Sandlands (31 page)

I wondered how much she really understood, but when the cockles were all rinsed she wiped her hands, stood back and nodded again, and said, ‘I like to hear you talk, child.'

Ganny had her own theory – and I've never seen it contradicted anywhere – that the layers you see through an oyster shell mark out the years of its life. You could count them, she said, like the rings through a tree trunk. ‘If you had a microscope,' I said with a grin, but Ganny wasn't laughing when she said, ‘You do.'

Mum's coming back tomorrow, and bringing Sam; Jonah will be arriving, too, tomorrow or the next day, driving down from Aberdeen. But just for tonight it's only me – only me and Ganny.

If a shellfish secretes a fresh mineral layer around itself each year, then the shell that you see, the shell that you touch when you pick it up, is new, but it's still the same creature. It's like the bluebell wood on the track to Farnham Hall, which has been there since the Domesday Book and – who knows? – perhaps for centuries longer. I remember reading that bluebell bulbs have been found which date back to Roman times. Putting up fresh shoots every year for two millennia: different flowers but the same bluebells.

The sand lies deep along here below the tall, banked verges; it kicks up, sun-warm, between my sandaled toes. There's St Peter's, across the field at the foot of Silly Hill. Gampa was never a churchgoer, nor Mum either, but Ganny rarely missed. I used to go with her sometimes for the joy of hearing her sing the hymns – vigorous, word-perfect and completely out of tune. There's a young female rector there now who meets with Ganny's approval. She's the one Mum's been speaking to this week, on the phone.

And now finally here's the cottage: I can see the roof and one gable end, half obscured by the big ash tree. There's no spool of smoke now above the chimney as there would be in the winter. The lane turns; here's the gate. I have Mum's door key with me, but out of habit I stop and call out from the threshold. ‘Ganny! It's me.'

I catch the sizzle of the frying pan, the smell of foaming butter, of mackerel and cracked pepper. But instead of the kitchen I make for the stairs.

The bedroom door stands ajar, and through it I see her standing by the window with a tea towel in her hand, wearing the dove-grey cardigan she had on the last time I saw her. She turns towards me, but slowly and not as if I've startled her, and a smile breaks over her face.

Then she is gone, like a fish that catches the sunlight through the water for an instant before it twists away. And there is only spiralling dust, and the room stripped bare, and the piled-up cardboard boxes.