On Top of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

opportunities.
    We went to the Ritz, to Simpsons of Picadilly, to Fortnum and Mason, to Harrods. On my tenth birthday Rose took me to Claridge’s, for a silver tray stacked high with tiny bite-sized morsels accompanied by bottomless pots of tea, poured with unerring politeness by unobtrusive yet attentive staff. The Art Deco glamour and seductive ambience of Claridge’s seemed to me the height of grown-up sophistication.
    We took tea at the Dorchester for my eleventh birthday, at the Savoy for my twelfth, then went back to Claridge’s to see if it really was our favourite for my thirteenth (it was, so we went there for my fourteenth and fifteenth too).
    It was a treat that I utterly treasured but I treasured having tea at home with Rose too. When my grandfather, Cecil, was alive, Rose and I would wait for him to join us in the sitting room, spying out the upstairs window at his patients as they came and went, guessing what was wrong with them. The slings and crutches were easy to spot but gentlemen who sprang up the front steps two at a time or ladies who skipped under the tree of heaven and across the road afterwards had us guessing for hours.
    ‘It could be leprosy, you know,’ Rose would suggest in her gentle voice. ‘The way she’s hiding inside that great big coat.’
    ‘Or scarlet fever,’ I would counter. I loved the idea of scarlet fever. ‘She might be going blind and deaf like Helen Keller did after she got scarlet fever. Any minute now it will hit her, I expect.’
    At three on the dot, my grandfather would walk in and Rose would pour his tea and arrange a plate of homemade goodies for him, always including a couple of Rich Tea biscuits, the only things he ever actually touched. My mother had been an only child and a wilful one who had distanced herself somewhat so in their later years my grandparents mostly hadjust each other. Although I can barely remember Cecil saying a word, I remember the way he looked at Rose and that told me everything.
    When he died, pre-dating the grandparent trifecta by nearly a decade, my grandmother retained the composure for which I loved her so dearly. She grieved, but delicately. Not for her the weeping and wailing and Buddhist chants, the likes of which were going on at Primrose Hill even though Mum barely spoke to her father while he was alive. No, Rose suffered in silence. Even as a six-year-old I could spot the pain, the loneliness she felt, but her sadness did not overwhelm her or anyone else.
    One thing did surprise me in the wake of Grandad’s departure though. Rose had the most beautiful collection of china, mostly Royal Doulton, about which she was justifiably proud, much of it chosen and bought for her by my grandfather. But from the day of his funeral onward, she mixed the cups and saucers from different sets, quietly insisted on it. Should a cup end up accidentally with its true partner, she would lean across and switch the saucer. I asked her why she did this once and she just smiled and gave a little continental shrug.
    This mismatching habit of hers said a lot about her because it was a cheeky kink in her otherwise silky smooth armour. She was conservative with a twist, Rose, as I suppose was I. In truth it probably kept us from being dead boring. Mum and Dad and Poppy, on the other hand, would rather gouge out their eyes with macramé hooks than admit to a single ounce of conservative. For them it was pretty much all about the twist. Mum and Dad’s twists were quite deliberate, of course, because they were really still rebelling against their upbringing but Poppy’s twist came naturally.
    Not that they are terrible people; heavens, far from it. Theyare delightful people. Truly delightful. Everybody loves them, and I do too, deeply. We are, and always have been in many respects, very close.
    Less close, I suppose, since they all upped stumps and moved to Tannington Hall, a Tudor farmhouse in Suffolk, where Mum and Dad talked about growing organic herb crops