Grandmothers Read online

  Salley Vickers

  * * *

  GRANDMOTHERS

  Contents

  Prologue

  Summer Term Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Bank Holidays Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Half-term Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Summer Holidays Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Autumn Term Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Half-term Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Christmas Holidays Chapter 41

  About the Author

  Salley Vickers is the author of many novels, including Miss Garnet’s Angel, The Cleaner of Chartres, Cousins and The Librarian. She has worked as a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full time and divides her time between London and Wiltshire.

  In memory of my much-loved grandmothers, who gave me their time.

  And for Rowan, Sam and Martha, who shall have as much of mine as they want.

  Nan Appleby, waiting for the kettle to boil in the kitchen of her fifth-floor flat, observed the signs of weather. The sky was a Turner palette of brooding colour. A storm looked to be brewing. Nan liked storms. She liked it that so far – but who could say for how long? – the weather still eluded the creeping control of humankind. Outside, the tops of the trees, which were at a level with her window, lifted and fell and then lifted again, heralding the storm. In the oiled-wool fisherman’s socks she wore for slippers Nan carried her mug of tea back to bed and opened her laptop.

  Peace of Mind Funeral Planning, she read with a sense of pleasant expectation. Act Now to Spare Your Loved Ones the Anguish of Rising Funeral Costs.

  Nan was engaged in her favourite occupation: researching her own funeral. Only the other day she had come across a tempting possibility, a firm offering a cut-price casket of Norfolk reed – a material that usually commanded a price that was high even in the exorbitant market of funeral services – and she was about to scroll through her search history to recover the details.

  On that same morning at a later hour Blanche Carrington woke in her comfortable mansion flat to an unlocatable sense of despair. The day, she divined, without bothering to go to the window, was an accomplice to this mood. The bedroom felt chilly – the boiler had given out and the man had not called to see to it as he had promised. Behind the heavy curtains she heard the thin wail of a wind get up and – memory broke rudely in – all this only went to emphasise the misery induced by the dreadful row she had had with her son. Her only son, Dominic, the light of her life, as she had once held him.

  The faint whining sound outside seemed to bind her to these dark thoughts. Unwilling to leave the insulation of the down-filled duvet, Blanche turned on the bedside radio.

  Storm Christina, she heard, was moving south and motorists were recommended not to undertake needless journeys. Well, she wasn’t going to make any journey if she could help it. She would quite happily stay where she was in bed for the rest of the year, for the rest of her life if it came to that.

  Minna Dyer woke to the sound of rain making a rousing kettledrum of the roof of the shepherd’s hut that stood in Frank Fairbody’s smallholding and sighed contentedly. She especially liked it when it rained. The hut was cosy with her newly installed stove and she had banked up the coals so they would smoulder overnight. The wilder the weather outside, the more she enjoyed her snug cocoon. She leant down from her bunk bed to fish up the book she had set aside the night before. A long read but, she had been assured by the nice volunteer at her local library, a worthwhile one. She would finish the chapter she had started last night and then get cracking on the doll’s dress.

  SUMMER TERM

  * * *

  1

  It was Nan’s day for collecting her grandson, Billy, from school. The storm had swept in splendidly while she was checking out the details of a willow coffin advertised as fashioned to fit around the living form.

  Many of our satisfied clients the blurb ran take home our lovely caskets and decorate them in their own unique and personal style so family and friends can become acquainted with their loved one’s chosen end-of-life journey.

  There were photos of caskets stuffed with flowers – artificial ones, Nan judged: detergent-white lilies, electric-blue delphiniums and egg-yolk daffodils all mixed together without regard to season in shades that cheated nature’s own. One of the featured pictures had a casket’s intended content lying in an imitation of repose with a smug would-be-seraphic smile.

  Now in raincoat and wellingtons, Nan waited with the assorted mothers, fathers, grandparents, the odd nanny, for the children of St Monica’s Primary to come out.

  They were let loose according to a system intended to allow one lot of chattering children to disperse before the onset of another wave. Billy didn’t appear with the rest of Year 5, who straggled out swapping sweets and jokes or cheerfully shoving each other, apparently oblivious to the rain.

  Nan enquired of a boy with a plump rosy face, ‘Laurence, have you seen Billy?’

  ‘He’s been kept in.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For swearing at Josie Smith.’

  Oh Lord, Nan thought. ‘What did he say, do you know, Laurence?’

  The boy looked at her, sizing up her resilience. ‘He called her an effing little shit – only,’ he added tactfully, ‘it wasn’t “effing” he said.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Nan said, aloud this time. ‘I suppose I’d best go and brave Miss Green.’

  Laurence looked sympathetic. ‘She’s in a cross mood.’

  ‘Who can blame her? Thank you, Laurence, wish me luck.’

  Nan met Miss Green with Billy in the corridor.

  ‘Mrs Appleby, I’m afraid I am having to take Billy to Miss Rainwright’s office again.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Green. What is it this time?’ Nan shot a glance at her grandson, who, mulish, was examining the floor.

  Miss Green frowned. Her healthy young face was creased with fatigue. It must be hell, Nan thought, coping with a class of nine- to ten-year-olds with all the cuts to the budget and no assistant. ‘I’m afraid Billy used language.’

  Billy’s mule expression turned to blaze. ‘Josie Smith said I was on the spectrum.’

  Nan looked enquiringly at Miss Green, who looked embarrassed and said, ‘Josie has also been reprimanded. And I’ve asked to speak to her parents.’

  ‘Well, now’ – Nan sensed that the teacher was keen to be free of this nuisance – ‘Billy shouldn’t swear of course but perhaps with the provocation …? I’ll give him a telling-off worse than Miss Rainwright’s, I can promise you that.’

  Miss Green had a hair appointment and was anxious to be off. ‘Billy, if it happens again then you will not be coming on the field trip. Is that quite clear?’

  Billy examined his shoes. ‘Yes, Miss Green.’

  ‘Well, run along with your nan.’

  ‘She’s not my nan,’ Billy sai
d. ‘She’s just “Nan”,’ but his teacher, relieved of the burden of imposing discipline, had already hurried out of earshot.

  Nan looked at her grandson, who said, ‘Anyway, I don’t want to go on a stupid field trip.’

  ‘That’s as may be but right now you can have a quick slap and then come back to mine and no more said or we can go back to yours and you can write a letter of apology to that girl.’

  ‘Smacking’s illegal,’ Billy said. ‘You could go to prison.’

  ‘Ah, but who’s to tell?’ Nan asked. It was not that she was in favour of corporal punishment but she heartily disliked the modern habit of subjecting children to prolonged reproach or dismal lectures. ‘It’d be your word against mine.’

  This was a well-rehearsed dispute and both were familiar with the terms.

  Billy considered. ‘Is there cake at yours?’

  ‘Mr Kipling and some Battenberg.’

  ‘I don’t like Battenberg.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Nan said. ‘Back at yours it’ll be oatcakes and almond butter. What’s that little girl’s name again?’

  Billy settled for a token slap on the back of his calves. They walked briskly back to Nan’s flat, past ‘Geraldine’s’ the corner shop, still valiantly holding its own against the vastly superior, in terms of stock, supermarkets. Although she generally shopped from the market in the Portobello, Nan made a point of buying the odd thing she needed from the struggling local shops. Now she bought a loaf of sliced white and a tin of baked beans and agreed with Geraldine that outside it was perishing. One of her reasons for patronising the local shops was that there, as with the market-stall holders, one could hold a genuine conversation.

  After chatting with Geraldine Nan offered to buy Billy a traffic-light lolly. ‘That’s a reward for making up your own mind, not for the slap,’ she explained. ‘All ways of life have a cost,’ she added. She was aware that for the present this wisdom would mean little but she hoped it might lie dormant in her grandson’s mind. It was a useful observation. One she had learned from her own grandmother.

  Back at Nan’s flat Billy inspected the weather house which hung in Nan’s hall. For as long as he could remember the inhabitants had been out of sync with the weather. True to form, the lady with her red sunhat was out, which by rights should indicate sunny weather. Outside, rain like a hail of knives had joined forces with the wind howling round the flats. ‘Your weather house still isn’t working,’ he called to Nan, who was opening the tin of beans in the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t go fiddling with it, you’ll upset their balance – you know they’re used to it that way.’

  Billy went to the bedroom and opened his grandmother’s laptop. He took an interest in her search for the perfect send-off and was keen to discover the latest candidates for her funeral. He had once mentioned his grandmother’s preoccupation to his mother but she had warned him off the subject, saying that it was ‘morbid’ and that he must not think about his grandmother’s death, which would be a long time off. This was in spite of an awareness of her son’s unusual interest in naked truths. His mother, terrorised by any threat to her vision of life, attempted to curtail this trait much as she attempted to discourage his taste for unwholesome foods.

  Nan came through to the bedroom and found Billy absorbed in the details of the ‘take-home, tailored-to-fit all-natural willow casket’.

  ‘This one’s cool,’ he decided.

  ‘I was thinking of going to take a look next Saturday. Your beans are ready. Milk or tea? I’ve just brewed a pot.’

  Billy said he’d have tea and could he go with her to view the casket.

  ‘If your mother says you can. I’d be glad of your opinion.’

  They ate beans on toast at the gate-leg mahogany table in Nan’s snug sitting room. Billy ladled three spoons of sugar into his tea.

  ‘Are you doing that to spite your mother or because you really like it?’

  Billy considered. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You should think about it. If you like it, all well and good. If it’s to get at your mum, you’re doing yourself more harm than you’re doing her. There’s rebelling and there’s revolting.’

  ‘Revolting? Like fish pie?’

  ‘Different meaning, or it’s come to have. You can turn against things for the sake of it, that’s rebellion, or because you see them as wrong, that’s revolt.’ The two conditions look alike, she reminded herself but said, ‘It looks the same but it’s all the difference in the world.’

  ‘How?’ he asked, truly interested and sure of a real reply, for his grandmother understood his urgent need to get to the bottom of things.

  Nan thought, then said, ‘One’s reaction, the other’s action. You taking all that sugar because your mother doesn’t like you to is reaction; it takes no account of what you like or don’t like yourself.’

  Billy sipped his tea. ‘Would I like it without sugar?’ he enquired.

  His small white triangular face with the peat-dark eyes looked so ardent, so utterly honest and trusting, that she leant across and kissed his forehead. ‘You won’t know till you’ve tried, pet.’

  Her heart ablaze with love for him, she watched as he went to the kitchen and fetched a mug and poured himself fresh tea. Adding only milk, he sipped it cautiously. ‘I think I do prefer it with sugar.’ But he put in a single spoonful, stirring it extra to extract all the sweetness. ‘Can we look through the funerals?’ he asked when he had eaten his beans.

  ‘No Mr Kipling?’

  He looked a mite anxious and she said, ‘Listen, I’m not saying liking sweet things is wrong. Just be sure why you are choosing them.’

  ‘Then I’ll have one.’

  She got up to fetch the tin from the kitchen. ‘A little of what you fancy does you good. Now once you’ve eaten that and helped with the dishes we can check out the coffins. There’s another’s caught my eye that comes in parts they say’ll double up to use as a bookcase beforehand, which could come in handy.’

  2

  Blanche was summoned from the padded security of her bed by the persistent ringing of her landline. She stumbled to it, praying that it was her son calling to apologise. No such luck. Only her cleaner, Marissa, ringing to say she was not able to come tomorrow as she was ‘bleeding’.

  ‘Oh dear. What sort of “bleeding”, Marissa?’

  ‘I think maybe a miscarriage. My boyfriend will take me to the hospital.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marissa. I didn’t realise you were pregnant.’

  ‘I did not realise either. But it happens.’

  Although Blanche did not especially like her cleaner this felt like a further dereliction. Not only would there be no company tomorrow but the solicitous boyfriend – and the pregnancy, miscarried or otherwise – emphasised her own isolation. Her closest friend, Maggie, was away on one of her singles cruises, hunting, as Blanche put it, more or less humorously, for a man.

  ‘Not any man!’ Maggie had objected, but Blanche’s guess was that for Maggie any man was better than none. She herself, she liked to think, had better taste. Or was more fearful, as Maggie had hinted. Certainly, since the death of Dominic’s father she had been out only once on what might be described as a date.

  The date had been with a former colleague of her dead husband’s – a seemingly decent man who had also recently lost his spouse. She had dressed carefully, with some excitement, for the dinner he had proposed at a well-reviewed Italian restaurant. The dinner had seemed to pass off well – he had been courteous and amiable and had asked just enough questions to register a lively interest in her and not too many to seem to presume. Neither of them had drunk more than a couple of glasses of wine. What then, had prompted him to make that sudden and crude pass as he dropped her in his car outside her flat? A quite disgusting pass which involved grabbing her hand and laying it – no, clamping it, rather – on his bulging flies.

  She had not liked to tell even Maggie about it. Maggie would laugh or suggest that she should have hi
t the bastard hard where it hurt. She had been too appalled at the time to do more than disentangle her hand and flee from the car with all speed. He had sent her a nasty text too, implying she had led him on. The experience had so disturbed her that she was loath to risk any further assignations and had determined henceforth to settle all her love and devotion on Kitty and Harry, her grandchildren. Especially on Kitty, her most beloved.

  At the thought of the children her eyes filled again with tears.

  ‘You shan’t be seeing them again,’ Dominic had said, his voice colder than an Arctic floe. Terrible words. Terrible Dominic. Terrible terrible Tina, for surely it was Tina, her daughter-in-law, who was behind all this.

  Still trembling with rage and misery, Blanche began to dress. She dressed with none of her usual care, pulling out drawers savagely, throwing on the first dress to hand from the wardrobe, and without any chosen purpose decided to go out. There were things she needed, in so far as she needed anything other than the recovered certainty of seeing her grandchildren. But she could at least stock up on alcohol. Wine and possibly gin or brandy or both. Whisky, even. She disliked whisky but believed it might be palatable with ginger. If her son was going to accuse her of being a drunk, well then, she would become a drunk. The idea was a boost to her spirits, if a temporary one. That was it – she would become a drunk. Then they would see what bad behaviour was really like.

  In the High Street, almost bowled over by the onslaught of a viciously rain-charged wind, she passed Boots and thought to buy paracetamol. If she was going to get drunk she would need it.

  The entrance to Boots in Kensington High Street is given over to the various cosmetic houses and their latest eye-catching products. As Blanche wandered through the store her eye was caught by a colourful display of lipsticks. She stopped to examine these, pulling out some testers to try out on her wrist. Without premeditation, she found that rather than returning them to their places in the stand she had slipped them into her pocket. She looked round furtively. No assistant was in sight. A selection of eye shadows in the same range was also displayed. Artfully, she pocketed a couple, moving seamlessly on towards the pharmacy at the back of the store.