May is ready now. She doesn’t meet Julia’s gaze as she leaves the room. The brief burst of warmth between the two of them has dissipated, and the tantalising letter is tucked snugly inside May’s bag. She can’t wait to tap into its memories.
It doesn’t take long for Andy to get May home and settled in her favourite chair, with Fossil rubbing around her ankles.
‘Shall I make you a sandwich?’ Tamsin says. It’s her latest skill. She can only do ham or jam so far but she’s building up to cheese. It’s the cutting that’s tricky. ‘I’m getting better at the buttering bit now,’ she adds hopefully. ‘There’s not so many holes.’
‘No, you get back home and get into bed when you’ve had that bath. I’m full of Julia’s scones, thanks.’
May hears them go, with Fossil following just in case there’s any fish going spare at Andy’s. Her bag is on her knee before they’ve even had time to cross the gap and go through the gate between Shangri-La and their terraced house. She fumbles for the letter, fingers made clumsy by urgency. As she pulls the faded blue sheets from their envelope, the familiar buzzing begins and she sighs with relief. It’s happening. She hasn’t lost the knack of tapping into the precious memories.
For a little while, it’s enough just to hold the pages in her hand and feel a warmth spreading through her body. It builds slowly: a tingling, effervescent shimmer of hope, cascading into ripples of delight. May wriggles blissfully. This is what she’s been missing so desperately. On one level, she’s still in her cosy living room hearing the cry of the gulls and the faint sound of Tamsin pushing the cat back in through the flap in the kitchen door and telling him it’s nearly bedtime. On the other hand, she’s floating above the room, high on a wave of wellbeing and happiness.
It’s the lifeblood, flowing into her veins. The power to stay young, or at least to slow the march of time. One hundred and eleven is surely going to be possible now. Eventually, May feels the intensity of the memories ebbing, and reaches for her glasses as Fossil jumps up to settle on her lap. Pulling out the closely written sheets, she sees Kathryn’s name on the final page.
As she begins to read, cascades of tiny bubbles dance through her narrow frame and she has to stop every few sentences to catch her breath.
We’ve just had a newspaper cutting from our Nottingham family telling us of Pauline’s engagement! Quick work, what? I bet her engagement ring isn’t as good as Mother’s. Opals take some beating, especially three such beautiful stones – and the tiny diamonds around them are so pretty too. If only we could find it. Mother’s heartbroken. She’s started behaving very oddly, accusing each one of us in turn of hiding it. As if we would. We all know how much she wants Julia to have the ring. Will’s very upset about it all. Has he written to you lately? That boy gets more and more secretive the older he gets, it seems to me.
May leans back in her chair. After months of memory-deprivation this is almost too much.
She recalls the large, noisy family and their visits very well. Charles was quite chummy with Don’s relatives for a while. He used to take them out in his boat.
It’s time to put the letter away for the night, even though the mystery of the ring is intriguing. Perhaps there will be more clues in the later ones. May’s sure Julia has never had a ring like the one Kathryn describes.
May is lost in echoes of the past now, and thinking of Kathryn puts her in mind of another girl from long ago, with the same name but spelled differently. She reaches over to fetch a dusty book from a low shelf, and sniffs the musty fragrance happily as the pages fall open at her favourite entry.
May’s old school friend Catherine was what they used to call ‘a card’. She loved making up silly rhymes, usually about their teachers, leaving them around for people to find at the most inopportune moments. Catherine really came into her own during a fad for collecting autographs that swept the girls’ grammar school. These weren’t in the modern trend of finding famous people to write in your autograph book, but merely a way of proving how many friends you had by letting them fill the pages with trite, jokey and sometimes rather rude messages.
When May passed Catherine her own precious leather-bound book, she hoped that the other girl wouldn’t write anything that her parents shouldn’t see. She was relieved to read a poem that was more thoughtful than Catherine’s usual doggerel and reminded her of her father’s words about living to the ripe old age of one hundred and eleven when he’d gazed at that beautiful sunset so long ago. Coincidence? May has never believed in them. This was surely a sign. The poem was entitled ‘My Years With You’, and read:
The Bible always tells us
That in the eyes of men,
The time that we might hope for
Is three score years and ten.
But when I view our friendship
Those years seem far too few,
And I will always hanker
To spend more time with you.
So let us aim for five score
Plus ten before we’re done.
And when we reach that milestone
We’ll add another one.
May was enormously flattered to read this, but came back down to earth with a bang when she found out that Catherine had written the same ditty in at least half the class’s books. Even so, the thought of living to the grand old age of one hundred and eleven strongly appealed to May, and over the years the magical number has become her Holy Grail. She’s so nearly there now.
More letters are needed, and quickly. Julia’s got so many she’ll hardly miss a few, will she? And May’s need is so much greater than Julia’s. Her birthday is on the horizon – only three months away – and she has to get there. She simply has to.
Chapter Five
The next day at around noon, Julia looks out of the kitchen window and sees Andy perched on an upturned crate eating his lunchtime sandwiches. He’s been weeding the rows of broad beans and courgettes he planted in the spring. It’s Saturday, so Tamsin is with him, sitting cross-legged on the grass with a lunch box open in front of her.
Tamsin waves as Julia approaches them with a loaded tray, carefully avoiding the ruts in the path.
‘Have you got my tea things, Aunty Jules?’ she asks, jumping up.
‘Absolutely. I wouldn’t forget you, my love,’ says Julia. She puts the tray down on a nearby garden table in the shade of the oak tree and spreads out the contents – a brown teapot with a multi-coloured knitted cosy, Andy’s oversize mug, a blue and white jug of milk, a tin of biscuits and last of all a miniature tea set for Tamsin.
‘Thank you,’ says the little girl, eyes sparkling. ‘Tea is my best drink ever.’
‘You told me Vimto was your favourite this morning,’ says Andy, ‘and yesterday you said you’d never again drink anything but strawberry milkshake.’
‘Yes, but tea’s my favouritest favourite,’ says Tamsin, then begins humming to herself as she rearranges the teacups more to her liking. Julia remembers her son taking the same pleasure in the tiny cups and saucers, milk jug and teapot with their blue Cornish stripes. His own daughter, in turn, loved them as much as Felix had. Julia sighs. She misses Emily more than she misses her son. Felix isn’t an easy person to get on with – he’s often a bit too fond of the sound of his own voice – but Emily is a delight.
Julia presses her lips together to stop them wobbling. Now’s not the time to get all emotional over a few little teacups. Perhaps she should write and ask Emily to visit at a specific time rather than hoping she’ll make the decision herself? The fear of seeming pathetic catches at Julia’s heart, but she so wants to see her granddaughter.
‘You sad today then?’ asks Tamsin, busy adding milk and a sugar lump to her tea.
Andy frowns at his daughter, but Julia takes a deep breath and smiles. ‘Not especially, sweetheart, it’s just that I’ve been reading these old letters and thinking about the old days.’
‘Oldays, oldays, oldie oldie oldays,’ sings Tamsin to herself as she hands Julia one of th
e little cups brimming with sweet, milky liquid. Julia takes it, braces herself, and knocks it back in one.
‘Careful. You’ll get the burps,’ warns Tamsin, ‘Daddy gets the burps sometimes. And sometimes he—’
‘Anything interesting in the letters you’ve sorted so far, Julia?’ Andy says hastily, helping himself to a couple of digestives.
‘I … er …’
‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. They’re probably full of personal stuff.’
Julia rubs her eyes to ease the gritty lack-of-sleep feeling that’s built up in them over the months since Don’s death. ‘No, I wasn’t being cagey, it’s just that for a minute I couldn’t remember which one I was reading last. I’m sure it was from Don’s younger sister. She was talking about …’
There’s a friendly sort of silence as Julia racks her brain to think of the gist of that letter. She’s been sorting the letters into decades and is drawn to the fifties and sixties for many reasons. Her own recollections of that time keep mixing themselves up with Don’s family’s news. But as hard as she tries, she just can’t remember what the main point of the letter was. Something about a ring …
‘I’ll just pop inside and fetch the one I was reading last to show you,’ she says.
Five minutes later, Julia’s back outside, and Andy looks up from retying Tamsin’s shoelaces. ‘What’s up?’ he asks, taking in her flushed cheeks.
‘I can’t find the letter I was telling you about.’
Andy laughs. ‘Well, I’m not surprised. Talk about needle in a haystack – there must be hundreds of them.’
‘Yes, but it was only yesterday, and I remember putting it on top of the pile. It isn’t there now.’
‘I’m always losing things,’ says Tamsin helpfully. ‘I lost my best spider last week. I left it in a jam jar in the kitchen, and when I went back, it had gone away.’
Andy doesn’t meet his daughter’s clear gaze and changes the subject quickly. ‘How did you get on with May? You haven’t said much about the visit.’
‘It was fine,’ says Julia absently. ‘She’s coming over every Friday, if you can bring her.’
‘Course I will. Did you find plenty to talk about?’
‘Hmm? Oh … yes … it was quite painless.’
‘Does May give you a pain then?’ asks Tamsin. ‘She doesn’t make me have a pain. I love May. Don’t you love May?’
‘You bet she does, sweetheart,’ says Andy, still watching Julia’s face. ‘We all do. Why are you so anxious, Julia? Did you two argue or something?’
‘Oh, no, it’s not that. I’m just bothered that I can’t put my hands on that envelope.’
‘Who did you say it was from?’
‘I didn’t, but it was from … one of Don’s sisters, I think.’ She bites her lip.
‘Which one? There were two, weren’t there?’
Julia doesn’t answer.
Tamsin waits for a moment and then counts on her fingers as she recites the names. Sisters fascinate her. She has asked Andy for one of her own several times but he says it’s a bit difficult when there isn’t a mummy around. ‘Kathryn and Elsie,’ she says, in a singsong voice. ‘And then there were the three boys. Uncle Don told me about them.’
‘I thought there were only two brothers, Julia?’
‘No, there was—’
Tamsin butts in. ‘There was Will. He was the littlest, and then another little boy called Peter but he went to live in heaven when he was a baby. I bet he knows my mum, doesn’t he, Dad? She probably cuddles him when she’s missing me.’
Julia and Andy are silent, and Tamsin, bored, wanders off to dig a hole in the newly turned soil near the greenhouse. Sometimes she gets to make mud pies in this garden if she asks nicely. Andy turns to Julia again.
‘Is reading about all these times in the past getting a bit too much for you, do you think?’ he says. ‘Only you seem distracted, somehow. Maybe you should put them away for a little while? Have a break. Write to Emily, or something. See if she fancies a visit.’
‘What are you getting at? I’m not going gaga. I don’t need a break.’
‘No, I wasn’t saying—’
‘You think I’m losing my marbles, don’t you? Well, it’s possible. It happened to my mother at about this age.’
There are tears in Julia’s eyes as she marches back into the house, and she wipes them away with the back of her hand, slamming the kitchen door behind her. Andy frowns. Now he’s done it. Why did he have to be so tactless?
His mind returns to their conversation over and over throughout the day, and by evening he’s decided to take action. If Julia won’t get in touch with her granddaughter, he’ll do it himself. Emily gave him her email address and phone number after the funeral, just in case he needed her for anything to do with Julia, and now he does. This is serious.
Andy has seen Emily off and on over the years when she’s visited Pengelly and sometimes actually plucked up the courage to talk to her, but she always seemed rather aloof, even when she joined the rest of the local gang on the beach for impromptu barbecues and illicit cider binges. Her gothic phase was quite scary but she’s left that far behind her now.
It was a chilly day when they said the final goodbye to Don. Emily was wrapped up warmly in a soft black coat so long it almost swept the floor, and she’d added a cherry-red cashmere scarf and lipstick to match. He remembers her telling him that her grandfather posted the scarf the winter before, when Emily wasn’t able to get to Cornwall in time for Christmas. Don was always good at presents. Emily’s hair was out of sight for most of the day, tucked up inside a fur hat. She looked like a Russian princess, Andy recalls, pale and delicate, but stunning.
Afterwards, when they gathered at the local pub with all the available villagers for Don’s send-off drinks, hefty sandwiches and chunks of pork pie, Andy watched breathlessly as Emily pulled off her hat, and corkscrews of golden hair tumbled down her back. It was cross between a shampoo commercial and a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life.
Andy needed a large whisky to take his mind off the sight. But later, when he tried to talk to Emily, she was so sad that he had not the heart to tell her how lovely she looked. And anyway, he hasn’t been interested in serious relationships with women since Allie died. You couldn’t really count Candice, could you?
He opens his laptop and starts a new email before the unsettling thoughts have a chance to get a grip.
‘Hi Emily,’ he writes. ‘I’m just dropping you a line to say …’
What is he actually going to tell her? Your grandma’s acting strangely? I’m worried she’s not even beginning to deal with Don’s death? She hardly ever leaves the house? He tries again.
… to say that Julia isn’t acting quite like herself, and I wondered if you could give me a call, or I could phone you for a bit of a team talk? I’m really concerned about her state of mind, and the way she’s forgetting things that have only just happened. I know it’s hard for her being alone in the house after all those years with your grandpa, and grief can affect people in different ways, but I’m afraid it’s more serious than just missing him and feeling sad. I won’t tell her I’ve written to you – don’t want her to think I’m interfering.
Love, Andy
He frowns at the screen, deletes ‘Love’ and adds ‘Regards’, then changes it to ‘Best wishes’, and presses Send. At least he’ll have tried. Whether she gets back to him is another matter. Flying around the world doing glitzy book deals and hobnobbing with top authors must be very time-consuming. Writing to a mere gardener will be way down her list of priorities. She probably won’t even bother to reply.
Chapter Six
‘Well, of course I’m OK, darling,’ Julia says. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? I miss Gramps – I’m bound to, aren’t I? But I’m keeping very busy sorting his things.’
Emily imagines her grandmother, short dark hair as smooth and neat as ever, sitting next to the telephone table with her elegant legs up on a footstool, dressed in
one of her daytime outfits – a print frock, maybe, or a soft sweater with a knee-length skirt. She can hear Radio Three playing in the background. It’s the sort of tinkling piano concerto that Gramps hated. He’d have switched it over to something more upbeat.
‘So what have you been doing with yourself? Are you getting out and about much?’
There’s a pause. ‘There’s a lot to do at home at the moment. And I’ve got to tell you about the letters, Em.’
Emily listens, fascinated, as Julia fills her in on the chest full of family treasures.
‘You’re kidding? Family memories going right back to the fifties? How cool is that?’
‘I know! But it’s not just that. I’ve found another couple of letters this morning, ones I’d not read before, or I can’t remember having seen them, anyway. I’m getting the strangest hints here and there about something that’s been missing for a very long time and has never been found, as far as I’m aware.’
‘Really? What is it?’
‘A rather unusual opal ring. I remember Don telling me about it. He wanted me to have it when we got engaged but I think his sisters or maybe his brother had other ideas. It belonged to their mother, and then it was lost just before she was going to give it to me.’
‘Wow. Was the ring valuable?’
‘Yes. But also hugely important to the family. It was supposed to bring luck to the wearer. Three perfect opals in an antique setting with little diamonds. I read somewhere that opals are meant to enhance memory and decrease confusion.’
‘Really? I don’t think a few stones could do that, do you?’
There’s a short silence. Emily can hear her grandmother breathing rather heavily. Is she crying? ‘Gran? Are you OK?’
Julia heaves a huge sigh. ‘Yes, dear, I’m fine. I so wish I’d got the ring now, though. I could certainly do with it. I’m sure I’d cope better if it was on my finger. It’d give me strength, I know it would. Opals are so pretty. They catch the light, and almost seem to glow.’
59 Memory Lane Page 4