message after Luke had called her postponing the wedding plans we’d had that night. I was shaping up to be the world’s worst bridesmaid. The moment I saw Grandad, though, I forgot about everything else, knew the whole day had been putting off this moment. His face was rumpled, eyes deadened, eyebrows drawn together in a permanent frown.
I reached a hand out and leant towards him. He smelt of ginger and coffee.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here earlier. I hate that you had to do all this on your own.’
He picked up my hand and patted it. ‘I wasn’t on my own,’ Grandad said. ‘Luke was extremely helpful, and very kind.’
So that’s where Luke had been. He’d probably never gone into the office. He would have known I didn’t want Grandad to be alone. I felt a surge of love for my warmhearted boyfriend.
‘And my golfing gang, Arjun, Geoffrey and Howard, were here, and Auntie Sue would have stayed longer if I’d asked her but the poor woman is as crushed as I am and it wouldn’t have been good for either of us.’
Typical of Grandad to be thinking of others.
He got up and flicked on the kettle. ‘Was it an interesting case?’
‘Grandad, I’m not going to tell you about some guy who smashed someone so hard in the thigh with a chair leg he fractured his femur – allegedly. No court talk at all. I’m going to order us a Chinese takeaway. We’re going to eat it and we’re going to talk about Grandma.’
He nodded then and I was grateful to see the hint of relief cross his face. He seemed to have aged ten years in as many hours: his shoulders sagging, his feet shuffling as if he didn’t have the energy to lift them off the floor any more.
The Chinese arrived and I pretended not to notice Grandad picking around the food. Every now and again a sound from the house next door would make us both look up, as if we were expecting Grandma to emerge in the doorway, to cross the room and sit in her chair. She’d offer us cocoa that we’d both politely refuse (Grandma could burn most things) and things would just be . . . normal.
She didn’t appear, of course, and it still seemed a shock. She’d been seriously ill for a long while now, Grandad insisting on nursing her in the last few months. But even though she’d grown frailer, with longer pauses as she sought to catch her breath, grimacing at the rattle in her chest, she still had the same spirit and the same mind. She could still smash us both in a cryptic crossword or a game of backgammon. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t here. I felt a shiver run through me as I realised Grandad was now living on his own. For the first time in forty-four years, it was just him.
We talked about her then, Grandad telling me stories I’d heard before made all the more poignant because she wasn’t here now. The time she’d been pulled over by the police after singing opera in her car at a set of traffic lights (they believed she was screaming from some kind of abdominal pain); the time she’d insisted on making jam and had ended up in the hospital with third-degree burns on her hand; the time she toppled over the fence into next door’s garden after spying up a ladder because she thought her friend’s husband was having an affair (it was a female plumber fixing the sink in their en suite).
Our laughter filled the room. At one point I was clutching my side, both of us on the edge of hysteria, before tears leaked down my cheeks, my sobs stoppered by a handkerchief proffered by grandad. Grandad and Grandma’s house had been my home since I was seventeen. We still had Sunday lunches there, Luke and Grandad sneaking off to watch football as Grandma and I cleared up in the kitchen, listening to musical theatre soundtracks. Grandma loved to sing and whatever she lacked in pitch she more than made up for in enthusiasm.
I felt an ache in my stomach then for the woman I loved so much. She had held my hand when I didn’t get the pupillage I’d so desperately wanted; when I’d heard Luke had injured himself skiing in Verbier and wasn’t sure what was happening, how bad it was; when I missed my mum after failing my A-level English