“Oh yes,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she really knew.
There was a knock on the door, and one of the nursing home staff put her head into the room. “Everything OK?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Would you like some tea or coffee?”
“Coffee would be lovely,” I said. I turned to my grandmother. “Nanna, would you like some coffee or tea?”
“I don’t drink tea,” she said.
“I’ll bring her some anyway,” said the staff member with a smile. “She always says she doesn’t drink tea, but she must have at least six or seven cups a day. Milk and sugar?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “One sugar.”
The head withdrew and the door closed.
“I like Julie,” my grandmother said again.
“Was that Julie?” I asked, but Nanna didn’t answer. She was looking again out of the window. I took her hand in mine and stroked it.
We sat silently for a while until the woman came back in with a tray and two cups.
“Are you Julie?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I’m Laura. But we do have a Julie here, and your grandmother calls all of us Julie. We don’t mind. I’ll answer to anything.” She laughed. “Here you are, Mrs. Talbot,” Laura said, putting the tray down on a table beside her armchair.
It was comforting for me to know that there were such caring people looking after my Nanna.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Just pull the alarm if you need anything,” Laura said, pointing at a red cord that hung down the wall alongside my grandmother’s bed. “She should be all right for a while, but call if she needs the loo or anything. She can sometimes get quite urgent.”
“Thank you,” I said again, “I will.”
I sat patiently drinking my coffee as my grandmother’s tea slowly cooled.
“Here, Nanna,” I said, giving her the cup. “Don’t forget your tea.”
“I don’t drink tea,” she said, but she still took the china cup in her thin, bony hands and drank from it. The tea was soon all gone, so I took the empty cup from her and put it back on the tray.
“Nanna,” I said. She went on looking out of the window. “Nanna,” I repeated a little louder while also pulling on her arm. She slowly turned to face me.
“Nanna, can you tell me about my parents? Can you tell me about Peter and Tricia?” It didn’t seem odd for me to call my parents by their names rather than Mummy and Daddy. I’d never had a mummy and daddy, only a nanna and grandpa.
She looked up at my face, but the sharpness of fifteen minutes previously had begun to fade. I feared I had missed my chance and that I was losing her. At the best of times, what I was asking would not have been easy for either of us. In her present state, it might be impossible.
“Nanna,” I said again with some urgency, “tell me about Peter and Tricia.”
“Peter and Tricia?” she said, some of the sharpness returning.
“Yes, Nanna. Peter, your son, and Tricia, his wife.”
“Such a dreadful thing,” she said, turning away from me and again looking out of the window.
“What was a dreadful thing?”
“What he did to her,” she said.
“What did he do to her?” I asked, pulling gently on her hand to keep her attention. She turned back slightly towards me.
“He killed her,” she said slowly. “He murdered her.”
“Tricia?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She looked back up at my face. “He murdered Tricia.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why did he murder Tricia?”
“Because of the baby,” she said.
“What about the baby?” I pressed her. “Why did he murder her because of the baby?” I wondered if he had killed her because the baby wasn’t his.
My grandmother stared into my eyes. “He killed the baby too,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Whose baby was it?”
“Tricia’s baby,” she said
“But was Peter the father?”
“Peter ran away,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Peter ran away because he killed Tricia. But was Peter the father of her baby?”
That quizzical look appeared again in her eyes.
“It wasn’t Peter,” she said slowly. “It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.”
I sat there staring at her, thinking that she must be confused.
“No,” I said. “Surely it was Peter who murdered Tricia? That’s why he ran away.”
“It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.” She said it again quite clearly. There was no confusion.
I sat there stunned. So it was not my father but my grandfather who was the murderer.
“But why?” I asked pitifully.
“Because of the baby,” she said equally clearly. “Your grandfather was the baby’s father.”
Oh my God, I thought. My mother’s unborn female child, who would have been my little sister, would also have been my aunt.
I stayed with my grandmother for another hour trying to piece together the whole sorry story. Trying to pull accurate details out of her fuzzy memory was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. Not only could I not see the puzzle, I didn’t know when, or if, I’d solved it.
But now that she had started to give up the secret that had burned within her for so long, she did so with a clarity of mind that I didn’t realize she still possessed. I knew it was true that some patients with even advanced dementia could recall events of long ago in spite of the total loss of their more recent memory and also their inability to function properly day by day. So it was with my grandmother that morning, as the awful knowledge poured from her, almost in relief, of at last being able to share her hitherto private horror. I learned more in that one hour about my parents and my early life than I had managed to extract from her at any time in the previous thirty-seven years. And I didn’t like it.
I discovered that the five of us had lived together in my grandparents’ house in Surrey, my mother having moved in there on the day of her marriage. It wasn’t something that I had thought about before, but, clearly, my grandmother hadn’t considered the arrangement at all unusual.
However, if what Nanna told me was right, and if I correctly read between the lines of what she said, severe tensions had existed between my mother and father throughout their short marriage. There had also been considerable friction between my parents and my grandparents. It had obviously not been a happy family home.
I found out that it hadn’t only been my mother and father who were staying in Paignton at the time of Tricia’s death. Both my grandparents had been with them, and I had been there as well. It seemed that the holiday in Devon had been my father’s idea, an attempt to make things better amongst them all, but it had actually made them much worse.
“Peter and Tricia argued all the time,” my grandmother said, placing her head to one side and closing her eyes. “On and on, they went. They physically fought more than once. Peter slapped her, and she scratched his face.”
Hence the traces of my father’s skin and DNA under Tricia’s fingernails, I thought. The DNA the police had found and wrongly believed was her killer’s.
“Then she told him that her baby wasn’t his,” Nanna said. “She told him that it was your grandfather’s baby. He went completely wild.”
“Peter went wild?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “But Teddy went wild as well, because she threatened to tell everyone and to get it in the newspapers. She said he would lose his bookmaker’s license.”
I wasn’t sure if that was actually true, but it would have been enough to frighten my grandfather.
“But was the baby Tricia was carrying really Grandpa’s child?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again, “I believe it was.”
“But are you certain?” I pressed her.
“Yes,” she said. “I had suspected it even before she said anything. I’d been telling Teddy over and over for months that we would be better off without her round, but he wouldn’t have it. He thought he was in love with her. Then the morning after Tricia tells us that he’s the father of the baby, he walks into the hotel where we were staying and tells me it’s finished between them. Then he calmly tells me that he’s strangled the little bitch.”