The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel Read Free Book Online Page B

Hillingdon or Ickenham. Close enough that Mum could tootle over there in the Austin every week to take her to the shops or for a pot of Earl Grey at the tea shop in the high street.
    He probably hadn’t envisaged her selling up and moving into the study.
    So it must have been either Mum or Aunt Caroline who had made the fateful suggestion that morning. They were the only ones likely to notice a change in Grandma Lake’s circumstances. And there must have been a change—no one would suggest their elderly mum move in with them unless there was a pretty compelling reason. Whatever the reason, one Sunday in late summer as the roast was spitting and hissing in the oven and Graham was watching Happy Days on the telly, Mum and Aunt Caroline and Dad had had a discussion around the kitchen table and by the end of the discussion Grandma Lake’s house had been valued, her possessions assessed, her longevity and health analysed, the problem of the stairs up to the study sorted and Dad had shaken out the sports section of The Times and left in disgust.
    There had been no question that Grandma Lake move in with Aunt Caroline.
    Aunt Caroline, who was in her mid-fifties, had quite suddenly become betrothed to a Yorkshireman, Ted Kettley, whom she’d met a few months earlier at an auction in Skipton. He was a valuer or something, employed by the local council. This meant that, after a lifetime of having a maiden aunt whom you could reasonably expect to remain a maiden, Charlotte and Jennifer and Graham had found themselves in the unexpected position of preparing to attend Aunt Caroline’s wedding in North Yorkshire to a red-faced, large-eared, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman who was, suddenly, their Uncle Ted. It had seemed to Charlotte at the time an example of the unforeseen and world-reeling changes that were suddenly dumped on you and that, as an adolescent, you had no control over. You were simply meant to deal with them. Grandma Lake’s arrival was another example of this unsettling phenomenon.
    Aunt Caroline had sold her high-ceiled Art Deco flat in Perivale and moved into Ted’s modern and centrally heated bungalow in North Yorkshire. It had been disturbing, though not nearly as disturbing as the realisation that North Yorkshire was too far away to relocate Grandma Lake and that an ageing mother-in-law was hardly a wedding present Uncle Ted could be expected to take on.
    ‘Grandma Lake will be coming to live with us,’ Mum had announced one Sunday over lunch as she’d spooned roast potatoes onto each of their plates.
    ‘Why?’ asked Graham.
    ‘Where will she sleep?’ asked Jennifer.
    How long for? thought Charlotte.
    ‘In the spare room,’ Mum had replied, craftily changing the name of ‘The Study’ to ‘The Spare Room’ as though by changing its name this room became a place they didn’t really need and that could easily be handed over to someone else with very little inconvenience to anyone. She’d ignored Graham’s question.
    After that nothing was the same again.
    The change came not suddenly, but bit by bit. An encroaching sort of change that you ought to have seen coming but somehow, because you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you didn’t. As the days and nights passed and record players had to be turned right down so as not to disturb Grandma Lake, and The Professionals had to make way for 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers and The Big Match was abandoned in favour of Songs of Praise , as chicken curry and spaghetti bolognese made way for lamb chops and casserole, as Dad’s armchair became Grandma Lake’s armchair, it began to dawn on everyone that this house that had for so long been a children’s house and then, briefly, a teenager’s house, was now, very definitely, an old person’s house.
    Everyone had dealt with the change in their own way. Graham, in a show of masculine territorialness, had decided to decorate his bedroom and spent long hours testing various colours, painting and repainting until the dimensions