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mother, Alice, in a sky-blue hat with tears in her eyes, her new husband Gordon beside her as they gathered their camera straps and her billowing skirt, the day he passed out from officers’ training. Gran arrived in a taxi that came all the way from Gatwick Airport. He was grateful she’d come and Alice had smiled thinly when he said, after the ceremony, that he wanted to take his gran for a walk down to the chapel. ‘We’ll go and find your ironing board and put it in the car,’ said Alice, always practical. ‘There’s no point leaving it for someone else to take.’
The chapel appeared to move, but it wasn’t the chapel it was the trees that moved and once the rain came down the trees got darker and Anne pointed it out, the way the trees darkened in the rain. She took his arm and was proud of his uniform as theywalked up the path. ‘God, Granny, the world’s going mad and you’re noticing the trees.’
‘Well, that’s life,’ she said. ‘If you weren’t looking you missed it. That’s all I know.’
They walked the length of the chapel and sat to one side under a ragged flag rescued from a battlefield, set high up on the wall in a gilt frame. They were quiet in the pews and that was easy. After a while Anne put her hand over his hand and gave him advice. ‘Be true,’ she said, ‘if not to yourself, then to something more interesting than yourself.’
‘I chose the Royal Western Fusiliers.’
‘All men are sentimental,’ she said. ‘Women get the reputation, but we just cry at the radio. Men are sentimental about institutions. You know: buildings. The old bricks, the old mottos. Harry was the same.’
‘We’re going to rid the world …’
‘Don’t say it,’ she said.
‘But Gran.’
‘The task is to see.’
‘Not for a soldier. There’s a lot to be done.’
‘We don’t rid the world , dear. We create it.’
‘We make it safe,’ he said. She just nodded at that and the high windows showed their pattern on the pews. Before they went back to join the others she took a present out of her bag. He still had the paperback somewhere, a book entitled Theory of Colours .
‘The colour red doesn’t actually exist,’ she said. ‘It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.’
His attention flickered as he lay in the Vector. Looking at the letter, he heard another thud down in the valley. The summerremembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia. He stretched out further and kicked off his boots, considering whether memory is just one of our little sicknesses. It was the sort of topic he used to discuss with Scullion in their happier days. His grandmother had stood up in the chapel at Sandhurst and tapped his cheek.
‘Send me one of your mugshots,’ she said.
And that’s the one she put up on her wall. He saw it the last time he was home on leave, when he went to see Anne in secret. At the time nobody was talking about dementia or anything like that, but he noticed a change. Her mind was wandering as they spoke, and, by the end of his visit, she seemed miles away. She sat in her favourite chair by the window and said the lights on the sea were very festive. Luke imagined she was joking but then he saw the concentration on her face. She said she could feel the cold coming on but this was the sort of Christmas she had always wanted, just me and her and two glasses of sherry.
It was the beginning of something and he knew it. He stayed the whole evening and they spoke about old times. She reminded him of an exhibition they’d seen together, famous photographs of tenement houses and poor children in the Saltmarket. ‘The exposure wasn’t right,’ she said, ‘and the children are blurred for life.’
‘That’s an odd phrase,’ Luke said.
He had gone his own way, but an interest in ‘seeing things’, as Anne called it, was what had made them close. At her flat in Glasgow, when he was young, she set