thought, she abandoned her plans—and David, who had made known his disappointment in her in no uncertain terms—and moved back in to the top floor of her grandmother’s house.
This was a different act of service than building schools, she told herself, though it had been hard to remember that when David’s occasional emails pinged in her inbox and told of heat and dust, making bricks and raising walls, bare feet and joyous singing. She knew he was doing his best to make her jealous, and she couldn’t help be aware that he was getting a tan and drinking beer with a foreign label while she bought prepared meals at Waitrose and massaged her grandmother’s pale, chilly feet. She tried not to mind too much, but it had made for a very long winter.
She saw her grandmother eyeing the flowers again. “Actually, Eve, I think we could. It’s time we made a start.”
“Okay then,” she said evenly, keeping the surprise out of her voice. She knew her grandmother was capricious enough to change her mind in five minutes’ time and pretend that Eve had misheard her. She went over to the window to open the curtains and let what little light there was into the room. “How about you finish your lunch and I’ll get my notebook?”
Editors had stalked her grandmother for years, petitioning to publish her memoirs, for, frail as she might appear now, she was once an Amazon of the climbing world, bagging summits with apparent ease, a better athlete than most men. In the 1950s and ’60s she, and a small handful of women like her, had pushed the boundaries of possibility with every peak they climbed, putting paid to the notion that women were the weaker sex when it came to endurance and strength of mind. They had paved the way for a generation of noted British climbers and made it possible for women anywhere to believe in their own strength and ability.
Though she’d stopped expedition climbing in her early fifties, her grandmother had been in demand as a motivational speaker and tour leader ever since, and even now there were several invitations awaiting her return to health. It was hard to reconcile this frail old lady with a woman who had once been at the pinnacle of physical fitness, though the fire in her eyes still burned bright.
“I think it’s time I got out of this damned bed too,” said her grandmother, finishing her tea and holding out the tray, with its plate now bearing only a few crumbs, to Eve.
“Are you sure? The doctor said not to rush things.”
“Pfft. What does he know? Let me be the judge of my own body. I’ve been in more pain than I am now and survived it.”
“Tough as old boots hey, Grams?” Eve smiled. “There’s a fire in the living room, so just let me get a few things sorted for you and we can work in there.”
Her grandmother could be stubborn—Eve had inherited the same streak of obstinacy—and so Eve was quietly pleased that she was getting up of her own accord. Six weeks was too long to spend in bed, even if you were a shade under ninety. Grams would normally have chafed against being bedridden, but Eve was aware that this accident had scared her more than she was prepared to admit. It scared Eve too. Her Grams had been more of a mother to her than her own mum, taking her and her brother every holiday, often collecting them from boarding school at the end of term. Grams’s home was as much Eve’s, and she’d only left when she went to live in halls of residence at university. She would be completely untethered if she lost her.
* * *
The accident had been the smallest of things. Apparently, Grams had been on her way out to the local shops when she’d skidded on the tiled floor and come crashing down. She’d lain there, stranded, for nearly twenty-four hours before her cleaner, Agata, arrived. “I might need a bit of a hand,” Grams had apparently said quite calmly, when the Polish girl had found her sprawled by the stairs the next morning. “I can’t seem to get up.” Agata had acted quickly, covering her with a blanket and calling for an ambulance. Grams had broken her hip and several ribs, and the paramedics who came and took her away chided her for not possessing an alarm button. “Living on your own, you really should have one,”