The Illuminations Read Free Page B

It was part of the illness. She could only do what she could do. Anne had her own wee things to contend with and didn’t really need the post office.
Alice lived up the coast and Maureen knew it had been a risk to phone her that morning. But she thought Alice might like to drive down and take over after lunch. It was a stressful situation because Anne undervalued her daughter, as she heard said ontelevision, and the daughter had self-esteem issues and the family was dysfunctional. But two wrongs don’t make a right and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Maureen sometimes heard herself sounding like a wise person on a talk show and it made her feel modern that she understood people’s problems. ‘I think it’s healing the way you always tried to keep in step with your grandson,’ she said.
‘In step?’
‘Yes, with Luke. Before he went into the army.’
‘Books,’ Anne said. ‘He studied literature and it was lovely stuff.’
‘You read all those books?’
‘Oh, yes. We used to buy them at Dillon’s. And we’d discuss them when he came over to visit me.’
‘It’s a surprise when a boy like that chooses the army.’
‘I thought he’d be a somethingologist,’ Anne said, ‘but men don’t always get to be what they want to be.’
On their way down Sidney Street, Maureen told Anne it would do her good to see her daughter. ‘She just wants to put me in a home,’ Anne said. ‘She just wants to get the keys to the flat.’
‘That’s not true, Anne. They wouldn’t give her the keys. Our place isn’t for young people.’
Maureen thought it was a true saying: you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Anne looped her arm through hers and they stopped in at the newsagent so that Maureen could buy some mints. The magazine rack was full of faces that Maureen knew off the telly and Anne stared past the men’s magazines to a shelf stacked to the ceiling with Airfix boxes.
The Candy Bar wasn’t busy. Maureen was all smiles, leading Anne by the arm through a group of empty tables. ‘We’re waitingfor a part in Charlie’s Angels ,’ she said to the waitress, ‘so mind and keep the strawberry tarts away from us today. We’re watching the figure.’ Maureen peeled off her friend’s coat and put the scarf inside the sleeve. She sniffed the scarf before tucking it in, liking the perfume, the essence of Anne. Then she went round to her own side and placed her purse on the table.
‘This is my treat. Ian left me a wee tenner this morning so we’ll let him buy us our tea.’
Anne was looking at the light coming off the teaspoons. It was a familiar process for her, looking at objects and the way the light picked them out and changed them. Her mind fell back to when she first met him. He was giving a talk about documentary photography and capturing life on the street. He spoke at the Masons’ Hall not far from the tower and his cheeks were flushed as he stood on the stage.
You were a lovely speaker. You had the audience in the palm of your hand for the best part of two hours.
They went for a drink at the Washington Arms that night and he began to tell her a story about himself, a story that never ended. Even after he died the story continued and became something she added to herself. She liked to think of him walking on the promenade with his back to where he was going, looking at her, talking with his hands.
A man called Cotton worked at the Air Ministry. That’s right. He got planes off the ground, Spitfires and Blenheims. Your eyes burned naming them. You were never a bad man, Harry. Not really. The planes did photographic intelligence at a height of 30,000 feet. They were the first, the first of their kind you said and I’m saying watch where you’re going. You nearly tripped. It seems there was fog and snow over Germany …
‘Anne, that’s the salt, hen. Not the sugar.’ Maureen was smiling as if to say that it didn’t matter. Anne had ripped the salt sachet instead of the