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Chapter 2
‘So, when are you going to help me make my grand debut?’ Nanny G threw the end of her silk scarf over her shoulder with a flourish.
‘You mean on dating apps, Nan?’
‘Well, only if you think I could snag one of the younger folk! Have you seen men my age? Disgusting!’
Helen coughed into her coffee.
‘I’m only teasing. I’ve probably had my share for this lifetime, but if this is the way to meet people these days, perhaps you could give it a shot?’
A knot tightened in Helen’s stomach. Despite her best efforts to muster some willpower, Helen had checked Jonathan’s Instagram more times than she wanted to admit yesterday. She fell into bed wired from gazing at her screen, and her sleep had become fractured by uncomfortable thoughts. She’d woken up at the slightest sound, got up to pee at least four times, and her brain kept flashing the alert, ‘you’re running out of time’, like some horrible countdown clock. She’d woken up too early, too hungry, and eventually gave up on the idea of ever going back to sleep.
Grabbing her blanket, she’d trudged downstairs, made coffee, and slumped into a beanbag in her parent’s sunroom next to Nanny G (who had only recently realised that it was far better for her knees to sit in a proper chair).
‘Not you as well, Nan? I just can’t deal with this anymore. I know you, mum and maybe even Dad, are only bringing it up because you care, but it’s not making me feel any better. Actually, it’s making me feel worse. It’s like by me being single I’m a worry to everyone: like I’m a dress on a sales rail that you can’t quite shift.
‘I know you probably think I’m not trying, but I have. I havereallytried. I honestly have. It’s just not worked out for me and I have to get my head around that. I’m quirky, I get it, there’s perhaps not that many good matches for me, and dating just isn’t the same as it used to be when Mum met Dad, or you met Grandad.
‘Most days, trying to meet someone just feels like a waste of effort. I am tired of going on dates, and being disappointed. In fact, I’m actuallysodone with dating. Rather than focusing on what I don’t have, I need to focus on all the things I do have. I have a career I like, and that haspotential.’ Helen winced at her constant need to stress the fact that she was really, honestly doing something with her life. ‘I have friends. I have my health, and I just don’t think you need to have a man to be happy.’
Helen cringed at just how many clichés she’d strung together in an effort to make her point. The more she tried to express how much she didn’t care about being single, the more she came across as someone who cared about this subject very much. Her face had become mottled and pink: a bit like when she didn’t get chosen to be Carnival Queen, but had to stand on stage and clap the winner.
‘Of course, you don’t! As my mother once told me, far better to be left on the shelf than locked in the wrong cupboard,’ Nanny G paused and looked Helen straight in the eyes, ‘but I do think it’s quite all right to say to yourself “I want this or that” and try to find it!’
‘Well, maybe dating was easier back in your day …’
‘In some ways maybe, but in others certainly not! If you weren’t married by twenty-four you were labelled a spinster and all that “no sex before marriage” malarky, what a terrible idea! Nothing worse than marrying who you thought was a man, only to discover he was a boy who had no idea how to treat a woman. The kind that just sticks it …’
‘Nan!’ Despite herself, Helen couldn’t help but smile. ‘TMI Nan! TMI! Too much …’
‘… information! You know I used to likeRicki Lake! Well, this may surprise you but we had our lives back then too, and of course during the war it was all very exciting …’ Nanny G’s eyes glinted through her glasses, with the flicker of a memory that she had been young once too.
‘I thought you met Grandad after the war?’
‘I did! But I still had a good war. The parties were fantastic! At the time I was living with my sisters as you know. Beautiful women! Golden locks of hair! But no personality. Looks are overrated I think, and of course they fade … Would you say I’m good-looking now, Helen?’
‘You have aged well, Nanny!’ Helen said with sincerity as she studied the spiderweb of lines across her grandmother’s face, her thin hair curled until it stood on end, and her religious dedication to wearing cerise lipstick. It was hard to think that once, she had fallen in love, fought with her sisters over who wore which dress, and danced into the night.
‘Of course, I look just dreadful!’ Nanny G pulled her skin taught around her neck and face. ‘Maybe that’s better?’
Helen laughed and batted Nanny G’s hands down from her face. ‘You’re lovely, so please don’t mention a facelift again?’
‘Well, even you can’t say I’m much to look at now, and the good news is I wasn’t even back then. Too thin! But I always had more personality in my little finger than all my sisters put together, and I was the worst flirt the devil put breath into. So, with me in the room they didn’t get a look in.
‘Not that there was much to get a look at back then. As you can imagine, we were suffering with the selection of local men; with most away at war, we only had the widowers and the farmers left here. Slimmer pickings than you have now, that I can guarantee! Oh, I would have loved one of these dating apps back then. But at least we had the evacuees!’
Helen snorted, ‘Err, weren’t the evacuees children?’
‘Of course, but someone had to bring them all the way down here, and one day on the farm I was minding my own business, and I saw the most handsome man! Initially, I was terribly embarrassed as we were made to wear these ugly brown breeches, quite unfeminine! At the time, as you know, I was working in the anti-vermin squad …’
Helen frowned, puzzled.
‘I haven’t told you that story? Another time maybe, frightful business. Not for the faint-hearted. But we did as we had to do. Anyway! On my way to work one morning I was greeted by two new evacuee children and their lovely older brother who had got them down here. Now … he was a man. Tall, dark, handsome, with those lovely lips! I was quite taken with him!’
‘So did you get your flirt on?’
‘Most certainly! He was working as a bus driver in London so didn’t need to go to the front line, at least not at that stage, but it meant he had to travel back to London the next day, so we only had one night …’
