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| Chamberlain's Daughter | |
| By zmbbw | ||||||||||
| 11 August 2008 | ||||||||||
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I watched her approach, her anorak hanging unevenly on account of a damaged zip. I imagined her dragging it over her head, the zip snagging her hair which was oily and pressed flat like a rat’s emerging from a pipe. I saw her wheezing violently, a cardiganed arm pressed against a tea-stained sideboard.
As she drew level with where I sat she stopped, muttering something out of reach. She pulled a hand from her pocket and started picking through coins, tossing crumbs and fluff on to the pavement. A carrier bag dangled from her wrist. Life is Good it said. I remembered that once, on my way to school, I came across my grandmother sitting in the curb on the Holmcroft Road talking to the lolly-pop man. I recognised her from a distance and crossed, embarrassed that she might see me and speak; I couldn’t imagine what my friends would make of her chocolate-coloured stockings and house-slippers. She died shortly after that, struck by a truck on a duel carriageway she didn’t know existed, on her way to visit a friend long since dead. “What do you think her name is?” asked the lady at the adjacent table. I turned toward her. Her hair was the colour of caramel. She’d spent an hour drinking cappuccino and watching the market, a river running through it of shoppers and traders churning in eddies and swirls. I enjoyed listening to the vendors and imagined that she did too. “I think she’ll have an Aunt’s name,” I said. “Valerie or Rose.” “Yes, or she could be foreign. Polish perhaps. Dorotha. Dot.” The bag lady looked up and clamped her bottom lip with a row of derelict teeth. She passed between us, squeezing through toward the door. She smelt forgotten. “She’s English,” I whispered, leaning closer. “Well-to-do, fallen on hard times. I think she’s Chamberlain’s daughter.” Shortly after my grandmother died, my father told me that as a young woman she’d worked as a personal assistant for Stephen Lloyd. “That’s Lloyds of London son,” he said. “Lloyds of London. One of the most famous banking institutions in the world.” We’d walked along the narrow path that separates the two halves of the golf course, me and my sister playing tig; running ahead and falling behind. Caroline had fallen far behind as we climbed the castle mound, overheating in her winter coat and hat; the brown and orange woollen bonnet with press-studs that clipped beneath her chin. Now she sat sulking on another bench. Hers was dedicated to the memory of Donald Boden; ours donated by the local Rotary Club. “Imagine how organised and professional she’d have to be, to be a personal assistant to one of the Lloyds,” he said watching the chimneys of the glue factory belching out a Sunday morning shift. I watched butterflies dog-fighting, aware that my father was gnawing something over still. “She travelled the world with them. She went everywhere. She stayed in Rome and had an audience with the Pope!” He turned toward me, the furrow between his eyes cutting deep; an exclamation of grief pressed into his face. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Your grandmother met the Pope.” A mobile phone rang at the table behind us. It had an old world tone, like a phone in the Cabinet Office during the war. It belonged to the reader; I’d noticed him as I sat down; a man with an angular face leant over a book, his legs crossed tightly. With his free hand he was tapping something on the table, a book-mark perhaps, raising it slightly between finger and thumb and dropping it, over and over. As we looked around he leant back in his chair. He was wiry, long-limbed. He placed the book over his knee and picked the phone out from the pocket of his jeans. “Yes good morning, Michael speaking.” I turned to the lady and we sniggered silently, shaking like schoolchildren. Her eyelids fluttered. “Your grandmother told me once,” my father said, “that important guests were expected at the house and she walked into the sitting room and his wife, Stephen Lloyd’s wife Sarah, was sat naked in front of an open fire.” Caroline was getting restless. It wouldn’t be long before we’d have to walk back down. We couldn’t be late for Sunday lunch; my mother would sulk for days if we were late for Sunday lunch. “Your grandmother approached her and she started to scream as if she’d never seen her before. As if she didn’t know who your grandmother was.” A smile slowly spread across his face. “As she tried to get her out, to get her to her room to get dressed, she bashed your grandmother about the face and bruised her black and blue. She had two black eyes for the whole of Christmas. She said she looked like a negative of Al Jolson.” The bag lady stepped out of the door shaking her head and her hand, muttering still. The waiter stood at the top of the steps drying a cup on a black apron, watching her leave. “You do the next thing,” my father had said. “When something bad happens and you don’t know what to do, you do the next thing. It isn’t easy, but it’s what you’ve got to do”. And that’s what I’d done. I’d gotten up and then I’d showered. I’d showered and then I’d dressed. I’d dressed and then I’d gone out. I’d gone out and then I’d sat for coffee. I’d sat for coffee and I’d seen the bag lady. I’d seen the bag lady and I decided to follow her. And that’s where it began.
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