It was only after Laurie was born that she felt inclined to ask her husband if it might be all right for her mother to sometimes come to the house instead of them always meeting in town. Twice now, Laurie had screamed down the restaurant at Harvey Nichols, but she also saw no reason why her mother should continue to be inconvenienced simply because of her father’s ignorance. Her husband had no problem with the suggestion, but when she brought this up with her mother, as they sat together in Hyde Park, her mother’s eyes remained focused on the carry-cot and she continued to play with her grandson. Annabelle held out a hand for rain was now falling through the trees, but in drops so fine that it felt as though they were being sprinkled with dew. Eventually her mother looked up at her and told Annabelle, in a semi-whispered voice, that she didn’t think that this would be a good idea, and so Annabelle decided not to pursue the topic. When Laurie was five, and had started to go to school, mother and daughter began once again to meet without the child being present. It was then that she noticed that a considerable loneliness seemed to have descended on to her mother’s shoulders. At first she thought it was just age, and that doting upon her grandson had been keeping her young. However, it soon became clear that, beyond the subject of Laurie, there was nothing occurring in her mother’s life that she might transmute into the raw material of conversation. She worried about her, but realised that the best thing that she could offer her was time with her grandson, which suited Laurie for he loved being spoiled by his grandmother. During school holidays, she often let them spend an afternoon together at the zoo or at the pictures, and before Grandma got on the train to go back to the country she always made sure that her excited grandson was laden down with sweets. As he grew older, Laurie began to wonder aloud why Grandma never came to the house, or why Daddy never came to wave goodbye to Grandma at Paddington station, and then he began to ask his increasingly frail grandmother questions about her husband which she found difficult to field. By the time Laurie was ten, his grandmother’s trips to London were becoming infrequent, and Annabelle decided that she had to talk with her husband about the situation. Much to her surprise it was he who suggested that they should make a daytrip to Wiltshire and give Laurie the chance to meet his grandfather before it was too late.
That evening, Annabelle called her mother and said that they were thinking of motoring down on Sunday. There was a long silence on the other end of the telephone and then Annabelle heard her mother’s hesitant voice.
‘Sunday?’ She paused. ‘This Sunday?’
Again Annabelle repeated the plan, stressing the fact that Keith would be driving the car so that there could be no misunderstanding as to what she was proposing. There was another long silence and a worried Annabelle felt compelled to ask, ‘Are you there, Mummy?’ She heard her mother cough quietly and then pull herself together.
‘Yes, dear, of course I’m here. And Sunday should be fine, but I’ve been meaning to tell you, Annabelle, that things with your father are a little difficult. Apparently the doctor thinks he might have the dreaded big “c”. She paused. ‘Cancer. Of the lungs, he says, but that doesn’t make any sense for your father hasn’t smoked a cigarette since he left the army, and that was aeons ago.’
On the journey down from London, Annabelle kept twisting around in her seat and dabbing Germolene on Laurie’s bruised lip where the boy who had called him a ‘halfie’ had hit him. Clearly, Laurie didn’t like his mother’s attention, so he kept squirming away from her and jiggling the packet of sunflower seeds that he had bought as a present for his grandmother. He was excited that they were finally going to visit Grandma’s home, where he would also meet his grandfather, but even happier to know that she had a big garden, as opposed to their own tiny one, and lots of space in which she could plant flowers. Annabelle had just helped Laurie with a school project on the different uses of sunflowers, and because the teacher had told him that sunflowers needed a lot of space to grow Laurie had decided that he wanted to bring sunflower seeds for Grandma. When Laurie dropped off to sleep, Annabelle finally had the opportunity to tell her husband what she had wanted to say since he had suggested that they make this trip. First, she wanted to apologise again for what she had done all those years earlier when she had lied to him about going to the theatre, but more importantly, even at this late stage, she wanted to let him know that she really didn’t need to see her father again. His use of the term ‘nigger-lover’, while knowing that she had an unborn child in her body, had irreparably broken something between them. As she sat and cried on the platform at Ashleigh station, and waited for the train that would take her back to London, she had finally come to accept that her father was weak, pathetic even, and she felt not a jot of hostility towards him. In fact, once the flood of tears had subsided, she finally understood that what she felt towards him was a remote indifference, which she knew she could cope with. However, what caused her a real shock was the realisation that she was experiencing a rising tide of admiration for her mother who stoically, over the years, had been living with a man she feared, and for whom she clearly had little affection.
Annabelle looked across the table at her gaunt father, who was propped up under a heavy blanket that reached to his chest, then at her husband, and then she stood up and left the two men at the table and joined her mother in the kitchen. Her mother passed her a wooden mallet and Annabelle slapped a bulb of garlic and watched as the cloves collapsed into a flower. Through the window they could both see Laurie on the expansive back lawn, wheeling around in circles and chasing butterflies. Back in the living room, neither man would look at the other. Annabelle’s father pointed out of the window towards Laurie.
‘How old is the boy now?’
‘Ten. He was ten last month.’
‘I see.’ Annabelle’s father began to nod as though approving of the fact that his grandson had crossed this threshold. ‘And the name, Laurie. Is that with a “w” or with a “u,” because there are two ways of spelling the word, or so I’m led to believe.’
‘It’s with a “u”. We named him after Laurie Cunningham.’ He paused and looked at his father-in-law, whose strangely dull eyes seemed to have lost their ability to reflect light. He felt sorry for him, for the man seemed to be permanently thrashing about in his mind. ‘He was a footballer who I used to like a lot. He played for England, but died young in a car crash. In Spain in the late eighties, I think.’
‘I see. Did you know the chap?’
‘Know him? You mean personally?’
‘Was he a chum?’
‘I didn’t know him, but Annabelle and I both liked the name.’
‘Well, given the bruise on the boy’s face perhaps you should have named him after a boxer. Henry, maybe. He’s got to learn to stand up for himself. No feather-bedding. People can be very cruel, you do understand that, don’t you?’
Through the window he could see his son charging happily about the vast expanse of the cottage’s neatly manicured lawn.