Granny (2 page)

The family occupied the main body of the house. There was a nanny, Mrs. Jinks, with rooms on the top floor. The west wing was occupied by two Hungarian servants—Wolfgang and Irma. And there was even a smaller house at the bottom of the garden where the gardener, a very old man called Mr. Lampy, lived with two cats and a family of moles that he had been too kind-hearted to gas.

Gordon Warden, the head of the family, was a short and rather plump man in his early fifties. He was, of course, extremely wealthy. “My suits are tailor-made, my private yacht is sailor-made, and I drink champagne like lemonade.” This was something he often liked to say. He smoked cigars that were at least eight inches long, even though he could seldom get to the last inch without being sick. His wife, Maud, also smoked—cigarettes in her case. Sometimes, at dinner, there would be so much smoke in the room that they would be unable to see each other and guests would be gasping for fresh air by the time coffee was served.

They also saw very little of their only child. They were not cruel people, but the fact was, there was no room for children in their world. To Mr. Warden, children meant runny noses, illnesses, and noise—which is why he employed a nanny, at great expense, to handle all that for him. Even so, he always made sure he spent at least five minutes with Jordan when he got home in the evening. He nearly always remembered his birthday. And he would smile pleasantly if he happened to pass his son in the street.

Mr. Warden was a businessman but he never spoke about his business. This was because it was almost certainly illegal. Nobody knew exactly what he did, but some things were certain. If Mr. Warden saw a policeman approaching, he would dive into the bushes, and he seldom went anywhere without a luxurious false mustache. Mr. Warden loved luxury. As well as the made-to-measure suits, he had a liking for silk shirts and shoes made from endangered species. He had a gold tie, a gold signet ring, and three gold teeth. He was particularly proud of the teeth, and as a special sign of affection had left them to his wife in his will.

Maud Warden did not work. She had never worked, not even at school, and as a consequence could not read or write. She was however a very fine bridge player. She played bridge twice a week, went out to lunch three times a week, and went riding on the days that were left. To amuse herself, she had piano lessons, tennis lessons, and trapeze lessons. Sometimes to please her husband she would play a Chopin nocturne or a Beethoven sonata. But he actually much preferred it when she put on her spangly leotard and swung in the air, suspended from the ceiling by her teeth.

The Wardens had one child and weren't even certain quite how they had ended up with him. Although he had been christened Jordan Morgan Warden, he liked to call himself Joe.

Joe did not like his parents. He didn't like the house, the garden, the cars, the huge meals, the cigarette smoke…any of it. It was as if he had been born in a prison cell, a very comfortable one certainly, but a prison nonetheless. All day long he dreamed of escaping. One day he would be a trapeze artist in a circus, the next a flier in the Royal Air Force. He dreamed of running away to Bosnia and becoming a relief worker or hiking to the very north of Scotland and looking after sheep. He wanted to be hungry, to feel cold, to have adventures, and to know danger, and he was angry because he knew that so long as he was a child, none of this would be his.

The strange truth is that many rich children have a much worse life and are much less happy than poor children. This was certainly the case for Joe.

To look at, he was a rather short boy with dark hair and a round face. He had brown eyes, but when he was daydreaming, they would soften and turn almost blue. Joe had very few friends, and what friends he did have were unfortunately just like him, locked up in their own homes and gardens. The two people closest to him were Mrs. Jinks, his nanny, and Mr. Lampy, the gardener. Often he would go down to the bottom of the garden and sit in the old shed with the two cats and the family of moles and the strange smell of gin that always hovered in the air.

“Next week I'm going,” he would say. “I'm really going. I'm going to join the Foreign Legion. Do you think they take twelve-year-olds?”

“I wouldn't join the Foreign Legion, Master Warden,” the gardener would reply. “Too many foreigners for me.”

“Don't call me ‘Master Warden'! My name is Joe.”

“That's right, Master Warden. That's what it is.” This, then, was life at Thattlebee Hall. But there was one other member of the family. She didn't live with the Wardens, but she was somehow never far away. And the whole family, everything, would change with her coming. Even the sound of her footsteps approaching the front door would be enough to trigger it off.
Scrunch… scrunch…scrunch.
Suddenly the sun would seem to have gone in and the shadows would stretch out like a carpet unrolling to welcome the new arrival.

Granny.

She always came to the house by taxi and she never gave the driver a tip. She was a short woman and every year she seemed a little shorter. She had wiry silver hair that looked all right from a distance—only when you got closer could you see right through to the speckled pink surface of her skull. Her clothes, even on the hottest summer day, were thick and heavy, as were her glasses. These were enormous with bright gold frames and two different sorts of glass. Once, just for a joke, Joe tried them on. He was still bumping into things two weeks later.

Her real name was Ivy Kettle (she was Mrs. Warden's mother), but nobody had called her that since she had turned seventy. From that time on, she had simply been Granny. Not Grandma. Not Grandmother. Just Granny. Somehow it suited her.

There was a time when Joe had liked his granny and had looked forward to her visits. She seemed to take a real interest in him—more so than his own parents—and she was always winking and smiling at him. Often she would give him candy or fifty pennies. But as he grew older, he had begun to notice things about his granny that he had not noticed before.

First there were the physical details: the terrible caves in her wrists where the skin seemed to sag underneath the veins, the blotchy patches on her legs, the whiskers on her upper lip, and the really quite enormous mole on her chin. She had no clothes sense whatsoever. She had, for example, worn the same coat for
twenty-seven
years and it had probably been secondhand when she bought it. Granny was very cheap with everyone. But she was cheapest to herself. She never bought any new clothes. She never went to the movies. She said she would prefer to wait and see the films on video, even though she was far too cheap to buy a machine to play them on. She had a pet cat that she never fed. Tiddles was so thin that one day it was attacked by a parakeet and that was the last time it was ever seen. As for the money and candy that she gave Joe, Mrs. Warden had actually slipped them to her when she arrived. It was simply an arrangement to make Joe like Granny more.

Then there were her table manners. Although it's a sad thing to say, Granny's table manners would have made a cannibal sick. She had a large mouth framed by some of the yellowest teeth in the world. These teeth were stumpy and irregular, slanting at odd angles, and actually wobbled in her gums when she laughed. But how hard they worked! Granny would eat at a fantastic rate, shoveling food in with a fork, lubricating it with a quick slurp of water, and then swallowing it with a little sucking noise and a final hiccup. Sitting at the table, she would remind you of a cement mixer at a construction site and watching her eat was both fascinating and repulsive at the same time.

Another aspect of her bad table manners was her tendency to steal the silver. After lunch with Granny, Mr. Warden would insist on a spoon count. Wolfgang and Irma would spend hours in the pantry checking off the pieces that remained against the pieces that had been laid and then writing down a long list of what would have to be replaced. When Granny left the house at half past four or whenever, her twenty-seven-year-old coat would be a lot bulgier than when she arrived, and as she leaned over to kiss Joe good-bye, he would hear the clinking in her pockets. On one occasion, Mrs. Warden embraced her mother too enthusiastically and actually impaled herself on a fruit knife. After that, Mr. Warden installed a metal detector in the front door, which did at least help.

But nobody in the family ever mentioned this—either to one another or to anyone else. Mr. Warden was never rude to his mother-in-law. Mrs. Warden was always pleased to see her. Nobody acted as if anything was wrong.

Joe became more and more puzzled about this—and more confused about his own feelings. He supposed he loved her. Didn't all children love their grandparents? But
why
did he love her? One day he tackled Mrs. Jinks on the subject.

“Do you like Granny, Mrs. Jinks?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” his nanny replied.

“But why? She's got wrinkled skin. Her teeth are horrible. And she steals the knives and forks.”

Mrs. Jinks frowned at him. “That's not her fault,” she said. “She's old…”

“Yes. But—”

“There is no but.” Mrs. Jinks gave him the sort of look that meant either a spoonful of cod-liver oil or a hot bath. “Always remember this, Joe,” she went on. “Old people are special. You have to treat them with respect and never make fun of them. Just remember! One day you'll be old, too…”

I
f Joe had doubts about Granny, the Christmas of his twelfth year was when they became horrible certainties.

Christmas was always a special time at Thattlebee Hall: specially unpleasant, unfortunately. For this was when the whole family came together and Joe found himself surrounded by aunts and uncles, first cousins and second cousins—none of whom he particularly liked. And it wasn't just him. None of them liked one another either and they always spent the whole day arguing and scoring points off one another. One Christmas they had actually had a fight during the course of which Aunty Nita had broken Uncle David's nose. Since then, all the relations came prepared, and as they trooped into the house, the metal detector would bleep like crazy, picking up the knives, crowbars, and brass knuckles that they had concealed in their clothes.

Joe had four cousins who were only a few years older than him but who never spoke to him. They were very fat, with ginger hair and freckles and pink legs that oozed out of tight, short trousers, like sausages out of a sausage machine. They were terribly spoiled, of course, and always very rude to Joe. This was one of the reasons he didn't like them. But the main one was that Joe realized that if his parents had their way, he would end up just like them. They were reflections of him in a nightmare, distorted mirror.

But the star of Christmas Day was Granny. She was the head of the family and always came a day early, on Christmas Eve, to spend the night in the house. Joe would watch as the house was prepared for her coming.

First the central heating would be turned up. It would be turned up so high that by eleven o'clock all the plants had died and the windows were so steamed up that the outside world had disappeared. Then her favorite chair would be moved into her favorite place with three cushions—one for her back, one for her neck, and one for her legs. A silver dish of chocolates would be placed on a table, carefully selected so only the ones with soft centers remained. And a large photograph of her in a gold frame would be taken out of the cabinet under the stairs and placed in the middle of the mantelpiece.

This had been happening every year for twelve years. But this year Joe noticed other things, too. And he was puzzled.

First of all, Irma and Wolfgang were both in a bad mood. At breakfast, Irma burned the toast while Wolfgang spent the whole morning sulking, muttering to himself in Hungarian, which is a sulky enough language at the best of times. His parents were irritable, too. Mrs. Warden bit her nails. Mr. Warden bit Mrs. Warden. By midday they had consumed an entire bottle of whiskey between them, including the glass.

Joe had seen this sort of behavior before. It was always the same when Granny came to visit. But it was only now that he began to wonder. Were they like this
because
Granny was coming? Could it be that they didn't actually want to see her at all?

It was seven o'clock on the evening of Christmas Eve when Granny finally arrived. She had told Mr. Warden that she would be coming at lunch and Wolfgang had been dutifully waiting at the door since then. When the taxi did finally pull up, the unfortunate man was so covered in snow that only his head was showing and he was too cold to announce that she was there. It was a bad start.

“I've been waiting out here for ten minutes,” Granny muttered as Mrs. Warden opened the door after just two. “Really, dear. You know this weather doesn't agree with me. I'm going to have to go to bed straight away—although goodness knows I won't sleep. This house is far too cold.”

“What's gotten into you, Wolfgang?” Mrs. Warden sighed, gazing at the blue nose and forehead, which was just about all she could see of her faithful Hungarian servant.

Granny stepped into the house, leaving her luggage on the drive where the taxi driver had dumped it.

“A little brandy?” Mrs. Warden suggested.

“A large one.”

Granny stood in the hall waiting for someone to help her off with her coat and at the same time examining her surroundings with a critical eye. Mr. Warden had recently bought a new Picasso of which he was very proud. It hung by the door and she noticed it now. “I don't think very much of that, dear. Too many squiggles and it doesn't go with the wallpaper.”

“But, Mummy, it's a Picasso!”