Chapter 5
‘Hi, Mum!’ Amy dashed up the front steps, almost tripping over the Home Sweet Home doormat.
She set down two shopping bags. ‘Sorry I was so long, I thought I’d be back at least an hour ago.
The Everglades was mobbed and I couldn’t get a parking place.
Then I bumped into Rhianna from school and we went for a coffee.
Where’s Grandpa? Is he in his shed? I’ll go and get my laptop when I’ve put this stuff away. I can’t wait to get started.’
‘Amy…’ Mum’s voice was strange as though coming from a faraway place.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
Tears welled in Mum’s eyes. Dad emerged from the door to the garage and came and stood behind Mum, one hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry, Amy. Grandpa’s gone.’
‘But he can’t have. You’re wrong, it’s not true!’ Amy almost shouted.
‘Oh, love, I know it’s a shock, but you know how ill he’s been.’ Dad wrapped his arms around her. She buried her face in his shirt, breathing in that familiar Dad scent of ferny aftershave, fabric conditioner and cigarettes.
Amy untangled herself. ‘But he was fine last night. He was talking about… about us going in the shed and his memoirs and…’
‘The doctors never thought he’d last so long. No one expected him to make it past his hundredth,’ Dad said. ‘Sorry… that came out a bit blunter than I meant it to.’
‘He was determined to hold your cousin Martha’s baby. It was almost as though becoming a great-grandfather was the goal he was holding on for after your grandma had gone. And after that…’ Mum’s voice tailed off.
‘When did it happen? Why didn’t you call me? I would have come back straight away.’
‘I couldn’t tell you over the phone and it made no sense knowing you’d be home soon enough,’ Mum said. ‘Come on in, I’ll make some tea. We can’t just stand around in the hallway.’
Amy trailed after her. She didn’t want tea.
She didn’t want anything except to go back in time.
She should have been here. She should have taken Grandpa his morning coffee in bed.
He might still have been alive. She might have heard his voice one last time, spent precious moments with him.
Instead, she’d been sitting in some soulless shopping centre café cooing over Rhianna’s rainbow-coloured bikinis as she swiped through her school friend’s holiday snaps.
Mum switched on the kettle. She took out a carton of milk and gave it a sniff. Dad opened and closed cupboard doors as though he’d forgotten where the mugs lived.
‘Can I see him?’ Amy started for the stairs without waiting for an answer.
‘Are you sure?’ Dad called out but he didn’t go after her.
Amy pushed open the door. Lance was dressed in his usual striped pyjamas, his head back against the pillow.
She crept in quietly as though he might be disturbed and stood by the head of the bed instead of perching on the quilt as she normally did.
The window was open. Down on the patio, clothes were pegged out on the rotating dryer.
The sun was out. It wasn’t a day for dying.
Maybe he was just sleeping, maybe it wasn’t true. She reached out to touch him.
‘Grandpa?’ His cheek was cool. She snatched back her hand.
A floorboard creaked. Dad crossed the room.
‘Oh, Amy!’ He smoothed down her hair and kissed her on the forehead the way he’d done when she was little.
‘He was the best grandpa in the world.’ Amy gulped. ‘I was going to write up his memoirs, what he did when he was young, what he did in the war. And now it’s too late. I wish I’d asked him about it before. Why didn’t I?’
‘I suppose it was hard to imagine he wouldn’t be around forever,’ Dad said. ‘Did you see that box sitting on the bedside table? Grandpa made it for you himself.’
She traced her finger over the letters AMY carved into the wooden lid. ‘This must be what he was talking about yesterday.’ She picked it up. It was lighter than she expected.
‘Bring it downstairs and open it.’
‘Do you think I ought to?’
‘Wasn’t that what Grandpa wanted to do today?’
‘Not like this… Not without him. It’s not fair.’
‘It’s not fair, love, that it isn’t… now let’s go down and sit with your mum. That tea will be stewed to the colour of gravy if it’s left much longer.’
She followed him down the stairs. Mum was in the living room. She’d poured out the tea.
‘Grandpa put this tin of Ceylon Blend in my stocking a few years ago. I never opened it. It seemed such a bother when it’s so easy to chuck in a teabag.
Stupid, isn’t it?’ Mum took a sip. ‘It’s well gone past the use-by date, but it still tastes so much nicer than the supermarket stuff. Wish I could tell him.’
‘Amy’s brought down that memory box, Eileen.’
‘I found it this morning fallen on the floor by his slippers. He must have been looking at it before he nodded off last night. I wonder what he kept for you and your brother.’
‘Oh!’ Amy clamped her hand to her mouth. ‘What about Jack? Have you told him?’
‘We haven’t got hold of him yet,’ Mum said. ‘New Zealand’s hours ahead of us. He’s probably out in some noisy bar somewhere.’
‘He’ll be gutted. And he’ll be so upset he wasn’t here yesterday.’
‘What’s done is done. I don’t want him brooding on that.’ Dad picked up the box of drawing pins and gave it a rattle. ‘Our Jack’s trip was Lance’s last adventure. I’ll remind your brother of that.’
‘Sit down, Amy, love. Drink your tea, then you can open that box,’ Mum said.
Amy balanced the box on the arm of the sofa and sat on the end sipping her tea. She wanted to open her gift from Grandpa alone, in the shed. The place where he’d taught her how to shape her first pot from wet clay, where she’d daubed their creations with a paintbrush in her six-year-old hands.
Dad’s eyes shifted towards where Mum sat staring vacantly at Lance’s wallchart.
Amy took the hint. She opened the box’s hinged lid. Lying on top of a black and white postcard was a coin she didn’t recognise strung on a leather thong. ‘This is foreign, but it’s not a euro.’
‘Let’s see.’ Dad took it from her. ‘A one-lira piece – it’s Italian, the currency they used before Italy joined the EU.
That’s Vittorio Emanuele, their old king, on the back.
And on the front, this eagle is a fascist symbol, this must be from Mussolini’s day.
What else is in the box – a couple of postcards? ’
Amy took the coin necklace from her dad and laid it on her lap, one hand playing with the leather cord. She studied the first postcard: a long expanse of beach, a small stone chapel, swifts circling overhead. She passed it to her mum. ‘Look, do you recognise it?’
‘Oh, yes. This is Alassio, on the Italian Riviera in Liguria; that’s the seafarers’ chapel at the end of the seafront.
It’s where Grandpa grew up. His dad, your great-grandfather, was advised by his doctor to move to a warmer climate for the sake of his health.
It was quite a fashionable thing for the English to do, back in those days. ’
Amy held out the second postcard, cracked with deep fold marks as though someone had kept it in their pocket. ‘This one’s a little village.’ The place looked like something out of a fairytale, all tiled roofs and a clocktower nestled higgledy-piggledy amongst olive groves and dark wooded hills.
Mum frowned. ‘I don’t recognise this but I suppose this could be Liguria too.
I don’t think the family travelled around all that much.
I expect it says where it is on the back.
’ She turned it over. ‘Oh, there’s a message!
Something in Italian, I think… it’s not your grandpa’s writing. I’ll need my reading glasses.’
‘Let me see.’ Dad took the card before Amy could. ‘It is in Italian but I know what it means.’
‘What?’ Amy longed to snatch it back.
‘Baci e abbracci dall’ Italia. It means kisses and hugs from Italy – it’s their equivalent of saying “love from Italy”.’
‘But who’s it from?’ Mum, now with her glasses on, peered over Dad’s shoulder.
‘It doesn’t say. And the name of the place was printed in the top corner but someone’s struck through it with a thick black pen.’
‘Must be somewhere Lance visited as a boy.’
‘Love from Italy – do you think these things were from a girl? Maybe a teenage sweetheart?’ Amy said.
Dad took the necklace back from her. He ran his thumb along the coin’s reeded edge. ‘There’s something etched into the back. Hard to tell what it is. A letter C or J perhaps but it’s a love token for sure. I’ve seen these before made from an old farthing.’
‘That’s so sweet,’ Amy said.
‘First love.’ Mum sighed.
An odd look passed over Dad’s face. He screwed up his eyes to study the coin more closely. ‘What year did your dad’s family come back to England, Eileen?’
‘Sometime before the war. A lot of English families moved back here in the thirties. Must have been 1937. No, I remember, now, he told me it was 1938, he would have been around sixteen. These keepsakes must have been of some girl he’d left behind.’
‘I don’t think they can be. This coin wasn’t minted until 1941. At least two or three years after they left Italy.’
He handed Amy the necklace back; the metal was warm. ‘I suppose he could have found that old lira coin in a flea market over here and made this anytime.’
Mum chewed the edge of her finger. ‘That doesn’t explain that old postcard of the village or why he kept these things for you. But I can tell you one thing: I never saw your grandma wear that coin around her neck.’