Mum rushes into the kitchen. She looks flustered. ‘I’ve just had a great idea,’ she says. ‘Why don’t we look through your gran’s things? All this talk of a Jean and a Victor. It’s got me curious.’
‘Her things?’ I say, taking the tea-towel from Tom to wipe my sudsy hands.
‘Yes. You know, the stuff we boxed up when we were packing her Bristol house.’
I frown. ‘We gave a lot of it away to charity. Her furniture and things.’
‘Yes, yes, but we kept her personal stuff, didn’t we, her admin and so on?’ She sounds impatient. I nod, remembering the envelopes and boxes of papers that were stuffed into her sideboard and we couldn’t be bothered to look through, telling ourselves we’d do it at a later date. But then we forgot and Mum went back to Spain. ‘What did you do with it all?’
‘I …’ I try to think. ‘It could be in the spare room or in the attic now. We still have a lot of unpacking to do.’
Mum raises an eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘But you’ve been living here months!’ I know she would have had it all done in the first week. ‘Okay, then. We need to find the boxes and go through them.’
My heart falls. ‘What – now?’ I was looking forward to a packet of Minstrels in front of the telly and a light-hearted romcom, something funny to take our minds off everything that’s been going on.
Her face softens. ‘I’m sorry, honey. I know you must be tired. I’d forgotten how knackering the second trimester is. Just show me where they are and I’ll go through them.’
I’m tempted, I’m not going to lie. But I can’t let her do it by herself. It wouldn’t be right. ‘It’s fine. I’ll help. Come on.’
I throw Tom an exasperated look over my shoulder. He smiles in sympathy and says he’ll put the kettle on.
We find them in the attic. The two large boxes the furthest away, crammed into a corner under the eaves. Tom has to come up to help lift them down the ladder. Then the three of us sit on the floor, with a hot drink beside us, and sift through them, Snowy with his head resting in Tom’s lap.
‘God, your gran kept a lot of crap,’ he says, as he sorts through a pile of old receipts.
‘Look at this.’ I hold up a tan leatherbound book. ‘It’s a book of poems. It looks ancient.’ I open it. The pages are yellowing and smell musty. ‘Oh … wow.’
‘What?’ asks Mum.
I gently peel a pressed flower from between the pages. ‘It’s a pressed rose.’ It’s dry and crispy but the burnt crimson colours are still vivid. ‘Someone she loved gave her this.’ I place the flower carefully back in the book and hand it to Mum. ‘They’re love poems.’
Mum’s eyes glisten as she takes the book and turns it over in her hands. I know how she feels. Gran has always been so private, never talking about her past, her lovers, her husband. It’s hard to imagine she had a life before she was a mother and a grandmother. A life in which she’d received a pressed rose in a book of poems. A life in which she was in love. ‘Maybe my father gave it to her,’ says Mum. ‘What about old photos? Do you have any in your box?’
‘She always did have a sparse amount,’ I say, remembering how I’d asked once to see some of my granddad and she proclaimed that she hardly had any, that people didn’t take that many photos in her day, which I found hard to believe. She didn’t grow up in Victorian times. ‘Have you ever seen any of your dad?’ I say to Mum, who’s still staring at the little book of poetry. She puts it on the floor next to her feet, reluctantly.
‘No, never. She said they’d got lost in a move.’
‘So you know nothing about him?’