by Liz Trenow
“Gran?” Emily’s voice seems to come from somewhere far away. “Are you cross with me for not asking you first?”
I have waited so long for news of Gwen, anything. Now I know she’s still alive, the idea of seeing her again, of asking for her forgiveness, seems suddenly the most important thing in the world. I clear my throat and manage to croak, “Of course not, my lovely. I’m thrilled you’ve found her.”
“But this Catherine person doesn’t seem sure it’s a good idea to get in touch.”
The words jiggle on the page: It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Time might be running out. I don’t care what Catherine Ryan thinks.
“How do you do this googling thing?” I ask. “Would it find a telephone number?”
“I’ll give it a try,” she says, getting up. “Back in a mo.”
We google, and we ring directory enquiries, but there are no numbers for G. Collins or C. Ryan at that address. Then clever-clogs Emily suggests we ring the nearest hospital, in Dorchester.
“They won’t let me talk to her,” I say, losing my nerve.
“Worth a try?”
“Go on then,” I agree reluctantly. It is useless to resist when a Verner jaw juts like that.
She grabs the telephone and dials.
“Good afternoon, I was wondering if I could speak to a Miss Gwen Collins,” Emily says. “I think she’s a patient at your hospital.”
There is a voice at the other end and she punches the air with her fist and puts her hand over the mouthpiece, “Bull’s-eye! They’re putting me through to the ward.”
After a long silence, she says, “Hello. Is that the ward sister? Do you have a Gwen Collins on your ward? Is there any chance I could speak to her? Or Catherine Ryan…I’m a very close friend…Yes, practically related.”
I am transfixed by my granddaughter’s chutzpah. I could never be so bold. After another agonizing pause, there’s a voice at the other end.
Emily squeaks with surprise but quickly gathers her composure. “Is that Catherine Ryan? This is Emily, Lily’s granddaughter. You wrote to me?”
She points silently at the phone and then to me, suggesting I should take it. I shake my head and she says, “Hold on a tick, I’ll put you on to Gran.”
She hands the receiver to me. It feels as though I am taking a grenade packed with emotion that could explode at any moment. My hands shake so much I nearly drop it, and my voice comes out awkward and tremulous. “Miss Ryan? This is Lily. So sorry to trouble you,” I manage to say.
“I thought we might hear from you,” she says calmly, apparently unfazed. “Your granddaughter’s obviously a very determined young woman. But I’m sorry you can’t speak to Gwen right now, she’s gone to have a scan.” I detect a sing-song lilt to her voice, Irish perhaps?
“How is she?” I can hardly bear to hear the answer.
“She’s rallied a bit today. If the scan’s okay, they might let her come home.”
I struggle to find a way of asking the question. Finally I just say it straight. “Miss Ryan, I am so pleased to have found you and I very much want to see Gwen again. Do you think she would agree?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” she says. “But when she’s feeling a bit more with it, I’ll ask her, shall I?”
“I don’t want to put any pressure on her.”
“Even if she says yes, she’ll be too unwell to travel, so you’d have to come to us. Could you manage that?”
“I’m sure I could persuade my son to drive me,” I say, crossing my fingers. Emily is nodding energetically. “I’ll give you my number and wait to hear from you, shall I?”
“That’d be grand,” she says.
• • •
It’s been only three days but feels like months. The questions chase each other exhaustingly around my head. What’s happening? Is Gwen home yet? How is she? Has Catherine mentioned me? Has she asked her? What if she says no?
In the meantime, I have been working on the family.
“Are you crazy, Mum?” Simon says. “You struggle to get to the loo on your own and you’re talking about traveling all that way?”
“Don’t be so rude to your mother,” Louise chides. “But seriously, Lily, it’s a long way. Five hours’ drive at least. I’m sure your doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”
“She’s got to go, Mum. It’s so important,” says my faithful granddaughter. I smile at her gratefully.
“I don’t care what the doctor says,” I say firmly. “If you won’t drive me, I’ll take a taxi.”
At last, Catherine telephones. “Gwen’s back home,” she says. “She’s very weak but they’ve got the pain medication pretty much sorted. She would like to see you, Lily, very much. Can you come? Soonish?”
I feel tearful with relief. “Would later this week do? Say Thursday or Friday?”
Either, she says.
“Thank you so much, Catherine. I do look forward to meeting you.”
“Please, call me Cath,” she says. “See you soon.”
• • •
My son has caved in. He will drive and we will stay in a bed-and-breakfast overnight on the way, to break the journey. Emily’s determined to come too, and she’s booked somewhere for the three of us, with a bedroom for me on the ground floor.
I feel foolishly nervous, as if it’s a job interview. At night, I lie in bed rehearsing what I will say. During the day, I unearth outfits unworn for years and exhaust myself trying them on.
“What do you think, blue or beige?” I ask Emily, holding the cardigans against me.
“Blue every time, Gran. Bin the beige,” she replies, with that wonderful conviction of the young.
My home hairdresser comes to smarten me up—my hair is still thick and straight, but all white now, of course. We take the photo album and Emily helps me wrap (with ribbon, no tricky sticky tape) a copy of the book.
As we draw up in the unpaved lane outside a small stone cottage—the middle in a row of three—a person I take to be Cath is standing in the porch. She’s a younger woman, I guess in her late sixties, wearing a gardening apron over jeans and a tee-shirt. She could be Gwen’s sister, has the same sturdy build, pale skin with freckles, and streaks of ginger in unkempt graying curls.
The front garden is overgrown but there are a few splashes of late color: lanky yellow roses and the last red blossoms at the top of tall hollyhock stems swaying in the breeze.
“You must be Cath,” I say from the open car window. She nods. “Meet my son Simon and granddaughter Emily—she’s the one who tracked you down.”
“So pleased to meet you all,” she says. “Come on in.”
Emily and Simon support me as I shuffle up the gravel path with my sticks, and when we reach the porch, she suggests I rest a moment. The wooden steps settle and my bones creak in unison.
“I’m trying to get on top of it all, without much success,” Cath says, waving at the garden with a rueful smile, a bundle of bindweed still in her hand. “I had this idea of smartening up for your visit, but it’s a lost cause I’m afraid.”
“How is she?” I ask.
“Well, she’s frail, as you’ll see. But the pain medicine’s working okay at the moment. She’s really looking forward to this.”
The front doorway is so small Simon has to stoop, and inside, the ceilings are almost as low. The room smells of wood smoke. At first I think it’s empty; a threadbare three-piece suite is set around a blackened brick fireplace and a low table laden with books and newspapers. On the walls are sketches and watercolor landscapes I assume to be Gwen’s. No nudes, though.
“They’re here, Gwen.” Cath leads our slow procession toward the other end of the room where a couple of high-backed winged armchairs are placed close to each other, facing away from us. Beyond these are French windows through which I can see another overgrown patch of greenery with fruit trees.
“Lily, is that you?” That voice, deep and smoky, is so familiar the tears prickle behind my eyes. But as I shuffle around an
d come in sight of her, it’s as if someone has played a trick on me. There, in one of the chairs, is not Gwen but a small crumpled person with hardly any hair, whose bones shine through shrivelled skin like a fledgling bird. She gazes at us, slightly bemused, as Emily guides me to another chair and helps me sit.
Cath offers to make tea and the others go with her, tactfully leaving us alone.
“Gwen?” The pale green eyes, huge in her shrunken face, slowly focus into that old intense look. Skeletal hands reach toward me. I am surprised to find them so warm, the grip so strong. I remember the deft way she manipulated tiny picking shears, how her fingers traveled across a warp, detecting broken threads just by the feel. And those hands softly on the back of my neck, stroking away my nightmares.
“Lily? Is it really you?” she says in that surprisingly robust voice.
I nod, unable to speak.
“I’ve been thinking about you so much lately,” she says. Fat pools of tears brim in the red-rimmed eyes.
“Me too,” I murmur and pass a handkerchief—I’ve brought two. After a bit, Cath returns with the tea tray and we are now both sobbing openly but laughing at ourselves too. Our hands are entwined like a lovers’ knot, neither of us willing to let go.
“Would you look at the pair of you,” Cath says delightedly, setting down the tray. “You seem to be getting on very well. We’re going to take our tea into the garden. Leave you two to your memories. Can you serve yourselves? Shout if you need anything.”
By the time I finish pouring the tea, my tears have dried and my voice is stronger. “She’s a lovely woman, Gwen.”
“I know,” she says fondly. “We’ve been together thirty-five years. A long time. I’m very blessed.”
I sit back, take a deep breath. “Gwen, there’s something…” I gasp with exasperation, struggling to recall the words I’ve rehearsed in my head so many times.
“It’s all right,” she says. “You don’t have to say it.”
I’m determined not to falter, to say it properly.
“The way Cath supports you now, that’s how you were for me back then. The warp to my weft. Remember? After VE Day, I tried to find you, ask you to come back and see if we could start again. But you disappeared. No trace.”
“That’s how I wanted it,” she mutters.
“I just felt so guilty I couldn’t forgive myself. What I need to know now is,” she looks up at me sharply, wondering what I’m going to say, “can you forgive me?”
She doesn’t reply at once, and I find myself holding my breath, fearful of how she’ll respond.
Then she says, simply, “You hurt me terribly. If I’d stayed any longer the bitterness would have been like this bloody cancer of mine, eating away at me. In the end, the best thing was just to try to cut it out. Brutal, I know, but for the best.”
She reaches forward and takes a sip of tea as I listen to the swish of the pulse in my ears. I know she hasn’t finished. She puts the cup down with a shaky hand and takes a moment to summon reserves of scarce strength.
“Mum was ill and at first it took all my energy to nurse her. When she died, I fell into a black hole for a while. Eventually I pulled myself together and went to a counselor. Cath and I met in the waiting room—she had this crazy idea she could be cured of women. Hah.” Gwen laughs in that familiar stagey way. “We soon put paid to that. The therapist was rubbish, but Cath soon healed my depression.”
She pauses and smiles at the memories. “As time went by, I thought about you less and less, and after a while realized that I had forgiven you, after all. And now all I remember is how much I loved you.”
Her words fill the silent room and wrap themselves around me like a balm. My shoulders relax, and the pains in my legs are easing. After a bit, she squeezes my hand and the spell is broken. Before long, we are cackling like a couple of crazy old witches over some long forgotten joke when the others come back from the garden.
“So who’s this handsome young fellow?” Gwen says, peering up at him.
“The ninth generation of Verners,” I say. “Don’t you recognize the Huguenot genes?”
“Simon Merrison,” he says, bending to shake her birdlike hand in his great paw. “Lily’s son. Very pleased to meet you.” He sits down beside her in the pool of sunshine filtering through the dusty panes of the French windows.
“And this is my granddaughter, Emily Merrison,” I say.
Gwen looks at her with that intense gaze I remember so well. “What a beautiful girl. The image of your gran when she was your age, Emily.”
Emily blushes at the compliment, just as I used to.
“I recall a Merrison,” Gwen says, turning a quizzical gaze to me. “Michael, wasn’t it? Yarn merchant from the Midlands somewhere. The one with the curly hair. You married him in the end?”
I nod, tears pricking the back of my eyes as I recall the photos in the funeral slide show of that tall, confident young man with the almost violet eyes, who loved Battenberg cake.
“Good-looking boy, I always thought. Didn’t he go to Syria or someplace and send us back that troublesome yarn?” she says.
“He came to Westbury a few weeks after VE day and we got married in 1947,” I say, ignoring her mention of troublesome yarn. “We were married for nearly fifty-three years—very happily.”
“My grandpa,” Emily says fondly. “He was a lovely man.”
“The kindest man on earth,” I say. “Absolutely the best husband anyone could have wished for.”
“I take it from the past tense that he’s not alive?”
“He died earlier this year,” I say. “But my son and his wife and their two wonderful children have moved in with me to The Chestnuts. I’m a lucky woman.”
“Ah, The Chestnuts,” she sighs. “I lived there too, you know, for a short time,” she says to Emily and Simon. “Such a fine house. Those wonderful Constable views.”
“The views haven’t changed,” he says. “The house has central heating and a few other mod cons, but otherwise it’s much as it was.”
“The tennis court?”
“That’s gone, I’m afraid. We needed space for more car parking.”
“And the kitchen garden? The smell of gooseberries warmed in the sun always takes me back.”
“Sorry, that too.”
She sighs wearily, and turns to me. “And did brave brother John come home safely?”
“Yes, he did, but thin and looking terribly aged,” I say. “He and Vera finally got married just before Christmas ’45, which perked him up a bit, and he worked at the mill for a while. But he couldn’t bear it. After all those years of being cooped up, he was desperate for wide-open spaces. He started volunteering for the local nature reserve, then got a full-time job as a warden. Badly paid, but he loved it. Stayed there till he retired.”
“Is John still alive?” Gwen asks.
“No, he died five years ago. And Vera got dementia, sadly, spent her last few years in a home. I couldn’t manage looking after her myself.”
“By God, old age is not for the faint-hearted,” she says, and we laugh in mutual sympathy.
“So you ended up running the mill single-handed, after all?”
“You always said I had management potential.”
Gwen smiles. “You remembered.”
“Mum was an excellent managing director,” Simon says. “Highly respected by everyone in the business.”
“You didn’t believe me at first, did you?” she says drily. “But you proved my point in the end.”
I take the photograph album out of my bag and we hand it around, exclaiming happily at shared memories. It is still hard to believe that somehow, wonderfully, I can face them without flinching, even welcome them. The ghosts have been outed, as Emily said the other day about a corrupt politician. It seems appropriate; they’re better out than in.
“How’s business?” Gwen asks, handing back the album.
Simon tells her about the ups and downs of the past few decades: rapier
machines that have done away with shuttles and weave at twenty times the speed, the opening up of Chinese raw silk supplies, the decline of the tie and menswear trade, the royal wedding dresses they have woven. And the success of a new business: the silk furnishings trade, reintegrated into the firm in 1980 after splitting away in a Verner brothers’ feud a century ago.
She listens intently, but I can see the effort of fighting the pain is draining the animation from her face. We will have to leave soon and it is unbearable to contemplate. I know that I will never see her again.
Then Emily says, “We forgot the book, Gran. It’s in the car, I’ll go and get it.”
She comes back and helps Gwen unwrap the parcel. On the book jacket is a black-and-white photograph of Father, standing proudly with one of the new power looms they had just installed in the late ’20s, with Jim Williams beside him.
“How wonderful, I’d forgotten about Harold’s book. How did you get it published?”
“Simon and I, we finished writing it together,” I say. “Emily typed it into the computer and scanned all the photographs so we could get it printed as part of Verners’ two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations.”
She’s turning the pages, looking at the photographs, touching the small samples of silk pasted into the index. But she has missed the frontispiece. I lean over to open it, and she reads out loud what I have written there: “To Gwen, who taught me about warp and weft, and helped me through the dark times. See page 122.” She turns to the page, and there is the photo of the two of us standing outside the double doors at the front of Old Mill, squinting into the sunshine. The caption reads: “Verners’ wartime management team, Lily Verner and Gwen Collins, in 1943.”
“I don’t remember that being taken. What a pair of scruffs,” she says, laughing, showing it to Cath. “Whatever was I doing in those dreadful turn-ups?” She closes the book and turns to me, more seriously. “But we did the business, didn’t we?”
“We definitely did the business. Thanks largely to you, we held it together and did the business.”
As we start to leave, Cath helps her to her feet and I totter over to embrace her. I feel the bones beneath her skin, the frail arms that weakly hug me. When I put my lips to it, her cheek feels like parchment, but is warm with life.