Blue Bedroom and Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher

little thing she is,” her mother’s friends would observe, thinking that Laurie was not listening. “So self-contained. Doesn’t she ever want another child to play with?” But Laurie did not need other children, because she had Grandfa.
    Grandfa had been in the Navy all his life. After his retirement and the death of his wife, more than twenty years ago, he had bought a piece of land off his son, built himself a little house, and moved to Cornwall, leaving Portsmouth behind forever. It was a wooden house, a cedar house with a shingle roof and a wide verandah that jutted out over the old sea wall. At high tide the water lapped against the stones and reminded Grandfa of his days at sea. He had a telescope fixed to his verandah rail and this afforded him much pleasure. There were no boats to watch, because although there were a few ramshackle crabbers pulled up on the shingle below his house, nothing nowadays came in or out of the estuary except the sea, but he enjoyed watching the birds and counting the cars on the causeway that ran along the far side of the sands. In winter they were few and far between, but once the summer tourists started, they crowded bumper to bumper, the sun flashing on their windscreens and the endless drone of traffic steady as a distant hum of bees.
    He had died on his verandah, on a warm evening, with his ritual pink gin in his hand and his gramophone playing in the room behind him. He was very fond of his gramophone. He never owned a television, but he had a great love of music. Night of love, O lovely night, O, Night that’s all divine. The Barcarolle. He had been playing “The Barcarolle” when he died, because they had found it still on the gramophone, the finished disc still spinning, the needle grinding in the final groove.
    He had an old upright piano, too, which he played with gusto but not a great deal of finesse. When Laurie was small he taught her songs and they had sung them together, with Grandfa providing the accompaniment. Mostly sturdy sea shanties with no-nonsense tunes. “Whisky Johnny” and “Rio Grande” and “Shenandoah.” But his favourite was “Spanish Ladies”:
    Goodbye and farewell to you, fair Spanish ladies,
    Goodbye and farewell to you, ladies of Spain,
    For we have received orders for to sail for old England …
    He would play it in slow march time, with great crashing chords, and Laurie would have to hold the long notes and she frequently ran out of breath.
    â€œWonderful slow march,” Grandfa would say, remembering Colours at Whale Island, with the Royal Marine band playing “Spanish Ladies” while the Captain inspected the Guard, and the White Ensign fluttered high in the morning sky.
    His stories were legion, of Hong Kong and Simonstown and Malta. He had fought the war in the Mediterranean and then moved to the Far East and Ceylon. He had survived bombings and sinkings and shattered ships, only to bob up again, joking, indestructible, surviving to become one of the best loved flag officers in the Service.
    Indestructible. But he wasn’t indestructible. No person was indestructible. At the end of it all he had keeled over in his chair, listening to “The Barcarolle,” and the glass of pink gin had fallen to the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces. There was no saying how long he might have sat there, with nobody knowing that he had gone, but one of the local fishermen, working on his boat, had looked up and seen him and realised something was wrong, and had walked up to the house, his cap in his hand, to break the news.
    Goodbye and farewell to you, fair Spanish ladies …
    At the funeral service they had sung “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and then “Eternal Father Strong to Save.” And Laurie had looked at the simple coffin draped in the White Ensign, and had broken into noisy, unstoppable tears and had to be discreetly ushered out of some side door by