a pile of magazines at her side. She smiled as I approached, and I relaxed, all thoughts of Paddy Friel effectively banished. With Caitlyn’s recent departure, and Mum having been settled on the Costa Brava for the last sixteen years, Gran was the only family I had left. I had never been so glad to see her.
‘Hello, Gran,’ I said, bending to kiss her soft cheek, and resting my head against hers for a moment too long. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘You’re looking thin,’ she said, never one to mince words. ‘Are you overdoing the exercise again? There’ll be nowt left of you by Christmas at this rate. I’ll be mistaking you for the turkey wishbone. You want plenty of best butter, chips cooked in dripping, and a good supply of gin. How else do you think I made it to my age?’
‘Certainly not by flattering your nearest and dearest.’ I laughed and pulled up a chair beside her. ‘I don’t know whether I should give you these biscuits now …’
‘All-butter shortbread?’ I nodded. They were her favourites; I brought them every week. Woe betide if I produced anything else. ‘I’ll ring for tea.’
Gran pressed a button on the plastic emergency necklace she wore and shortly afterwards an exasperated carer bustled in. She took one look at me and rolled her eyes.
‘You know the story of the boy who cried wolf, don’t you?’ she grumbled, but with a smile of undoubted affection. ‘One of these days there’ll be a real emergency and we won’t come. I suppose you’ll be wanting tea.’
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ Gran said.
‘It beats some of the jobs I have to do round here …’
‘You shouldn’t take advantage,’ I said, when the carer had wandered off on her mission. ‘This isn’t a hotel.’
‘Nonsense. I’m one of the least demanding ones in here. You should hear what Mr Jacobs asks them to do. No one wants to be on rota to give him a bed bath …’
‘Have you heard from Caitlyn yet?’ Gran asked, when our tea had arrived and she had started on the biscuits. ‘Is she in Paris now?’
‘I don’t know. She said she would text as soon as she could.’ I touched the pocket where my phone lay, out of my handbag so I would feel the first vibration of a text arriving. ‘I’m sure she’s fine …’
So I said; but that hadn’t stopped me checking the news websites on a regular basis all morning, dreading reports of a fire in the Channel Tunnel, terrorist attacks in France, or a million and one other disasters that my imagination was all too happy to suggest. I was so perturbed by the ideas, that when Gran offered me her biscuits, I took one without thinking.
‘Of course she’ll be fine.’ Gran patted my hand. ‘She’s a sensible girl. You’ve done a grand job.’
But it hadn’t been a job – it had been love. Because Caitlyn wasn’t actually mine. She was my sister Faye’s child, the big sister I had adored with my whole being, until her sudden death when she was twenty-four, and Caitlyn just two. Faye had fallen pregnant around the time I started university, and she had never told us who the father was; it was all too easy to believe she didn’t know, given her lifestyle. There had been lengthy debate about what should happen to Caitlyn after Faye’s death, but it could only ever end one way. I had wanted her to live with me, whatever the personal cost – and it had been high, higher than I could have anticipated. But I had owed it to Faye. No price could ever have been too high.
‘I can’t help worrying,’ I said now, drawing back from the past. ‘Who knows what temptations she’s going to face in Paris?’
‘No more than I expect she’s faced already.’
‘Not on my watch!’
‘So I suppose your mum knew everything you got up to, did she?’ Gran laughed. ‘I thought not. You’ve done your bit, love, and more besides. Time to let go. It’ll do you both good to stretch your wings a bit. Here, have another biccie.’
I did, telling myself that it was my own small act of stretching. I usually tried to stick to a healthy diet, but already my worries about Caitlyn were eroding my good intentions. I didn’t know how to stop, however old she was: I had a sudden vision of myself in Gran’s position in fifty years’ time, my phone clutched in my gnarled old hand, waiting for news of Caitlyn. Perhaps she was right, and I did need to learn to let go, but I didn’t know how to do it.
‘Here, you’ll never guess who I saw t’other day,’ Gran said later, when our teas were drunk, and I was getting ready to leave. She reached for a tatty magazine on the table at her side. ‘I saved it for you. Have a look at the page folded over.’
Perhaps the unexpected sugar consumption had addled my wits, because I flicked to the marked page without a glimmer of suspicion. Oddly, it was the young woman in the photograph that I noticed first: luscious, thick blonde hair cascaded over bare shoulders and brushed against a large bust that could have earned her a place as a centrefold. I felt the familiar twinge of regret over my own boyish figure and chin-length brown hair, hastily wiped away when I turned my attention to the man attached to the woman’s side.
‘It’s the fella you went out with, isn’t it?’ Gran asked, making it sound as if I had only had one boyfriend over my entire lifetime. It wasn’t true: there had been several boys before Paddy. Not so many after, but that was hardly surprising, and not only because all my focus had been on Caitlyn. Paddy had taught me many things that I had been delighted to learn, and one thing that I hadn’t. A broken heart can be broken a second time, and a third, until only the crushed fragments remain.
‘And look who he’s with!’ Gran continued, oblivious to my discomfort. ‘She was in Emmerdale until she ran off with someone’s husband.’
I assumed she meant in the TV programme, rather than in real life, but who knew with these showbiz folk? Much against my will, my eyes strayed back to the man in the photograph. Here was Paddy Friel again, thrust to my attention for the second time in as many days, and no more welcome this time. It was a good photograph, I couldn’t deny that: he was wearing black tie, which suited his colouring, and with his raffish curls and hint of five-o’clock shadow he looked like a pirate trying to infiltrate polite society. It was hard to believe that this confident, well-dressed man had once been the boy who left dirty underpants under my bed. Hard to believe, too, what weakness lay behind that charming smile.
I flicked the magazine closed and noticed the date on the front cover.
‘This is six months old,’ I said, dropping the magazine on the table as if it were soiling my fingers. ‘He’ll have moved on by now, probably several times. Doesn’t he have a failed marriage behind him? Commitment was never his strong point.’
‘He always was a handsome devil,’ Gran said, with a wistful smile. She’d had a soft spot for Paddy, and he had given the appearance of being fond of her, but that was the trouble with Paddy: it was all style over substance, appearance over truth. ‘You could forgive a man a lot who looked like that.’
I said nothing. Some things were impossible to forgive, however attractive the face. Not that I found him attractive any more: those feelings had died a long time ago, the least mourned of all my losses at that time. I picked up my bag and bent to give Gran a kiss.
‘I thought I might have seen you as Mrs Friel.’ Gran was on a roll; I wished she’d never seen the blasted magazine. ‘I’d have liked a chance to get dressed up as grandmother of the bride. I’d have out-glitzed the lot of them. I still would. Where there’s life, there’s hope, eh?’
She looked at me with such pride and hope, that all I could do was smile back and kiss her again, too kind to tell her that life in my heart had been pronounced extinct many years ago.
*
I offered to drive Tina to the talk on Roman Britain the following Thursday night. As a longstanding teetotaller, I was used to being the designated driver, and I knew that Tina was hoping that to make