Half term a few weeks later brought the girls’ planned stay at their grandmother’s. Effie made sure to give both parents a warm and encouraging farewell, determined to express only good feelings. She was pleased for them to be off on a jaunt and truly delighted to have the girls to herself for longer than usual. She shamelessly indulged them: a cinema visit with popcorn, hamburgers from Hank’s Hickory Hamburgers and ice-creams from the Italian cafe. Back at the house it was to be a bubble bath and extra long story time. When they arrived at Effie’s house around 6.30 it was to witness Oliver’s bent figure struggling to extract something from the boot of his car.
‘Who’s that man?’ was the immediate question.
Effie explained it was her friend Oliver, a kind man who had been fixing her lawn mower and was returning it. Oliver greeted them all cheerfully, deposited the mower, but did not stay, on the understanding that this was to be a weekend for Effie and her grandchildren.
The girls were excited and rushed upstairs to turn on the bath taps, chucking in half a bottle-full of Little Miss Happy bubble mixture and throwing off their clothes with gay abandon. A cloud of shimmering bubbles gradually rose over the edge of the bath and was soon covering the two girls who were whipping it up with their small arms flailing and much merriment until Effie decided she had to calm things down a bit to prevent the whole bathroom disappearing under a layer of foam.
‘Right, time for some washing’ she asserted as she took a towel to Daisy’s tousled blond hair. ‘Rosie, you too’.
‘Look at me’ shouted Rosie who had given herself a white moustache and white frothy eyebrows. ‘Let me see, grandma, let me see!’. The shouting turned to laughter as she spied herself in the bathroom mirror. ‘I look like your friend. He’s got white hair.’
‘No he doesn’t’ retorted Daisy ‘he doesn’t have any hair.’
‘Oh, he does have some.’ Effie felt the need to defend Oliver from juvenile disdain.
‘Is he your boyfriend?’ asked Daisy, with a coy look.
‘Well, he is – sort of, I suppose’ said Effie grabbing the sponge and wafting her arms through the foam in an attempt to find the soap.
‘But you’re old, grandma!’ exclaimed Rosie, wiping the bubbles off her face and furrowing her small brow.
‘Yeh, and if he’s your boyfriend, that means you do sex’ pronounced Daisy grinning.
‘What’s sex? queried Rosie.
‘Sex is what you do when you have a boyfriend, that’s what Annie told me, and she knows ‘cos she’s got a big brother who told her and he says...’
‘That’s enough of that, Daisy. I have no wish to know what her brother says, and...’ Effie grasped Rosie by her blond topknot and began to scrub her back vigorously ‘I may be old to you but these days sixty isn’t so old, you know.’
‘Sixty!’ Rosie was stunned.
‘She can’t even count to sixty’ Daisy blithely dismissed her sister.
‘Oh yes I can’ responded Rosie heatedly, and the two began counting up as fast as they could, with Daisy inevitably charging ahead leaving Rosie floundering in the 30s. Upset and angry, she began hitting the water in Daisy’s direction which was Effie’s cue to pull the plug and defuse the situation before it got out of hand and the bathroom was totally flooded.
‘Right, that’s it. Anyone who isn’t out and dry in one minute does not get a story,’ a threat which, to Effie’s amazement, worked.
The girls were deposited back with their parents on Sunday evening by an exhausted Effie who stayed just long enough to absorb the fact that Cathy and Jim looked relaxed and seemed to have had a good time but also long enough to notice that almost the first words from her daughter had a critical edge: ‘they look as though they didn’t get much sleep’, to which Effie could not resist replying that none of them had got much sleep and that she was pretty tired herself.
‘I’m not tired’ insisted Rosie, yawning.
Not to be outdone, Daisy boasted ‘We went to bed at nearly ten o’clock’, which caused Cathy to frown and tut ‘honestly, Mum, that really is a bit late, even for specials...’
‘Well, it was special. We were enjoying ourselves, and the girls are hard to resist when they really set their minds on something.’
‘Boundaries never were your strong point, Mum.’
...
Later that evening Effie was busy filling in her diary. Under ‘events of the day’ she was describing her time with the girls together with her assessment of how she had handled things which came out again in the form of a dialogue. ‘Those kids had a great time, I know they did. I’d give myself 9 out of 10, but two minutes with Cathy and I barely get a pass mark.
So what are you doing wrong?
What am I doing wrong?
Yes, you.
I feel she is always sniping at me, disapproves, makes me feel I can’t get it right and isn’t at all grateful.
That’s quite a list.
I know, and I’ve also put on two kilo, though I suppose I can’t blame her for that.
No you can’t, she said to herself out loud, sitting back in her chair and letting her inner eye take her off, remembering the food she had readily consumed with the grandchildren over the weekend. Those two liked their food, unlike their mother who had been a picky eater as a child, rejecting dishes she had prepared and then complaining she was hungry, and fussy too about her clothes, never happy with what Effie chose but refusing to take any interest when they went shopping together. Damn difficult child. Much more so than the other two. She remembered one summer when Cathy had insisted on wearing the same pair of torn jeans for the whole time, refusing to be parted from them. As she pictured it Effie’s hand moved to the waistband on her own trousers, aware that she could barely squeeze in her fingers. Action was called for and her final entry that night was a clearly spelt out resolution that she would: