by Stuart Evers
‘You’re the funniest old bastard I’ve ever met,’ she said.
‘You’re a lousy liar,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take any superlative as a compliment.’
Soon after her fifteenth birthday he began to write her letters. There had been a family gathering for Anna at his son’s house, and Ben had made one of his quarterly excursions from the seafront to the city. In the late-summer sunshine he briefly caught up with his son and daughter-in-law, then retired to a corner of the garden to drink red wine with a widower and a divorcee of his own age. Sitting at the rattan table, top buttons undone on their waistbands, they looked like close, old friends.
Whenever the conversation took a tedious turn, Ben would stare past his companions to Anna across the lawn. She was curled up on a picnic blanket with her three best friends, fingers worrying at the shorn grass. As he passed them on the way to the bathroom, he overheard their conversation.
‘She makes me write thank-you cards. By hand. Can you believe that?’
‘Serious? Not even email?’
‘No. Must be handwritten. Takes for ever.’
‘By hand? Serious?’
‘What’s the fucking point in sending a letter?’ Anna said.
There was a stationery shop at Victoria station and before boarding the train he picked up some writing paper – cheap, flimsy stuff, but writing paper nonetheless – and an ink cartridge for the fountain pen he never used.
The following morning, sitting at the kitchen table, he wrote:
Dear Anna
It was lovely to see you at your birthday celebrations yesterday. While I was there, I overheard you ask why people write and send letters. I hope the following answers your question.
We write letters for the way they make the recipient feel: for the elation caused by their discovery on the doormat; for the thrill in recognising the sender’s handwriting; for the delightful promise of the tearing of the envelope (though using a letter-knife is even more wonderful!); for the physical and emotional exchange that only a handwritten letter can provide.
I am not against technology, far from it (you should see me go on the Internet!); but if you do not feel any of these emotions upon receipt of this letter, I will happily receive an emailed thank-you note in future. I am – for once – confident, however, that you will understand why we still send letters, and perhaps even correspond with me in this most venerable of ways.
I shall watch my doormat with eager eyes.
Love always,
Grandpa B
Anna’s response arrived a week later, written on a page torn from an A4 notepad.
Dear Grandpa B
Thanks for the letter. And thank you very much for the book and the H&M vouchers. I can’t remember ever having got a handwritten letter before, and I loved it. I am busy with exams at the moment, but when they are over I will write and tell you how they went.
Love from
Anna
Over the next six years he wrote whenever the urge took him. He was pleased with the way his script curled and the neatness of his hand. He often prefaced his reminiscences, or things that had occurred to him, with, ‘Forgive me if I have written this before . . .’ He wrote, ‘It is a curse of old age to one day assume you have said everything, and the next assume the opposite. Each is as tedious to the recipient as the other.’ This he could remember writing, sitting in the pub on the other side of the Seven Sisters, his trousers roasting by a fake open fire.
Anna’s replies were erratic, though she never forgot a thank-you note for a Christmas or birthday gift. There was a period of six months when she sent him a letter every two weeks, but mostly they were spread-out, badly written, poorly punctuated, scrawled on good-stock paper (his gift to her each birthday). He kept her letters in an unmarked suspension file. He had no idea how many letters he had written. Hundreds, he assumed. When he read through her letters, he wondered whether she kept his, and what the sum of those letters would say about him. Perhaps she had thrown them away, destroyed them as though never written or read. Still he wrote the letters. Still he licked the envelopes and affixed the stamps and walked to the end of the road to post them. Still he listened for the postman’s trolley on the pitted asphalt.
Anna sat down at the kitchen table. She smelled of things the house had never before encountered. Shea butter, cocoa beans, jasmine, spearmint. The sharpness of it cut the musty air. His aunt’s house had smelled of trousers worn too long, of undried clothes, and he hoped his house did not smell that way.
‘Here you are,’ Ben said. The radio was on. He poured tea into her cup. Blue-green, with a white interior, the kind they used to have in cafes. Matching teapot. She poured in milk from the jug. They had always done this. From the jetty to Peacehaven, then back. Him at the window, teapot in hand. Preparations for breakfast and then her taking her place at the table, hair in a towel turban, a sloppy T-shirt and sweatpants. Here you are. Pour the tea.
As he beat the eggs and warmed the grill for the bacon, she checked her messages. Her nails on the screen, clicks and clips like a telegraph operator. He watched her, her eyes intent on the glow. He remembered a line from a song – these are the days of miracle and wonder. Anna sighed, muttered something he didn’t catch over the sound of his beating eggs. His ex-wife used to do the same while reading the morning paper. He would ask what was wrong, but she could never quite manage to communicate her displeasure. The thing is. What he’s saying is. What they don’t understand is.
He remembered the singer’s name as he placed the bacon on the grill pan. Would you not say, Anna, he wrote in bed that night, the writing pad propped on his knees, that all days are full of miracle and wonder?
He sliced the toast diagonally and arranged it with the eggs and bacon on both plates. She typed until the very last moment. He put the plate in front of her. The smell of her; the smell of salt and fat, the piping lines of steam from the eggs.
‘This looks grand,’ Anna said. Ben nodded and smiled. Grand. Yes. She had said it twice since her arrival. Things were grand. Things were not grand. He watched her construct a forkful of breakfast. She grinned and nodded as she chewed, pointed with her knife towards the plate in approval. He ground pepper over his eggs. The woman on the radio said ‘tyranny’.
‘I was thinking,’ Anna said, ‘I might stay a day longer. If that’s all right.’
He pretended to be distracted by the radio. He heard the word ‘atrocity’.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Please, stay as long as you like.’
‘Thanks, Grandpa,’ she said.
He would have said something then, but there was a soft beep and Anna looked from him to her device. She crossed her cutlery and for the rest of the meal tapped and typed without apology. He watched her idly noose a strand of hair around her finger, the way the finger went red, then white and then slowly back to pink as she released it. These are the days.
In bed that night he wrote: The breakfast I cooked was hearty; too hearty for me. I usually eat thin toast. With all that running though, you need the energy. Maybe I should begin to run. Perhaps then I would sleep better. Am I too old to run? Would I look ridiculous in pink and green and yellow training shoes? When you come again, let’s run together on the seafront . . .
He picked up her plate. The bacon’s fat had been delicately removed; the bread was untouched. He looked down at her and saw her father’s bow mouth and wide eyes; her mother’s haughty cheekbones and tiny ears. Hairline from her paternal grandmother, his ex-wife; chin-line from her maternal grandfather. Nothing, save for the crease of her brow, to call her own.
‘That was delicious,’ Anna said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said. The man on the radio said ‘uncertainty’; Anna sat with her elbows on the table, the heels of her hands together.
‘You haven’t asked,’ she said.
‘Asked what?’ he said.
‘Why I’m here.’
‘Do you want me to?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘No I don’t.’
She got up from the table.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She picked up her phone and made a call as she walked through the sitting room.
He had been decanting a batch of soup from the stock pan into a third plastic container. Thick-sliced ham, specially cut off the bone at the supermarket. Home-made stock. Potato and cream and salt. He used to make it when the boy was ill; telling him it would make him fit and strong again. Also for his now ex-wife, for his mother when she was latterly fading, and for himself, for himself mainly, over the last twenty years or so. He listened to the radio and checked the clock. Dark outside, light in. A glass of wine. Two.
The telephone rang. In the letter to Anna he wrote the following evening, he described himself answering it like a washer woman, drying her hands on a rag as she made her way from kitchen to hallway.
‘Grandpa B?’ Anna said.
‘Oh, hello, Anna,’ he said, like this happened always: her phoning, him picking up, him drying his hands on a dishrag. He switched the receiver from one hand to the other.
‘How are you?’ he said.
‘I’m not too far away from you,’ she said. ‘Brighton. Can I stop by?’
Instinctively he looked at his watch. He knew what time it was. He knew almost precisely. But still he looked. A little after eight.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Would it be okay if I stayed?’ she said. ‘I’m tired and I don’t want to go home tonight.’
‘I’ll make up the spare room.’
An hour later, her car – small and snub, snooker-baize green – pulled up outside. Ben was at the front-room window quite by chance. He watched its headlamps die. The driver-side door opened and his slender, tall granddaughter got out. He watched her stretch. Long arms high in the air. He watched her remove her handbag from the passenger seat, slam the door shut and from the boot remove a wheeled suitcase. He watched her drag it up the short pathway.
‘Hi,’ she said. At the door, in the lamplight.
‘Come in,’ he said.
After he’d shown her the bathroom and to her bedroom – sheets newly clean, carpet vacuumed – they sat at the kitchen table. He had uncorked a bottle of wine he’d bought on a day trip to France and spooned out bowls of soup for them both.
That night in bed, the writing pad balanced on his knees, he wrote: Perhaps I drank my wine too quickly, but I don’t recall all of what we talked about. Where you might go for a run, yes. The shops in the town. The traffic on the motorway. I remember what I didn’t say. I didn’t tell you that I’d thought about calling your father, but didn’t. I didn’t ask you why you’d come to see me when you’d never stayed with me before. I didn’t ask you anything I didn’t know the answer to. I sat at the table with my soup and I did not wish to add to the weight. I just did not want you to leave. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know; I didn’t ask because I feared you’d leave.
Outside, behind the fence, the heads and hats of walkers; the sea beyond them, a tanker just before the horizon’s tuck. He was scrubbing the grill pan. The sink was black and tan from the grill, the pork fat curdling the water. He pulled the plug and turned on the hot tap.
‘This is a lovely house,’ Anna said. He turned from the sink to her. She was dressed in jeans and jacket, boots already on.
‘You think so?’
‘Yeah. Reminds me of your old house. The one in Northampton. Like that, but smaller.’
‘I’m surprised you remember it,’ he said. ‘You must have been very young.’
The family house in Northampton. Bought on the cheap using money they didn’t have. How many years there? Almost thirty. Should not have stayed there as long as that. After Val left, should have sold up and moved on. But no. Unable to move, unable to think. A house with a child and a wife, and then just him. His job, his house and walks in the park. Call it mourning. Val always said he was the sentimental sort.
He’d had no intention of moving, and had only done so because an estate agent pushed a flyer through the door. He retired then. Took it early. For quiet by the sea. For a different view. For beach walks and hikes across cliffs and afternoon drinks in comfortable, open-fired taverns. For his grandchild to visit on weekends and on holidays.
‘Whenever Dad asked where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do, I always said I wanted to go to Grandpa’s house. To go to that big park behind your house. I thought it was your garden at first,’ Anna said.
‘You were five,’ Ben said. ‘I remember you coming then.’
He had lived in Seaford for almost fifteen years now and had never considered the new house’s similarity to the old. Anna was right: it had the same layout, the same proportions. What had been his son’s room, upstairs at the back of the house, was now the spare room, Anna’s room. The small room where his wife would banish him for snoring was now a place for his junk and his computer. The master bedroom, his room, their room, where his son would impose himself in those early years, a little boy between man and wife. The five cookery books on the shelf by the cooker had been on a similar shelf in the previous house. The potato peeler on the washboard, the spoons and bowls had survived from that time; the kitchen table too.
‘There were the most amazing swings.’
Little Anna in the park that afternoon, running and chasing the rain in her wellington boots. Red wellington boots, a hand-knitted coat, a cold, cold nose. His daughter-in-law picking her up, taking her back to the house as the two men talked.
‘What do you want me to say,’ his son said. ‘What did you expect?’
His son was no longer his son, but an unknown man with side-whiskers and a paunch.
‘You can’t blame her for moving on,’ he said, and his look said where the blame lay. The wind caught Ben’s anger. The things he said, the volume at which he said them! And his son just standing there, watching him. Almost confused. On the edge of laughter.
‘You’re angry because you didn’t see it coming. That’s all,’ his son said. ‘She says she’s happy. She looks happy. Happiest I’ve ever seen her. So you leave her alone. I want you to promise me to leave her be.’
Ben took a step towards him and the boy’s stance changed: on point, the jaw set and clenched. Ben walked past him and back to the house. The boy shouted something the wind and trees caught and Ben did not turn around. He needed to hear it from her, from Val, not from his son, with his unsmiling mouth. From the house, he telephoned her. He called her and she did not answer. From the bedroom he heard them getting ready to leave. They did not say goodbye.
Anna standing now in his living room. Grandchildren grow so much more quickly than your own.
‘And how is your father?’ Ben asked.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Dad’s fine. Mum too.’
‘That’s good,’ he said.
‘I thought I’d go into town,’ she said. ‘You said the charity shops were good, right?’
‘They’re the best, so I’ve been told. Rich pickings from all us oldies pegging out.’ He smiled, sadly. She looked down at her phone and typed a message.
‘I thought we might walk over the Seven Sisters later. If you fancy. There’s a pub. The food’s quite good. We could eat dinner there, get a cab back.’
‘Sounds good,’ she said, typing another message.
‘That’s decided then.’
The water collecting in the sink was finally clear. He added washing-up liquid and felt arms around him. He turned and her tallness was awkward. Her hair had been fixed into a bun, chopsticks keeping it up, and he worried the points might poke into his cheek. She held on to him and he rubbed her shoulders and the tops of her arms.
‘It’s okay, it’ll all be okay,’ he said. He used to say the same to his boy. To Val. He hadn’t known what he meant then either.
She stepped away, picked up her phone and smiled. The sun was warming the windows, bright cool light setting off a series of kitchen motes.
He shou
ld have asked her. Asked her then and there. But she was on her way out, and she was calm and healthy, and she had run along the coastal path, from the jetty up to Peacehaven and then back. And ultimately it didn’t matter. She was fine and happy. She was grand.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said.
In the junk room he took out the suspension file. He sorted through her letters quickly, taking out those written over the last year. There were four, their envelopes the shade of lemon sherbet. He opened the letters and read. Chronologically, from the first – dated in January – to the one that had arrived three weeks before. Two in black ink, two in blue.
In January she was planning a trip to Dublin with some girlfriends. A hen party. She was apprehensive. She did not like being just one of the girls. She was concerned about dressing up. He’d sent her a cheque to have a drink on him; he’d heard Dublin was expensive. I hope to write to you more, her letter said. Your letters are very special to me. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in your own life, isn’t it? You need to be reminded of what’s going on elsewhere. He remembered that one.
Her next letter thanked him for the cheque and explained she’d had a grand time in Dublin. Though I must say I can’t understand, she wrote, why anyone would want to marry at my age. I know you did. I know Dad and Mum did too. But neither are terribly good examples are they? (Sorry!)
In February there was no letter. In March, she was concerned about exams and had fallen in love with an older man whom he thought might be married. You would like him (don’t I always say that?) but Dad wouldn’t be pleased. Not that he ever would be.
April had no letter, nor May. In early June, there was a letter thanking him for the birthday cheque, the running shirt and the stationery. He had not seen her. (The only thing better than a letter: a parcel.) There was no mention of the older man, no mention of her father. College was going well. College was grand. She and three friends were going to get a flat. The deposits were large. Money was needed. She was looking forward to seeing Ben soon. Dad has been wonderful. He has given me the money. He had sent her another cheque. He read the letters again in the bathing chill of the sun. He did not know what he hoped to find in them, but he was reading them for a third time when the doorbell rang.
