How I love the smell of the sea, the sound of the seagulls and the sight of boats bobbing in and out of the bay. I run across the front lawn and clamber down a couple of steep steps, swing open the gate and head down a wooded path. ‘Slow down!’ I hear Granny calling, ‘Your laces!’
I laugh. Granny is always fussing.
Then I scream.
‘It was this long!’ I make a wide gap between my hands, ‘and it shot right out at me.’ I stare at the grass. I caught a glimpse of scales, a dark stripe and a beady eye.
‘Yeah, right.’ Lucas crosses his arms. ‘Anyway, even if it was, grass snakes aren’t poisonous.’
‘Do your laces up,’ Granny commands, ‘and then on we go, no more dramas.’ She holds out her hand and this time I take it.
The beach is small and not too crowded today. As Granny arranges the picnic on the rug Grandad won’t sit down. ‘Our revels now are ended…’ he’s saying, his eyes shut, as if on stage.
‘Uh-oh. He’s off again.’ Granny rolls her eyes.
Grandad loves to act. He is a theatre director and ran the theatre in Hampstead, and always has his nose in a script or a play. He ran his first theatre in west London aged twenty-six and remembers that year well because it was the year he met Granny. He told Lucas and me that fate had brought her to a performance ofThe Taming of the Shrew. Granny’s best friend was playing the leading role. ‘You must meet Tim,’ she’d said to her in her dressing room that evening after the performance, ‘he’s so handsome.’
Granny shook her head, saying she didn’t recall the handsome part.
‘There she was, in this long black dress with her striking chestnut hair, hair just like yours, January. I asked her out there and then. You see if I hadn’t, someone else would have beaten me to it. Remember that tip, Lucas.’
‘I don’t like girls,’ he’d said, looking at me.
‘We married six months later.’ Granny had been twenty-one.
I think Grandad will miss his job in London, but he’s not going to retire just yet. He’ll work from home instead, approaching theatre companies with ideas and stories. He also wants the time to write his own play and he might get in touch with some local schools here: ‘To see if they need a crusty old drama teacher.’
I remember Grandad coming home telling us what wonderful creatures actors were, vulnerable and magnificent, all rolled into one. Sometimes Lucas and I would mimic him at the kitchen table, Lucas pretending his maths homework book was a play he’d written. ‘Darling!’ I’d gasp, waving the book in the air. ‘It’s simply marvellous. We must do it!’Or I’d cross my legs dramatically, sigh and hand the book back with a,‘It sounds simply ghastly!’and we’d all laugh, especially Grandad who said it often was like that.
Granny unwraps sandwiches. ‘Lucas, egg or cheese?’
‘Not hungry.’
I sense Lucas blames me for moving; he knows part of the reason is because I was bullied at school, yet he was happy. Why does he have to be torn away from his friends? I notice Granny gesturing to Grandad that Lucas has barely said a word since we arrived. It’s as if there is a black cloud over his head. She looks out to the sea, wrapping her arms closely around her. ‘Even in the winter Mick used to come out in his old blue trunks and swim before breakfast. I wouldn’t like to get in, would you, Lucas?’
‘Wimp,’ Grandad says to her, making me laugh.
‘You can talk. You never swim.’
‘I swim.’
‘Since when? I dare you,’ Granny says, and at last Lucas looks up, though he’s still pretending not to be interested.
‘How much will you pay me?’ Grandad flexes his muscles.
‘If you go in I’ll buy some lobster from the fish man for your supper.’
Grandad whips off his navy jumper (he always wears jumpers, even in the summer), kicks off his shoes and pulls down his trousers and I laugh at his skinny white legs.
As he runs towards the sea in his baggy underpants, Granny and I clap our hands. A few other families stop to point and watch. Next we hear a giant groan and splashing.
‘You have to stay in for at least three minutes!’ Granny calls out.
And we share a secret smile when we hear Lucas laughing as Grandad says, ‘Bugger! It’s freezing! How much longer?’
‘Are we daft old bats?’ I overhear Grandad say. I’m outside the sitting-room door, a glass of milk in one hand. It’s late, but I can’t sleep.
‘We’re not daft and we’re notthatold. I’m still in my fifties.’
