But Joe insisted on taking it down; he pulled from his bedside cabinet an old battered leather address book that Issy remembered sitting next to their rotary-dial green telephone on the hall table for years and years. She watched as he turned the pages. Page after page was full of names, old addresses crossed out, over and over again; numbers starting short – Sheffield 4439; Lancaster 1133 – and becoming longer and more complicated. It was a melancholy document, and her grandfather started to mutter over it too.
‘He’s gone,’ he would say. ‘And them – the both of them. Died within a month of each other. I can’t even remember who this is.’
And he shook his wispy head.
‘Tell me,’ said Issy quickly to cheer him up, ‘tell me about my grandmother again.’
When she was little she had always loved to hear stories about her glamorous granny but it hurt her mother too much, so her grandfather had waited till it was just the two of them.
‘Well,’ started Joe, and his crumpled face relaxed slightly as he took on the familiar tale. ‘Well, I was working at the bakery, and she came in one day for a cream horn.’
He paused for appreciative laughter, which Issy duly supplied. One of the nurses, passing, popped her head in and stayed to listen.
‘And I knew her of course – you knew everyone then. She was the youngest daughter of the farrier, so quite posh, you know. Wouldn’t look at a simple flour boy like me.’
‘Mm.’
‘But I noticed that she’d started coming in quite a lot. Nearly every day in fact, even though people still had a woman then who would do that for you. And it got so that, well, I’d stick a little extra in her bag maybe. A little bit of jam tart that I happened to have spare, or some bath buns.
‘And I began to notice – oh, it was a lovely thing. I mean, in those days, the women were little things of course, not like those big carthorses who stomp up and down the halls all day and night now,’ he added fiercely, as Issy shushed him, and the nurse, who was generously proportioned, shook her head and laughed.
‘But she started to put a little flesh on – just a little bit, in all the right places, you know, up top, round the derrière. And I thought to meself, that’s my cakes that are doing it. She’s fattening herself up for me. And that’s how I knew that she was interested. If she were after some other fella, she’d have been watching her weight.’
He smiled contentedly.
‘So I says to her, “I’ve got my eye on you.” And she looked back, pert as you like, and said, “Well, that’s just as well, isn’t it?” and she sashayed out of that shop like Rita Hayworth. And so that’s when I knew. So when I saw her at the RAFA dance on the Saturday night, all dressed up, and me and my friends are hanging round for some of the latest shop girls, you know, but I saw her with all her smart friends, laughing and standing around with some posh boys, I said to my friends, I’m going to ask her anyway. Normally I would never see her at the dance halls we went to. Oh no. It was a stroke of luck that night. So I went up to her and she said—’
‘“I thought you had white hair”,’ chorused Issy, who had heard the story a hundred times.
‘Then she put out her hand and touched it. I reckon I knew about then.’
Issy had seen photos of her grandparents’ wedding day. He’d been a handsome man, tall, with a thick head of curly hair and a shy smile. Her grandmother was a knockout.
‘And I said, “What’s your name then?” although of course I knew perfectly well. And she said …’
‘Isabel,’ said Issy.
‘Isabel,’ said her grandfather.
Issy played with her skirt like a little girl.
‘But did you just know?’ she asked forcefully. ‘I mean, did you just know straight away? That you were going to fall in love and get married and have children and you were going to love her for ever and everything was going to be all right? Well, you know, until …’
‘We had twenty years together,’ said Joe, patting Issy’s hand. Issy had never known her namesake; she’d died when Issy’s mother was fifteen. ‘They were wonderful, happy years. A lot of people in here, they were married sixty years to someone they couldn’t abide. I know people in here who were relieved when their spouses died. Can you imagine?’
Issy didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to imagine.
‘She was a wonderful woman. She always was cheeky, you know. And confident, whereas I was a bit shy. Apart from that one night. I still don’t know how I found the courage to go up to her. And yes, I knew straight away.’
He chuckled at the memory. ‘Took a while to talk her old dad round though. Oh, he was a stickler. He perked up a bit when I opened the third shop, I remember that much.’
Joe touched Issy’s cheek. ‘She’d have loved you too.’
Issy held his old hand to her face. ‘Thanks, Gramps.’
‘Give me a cake then.’
Issy raised her eyebrows at the nurse; it wasn’t Keavie today. The nurse walked her to the door.
‘Where have all the romantics gone these days?’ the nurse mused. ‘It wouldn’t be like that now. He’d pull her then not ring her the next day. Not your grandfather,’ she hastened to add. ‘I mean, a bloke. In general. I don’t think a man would ever come up to me in a nightclub and think, right, babe, let’s get married and have children. Or if he’s going to, he’d better hurry up.’
Issy smiled in sympathy.
‘Good luck. Would you like another cake?’
‘Go on then.’
Chapter Seventeen
Graeme looked at the post and sighed. He didn’t even want to open it. He’d been through this before; it was a big envelope, stuffed with leaflets and information. With planning, a big envelope was good. A small one was bad, it meant ‘no’. A big envelope meant, ‘Please fill in all these forms for the next stage.’ It meant printed signs to put up on the lamp posts around Pear Tree Court. He didn’t even have to open it. He just had to do it. He sighed.
A blond head poked round the door. It was Marcus Boekhoorn, the Dutch owner of Kalinga Deniki along with about a hundred other companies, who was over on a tour of his UK bases.
‘Our rising star,’ he said, striding into the office. Marcus did everything quickly. He never stopped moving, like a shark. Graeme jumped up immediately.