The Undertow (37 page)

Granddad. Grandma.

She pushes open the gate and runs up the path.

The nets in the front bay window fall back into place. She can hear her granddad’s voice, calling out: “Ruby!”

And he’s there, she doesn’t even have to knock, she can see him through the glass panes of the door, trapped between the rays of the wooden sunrise.

He opens the door. She steps up and into the house and into his arms.

He smells familiar, of Old Spice, and sweetened coffee, and mints.

The hall is as it always was. Wallpaper dizzy with roses. Warm and stuffy. His cream nylon cap; Grandma’s navy coat.

“Billie,” Granddad says. He breathes against her. Her cheek lies on his chest.

“Granddad.”

“Thank God.”

He rubs her hair. Grandma appears in the doorway to the sitting room. She has a duster twisted up in her hand. She has a headscarf on over her grey curls. Billie smiles at her, but her grandma blinks away tears.

“Sweetheart.”

Billie steps away from Granddad and goes to hug her. “What’s wrong, Grandma?”

“You’ve given us all a proper scare.”

She’s looking over Billie’s shoulder at Granddad; Billie can feel it. Some kind of look they’re giving each other.

Then she lets go. Billie ducks down and fusses the wriggling dog. It’s a skinny black and tan mongrel, got from Battersea Dogs Home. It’s the second Sukie since Billie was born, but she knows there were other Sukies before.

“Are you hungry?” Grandma asks.

“I am a bit.”

“I’ve got crispy pancakes,” Grandma says. “I’ve got fondant fancies, and I’ve got these little frozen mousses. Chocolate and raspberry.”

Billie smiles. She rubs at the dog’s head. “Thank you.”

“Come on through,” Grandma says.

In the front room, the chairs sag on either side of the gas fire. Grandma heads on through the arch into the dining room, and then into the kitchen. She makes a rattle with the kettle and the cups. Billie pauses just before the sliding door into the kitchen, glances back for Granddad, but he has stayed in the hall.

“Coffee,” Grandma calls, “or tea?”

There’s a framed photograph on top of the cabinet just by the kitchen door. It’s of the three of them on a boat. Mum is in a cream tunic dress with yellow and brown flowers embroidered round the neckline; her hair is all loose and shiny. Dad has a moustache and an open-necked cheesecloth shirt. The little girl’s wearing dungarees and has her hair cut in a blunt fringe. She’s three years old, maybe. It’s Cornwall, she remembers: she ate too much fudge, and was sick. In the picture they are all smiling.

“Tea,” Billie says. “Thank you.”

Billie hears the click of a lighter. She moves away from the photograph, and steps down into the kitchen. A cigarette spools blue smoke from her grandma’s hand.

“Or milk or water? Or I can send Granddad out for cordial.”

“Tea would be lovely, please, Grandma.”

She can hear him in the hallway—the tock-tock-tock-tock-tock and whizz of a phone number being dialled. She glances back round for him.

“Who’s he calling?”

“Sit down, honey.”

“Is he calling them?” Billie asks.

“You look shattered.”

Billie pulls out one of the chairs, sits down on the creaky vinyl, but tilts herself to look through the open kitchen door and back into the dining room and sitting room and the open hall door. Granddad is standing there—she can even see a strip of him, the fawn back of his trousers—talking on the phone.

“But who’s he on the phone to?”

“Your mum and dad, of course. They’re frantic.”

“But it doesn’t work like that any more.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not mum-and-dad any more. Not like that. Not as a pair.”

Grandma slides open the frosted glass door of the kitchen cupboard, lifts down the cut-glass sugar bowl. She taps her cigarette into a red plastic ashtray.

“We’ll see.”

But she doesn’t know, not really. She gets out a small mug and puts it down in front of Billie. Inside it’s glossy dark brown glaze, outside matte and creamy, decorated with brown-glaze aeroplanes.

They can hear the conversation; Granddad’s end of it. It starts out quiet, urgent—not to worry, yes, yes, she’s turned up here. No, no,
she’s fine, yes, he will tell her. Billie knows it’s her mum on the other end. And then it changes, and there’s a big silence, which means her dad has taken over. The call ends abruptly—a brisk signing off from Granddad, then the clatter and ping as the handset is set down.

Granddad comes back in. He and Grandma exchange a glance. They don’t say anything. She thinks she might cry. He’s supposed to be on her side.

“Don’t make me go back there.”

“One thing at a time, honey,” Grandma says.

Billie feels hot. She holds her hands to her cheeks. Grandma pours her a cup of tea, gives her an awkward little smile.

“It’s all right, love. It’ll be all right.”

And Billie shifts her hands across her eyes and cries.

They eat ham-and-cheese Findus Crispy Pancakes and tinned peas, and new potatoes from a tin. Billie helps in the kitchen, opening the tins, pouring contents into aluminium pans. Her eyes are sore but she is keen to show how calm and reasonable and cheerful she really is. The potatoes emerge from the tin white and faintly porous, like deep-sea creatures used to living in the dark.

As they eat, Grandma watches Granddad, Granddad frowns. When he does that, he looks just like her dad. Something serious is going to happen. They are going to want to talk. If she lets them talk, they will tell her that she has to go back.

Grandma gets out the mousses. Billie asks for chocolate. It is still a little frozen in the middle. She digs it out with a spoon. It is frosty on the tongue.

“It was before the war, wasn’t it, Granddad, when you were cycling?”

He looks up at her, blinks. After a moment he smiles. And he starts to tell her again about his racing days. Grandma smiles at his smile, chips in eagerly. Familiar phrases. People would stop him in the street. People would want to shake his hand. Billy Hastings.

Just like her. It’s her name too. Give or take a couple of vowels.

He looks up at her then, blinks his soft blue eyes, and another silence falls.

“And then there was the war,” Billie says.

“Did I tell you about D-Day, about how we were going to sacrifice a gull?”

“Forty years ago now,” Grandma says.

“Forty-one. Nearly.”

He goes quiet. Taps at the side of his mug.

“Go on, Granddad.”

Billie’s heard the story a dozen times already. It doesn’t matter because she’s listening only enough to nod and smile in the right places. Her mind’s searching for the next thing, a new question, a question that will keep this freewheeling on along through warm familiar memories for a while longer. They drink tea. A little later the box is got out. The campaign medals, the war medal stamped with an eagle and a dragon, and the cycling medals. Amateur Pursuit Cycling Champion 1935, one in French from 1935, then a Veteran’s Medal, 1946.

“Veteran as in war veteran?”

“Veteran as in old man.”

“You were an old man in 1946?”

Grandma and Granddad both laugh. “In a manner of speaking,” he says.

She turns its weight round in her hands.
William Arthur Hastings
engraved on the back.

“We could go out later, Granddad. I could borrow a bike from next door.”

“Roads are so busy these days,” Grandma says briskly, setting a plate of Mr. Kipling’s Fondant Fancies down in the middle of the table. Billie picks up the pink one. The icing sticks to the roof of her mouth. She teases at it with the tip of her tongue.

“What about this one?” She picks out the French medal, turns it over to peer at the inscription.

Grandma looks at him. An unfathomable look.

“Won that in Paris. At the Vélodrome d’Hiver,” he says.

“The winter—?”

“Cycle track, that’s right. Famous, it is. Infamous—”

“Billy.” Grandma’s voice is warning.

“Why shouldn’t she know? Jesus, if things were not so very different, she wouldn’t be here—”

“Please.”

Granddad gets up. He opens a kitchen cabinet, rattles around. Billie sneaks her hand into Grandma’s. Grandma gives her a wobbly smile. Billie doesn’t understand. He returns with a quarter bottle of something. Rum, Billie supposes, because Granddad is known to be partial
to a drop of rum. He doesn’t look at either of them. He slops the liquid into his tea, screws the cap back on, sets the bottle down too hard, making Billie jump. The smell of it is sweet and peppery. No-one says anything. Grandma’s face has fallen into a deep-lined frown; Granddad’s flushed and defiant.

Then the doorbell goes. Granddad looks at Grandma, and Grandma gets up stiffly from her seat. “I’ll get it.”

“Oh,” Billie says. “Oh no.” She knows it’s him.

She hears the briskness of the greeting at the door, a kiss, and then the two of them—her dad and Grandma—coming in through the sitting room and back to the kitchen. Granddad wipes a drip of tea from the side of his mug.

She doesn’t dare look at Dad. He’s there on the edge of her vision, blue jeans and pale top and a loose navy jacket. He’s slumped slightly, favouring that bad leg, sore from the drive. So she has to feel guilty about that now.

“Right, Billie,” Dad says. “Come on. We can talk in the car.”

Granddad looks up. Billie doesn’t shift.

“Don’t mess around, Billie. Get your stuff.”

“I’m not coming.”

“I don’t have time for this.” He grabs her arm, tugs her out of her chair. It hurts.

“Dad—”

“We’re going.”

Grandma turns away—does something busy on the counter. Granddad’s chair scrapes back, and he grabs Dad’s arm, and stops him dead. Dad looks at the old hand on his arm, and then looks at his hand on Billie’s. “Don’t,” Dad says.

There’s a moment, then Granddad’s hand drops away. And Dad lets her go.

“Sorry, petal,” her dad says to her.

It’s worse, his apology: it’s more upsetting than him pulling her out of the chair. “S’all right.”

“I was worried,” he says. “Terrified. Jesus. Anything could have happened.”

But it didn’t, Billie wants to say. I’m here and nothing happened and everything was fine until you came. She sits back down. Dad shifts
uneasily, takes hold of the back of Grandma’s chair. His leg is hurting him.

“And why d’you think she’d go and do a thing like that?” Granddad says.

“Jesus. Do we have to?”

“But why do you think? Smart girl like that, doing something so daft.”

“Her mother and I are sorting things out.”

“Sorting things out? Ha! How exactly? Maybe to your convenience, but bugger everyone else, hey?”

Billie’s head drops down onto folded arms. For a while there are just voices, and Grandma’s arm around her shoulders. Billie nods to the soothing noises that she makes, dabs her eyes with her sleeve. Sniffs.

“The thing about you, son,” her granddad says. “The thing I don’t understand—”

“Billy,” Grandma warns.

Billie glances up at her. She looks trapped, somehow, alert and anxious. Billie’s dad stands back from things—back against the counter, as if he’s restrained, held in place by something. The room is full of unseen cables, linking, pulling, tense.

“Your mother and me—we thought we’d brought you up better than that.”

“Jesus Christ—”

Her granddad just talks over him: “A good home, a stable home, all these years. And this is what you do.”

“Keep it vague, why don’t you? You’re not going to want to go into too much detail.”

“You know your problem, boy?”

“I’d be fascinated to hear.”

“You never had a war to go to. That’s your problem.”

“You reckon? You reckon that’s it, do you—?”

“When is the baby due?” Billie asks.

Attention spins and fixes on her. They didn’t know she knew.

“I mean, it’ll be my half-brother or sister. I think I should be told.”

Her dad lets out a slow thin breath. “It’s early days yet. We don’t know—Carole has to …”

Billie nods, looks down at her hands. Moves her fingers so the glitter in her nail varnish catches the light. This is what the family will be now, this is what it will be shuffled out and sorted into: a new neat unit. Dad, Carole, new baby. If it’s a boy, will they call it William too,
as though she’d never been? And all the mess will be sorted out and cleared off and got rid of. Billie has an image of herself, on a lilo drifting out to sea, and everyone she’s ever known is crowded on the beach, all talking and far too busy and preoccupied to look out after her, and watch her disappear.

The museum’s dome is off to their right. The air is dirty with fumes: it tastes like pennies. They cross at the lights, walk along beside the railings.

They have agreed that she can have this: these few days here in London before she has to go back. She needed to calm down, her dad told her, to have a break from home and all that disruption: he knew things were difficult right now. And Granddad and Grandma were glad to have her there, he’d said. And she’d wanted to say she knew that, and that was why she’d come. But instead she’d just said thank you.

Granddad’s hand swings along beside her. She catches it. He squeezes her hand, and that makes her smile. The railings flicker by, her reaching slightly up, him reaching slightly down, and it feels at once strange and awkward and really nice. She remembers the green gloss of the pedal-aeroplane he made for her, the bulls-eye markings on the wings.

“There we are,” he says.

They head through the gates. The vast naval guns rear up overhead, silvery, cold, incongruous.

“They’re from the
Roberts
,” he says. “At least, one of them is, I think.”

“Go over,” she says. “I’ll take your photo.”

He walks away from her. His trousers hang loose around his legs. His backside is flat underneath the polyester. He stands between the guns for a moment. His right hand almost lifts away from his side, as if he’s going to reach out and try and touch the gun’s flank. But instead he dips it into his pocket. He turns round and squints at her. Smiles. Jerks his head towards the doors:
Come on then
.