And I did not ask twice — because asking twice in that house cost more than the answer was ever worth, and I had learned that, and adjusted to it, and called the adjustment keeping the peace.
And my grandmother, who I have described as a woman who set a trap, and who was also a person.
Hester Halliday left school at fifteen. She drove a dumper truck at nineteen. She bought her first machine at twenty-six with money from a bank manager who she said only lent it because he wanted her out of his office.
She did her own books until she was eighty because she did not trust anybody else’s arithmetic, including mine, and I am the qualified one.
She was not warm. I want to say that, because the way people talk about her now that she is dead makes her sound like a greetings card.
She was blunt, and she was sometimes unkind about people’s weight, and she did not come to my wedding reception because she said the music was too loud, and she and I did not speak for four months in 2015 over something neither of us could afterwards remember.
And she sat at a solicitor’s desk at eighty-four, with arthritis in both hands, and signed eleven documents to build a wall around her granddaughter — and then went home and said nothing about it for two years, and took his phone calls, and let him drive her to the garden centre, and put sixty-one thousand of her own money on a table to see if he would take it.
