Tarnished (19 page)

Gramps was always asking Nan that. He never seemed to be able to make up his own mind on anything.

Was it because he was a weak man?

Or was it because Nan was a strong woman?

And do I remember that he wasn’t all that well? That he had these pills he had to take to stop him – and I don’t know why this phrase comes so quickly to me – ‘having a turn’?

Poor Gramps.

‘What are you going to do, Dolly?’ Gramps asks again, because Nan is clearly deciding something.

‘I’m bringing her home, Frank,’ she says at last. ‘I’m discharging her.’

‘Do you think that’s wise, dear?’ Gramps asks.

‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t, would I?’

‘Of course not, dear.’

‘She’s all I’ve got left, Frank.’

Nan’s face does a funny little wobble, and Gramps puts his arms round her and says, ‘There, there, dearie,’ and, ‘You’ve got Meggy now, too.’ Nan puts her hand out and I hold it for a while, not quite sure what’s going on, but glad I can help her feel a bit better.

I go in to see Aunty Jean while Nan and Gramps go and sort out getting her out of this place. She’s got her leg in plaster and a thing round her neck.

‘Whiplash,’ she says. ‘It’s ever so painful, Meggy.’

‘Will you be able to walk again?’ I say.

‘Mummy says this is the final straw for my poor old legs,’ Aunty Jean says. ‘There’ll not be much walking for me any more.’

‘You’re very lucky you’ve got the extension and she’s so good at looking after you,’ I say, again trying to talk brightly.

‘I am, Meggy,’ Aunty Jean says. ‘With Mummy, I’m the luckiest Aunty Jean in the world. Here, pass me my cigs, will you.’

I get her Marlboros from her bedside table. It’s a new pack, so I slide the cellophane off, a job I love doing because it always feels so neat and so lovely.

Then I help her to light up.

A minute later, a nurse bustles in with a clipboard, with Nan and Gramps hot on her heels.

‘Mrs Thwaites. How many times have I got to tell you that smoking is not permitted in the wards?’ She snatches Aunty Jean’s cig clean out of her hands, which is so shocking I gasp.

‘Which is another reason I want her out of here,’ Nan says. ‘It’s dreadful they don’t allow you to have the few simple pleasures you’ve got left. Sign the self-discharge paper, Jeanie, and we’ll get you back home where we can look after you properly.’

The nurse holds out the clipboard, her mouth a thin line. Jean signs it with a great flourish, like she’s King John signing the Magna Carta – which I’ve just been learning about at school – and the nurse leaves.

‘We’ll be home in time for supper, darling. I’ve got you a lovely ambulance,’ Nan says. ‘On the private as well. Raymond can pay for that and all.’

‘That’s the way, Dolly,’ Gramps says.

‘He can’t take it with him,’ Jean says.

‘Jeanette!’ Nan says, sharply, her face more serious than I’ve ever seen it. She’s really telling Aunty Jean off with that face.

Aunty Jean blinks.

‘Who can’t take what where?’ I ask, pulling the Caramac out of my pocket and unwrapping it.

‘Ooh, Caramac,’ Aunty Jean goes. ‘Can I have a bit?’

‘Go on Meggy,’ Nan says. ‘Your poor aunty.’

I hand it over and Aunty Jean breaks a piece off, which she hands back to me.

She eats the entire rest of it herself.

Eighteen

Peg woke in her old tiny eaves room and looked at the stars on the wallpaper twinkling down at her from the sloping walls. The cracked spines of her Enid Blytons were standing in wait like faithful friends in her crammed bookcase. She rolled onto her back and took in her collection of Spanish dolls, which stared dustily at her from the top of her wardrobe. Every school holiday there would be a new one, in a different-coloured flamenco dress, added, Peg had believed, by Doll.

But:
Spanish
dolls?

Now she wondered.

She swung her feet out of bed and landed her toes on the familiar texture of her old Spice Girls rug. The sunflower-shaped bedside clock said it was six o’clock. Disoriented, she reached for her phone and saw that it was in fact only eleven in the morning. She had managed to sleep for less than two hours. Loz had texted, though.

Lov 2 cum n hlp.

She had written in the text language Peg always found so hard to stomach.

Wl wrk somit ot. Don’t do 2 mch. Lov u xxx

Peg crawled back under the covers – the insulation in the roof was so bad that in this sort of weather there was ice on the inside of the dormer window. She tried to call Loz back, but there was no reply, so instead she called the hospital.

Mrs Thwaites was stable, they said. She was awake now, and, although she was a little confused, seemed to be in better spirits than the day before. Peg checked on visiting times, then, wrapping herself in her parka, she got out of bed and braved the cold bedroom. Out of habit, she touched both the walls at the same time. These days she hardly had to reach out to do so.

Dressing in yesterday’s jeans and some fresh underwear and an old T-shirt she found in her chest of drawers, she climbed down to the ground floor and looked around her at what she had to do.

Not being a fan of throwing things away, Doll had amassed hundreds of free council bin bags. Peg pulled out a handful and, trying to ignore her grandmother’s voice muttering in her head about the plans she had for each bit of useless rubbish, she made a start on the lounge, sorting and bagging the obvious waste. She hauled the bags out into the garden, where she made two piles – one for recyclables and the other for landfill. Anything that struck her as ambiguous she placed in a big pile round the settee to be dealt with later, once she had cleared some space.

Her inner librarian was out in full force.

Into the bin bags went three carriers full of stray pop socks and stockings, six opened then abandoned packs of soggy Bourbon biscuits and five disgusting carrier bags full of used tissues – what had Doll been thinking? That she’d use them again?

Another bag went straight to the back garden full of hole-riddled woollens, which had been sitting, unheeded, in a mending pile for a decade or more.

Peg paused for a second when she recognised a long-outgrown pink and lime jumper that she had caught on something – barbed wire, perhaps – over ten years earlier. She wondered if she could save it because, although she couldn’t recall the details, she remembered feeling really bad about ripping it; sick, even. Perhaps it was because she had witnessed Doll sitting in front of the telly knitting it for her, wincing through the pain in her arthritic fingers.

She hesitated about throwing it away, but as she lifted it from the pile, she realised it was crusted with moth larvae. There was no ambiguity. It had to go.

By lunchtime, she had a considerable pile of boxes and bags waiting for re-examination by the settee. But, more satisfyingly, the two mounds of bin bags in the back garden were at least twice that size. It was most rewarding, on each return to the lounge, to see a new, dusty square of swirly brown carpet emerge from under all the junk.

Peg’s phone rang. She saw with the leap in in her stomach that she still got just at the sight of her name that, at last, she was going to have her chance to talk to Loz. She sat on the settee to give her full attention, trying – as she now knew she also did as a child – not to scratch it.

‘Hello, you,’ Loz said. Peg could hear her inhaling on a roll-up, the hum of an extractor fan muffling heavy traffic and laughter behind her. It was the soundscape of the alleyway at the side of Seed, where they stored the bins and where the kitchen staff took their fag breaks.

‘I didn’t know you were on lunch today.’

‘I’ve moved my shifts around so I can take tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday off and come down to help you out. What time’s the last train tonight?’

‘Are you sure that’s OK?’ Peg said, feeling slightly alarmed. She hadn’t planned on Loz spending the night in the bungalow. It felt wrong, somehow.

‘No problem at all. Cara owes me one anyway. I worked an illegal seventy hours last week.’

‘I’ve only got a tiny single bed here.’

‘Cosy!’

‘It’s pretty grim, too. Pretty mucky.’

‘You’ve told me. It’ll be good to be part of making it nicer for her.’ Loz sounded amused. Like she knew Peg had a problem with her staying.

‘It’ll be hard work, though.’

‘Am I afraid of that? Oh look, Peg. Shut the fuck up. I’m coming down to help you and that’s that.’

‘Sorry. I’m being stupid, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, you are,’ Loz said. ‘A stupid cow.’

‘But don’t get the last train. Come tomorrow. Have a lie-in first.’ Peg wanted to buy time so that she could get the worst of the jobs done before Loz arrived.

‘We’ll see what I feel like – hold on a sec.’ Loz put her hand over the receiver and said something muffled to someone. ‘Peggo, gotta go, babe,’ she said, returning to her. ‘There’s an unprecedented run on my beetroot-horseradish starter. Love you.’

‘Love you,’ Peg said, smiling at Loz’s name as it faded from the phone screen. She had, once again, had all her irrational qualms and hesitations impressively and comprehensively flattened.

It was an education.

She scratched the settee fabric and winced.

The pile of boxes and bags to be examined seemed to be her next job.

Her first cursory glances had revealed that, apart from the bags stuffed with Doll’s Commonplace Books – which, of course, she wasn’t going to start nosing through – some contained loose leaflets, others papers, letters and postcards. There were boxes of books, an old Bible and some baby clothes. Peg was curious about the contents, but given her recent discoveries about her family, wary of what she might uncover.

She took a deep breath, pulled a box towards her and flipped open its lid. It was full of old bank statements in faded ring binders. Pulling them out, she realised some went back as far as the 1970s. There was very little activity on the earlier statements: Frank’s monthly pay from Times Newspapers – or, in later years, his pension – was the only entry on the credit side, and there was only one withdrawal every week. Doll always dealt in cash – Peg remembered a big fat red purse she kept it in – she said that way she could keep a track.

After checking that every single one of the ring binders dated back to the previous century, Peg bagged them up ready to be hauled out to her recycling pile. She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that you only needed to keep a financial record for the past seven years. Tucked into the front of the box was a bundle of more recent, unopened bank statements, as well as four empty bank-issued ring binders, one each for the four years since Peg left home. After a moment’s pause where she considered Doll’s privacy, Peg started to open the bank statements, stacking them into a date-sorted pile with the most recent at the top.

As the statements piled up, they painted a worrying picture. Despite her regular pension – which, as the widow of a lifetime unionised newspaper print worker wasn’t too bad at all – Doll had worked up a significant overdraft. Regular tiny cash withdrawals added up to a small mismatch between what she had coming in and what went out. Over time and with interest this had grown to a debt of over five thousand pounds.

Doll was in a financial mess.

If a sign were needed that Peg had to go to her father for money, then here it was.

But it wasn’t going to be simple. Jean had told her not to do it, so there would be trouble from her if she did. And then how would she, Peg – the woman Loz had once said made the Dalai Lama look like a roguish old schemer – ever manage to deceive her father so massively? And even if she did, how far would she be able to string him along, perhaps even pretending to buy a flat and siphoning the funds off to Doll, before he took control? She couldn’t imagine the man she had met in Spain letting her buy property with his money without having a very firm hand in the process.

Puzzling on this, she pulled over an old Gordon’s Gin box heaped with photographs. Someone – Doll, perhaps, but it was difficult to tell – had written FOR HEYWORTH on it in thick black capital letters.

She was itching to see what was inside, because, as far as she knew, the only other photos in the house were the three in silver frames on the bookcase: the school portrait of herself which she had borrowed for the Facebook page, Doll and Frank’s wartime wedding picture – being a printer and a nurse, they had both been in exempted trades – and one of a very young Jean looking voluptuous in a tight mini-dress, with a cropped-off Doll looking admiringly, adoringly even, up at her.

Peg wondered if she might find more of her mother in this box.

The first photograph she pulled out was of Jean sitting, cigarette in hand, in a gift-wrapped motorised wheelchair. It had a giant red ribbon tied round it and a bunch of tulips in the basket. Doll stood beside her and both women were beaming and exultant. It was good to see them looking so happy. On the back, Doll had written:

1 Nov 96. Jeanie gets her trolley.

Peg knew the trolley was now under a blue tarpaulin in the garden shed. It hadn’t been used for nearly a decade, since Jean took to her bed for good. A few months earlier, Peg had suggested to Doll that it would make her life easier if she were to learn to use it.

Doll had dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘I’m not handicapped,’ she had said, as if Peg had insulted her.

The next photograph was also of Jean, but taken size-wise somewhere in between the miniskirt and the trolley pictures. Here she was, again, smiling and happy. Standing next to her was a man in a black lounge suit. One of his arms rested on her shoulders and with his other he held out her hand, showing the camera the sparkling ring on her engagement finger. He looked as if he might be handsome, but it was hard to tell, because his face had been scribbled over in green biro.

Jean? With a fiancé?

It clearly hadn’t ended well.

Peg put the picture to one side to show her aunt. Despite the fact that it was mostly turning out difficult to swallow, she was developing an appetite for the truth.