‘No problem, Mum. If I’m honest, it’s good to have a few days when I’m not just looking after Jerome. Did you get those croissants in?’
‘Of course! I was outside McKinley’s before it had even opened. We’ll have coffee and pastries first, before going up into that hideous attic.’ Harriet gave a fake shudder at what was ahead, and Sally laughed.
‘You know what, I reckon you’ll quite enjoy it once we get started, Mum. It’s quite cathartic, throwing out rubbish.’
Harriet nodded, and poured out the coffee. It wasn’t the rubbish she was worried about finding up there. It was the memories. ‘I’m sure it is. Anyway, sit you down and tell me, how’s my little grandson?’
‘On good form.’ Sally took a mouthful of warm pastry and had to immediately reach for a paper napkin Harriet had piled on the table, to mop up some escaped chocolate from the corner of her mouth. ‘Wow, these are as excellent as ever. He’s at a point in his treatment cycle when he has more energy than usual, enough to do a few days in school. I’m so glad. A bit of normality for him, a chance to play with his friends; and for me, a chance to do something else other than constantly change the DVDs while he lies on the sofa.’
‘Poor little mite. Is the chemotherapy working?’ Six-year-old Jerome had been diagnosed with an acute form of leukaemia a couple of months earlier. It had knocked them all for six. It just seemed so unfair.
‘I’m really, really hoping so, Mum.’
Harriet glanced at her daughter. Sally’s voice had cracked a little and there was a tell-tale glistening in her eyes. Time to change the subject, then. She knew that Sally hated showing how vulnerable she was, and found it hard to talk about Jerome’s illness. Even in the early days when he’d just been diagnosed, she’d struggled to put into words what the consultant had told her. Half the point of today was to give Sally a chance to take her mind off Jerome for a few hours. ‘Shall we get going then, if you’ve finished your coffee? I’ve pulled the loft-ladder down already.’
‘OK. Let’s do this.’ Sally stood up abruptly and rubbed her eyes, which Harriet pretended not to notice as she led the way out of the kitchen and upstairs. The hatch to the loft was above the landing, and they had to duck around the ladder. ‘You go up first, Mum, and be careful.’
‘I’m perfectly all right on the ladder, love,’ Harriet said. She might be seventy but she was fit and active, doing Pilates every week and cycling everywhere. Even so she climbed the ladder with care. It’d be mortifying to trip and fall with Sally here. Her daughter would never forgive her.
She flicked the light switch as she emerged into the attic. It was a large space, boarded over, and with a murky skylight set into one section of the sloped roof. There was very little free floor space – boxes were piled on top of boxes, carrier bags tucked into corners, small pieces of furniture stored haphazardly. John’s set of golf clubs leaned against a chimney breast. Half a dozen framed pictures were balanced against the golf clubs. Boxes of Sally’s and Davina’s old schoolbooks were tucked deep under the eaves. Three boxes of books and bric-a-brac she’d once sorted out to sell at a car boot sale that somehow she’d never got round to doing, were stacked in the middle. A pile of crates that she’d brought from her own mother’s house twenty years ago, meaning to sort them out, had never got further than her own attic and now sat in what had once been intended as a clear walkway through the space.
‘Well. Where shall we start?’ said Sally, as she emerged through the hatch and stood beside Harriet, hands on hips, gazing about her and trying unsuccessfully to hide her astonishment at the amount of stuff there was to deal with. ‘This is, I hate to say it, even more cluttered than I remember.’
‘I know. But I kind of know where things are – there’s sort of a system,’ Harriet said, sounding uncertain even to herself. ‘Over there’s Christmas decorations. All that lot is from your nan’s house. Stuff relating to you and Davina is in that corner. Photos and slides and the projector and whatnot over there.’
‘What’s this pile?’ Sally had her hand on a precariously stacked pile of boxes. The bottom one had ‘old stuff’ helpfully written on the side in marker pen.
‘No idea,’ Harriet had to admit. She had a horrible feeling the ‘old stuff’ box might have remained packed and sealed since she and John moved out of their last house and into this one, nearly forty years ago.
‘Well then, shall we start here?’ Not waiting for an answer, Sally heaved the top box off the pile, opened it and peered inside. ‘Vases. Salt and pepper shakers in the shape of church towers. A picture of the Coliseum.’
‘Ah. Mum’s old bits and pieces. I thought it was just that pile.’ Harriet gestured to boxes that sat on top of an old travelling trunk. ‘But yes, we can start here.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ Sally asked, holding the cruet set. ‘One pile for keep, one to go to charity or car boot sale, one to go to the tip? And only keep what’s valuable or really sentimental?’
Harriet smiled. Sally was so much more efficient than she was. Her daughter’s house was always tidy and clutter-free. ‘That sounds good to me. For a start, you can put that cruet set in the charity pile. I always loathed it. Mum bought them when on holiday in York many years ago.’
‘I quite like them,’ Sally said, ‘but I’m not keeping them.’ She looked around her, found an empty box that had once held
