I looked up to the fly and saw it find an unblocked pane and escape. Speak now, I urged myself. I drew in breath, but I didn’t need it.
‘Are you going to talk again of leaving me?’ The tension in Grandmother’s chin made the knot of her bonnet twitch.
‘I wish you wouldn’t think of it like that,’ I replied. ‘It’s not about leaving you, it’s about finding a life of my own.’
‘We have discussed this time and time again, as I recall – and I do recall, as much as you think my mind is feeble these days. Each time, the subject cuts as deep as it did the first, my dear.’
I opened my mouth to speak but was interrupted. ‘Drunks, vagrants and defiled women gather like rats in London. They take people apart in hospitals there, you know! They tear limbs from bodies, cut them open – is that what you want?’
‘Then what? Am I to spend my life here? I am twenty-seven. If I am able to become a nurse, I can earn a good wage, for the both of us.’
Grandmother fixed her pale blue eyes on me. ‘Pah, it’s not about money. It’s about that part of you that wants to wriggle free of the guidance it requires. I shudder to think what you’d get up to. You don’t have the will. Sin seeps through you, but while you are here, I can frighten it away; we can stop it. I’m glad your grandfather isn’t here; he would be heartbroken to know you want to abandon me.’
Her paper-white fingers worked her rosary faster and faster, her thin veins like blue and green cotton. I looked towards the hole in the stained-glass window and wished I could fly out too. The sound of her sobbing echoed around the church. This was her trick; she cried so as to sabotage the conversation.
‘Please… please don’t cry,’ I said, and placed my hand on hers, though I had no feeling for it. I didn’t like to touch her but knew it was the thing to do.
Her hand felt cold and small, and she snatched it from me anyway. ‘Stupid little fool! You don’t know anything,’ she said.
‘Then let me go!’ I growled.
Contempt flashed across her face.
I glanced around. No one had seen me struggle to contain my resentment. ‘How can I know anything when you refuse to let me leave the house?’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘You will take me home now.’
In my gut I had made the decision already, but my gut had yet to persuade my head. With her continued resistance to my desires and ambitions she had sealed her own fate. She hadn’t always been like this, not when my grandfather was alive. He was more liberal in relation to me and she had respected his male authority. I had learned that girls should fear the jealousy of the women who raised them, for they sought companions in confinement.
My grandmother’s health had deteriorated in recent months. She tired easily and complained of feeling ill and feverish all the time, for attention mainly. The village doctor was used to being called and would send me to the chemist for a tonic I could have purchased without his direction, if only she’d asked. She was an irritant. I knew he thought I had the patience of a saint. Often she forgot herself and called me Christabel, which had been my mother’s name. When she realised I wasn’t Christabel, she became listless and sad. She would pace the house at night, looking for my grandfather, and I would take her back to her bedroom and lock the door – just like Mrs Wiggs now did to me. What was the distance between locking an old woman in her room for her own safety and helping her on her way back to God? It didn’t seem so great to me.
I prayed to Him many times, but I think the Devil answered. I prayed for the chance to fly and it came three days later. I was in the potting shed, looking for a trowel to fill in a hole some animal had dug in the garden, and as I sifted through the rusted tools, a box fell from an old shelf – my grandfather never was much of a carpenter – and dropped on my head. It was a box of flypapers with arsenic.
That night she said she would take her supper in bed. I generally served her some broth and bread, and a little mutton if she could manage it. I soaked the flypaper in water and used it to make the broth. As I walked up the stairs carrying that tray, there was excitement, I admit, at the prospect of a huge event about to occur. With each step I took, I thought I wouldn’t do it, she might not eat it, it might not work. God could still intervene.
But she became ill after the first night and never left her bed again. I continued to make the broth each day until the end.
On the last night, when she was very weak, I heard her cough from the landing. I hurried to her door but did not go inside, just listened to the rasping for a while. Then I ran down the stairs, out the back door and all the way to the bottom of the garden. From the potting shed I took a spade and dug a hole of my own. I dug and dug and dug. The earth was hard, but I didn’t care. It started to rain and I carried on digging a hole right in the middle of the garden. I prayed for someone to help me, vowed that I was sorry for being wicked. I promised that if it didn’t work, I would never do anything like it again. I sat on
