‘It’s all right; it was your grandfather.’ She patted the wing of the car with one thin hand. ‘After a dance,’ she said quietly, smiling. She looked up at me again, her lined, delicate face amused, eyes glittering. ‘Prentice,’ she laughed. ‘You’re blushing!’
‘Sorry, gran,’ I said. ‘It’s just ... well, you don’t ... well, when you’re young and somebody’s ...’
‘Past it,’ she said, and slammed the door shut; dust duly danced. ‘Well, we’re all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.’ She pushed the wheelchair back, over the toe of my new trainers. I lifted the chair clear and helped complete the manoeuvre, then pushed her to the door. I left her there while I put the tarpaulin back over the car.
‘In fact some of us get to be young twice,’ she said from the doorway. ‘When we go senile: toothless, incontinent, babbling like a baby ...’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Grandma, please.’
‘Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn’t much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind ... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.’
‘I’m sorry, Grandma.’ I closed the garage door, dusted off my hands, and took up my position at the back of the wheelchair again. There was an oily tyre print on my trainer. Crows raucoused in the surrounding trees above as I pushed my gran towards the drive.
‘Lagonda.’
‘Sorry, Gran?’
‘The car; it’s a Lagonda Rapide Saloon.’
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. ‘Yes, I know.’
We left the courtyard and went crunchily down the gravel drive towards the sparkling waters of the loch. Grandma Margot was humming to herself; she sounded happy. I wondered if she was recalling her tryst in the Lagonda’s back seat. Certainly I was recalling mine; it was on the same piece of cracked and creaking, buttoned and fragrant upholstery - some years after my gran’s last full sexual experience - that I had had my first.
This sort of thing keeps happening in my family.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the family; on the one hand, as I don’t doubt you may well imagine, it gives me no great pleasure to stand here before you at this time ... yet on the other hand I am proud, and indeed honoured, to have been asked to speak at the funeral of my dear old client, the late and greatly loved Margot McHoan ...’
My grandmother had asked the family lawyer, Lawrence L. Blawke, to say the traditional few words. Pencil-thin and nearly as leaden, the tall and still dramatically black-haired Mr Blawke was dressed somewhere in the high nines, sporting a dark grey double-breasted suit over a memorable purple waistcoat that took its inspiration from what looked like Mandelbrot but might more charitably have been Paisley. A glittering gold fob watch the size of a small frying pan was anchored in the shallows of one waistcoat pocket by a bulk-carrier grade chain.
Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I’m not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows that time is on his side. I thought he had looked oddly comfortable in the presence of the undertakers.
I sat and listened to the lawyer and in short order wondered (a) why Grandma Margot had chosen a lawyer to make the address, (b) whether he’d be charging us for his time, and (c) how many others of my family were wondering the same things.
‘... long history of the McHoan family in the town of Gallanach, of which she was so proud, and to which she so ... usefully and, and industriously contributed throughout her long life. It was my privilege to know and serve both Margot and her late husband Matthew well, in Matthew’s case first as a school friend, back in the twenties. I well remember ...’
‘Grandma, I mean; good grief.’
‘What?’
My grandmother drew deeply on the Dunhill, flicked her wrist to close the brass Zippo, then put the lighter back in her cardigan.
‘Grandma, you’re smoking.’
Margot coughed a little and blew the smoke towards me, a grey screen for those ash-coloured eyes. ‘Well, so I am.’ She inspected the cigarette closely, then took another drag. ‘I always wanted to, you know,’ she told me, and looked away, over the loch towards the hills and trees on the far side. I’d wheeled her