In a Good Light (17 page)

Dad nodded. ‘Barbara very kindly gave us a key. We've had some good holidays there. The children love it.'

‘We did too. We had some great times there when Donovan was small.' Then he glanced at Suzie and shut up, as if reminiscing was not allowed.

At the mention of his name Donovan disengaged himself from Christian, with whom he had started wrestling, and stood up. ‘What? Where? When did we have great times?' He studied the photograph. ‘There was a stone building with half a door, and a plastic toilet,' he said, screwing up his eyes with the effort of dredging his memory at such a distance of years. ‘And a field with a bull. And sheep poo.'

‘Like I said – great times,' Alan laughed.

‘Can we go back there one day?'

‘You'll have to ask your mother to take you. It's her caravan.'

‘She won't take me. We never go on holiday. She doesn't like driving on motorways.'

‘In that case, no then.'

‘How come they can stay in our caravan but I can't?' Donovan demanded, indignantly. ‘That's not fair.'

‘We could stay in a different caravan somewhere else if you like,' Alan said, in an effort to appease.

‘I'm not staying in any caravan,' Suzie retorted. ‘Not with Pippa.'

This dispute was cut short by the arrival of Mum with the tea. She was looking slightly flustered: one of our ‘authentic' light switches had given her a shock. ‘Do sit down,' she said, putting the tray on the floor now that the coffee table was out of commission. Donovan threw himself into an armchair, releasing a puff of dust. Suzie glanced
fearfully at her white suede skirt before perching reluctantly on the arm of the couch. I could see now why Mum never wore white, favouring instead shades of dung and porridge. ‘White is for brides and babies,' she used to say. ‘It wouldn't last two seconds in our house.'

She had dug out a bone china tea service that used to belong to Grandma Percy, who would never drink out of earthenware. I could see Mum checking the cups as she handed them round, to make sure Suzie and Alan didn't get the glued handles. Dad peeled Pippa from around Suzie's neck and took her off for a tour of the dining room so that Suzie could drink her tea.

‘She's not very good with strangers,' Suzie warned, but Pippa's whining turned to giggles in Dad's arms as soon as they were out of the room.

‘I don't know how to thank you for looking after Donovan,' Alan said to Mum. ‘I feel so bad that we were away. If there's ever anything I can do for you . . .' but Mum just laughed this suggestion away. In her view there were people in this world who gave help and people who took it, and precious little crossover between the parties.

When the time came to say goodbye, Pippa wound her fingers tightly into Mary Quant's hair and refused to give her up. ‘Give it back, Pippa. It's not yours,' Suzie said mildly.

Even I could see mere suggestion would never work. Pippa wasn't going to let go unless someone got physical. I took Mary's ankles in one hand and Pippa's wrist in the other. ‘Drop!' I said, sternly.

Pippa's face crumpled as she prepared for a good shriek, but her grip remained firm.

‘Oh, goodness, don't upset her,' said Mum. ‘Esther won't mind Pippa borrowing it – she's got dozens of toys upstairs.'

I opened my mouth to protest, but help came from an unexpected source.

‘No she hasn't,' Donovan said stoutly. ‘Pippa's got way more toys than Esther, and she's only one. Esther's hardly got any and they're mostly crap.'

‘Oh. Well . . .' It was the only time I'd ever known Mum to backtrack, and my eyes began to water with gratitude.

‘That's not very polite, Donovan,' Alan said, firmly releasing Mary Quant from Pippa's iron grasp. All the same he was smiling. ‘There you are sweetie,' he said, as he handed her back to me. ‘Get your stuff together now, Donovan. Let's leave these good people in peace.'

His smile faltered at the sight of the fish tank, its lone occupant stirring the murky water. He was thinking of his cream leather upholstery. ‘Did you bring that all the way from home?' he asked incredulously. ‘Good grief. I suppose it'll be all right on the floor.'

‘You'll have to drive really, really slowly or he'll get seasick,' Donovan explained. ‘About five miles an hour, like Uncle Gordon did.'

Dad gave Alan an apologetic shrug.

When Mum came to clear out Aunty Barbara's room ready for its next occupant – as yet undeclared – she found a dozen empty miniature vodka bottles under the bed, along with all the packets of tights and make-up, still unopened. The cosmetics and tights went in a bring and buy sale for the Less Fortunate, but we kept the vodka bottles, and Christian showed me how to get a tune out of them by filling them with water to different levels and tapping them with a metal skewer. After some practice I managed to produce a recognisable rendition of ‘Men of Harlech', but
Mum said it didn't look good for a girl of eight to have so many vodka bottles on her window sill, and she would buy me a proper xylophone instead. It was nowhere near my birthday, so she must still have been smarting from Donovan's remark about my ‘mostly crap' toys.

WHEN I WAS
ten Grandpa Percy came to stay and never left. He'd lived on his own in a bungalow in King's Lynn since Grandma Percy died of pneumonia six years earlier. Her death had taken all the stuffing out of him, Mum said, and when you saw him you knew what she meant: his clothes hung from his shoulders and hips as though they'd been borrowed from a much bigger man.

According to legend he'd proposed to Grandma Percy seven times before she finally accepted, with the words: ‘You be kind to me or I won't stay.' On their honeymoon she had taken a spare suitcase, packed with the essentials for a quick getaway, which she later kept in the back of the wardrobe at home, just in case. As far as we knew Grandpa's kindness never wavered throughout their marriage in the face of this ongoing threat. After her death, when Mum went to help sort out her belongings, she found the suitcase on top of the airing cupboard. Its contents had clearly
been updated over the years as the accoutrements of a 1920s newlywed were accompanied by the paraphernalia of an older runaway: support tights, hot waterbottle, Rennies.

Relatives on Mum's side of the family always claimed to detect a resemblance between me and Grandma Percy. ‘It's the chin,' they'd say, or ‘the eyebrows', or ‘that stubborn way she's got'. I didn't like this kind of talk: it's not fun being compared to a dead person you can't remember, who was only ever young in black and white.

Until now Grandpa Percy had seemed to be coping well on his own, grief aside. There were just a few lapses that were giving Mum some unease – that twenty pound note at Christmas, for example. Just recently he had let the gas man in to read the meter and noticed some time later that the tin of Old Holborn in which he kept a float of £100 for emergencies was missing from the window ledge. Later still he remembered that he didn't have gas.

Dad drove to King's Lynn and brought him back to the Old Schoolhouse for a week's holiday at Easter. He sat in an armchair by the French windows looking out over the garden, shouting abuse at any trespassing foxes. Occasionally he would advance to the doorway and pelt them with ice cubes from the freeze box. Christian and I liked having him around once we had grown used to the strange snoring sound he made even when awake. He had given up a lifetime of smoking only on Grandma Percy's death, replacing this with a tic-tac habit that had become equally obsessional. He always had at least one packet about his person, and would carefully decant one capsule every five minutes and lay it on the end of his tongue before rolling it around his mouth for maximum coverage. Although his teeth were yellow and crumbling his breath was always fresh and minty. He seemed
delighted with everything we said or did, however trivial, and was forever winking at us and pressing pound notes into our hands when no one else was looking. When not persecuting foxes, he entertained himself by playing variants of patience on a tray on his lap. In spite of his ropey, old-man's hands, he was remarkably dextrous and could cut a pack of cards one-handed, a trick that always made me think of Donovan.

When the week was up Mum asked him if he'd like to stay longer – he was after all a far less demanding house guest than some of our previous visitors. He didn't take much persuading: it was lonely in the bungalow and apart from his cribbage team, and the Men's Afternoon Fellowship – who were a bunch of old women as far as he was concerned – he didn't have much of a social life. At the end of the fortnight he began to exhibit signs of anxiety: he remembered he had only cancelled the milk for a week; it would be piling up on the doorstep; the grass would be knee-high; the letterbox would be choked with free newspapers and leaflets.

Mum and Dad agreed to take him home. Naturally I was required to accompany them: Christian was unavailable as a babysitter as the cricket season had started, and Turton's reputation in the county depended on his presence at the crease.

While Grandpa worked through the pile of mail that had built up behind the front door, Dad whisked round performing various remedial chores: mowing the lawn; repairing a broken gutter and a sagging section of fence; removing furry cheese and liquefying vegetables from the fridge and desiccated plants from the window sills. The sort of things he never got around to at home. My job was to scour the
washbasin in the bathroom with Ajax, paying particular attention to the streak of seaweed-coloured slime caused by the perpetually dripping tap. Mum busied herself going through Grandpa's wardrobe, sorting his clothes into two piles: With and Without Blobs, then washing the former pile in the kitchen sink and whizzing them to a blur in the spin dryer.

Just as we came to say goodbye Grandpa flew into a panic: he had hidden his pension book in a safe place before he left and couldn't now remember where. It was somewhere, he said, with a touch of pride, that no burglar would dream of looking in a thousand years. Mum and Dad looked dismayed: unfortunately this sort of ingenuity often went hand in hand with total amnesia. A frustrating hour was spent hunting in improbable places – the fridge, the oven, inside the piano, while Grandpa paced and fretted. On the one hand he wanted his pension book back: on the other, its discovery would disprove the impregnability of his hiding place. Our search, though unsuccessful in its main objective, turned up various other long-missing items: his gold fob (taped under the kitchen table), passport (inside dress shoe), and several old wallets full of cash (medicine cabinet, backs of drawers, under mattress, etc.).

It was only when we reconvened in the sitting room that the hiding place revealed itself as if by divine intervention. Mum was patiently lecturing Grandpa on the folly of keeping wads of notes in the house, when a clod of soot and loose mortar came rattling down the chimney into the fireplace. Newton himself could scarcely have been more grateful for the providential fall of the apple. Grandpa smote his forehead. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘I put it in the fire.' Poking about in the pyramid of anthracite he turned up an envelope
containing the pension book, a little streaky from the coal-dust, but perfectly serviceable.

Mum let out a sigh that ruffled the net curtains. ‘What a place to choose. Honestly, Dad.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘A stroke of pure genius, that was.' Although he was relieved by the turn of events, I noticed that Grandpa's breathing was louder than usual. When he made to go out to the kitchen, he caught his foot against the leg of the coffee table and stumbled, falling against Dad, who caught him and returned him to the vertical.

‘Whoopsy,' said Grandpa. ‘Perhaps I'll sit down. You put the kettle on, Pru.'

In the kitchen the kettle stood neglected while Mum and Dad conferred in low voices. ‘We can't leave him on his own,' Dad said. ‘He's a liability.'

‘He'll have to come back with us,' Mum said.

‘He's not been coping here. Did you see the fridge?'

‘I did.'

‘And the bathroom?'

‘Heaven knows I'm not houseproud, but . . .'

‘We've got the space.'

‘How much of his stuff could we fit in the car, do you think?'

And so it was decided. ‘You're coming to live with us,' Mum said, as we trooped back into the sitting room to deliver the verdict.

‘Well, if you're sure,' said Grandpa, who wanted to give as little trouble as possible, even in the matter of polite resistance. ‘It won't be for long.'

‘Nonsense,' said Mum. ‘You've got years.'

‘I'll keep out of your way,' he promised. ‘You just carry
on as if I'm not there.' And then the words that filled my ten-year-old heart with joy: ‘Can I bring my television?'

Grandpa was installed in the guest room the same day, with his black and white portable TV on a table at the end of his bed. Christian and I spent so much time in there, trying to catch up on years of deprivation, that the set was eventually brought down into the sitting room, a sign of parental resignation. Grandpa was not a terribly discriminating viewer: he just sat in his armchair and watched whatever was on. Sport, cartoons, old films, news, it made no difference to him. It was too much trouble to keep jumping up and down changing channels. Sometimes he'd tut and say, ‘What a load of old rubbish,' but he watched it just the same.

Christian's favourite trick was to drag the cushions off the couch and lie on his stomach, propped on his elbows, a couple of feet from the screen. He'd watch anything too: horse racing, wrestling,
Scooby Doo
,
The Brady Bunch
,
The Muppet Show
. Nothing was too dull, nothing too childish.

‘You'll go blind,' Mum would say. Or, ‘You'll end up talking American,' but Christian just laughed, his response to all advice. She was full of these phrases: ‘There'll be plenty of time for lying down when you're dead,' as she chivvied us out of bed on Saturday mornings. ‘It's not fair,' I'd say, as we were hauled away from the TV on health grounds. ‘Grandpa is allowed to watch it all day.'