Vivienne took my hand, pulling me up from the breakfast table and, aping Ethel Merman, began to sing lines from Annie Get Your Gun. Daisy, trailing dirt and wet in from the garden, where she’d obviously been doing something gardenerish, joined in singing right on cue with Dad and Vivienne while Malvolio, used to such bursting forth of song, slunk despondently towards his basket, tail between his legs, as the three of them went for it. I looked at the dog, at Mum, in a world of her own clearing the breakfast table, and at Vivienne, Dad and Daisy united in their love of drama and musicals, and wished I had a tail and basket of my own.
I knew I was home.
*
Over the next couple of hours, I must have called Dominic’s mobile ten times, all to no avail. I sent as many emails, my tone ranging from jolly and friendly, so as not to frighten him into not replying, to pleading with him just to ring and talk to me, and then downright murderous where I left him in no doubt as to the state of his manly bits and pieces were he ever to cross my path in the future. And then, worried that I might be accused of stalking and sending threatening letters, reverted to jolly and friendly once more. At the end of the day I needed a reference from him. I couldn’t envisage applying to top architectural and property development companies back in London for a job and, when asked to supply references from my present post, have to say sorry, can’t do that, I was shagging the boss and his wife found out. Not overly professional. I wrote a final, grovelling email to Dominic saying that the least he could supply – if his tanned lithesome body was no longer on the menu – was a glowing reference as to my experience, capabilities and downright brilliance as a property developer.
And I was good. I knew I had an eye for finding the right property, haggling the price and then drawing up the plans for developments. Problem was that although I knew I was pretty good, and Dominic, having taken me on in the first place after seeing the projects I’d worked on previously, knew I was pretty good, I’d only done a couple of internships and temporary work before landing my dream job with Abraham Developments. Any prospective employer worth their salt would want to know what I’d been doing in the past eighteen months and why there was no one willing to back my application.
‘Right, Charlie, come on, you can’t stay up here all day hiding away.’ Mum bustled in, her arms full of clean towels and spare loo rolls. ‘Unpack these black bin bags, let’s get the dirty things washed and the rest hung in your wardrobe and then I have a couple of jobs for you.’
I groaned inwardly. Hell, this was like being a teenager again when I used to hide in my room.
‘Jobs?’ I frowned up at Mum from the depths of my bed and laptop. ‘I’m actually doing some work, Mum.’
She laughed. ‘Yes, you used to say that when you were sixteen, too. Revising, doing homework: anything to get out of peeling the potatoes or hanging up your wet towels.’
I sighed. ‘OK. What is it?’
‘We need to sort Granddad.’
I stared at her. ‘Which one? Aren’t they both, you know, dead?’
Mum tutted. ‘Of course they are, and Grandpa Maddison well and truly with his maker, I should hope, these past ten years, but Granddad Black is still in the utility.’
‘The utility? What’s he doing there? Has he come back to haunt us? He’s been dead two years now, hasn’t he?’
‘I feel so guilty every time I look up at the top of the utility units, Charlie.’ Mum pulled a face. ‘He’s up there with Gin and Tonic.’
I stared at her. ‘You’ve put Granddad in the utility and you leave him a gin and tonic? What every night? Or on his birthday and Christmas? What?’
Mum tutted. ‘Oh, you haven’t met the kittens, have you? Well, not so much kittens now, actually. Brother and sister, and feral little things they are too. They spend most of the time out in the paddock but come into the utility at night. They go up on top of the units to get out of the way and to sleep, but my father’s up there, too. I put him up there after the cremation. I didn’t like to put him in the garage; it gets nippy out there in winter and full of fumes too. He was always a bit asthmatic.’
‘Mum, you’re not telling me Granddad’s been roosting up on the top of the cupboards with two cats for the last two years?’
‘Well, no, the cats have only been with us a few months: your dad rescued them from some farmyard in the summer. Anyway, I don’t think the cats mind, darling,’ Mum said seriously. ‘In fact, I think they quite enjoy his company. Cats have this spiritual connection with the dead, don’t they? Wasn’t it the Egyptians who thought so? Anyway, my father, from what I knew of him, was a rather nice man. Quiet, but intelligent. I’m sure the cats haven’t been spooked with him sharing their bedroom.’
She broke off as Daisy came into my room, red faced and glowing from two hours in the garden, ‘Did you know Granddad was still up in the utility?’ I asked.
‘Still? Mum, you promised you’d do something with him when I was home at Easter.’ She shivered. ‘I really think it’s weird he’s still in the house. It probably means he’s in purgatory, unable to go up or down, suspended in a world of Persil, Kitekat and muddy wellingtons.’
‘Why have you never scattered him?’ I asked Mum as she fiddled with tying curtains and smoothing my duvet cover.
‘It’s your Granny Nancy’s fault really. You know what she’s like.’ Granny Nancy was Mum’s mum, and she and Mum had, allegedly, never been close, my mum being brought up, for much of the time, by her own grandmother, Granny Madge. God, all these grandmothers and not one grandfather left – apart from Granddad Black, forever trapped in his box in the utility...
‘Your granny Nancy and my father were divorced years ago when I was still a little girl – she’d have driven him into an even earlier grave if he’d continued to be married to her – and she denied all responsibility for his ashes. She told me, as his only next of kin, that I should do with him as I felt fit, and I really wanted to scatter his ashes where he’d always been happiest.’
‘The golf course,’ Daisy and I chorused in unison.
‘Absolutely.’
‘So, why haven’t you?’ I asked.
‘Because your granddad’s golf course committee have a policy of not allowing it. I asked, immediately after the funeral, and they said no way.’
‘Oh, come on, Mum, who’s to know?’ Daisy frowned.
‘How about the golfers whose way we obstruct just as they are about to get a hole in one?’ she said tartly. ‘You know what golfers are like about their precious greens. So, Charlie, that’s job number one for you today. I want you to come with me to scatter Granddad’s ashes. Take your mind off things.’
‘I doubt it,’ I muttered. ‘Probably make me wish you were scattering me as well, seeing my life is over.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Daisy frowned. ‘It’s just one adulterous bastard man. Get over it. Wash your hair, get your lippy on and get out there. And if you’re as good as you say you are, you’ll soon find another job. And this time don’t bother with the man. Concentrate on the job.’
‘Like you, you mean?’ I said somewhat sourly, looking at the dirt under Daisy’s fingernails and her glowing face.
‘I’ve not been dumped on from a great height. I don’t need to take my mind off things. I just love being outside.’
‘Right, girls, while you’re arguing about whose job is more fulfilling, Granddad is languishing another day with the cats.’
‘And the other job?’ I asked, heading, without any enthusiasm, for the bathroom and a shower.
‘Great-granny Madge.’ Mum said firmly. ‘It’s Saturday and I’ve not been to visit her for over a week. She’d love to see both you girls.’
So, instead of spending Saturday in bed with Dominic in London, licking croissant crumbs from his neck and chest before sliding myself onto him once more, I was scattering one grandparent on a golf course and then spending what remained of the afternoon in the old folks’ home with another. Great stuff. I glanced out at the rain, a
t the dark clouds gathering on the northern hills, and made it all even worse by realising that, as far as I could remember, Dominic had never spent more than a handful of Saturdays at the flat with me in Bloomsbury anyway.
*
‘We can’t leave him here,’ Mum frowned as Daisy instructed her to pull in at the gates of Midhope Golf Club. ‘It’s not allowed, I told you.’
‘Mum, where did Granddad spend all his time?’ Daisy reached for the box beside her on the back seat.
‘Well, here…’
‘Exactly. The golf course. We have to leave him here. Gosh, I never realised he’d be so heavy,’ she added, pulling him onto her knee. ‘Do you reckon big fat people’s ashes are heavier than little slim ones?’
‘Daisy, do you mind?’ Mum was beginning to look a bit weepy. ‘I’ve got to know my father a lot better these past couple of years than I ever did when he was alive.’
I glanced behind me at Daisy, who was cradling Granddad Black with some reverence. What was Mum going on about?
‘I’ve spent quite some time with him in the utility,’ she went on. ‘We’ve discussed whether to come out of Europe – he’d have definitely voted to stay in – and what Zimbabwe should do about Mugabe. He wasn’t very good at deciding what to have for supper, but…’
‘Mum,’ I said gently, taking her arm and indicating she should stop the engine. ‘I know he wasn’t a huge part of your life when you were growing up, but you obviously did get to know him a little better recently.’ I turned once more to Daisy, who was trying not to laugh. ‘Now, you want to leave him where he’s been happy, don’t you? He spent virtually every day here after he retired and moved back to Midhope. We’re going to leave him here. Come on.’
Somewhat reluctantly, Mum followed Daisy and me as we skirted the perimeter wall with Granddad, looking for a way in. The rain was becoming more persistent. I pulled up the hood of Mum’s plum-coloured quilted dog-walking coat I’d borrowed, seeing my own coat was still on the peg in the office. It made me look like the Queen: a headscarf and a couple of corgis and I’d be a dead ringer. I bet anything Milly Taylor, whose desk was next to mine, would filch my lovely sheepskin once she knew I wasn’t coming back.
‘Charlie? Charlie, are you listening?’ Daisy pulled at the hood covering my head. ‘We’re going to have to go back to the car and drive him round to the far edge of the golf course. We can’t just blatantly walk up the drive, and there’s no other way in from this side.’
We retraced our steps back to the car, Granddad becoming decidedly soggy as the heavens opened.
‘Maybe we should leave it for a better day,’ Mum said. ‘You know, wait until the sun comes out.’
‘Mum, this isn’t an outing to the seaside,’ Daisy snapped. She was obviously getting thoroughly fed up and thrust Granddad towards me. The cardboard-taped box was beginning to lose its rigidity as it soaked up the rain; all we needed was for it to split and Granddad to be spilled unceremoniously onto the pavement amongst the crisp packets, fag ends and dog shit.
Five minutes later we were back where we started. Mum drove for ten minutes through the next few villages before taking a couple of right-hand turns down bumpy lanes and overgrown farm tracks, pulling up on the edge of a large coppice of trees that abutted the golf course.
‘Perfect,’ Daisy smiled. ‘Come on.’
‘You don’t think he’ll be a bit lonely out here all by himself?’ I said doubtfully as we stood amongst the giant oaks and sycamores and I opened the box to reveal a plastic bag of grey lumpy ash. ‘I’d be really scared out here by myself at night.’
‘He’ll miss the cats,’ Mum added.
‘There’ll be foxes,’ Daisy said somewhat impatiently. ‘And squirrels and birds… Oh, and golfers.’ She attempted nonchalance as three hearty-looking women in waterproofs suddenly appeared in front of us.
‘Afternoon,’ one trilled in our direction. ‘Lovely day for it.’
‘Does she mean for scattering granddads?’ Daisy asked, giggling.
‘I think she’s being ironic,’ I said sarcastically. ‘OK, they’ve gone. Is the coast clear?’
I took a handful of the ashes, my black leather gloves turning white in the process, and looked around for a good place to scatter.
‘Hang on,’ Mum said suddenly, staying my hand. ‘Shouldn’t we sing something?’
‘What?’ Daisy asked. ‘“So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye?”’
Mum stared at her. ‘He wasn’t German.’
Daisy tutted. ‘OK, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”?’
‘“Going Underground”?’ by The Jam,’ I sang, giggling.
‘Now I think you’re both being disrespectful,’ Mum tutted in turn.
‘And you weren’t, putting him on a shelf with feral cats?’ Daisy said indignantly.
In the end, we sang four verses of ‘Fight the Good Fight’, scattering a handful of ashes on the downbeat at the end of each line. Never having done anything like it before, I was amazed at just how much there was; it seemed never ending, but we did manage to get quite a bit of him onto the actual green, which pleased Mum.
Once we’d finished it was mid-afternoon and growing dark and miserable in the way only a November day can. The day reflected my mood. I was shattered and beginning to feel depressed again as the reality of my situation hit me once more now that the excitement of sending Granddad to that great golf course in the sky was over. I wanted to go home.
‘No, no,’ Mum said firmly. ‘Job number two, if you remember. We’re off to see Great-granny Madge.’
4
Great-granny Madge, Mum’s gran, was, at the last count, ninety-four and still going strong. She’d lived alone – apart from various moth-eaten cats and dogs – as long as I could remember in an untidy bungalow on the other side of Midhope, perhaps fifteen minutes or so from where we lived in the village of Westenbury. While the bungalow had always been in need of a good dust round, according to Granny Nancy – my Mum’s mum and Madge’s only daughter – the garden, where Granny Madge had spent much of her day, regardless of the weather, could have been a model for the lid of one of those chocolate boxes full of strawberry creams and sickly Turkish Delight. It was obvious from which gene pool Daisy had been handed her love of, and ability for, gardening.
To my shame, I’d not seen Madge since Granny Nancy and Mum had moved her from her bungalow into a care home, six months previously when it became obvious, after breaking her femur falling off a ladder as she pruned her wisteria, she was no longer capable of living alone.
‘I’m not intending to stay here for ever, you know,’ Granny Madge stated crossly as soon as the three of us trooped in and found her staring out of the window at the rain and gathering dark, an abandoned gardening book on her knee ‘They’re all so bloody old in here. Old codgers who sit watching TV all day or sleeping. I need to be getting back to my garden. There’s jobs to be done.’
‘Hello, Granny Madge,’ Daisy said, sitting down beside her and giving her a kiss. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about your garden – there’s not a great deal to be done this time of year.’
‘I thought you said there was loads…’ I trailed off as Daisy glared at me.
‘Would you like me to go over there next week and see what’s needed?’ Daisy asked. ‘In fact, can’t we take you home for the afternoon and you can show me?’ It was Mum’s turn to glare at Daisy.
‘You can all stop glaring at each other,’ Granny Madge said crossly. ‘I’m not in my dotage yet even though you’ve put me in here. I’m fully aware that you,’ she nodded towards Mum, who had the grace to look embarrassed, ‘and especially Nancy, are wanting to sell the bungalow from under my feet. But you can’t. You do know that. I’m perfectly capable, once this damned leg is up and running again, of returning home, and I fully intend to do so.’
‘Look, Granny,’ Mum said, placating, ‘why don’t we see what happens once you’re all mended?’
‘Kate,’ Granny
spoke in measured tones, ‘I’m not a child so stop treating me like one.’
‘I’m well aware you’re not a child,’ Mum said gently, ‘but it’s not safe, you going back to the bungalow by yourself. And you’d hate having someone to live in with you.’
‘Hell, I certainly would. I’ve lived far too long by myself to consider flat sharing.’
Daisy and I both looked at each other and giggled. Granny Madge laughed too. ‘God, you two girls, don’t ever get to my age. It’s bloody awful. And avoid hellholes like this. They’re determined to call me Poppet or Dearie and feed me mush on a spoon. I’m dying for a decent steak and a good bottle of red. If you want to bring me anything, girls, a bottle of Merlot would be very much appreciated. And then there’s the damned singalongs, for heaven’s sake and the woman who comes to do our hair once a week. She ended up giving me a lacquered helmet; so ageing.’ Granny Madge patted Daisy’s knee and then looked hard at me. ‘Not seen you for a while, Charlotte. Been busy in London?’ Before I could reply, she went on, ‘Some man, I suppose? Yes, I know what that’s like. Nothing else matters when you’re feeling so in love that you forget everyone else. Being in love makes one terribly selfish, of course, but better to have known that passion than not.’ She looked at me intently as I sat, embarrassed, unable to speak, wanting to cry and, for some reason, tell her everything, but then she smiled and the moment passed.
‘You’ve a couple more visitors, Madge.’ The woman who’d opened the door to us earlier popped her head round the door. ‘You are popular today, lovey.’ The opening bars from some popular TV quiz show followed by a burst of canned laughter, plus what was presumably the lingering smell of the residents’ lunch came into the room with her.
An attractive blonde woman, in her early forties, was walking towards us, ushering forwards a young girl who was much younger than either Daisy or me, but who was carrying a very tiny baby in her arms. Granny Madge frowned, peering over her spectacles as she appeared to work out whether she knew them. Mum didn’t seem to know who they were but stood up smiling as the older woman stopped in front of Granny.
Coming Home To Holly Close Farm Page 3