Another World by Pat Barker Page B

that thing they’ve got him in?’
    ‘What thing?’
    ‘You know, the white thing.’
    ‘The smock?’
    ‘Yes. Do they put you in that if they know you’re not going to get better?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so. It just makes bathing them easier. They don’t have to pull them about so much.’
    ‘Only I thought it might be easier for them to lay you out.’
    She knows it’s cancer, but she belongs to a generation that can hardly bring itself to say the word. ‘The big C’ was as far as he’d ever heard her go to naming it, and that was explaining the death of a woman at the bottom of the street, a woman she hardly knew. How many of the reassuring things she says to Grandad does she believe herself, and does he believe them? Is anybody saying what they think? When he next looks at her she’s fallen asleep, hanging from the seat belt like a toddler from its harness. He concentrates on braking smoothly, and manages in this way to safeguard her sleep until they bump once, twice, over the sleeping policemen in the street outside her house. She blinks like an old tortoise, sits up straight, clasps her handbag with both hands, runs her tongue round her front teeth, pretends she has never not been awake.
    ‘Do the sleeping policemen work?’ he asks, as she fumbles her front-door key in the lock.
    ‘Do they heck as like. You’d think it was the dodgems round here.’
    Inside, it’s a matter of moments only to light the gas fire and put the kettle on. She comes back, unwrapping her scarf, to find him sitting in one of the armchairs staring at the regular blue buds of flame. ‘I thought we’d just have a sandwich,’ she says. ‘If that’s all right?’
    ‘Fine.’
    While she’s making them, he looks round the room at the photographs. Nick’s mother and Auntie Frieda as children, himself in his graduation gown, Miranda at various stages of development from newborn baby onwards. The photographs of Miranda stop abruptly at the time of the divorce. He must bring her some more up-to-date ones, he thinks, but then he’s hurt because several of the early photographs are of Barbara and Miranda together, but there are none of Fran and Jasper. When he first asked if he could bring Fran to see her, Frieda had said, ‘Leave it a bit, Nick. You know I’m mebbe a bit old-fashioned.’ It had spread to include even Jasper. She always asks after him, but it’s never ‘How’s my bairn?’ as it used to be with Miranda.
    ‘Is there anything you need doing while I’m here?’ he says, hovering in the kitchen door while she slaps butter on to bread.
    ‘You could change the bulb on the landing if you wouldn’t mind.’
    Of course he doesn’t mind. He’s relieved to be doing something that only he can do. He gets the stepladder, says, as Grandad always said at such moments, in his younger days, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. He puts the stepladder back in the bedroom and goes down to eat.
    When she comes in with the sandwiches on a tray they talk about Geordie and his illness, Frieda reproaching herself for not having spotted the signs sooner. She seems to think if only she’d got him to the doctor more quickly he might have lived for ever. Once or twice Nick notices slips of the tongue: she talks about ‘your dad’ when she means her dad. Tiredness – she must be absolutely knackered. ‘Grandad,’ he corrects, gently, but then thinks, Why bother? She’s only unconsciously recognizing a truth.
    When his father died, Nick stood by the grave, eyes stinging, not from grief, but from a kind of despair at his failure to feel anything. His deepest reaction had been one of relief: that he wouldn’t have to try to talk to him any more. Cars and cricket, cricket and cars. They’d sit on either side of the fire during Nick’s disgracefully rare visits, like a couple of bookends with no book worth reading in the middle.
    Once the sandwiches have been eaten and the tray taken away, he asks, ‘How bad are