‘I’ve written what they are on the back,’ Poppy tells him, her voice tight and high in the back of her throat, defending her corner. And so she has. In biro. She has been very careful not to press too hard, so the writing on the back of each photograph has come out faint and spidery and barely legible. How typical of Poppy, to cook up a pointless task for herself and then make a difficulty out of it.
After Poppy has gone to bed, Hanna, Michel and I stay up drinking. We need to decompress. Even setting aside Michel’s spat with her, Poppy is a heavy presence. She is incapable of saying what she wants, while being utterly ruthless at getting it. Hanna has spent the entire afternoon trying to establish whether she takes milk in her tea any more.
‘Oh, don’t worry, dear.’
‘Yes, but do you want some?’
‘I often have it without.’
‘But do you want any?’
‘I’d be very happy with a cup of hot water.’
‘But I’ve just made you tea . . .’
‘If it wasn’t for Agnes,’ says Michel, ‘I’d never have invited the old sow.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Well, I’m glad I’ve seen her. It’s been years.’
No-one is interested in my sentimental reunion.
‘God.’ Michel shakes his head. ‘Agnes is besotted with her. She spent all last week asking when is Grandma going to get here? How long is Grandma staying? Is she staying for Christmas? You’d think Poppy would have made an effort.’
‘But Agnes knows Grandma isn’t staying for Christmas Day.’
‘I’m not talking about her staying, Hanna, I’m talking about the photographs.’
‘Oh. Well. That’s not about Agnes, is it? That’s about you and her.’
‘What did I do?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ Hanna corks the whisky and gathers up our glasses, policing us. ‘Agnes will be all right.’
Michel says to me, ‘Mum thinks I want to trash her house. She thinks I can’t wait till she’s dead, so I can get my hands on all her things. It’s why she’s thrown so much away. The albums. Dad’s medals and letters.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t think like that.’
‘This is exactly the way she thinks. How else do you explain this shit?’ He waves the plastic photo wallet at me. ‘She’s afraid of me. No way is she letting me get my grubby paws on the precious things. Not by the hairs on her chinny-chin-chin. Grandma’s built her house of bricks and lit a fucking big fire in the grate.’
Hanna comes back in to announce, ‘I’m going to bed.’
But Michel has the bit between his teeth. He continues, ‘If you had any idea how often I’ve sat on Agnes’s bed of an evening, tucking her in, explaining to her why we never go to see Grandma.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘why can’t you go see Grandma?’
‘Because we’re not invited,’ says Hanna, drawn back into the conversation in spite of herself.
‘Come on, you could just turn up if you wanted—’
Michel’s eyes go wide. ‘Turn up?’
Hanna says, ‘Agnes has only ever been to Sand Lane once, when she was a baby, and then only because we invited ourselves.’
Michel says, ‘We’re never fucking doing that again.’
The next morning I come downstairs to find Agnes playing by herself, singing and laughing at the top of her voice, the way children do when they are trying to block out something bad. In the kitchen, Michel and his mother are already at each other.
Michel says to Poppy, ‘Look, I don’t want to take it. I don’t want to take anything off you. Jesus. I just want to copy stuff.’
‘You’ll get it all when I’m dead anyway, I wouldn’t care.’
‘Why wait?’
‘I’m not having you clambering about the loft. I’m not having you up there stamping about in my things!’
‘Morning.’
Poppy runs to me, as best she can. ‘You speak to him!’ There is something magnificent about Poppy – the way she assumes I will take her side.
‘Speak to him about what?’
‘He’s going on about his father’s things again!’
‘Michel. I have told you before. These heirlooms traditionally belong in the family home. Now stop badgering your mother.’
Poppy’s self-satisfaction is priceless. ‘You see?’
Hanna comes in and sends Poppy and me packing. ‘There’s croissants and coffee in the sun lounge.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t manage a whole croissant.’
‘Whatever. Agnes! You see that Grandma has a good breakfast.’
Agnes, an eager gaoler, leads Poppy from the room.
‘That,’ I say, ‘was brilliant.’
‘Fuck off, Connie.’
‘And a merry Christmas to you.’
In the sun lounge, Poppy is staring at her croissant with revulsion, as if it were a dead rat or a large turd.
‘You know how this all started, don’t you?’ Poppy says, picking up her knife with a shaking hand.
Agnes is here to help. She tears her grandmother’s croissant in two and, with a sidelong look, shovels the larger half all the way into her mouth.
Poppy, oblivious, ineptly butters the shred that’s left. ‘It’s because—’ It suddenly occurs to her that Agnes is in the room. But Agnes, aware that another wave of boring grown-up gibberish is about to break over her lovely Christmas morning, is already on her way out.
‘I’m going to rehearse a show!’
Sotto voce from Poppy: ‘Agnes had a school project.’
‘Well.’ I go over and close the door. ‘I think it’s normal, when you’re a child, to want to know about your grandparents. It’s normal to be interested in that stuff.’
Poppy flaps her hands in irritated dismissal. ‘It’s not her. It’s the school. It’s ridiculous.’
‘Perhaps you should write a letter to the school explaining how ridiculous it’s being, and Agnes can take that in as her holiday project.’
You can say these things to Poppy because her self-defence is seamless. She only ever hears what she wants to hear. This has nothing to do with her age. She was always like this. In fact I would go so far as to say that, after a gap of almost twenty years, she hasn’t changed.
‘Michel’s never shown the slightest bit of interest in Louis until now.’
Louis? It occurs to me I’ve never heard the man’s name before. It’s always been ‘Dad’ from Michel or, from Poppy, ‘Michel’s father’.
‘This isn’t about Michel,’ I point out.
‘He’s never asked for anything of Louis’s before. He’s just got it into his head.’ She makes it sound as though he’s contracted an infection.
‘Is that a problem? Why is that a problem?’
Poppy’s trouble is that she has never really believed in communication. Information goes in but it never comes out, and if you force it out, it emerges so tortured, twisted, hedged around with all sorts of mysteries and qualifications, that it’s worse than useless and obscurely upsetting. ‘I had nothing from my family. I didn’t have anything of my mother’s or my father’s. Anyway, I don’t want to have to explain myself to you.’ Poppy is in tears now.
‘You don’t have to explain anything to me. Come on, Poppy.’
‘My home was sold from under me. Why should I have to explain myself to you?’
The next evening, once he has seen Poppy off at the station, Michel comes home and we try scanning and printing out Poppy’s photographs so that Agnes can have at least a couple of pictures of her grandfather for her Christmas project.
I suppose I had a very romantic notion of what a writer’s study should look like. Waxed floorboards. Kilims draped thickly over a daybed under the window. African masks on the walls. A desk piled with manuscripts and obscure books.
Michel’s den isn’t remotely like that. It is tiny, carpeted, and brutally functional. The walls are bare. The window is too high to see out of. On the far wall there is a small MDF bookshelf, stacked with copies of his own books. The desk is a sandblasted glass sheet on unvarnished wooden trestles. There’s a laptop, connected to a larger screen. A landline telephone. A desk lamp.