‘How are you, Grandmother?’ he said. He had brought her a box of fruit jellies, the only passion she still had. She took them in unsteady hands stained with grave marks, and peered with suspicion at the manufacturer’s name. ‘How have you been getting on?’
‘Just the same.’
‘Anybody been to see you?’
Mrs Naulls shook her head. ‘Nobody ever comes to see me.’ She took the cellophane wrapping off the box. ‘Not a soul.’
‘Oh, Mrs Naulls, what an untruth!’ said the old woman in the next chair. She was the one who had been knitting. ‘Your son Leslie was here only yesterday.’
‘Haven’t got a son called Leslie, have I, Stanley?’ said Mrs Naulls, dropping cellophane on the floor.
‘Leonard. And I’m Stephen.’
‘Nurse’ll be after you,’ said the knitter. ‘You’re what they call a litter bug.’
Mrs Naulls ate a crimson jelly and then a green one. She didn’t offer the box. A bovine contentment came into her face as she chewed. Stephen had never been able to talk to her about her relationship with the great novelist. He had been over twenty before he had even found out about it but he hadn’t been old enough to dare ask his grandmother how it had been and how she had felt and what they had talked about. Now when he might dare it was too late. But still he searched for ways to bring the conversation round to Tace.
‘I expect you’ve been watching those “Bleakland” programmes, haven’t you, Grandmother?’
‘Pardon?’ she said, her mouth full.
‘On the television, Saturday nights.’
A woman who had been looking at the screen turned to him and said, ‘I saw one, round at my daughter’s. It was lovely. Lovely dresses.’
‘Why can’t you see it here?’
‘They get us to bed,’ said the knitter. ‘Eight they start getting us to bed.’
‘That’s a pity,’ Stephen persisted. ‘You’d have liked to watch that, Grandmother.’
‘How’s Rosemary, Keith?’ said Mrs Naulls.
‘If you mean Lyn, she’s fine. And I’m Stephen.’
He looked at her hopelessly. She had come to this, to a limp white heap who had forgotten the names of her nearest and dearest. Once he had tried to extract so much from her, and not just details of the Tace affair. She was the key to a past he needed to understand. Dadda’s temper, that he had inherited along with Dadda’s darkness and Dadda’s height, had got the better of him and he had attacked her, physically attacked her. But that was more than half his lifetime ago. He got up.
‘Time I was on my way.’
Mrs Naulls said lucidly, as if veils had suddenly, when it was too late, fallen from her mind and her speech, ‘It was good of you to come, dear. Thank you for the jellies.’
The knitter waved. Stephen was sure his grandmother had fallen asleep before he was even out of the room. It had begun to rain. Soon it was raining hard enough, Stephen noted dismally, to keep him off the moor for the evening. He felt as he had done when a small boy and rain or some other calamity of nature had kept him from a picnic, resentful and somewhat indignant.
It was the end of the week before Lyn took the cat basket back. There were ten birthday cards on the mantelpiece, but they had been there two days and she took them down. Two of them made her feel, not old exactly, but as if life was passing her by. They were the one from Joanne that said, ‘You’ve reached a quarter century’ and the one from Stephen, ‘My dearest wife’. She was uneasy about going to the pet shop. In her imagination she saw Nick Frazer as a young version of his uncle, a young wolf instead of an old one. But if she didn’t take it back he would only come along and ask for it. She was surprised he hadn’t already. Peach was sitting on the window sill, watching the raindrops run down the outside of the glass and trying to catch them with his paw. He behaved as if they were insects. Lyn stroked him and reminded him she would be back at lunchtime.
Nick Frazer was locking up the shop when she came along at one. She had remembered him quite differently from what he really was. He looked at her with a preoccupied air before he recognized her, perhaps because she had put up her hair rather severely — deliberately — into a tight knot on the back of her head. The pleasant, serious face, the steady brown eyes, disconcerted her. Was this the wolf who was going to make double-edged remarks, even a pass, at her? He took the basket, thanked her quietly, locked the shop door again. She was so surprised by the warmth of his smile, by his being able to smile so frankly, so like a friend, that when he said he was going to lunch at the Blue Lagoon and would she come too, she said yes, all right, without thinking.
They walked along by the river. The rain had almost stopped. The Blue Lagoon was the old Red Lion renamed, no one knew why, on the corner of Bankside and Trinity Street. She had already had second thoughts.
‘I ought to get back to Peach.’ She had told him what the cat was called.
He smiled again. ‘The great beauty of keeping cats is they don’t tie you.’
She sat at a table while he went to get their lager and ploughman’s lunches. Lyn took off her gloves. She saw that her left hand was bare. In washing her hands after breakfast she had taken off her wedding ring and must have left it on the side of the basin. It was the kind of ring you had to take off to wash, a kind of chased inlay of platinum and gold that Stephen had had specially made on Dadda’s advice. She was always taking it off and forgetting it. Kevin’s brother, who fancied himself as an amateur psychologist, said you didn’t really forget things like that and it meant Lyn must unconsciously want not to wear it — ergo, not to be married.
Nick brought their drinks and food on a tray.
‘And how is Peach?’
‘Quite happy, I think. He’s not shaking any more.’
‘But you are,’ Nick said.
It was true. Her hands were trembling, she could hardly hold the glass. She managed to laugh, held her hands for a minute in her lap. ‘It’s a nervous thing I have.’
He made no comment on that. It was then that she noticed how gravely and interestedly he was looking at her, had looked at her ever since they met outside the shop. It was as if he was very concerned with her as a person. But when he spoke it was not of her but of Peach, how to feed him, what sort of supplements he should have, that although he had had his routine immunizations, he must have a booster at a year old and also an injection against a new sort of feline virus.
‘How is it you know so much when you only took the shop over last week?’
‘Well —’ Again that warm, frank smile. ‘I’m a vet.’
‘Are you really?’ A hangover from Lyn’s childhood — a mother who cleaned at Chesney Hall, a father at Cartwright-Cageby’s — was to feel respect that had once amounted to awe for the professional man. But good sense asserted itself. ‘Why aren’t you being one then?’
‘I’ve only just qualified.’ He added almost apologetically, ‘It takes a long time. I’ve got a job waiting for me in London, but I can’t start till August when the man retires. Hence Hilderbridge and Uncle Jim.’