Still Me

  I sat on the side of the bed, tracing the pattern on the candlewick counterpane with my index finger. On the bedside table stood a picture of my grandmother in the 1950s, her hair set in rolled waves, her smile open and trusting. I had only fleeting memories of her. But my grandfather had been a constant fixture in my childhood, first in the little house along the street (Treena and I would run down there for sweets on Saturday afternoon as my mother stood at the gate), and then, for the last fifteen years, in a room at our house, his sweet, wavering smile the punctuation to my day, a permanent presence in the living room with his newspaper and a mug of tea.

  I thought about the stories he would tell us when we were small of his time in the navy (the ones about desert islands and monkeys and coconut trees might not have been entirely true), about the eggy bread he would fry in the blackened pan--the only thing he could cook--and how, when I was really small, he would tell my grandmother jokes that made her weep with laughter. And then I thought about his later years when I'd treated him almost as a part of the furniture. I hadn't written to him. I hadn't called him. I had just assumed he would be there for as long as I wanted him to be. Had he minded? Had he wanted to speak to me?

  I hadn't even said good-bye.

  I remembered Agnes's words: that we who traveled far from home would always have our hearts in two places. I placed my hand on the candlewick bedspread. And, finally, I wept.

  --

  On the day of the funeral I came downstairs to find Mum cleaning furiously in preparation for the funeral guests, even though to my knowledge nobody was coming back to the house. Dad sat at the table looking faintly out of his depth--not an unusual expression when he was talking to my mother these days.

  "You don't need to get a job, Josie. You don't need to do anything."

  "Well, I need something to do with my time." Mum took off her jacket and folded it carefully over the back of a chair before going down on her knees to get at some invisible speck of dirt behind a cupboard. Dad wordlessly pushed a plate and knife toward me.

  "I was just saying, Lou, love, your mother doesn't need to jump into anything. She's saying she's headed to the Job Center after the service."

  "You looked after Granddad for years, Mum. You should just enjoy having some time to yourself."

  "No. I'm better if I'm doing something."

  "We'll have no cupboards left if she keeps scrubbing them at this rate," Dad muttered.

  "Sit down. Please. You need to eat something."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "For God's sake, woman. You'll give me a stroke if you carry on like this." He winced as soon as he'd said it. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . ."

  "Mum." I walked over to her when she didn't appear to hear me. I put my hand on her shoulder and she briefly stilled. "Mum."

  She pushed her way up onto her feet. She wiped her face with her palm and looked out of the window. "What use am I now?" she said.

  "What do you mean?"

  She adjusted the starched white net curtain. "Nobody needs me anymore."

  "Oh, Mum, I need you. We all need you."

  "But you're not here, are you? None of you is. Not even Thom. You're all miles away."

  Dad and I exchanged a look.

  "Doesn't mean we don't need you."

  "Granddad was the only one who relied on me. Even you, Bernard, you'd be fine with a pie and a pint up the road every evening. What am I supposed to do now? I'm fifty-eight years old and I'm good for nothing. I've spent my whole life looking after someone else and now there's nobody left who even needs me."

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. I thought, for one terrifying minute, that she was about to howl.

  "We'll always need you, Mum. I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here. It's like you're like the foundations of a building. I might not see you all the time, but I know you're there. Supporting me. All of us. I bet you Treena would say the same."

  She looked at me, her eyes troubled, as if she weren't sure what to believe.

  "You are. And this--this is a weird time. It's going to take a while to adjust. But remember what happened when you started your night classes? How excited you felt? Like you were discovering bits of yourself? Well, that's going to happen again. It's not about who needs you--it's about finally devoting some time to yourself."

  "Josie," said Dad softly, "we'll travel. Do all those things we thought we couldn't do because it would have meant leaving him. Maybe we'll come and see you, Lou. A trip to New York! See, love, it's not that your life is over, just that it's going to be a different sort of life."

  "New York?" said Mum.

  "Oh, my God, I'd love that," I said, pulling a piece of toast from the rack. "I could find you a nice hotel and we could do all the sights."

  "You would?"

  "Perhaps we can meet that millionaire fella you work for," said Dad. "He can give us a few tips, right?"

  I'd never actually told them about my change in circumstances. I kept eating my toast, my face blank.

  "Us? Go to New York?" said Mum.

  Dad reached for a box of tissues and handed them to her. "Well, why not? We have savings. You can't take it with you. The old man knew that, at least. Don't be expecting any expensive bequests, eh, Louisa? I'm frightened to pass the bookie in case he jumps out and says Granddad owes him a fiver."

  Mum straightened up, her cloth in her hand. She looked to one side.

  "You and me and Dad in New York City. Well, wouldn't that be a thing?"

  "We can look up flights this evening, if you like." I wondered briefly if I could persuade Margot to say her surname was Gopnik.

  Mum put a hand to her cheek. "Oh, gracious, listen to me making plans and Granddad not cold in his grave yet. What would he think?"

  "He'd think it was wonderful. Granddad would love the thought of you and Dad coming to America."

  "You really think so?"

  "I know so." I reached across and hugged her. "He traveled the world in the navy, didn't he? And I also know he'd like to think of you starting back at the adult education center. No point wasting all that knowledge you've gained over the past year."

  "Though I'm also pretty sure he'd like to think you were still leaving me some dinner in the oven before you went," said Dad.

  "C'mon, Mum. Just get through today and then we can start planning. You did everything you could for him, and I know Granddad would feel you deserved the next stage of your life to be an adventure."

  "An adventure," Mum mused. She took a tissue from Dad and dabbed at the corner of her eye. "How did I raise daughters with so much wisdom, eh?"

  Dad raised his eyebrows and, with a deft move, slid the toast off my plate.

  "Ah. Well, that would be the fatherly influence, you see." He yelped as Mum flicked her tea towel at the back of his head and then, as she turned, he smiled at me with a look of utter relief.

  --

  The funeral passed, as funerals do, with varying degrees of sadness, some tears, and a sizable percentage of the congregation wishing they knew the tunes to the hymns. It was not an excessive gathering, as the priest put it politely. Granddad had ventured out so rarely by the end that few of his friends even seemed to know that he'd passed, even though Mum had put a notice in the Stortfold Observer. Either that or most of them were dead too (with a couple of the mourners it was quite hard to tell the difference).

  At the graveside I stood beside Treena, my jaw tense, and felt a very particular kind of sibling gratitude when her hand crept into mine and squeezed it. I looked behind me to where Eddie was holding Thom's hand, and he was kicking quietly at a daisy in the grass, perhaps trying not to cry, or perhaps thinking about Transformers or the half-eaten biscuit he had wedged into the upholstery of the funeral car.

  I heard the priest murmur the familiar recitation about dust and ashes and my eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away with a handkerchief. And then I looked up, and across the grave at the back of the small throng of mourners stood Sam. My heart lurch
ed. I felt a hot flush, somewhere between fear and nausea. I caught his eye briefly through the crowd, blinked hard, and looked away. When I looked back, he had gone.

  --

  I was at the buffet at the pub when I turned to find him beside me. I had never seen him in a suit and the sight of him looking both so handsome and so unfamiliar briefly knocked my breath from my chest. I decided to handle the situation in as mature a way as possible and simply refuse to acknowledge his presence, peering intently instead at the plates of sandwiches, in the manner of someone who had only recently been introduced to the concept of food.

  He stood there, perhaps waiting for me to look up, and then said softly, "I'm sorry about your granddad. I know what a close family you are."

  "Not that close, clearly, or I would have been here." I busied myself arranging the napkins on the table, even though Mum had paid for waiting staff.

  "Yes, well, life doesn't always work like that."

  "So I've gathered." I closed my eyes briefly, trying to remove the spike from my voice. I took a breath, then finally looked up at him, my face arranged carefully into something neutral. "So how are you?"

  "Not bad, thanks. You?"

  "Oh. Fine."

  We stood for a moment.

  "How's your house?"

  "Coming on. Moving in next month."

  "Wow." I was briefly startled from my discomfort. It seemed improbable to me that someone I knew could build a house from nothing. I had seen it when it was just a patch of concrete on the ground. And yet he had done it. "That's--that's amazing."

  "I know. I'll miss the old railway carriage, though. I quite liked being in there. Life was . . . simple."

  We looked at each other, then away.

  "How's Katie?"

  The faintest of pauses. "She's fine."

  My mother appeared at my shoulder with a tray of sausage rolls. "Lou, sweetheart, would you see where Treen is? She was going to hand these round for me--oh, no. There she is. Perhaps you could take them to her. There's people over there haven't had anything to eat ye--" She suddenly grasped who I was talking to. She snatched the tray away from me. "Sorry. I'm sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt."

  "You weren't," I said, slightly more emphatically than I'd intended. I took hold of the tray's edge.

  "I'll do it, love," she said, pulling the tray toward her waist.

  "I can do it." I held tight, my knuckles glowing white.

  "Lou. Let. Go," she said firmly. Her eyes burned into mine. I finally relinquished my grip and she hurried away.

  Sam and I stood by the table. We smiled awkwardly at each other but the smiles fell away too quickly. I picked up a plate and put a carrot stick on it. I wasn't sure I could eat anything but it seemed odd to stand there with an empty plate.

  "So. Are you back for long?"

  "Just a week."

  "How's life treating you over there?"

  "It's been interesting. I got the sack."

  "Lily told me. I see a fair bit of her now with the whole Jake thing."

  "Yeah, that was . . . surprising." I wondered briefly what Lily had told him about her visit.

  "Not to me. I could see it from the first time they met. You know, she's great. They're happy."

  I nodded, as if in agreement.

  "She talks a lot. About your amazing boyfriend and how you picked yourself up after the firing thing and found another place to live and your job at that Vintage Clothes Emporium." He was apparently as fascinated as I was by the cheese straws. "You got it all sorted, then. She's in awe of you."

  "I doubt that."

  "She said New York suits you." He shrugged. "But I guess we both knew that."

  I snuck a look at him while his gaze was elsewhere, marveling with the small part of me that wasn't actually dying that two people who were once so comfortable with each other could now barely work out how to string a sentence together in conversation.

  "I have something for you. In my room at home," I said abruptly. I wasn't entirely sure where it came from. "I brought it back last time but . . . you know."

  "Something for me?"

  "Not you exactly. It's, well, it's a Knicks baseball cap. I bought it . . . a while back. That thing you told me about your sister. She never made it to 30 Rock but I thought, well, maybe Jake might like it."

  He stared at me.

  It was my turn to look down at my feet. "It's probably a stupid idea, though," I said. "I can give it to someone else. It's not like I can't find a home for a Knicks cap in New York. And it might be a bit weird, me giving you stuff."

  "No. No. He'd love it. That's very kind of you." Someone beeped a horn outside and Sam glanced toward the window. I wondered idly if Katie was waiting in the car for him.

  I didn't know what to say. There didn't seem to be a right answer to any of it. I tried to fight the lump that had risen to my throat. I thought back to the Strager ball--I'd assumed that Sam would hate it, that he wouldn't have a suit. Why did I think that? The one he was wearing today looked like it had been made for him.

  "I'll--I'll send it. Do you know what?" I said, when I couldn't bear it any longer. "I think I'd better help Mum with those--with the-- There are sausages that . . ."

  Sam took a step backward. "Sure. I just wanted to pay my respects. I'll leave you to it."

  He turned away and my face crumpled. I was glad I was at a wake where nobody would think this particular expression worthy of attention. And then, before I could straighten my face, he turned back to me.

  "Lou," he said quietly.

  I couldn't speak. I just shook my head. And then I watched him as he made his way through the mourners and out through the pub door.

  --

  That evening Mum handed me a small parcel.

  "Is this from Granddad?" I said.

  "Don't be daft," she said. "Granddad never gave anyone a present for the last ten years of his life. This is from your man, Sam. Seeing him today reminded me. You left it here the last time you came. I wasn't sure what you wanted me to do with it."

  I held the little box and had a sudden memory of our argument at the kitchen table. Happy Christmas, he'd said, and dropped it there as he left.

  Mum turned away and began washing up. I opened it carefully, peeling off the layers of wrapping paper with exaggerated care, like someone opening an artifact from a previous age.

  Inside the little box lay an enamel pin in the shape of an ambulance, perhaps from the 1950s. Its red cross was made of tiny jewels that might have been rubies, or might have been paste. Either way, it glittered in my hand. A tiny note was folded in the roof of the box.

  To remind you of me while we're apart. All my love, Your Ambulance Sam. xxx

  I held it in the palm of my hand and Mum came to look over my shoulder. It's rare that my mother chooses not to speak. But this time she squeezed my shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of my head, and went back to the washing up.

  27

  Dear Louisa Clark,

  My name is Vincent Weber--grandson of Margot Weber, as I know her. But you seem to know her by her maiden name of De Witt.

  Your message came as a surprise because my dad doesn't really talk about his mom--to be honest, for years I was led to believe that she wasn't even alive, although I realize now that nobody ever put it in those exact terms.

  After I got your message I asked my mom and she said there had been some big falling-out way before I was born, but I've been thinking and have decided that's really nothing to do with me, and I would love to know some more about her (you seemed to hint that she'd been unwell?). Can't believe I have another grandma!

  Please e-mail back. And thank you for your efforts.

  Vincent Weber (Vinny)

  He came at the agreed time on a Wednesday afternoon, the first really warm day of May when the streets were full of abruptly exposed flesh and newly purchased sunglasses. I didn't tell Margot because (a) I knew she'd be furious and (b) I had a strong feeling she would simply go out for a walk until h
e had left. I opened the front door and there he stood--a tall blond man with his ear pierced in seven places, wearing a pair of 1940s-style baggy trousers with a bright scarlet shirt, highly polished brown brogues, and a Fair Isle sweater draped around his shoulders.

  "Are you Louisa?" he said, as I stooped to pick up the flailing dog.

  "Oh, my," I said, looking him slowly up and down. "You two are going to get on like a house on fire."

  I walked him down the corridor and we whispered a conversation. It took a full two minutes of Dean Martin barking and snarling before she called, "Who was at the door, dear? If it's that awful Gopnik woman you can tell her her piano playing is showy, sentimental tripe. And that's from someone who once saw Liberace." She started to cough.

  Walking backward, I beckoned him toward the living room. I pushed open the door. "Margot, you have a visitor."

  She turned, frowning slightly, her hands resting on the arm of her chair, and surveyed him for a full ten seconds. "I don't know you," she said decisively.

  "This is Vincent, Margot." I took a breath. "Your grandson."

  She stared at him.

  "Hey, Mrs. De Witt . . . Grandma." He walked forward and smiled, then stooped and crouched in front of her, and she studied his face.

  Her expression was so fierce that I thought she was going to shout at him, but then she gave what sounded like a little hiccup. Her mouth dropped open a half inch and her bony old hands closed on his sleeves. "You came," she said, her voice a low croon, cracking as it emerged from somewhere deep in her chest. "You came." She stared at him, her eyes flickering over his features as if she were already seeing similarities, histories, prompting memories long forgotten. "Oh, but you're so, so like your father." She reached out a hand and touched the side of his face.

  "I like to think I have slightly better taste," Vincent said, smiling, and Margot gave a yelp of laughter.

  "Let me look at you. Oh, my goodness. Oh, you're so handsome. But how did you find me? Does your father know about . . . ?" She shook her head, as if it were a jumble of questions, and her knuckles were white on his sleeves. Then she turned to me, as if she had forgotten I was even there. "Well, I don't know what you're staring at, Louisa. A normal person would have offered this poor man a drink by now. Goodness. Some days I have no idea what on earth you're doing here."