20

Revenge, like mother’s migraine remedy, is a dish best served cold.

‘I’m going to ask Mum to move in with us.’ Mother lobbed this into the breakfast-table silence like a grenade a few weeks later.

‘You are going to ask her?’ said father, a teacup arrested halfway to his lips.

‘Well, I have asked her, in fact.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said “Yes”.’

‘Oh. So it’s all settled then.’

‘Only with your approval.’ She looked at both of us. ‘She knows I have to consult you first.’

There was a pause while we savoured the impressive dishonesty of the word ‘first’. ‘Isn’t consultation more properly so called when it occurs before a decision has been taken?’ Father’s tone was as mild as possible – a dangerous sign.

Sensing irony, mother began to defend herself. ‘What could I do? She’s not safe on her own any more. She’s half blind and she keeps leaving things on the stove. You know I can’t go down there at the drop of a hat when I can’t drive.’ In an obscure way she blamed father for this problem of mobility, as if he had willed her to fail. ‘One of these days she’ll burn the house down. It’s such a responsibility. You don’t know how lucky you are not having parents to worry about.’

Amen to that, I thought.

There was some substance to her anxieties. Granny was indeed going blind. All that Thackeray under the bedclothes had finally caught up with her, and she could now no longer read at all. Large-print books and a magnifying glass had given way to audio-tapes to which she listened day and night at full volume, for her deafness had also seen no improvement with the years. She was gradually accumulating a houseful of gadgets and appurtenances to assist her in her independent life: an amplified telephone with huge numerals, Braille clocks, a hearing aid which she refused to wear because it whistled, an emergency buzzer which she was supposed to hang around her neck but which she inevitably left lying around and then lost, but none of them could withstand the vagaries of her memory or temper. Home helps were regularly accused of the theft of some item of mislaid jewellery which would later turn up in a new and bizarre hiding place – the tea caddy perhaps, or the fridge. Even the meals-on-wheels lady had been sent packing for calling out the social services when there was no reply to the doorbell. Granny had awoken from a midday nap to find a teenage policeman with one leg over the window sill. She now existed on a diet only slightly more varied than Auntie Mim’s: toast and marmalade for breakfast, a tin of something heated up for lunch (as she couldn’t see the labels she was never sure whether it would be pilchards or pear halves that ended up on the plate), and cheese biscuits for supper. All of this was supplemented by frequent snacks of sweets. Mother had been spending more and more weekends there, stocking up the larder, clearing packets of rancid butter and green cheese from the fridge, scrubbing away at marmalade spills which, left untreated, would get trodden right through the house on the sole of Granny’s slippers, and listening more or less patiently to endless complaints about loneliness and debility.

Granny would not be an easy house-guest, that was certain. But however much aggravation mother was inflicting on herself by inviting her to stay, father would suffer more. The silence and privacy he so revered would be gone. He would become an unpaid and unthanked chauffeur, a fixer of broken gadgets, an untangler of bank statements and share dividends and income bonds and pension books and run-ins with the DSS, and all without the bonds of love and duty and shared memories which for mother would make it – just – bearable. I could see the dread on his face as we sat there, taking in the news, but he would not quarrel.

‘I’ve told her she wouldn’t be able to bring much clobber – only what will fit in the spare room. And there’s room in the loft for a few boxes, isn’t there?’

Father confirmed that there was.

‘And I’ve said she can’t expect us to entertain her – we won’t have time to read the newspaper to her every morning the way we do when we’re down there. It won’t be a holiday, she understands that.’

‘Mmm. When would you like me to fetch her?’

Unnerved at meeting so little resistance, mother faltered. She had not expected anything like this level of co-operation, and having prepared various arguments in her defence did not want them to go to waste. ‘I know it will be difficult at first until we all get used to each other, but we couldn’t possibly afford a decent nursing home, and one of those state ones is out of the question – you know how rude she is to anyone who doesn’t speak the Queen’s English.’

‘Oh I don’t think she’d last long in a home,’ agreed father.

‘Yes, you’re always hearing of people going ga-ga after a week in one of those places. I couldn’t have that on my conscience.’

‘I meant no one would put up with her – she’d be expelled, rusticated, or whatever they do.’

‘Oh I see. Well, I can’t think what alternative I’ve got – every day I expect to get a phone call from the police saying she’s drowned in the bath or burnt the place down. She’s a danger to other people, not just herself.’

‘Mmm.’

‘And she’ll contribute towards bills and food and so on here. You must admit the extra money would be useful.’ Since you have failed to gain a salary increase, ran the unspoken sentence. I couldn’t share mother’s optimism about having tapped a new source of income. Granny was used to being able to save out of her state pension; her idea of a reasonable donation would be unlikely to cover the cost of keeping the bar heater in her room running. We would be worse not better off.

‘Oh I don’t know what to do,’ mother finished, as if she had met nothing but opposition.

‘Do?’ said father. ‘Our duty of course.’

Mother was wrong about it being difficult at first. At first it was just like having a visitor to stay: courtesies were observed and allowances made. When the World Service issued quite audibly from Granny’s room at three in the morning we pulled the blankets over our ears. When she talked through a television programme that we were trying to watch, we made polite responses or switched the set off. When she walked in on father, asleep in his study on Sunday afternoon, with the words, ‘Can somebody fix my torch/radio/hearing aid?’ he would spring up to do her bidding. When she insisted on carrying plates through from dining room to kitchen and then dropped one, mother clenched her teeth and said, ‘Doesn’t matter’.

It was only after a few weeks that it began to register that this was how it would always be: the armchair which Granny had taken to occupying would become without any discussion hers and would be left free by the rest of us. We would grow accustomed to finding empty milk bottles inverted in a cup overnight so that the last few drops might not be wasted, and clotted balls of multicoloured soap made from those tiny fragments left over at the end of a bar. I knew thrift was one of her particular vices: when helping her to pack up her possessions in the Bognor house I had come across a cardboard shoebox labelled PENS THAT NO LONGER WORK; she still saved and ironed old wrapping paper even though she had not bought, much less wrapped a present for years; and she kept all her old calendars and only ever wrote on them in pencil because she had worked out that every fourteen years the days and dates would be back in sync again. When I was younger I used to be sent up into the higher branches of her apple tree to pick the out-of-reach fruit. A morning’s prickly labour – scratched knees, near falls, and encounters with giant bees – would be rewarded with a bag of bruised and maggoty windfalls. The decent apples would be laid out in trays in the front garden and sold to holidaymakers.