by Jenny Colgan
Mrs Denton lived in an immaculate modern townhouse on a group of streets that looked exactly alike in Canary Wharf. The house was tiny with low ceilings, but had all mod cons – Graeme had found it for her off-plan.
‘Hello,’ said Issy warmly, looking past her at the pristine hallway. There were no pictures on the walls, apart from an enormous one of Graeme as a schoolboy, and no clutter of any kind anywhere. ‘Ooh, I can see where your son gets his tidiness from!’
Graeme’s mother smiled, seemingly lost in thought for a moment.
‘I brought you some cake,’ Issy went on cheerfully. ‘Did Graeme tell you I was a baker?’
Carole felt rooted to the spot. She had been so excited – this was the first girl Graeme had brought home in four or five years. She was so proud of him for being out there and doing so well – he was something big in property, as she liked to tell all her friends. Without actually saying as much, she implied that he’d bought her the house. The last couple of girls – well, they’d been terribly, terribly pretty, especially that one with the blonde hair all down her back. Of course they’d been gorgeous, look at her son. But she’d known it wouldn’t be serious. Graeme had his big career to establish first, of course, and he didn’t have time for all that settling down.
But recently she’d started to lose bragging rights to her friends when they discussed their children’s weddings – the size of the marquee, the number of guests, the arrays of presents – and worse, she’d had to go to these weddings, smile happily and compliment her friends’ good taste, even if the cold salmon tasted of nothing and they had those loud discos with DJs. Finally, the worst thing of all had happened: she’d been upstaged by Lilian Johnson, of all people, pathetic little mouse Lilian Johnson, whose daughter Shelley who’d gone off to university all lah-de-dah then come back and ended up a social worker, and everyone knew how rubbish they were. Well, Shelley had got married. The chicken had been disappointing at the reception but she supposed it was all right if you liked that kind of thing, and Lilian had looked quite fetching in mauve. And now Shelley was pregnant. Lilian was going to be a grandmother. Carole couldn’t bear it. So she’d been quite impatient for a while now for Graeme to get moving.
She’d thought maybe one of those delicate, pretty girls – a Gwyneth Paltrow type – very clever and so on, but utterly ready to give up her career and look after her boy, and desperate for some good advice on Graeme’s likes and dislikes, how to cook his favourite things, and some guidelines on taste – from her. She pictured them going to John Lewis together, and the girl saying, ‘Oh, Carole, you do know him inside out,’ and then perhaps they could pick out nursery things together and the girl would say, ‘Now, Carole, I don’t know anything about having a baby, you’re just going to have to fill me in on everything.’ And Graeme would say, ‘Well, I couldn’t find another you, Mum, I just had to make do with the next best thing.’ Not that that was the kind of thing Graeme was prone to saying, but she liked to imagine him thinking it.
So yes, that was what she was expecting, after Graeme had called and said, rather briskly, that he was bringing ‘Issy’ to tea. Isabel – that sounded like rather a smart name too, nothing common. Not that her Graeme would ever have gone for anyone common of course. He had good taste, like her.
So when she opened the door to see this diminutive, rounded, rosy-cheeked brunette – who had to be at least, what, thirty-four? Thirty-five? Could she even still have children? What on earth was Graeme thinking? It couldn’t be this girl. Graeme was so handsome, everyone said so. Since he was a little boy. Her ex might have been a total bastard, but he was a good-looking bastard, that was the truth, and it had all come out in the boy. And so smart, with his smart car and his smart suits and his smart flat. There was absolutely no way … Maybe she wasn’t his girlfriend. Maybe she was … Carole clutched at straws. Maybe someone who needed a visa to stay in the country. Maybe she was a friend of a friend passing through London and Graeme was kindly letting her stay at his flat. But then … why would he bring her? He wouldn’t.
‘Cake!’ said Issy again. ‘Um, I don’t know if you like cake.’
Issy felt the familiar blush spreading across her cheeks and grew hot and cross with herself. She felt dully, stupidly, like she wasn’t what Carole had been expecting. She glanced hurriedly at Graeme, who normally ignored his silly mother, but even he could see that her behaviour could be construed as quite rude. He gave Issy’s hand a quick squeeze.
‘Issy’s my girlfriend,’ he said, and Issy was grateful to him. ‘Uh, Mum, can we come in?’
‘Of course,’ said Carole weakly, standing back and letting them cross the threshold on to the cream shagpile carpet. Without thinking Issy walked straight in, then froze as she realized that, behind her, Graeme had bent down and taken off his shoes. Of course he had.
‘Ah,’ said Issy, taking off her sandals and realizing as she did so that she could do with a pedicure – but really, when did she have the time? She noticed Carole checking out her feet too.
‘Shall I put this cake in your kitchen?’ said Issy brightly. Carole gestured ahead. The kitchen was utterly spotless. Laid out on the side were three neat bowls with prewashed salad, a small pile of neatly trimmed white-bread ham sandwiches and a jug of lemonade.
Issy put the cake down with a sigh. This could turn into a long afternoon.
‘So do you work?’ asked Issy politely when they sat at the obviously rarely used round table to eat lunch. It was a glorious day, and Issy had looked longingly at the immaculately tended garden but Carole had announced loudly that she was terrified of wasps and flying insects and never ever sat outside. Issy had complimented her on her skin, which Carole had totally ignored, and now they were all sitting indoors with the windows shut and the television on so that Graeme could watch the sport.
Carole looked surprised at the question, but Issy had rarely asked Graeme about his mother; early in their relationship they were far too casual for it to be appropriate, and more recently she had sensed he rather avoided the topic. Carole couldn’t believe he hadn’t mentioned her to this girl … Well, woman, girl was pushing it a bit. Maybe the relationship wasn’t that serious after all.
‘Well, presumably Graeme’s told you about my charity work?’ Carole said stiffly. ‘And of course, the Rose Growers Association keeps me busy. Although I mostly do the admin for that. Insects, you see. They never seem very grateful.’
‘The insects?’
‘The rose growers.’ Carole sniffed. ‘I slave over the minutes for them.’
‘I know what that’s like,’ said Issy sympathetically, but Carole didn’t seem to hear her.
‘Do they all still love you in the office, darling?’ she cooed to Graeme. Graeme grunted and indicated that he was trying to watch the television. ‘He’s ever so popular there,’ she said to Issy.
‘I know,’ said Issy. ‘That’s where we met.’
Carole raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought he said you worked in a shop.’
‘I run my own business,’ said Issy. ‘I’m a baker. I make cakes and so on.’
‘I can’t eat cakes,’ said Carole. ‘They interfere with my digestion.’
Issy thought with some regret of the lighter-than-air sponge sitting in the kitchen. They’d already eaten the ham sandwiches – it had taken two minutes – and she now felt trapped and unsatisfied, still sitting at the table, waiting for the tea to cool.
‘So, er,’ said Issy, desperate to get this conversation on track. Graeme was whooping a goal; Issy didn’t have the faintest idea who was playing. But this was, potentially, her future mother-in-law sitting in front of her. Potentially, the grandmother … Issy stopped herself thinking along those lines. It was far too early, and far too precarious, to think along those lines. She decided to stick to the safest possible ground.
‘So, Graeme was totally the most popular at work. He’s doing brilliantly there, I think, still. You must be very proud.’
Carole almost softened for
a second before remembering that this chubby, ageing harpy sitting in front of her had had the temerity to show up with a cake, implying that she, Carole, didn’t bake for her own son, and had swanned in here with her shoes on like she owned the place already.
‘Yes, well, he always did go for the best, my son,’ she said, larding the comment with as much double meaning as she could manage. Issy had been completely crestfallen.
There had been another long, uncomfortable silence, punctuated only by Graeme cheering or sighing along with his football team.
‘She hates me,’ Issy had pointed out mournfully in the car on the way home.
‘She doesn’t hate you,’ said Graeme, grumpy because his team had lost again. In fact, Carole had taken him into the kitchen to tell him in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t happy. Wasn’t Issy terribly old? And just a baker? Graeme, unused to his mother questioning his judgement on anything, had tuned out. He didn’t need Issy nipping his head about it too. Issy hadn’t deliberately tried to overhear the conversation in the kitchen, but figured the very fact that Carole had decided she and Graeme needed a private chat was probably all the information she needed. ‘She just thinks you’re a bit old.’
Graeme turned up Radio 5 Live. Issy stared out of the car window, into a rainstorm coming in from the east, over Canary Wharf. The raindrops came down thick and heavy, and started hitting the window.
‘That’s what she said?’ said Issy quietly.
‘Mm,’ said Graeme.
‘Do you think I’m a bit old?’
‘For what?’ said Graeme. He had the distinct sensation that this was a conversation he didn’t want to be in, but here he was stuck in a car with it, and no way out.
Issy closed her eyes tightly. So close, she thought. So close; she could just ask him now. Was this her happy-ever-after? Get it sewn up. Signed, sealed and delivered. But what if she did ask and the answer was ‘no’? And what if she did ask and the answer was ‘yes’?
If both the answers were going to make her unhappy, well, what did that mean? What did that make her? Suddenly she saw the years stretching ahead … Graeme, marching forward with his career, using her, maybe, as a sounding board if he needed to vent, but otherwise as a general slave … ignoring her to watch TV, the way he did his mother. An easy, non-demanding doormat.
Well, maybe she had been a bit like that – Helena, she was sure, would agree. But she had changed. The café had changed her. For the better. And this time it wouldn’t be shouting and histrionics, or an optional go-and-come-back whenever he wanted a hot meal. She would do it properly.
‘Graeme …’ she said, turning to him in the rain-flecked car.
‘What do you mean?’ Graeme had said. He’d been more upset than Issy had expected, but of course she didn’t know what this meant for him at work.
‘I don’t think … I don’t think this is going to work out, do you?’ said Issy, as calmly as she could, reflecting, as she did so, on the fine profile and tight jaw, as he cut up another car splashing out of a roundabout. After swearing repeatedly, he had shut up like a clam and refused to speak to her any more. As soon as was legally possible, he had simply stopped the car and dropped her by the side of the road. It felt oddly fitting somehow, thought Issy, watching the sports car zip away. Allow him his petty little victory; in fact, it wasn’t cold outside in the rain, she didn’t even mind too much; and when a cab cruised past, its yellow light shining like a friendly beacon, she hailed it to take her home.
Helena shrieked when she came in, and demanded all the details of her disastrous visit to Graeme’s mother.
‘It just became obvious,’ said Issy, ‘that, regardless of what is out there … well, it was doing me no good. Although,’ she said, with slightly wobbly bravado, ‘I would have liked to have a baby.’
‘You’ll have a baby,’ said Helena reassuringly. ‘Maybe freeze some eggs just in case.’
‘Thanks, Lena,’ said Issy, and her friend took her in her arms and gave her a long, reassuring hug.
Issy felt much better after a night’s sleep. After dispensing the goodies – which were met with considerably more enthusiasm than her Victoria sponge had been the day before – she flopped on to her grampa’s bed like she needed it more than he did.
‘Hello, Gramps.’
Her grandfather was wearing his little half-moon reading glasses. They were the same style he had worn when she was a child. She wondered if they were the same actual pair. He was from that generation – the type who didn’t change things just because they were tired of them, or they were outdated. You bought something, or married someone, and stuck with it.
‘I’m just writing a recipe to my granddaughter in London,’ he announced. ‘She needs to know this stuff.’
‘Great!’ said Issy. ‘Gramps, it’s me! I’m here! What is it?’
Joe blinked several times, then his vision cleared and he recognized her. ‘Issy,’ he said. ‘My girl,’ and she hugged him.
‘Don’t give me my letter,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea how much it cheers me up to get them in the post. But I’ve changed my address again – I’ll give it to the nurse.’
But Joe insisted on taking it down; he pulled from his bedside cabinet an old battered leather address book that Issy remembered sitting next to their rotary-dial green telephone on the hall table for years and years. She watched as he turned the pages. Page after page was full of names, old addresses crossed out, over and over again; numbers starting short – Sheffield 4439; Lancaster 1133 – and becoming longer and more complicated. It was a melancholy document, and her grandfather started to mutter over it too.
‘He’s gone,’ he would say. ‘And them – the both of them. Died within a month of each other. I can’t even remember who this is.’
And he shook his wispy head.
‘Tell me,’ said Issy quickly to cheer him up, ‘tell me about my grandmother again.’
When she was little she had always loved to hear stories about her glamorous granny but it hurt her mother too much, so her grandfather had waited till it was just the two of them.
‘Well,’ started Joe, and his crumpled face relaxed slightly as he took on the familiar tale. ‘Well, I was working at the bakery, and she came in one day for a cream horn.’
He paused for appreciative laughter, which Issy duly supplied. One of the nurses, passing, popped her head in and stayed to listen.
‘And I knew her of course – you knew everyone then. She was the youngest daughter of the farrier, so quite posh, you know. Wouldn’t look at a simple flour boy like me.’
‘Mm.’
‘But I noticed that she’d started coming in quite a lot. Nearly every day in fact, even though people still had a woman then who would do that for you. And it got so that, well, I’d stick a little extra in her bag maybe. A little bit of jam tart that I happened to have spare, or some bath buns.
‘And I began to notice – oh, it was a lovely thing. I mean, in those days, the women were little things of course, not like those big carthorses who stomp up and down the halls all day and night now,’ he added fiercely, as Issy shushed him, and the nurse, who was generously proportioned, shook her head and laughed.
‘But she started to put a little flesh on – just a little bit, in all the right places, you know, up top, round the derrière. And I thought to meself, that’s my cakes that are doing it. She’s fattening herself up for me. And that’s how I knew that she was interested. If she were after some other fella, she’d have been watching her weight.’
He smiled contentedly.
‘So I says to her, “I’ve got my eye on you.” And she looked back, pert as you like, and said, “Well, that’s just as well, isn’t it?” and she sashayed out of that shop like Rita Hayworth. And so that’s when I knew. So when I saw her at the RAFA dance on the Saturday night, all dressed up, and me and my friends are hanging round for some of the latest shop girls, you know, but I saw her with all her smart friends, laughing and standing around with so
me posh boys, I said to my friends, I’m going to ask her anyway. Normally I would never see her at the dance halls we went to. Oh no. It was a stroke of luck that night. So I went up to her and she said—’
‘“I thought you had white hair”,’ chorused Issy, who had heard the story a hundred times.
‘Then she put out her hand and touched it. I reckon I knew about then.’
Issy had seen photos of her grandparents’ wedding day. He’d been a handsome man, tall, with a thick head of curly hair and a shy smile. Her grandmother was a knockout.
‘And I said, “What’s your name then?” although of course I knew perfectly well. And she said …’
‘Isabel,’ said Issy.
‘Isabel,’ said her grandfather.
Issy played with her skirt like a little girl.
‘But did you just know?’ she asked forcefully. ‘I mean, did you just know straight away? That you were going to fall in love and get married and have children and you were going to love her for ever and everything was going to be all right? Well, you know, until …’
‘We had twenty years together,’ said Joe, patting Issy’s hand. Issy had never known her namesake; she’d died when Issy’s mother was fifteen. ‘They were wonderful, happy years. A lot of people in here, they were married sixty years to someone they couldn’t abide. I know people in here who were relieved when their spouses died. Can you imagine?’
Issy didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to imagine.
‘She was a wonderful woman. She always was cheeky, you know. And confident, whereas I was a bit shy. Apart from that one night. I still don’t know how I found the courage to go up to her. And yes, I knew straight away.’
He chuckled at the memory. ‘Took a while to talk her old dad round though. Oh, he was a stickler. He perked up a bit when I opened the third shop, I remember that much.’
