Getting the Picture by Sarah Salway

Author:Sarah Salway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2015-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

101. letter from martin morris to mo griffiths

Dear Mo,

I went out and planted your cornflower seeds today. There’s a spot around a bench here that I think you would like. I nearly toppled over when I was leaning forward to make sure they were pushed in properly. It’s one of the perils of getting old. You lose your sense of balance and forget how far you can go before you won’t be able to get back again.

Robyn and I are back in our old routine. She’s a good girl, just wants to please her mother. I’m not sure I can teach her much more so she mostly works away on her own, while I look through Nell’s things. Of course, I never sent her your letter, Mo, but I did ask her about you the other day. She didn’t want to tell me at first, but I started talking about those funny poems she wrote about us all at Pilgrim House and she opened up a bit more. ‘She was kind, but quiet,’ Robyn said. ‘Granddad mostly did the talking for her, but I think she always got on with Auntie Angie more than Mum. That’s what Mum says anyway.’

Of course, you preferred Angie because of me, but that doesn’t mean that Nell’s not important to me now. They’re becoming my family as much as yours. And when we get Angie back here, then we’ll all be together. As we should have been.

George didn’t deserve any of you. He and I went to the pub the other day and I asked him about Angie. He didn’t say anything about her, but just started going on about this important mystery job that keeps her in France. ‘So you speak to her often?’ I asked, and his eyes didn’t even start to water. Muttered something about talking to a machine. ‘So when was the last time you saw her?’ I asked, and he said she’d come back briefly for your funeral but went away again straight after.

‘You could see her,’ I said. ‘You could get her back here.’

‘No,’ he said, and he did this straightening his shoulders thing he does. As if someone’s shoving a stick down his back. I could tell it annoyed him, having to admit something in his life wasn’t going the way it should.

‘I could help you,’ I said. ‘All you need to do is to stop telling your girls what to do, and praise them even if you’re not sure they deserve it. Especially then.’

He said he’d think about it, but that he’d always been unsure about praising too much. It builds up false hopes, apparently, and he’d always thought the inside was more important than the outside. He doesn’t let up, does he? Mrs. Oliver says she’s changed her mind, and that he’s a good man, but I wouldn’t know about that. Good men, in my experience, never win in the end.

Talking of which, I am afraid I had to go in and talk to Brenda about Annabel Armstrong.

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