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Authors: Eliza Graham

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BOOK: The One I Was
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‘I know,’ Granny said. ‘Sometimes, during the war, it seemed hard to imagine that Fairfleet could still exist, just waiting for me to come back.’

A snap as Reggie lit Granny’s cigarette with his lighter. ‘Clarissa looks well.’

‘She’s making a huge effort. For the children.’

‘So cruel, mental illness.’

‘It’s cost her so much already. I pray things won’t go as badly for her as they did for her father.’

Mum’s father; my grandfather Peter, whom I’d never met.

‘They wouldn’t do … that to Clarissa, would they?’

Granny seemed to cough on her cigarette. She was always saying she needed to give up smoking. ‘A lobotomy? They’re out of fashion now, thank God. I shouldn’t have allowed it with Peter. He never recovered from the operation. The infection alone nearly killed him.’

‘The medication’s much better nowadays, anyway, isn’t it?’

‘Clarissa’s on Lithium. I’ve heard things about it, but it must be better than the alternative, as you say.’

I remembered how Mum always twisted her mouth before she unscrewed the little bottle. Perhaps the tablets tasted bitter.

‘And there’s no prospect of Tony coming back to her?’

A sigh from Granny.

‘I’ve read about expat life in Saudi Arabia,’ Reggie said. ‘It sounds a bit wild. I hope he doesn’t become entangled.’

Granny made a sound like a gasp.

‘I’m sorry.’ Reggie sounded worried. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No. It’s not that. Just a brief pain in my side. Perhaps I ate too much.’ She laughed.

‘Do you remember that night in the mess when you ate that vile meat pie and went down with food poisoning?’

‘I thought I’d die! Shall we see if the coffee’s ready?’

Their feet crunched along the gravel path towards the door.

*

Dad didn’t become entangled with some tanned woman in a small bikini, as I feared, having listened in to the conversation.

She was someone he met at a tennis tournament. Not very tanned and probably too large to look good in a bikini, I discovered much later when I met her. A few days after the dinner party he wrote and told Mum he wanted a divorce so he could marry this Marie person. When Mum read his airmail letter she let out a single gasp and went upstairs very slowly, leaving the letter on the breakfast table for Granny to read. She shut herself up in her room for the rest of the morning, then came downstairs to talk to Granny in the drawing room.

Smithy kept Andrew and me in the kitchen, making meringues, trying to distract us. It didn’t work. Smithy didn’t really like baking much, anyway and fretted over the egg white and oven temperature.

‘The three of you will stay here at Fairfleet with me,’ Granny said when they finally came out of the drawing room. ‘In the holidays you’ll stay with your father and … Well, we won’t worry about the details now. All will be well.’ She put an arm around each of us. ‘We’ll find you new schools, near here.’

‘We’ll manage.’ Mum’s smile looked as though it was hurting her. ‘Your father is still your father. That hasn’t changed.’

Mum, Granny and Smithy continued the conversation in the drawing room that night; Andrew and I were supposed to be in bed but crouched on the staircase, listening in.

‘I thought it would all work out.’ Mum sounded puzzled. ‘That he’d come back to me when he finished the contract. I know I did silly things while I was ill, but I thought he still loved me.’

‘You must keep on being brave,’ Granny said. Smithy made a clicking sound that seemed to signify agreement.

‘He wants the children,’ Mum said. ‘He says I’m not up to looking after them alone. He says I have to carry on living here if I want custody during term-time.’ She sounded as
though there was a stone lodged in her throat. ‘I love Fairfleet, but it feels as if he’s trying to make it into a kind of prison for me.’

‘Fairfleet is your home, Clarissa.’ Granny said. ‘And you need to be here with me. Tony will be reasonable.’ She sounded sad. She’d always liked Dad, his teasing about her flying exploits and his quick feet on the tennis court.

‘Smithy looks after me and I will look after you and you will look after your children. You’ll be back on your feet in no time,’ Granny went on.

‘Do what your mother says, Clarissa,’ Smithy said. I pictured her pale green eyes moving slowly around the room, to the paintings, clocks and silver she dusted so carefully. She regarded Granny and Mum as part of the fixtures and fittings: to be looked after. Smithy knew if someone had moved an ornament half an inch out of alignment. She liked things, and people, to stay in their places.

Granny went up to Mum’s bedroom next morning to make sure she was still taking her tablets.

‘My hair is coming out,’ Mum said. The door was open, I could hear them from my own bedroom. ‘And I have the shakes. And everything seems to take so much effort.’

‘It’ll be worth it to stay well, darling. Promise me you’ll keep taking them?’

‘I don’t feel like me any more. But I promise.’

I crossed my fingers.

*

‘Everything will be fine,’ Granny said the very next day as she was leaving for the doctor’s. ‘Your mother is making good progress. I’ll just get some pills for this silly ache of mine. I must have pulled a muscle weeding.’

The charity tea party was to be held in the garden in three days’ time.

Granny didn’t come back from the doctor’s. He sent her straight up to hospital. Mum drove her in, returning to collect a bag for her. Just for a few days.

‘What’s wrong with Granny?’ Andrew asked Mum.

‘Appendicitis. They’ll need to take it out.’

Smithy didn’t say a word. She went up to Granny’s room to find all the things that Mum wouldn’t remember to pack.

Mum returned hours later saying that Granny seemed cheerful.

Next morning the telephone downstairs in the hallway rang very early; only Smithy was out of bed. I heard her feet running upstairs, the knock on my mother’s door, Mum’s cry.

I threw off my bedclothes and ran into my mother. Mum was sitting up in bed, her face as pale as the ivory sheets. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘I told her days ago it was an appendix.’ Smithy’s fingers clasped the front of her pinafore so hard they might snap. ‘She said I was fussing.’

‘What’s happened?’ Andrew was rubbing his eyes as he came in.

‘It’s Granny, she …’ Mum’s mouth stayed open, but no more words came out.

‘The appendix burst before they could operate. They couldn’t control the infection,’ Smithy said.

Mum swallowed. ‘I can’t believe it. She was fine on Monday, pulling up bindweed.’

‘She was never one for making a fuss,’ Smithy said. ‘Perhaps she should have been.’

Mum put a hand to her mouth. ‘The charity tea. Oh God, it’s the day after tomorrow. What are we going to do, Smithy?’

‘Leave that to me. I’ll make calls.’ Smithy stood straighter, releasing her hands. ‘I’ll take care of everything.’

*

Mum went into Oxford to see Granny’s body. Smithy said she’d ring the funeral people and make arrangements.

‘By “arrangements” you mean looking at Granny’s body and ordering the coffin people to take her away until we can bury her?’ Andrew liked things to be said plainly.

Smithy nodded. She sent us out while she made the call. When we came back into the house she was sitting at the telephone table with a list of all the people who were supposed to be coming to tea in the gardens. She invited some of them to the funeral instead, seeming to know exactly which of them Granny would have wanted to come.

Granny couldn’t be dead. Her body couldn’t be going into a wooden box to be stuffed into a hole in the ground. I ran out of the house, into the topiary garden. If I ran quickly enough through the animals I’d catch sight of my grandmother, secateurs in hand, trimming the elephant’s trunk or the wings on the beloved Spitfire someone had carved out of a box tree in the forties to commemorate her wartime flying.

My grandmother wasn’t there. But she’d be out in the flowerbeds, dead-heading and clipping.

She’d be somewhere here at Fairfleet. She always said she never wanted to be anywhere else. I just needed to find her. Granny would laugh that amused throaty laugh of hers and tell us we were mad: here she was, full of life.

But Granny wasn’t at Fairfleet any more. Eventually I stopped running through the gardens and up and down stairs, opening and closing doors, going down to the basement to check in all the rooms down there. She’d gone. For the next day or so I could still smell her Player’s cigarettes in the drawing room, but then Smithy washed the sofa cushions so that they would look smart for the funeral tea and they lost the tobacco scent.

More people came back to the house after the service in the village church than anyone had predicted. Smithy nearly ran out of teacups and I had to help wash them up as they became free.

‘You’ll stay at Fairfleet now, Clarissa?’ a guest asked Mum, as I stood beside her at the dining room table.

‘I suppose I will,’ Mum said. She put a hand to her fringe, slightly damp, and pushed it back. Her skin was covered with a film of moisture.

‘At least you’ll have Alice Smith to help,’ the guest said.

‘Thank God for Smithy,’ Mum said. ‘I couldn’t manage without her.’

14

Mum finished constructing her daisy chain. It was only a few weeks since Granny had died and this felt like the first near-to-normal day. She hung it round my neck. ‘You look like a princess, Rosie.’

‘Not with those crumbs round her mouth, she doesn’t. Fat chance of her marrying a prince in St Paul’s like Lady Diana.’ Andrew grinned at me. Nobody could be bad-tempered on a sunny afternoon like this. Even the sadness for Granny felt more like a kind of pet or old companion, creeping up to touch me unobtrusively.

From the garden came the scent of mint, rosemary and thyme. For the first time since Granny had died I felt it might be possible to enjoy summer afternoons again.

Andrew ran his fingers through the grass. ‘It’s getting long.’

‘I’ll get the mower out.’ But Mum sounded doubtful. The mower was temperamental: spluttering out clouds of black, smelly smoke if it didn’t like the way you handled it. Even Smithy couldn’t manage it.

‘When’s Mr Andrews coming back?’

‘I don’t know that he is. His back is still hurting him and gardeners need strong backs.’

But Mum seemed to put aside the worry about the long grass. She lay back so that a perfect shaft of clear light bathed her. If only Dad could see her now: despite everything, despite Granny dying, she looked beautiful. The tablets had made her put on weight, she
complained, but her face looked better now, less thin. Mum was still taking them, because she’d promised Granny she would.

It was only the three of us here today. Smithy was visiting her niece on her afternoon off. Sometimes it was more relaxing when she was away. You could leave out a tea mug on the kitchen table without it being immediately removed for washing.

Don’t move, I wanted to tell Mum and Andrew. Let’s all stay here in the sun. If only Dad could come home now, this very afternoon, to see how well Mum was managing, how strong she was.

Being at Fairfleet was still doing her good, even now. Granny had always claimed there was magic in the air, benefiting everyone who lived here. During the war she’d opened her home to the refugees from Germany. On an afternoon like this I could picture the boys out here on the lawn, or perhaps plunging into the lake for a swim.

The view across the water would have been different all those years ago. Granny had sold a field adjoining the grounds six months ago and new houses were to be built on it. We had seen men with clipboards using strange instruments on legs to measure out the plots. In the spring Granny had planted a new hedge behind the lake, which would grow up and block the view of the new buildings.

Above the baby hawthorns something bright flashed. A man. White suit and a Panama hat. Too smart for a builder. Perhaps he was a surveyor. I felt proud of knowing that word. But he didn’t really seem to be interested in the building site, standing with his back to the marked-out plots and gazing out across the lake towards us. When he saw me watching him he smiled at me and raised his hat, as though I were a grown-up. For a few seconds we stared at one another. Then he turned away.

‘Who was that?’ I pointed at the white suit as it retreated.

‘Who?’ Andrew squinted, but the man had gone.

‘A man in a hat, staring at us.’

‘What a nerve,’ Andrew said.

‘Thank heavens the new hedge will have grown up by next year.’ Mum frowned in the direction of the building site.

But I didn’t think that the man had been rude at all. Perhaps I had just imagined him, though. I lay back on the soft grass, watching the boughs of the oak sway as they picked up a breeze too light to be felt down here. Minutes passed.

The squeak of a rusty machine part made me sit up again. Someone was pushing a bicycle around the side of the house, past the tennis court. Whoever it was came closer. An intruder from the building site?

He stopped. I saw a man in his early forties, or so I guessed. Dark-haired. Tall. He wore old but clean cotton trousers and a short-sleeved t-shirt, revealing strong arms.

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ he said to Mum. ‘I’m looking for work.’

‘We’ve got nothing to do with the new houses.’ Mum pointed down the drive. ‘The construction site’s back that way.’

‘I’m not looking for building work. I can do gardening. Or clearing out guttering, cleaning paving stones. Odd jobs.’

‘I don’t need any help, thanks.’ Mum gave a kind smile.

‘I’d try my hand at anything. Weeding, perhaps?’ he looked at the gravel, where weeds poked through. ‘Or lawn-mowing?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I thought of how tired Mum had been recently, how she hated the mower with its bad-tempered ways. ‘Let him,’ I said. ‘At least the grass.’

Mum’s mouth opened as though she was going to say no again. Then she looked down at the long grass at her feet.

Andrew said nothing. Surely he could see how much Mum needed help.

‘Let him,’ I said again.

BOOK: The One I Was
10.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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