The Venice Sketchbook(15)

She had to wait patiently to see when flights would resume. They’d all be overbooked, of course. All those people trapped in New York, waiting to get out. Finally she made contact again with Josh. “When do you think you can fly? Teddy’s missing school.”

“I was going to call you,” Josh said. He sounded a little hesitant. “Teddy’s been having nightmares. We took him to Desiree’s shrink. He says the child has a real terror of planes right now and shouldn’t fly for a while. So we’ll find a school for him here.”

“No!” Caroline surprised herself with the force of her word. “No. If he’s having nightmares and he’s terrified, he needs to be with his mother. No wonder he’s upset, being amongst strange people after a tragedy like that. I want him home with me, Josh. I’ll come and get him if necessary.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said, Caroline?” His voice was surprisingly calm. “The doctor says he should not fly for a while. It could do him severe psychological damage. And we’re not strange people. We are his new family. He already thinks of Autumn as his sister. They share a room. They are very close. And he’s got me. I’m his dad. I’m going to do what’s best for him, and that means staying here at the moment.”

At that moment, Caroline felt her stomach drop. She realized Josh was going to keep stalling. Perhaps he was never going to return Teddy. If she wanted her son, she was going to have to fight for him. She was going to have to get a lawyer.

She went through the motions of work, eat and sleep. Someone at work recommended a family solicitor. She met with him, and he told her it was reasonable that the child shouldn’t fly at the moment. If her husband decided to apply for sole custody, that would be the time to do something legally. Since he hadn’t made any such threat, all she could do was wait and see. She came out a hundred pounds poorer for the consultation and very angry. As she lay alone in her bed at night, staring at water stains on the ceiling, she fantasized about flying to New York, grabbing Teddy and rushing home with him. But then she’d be the bad one, the irresponsible one, and Josh would have a perfect reason to demand sole custody of his son.

September turned into October, and then Caroline received a telephone call from her grandmother. “I’m afraid I have sad news, darling. Aunt Lettie has had a stroke.”

“A bad one? Is she in hospital?” Caroline asked.

“No, she’s at home. The doctor came to the house.”

“She should be in hospital. If you catch a stroke early enough . . .” Anger exploded from Caroline.

“Sweetheart, she didn’t want extraordinary measures. She must have foreseen this, because she said to me, only a couple of days ago, ‘If anything happens to me, no hospitals, no tubes. I’ve lived long enough. I don’t need to be kept alive like a vegetable.’”

“So it’s bad?” Caroline asked.

“The doctor says she doesn’t have long, and she seems quite comfortable,” Granny said. “She was quite lucid when it happened. She asked for you. Several times.”

“I’ll come right down,” Caroline said.

She put down the phone and found that she was crying. Everything else that had happened—Josh leaving, Teddy going, the Twin Towers falling—had made her angry but not made her cry. This last straw brought her to her knees. She sat on her bed and wept. Aunt Lettie was over ninety, she knew. She should be glad her great-aunt was dying naturally and in her own bed. But when Caroline was growing up, it was Great-Aunt Lettie who listened when she complained of her absent mother, bullying girls at school or unfair teachers, and gave calm, measured advice and reassurance. “People only bully because they feel inadequate, Caroline. You should pity them. And that teacher—how old is she? An old spinster like me. Probably she resents seeing you bright young people with your lives full of hope.”

“Why are you always so nice?” Caroline remembered asking her. “So kind. So forgiving?”

“I wasn’t always,” her great-aunt replied. “Experience makes one come to terms with life, to be at one with the mind and the heart. And most people are suffering in some way.”

“Oh, Aunt Lettie,” Caroline whispered. “What will I do without you?”

On the train down from London, it came to her that her grandmother would be hurting, too. The two old women had lived together for years. Granny would now be all alone, too, if Caroline didn’t move in with her. Caroline had asked for a few days’ compassionate leave. She’d take it from there.

The weather matched her mood as she changed from a train to a bus in the town of Godalming, and then walked to her grandmother’s house in the village of Witley. The sky was leaden with the promise of rain. A cold wind swirled up piles of leaves, and the first drops spattered on to her. Her grandmother lived in a pleasant but unpretentious bungalow at the edge of the village. It had a large garden dotted with fruit trees and a view of the twelfth-century grey stone church. Granny was passionate about her garden. Even though she was now in her eighties, she could often be found kneeling at a flower bed, weeding or deadheading. Of course, these days she had a man who came in once a week to mow, prune and dig, but she supervised him like a hawk.

The garden looked rather bleak and bare as Caroline pushed open the front gate and walked up the path between rose beds that were now just stumps of twig, having been pruned back for the winter. She took a deep breath before she knocked. She didn’t want to cry in front of Granny. When her grandmother opened the door, she looked as if she might have been crying, too.