“Hello, Nanna,” I said, going into her room.
She was sitting in her armchair, looking out of the window, and she turned towards me. I went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“Hello, Ned,” she said. “How lovely.”
Today was clearly a good day. She looked very smart in a dark skirt, a white blouse with a line of small yellow-and-pink embroidered flowers down the center and a lavender-colored cardigan over it, open at the front. And she’d had her hair done since my last visit.
“You look beautiful,” I said, meaning it.
She smiled at me, full of understanding. How I wished it could last for ever.
I sat on the end of her bed next to her chair.
“How have you been?” I asked. “I like your hair.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Julie will be here soon.”
“Who is Julie?” I asked.
“Julie,” she repeated. “She’ll be here soon.”
I decided not to ask again.
“Sophie sends her love,” I said. A small, quizzical expression came into her eyes. “You remember Sophie. She’s my wife.”
“Oh yes,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she really knew.
There was a knock on the door, and one of the nursing home staff put her head into the room. “Everything OK?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Would you like some tea or coffee?”
“Coffee would be lovely,” I said. I turned to my grandmother. “Nanna, would you like some coffee or tea?”
“I don’t drink tea,” she said.
“I’ll bring her some anyway,” said the staff member with a smile. “She always says she doesn’t drink tea, but she must have at least six or seven cups a day. Milk and sugar?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “One sugar.”
The head withdrew and the door closed.
“I like Julie,” my grandmother said again.
“Was that Julie?” I asked, but Nanna didn’t answer. She was looking again out of the window. I took her hand in mine and stroked it.
We sat silently for a while until the woman came back in with a tray and two cups.
“Are you Julie?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I’m Laura. But we do have a Julie here, and your grandmother calls all of us Julie. We don’t mind. I’ll answer to anything.” She laughed. “Here you are, Mrs. Talbot,” Laura said, putting the tray down on a table beside her armchair.
It was comforting for me to know that there were such caring people looking after my Nanna.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Just pull the alarm if you need anything,” Laura said, pointing at a red cord that hung down the wall alongside my grandmother’s bed. “She should be all right for a while, but call if she needs the loo or anything. She can sometimes get quite urgent.”
“Thank you,” I said again, “I will.”
I sat patiently drinking my coffee as my grandmother’s tea slowly cooled.
“Here, Nanna,” I said, giving her the cup. “Don’t forget your tea.”
“I don’t drink tea,” she said, but she still took the china cup in her thin, bony hands and drank from it. The tea was soon all gone, so I took the empty cup from her and put it back on the tray.
“Nanna,” I said. She went on looking out of the window. “Nanna,” I repeated a little louder while also pulling on her arm. She slowly turned to face me.
“Nanna, can you tell me about my parents? Can you tell me about Peter and Tricia?” It didn’t seem odd for me to call my parents by their names rather than Mummy and Daddy. I’d never had a mummy and daddy, only a nanna and grandpa.
She looked up at my face, but the sharpness of fifteen minutes previously had begun to fade. I feared I had missed my chance and that I was losing her. At the best of times, what I was asking would not have been easy for either of us. In her present state, it might be impossible.
“Nanna,” I said again with some urgency, “tell me about Peter and Tricia.”
“Peter and Tricia?” she said, some of the sharpness returning.
“Yes, Nanna. Peter, your son, and Tricia, his wife.”
“Such a dreadful thing,” she said, turning away from me and again looking out of the window.
“What was a dreadful thing?”
“What he did to her,” she said.
“What did he do to her?” I asked, pulling gently on her hand to keep her attention. She turned back slightly towards me.
“He killed her,” she said slowly. “He murdered her.”
“Tricia?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She looked back up at my face. “He murdered Tricia.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why did he murder Tricia?”
“Because of the baby,” she said.
“What about the baby?” I pressed her. “Why did he murder her because of the baby?” I wondered if he had killed her because the baby wasn’t his.
My grandmother stared into my eyes. “He killed the baby too,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Whose baby was it?”
“Tricia’s baby,” she said
“But was Peter the father?”
“Peter ran away,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Peter ran away because he killed Tricia. But was Peter the father of her baby?”
That quizzical look appeared again in her eyes.
“It wasn’t Peter,” she said slowly. “It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.”
I sat there staring at her, thinking that she must be confused.
“No,” I said. “Surely it was Peter who murdered Tricia? That’s why he ran away.”
“It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.” She said it again quite clearly. There was no confusion.
I sat there stunned. So it was not my father but my grandfather who was the murderer.
“But why?” I asked pitifully.
“Because of the baby,” she said equally clearly. “Your grandfather was the baby’s father.”
Oh my God, I thought. My mother’s unborn female child, who would have been my little sister, would also have been my aunt.
I stayed with my grandmother for another hour trying to piece together the whole sorry story. Trying to pull accurate details out of her fuzzy memory was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. Not only could I not see the puzzle, I didn’t know when, or if, I’d solved it.
But now that she had started to give up the secret that had burned within her for so long, she did so with a clarity of mind that I didn’t realize she still possessed. I knew it was true that some patients with even advanced dementia could recall events of long ago in spite of the total loss of their more recent memory and also their inability to function properly day by day. So it was with my grandmother that morning, as the awful knowledge poured from her, almost in relief, of at last being able to share her hitherto private horror. I learned more in that one hour about my parents and my early life than I had managed to extract from her at any time in the previous thirty-seven years. And I didn’t like it.
I discovered that the five of us had lived together in my grandparents’ house in Surrey, my mother having moved in there on the day of her marriage. It wasn’t something that I had thought about before, but, clearly, my grandmother hadn’t considered the arrangement at all unusual.
However, if what Nanna told me was right, and if I correctly read between the lines of what she said, severe tensions had existed between my mother and father throughout their short marriage. There had also been considerable friction between my parents and my grandparents. It had obviously not been a happy family home.