Gabriella

One summer, at the time of year when the late afternoon sunlight shines on the closed, faded wooden door of my bedroom, I hear doors downstairs opening and closing, shouts of greeting and laughter, and I know that Grandma Anna (as mum calls her – I call her ‘nanny’) has arrived for one of her brief stays.

I have no idea what mum and nanny do during the day when I’m at school, but in the evening they still seem to be full of talk, talk, talk, all through tea: about people they used to know, places they used to know, and relatives whose names sound familiar but whom I have never met. They try to engage me in their conversations too, but I don’t understand how this kind of conversation works, and I find it boring and effortful, and they quickly tire of my monosyllables and patent lack of interest, and I’m free to go back to my comic book.

As their talk flows across the table, though, and as they drink cup after cup of tea, I [soak up/osmote] an impression of intimacy and shared history, and I somehow resent – despite my boredom – the fact that I’m excluded.

In the evening, after a typical summer supper of cold potatoes, pickled beetroot and a slice of ham, I’ll go up the stairs to bed with the dusk light glimmering on the staircase, and nanny will follow me up later – wheezing by the time she gets to the top – to tell me a story, either reading from one of my books, or something from memory.

Her favourite story, it seems to me, and the one that I’ll always associate with the smell of her soap and sweat, and with her cotton-clad bulk beside me on the bed, is the one that was set – or so she insisted – in the village where she had grown up. This insistence (which I didn’t come to doubt until much later) lent the tale an intriguing degree of immediacy and contemporaneity, and I imagined my nanny as an active, concrete presence in the landscape that unfolded in the story, and I sensed her in the background of the story, going about her everyday life, as she told it.

Sometimes I would tune out of the story and just gaze up at the side of her face as she read, her jaw moving, as the evening faded down and she had to shift the book around to catch the light from my bedside lamp.