By Sophie Livingston.
Not the usual sort of grandmother. Tough looking: A torn lumberjack shirt tucked into the waistband of thick, blue, cord jeans, polished with age: A black leather belt, no buckle, knotted and the ends twisted into the trouser loops: Skin as worn and polished as the jeans: Hair black, tucked fiercely behind her ears. I wonder now at that hair, but at eight, I took it at face value: Eyes? Unreadable, as I stared, full of fury and grief, at this woman I did not know at all.
“I know,” she said in answer to nothing, for I was determined not to say a word. “It’s bad, but there is no help for it. They’re dead, and there’s nothing we can do, however much we rage.” Then she said nothing. Nothing. For five minutes we stared at each other, my eyes spitting hatred, hers fathomless. Then, after five minutes without a word, she smiled. Not a happy smile, for it was her daughter and husband, my mother and father, who had just died. It was, I think, a smile of defiance. It was her own little third-finger gesture to fate.
“You’re tough, too,” she said. “We’ll get on fine.”
And so I moved to her dark, thatched cottage in Dorset and went to school and survived. Not exactly living together. She did her thing and left me to do mine. Still, every now and then, I helped her hunt for mushrooms in musty-smelling woodlands or sorted dried lavender into bags, sending up clouds of flower dust and scent. Feverfew, calendula, angelica, rue – occasionally she would talk to me about the herbs that filled her garden, for she had been a famous botanist in her time and had travelled the World. Though the herbs were now just a hobby, she would, if I were ill, brew strange teas and make me drink them, however fiercely I protested.
Of course, all the children at school said she was a witch.
I didn’t mind what they said. It was useful. I was small and dark and strange and would have been teased if they had not been a little scared.
It was on my 10th birthday that she first made her cake. I had been sitting quietly in the dark store cupboard mapping out her journeys from the labels on the jars – Sandwort from Malta, Betel Nut from Malaysia, Ammoniacum from Turkey – when suddenly the door flew open, and she said: “Time to come out and bake.”
All the ingredients were lined up on the kitchen table; eggs, sugar, flour and three small jars of what looked like seeds of some sort I did not recognise. As we poured and mixed, we talked. Not to any sort of purpose, really, but I remember speaking a little about school and not being much good at anything. She said the most powerful talents took much longer to grow and that school could only measure the leaves and not the root of things. She said something about it being important to appreciate the essence of things even when you did not understand them. Then she said: “Your grandfather was a very good sort of a man,” which startled me, for it was a big leap, and it had never occurred to me before to wonder about a grandfather. She had always seemed so utterly complete in herself.
“The next bit is secret,” she said, turned away, and silently counted the seeds into her hand before throwing them into the smooth, creamy surface of the cake. “Fifteen minutes at 180 degrees, and there is a present on your bed,” she called, as she walked out into the garden.
There were two presents. Lying on the bed was a large, leather-bound book and lying on the book was a black kitten. The smell of the cake drifted into the room, and I looked at that kitten. It was a strange, rich, warm smell, foreign and comforting, and later I bit into the warm cake and stroked my kitten and sobbed into her black fur.
The book was a diary. Its smooth creamy pages yielded to my ink as easily as the cake to the seeds.
I was 23 years old when I brought Thomas home to meet her. We met while studying English at university. He had just won a place at drama school, and I was working on my Masters. Thomas was tall, dark and funny and he had wooed me, despite my taciturn replies and the come-on looks of much prettier girls. I was so happy, and I wanted to show off my happiness. Thomas, too seemed keen to visit, and my grandmother said we were welcome to come, particularly as she could do with some help harvesting the herbs.
“Wow, this place is uncomfortable,” he said, resting his feet on the kitchen table as I made tea. “There’s a really unpleasant smell coming from somewhere.”
“That’s the countryside,” I teased him, “and possibly the herbs. My grandmother dries them and uses them to make infusions and decoctions.” I laughed at his expression. “Infusions are made like tea by pouring boiling water over crushed herbs. Decoctions are herbs added to cold water, which is then brought to a boil and allowed to evaporate off until you are left with about two-thirds of the liquid. It’s the kind of thing you learn if you stay here for any length of time”
“And where is the old witch?” he said. “I thought she’d be here to meet us?”
“Oh no, she’ll just pop in and out when she feels like it. We can just make ourselves at home,” I answered, thinking of his smart and stuffy mother who had worked so tirelessly to make me feel uncomfortable on my brief visit to her.
“So, have we time for a quick visit to the bedroom then?”
“No,” I said, laughing and picking up Poppy, who had just purred in through the door. “Behave yourself.”
“So, what do you think?” I asked my grandmother later that evening as we cleared the kitchen and made coffee, happiness making me more talkative than usual.
She thought for a moment, and for once, the silence hung uncomfortably around us. Then she laughed, at herself, I think, and said: “It’s up to you to work out what you think yourself, but I believe he’d feel a lot more comfortable with a bit of alcohol in his coffee. Go and offer him something from the blue bottle, third shelf down.”
The following morning Thomas was in a foul mood and complained he’d been kept awake most of the night by scrapping foxes. He said he woke to find two slugs and a frog on his pillow. “Probably nasty things crawled over me all night,” he moaned, picking at the spot that had erupted on his chin. “Mouth feels like something’s died in it. The place is a health hazard.”
He hopped over to the window to avoid putting weight on the blister that had come up on his big toe and moodily watched my grandmother striding back across the fields with fresh mushrooms for breakfast. “Old witch should be burnt at the stake,” he muttered, thinking I couldn’t hear.
Somehow I wasn’t really surprised when I went to visit Thomas in London the following week and found him in bed with the other girl he’d been sleeping with for the last month.
I went home to my grandmother, and we baked another cake. This time we ate it together, and she asked what I was thinking of doing once I finished my Masters.
I said I hadn’t really thought about it, but perhaps I would try to get into publishing, and she said why? I said because I really want to write but don’t dare say so because it is such a stupid thing to say you want to do.
“It’s only stupid if you say it and never do it,” she replied. “What you need is something to write about. There is nothing like travel for clearing the mind, particularly if it is dangerous.”
And somehow, the chance came up to teach in China, and I travelled and wrote about my travels, and one Sunday newspaper commissioned a series of articles, and then another asked me to go to Kashmir, and then a magazine asked me to travel somewhere else, and slowly that became my career.
And always I would write to my grandmother, and every now and then, I would get replies. Poppy, whose age I’d long ago given up trying to calculate, was going strong, she wrote. She herself was going strong. She had a new neighbour, a single man, who reminded her of my grandfather. He would come over to visit her quite often, and she often baked him a cake, she said.
I wondered, of course. Who wouldn’t? Was my grandmother, my tough, solitary grandmother about to find romance again at the age of 82? For, incredibly to me, that was how old she now was. What kind of man was it that had managed to pass whatever terrible test she had devised for him?
Romance had eluded me. Of course, there were men but never anyone who really held my interest. Still, work was good, and an idea for a novel was beginning to take shape. It was possibly not a very good novel but something all the same.
And then that final card. No message. Just a recipe for her cake and a large kiss on the bottom.
She had died, they told me, in her sleep, the night she sent the card. She had left a message asking to be cremated before I got home and for her ashes to be scattered in the woods. The cottage was mine and would be a wonderful place to write a book and bring up a family, she said.
I sat in the kitchen, and I stroked Poppy, but nothing this time could shift the hard lump of pain in my chest. “Why couldn’t you have called me back sooner?” I said to the empty room. “I would have liked to have been here.”
There was silence. I went wearily over to the kitchen cupboard to start making tea, opened the doors and there, lined up on the shelf, were all the ingredients for my grandmother’s cake. Leaning against the flour tin was a card, and on the card, in her dark, flamboyant handwriting, was: “Bake Me”.
“If that’s what you want,” I said, “but I don’t see what good you think it will do now.”
Slowly I measured and mixed, as we had done together so many times before and then finally, I counted out the seeds according to her recipe and scattered them in the cake and watched them sink slowly beneath the surface.
Into the oven, fifteen minutes at 180 degrees, and that same warm, rich smell filled the room and drifted out of the open window and…
Nothing. The pain was still there. Nothing had happened.
Except for the knock on the door.
I opened it, and there was a man. A startled-looking man. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were….I mean…I know she’s dead, but… your hair is black too, and I couldn’t see properly from the road and…. it was the cake.” He finished finally, looking sheepish and a little embarrassed. “Nobody else makes a cake that smells like that.”
I looked at him. About 35, not good looking exactly, but not plain either. Solid-looking with a nice mouth and lines that gave away the fact he smiled too much for his own good. Intelligent grey eyes that knew what it was like to be wounded. This just had to be grandmother’s good man.
“I think you’re supposed to come in,” I said.
Somewhere Else Writers Group 