But his old eyes were rheumy with emotion, his proud face working every last muscle to produce a smile whenever Victor said, ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you? You’ll remember how to FaceTime me?’
Tayo swatted him away, ‘You won’t be wanting to waste your time with me. You’ve got all that life to live, son.’
Several times during the packing and unpacking of the boot in order to get everything in, Patrick muttered, ‘God knows where we’re going to fit all this when we get home.’
Eventually I couldn’t resist retaliating by saying, ‘Well, now’s probably a good time for you to have a clear-out of your shed. Perhaps we could store some of it in there,’ before tipping him over the edge by appearing with three rugby balls and two sets of dumbbells.
When we’d crammed the last pair of trainers into the car, I went to say goodbye to Tayo. His hands were bony and cold, but there was no disguising the strength of emotion as he grasped my forearms. ‘Keep him safe. Keep him looking forwards. Not backwards.’
I could only nod and hug. I left Patrick to guide Victor back into the house to say goodbye to his granddad, ashamed of falling at the first hurdle by not containing my own grief, let alone helping him manage his.
As I sat in the car waiting for them to reappear, I thought about Ginny, the way she’d fling herself onto her dad whenever I came back home with her, a joyous and noisy entrance, so alien to the way I’d pause outside my mother’s front door, braced for an observation about how I’d put on a bit of weight/looked tired/didn’t suit my beige coat/yellow dress or needed a fringe.
I cried a bit harder, mourning the loss of her vivaciousness in the world, that energy she had that rubbed off on everyone around her, that made me buy into her philosophy that sleep was for the dead and we really did need another bottle of rosé. If she could see me now bawling my eyes out and searching desperately in the glove compartment for anything that could be used as a tissue, she would have laughed at me. ‘God, you’d cry at the crushing of a crisp.’
Then Patrick was shaking Tayo’s hand and gently moving Victor down the garden path, past the hydrangeas with their big mop heads and the roses, those flowers that Victor had probably never taken any notice of but would make him think of his granddad every time he came across them.
I did a huge sniff before they reached the car and jumped out to open the door for him. ‘Come on, love. We’ll bring you back to see your granddad just as soon as you’re settled with us.’
Victor sank down into the tiny space in the back, hemmed in by shoes, duvets and a sleeping bag. For all Patrick’s moaning, I was pretty sure Phoebe would have had twice as much. Half-finished pots of shampoo, body lotion and fake tan alone would have needed their own suitcase.
I patted his shoulder. ‘It’s okay to be sad, it’s normal,’ I said, dissolving into a fresh flood of tears myself.
Patrick gave me a little smile of encouragement. ‘Come on, let’s get going.’
The journey home was punctuated with both of us scratching about for conversation. Patrick came up with ‘Which radio station do you listen to?’ He tolerated Victor’s choice for about twenty minutes before saying, ‘Shall we just have a bit of quiet for a moment?’ I defaulted to chat about Phoebe’s school where Victor would be joining the sixth form. He answered us, but not in a way that encouraged further discussion. By the time we arrived home, I wanted to lie down and sleep for a week.
By the third week, when Victor had yet to initiate any conversation himself beyond ‘Could I have another towel?’ I’d begun to dread mealtimes. I felt under pressure to show Victor that he’d come to live with a jolly family, who, alongside our passionate eating of broccoli, avocado and cabbage, engaged in lively debates about the environment, the various merits of politicians and the possibility of an election later on in the year. Instead, Phoebe – while picking the peas out of the shepherd’s pie – announced that she was never going to vote because all politicians were idiots. Both Patrick and I waded in with how hard women fought for the right to vote. But rather