Part 4 (2/2)

The house was two-storey with a turrety sort of tower, and was painted white with black woodwork as if it was dressed up for something formal. A tabby cat lay asleep on a cane chair near the front door. I was twitchy and uneasy and had forgotten why I wanted to visit Granny Carmelene at all. I heard the front door open and Granny Carmelene appeared, holding out her hand.

'Sunday! How lovely,' she said, smiling. The very first thing I noticed about Granny Carmelene was that she had nice teeth, but maybe they were false, because lots of old people have the kind of teeth that fall out. I was nervous about having correct manners because I heard Mum saying once that manners were more important to Granny Carmelene than love, whatever that means.

I took her hand and kissed her on the cheek, hoping I wasn't meant to bow or something. She smelt of baby powder, which was better than smelling of mothb.a.l.l.s like some grandparents do (usually the the ones that have blue hair). Granny Carmelene was elegant and rather beautiful, in a grandmotherly sort of a way. She had long straight hair, like me, and wore it high up off her face in a silver twisty scroll. Or maybe it was a wig? You can never be sure with grandmothers, especially ones you've never met before. She wore a navy blue summery b.u.t.ton-up dress that came down below her knees and had a wide belt and matching dark red shoes with square toes. She looked nothing like Mum at all, but as she turned to usher me inside I recognised that Granny Carmelene and I had the same shaped nose as well as the same hair, just that hers was older.

'Come inside, Sunday. Let me have a look at you. Lovely and tall and s.h.i.+ning hair, black as night. You're the picture of good health young lady. Such a long time . . .'

I had absolutely no idea what to say to Granny Carmelene. I mean, I couldn't just come out and ask her what all the fuss with Mum was about, could I? And because that topic was forbidden, I couldn't think of anything else. I had no words and no ideas at all. Maybe my mind had fallen asleep in seat 44K and my empty body was standing in Granny Carmelene's entrance hall. It was a bad scene. For a moment I wished that I was an extrovert, like Claud. She'd have been chatting away and giving Granny Carmelene compliments on her rose garden and asking her all sorts of questions, like what was the name of the cat. They'd be best friends in less than two minutes. Still, thinking about being Claud did help me a little.

'What's the cat called?' I asked, suddenly worried that my short-short, denim skirt and stripy socks (which I'd pulled up really high) wasn't the right sort of outfit to be wearing.

'Oh, that's Marmalade. She's an old girl now I'm afraid. Hasn't caught a mouse in years.'

She led me into a dark panelled room off the entrance hall. 'Here Sunday, have a seat in the drawing room and I'll make some tea.' She pointed towards a dark-green square leather chair.

'Go on, make yourself at home. I won't be long.'

The drawing room was dead freaky, and there were no drawings at all, just ancient looking portraits on the walls. There was a huge one of a man with a ruddy face and a white curled wig like judges wear, and another enormous painting, in a carved gold frame above the fire place, of a lady in a blue velvet gown standing next to a huge bowl of fruit. There were peac.o.c.ks next to her, and two dogs that looked like longer versions of Willow. There were eight portraits in total. I know because, apart from being an on-timer and a list maker, I'm also a counter. The freaky part was that the old-fas.h.i.+oned people in the portraits were all staring at me as if they'd been expecting me. And freakier still was that when I edged away from the square green chair and positioned myself by the window they were still looking at me. Their eyes actually followed me as if I was dead suspicious, making me feel kind of guilty. I spent a few moments looking down at my shoes (which were a bit scuffed), and then I stood over by the fire place. When I looked up, all the sets of eyes (sixteen eyes in total) were still on me. I mean, didn't they have anything better to do? I wanted to yell out 'What?' but was scared one of them would actually answer me. That can happen you know. I saw it in a movie once.

I heard the whistling of a kettle and Granny Carmelene making clunking noises in the kitchen. I really hoped they were the sort of clunking noises that involved putting biscuits or cakes onto a plate, because I'm sure you'd agree I deserved some. Even if I was guilty of having an ulterior motive. (That's a detective term. It means looking like you're doing something for one reason but really doing it for another reason entirely, like getting to know Granny Carmelene in a long-lost-relative way, while also wanting to get some information out of her that I couldn't get from Mum, while also hoping like crazy that the whole thing included cake.) Granny Carmelene appeared at the doorway with a tea-set (and cakes!) rattling about on a tray, and suggested we take it down by the river. It helped to get out of the drawing room and escape the eyes. There were steps down to a rickety old jetty and a table and chairs under the weeping willows. It was lucky for me that Granny Carmelene was the talkative type because my personality was still up in 44K desperately buzzing for the hostess, and I could only think of completely trivial things to say, as though I were about four years old. She told me that the people in the portraits were all our ancestors from England where she grew up.

'Gosh,' I said.

She poured two cups of tea. 'Milk, Sunny?' she asked holding up a matching china jug.

'Yes please, and sugar, please.'

'I made us some mini chocolate eclairs, too. Do you like them?'

'Oh yes, thank you, they look delicious. Is it real cream, like from a cow?'

'Of course, Sunday. Where else do you get cream from?'

'Well, you can get this stuff in a can now. You shake it and it comes out all whipped up,' I said, sitting on one of the wooden chairs facing the river and wondering how many mini eclairs I could have before it started looking like bad manners. I had already counted six on the plate.

'Good heavens! What will they think of next?' (See, even Granny Carmelene knows about The Theys.) The water was flowing fast after all the rain, and some of the ropy tendrils from the willow tree were brus.h.i.+ng along the surface with the current. I wondered if Mum ever played Tarzan on them when she was growing up, and flung herself out into the middle of the river on hot days. I would have. I took a sip of tea and one of the eclairs, trying like anything not to ask any more dumb questions. But the more I tried not to, the more I seemed to burp them up like bad gas.

'Was it the English who invented hedges, Granny?'

'Do people really eat hot potato chips and b.u.t.ter in bread rolls over there?'

'Is it true that the Queen smokes?'

'Did you ever see any crop circles?'

'Do grown-ups really still call their parents Mummy and Daddy in England?'

'Does the Hundred Acre Wood really exist?'

'Is it true that Christopher Robin is gay?'

'Do the English really love their pets more than their own children?'

'How far is England from Transylvania?'

'Do you believe in vampires, Granny?'

And then finally: 'Granny, why are you and Mum divorced?'

'Well I don't really think divorce is the right term for it, Sunday. Do you?' Granny Carmelene sighed, and pulled her lips into a tight straight line, adjusting her belt as she stood up and stacked the dishes back onto the tray.

'Should we make our way back to the house?' She asked, without looking at me, and I realised what bad timing it was to be asking the divorce question when there were still four mini eclairs left. Now they would surely be packed away, or fed to Marmalade, or maybe Granny Carmelene was planning to have them for dinner, because people who live on their own can have cake for dinner. There's no one around to tell them not to.

Because I didn't know Granny Carmelene that well, I couldn't tell how she did angry. Was she was silent because she had nothing to say? Or was she silently angry about what I had said? If you ask me, silent angry is the worst. I much prefer someone to just yell at me or throw something across the room than brood and grump about and make the air all heavy with twisted stares and sighs. I wished like anything for the silence to go away, but couldn't think of anything to say to break it. Why did I mention the 'D' word? I started finding it difficult to breathe, as if my lungs were made of thick rubber, like a whoopee cus.h.i.+on, that wouldn't expand.

Finally, Granny Carmelene said, 'Unfortunately, Sunday, as much as your mother has many strengths, she doesn't always know what side her bread is b.u.t.tered on.' Which, wasn't exactly the explanation I'd been looking for, I can tell you, especially as Mum doesn't even eat b.u.t.ter, or margarine for that matter.

Still, the fact that Granny Carmelene didn't seem to be silently angry sure made it easier to breathe again. It was as if she just felt comfortable with the s.p.a.ces between her words and didn't always hurry to chatter them in. It made more room to listen to other things, like the gush of a river after a storm and the sounds of gravely footsteps, and the particular way Granny Carmelene brushed her shoes on the door mat and the wiry stretching of the springs on the screen door as we went back inside.

'Come, Sunny, I'll show you the library. Do books interest you?'

I followed Granny Carmelene into a room opposite the stairs. Thank G.o.d there were no portraits. The library opened out to the front verandah, and shafts of dusty light streamed through the windows. There were bookshelves covering the walls and a ladder for reaching the higher ones. In the middle of the room was a large oval table with some old maps pinned down at the corners with gla.s.s paperweights, and some blue and pink hydrangeas in a vase. In front of the fireplace was a zebraskin rug and two velvet armchairs, each with their own lamp. I wondered if one of the chairs belonged to Grandpa Henry before he went away. I almost asked Granny about him, but something inside me grabbed onto the thought and stuffed it safely under a cus.h.i.+on.

I moved towards the table to look at the maps, and could feel Granny Carmelene hovering close behind me.

'I'm an avid collector, you know,' she said s.h.i.+fting the paperweights to the corners of one of the maps. 'This one's only a replica though, I'm afraid. Have you heard about the Chinese voyages of discovery in 1421? It's an absolutely fascinating piece of history.'

'No, no, I haven't. But I did a project once on Christopher Columbus and how he discovered America.'

'Ah yes, Columbus made some fine maps. Only now evidence suggests that it wasn't Columbus who discovered America at all, nor was it Cook who discovered Australia. The Chinese had already mapped it all out hundreds of years before and had circ.u.mnavigated the world twice almost one hundred years before Magellan. It's just that all the evidence was destroyed . . . Well, almost all of it anyway. This map, for instance, dates back to 1425. The original was found only last year in an antique bookshop in Beijing, quite by accident. The discovery of the world as we know it could be completely rewritten. It's enormously exciting, Sunday.'

'That's amazing,' I said, feeling dizzy as if the swirling whirlpools on the map were pulling me in. Kind of like an underwater version of Seat 44K. Maybe there could be a submarine version, with a periscope?

'I like maps, too,' I said. 'They make me feel peaceful, like flying, when you can look out at the map of your whole life.'

She leant down to study one of them in more detail and gave a deep sigh.

'The thing is, Sunday, we all live with our pain. It becomes part of the landscape that's inside us. Your life becomes a project in cartography. You alone must map it all out. One has to become intimately familiar with what has been carved into us like a river, or laid down in us like rock. You have to find a way to flow your life around the obstacles, or through them. Or you can fence parts off, of course, but your life gets a little narrow as a result. If you spend your life shunning the painful parts, you risk them growing wild with neglect and taking you over, like weeds.'

I wasn't exactly sure what Granny Carmelene was talking about. It was like listening to someone talk to themselves. I think old people do a bit of that. I moved over to the doors near the verandah and looked out to the garden. It was so peaceful, as if Granny Carmelene had created a world with only lovely things in it. She leant over the table and examined the map with a magnifying gla.s.s. Her words became soft and slow, like she was whispering into a crystal ball.

'So here we all are, Sunny, each with our joys, each with our pain. Your mother has regrets, too, I'm sure. You may think pain is an obstacle, but at the core of one's pain is always a diamond that can help shape your life. We can't change the past, my dear. But we can learn from it, and perhaps make different choices for the future. Grasping for happiness, I'm afraid, is like licking sweet honey from a knife.'

I'm glad Granny Carmelene mentioned honey, because talking about ingredients made me feel like I had something I could add to the conversation, even though most of it sounded like gobbledy-gook to me. I mean, what did any of it have to do with Mum and the D word?

She looked up from the map and gave me a gentle smile, which reminded me of a sun-shower, on account of a solitary tear also rolling down her cheek.

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