Jamie slumped down on the bottom stair and closed his eyes. No tears. Not yet. Because the prevailing emotion wasn’t grief, but loneliness. His grandfather was – had been – his last living relative. No uncles or aunts. No cousins, at least that he knew of. He tried to imagine the old man as he had been, and came up with a narrow, bony face dominated by a Belisha beacon of a nose whose rosy light was fuelled by the cheap Scotch he claimed was the only thing that helped him sleep. Grey, thinning hair and benign, kindly amusement in eyes shadowed by the tropical diseases that were the legacy of his years in Africa. A prayer formed in his head, but he knew the old man was already with the God who had sustained him for so long. Matthew had been a ‘good’ man in the truest sense of the word. Every waking hour and spare penny dedicated to helping others. Every new day an opportunity to be a better person.
Jamie put his hand to his mouth and choked back a sob. The guilt that had been lying dormant was growing now – why hadn’t he insisted on staying with him? – but the shock was wearing off. A switch clicked in his head telling him to move: to do something.
He knelt beside the still figure and bent to kiss the cold brow.
‘Goodbye, Granddad.’
It was ten days before he felt strong enough to return to the house, his mind still numbed by that peculiar detachment that follows a period of intense grief. Only now had he been able to overcome the dread that had been keeping him away from the unwanted, but necessary task of sorting out his grandfather’s papers and putting aside anything of monetary or sentimental value before the house clearers came in.
This had been his home for eighteen years, shared with his mother and grandfather, before he’d left for university. Like his mother, the house was a product of the fifties; a functional five-room cube of brown pebbledash with a tile roof, neat windows and a small, carefully tended garden. Semi-detached, of course; she could never have afforded what she called a ‘proper’ house in Welwyn, and Matthew’s meagre church pension didn’t stretch far. He remembered the day she’d died and the unexpected sense of release he’d experienced. At last he’d been free of the smothering influence that had kept him wound tight since the day he was old enough to understand it.
Matthew had changed nothing in the year since she’d gone. The house had become a shrine to her. Every corner had memories for Jamie. Strawberry teas at the kitchen table where she’d wiped jam from his face with a damp facecloth. The scent of her perfume as she’d leaned over him in twin-set and pearls to complete a jigsaw in the front room. His grandfather helping with an elusive Latin verb when he was about twelve, at what must have been one of the hardest times. He shook his head. Where to begin? The papers, he supposed, which were stored in the polished bureau in the corner.
He kept it up for half an hour, sorting through insurance documents and gas bills, before boredom inexorably drew him to a collection of his mother’s leather-bound photo albums. He flicked through the pages of regimented pictures, each perfectly positioned and in its proper place. The early ones were mostly photographs of him as a baby, alone or with his mother or grandparents. But here was five-year-old Jamie, deadly serious, ready for his first day at school in cap, purple blazer and tie, with his proud mother at his shoulder. In the picture, her hair was a dark, lustrous brown. How could he have forgotten that? Margaret Saintclair had been a snob, an unbridled and unapologetic snob who had somehow kept her status as an unmarried mother from her toffee-nosed acquaintances as she’d clawed her way to become chairwoman – not chairperson, God forbid – of the local bridge club. For all her faults she had loved him, and loved him as only the single mother of an only child can show love: single-mindedly to the point of obsession. It had taken him a long time to understand what she and his grandfather had gone through to ensure that he was equipped to take on the world. In a way, she had donated thirty years of her life to him. She’d even given up her name – plain old Sinclair – as part of the plot to give him the best possible chance when he went to Cambridge: driven, almost bullied, by her to win a scholarship from the local grammar school.
As he leafed through the pictures he realized that he’d always thought of his mother as old, but she hadn’t been old at all. She wasn’t quite sixty-three when she died.
Another picture. Her proudest moment, his graduation with a First in fine arts and modern languages. Jamie barely recognized himself in the stern-faced young man in the one-size-fits-all, hired robe, even though the photograph had been taken less than ten years earlier. While the other students had spent most of their time drinking and carousing, he’d never been able to escape his mother’s telepathic control. If he remembered correctly, the popular term for the image he’d created for himself had been ‘Young Fogey’ and he’d cheerfully embraced it, right down to the tweed jacket and briar pipe, for Christ’s sake. Oh, he’d had his moments, and the girls who seduced him, usually for a dare, had gone away pleasantly surprised and reasonably well-satisfied, but he’d never indulged in that relentless pursuit of the female flesh his fellow undergraduates felt was their duty.