she keeps asking me to make it again. Ah, come on Edith, just let me see them, they’re beautiful, really beautiful.’ I batted my eyelashes.
Edith resigned herself to fate and I lifted the flowers from her arms.
‘Mum will love them. Thanks,’ I smiled cheekily.
She fought a smile; even when we were kids she’d found it hard to give out to us. ‘You deserve what’s coming to you now, that’s all I can say.’ Then she returned in the direction of the kitchen, while dread filled inside me to the point of bursting. Riley led the way and I struggled to walk down the wide steps with the bouquet which took two of my strides next to Riley’s one. He was down ahead of me and Mum almost lit up like a firework at the sight of her precious son making his way to her.
‘Lucy, sweetheart, they’re beautiful, you shouldn’t have,’ Mum said, taking the flowers from me and over-exaggerating her thanks as though she’d just been handed the Miss World title.
I kissed my grandmother on the cheek. She acknowledged it slightly with a small nod of her head but didn’t move.
‘Hi, Lucy,’ Philip stood to kiss me on the cheek.
‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this,’ I said to him quietly, and he laughed.
I wanted to ask Philip about the kids, I knew that I should, but Philip was one of those people who actually took the enquiry way too far and would go into the verbal diarrhoea of every single thing his children had said and done since I’d seen them last. I loved his children, I really did, but I just didn’t care so much for what they’d eaten for breakfast that morning, though I’m pretty sure it was something to do with organic mangoes and dehydrated dates.
‘I should put these in water,’ Mum said, still admiring the flowers for my benefit though the moment had long since past.
‘I’ll do it for you,’ I jumped at the chance. ‘I saw the perfect vase for them inside.’
Riley shook his head incredulously behind her back.
‘Thank you,’ Mum said, as though I’d just offered to pay her bills for her lifetime. She looked at me adoringly. ‘You look different, did you do something with your hair?’
My hand went immediately to my chestnut mane. ‘Em. I slept with wet hair last night.’
Riley laughed.
‘Oh. Well, it’s lovely,’ she said.
‘That will give you a cold,’ my grandmother said.
‘It didn’t.’
‘It can.’
‘But it didn’t.’
Silence.
I left, and tottered over the grass in my heels to get to the stone steps. I gave up and kicked off my shoes; the stone under my feet was warm from the sun. Edith had moved the vase from the bar but I was happy about that; another errand to waste more time. I calculated in my head that from my late arrival to the flower/vase errand I had passed twenty minutes of the dreaded two-hour stay.
‘Edith,’ I called half-heartedly for nobody’s benefit but my own, moving from room to room, moving further away from the kitchen where I knew she would be based. There were five large rooms facing the back garden. One from Drunken Literary Writer’s time, two from the main original part of the house and then another two from the German beer family. Once I had walked through all of the rooms which were connected by oversized double doors, I stepped out in the hallway and looped my way back round. Across the hallway I could see the massive walnut double doors to my father’s office were open. It was where Famous Literary Writer had penned his famous novel. It was where my father went through endless mounds of paperwork. Sometimes I even wondered if there was anything printed on the paper or if he just liked the feel of it, if it was some nervous disposition that meant he must look at and touch and turn paper.
Father and I have the best relationship. Sometimes our thoughts are so similar it’s almost as if we’re the same person. When people see us they are blown away by our bond, by the respect he holds for me, by the admiration I hold for him. Often he’d take days off work just to pick me up from my apartment and take me off on an adventure. It was the same when I was a child, the only daughter in the family, he spoiled me. Daddy’s girl, everybody called me. He’d phone me during the day just to see how I was, send me flowers and Valentine’s cards so I didn’t feel lonely. He really was a special guy. We really did have a special bond. Sometimes he’d take me to a barley field on a windy day and I’d wear a floaty dress and we’d run around in slow motion and he’d become the tickle monster and try to catch me, chasing me around and around until I’d fall down on the barley which would be all around me, waving back and forth in the breeze. How we’d laugh.
Okay, I lied.
That was probably obvious from the slow-motion barley-field image. I pushed it too much there. In truth, he can barely stand me nor I him. But we do stand each other, just about enough, somewhere on the cusp of standing each other for the sake of world peace.
He must have known I was outside his office but he didn’t look up, just turned another mysterious page. He’d kept those pages far from our grasp all of our lives, so much so that I’d become obsessed about discovering what was on them. When I was ten years old I finally managed to sneak into his office one night when he’d forgotten to lock the door, and when I saw the papers, with my heart pounding manically in my chest, I couldn’t understand a word that was written on them. Law talk. He’s a High Court judge and the older I got the more I came to understand how regarded he was as a leading expert on Irish criminal law. He’d presided over murder and rape trials since his appointment to the High Court twenty years ago. He was a real bag of laughs. His old-school views on many things had been nothing short of controversial; at times, if he hadn’t been my father, I’d have taken to the streets in protest – or maybe that was because he was my father. His parents were academics, his father a university professor, his mother – the floral-dress-wearing old woman in the back garden – was a scientist. Though apart from creating tension in every room she walked into I don’t know exactly what she got up to. Something to do with maggots in soil in certain climates. Father’s a European Universities Debating Champion, graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the Honourable Society of King’s Inns whose motto is ‘Nolumus Mutari’ meaning ‘We Shall Not Be Changed’ and that right there says a lot about him. All I know about my father is what the plaques on his office walls declare to the world. I used to think that everything else about him was a great big mystery that I would someday figure out, that I would unlock a secret and suddenly he would all make sense; and that in the end of his days – he an old man and me a responsible beautiful career woman with a stunning husband, longer legs than I’d ever had before and the world at my feet – we’d try to make up for lost time. Now I realise there is no mystery, he is the way he is, and we dislike each other because there isn’t a part of either of us which can even begin to understand a minuscule part of the other.
I watched him from the doorway in his panelled office, head down, glasses low on his nose reading papers. Walls of books filled the room and the smell of dust, leather and cigar smoke was thick even though he’d stopped smoking ten years ago. I felt a tiny rush of warmth for him, because all of a sudden he looked old. Or at least older. And older people were like babies; something about their demeanour made you love them despite their ignorant selfish personalities. I’d been standing there for a while taking the place in and pondering this sudden feeling of warmth, and it seemed
