by Maggie Joel
‘Grandma Lake will be coming to live with us,’ Mum had announced one Sunday over lunch as she’d spooned roast potatoes onto each of their plates.
‘Why?’ asked Graham.
‘Where will she sleep?’ asked Jennifer.
How long for? thought Charlotte.
‘In the spare room,’ Mum had replied, craftily changing the name of ‘The Study’ to ‘The Spare Room’ as though by changing its name this room became a place they didn’t really need and that could easily be handed over to someone else with very little inconvenience to anyone. She’d ignored Graham’s question.
After that nothing was the same again.
The change came not suddenly, but bit by bit. An encroaching sort of change that you ought to have seen coming but somehow, because you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you didn’t. As the days and nights passed and record players had to be turned right down so as not to disturb Grandma Lake, and The Professionals had to make way for 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers and The Big Match was abandoned in favour of Songs of Praise, as chicken curry and spaghetti bolognese made way for lamb chops and casserole, as Dad’s armchair became Grandma Lake’s armchair, it began to dawn on everyone that this house that had for so long been a children’s house and then, briefly, a teenager’s house, was now, very definitely, an old person’s house.
Everyone had dealt with the change in their own way. Graham, in a show of masculine territorialness, had decided to decorate his bedroom and spent long hours testing various colours, painting and repainting until the dimensions of his room must have shrunk by some inches and the fumes sent Grandma Lake to bed with a migraine. Jennifer had selected a boy at school—Darren McKenzie—to go out with and spent all her free time at his house.
Charlotte stayed late after school and no one ever asked why. She read books in the library that weren’t on the curriculum (War and Peace, Animal Farm, Madame Bovary), she wandered aimlessly around the shopping precinct near school, avoiding the gangs of fifth-formers who gathered near the fountain and threw each other’s school bags in the water. And she spent at least three evenings a week and most of the weekend over at Zoe Findlay’s house.
Nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Aunt Caroline still hadn’t been down to visit.
Mum alone had carried on as though nothing had happened, vacuuming around Grandma Lake as though she were a fixture that came with the house, reducing her array of culinary dishes down to about five that all included potato, carrots and peas as though potato, carrots and peas were what she had secretly yearned to cook all her life.
Dad said very little on the subject of Grandma Lake but he didn’t have to. On a chilly March morning, some five months after Grandma Lake’s arrival, he had turfed the Austin out of the garage and onto the driveway and in a day-long flurry of shifting and rearranging and throwing out and rewiring and hammering had turned the garage into a den. Here he had moved the second-best armchair, the desk that had once been in the study, a bookcase, a transistor radio, his case of dusty old 45s (the Everly Brothers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Del Shannon, Dion and the Belmonts, Adam Faith), the old black-and-white portable television set that still occasionally worked and, finally, himself.
A sort of calm had descended.
Charlotte sat up, listening. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was closed. Downstairs the theme tune to Crossroads had just ended and in the bathroom Jennifer coughed and sobbed noisily into the toilet bowl. And tomorrow was the first day of the new school year. Not just any school year: her first day in the lower sixth form, Jennifer’s first in the upper sixth.
Tomorrow.
It was curious, mind-numbing even, to think of a tomorrow. To think of the rest of this evening. The next five minutes.
She wouldn’t go in to school. She would spend the day curled up in bed even if it meant Mum telephoning the doctor’s surgery. Perhaps she would never go in. Perhaps she would never get up.
Jennifer had stopped vomiting and was breathing loudly with jerky sobbing breaths as though she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
‘...an unlikely place to find a soup tureen.’
Crossroads had ended and in its place the carefully modulated voice of Derek Longstaff, the new Capital Tonight presenter, floated up the stairs from the lounge. Derek Longstaff had started the week before, replacing the previous presenter, much to Grandma Lake’s disgust. Each time he came on she scowled and said, ‘He’s not a patch on that Naomi girl.’
Charlotte closed her eyes.
From the bathroom the sound of the toilet flushing momentarily muffled the sobbing.
She opened her eyes. Soon Jennifer would emerge from the bathroom—and then what? Did she want to be found crouching here in the doorway? What was the alternative? She couldn’t go downstairs and sit with everyone watching television. She didn’t want to listen to Grandma Lake complaining about Derek Longstaff.
Funny that Grandma Lake was always Grandma Lake and never Grandma. It wasn’t as though Grandma Lake had to compete for a place with a plethora of other grandmas—she was it: the sole grandparent. Her real name was Bertha, which made you think of ocean liners and little cabins with narrow bunks—but no one ever called her that either.
Grandma Lake’s bedroom door was closed. You could almost imagine that behind the door it was still a study, with Dad’s old desk in there and, on it, the old gramophone and the small black typewriter from the fifties on which Mum had taught herself to touch-type.
Now, what had once been the study was cluttered with the dusty, faded and moth-eaten collection of items that was all Grandma Lake had to show for eighty-odd years of living (or was all that Dad had allowed her to salvage from the house in Oakton Way). On the day of her arrival last October they had all been press-ganged into helping to carry her belongings up the stairs: dented Art Deco lampshades, musty wooden bookshelves and boxes of spineless Catherine Cooksons and Dorothy L. Sayers and a Mrs Beeton, an oppressive Victorian wardrobe and a rotting tea chest bursting with heavy silks and tweeds and a number of tatty furry items that looked suspiciously as though they had once been attached to living creatures.
And Grandma Lake had stood in the middle of the room pointing and saying, ‘There, put it there! Oh, that old thing, I couldn’t bear to leave it. You be careful with that! Oh dear! Oh dear oh dear...’ Then she had sat down on the bed and said nothing.
On the mantelpiece and window sill Mum had placed a confusion of music boxes, ugly china and glass ornaments, empty brass candlesticks and yellowing photographs in ornate frames showing babies in long white christening gowns. Charlotte had recognised herself and Jennifer and Graham as babies. There was nothing more recent of any of them. Or perhaps Grandma Lake had a thing for baby photos, for there were photographs of Mum and Aunt Caroline too.
From the bathroom, the toilet flushed a second time.
Jennifer never ever threw up unless she was in the car. She’d been sick in the car on the journey home from Aunt Caroline’s wedding last summer—all over the Ordnance Survey map of Norfolk.
On Grandma Lake’s window sill there were also two much older photographs of people sporting between-the-wars fashions. One group was unmistakably a wedding party, presumably Grandma and Grandad Lake’s. The second photograph, in a tarnished silver frame, showed a pretty young woman of perhaps twenty-one done up in a stiff black skirt and lace-up boots, wearing an armband and a jaunty black cap. Over her left shoulder hung a bulky box-like bag that looked like a gas-mask box but must surely pre-date gas masks by a good ten or fifteen years. The young woman waved a hand rather coquettishly at the camera, the sun in her eyes so that it was hard to tell if she was smiling or frowning. She was standing in what appeared to be a bus depot.
On the day that Grandma Lake moved in Charlotte had made the mistake of picking up the photograph, vaguely wondering if this was Grandma Lake as a young woman. But Grandma Lake had heaved herself to her feet and informed her with some ceremony that she was holding the Only Surviv
ing Photograph of Great-Aunt Jemima.
No one had ever heard of Great-Aunt Jemima.
Grandma Lake had tapped the photograph meaningfully. Great-Aunt Jemima, her only sister, had died tragically during the General Strike of 1926 while on duty as a volunteer bus conductor—hence the bus depot, which was, she had explained, Acton Bus Garage—and during that turbulent and divisive period of Britain’s history this was where Great-Aunt Jemima had been briefly and dramatically stationed.
‘Turbulent and divisive’ was not how Grandma Lake had described the General Strike. ‘That daft strike’ had been her exact words, but if you were studying the Rebellions and Revolutions course in O-level history you had to grant such a pivotal event its full historical significance.
Jennifer had muttered some excuse and fled downstairs but Charlotte, whether due to guilt or embarrassment, had remained.
And so now they had a great-aunt who had died tragically during the General Strike. This was unusual and perhaps mildly interesting, though somehow it failed to have the same pathos as, say, a great-uncle lost at Passchendaele. And according to Grandma Lake, Jemima had only signed up as a bus conductor because she was sweet on one of the drivers. Not a very glorious reason to die—particularly, Grandma Lake had explained, as Jemima had had a husband and a three-month-old baby at the time.
Her death had come on the fourth day of the strike at seven twenty-five in the morning (Grandma Lake had been most particular about the time) somewhere near Chiswick when the driver of Jemima’s bus, a volunteer like Jemima, had taken a wrong turn and attempted to drive under a railway bridge. The bridge had proved too low and most of the top deck of the bus had been sheared off. Fortunately only four people had been on the top deck at the time—an elderly gentleman who had sustained a broken finger; a nanny and a one-year-old child who had both been thrown clear and who had, remarkably, sustained only mild cuts and bruises; and the bus conductor, Jemima, who’d been killed outright.
‘She were the only casualty in the whole strike,’ had been Grandma Lake’s summing up of the tragedy. ‘Lots of accidents and the like. Well, it’s to be expected, all those young men and girls driving about helter-skelter—wonder it wasn’t wholesale carnage. But no, on the whole, it went off remarkably well. Apart from poor Jemmy, of course.’
Charlotte had listened dutifully but henceforth had ensured she was never again alone in the room with Grandma Lake.
Now, nearly a year later, at a little before seven o’clock on Monday evening, it was safe to assume Grandma Lake was downstairs, dozing in front of Capital Tonight, and Dad’s old desk and the gramophone and Mum’s small black typewriter had been consigned to the garage, perhaps forever.
Everything had gone silent in the bathroom. Charlotte held her breath and realised that an elderly woman coming to live with you wasn’t the worst thing that could happen in the world.
CHAPTER SIX
AS JENNIFER WAS HANGING up the phone in her office and bleakly contemplating her career in retail, the Waverley University Graduations and Ceremonies Committee was in session.
This morning the talk was of academic dress.
‘I’m sorry, but I fail to see why Media Studies shouldn’t have the claret hood lined with silk of a lighter shade of claret and edged with gold silk,’ declared Professor Kendall, who was chairing the Academic Dress Sub-Committee meeting in the faculty meeting room. ‘After all, it’s in keeping with the rest of the faculty.’
‘It’s not the claret hood per se,’ replied one of the Media Studies lecturers, a thin, wiry lad of about twelve with a tufty goatee and impossibly skinny jeans. A series of sighs circled the table like a deflated Mexican wave. ‘It’s the lighter claret lining and the gold tassel,’ he explained. ‘We were told we could have malachite green and that we didn’t need a tassel.’
‘You. Have. To. Have. A. Tassel,’ replied Professor Kendall between gritted teeth, and somewhere near the window a pencil snapped.
Charlotte glanced at the clock above Professor Kendall’s head. It was nine forty-five on Wednesday morning. The meeting would have to be over by ten because the heads of department had a Finance Committee meeting at that time. Fifteen minutes.
It was time she said something. Made her mark on the meeting.
She shifted uneasily in her chair, aware that most of the fifteen committee members seated around the oval table had spoken, aware that if she’d just said something right at the very beginning of the meeting, she could relax now and zone out till the meeting ended. As it was, she knew she was in for an uncomfortable time until she could think of something to say.
Tom Pitney, seated beside Professor Kendall, had already given his report on Smalt and Begonia as defined in the British Colour Council Dictionary of Standard Colours, 1951 edition. Having given his report, Tom had taken no further part in the meeting and instead was scribbling timetabling revisions idly on his university notepad. Beside Tom, Bert Humphries, the department’s senior lecturer, sat with a weary air about him, emerging from his stupor just long enough to challenge the assertion made by the Professor of Politics that a second colour in a hood lining must go to five centimetres by citing a little-known Australian university that used two and a half centimetres as its hood-lining measurement. The comment had been met with derision and raised eyebrows of the ‘What can you expect from an Australian university?’ kind and Bert had relapsed into silence.
Dr Ashley Lempriere was there too, tapping a pencil with loud impatience. Charlotte watched her through narrowed eyes. What was she doing here? There was no way a Canadian exchange professor was the least bit interested in academic dress, except perhaps her own academic dress when collecting some honorary degree from somewhere. Charlotte’s eyes scanned the room. There were a lot of professors and department heads around the table and Lempriere’s contract ended in June. Was she preparing the way for an extension? Tenure? A takeover?
She tightened her grip on her pen and took a calming breath. There was less than fifteen minutes of the meeting left. She squeezed her eyes shut. Concentrate. She must concentrate.
TEENAGE SUICIDE IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM!
The problem was she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
She didn’t like the fact that she still felt guilty more than twenty years later. That she felt guilty despite having done more than enough over the years (some of it pretty morally dubious—lying to save her sister’s marriage being one glaring example) to make up for it. And she couldn’t understand why the bad things she had done over the years (borrowing people’s cars without asking them, moving out of houses when the rent was due, lying on her CV on two occasions, pretending to be ill to avoid family Christmases) caused her no pangs of remorse whatsoever, not a shred of regret, and yet she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
Of course, none of those other things had ended up with someone trying to kill themselves.
Except that it hadn’t ended. Nothing ever ended—something happened and then something else happened and so it went on. And the most recent thing that had happened was that Jennifer had gone on national television and said all that.
It couldn’t possibly be because of Darren McKenzie, could it?
She tried to remember. Jennifer hadn’t cried for long. A couple of nights. Maybe three. By the end of that summer she’d been seeing someone else. Hadn’t she? Or was that the following summer? At any rate, she’d got over Darren.
The clock above Professor Kendall’s head inched forward to nine forty-nine. If she could just think of something to say. Of course, the obvious thing to say, the one thing that every single person seated around the table was thinking but hadn’t said, was: Isn’t this the most absurd waste of all our time and who the hell really gives a flying fuck what colours the Media Studies people choose to graduate in and why can’t we all just pack up and go home right now?
The clock moved on to nine fifty and Charlotte twisted her pen around and around in her hands.
As far as she could reca
ll, the main thing about Darren McKenzie was that he came from the north and wore a red-and-white-striped football scarf, which was the colours of Stoke City Football Club, when every other boy at Henry Morton Secondary had worn blue and white QPR or Chelsea scarves or the navy and white of Spurs who, that year, had won the Cup. This, and the way he said ‘bath’ so that it rhymed with ‘maths’, made Darren distinctive. Other than these scintillating differences, Darren McKenzie had been average-looking with acne and sticking-out ears and the usual Saturday job at Your Price Records.
Were our lives so dull, Charlotte wondered, that the arrival of a boy from Stoke seemed exciting?
Jennifer had started going out with Darren McKenzie not long after Grandma Lake had come to live with them, which meant Jennifer was over at the McKenzies’ most evenings and so had avoided the nightly trauma of Grandma Lake sucking vegetable soup through her dentures and dribbling it onto the nylon tablecloth. By the start of the summer holidays, Jennifer and Darren had been going out for perhaps ten months, which was some sort of milestone for Henry Morton Secondary and a world record for Jennifer.
Going out with Darren McKenzie meant being seen out with him by as many people as possible—the more people that saw them lighting up a Silk Cut at the school gate or sharing a vanilla milkshake at Wimpey or queuing up to see Conan the Barbarian or whatever was on at the Palace, the more significant the relationship was. ‘People’, of course, referred only to other kids in Jennifer’s year at school.
Such ostentation had been, and still was, inexplicable. Charlotte had spent her entire school life staring at her shoes, sitting at the back and generally going out of her way to avoid being seen by anyone and could not have imagined herself telling even her closest friend anything more revealing than her opinion on who had shot J.R. Ewing.
Right up until that Thursday at the end of term. The Thursday of the maths O-level.
‘Would you believe, some people actually try to get themselves onto these committees...’ murmured Geethan Chandrasekaran, the Professor of Celtic Runes, who had squeezed in next to Charlotte at the beginning of the meeting and who had been trying to catch her eye for the last half-hour.