When I was eleven, she was plump and Yardley powdered; when I was twelve she had sour hanging creases full of dying crud; a year later, I betrayed her.
She lived in a ground-floor flat in a different suburb, and twice a week we'd visit her while my mother did the shopping. She liked my sister Rosemary best, her eldest grandchild, with her glasses and her quiet listening placidity. We learned to wind wool into precise balls from the skeins stretched across her calloused hands as we counted in various languages. I loved to sort her button box. In a chest of stiff drawers were suitable toys draughts, Buccaneer with its fascinating glass jewels and sailing ships, and a wooden Pinocchio doll with alternative noses.
I don't think what you said is completely true, Alexandra. I think it might be a little fib, an exaggeration. Let's see what Pinocchio says about it, shall we? She would hold the doll behind her back, unscrew the short wooden nose and fix in the long one, presenting it with a flourish to me and my brother and sister. See.
And we would have to pretend we didn't know that she had done it.
She always gave us silver tea, so pale it was like milk and water, and seed-cake. The seeds would linger in tooth crevices and annoy my tongue.
I remember once she poured the tea from her silver pot, and poured and poured till the cup was running over, filling the tray, soaking the seed-cake, and I thought it was funny.
A few weeks later a policeman woke us up at night. They'd found my grandmother wandering, clutching her handbag, barefoot in her lace-trimmed cotton nightgown. She thought she lived in Nottingham, and that there was a toad under the tree at the bottom of her garden. She hadn't lived there for over sixty years.
Something had to be done. She came to live with us, with her family.
We had a large house, with a massive front music room. The Bechstein boudoir grand piano went into storage and Granny settled there instead.
The smell of the house changed, Blue Grass dusting powder, sharp iron tonic, minced chicken cooked in blandest milk sauce, sweet old lady farts and armpits from a time before deodorants. She thought it right to change one's knickers once a week.
We practised tentatively on the Broadwood upright in the study, but Granny slept most of the time. Little Joe went off to boarding school, to have so much more fun among his friends, sliding and shouting. Rosemary discovered boys.
And I had to learn how to care.
She would eat her breakfast and sit back in her chair, fiddling and fretting with her alarm clock. She had a brass bell on the table beside her. She rang it constantly and my mother grew thin from the exercise, thin as she had always wished to be.
It's lunch time, Brenda. Where's my lunch?
Oh, but mother, you've only just finished breakfast.
Rubbish, child. Look, it's one o'clock.
Oh, whatever are we going to do with you? You've been playing with that clock again. The day won't go any faster just because you wind the hands on.
My father worked abroad for nine months out of twelve. When he came home he seemed to take up very little space, far less than he did before.
Soon the hottest curry seemed to her like stew, gas taps hissed unlit, and as her senses left her, so did her inhibitions. The doorbell ringing was a sign for her to take off all her clothes, and wander coquettishly into the hallway naked, ogling the vicar or the piano tuner (who thankfully was blind).
She discovered finger painting, and startling brown pictures would suddenly appear upon her walls, smeared with her own hands from the palette of her commode.
My mother's face and hair grew thin.
Sometimes I'd help my granny to dress. Her bones were fragile; you could see them through the muslin drapery of her skin. I was gentle, threading her through the sleeves, but later in the day dark purple bruises would appear upon her arms, five rounded pressure marks tattooed by my young fingertips upon my grandmother. She seemed to shrink, except for her nose.
Her speech deserted her. She was left with only self. All she could say was I I I , no further.
My mother's life was thin, housebound, tied to the demands of one who could no longer ask. She grew short-tempered, hiding her resentment. Her music left her. She had no time for me.
Granny had no senses left, but she was sly. One day she left the house, naked but for a pair of knee-long pink knickers, breasts hanging to her navel, navel hanging over her knicker elastic on a drooping fold of grey skin. Three streets she walked along before she fell, and her arm snapped like dried spaghetti on the pavement.
We visited her in the hospital, and the consultant spoke hard plum-stone words demented, Alzheimers, deterioration, residential, geriatric, terminal.
The Bechstein boudoir grand returned from storage, but the room still smelt old. My mother plumped and talked to me again.
I went to visit granny in the care home. There was an old-tyme music hall singer there, and a pianist accompanying her on a jangling upright piano.
Granny spoke. I I don't like it here. I I want to go home.
How was she? my mother asked, when I returned. She was cooking in the kitchen, a novel open on the work-surface, pages dusted with scattered flour. Delius was playing on the radio and fresh garden air blew in through the open top of the back door.
Just the same, I said. No change. They say she hasn't long to go now. My fingers twisted, screwed behind my back. I turned my face away.
She died two weeks later.