Open Writing

Jeffrey followed the policeman to the door and said, "I must go, Great'ma. I should be at school. I rang Mum as soon as I knew you were alright and she said she would let them know I might be a bit late."

He left and within a few moments Cynthia arrived with the fresh breakfast.

"Shouldn't you be at school, though I'm very pleased to see the food," greeted her.

"No, I only go to hear the kids read. That sort of thing. I'm doing an Open University course. The first step to bigger things. I do that from home."

"Jeffrey said you were writing something and he thinks you have a secret."

"I won't let him see what I have written. Some of it is children's stuff really. I don't want to show it to anyone."

"I'll go over to the table there, if you put the tray on it. Just give me a hand across. I'm not feeling all that steady."

Cynthia did as she was asked, then said, "I'm off again now, Great'ma. Auntie Hilda needs some company I think. She says she doesn't, but she is not like her usual self."

Left alone she ate slowly. Her solicitor was to come that morning. She did not feel up to the concentration she felt she would need. The patio did not seem a good idea. Was the body still in the garden? What a shock for poor Hilda. One of her gentlemen friends. How many did she have?

On the breakfast tray was another letter from her friend Joe. She had sent him a letter in reply to his first and now realised it was going to be a regular correspondence. He had enclosed an invitation to a swimming gala in which he was to compete. He was extremely enthusiastic about this and Great'ma realised she would have to be very candid about what she could and could not undertake.

She began planning her reply: 'I feel it would not be a good experience for you if, with the activity involved, I should be overcome and die on you, thus taking all the limelight away from your undoubted success. I suggest you have your efforts videoed and bring this up here to show me. I am sure that another swimming party can be arranged for you and, as I now have a wheelchair, will be less of an encumbriance to your father.'

The enquiries that had been made into Joe's father's business had indicated that with a little more capital, he could well branch out, which would lead to an increase in his turnover. Hilda had told her that he and a friend had approached their bank to raise the money they needed. Her solicitor had written to him on the subject and she was waiting for his response.

She had not had a good night and the prospect of Sophie, due to arrive in two days did not make for a relaxing time ahead of her.

Given the time Spohie had lived with them, when she had been unpredictable and often very difficult, it had come as something of a surprise that over the years Great'ma found herself established as the one who had given her such a good start in life.

She assumed that the experience of the new step-mother after her father's second remarriage must have made for some reappraisal of her life. The loss of faith in her as his special little girl, had had the effect of making her more difficult to live with. Even Hilda was given a hard time of it, and Dotty had come out with the fact that they were not unsympathetic as they knew what it was to grieve for a father.

The memory of the hullabaloo that hit the house after that made Great'ma smile, thinking also of how attractive she grew to be. Then there was the disaster of a marriage at the age of twenty-one which everyone had tried to dissuade her from. Hilda crying and seeming even more aware of an unhappy future.

Extricated from that and once again home with them, she took a domestic science course and armed with this set off to conquer the world - well at least travel it. Postcards arrived - the south of France, Australia, Japan and then America. From there came a long letter, hurriedly written, full of admiration for the place. She had found her paradise, she had informed them.

"Another man," Dotty had said.

Dotty killed in a car crash and all too quickly her two sons taken by their father to Australia, selling the house I bought them to pay for the move.

Not a word to me. Dotty was drinking far too much. Judith trying to keep it from me, but I knew. She had become spiteful.

"You never cried when daddy died", she had said.

No I didn't cry. Shock, astonishment, guilt. There was this one life before and something one scraped together after.

Then the acusation that I had not wanted to bring up Margaret. The answer, that she had already decided with Judith what she wanted, was swept aside.

"You didn't even try to talk to me about it", she had countered. Then, "You always think you know everthing..." What a scene and it still hurts. It continued, "You loved Amelia far more than you ever loved me."

So untrue, my laughing, smiling Dotty. When did she lose that sense of fun? The experience with Margaret's father perhaps. The war years that took both her and Amelia away from home, tasting a world that virtually lived for the day?

"A dead body in the garden. I wish I wasn't here, or a least the day over and done with. I'll write the letter to Joe. That should cheer me up a bit."

She then realised that writing paper was not to hand. It was a really low point. The chair she was in was not suitable for a short doze. Usually at this time she would have been in the wheelchair. Hilda would have been to see her. The day was completely disrupted.

"Pull yourself together and think of something else. You are still here. You are not dead." She paused, "Now is that a good thought?"

The past caught her again, when at a difficult time she had gone back to the house where she had grown up. Wanting to go inside and find the whole childhood aura of Mother and Father, the cook, Judith. Longing for that sense of a house taken for granted, everything normal. One knew nothing different.

How they were, my parents. It was my mother's house and we her charges. Even the cook, so solid the way she walked and my father, as much as anyone. If anyone had asked, one would have said, "Of course I love my mother, but what would I have meant?

The aura of a house crafted by her. Something sensed - no words. Coming round by the side of the house, she, walking the path, "What have you been up to?"

Edward's arrival with David. What a shock to Mother. She blamed him, but times were changing even then. Did she want to walk back into her young life? Only the outward person acknowledged by other people. One is the age they see, not the stream of memories that make up the whole.

A knock at the door came as a relief. David entered. "Thought I would just check on you," he said. "Are you comfortable there?"

"No, not really Have they taken the poor man away yet?"

"He is being moved now."

"He was sitting in the garden, I understand."

"Well he had, in fact, fallen onto the gravel in front of the seat. That's what upset Hilda so much. Lying very awkwardly."

"David, I am feeling... I don't know. His death, it's like a shadow on everything."

"Let me help you to... which is it, arm or wheelchair?"

"Wheelchair will be best, I think. I was going to avoid it, but it will be best if I get out a bit."

"You know you only use this patio room. It would give you more of a change if you had your bed back there." He indicated the other room. "No one uses it."

"Yes that is, perhaps, a good idea."

"We have cleared your flat as you wished and advertised it. There are your personal effects to be sorted. See what you want to keep."

During this conversation David was helping Great'ma into her wheelchair. "Patio?" He asked.

"Yes, if they have finished out there."

He opened the doors and went out to look, came back through and fetched her.

"I'll leave you now. Just check on Hilda."

Left alone again she thought how this death had affected the whole house. Though the garden and the rooms all remained the same, the feelings of people had altered their ambience. This must have been the same when she had been brought from the hospital. Again a change as she had move to her present room.

Delphine's house changed, as her mother's had been. As mine was when Edward died, and then when John arrived.

Her thoughts returned to Hilda's gentleman friend. A slight smile that had also a sense of the sadness of the event in it. "Poor man," she said aloud, realising her mood was improving.

Once more she drifted off to sleep, thinking that her letter to Joe would have to wait. She was roused almost immediately however by a sound.

Waking up she looked into the eyes of a very large black and tan dog and thought what a beautiful animal. He did not look away from her and after a few seconds settled down beside her chair. The next time she woke David was there.

"How is Hilda?" she asked.

"Not too good and she is worried, as we have lost the dog," was the reply.

"No you haven't," Geat'ma countered, pointing to the other side of her chair. "I think he is finding comfort in the smells of another wrinkly person."

David was relieved by the response, not merely because of the dog being found but because he had thought Great'ma rather affected by the morning events. He voiced his concern and was answered by being told that she had experiencd too many deaths in her life to get only momentarily upset by them, and went on to tell him that when the dog had been mentioned she had immediately imagined an elderly man with a small dog. Not one big like this.

"He is so beautiful. I don't think I have ever seen one quite like him before."

He is a cross Dobermann, Alsation. You are right, he is exceptional. I didn't know you were into dogs."

"No, I'm not, but he is something special. What will happen to him now?"

"I really don't know - be rehoused I suppose. I'll just go and tell Hilda and Cynthia we have found him. They thought he had probably gone back to the man's flat."

"Well he is alright here it seems."

David left and Great'ma looked at the dog and said, "You better not get attached to me, I am likely to die on you as well."