by Eleanor Wood
‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘I’m here for you.’
I wasn’t sure how things slipped this far downhill. It had happened so gradually, I didn’t notice it. I guess that’s how it always happens.
‘Have a lovely holiday,’ he said when he left my house the next morning. ‘Lucky you, I’ve never had a holiday. I’ve always had to work too hard. I think it will be good for us to have a break from each other.’
After he left, as usual, I felt unsettled and found myself crying for no reason, and not just because of the inevitable post-sex bleeding-when-I-shit situation. What did ‘having a break’ mean? Was I allowed to text him? I didn’t like to ask in case it made him cross. This was terrible timing to be parted from him for two weeks. Things felt so shaky. I was very anxious.
I was still hopeful that I could make things work, so I couldn’t tell any of my friends about this. Besides, it was all so nebulous. Sometimes we had rough sex that went a bit too far. He hadn’t actually ever hit me; he threatened to once, during a minor argument that escalated quickly, but afterwards he insisted that I had misheard him.
I didn’t know how to put any of this into words. But I knew exactly what my friends would say. Worse, I knew exactly what I would say to them if the roles were reversed. I skirted around a few things, mentioned he could be a bit moody, said the sex was a bit weird but ‘I was mostly into it’. I couldn’t tell them what was really going on. You know, that might make things awkward at our future wedding!
And so I put Bad Boyfriend to the back of my mind as much as I could, as I packed my suitcase and prepared to spend my birthday on holiday with my grandmother. We were going to her house in Spain, a holiday villa in a vast complex of holiday villas, many of which are inhabited by the over-eighties. I love it. Seriously, love it. You can walk to a bar and a shop at the end of the road in approximately twenty seconds. That’s kind of it.
It would be just me and my nan for a week, and then Auntie Rose was coming out for the second week.
Turned out, this was the ideal holiday to have at such a weird time in my life. For a start, my nan has a plentiful supply of Valium that she doesn’t mind sharing. We had a couple of pills each with a gin and tonic on the flight and from then onwards drank gin with our lunch every day. It was the first time I’d had a fortnight off work maybe ever, and it turned out going away with old people was really relaxing. It forces you to slow down, which I am usually terrible at.
However, I missed Bad Boyfriend terribly, and spent the whole time wearing the birthday necklace he gave me and trying to think up plausible ways to text him that wouldn’t make him cross that I was disturbing him when he clearly wanted a break from me (I saw a cat that looked like you today? I was listening to that Radiohead song you like?). Nan and I listened to Radiohead a lot on that holiday.
‘It’s quite good,’ said Nan. ‘Atmospheric. Some of it’s quite sexy.’
We spent our days lying in the sun together and reading Jilly Cooper novels, tottering no further than the end of the road to the bar for our lunch and dinner. I woke up early every morning and went running in concentric circles through the complex, past houses that looked so identical I often got lost. When I came back, Nan would just be waking up and I would bring her coffee and biscuits in bed before making breakfast. We would sit about on the sunny patio drinking coffee and eating toast and chatting for hours each day, by which point it was nearly time for a gin.
When Auntie Rose arrived, the three of us fell into a great routine that involved pretty much doing nothing, from our morning coffee and digestives, through to our last post-dinner glass of wine. Nan and Rose often stayed up later than me, watching Poldark on BBC Worldwide while I went to bed at 10 p.m. Living so slowly was soporific. At home I have terrible trouble sleeping and never sleep through the night. Here, I could barely keep my eyes open in the evenings. I brought a stack of books with me and didn’t finish one of them.
I didn’t need books when there was so much chatting to be done. Turned out, the great joy of that holiday was talking my nan and Auntie Rose and hearing their stories. With a whole fortnight to go deep and ask the nosiest questions imaginable after a few glasses of wine, I realized for the first time that there was so much about our family and their lives I never knew.
Nan and I had always been close, but I’d never really delved into the past with her. This was the most time by a long way I’d ever spent with Auntie Rose. Usually I would see my aunties at Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, where there are always a million other people around. My family is huge and complicated, mostly due to the fact that nearly everyone has been married more than once.
Auntie Rose is great company and a huge amount of fun. She’s always up for anything; she rented a car in Spain and drove us around on trips to the beach and the market. My nan’s cool older sister, she has both an air of properness and a very naughty sense of humour. She was considered a great beauty when they were young, and she still acts like it, with an impressive combination of flirting and imperiousness. She’s given up now, but she smoked like a chimney for most of her life, so has a wonderful gravelly speaking voice that makes everything sound like a sexy secret.
Like my nan, she’s spent all of her life working as well as being a mother and grandmother. She’s a great golfer; she loves a gin and tonic. Now that she’s older, she’s still involved with the WI and goes to tai chi once a week. Since her husband died, she moved to Dorset, where she lives with her son, his wife and his family. She drives her teenage grandkids to school every day.
Rose is always up for just one more drink. She is a woman who knows her worth and does not take any shit. She’s a stickler for manners and has a stern side, but she’s also given to winking and bursting out laughing – especially around my nan. When they’re together, the years fall away and the two of them revert to giggling, bickering schoolgirls. When they were at school, Rose always used to look out for my nan and was often the one to speak up for her, as my nan was a much shyer child. Rose has never been shy.
When she realized I was genuinely interested in her stories, they kept on coming. I hung off every word.
‘Did I ever tell you about when I was living in the YWCA in Mumbai?’ she would ask me out of nowhere. ‘It was quite an adventure. Most girls didn’t live on their own in those days, but I went out and got myself a job as a secretary and organized my own accommodation. I just wanted to be where the excitement was. I thought working as a secretary was a good bet, as it would mean I could be around interesting people. Back in England I ended up working in the City and sharing a flat in Kensington with a model. But that’s another story for another day, darling.’
I couldn’t get enough of these stories. It is unbelievable to me that all of this happened within living memory, how different and exotic their lives were, and at the same time how much common ground we have.
It was the perfect way of putting things into perspective. It fully struck me for the first time that they had been through more than I had ever imagined. These women were staunch.
So, I spent my thirty-sixth birthday on the beach, drinking margaritas and eating paella for lunch, asking Nan and Rose a million questions about their lives. Once I started, I grew even more insatiably curious about what life was like when they were kids, what it was like moving to this country for the first time as teenagers, how they met their husbands, how they felt about the world. I wanted to know everything.
Lest this all sound too worthy, I also forced my nan to take approximately one million photographs of me posing with a cocktail in my bikini, until we got a good one. I posted it on Instagram in a sad bid for attention and to convince myself I was still (relatively) young and hot, even though I was now officially nearer to forty than thirty, and I was spending my birthday with two octogenarians. Even though I had a boyfriend who seemed to hate me a bit.
To be fair, Bad Boyfriend did text me on my birthday. He said he hoped I was having a lovely day, then went on to tell me at
length that he was most emphatically not. He’d had another bust-up with his ex, as well as some complicated drama at work, and something about having to build some shelves, which seemed to have been extremely stressful for him.
He sent me a picture of himself wearing my dressing gown, which I had lent him the morning I went away.
‘Isn’t that sweet?’ I said to Nan, showing her the picture.
She was furious. My nan is very rarely furious. I was taken aback. The last time this happened was when she threw the Christmas tree at me and my cousin Nic in 1995. We were being right little bitches, to be fair. We were both so horrified that we had made Nan lose her temper, we still talk about it in hushed tones.
‘I bought you that dressing gown last Christmas!’ she cried. ‘It was from The White Company, it cost nearly £80! You don’t just give your things away to any Tom, Dick or Harry you’ve only known for a few months!’
‘But … It’s this whole thing, you see. He always wears it when he comes over and because I was going away, we –’
‘No, Ells. I’m sorry to say it, but someone has to. He’s not for you and that’s all there is to it.’
I’d love to say this inspired me to go home and break up with Bad Boyfriend. Actually, I got home from Spain and never heard from him again. I should be grateful for the lucky escape – now I most definitely am, now that he seems like nothing more than a very distant bad dream – but at the time I was distraught over it.
I never did get that dressing gown back. He’s still got my Grey Gardens DVD too. This probably makes me the very opposite of staunch. It also serves to demonstrate that my nan is always right.
Present Day
So, when Nan and Rose decided they wanted to go back to India, possibly – let’s face it – one last time, I was the obvious choice to come with them to help.
We all got on so well in Spain, and I was really good at running around after them and bringing them cups of tea in the morning. My Auntie Ann decided to come with us on our journey of Indian discovery too. As she is their younger half-sister, she is a youngster for me to hang out with – she’s only seventy-two. While I was growing up, Ann lived in Hong Kong. So she was my glamorous, distant great-aunt who we only saw on very special occasions. I had never spent very much time with her before.
All of them were born in India: Nan and Rose were teenagers when they left, and Ann was only two and has no memory of living there. Nan has been back to India a lot over the years and has kept up speaking Urdu (mostly with her local Asian friends), but the last time she went was ten years ago. As she’s got further into her eighties, she’s been putting off the hassle of a long-haul flight. However, recently she has decided it’s now or never. ‘Never’ is a word that has rarely entered her vocabulary, so by default, it’s now.
Much of this was led by Rose, who hasn’t been back to India since the day she left, aged eighteen. She’s never been one to dwell on the past. Besides, she had a husband who would never have considered a trip to India (or wanted her to go alone). Now he has passed away and Rose has a bit of money, this is what she wants to do with it. Finally – seventy years after leaving – she has a hankering to make one last trip. It’s some kind of primal urge that seems to have set in late in life: the idea that if they don’t go now, they may never again set foot in the country where they were born.
Like me, Ann has been brought in by Nan and Rose as part of their plan. Ann is not only much younger than her siblings, but having been very athletic all her life, is in great physical shape. She is a former runner and hockey-player, now avid walker and golfer. Not only is she the youngest by a long way, but she looks even more so – she has maintained a very sporty figure and has lovely glossy dark hair, the combination of which lead people generally to assume she is somewhere around the fifty mark, when in fact, her eldest daughter is fifty.
Ann was the cleverest daughter, and she holds herself with the confidence that this standing deserves. As well as being stunning, she is one of the sharpest women I have ever met. She is witty and always interesting, challenging company, with an incredible breadth of knowledge, due to her genuinely diverse interests. She loves Virginia Woolf, goes to every film and art exhibition in London, travels the world and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of most sports. In short, Ann is the one you want on your pub quiz team.
Although I’m there to do the heavy lifting, I suspect Nan and Rose (quite fairly) figured that, as I have absolutely no common sense, we would also need Ann onside. I have to admit, it was an inspired decision. She is a retired teacher: very practical and no-nonsense, and keeps all of us in check. Also like me, Ann is a willing participant in this plan – she is well travelled and has lived in several countries, but she has never returned to India.
Their parents never went back after they left, because logistically and financially, it would not have been an option. Since then, time has gone by and nobody ever quite got around to it, but with the passing years, family history has somehow become more important. I guess that’s the way it works – the older we get, the more we want to be connected to the past, even if we never really cared before.
So now here we are – to varying degrees, the blind leading the blind. Or at least the blind leading the elderly, high-maintenance and not very mobile.
As we sit on a bus at Goa Airport for two hours, while nobody seems to have any idea what’s actually going on, it occurs to me that being a Victorian lady’s companion was probably quite a lot easier in Spain, where we were in my nan’s house and didn’t have to walk more than ten metres at a time, and even then it was only for a gin and a hamburguesa at the end of the road. Oh, and as you will have gleaned from my unnecessary use of the word hamburguesa (the word amuses me), I got an ‘A’ in GCSE Spanish. True story. My Urdu isn’t so hot. My plan is to rely on my nan but, although she speaks fluent Urdu, the main local dialect in Goa is Konkani, so we might all struggle.
I’ve never been to India before; I don’t know how it works. This becomes immediately apparent. The bus we are on is approximately two hundred years old and is somehow boiling hot, airless and too cold all at once. Sweat is pouring down my back but I am shivering. There are dogs running around outside everywhere, turns out that wasn’t a made-up story by the pilot. People are shouting at each other and I can’t understand a word. I’m not even sure we’re on the right bus; we were hustled onto it by a man who forcibly took our suitcases then demanded money for him and ‘his friend’. It’s nearly 2 a.m.
The bus eventually starts up like something out of Wacky Races. Even at this time, the roads are hectic – with the odd car, but mostly with mopeds, cows and dogs. We go from the airport highways and billboards into smaller, twisty roads where the houses – a dizzying mixture of grand houses and shacks in a jumble – are all covered in fairy lights. It’s hard to tell whether people are very into kitsch home design, or if they all still have their Christmas decorations up. Being of Portuguese influence, Goa is a very Christian area of India. There are Christmas decorations, fairy lights, neon signs, and the particularly garish Café Ganesh, which is a shack with all of the above plus a giant rotating 3D Coca-Cola logo on the roof.
As we swerve around the pot-holed, fairy-lit roads, my nan immediately starts to feel carsick, which she assures me never usually happens.
‘Have you got a plastic bag?’ she whispers to me.
We get one off the panicky driver just in time for Nan to vomit into it while Rose loudly asks what’s going on. Instructed by Ann, he takes a detour and drops us off first.
When we booked the trip, we realized that we had quite a lot of practical requirements. If you’re going to India when you’re in your late eighties, the checklist turns into something akin to Mariah Carey’s rider. We needed to be on the ground floor, as Rose was not so hot on stairs these days. We needed two adjoining twin rooms. We needed to be near the beach and town, as walking long distances was out.
This was how we ended up choosing Goa, and we found a hotel
that not only managed to meet all of these requirements, but provided golf carts to transport you between the pool, the beach and the restaurant. It was much grander than we intended but we (well, my nan) decided to go for it.
So when we arrive at the hotel, with a troupe of security guards letting us in through the grand front gates, I guess it must be fancy but we’re all too tired to take it in.
Nan’s still being sick into a leaky carrier bag as our suitcases are whisked away and somebody hands us coconuts with straws in and puts shell necklaces over our heads. Later, I ask her what happened to the sick-bag and she says someone discreetly took it out of her hands and she was too embarrassed to say anything. I absolutely don’t blame her. I’d have done exactly the same. I was quite glad I wasn’t holding it, to be honest.
The hotel lobby is vast, with shiny marble floors, fragrant with incense and, even at 3 a.m., crowded full of smiling staff. We are quite shell-shocked.
As we are taken to our adjoining rooms – one for me and Nan to share, one for Rose and Ann – it becomes apparent that there is a problem. I just want to get into bed. And, let’s face it, I’m the youngest here by over forty years and I’m not the one who’s recently had a bag of sick taken off them. We all really just want to go to bed.
Except it seems, surprisingly, my nan. She seems to get a new lease of life as soon as she clocks the adjoining rooms, each with one king-size bed, rather than the requested twin beds.
‘We can figure it out in the morning,’ I say hopefully.
‘Absolutely not.’
Staff are duly called in and it transpires there has been a mix-up and there are no suitable rooms available. There is a tired, passive-aggressive row about this, while I try to diffuse the tension by smiling too much and declaring ‘it’s fine, really!’ and the others glare at me. They’re right; I’m not helping at all.