Chapter 38
‘What happened?’ I asked softly.
She sighed and closed her eyes. ‘It was a long time ago… and we were all so young…’ Granny Annie had tears in her eyes.
The first tears I’d ever seen her have. ‘Lolly fell in. On purpose. On the far side of the island at Kitty’s Sound.
I suppose she took her own life. We were winning, I was focused on everything, and she stood up and grabbed the anchor and jumped in.
And she was gone, straight down. And the boat carried on and I was pulling down the sail and screaming and all the other boats were looking, everyone could tell something terrible had happened.
Eddie… he was sailing his boat and he was trying to turn around, dropping his sail, switching around, and then my boat was yanked back, the anchor had hit the bottom, and I remember the most terrible feeling, like whiplash, but worse was the feeling inside.
I knew what had happened. She had slung the rope around her wrist before she jumped in and she was drowned.
But we tried, Eddie and I, diving down and down, trying and trying.
The anchor was stuck, we couldn’t pull it back up.
And I knew what I had to do was follow the rope down down and we’d find her and then I gave a giant yank of the rope and the anchor moved and I pulled it up and up, and she was gone. ’
‘Poor Lolly.’ It was me this time.
‘Yes,’ said Granny Annie, sadly. ‘Poor Lolly. I think it was the cruelty of life, that it could be so awful. That Lolly could have felt such despair that she could have been treated so badly by Oliver.’
‘Oliver? Oliver Richmond?’
She nodded, almost wearily. ‘He’s still around then? You’ve met him?’
‘I’ve met him, his son, and his grandson.’
‘Bet he’s well and in fine form, is he? That’s the thing about bad pennies, they just keep rolling.
I left Sandycove for many reasons, one was that my feeling for the place was ruined.
I didn’t want to be around, and I did not want to run into Oliver Richmond ever again.
And I was in shock, I suppose. Perhaps you might say traumatised… ’
‘You would, Granny,’ said Johnny, ‘that’s exactly what you were.’
‘Yes, well…’
‘You were. Wasn’t she, K?’ He looked to me for support.
‘Of course you were.’ I thought of Lucy then, caught under the boat, and shivered. No wonder it had taken so long to get back on the water. And then I thought of Caitlin, who never got the chance, whose life was snatched away.
‘There’s no point moping now,’ said Granny Annie, standing up. ‘I’m here now, may as well face it.’
‘You don’t have to face it,’ said Johnny, looking up from the bed at her, where he was still cross-legged. ‘We could just go home?’
She smiled at him. ‘No, I’m fine. Thank you for worrying about me. But that’s not your job. Your job is to be the person worried about. Same as Kerry-Anne. I’m your grandmother.’
‘We’re allowed to worry about you,’ I said. ‘We want to worry.’
‘Yes, worrying is caring,’ said Johnny. ‘Oprah says that. People aren’t a burden, they are a joy. To worry is to love and to love is to worry.’
Granny Annie looked a little sceptical at Johnny and smiled. ‘Thank you for those words of wisdom, Johnny. I do think you should come back more often to Boston, we need to dilute those Californications.’
‘Wait!’ I had suddenly had a thought and raced from the room to my own, and returned with the guidebook, leafing through it, to find the right page.
I opened it on the double spread of the women and the old knitting circle, with Mrs DeCourcey in the middle, and the smiling and proud faces of the mothers and grandmothers of the current knitting circle.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the face of the laughing Lolly DeCourcey, at the edge of the photograph. ‘It’s Lolly.’
Granny Annie peered at it. ‘Yes, that’s her,’ she said.
‘And that’s me. The girl next to her was me.
I remember it like yesterday. We never stopped laughing the two of us, always jinxing about, having fun.
She was daring me to race into the photograph, just as the shutter was clicked, and I was trying to pull her back.
’ She handed it to Johnny, who took it from her.
‘You both look like a lot of fun,’ murmured Johnny, his eyes on the two figures. ‘I would have liked to hang with you two.’
‘It was fun,’ said Granny Annie. And then she turned to the page to the other image of Lolly, a moment frozen in time.
‘There I am again. We were so young. Just children.’ She stared at the two faces, two beautiful young women, life stretching ahead of them.
‘Oh, poor Lolly. The best friend I ever had. The thought of life without her was intolerable. I felt like half a person.’
I nodded, knowing exactly how she felt. I felt Johnny’s arm snake around my back and rest his arm on my shoulders, and I felt so grateful for his arm, and just for him.
‘Right,’ said Granny Annie. ‘Let’s go and face the Sandycove music. I want to see everyone again.’
‘They’ll be at the warehouse on Laundry Lane,’ I said. ‘The knitting circle.’
As Granny Annie marched ahead, Johnny caught my sleeve. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘So, what?’
‘You, grieving. Caitlin. You not talking or being normal about it.’
‘I am normal about it. It’s you who isn’t. Trying to get me to talk about it all the time.’
‘Well?’
I looked at him. ‘I have been talking about her. A lot. And I’ve been thinking about her. A lot. And missing her. And wishing she was here. She would have loved it here.’
He nodded. ‘She loved doing whatever you were doing. The two of you were a real pair.’
‘Yeah…’
‘Well, I’m always proud of you, Kerry-Anne.’ He slung his arm around my shoulder. ‘But I’m particularly proud of you right this moment.’
‘Yeah.’ I was worried if I spoke I might start crying, but I squeezed him back. ‘Come on,’ I managed, ‘before the Big G gets too far ahead.’ And we raced to catch up with her, just like we used to at the beach all those summers ago.