Google: Trish 1998–2015
The next time George and Sophie came home from the moon they took the twins back permanently. The twins were eleven, ready to start secondary school. She had hoped they might go to the excellent local schools in Lancaster, but George had heard from Cathy and didn’t regard her as really capable of looking after the twins any more. “I’ve found schools for them in Cambridge where they can go in as day pupils when we’re home and board when we’re not. They can come here, or to Helen’s, for holidays.” George was being brisk with her and the children. He was probably right that she wasn’t capable. “I know it’s been a lot to ask of you, Mum,” meant that. She was being punished for forgetting about Jamie by losing the twins. Or maybe she was imagining it, maybe this would have happened anyway.
“They will come to see me?” she asked, hearing herself sounding pathetic and cutting herself off.
“Of course, Mum, we’ll all come to see you.”
“How will you manage, Gran?” Rhodri asked as his father was taking an armload of bags to the car.
“I’ve got the Mac all set up,” she said. “And Bethany will be here. Your dad’s right, you shouldn’t really be helping me.”
“We liked it,” Rhodri said.
With that she had to be content. She wrote it down in the diary program on the Mac so she could remember it, or at least look at it and see it again. She emailed Rhodri and Bronwen, and they emailed her—at first frequently and then less often as they settled into their new schools and got used to living with their parents again.
The Mac and Bethany mostly kept her on track, but she got caught out now and then. She’d be told something, write it down, and forget to transfer it to the computer. Then she’d forget all about it. Helen was used to her, but Cathy and George only visited occasionally and were shocked.
They might have let her carry on living at home if it hadn’t been for the university expansion. The government were funding extra places at all universities, and Lancaster was taking advantage of that to build new libraries and lecture theaters and halls. Bethany was planning officer of the new Green-dominated council, and she told Trish all about it, sometimes several times. The problem was that the university didn’t have enough space in the halls of residence for all the new students. They hadn’t even had enough room for all the students they’d had before. Students had always lived in town, and in Morecambe, and in the countryside around. But now there was a new influx, and housing was in demand. House prices rocketed. Trish’s house, which they had bought in 1968, had been fully paid off since 1988. It had always been too big for most people, but it was now worth a fortune to the developers.
“Have you thought of moving somewhere smaller, Mum?” Helen asked.
“Where would I put my teapots?” Trish asked, looking at her mother’s china on the open shelves.
Cathy came up and tried. “This house has appreciated a great deal. You could move somewhere small and comfortable and free up a great deal of capital.”
“Anyone would know you were a banker,” Trish said.
“So how about it?”
“I like this house.”
Eventually the three children ganged up on her. They all sat around the kitchen table and proposed it again. “But where will Bethany go?” she protested.
“That’s Bethany’s problem,” Cathy said.
“Bethany is part of this family too. She’s been looking after me all this time. She helped bring up Tamsin and the twins.”
“We’re very grateful to Bethany,” George said. “But she’s not part of this family, and if she’s hoping to gain any financial benefit beyond all the years she’s been living here rent-free—”
“That’s not what I meant at all,” Trish said. “You twist me around.”
“You sold Gran’s house in Twickenham without even really asking her,” Helen said. “I remember when we went down there.”
“I do too,” Trish said. She looked at Helen. When had she stopped being beautiful? It wasn’t anything she did. She was just effortlessly lovely, all the time, until one day she just wasn’t. She was the same person with the same face, but no longer a beauty. It was 2004, and Helen, her oldest surviving child, was fifty.
“You should be in a home,” Cathy said.
She managed to put them off until the next weekend, and talked to Bethany. “They want to sell this house and throw you out. Is it too late for me to give it to you?”
Bethany laughed bitterly. “They’d easily find doctors to say you weren’t in your right mind if you did. In fact, it would be quite hard to find anyone to say you were!”
“They don’t need the money. Cathy’s rich, and George is very well paid, and Helen is all right.”
“Helen could do with the money. You’ve forgotten that Don’s divorcing her.” Bethany poured Trish more tea. “Remember? He found out she was having an affair with that customer in Quernmore?”