‘Yes, sorry,’ said Chloe, biting her lip. ‘Ben’s all right, really. But he’s not my dad.’
‘Of course not. I expect he’d agree with that. At least you’ve got a family. All mine have gone.’
Things were getting a little gloomy.
‘Can I get you a drink or something?’ asked Chloe brightly. ‘A cup of tea?’
The words ‘cup of tea’ seemed to stir the old man’s energy levels and he perked up.
‘You wouldn’t mind? The back door to the kitchen’s open. I could really do with a drink and I can’t always get up once I’m sat down.’
‘I don’t mind.’
Chloe went into the kitchen, which was a mess. Nelson, limping badly and full of hope, followed at her heels making soft meows. Chloe ignored Nelson and found the teabags and the kettle. The milk was in the fridge. She gave Nelson the cream from the top in a tin lid. He lapped it up quickly then, sensing that was it, went back to Mr Grantham’s feet.
‘Do you take sugar?’ she called, and when he waved over the top of the deckchair, cried, ‘How many?’
He held up one finger.
The sugar was harder to find, but she tracked it down eventually. She made two cups of tea in rather dubiously clean cups and took them out to Mr Grantham.
He said, ‘Got yourself one, eh? Quite right and proper.’
He sipped the tea with thin lips, staring into the yards of the houses that backed their own. Chloe noticed that the backs of his hands were covered in dark nebulous islands like coffee stains. Blue veins stood out under the thin layer of skin. Mr Grantham was very, very old.
‘Were you married?’ asked Chloe, trying to spark off the conversation again. ‘Did you have a wife?’
Mr Grantham put down the cup with a shaking hand, making it rattle in the saucer.
‘I had a wife, a very nice lady,’ he said, his translucent blue eyes beginning to moist over. ‘She died several years ago. It’s becoming harder to remember her face now.’
‘You have photos though?’
‘Oh yes, I have lots of photos of Florrie. Of her, and other people. But they’re just ghosts now. It doesn’t seem real any longer, that old life. It feels as if I’ve read about it, in a history book. Funny how the mind works.’
The pair of them spoke no more that day. Chloe read her book and Mr Grantham read his memories.
Jordy teased her a little when she told him about her conversation with Mr Grantham.
‘I wouldn’t know what to say to an old guy like that,’ he said. ‘What’ve you got in common?’
‘Secrets,’ she said. ‘Girls just love secrets. To hear them and to tell them. Old men have got lots of secrets. Things we wouldn’t even dream of. You don’t know anything about girls, do you?’
‘Don’t want to,’ he said haughtily. ‘Especially if they support Manchester United.’
She said, puzzled, ‘I don’t support any football team.’
‘That’s even worse.’
A week after their first meeting, Chloe again found Mr Grantham in the garden, contemplating nature. This time it took quite a while for her to get him to open up, but once he did Mr Grantham was even less reluctant than before to share his thoughts with her. She asked him at one point if he had gone to university, as she was thinking of doing that one day.
‘University? No, no, never went there.’ He almost chuckled. ‘We didn’t do things like that in them days. I went to a village school. Left at fourteen. Never took exams or anything like that. Went to work in a grocer’s, behind the counter. Just before I was twenty, the war came along, and I joined up.’ His eyes narrowed at this point. ‘I was engaged to a young woman called Susan then. She gave me a silver pocket-watch before I left for overseas, with her photo in the lid which covered the face. It was musical. Played Frère Jacques when you opened it.’
‘Oh, were you very much in love?’ Chloe recalled that his wife’s name had been Florrie. ‘You didn’t marry in the end?’
His mouth formed a thin bitter line.
‘No, no, we didn’t marry. I came home after the war, from POW camp in Germany, and she’d run off. Married a much older man than me. They’d moved away, so I never saw her again.’
‘Oh, how sad.’
Mr Grantham rallied. ‘Probably for the best.’ But he didn’t sound as if he meant it. ‘I met Florrie a little later. She was a good