The telephone rang. Brenda turned to her husband and said:

‘George get that darling, I can’t bear it.’

George was doing the crossword. He rose from his armchair and set the newspaper down.

‘No more Timeshares please,’ Brenda said.

George went to the hall and picked up the telephone.

‘Rollins, Six-Three-Eight-Nine-Double-O-Nine.’

George listened and nodded and set the receiver down. He returned to the living room where Brenda lay on the sofa watching daytime television.

‘It’s your father.’

Brenda rolled her eyes and slid off the sofa and padded to the hall in her slippers.

‘Dad, so nice—’

Henry paused on the landing when the telephone stopped ringing. He sat on the top stair and listened.

‘—to hear from you,’ his mother said.

Henry pictured the scene at Rose’s Home for Our Elders. His grandfather hunched in the high-backed chair. A nurse standing by with the phone on loudspeaker, now and then reaching to dab his drooling chin with a tissue.

‘O that’s wonderful, Dad. Isn’t that wonderful?’

It would be the nurse doing most of the talking, on his grandfather’s behalf, his grandfather long ago having lost the flair for speech. In the beginning they visited him often. But now more and more phone calls took the place of driving the twenty minutes to the red bricked building at the end of a cul-de-sac, where his grandfather was being held.

‘And how are we doing this morning?’

Henry could remember his grandfather in the conservatory, a week before the fall that would trigger his stunning decline. Henry lay on the couch. Sunlight poured through the glass. His grandfather rolled up his shirt sleeve and pointed to a peach-coloured welt in the flab below his shoulder.

‘We lost fifty-eight men that day. An we got nowhere. One German wounded. One wounded for fifty-eight of our boys. Dead an buried. An we got nowhere. It were all for nothin.’

Henry sat up and traced the scar with his finger.

‘I says to myself, get away from here, Jim. An I legged it. An all the boys screamin, “Come on! Come on, Jim!” An I made it back. Me arm. Me injured arm, it weighed a ton so it did.’

‘Did it hurt, Grandpa?’

But Jim was staring through the glass at the sky. A gull, unusually high, opened its wings to ride a thermal.

‘Rained for three weeks,’ Jim said. ‘Three weeks solid.’

When he had first visited his grandfather at Rose’s Home for Our Elders, Henry said:

‘This is no place for Grandpa.’

He followed his mother and father across thick grey carpets, along corridors painted magnolia. Vases of fake lilies and pictures of birds with speckled eggs. Jim was in the sitting room with some of the other residents, watching the news on television.  

‘Aw bless,’ a lady said to Henry. Her thick legs were raised on a pouffe and covered in bandages, weeping.

The room smelled hot and sour, he wanted to open a window.

‘Dad, you’ve had a haircut,’ Brenda said. ‘Doesn’t he look sweet?’

Henry joined his parents at the table for dinner and said:

‘I have something to tell you.’

His mother was using a spoon to push potatoes onto her plate. She looked at Henry, and then at her husband.

George went on reading his newspaper. Local Man Grows Banana in Greenhouse.

‘I have a girlfriend,’ Henry said.

‘O,’ Brenda said. ‘Isn’t nine a little young to be having a girlfriend?’

‘We are very much in love.’

Brenda again looked at her husband but he was sawing away at a piece of meat with his knife.

‘Well that’s wonderful, I suppose. Isn’t that wonderful George?’

George nodded, the grey meat rolling around in his mouth.

‘I’ve invited her to lunch tomorrow,’ Henry said. ‘Thought you could cook your lasagne. She likes lasagne.’

‘Well. This is all rather sudden. What do her mother and father think of all this?’

‘Her parents are dead.’

‘That’s awful. Whoever looks after her?’

‘She lives on her own. She’s quite capable of looking after herself.’

‘Now come Henry, don’t be ridiculous. What’s the meaning of this? What’s got into him, George? Good heavens.’

In the double bed, under the dry heat of an electric blanket, Brenda said:

‘I don’t know what’s got into him.’

‘Another one of his phases,’ George suggested.

Brenda switched off the bedside lamp and they lay awake in the half light. It was true Henry had phases. He’d rented a martial arts book from the local library when a friend told him about Bruce Lee. He’d fetch the tennis racket when Wimbledon was on, only to pack it away in the garage for another year when it was over. One Christmas, he’d asked for a tape recorder so he could catch people out. But this was different, he’d never shown an interest in girls before.

‘Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t belong to us. He’s so very different.’

She wondered whether they should have had a second child, that perhaps he might have benefited from having a brother or sister. She could hear, in her mind, George’s brother Brian’s voice: “They’ve only ever had sex the once”, and then his beastly laugh. She thought about that for a moment. She thought about how it wasn’t that far from the truth, even now, almost a decade later.

George rolled onto his pillow and said:

‘Well at least he’s not… He’s not… Well you know,’

‘O for heaven’s sake George, out with it.’

‘Of the fruit,’ he said.

At One O’clock in the afternoon, Brenda put the lasagne in the oven at gas mark 6. She set a timer, a plastic lemon, for thirty minutes and grated some cheese to top the lasagne when the lemon rang.

George sat with a mug of tea and his newspaper laid out on the table.

‘I watered the plants,’ he said.

‘Thank you, dear.’

‘Bob Watkins is in the paper.’

‘O?’ Brenda said. And she went to look at the picture George was pointing at in the newspaper.

‘Grew a banana in his greenhouse.’

They heard the front door open. The hinges needed oiled.

Henry came into the kitchen and said:

‘Mum, Dad. This is Isobel, my girlfriend.’

The lemon ticked. They all three stood for a moment and then a very old lady shuffled into the kitchen, dragging her feet on the tiles. Brenda wiped her hands with a tea towel. She looked at Henry, at Isobel, and then at George.

It took George a while to recognise the lady as Mrs Weebly. She lived in a bungalow at the end of their street, alone since Mr Weebly died about five years ago. George hadn’t seen Mrs Weebly in a very long time. He only knew of her, the two having never spoken. I thought you were dead, he thought, and almost said, but instead he shook her hand and said:

‘Isobel, pleased to meet you. I’m George, Henry’s father.’

‘Pleased to meet you John,’ Mrs Weebly said.

‘It’s George.’

‘My pleasure John,’ Mrs Weebly said. She looked up at Brenda. ‘Forgive me. Let me find my glasses. And put my teeth in.’

After lunch, Brenda cleared the plates and slid her own lasagne into the bin. They had tea and some cake and Mrs Weebly said she had better be going, that her programme was on and she hadn’t set the video to record.

Brenda saw her to the door and Henry followed.

‘Goodbye, Barbara. Thank you for a lovely lunch.’

‘It’s no trouble Isobel,’ Brenda said. ‘No trouble at all.’

Henry opened the door and kissed Isobel on the lips. Brenda looked away and then back at the pair still kissing. She went to look at the clock, a habit of hers, but they had moved it some time ago, its circular stain still there on the woodchip.

Henry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Goodbye, my love,’ he said, then skipped up the stairs to his bedroom.

George joined Brenda in the hall, clutching his newspaper.

‘Reckon we should get a greenhouse,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

February 2021