neglect. It is, in some regards, a very sad book, about loneliness and mortality. By the time I had reached the end, I wanted to push it into the hands of anyone below retirement age.

When I read the blurb - residents of a London hotel “fight off boredom and the Grim Reaper” - I thought it an odd choice. I WAS given Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, first published in 1971, as a wedding gift.

Mrs claremont