“It’s all right, dear. I’m crying because I remember. I remember the church bells the most. They’d been silent during the war, you see.” Her eyes flickered shut and her head tilted to one side: listening, remembering. She looked wistfully out of the window then. “You never forget a feeling like I had that day. It becomes part of you. Like these bloody wrinkles and liver spots. Happiness like that leaves its mark forever.”
As Nana spoke, it struck Olivia more than ever how little she knew about her family’s past. Like a sea mist warmed beneath the sun, she’d watched Nana Martha slowly fade away in recent years, but only now, as she looked at the frail old lady beside her, did she realize that she didn’t know her at all. Yes, she knew a gentle-hearted woman called Nana, but she didn’t know Martha Kavanagh, the wife and mother, or the Martha Hogan she’d been before she met Pappy. When she looked into Nana’s eyes, Olivia didn’t know what made her laugh or what frightened her. She didn’t know her favorite color or her favorite song. She didn’t know what she and Pappy had danced to on their wedding day. She didn’t even know where they were married, or who’d made Nana’s dress. She felt that part of her own story would always be missing without these precious fragments of the past.
“What year were you married, Nana?”
Nana told Olivia to take the photo from the page. Olivia removed it from the plastic slot and passed it to her. She turned it over and asked Olivia to read what it said on the back.
“‘Cormac and Martha. St. Michael and All Angels Church, Cottingley. 16 March 1946.’ That wasn’t long after the war, was it?”
“He’d been in France. Asked me to marry him before he’d even dropped his kit bag on the cottage floor.”
“The cottage in Yorkshire?”
“Yes. We met in a hospital in Leeds. I was nursing there. He was sent back to recover from a shell wound. I thought him funny with his Irish accent. When he got better he went back to fight, but we wrote as often as we could. When the war ended, he came to find me.”
Olivia rested her head on Nana’s shoulder as they continued to look through the photographs together. Only briefly did her thoughts jump to her own wedding day. She’d always imagined an autumn wedding: russet leaves and black velvets and dancing to Fred Astaire. The wedding she would be part of in a matter of weeks had none of that. She could hardly remember how all those simple ideas had become so lost.
“How did you know Pappy was the one, Nana?”
Nana laughed and coughed. Olivia passed her a glass of water and rubbed her back until she recovered. “I didn’t! We fell in love through our letters, through our words. We’ve had our problems over the years, but we made it work.”
“What sort of problems?” Olivia was aware she was being insensitive in asking, but something about her own relationship problems compelled her to hear about other people’s too.
Nana shifted in her chair and asked Olivia to fetch her a blanket. She didn’t answer the question.
They carried on turning the pages of the album until they came across a photograph of Pappy outside Something Old, his smile as broad as the flourish on the sign above his head.
“He loved that shop, loved those books like his own children.”
Olivia closed the book and took it back to the wardrobe. “He doted on Mammy, didn’t he? She loved him very much.” Nana looked at Olivia through narrowed, expressionless eyes. Olivia knew that look. Nana didn’t know whom she was talking about. “Katherine. Kitty. Your daughter? My mam?”
Questions without answers. She didn’t remember.
Reaching for her walking stick, Nana pulled herself up out of the chair. “I want to go to the bookshop.”
Olivia was taken aback. Nana usually complained whenever Olivia suggested they go out somewhere for the day. She always said it was too far. Everywhere was too far these days. Too much of an ordeal.
“We’ll go one day soon, Nana. When you’re feeling up to it.”
Nana pushed Olivia’s hand away with a determined shove as she rummaged in the wardrobe for her coat. “I want to go today. Where’s my coat? Have you seen my blue coat?”
She hadn’t worn her blue coat for decades. Olivia remembered seeing it in the wardrobe, musty with damp. She’d put it in a bag for the charity shop.
Like a pan of water coming to the boil, Olivia could feel her grandmother’s frustration rising as she rifled through the wardrobe.
“Where the bloody hell is it?” Nana’s arms physically shook against her sides.
“Let’s have a cup of tea, Nana, and I’ll find it for you. Listen. I can hear Barbara coming with the trolley.”
It was too much. Nana’s frustration boiled over. She turned to Olivia. “I don’t want tea. I want to go to the bookshop, now, silly girl.”
Olivia hated it when Nana got angry. It frightened and upset her. She wanted to say it wasn’t her fault. She wanted to shout back and say she wasn’t a silly girl. She wanted to say, “I’m your granddaughter, and I love you and I’m doing my best.” But she said nothing. With tears smarting in her eyes, she fetched the nurse, who spoke calmly to Nana and assured her she would go to the bookshop soon and why didn’t she sit down and have a rest for a minute.
Like a child after a bad dream, Nana was exhausted and confused by her outburst. With the nurse comforting her, she fell asleep in minutes.
The nurse assured Olivia she would be okay. “She won’t remember anything about it when she wakes up. If you want to take her out anytime, though, love, let us know and we’ll have her ready.”
Olivia said thank you, she would. She kissed Nana’s cheek and told her she loved her before reluctantly picking up her bag and leaving the nurses to it. She loathed herself for being afraid; loathed this awful disease for stealing Nana away from her so cruelly.
That night in the flat, Olivia dreamed that she was walking in a woodland glade lit by a bright moon that hung low in the sky. Her footsteps were soft upon the velvet moss beneath her feet as angelic voices whispered like a hundred distant bells, “Fairies, fairies, ah, come soon.” Flashes of green, blue, and purple whirled around her, leading her to a cottage with a white door, where a child with hair of flame red held a bunch of wildflowers in her hands. She offered them to Olivia, smiling. “For Mammy,” she said. “For my Mammy. Cinquefoil and harebell, for love.”
OLIVIA WOKE THE next morning, groggy, as if she’d hardly slept at all. Stepping out of bed, she paused. On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.