after a pause. ‘My father used to say that she was a daredevil. Always getting into scrapes and running up huge debts that old Sir Stephen had to pay off. But everyone forgave her because she was so pretty and full of life. Then suddenly she was dead. Killed by a horse, of all things.’
‘How old were you, Mum?’
‘When it happened? Five. I’d just turned five.’
‘It must’ve been awful. Really awful.’ Thomas suddenly wished that he’d not brought up the subject of his grandmother.
‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ said Anne. ‘I mean, yes, it must have completely traumatized me, which is why I can’t remember anything about it except one image, which may have nothing to do with her death except that I feel sure it does. It’s seeing my father sitting on the front stairs. I can’t remember if he was crying or not but I know that he never sat anywhere except on a chair and there he was sitting on the stairs.’
‘The front stairs?’
‘Yes. And for many years I couldn’t remember anything about my mother at all. I would look at the old photograph albums, but they didn’t mean anything, and curiously it was that painting you like that gave me the strongest sense of her. It used to hang in the hall, and I’d gaze at it for hours until one day a memory came back to me.
‘I was in a park on a swing. It must’ve been like a children’s playground, and I’ve never been able to work out where it is, although I can see a grove of big green Christmas trees nearby. Anyway, there’s someone pushing the swing, and I go up, up, up in the air so high that my little patent leather black shoes are right above my head.’
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