The Heart Beats in Secret. Katie Munnik
the sheet folded over. If I lay down, I would feel her hands soothing my spine, her hair warm beside me and, in the morning, tangling over me so I’d wake laughing. I would be a child again, too young for this empty house, and I knew I’d never sleep for her whispered stories, her gentle questions, and my own held answers.
In Gran’s room, I told myself the clock would be soothing, the photographs interesting, and the knick-knacks would leave no space for ghosts. The wash of the sea would sound like wind in the trees at the camp or like trucks on the highway in Ottawa. But, inevitably, I slept fitfully. Maybe the smell of her soap never quite let me settle. Maybe I was just overtired. A little after dawn, there were birds in the garden and I started to compile an inventory in my head.
The books. The photographs. The rag rug. All the boxes on the shelves. The letters. The things in the shed. The kitchen things, too. The teacups. The small jars. I might have slept again, thinking through the shelves and counting, but the blue glass cake-stand on the top of the cupboard brought Felicity’s voice close.
‘It was just this colour, wasn’t it, Mum? Do you remember that? The blue moon when I was wee?’
I was sitting with two cushions wedged beneath me as she took it from the shelf. The collar on my new dress was itchy and wrong, but I held Granny’s coffee mill tight between my knees, turning the crank to grind the beans. Granny sat beside me, the pen in her hand paused over a sheet of white paper.
‘Goodness, Felicity. I’m surprised you do. It was a very long time ago. Be careful with that, dear. It was a wedding present.’
‘But the colour was just like this, wasn’t it? Don’t you think?’
‘Hmm. I hadn’t made that connection before. I always wished it were green, which was more fashionable back then. Auntie Jean wouldn’t have known that. She must have purchased it in Jenners, I suppose. Imagined it sitting in pride of place in my matrimonial home. That was the sort of thing the Morningside aunts said.’
‘I don’t remember it at all,’ Felicity said.
‘Well, when you were small, I didn’t have much cause to use it. Too hard to make cakes on the ration. And people didn’t come around then. At least, they didn’t come here.’
‘Well, they will come tomorrow,’ Felicity said.
‘Yes. They will. They will come for your father.’
Felicity placed the cake-stand on the table, tracing her finger around the rim, and I waited for her to say the words to our bedtime poem. The moon is round as round can be. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth has she. But you need a face for the moon and a cake-stand has no face, no chin at all to tickle.
‘How’s that coffee coming along?’
‘Almost done,’ I said. ‘I can still feel a few scratchy bits.’
‘Well, I certainly don’t want any scratchy bits in my cup. Be sure to grind them carefully.’
‘Was the moon really blue, Granny?’
‘That night it was. A long, long time ago now. And the next night, too, though not so clearly perhaps. It was a strange sight. Like a painting of the moon someone had slipped into the sky, trying to fool us all.’
‘Did Granddad see it, too?’
‘Yes, pet. Your granddad saw it. He thought it was very special. In fact, he took his chair, that chair you’re sitting on right now, and placed it in front of the window in the sitting room so that he could watch the moon travel right across the sky. He sat and sat, just watching that beautiful blue moon.’
‘All night? I like to stay up all night.’
‘Well, maybe not all night. Until it was bedtime.’
‘Felicity lets me stay up all night when it’s a full moon and there’s a baby coming hard.’
‘Having a hard time coming, perhaps?’
‘Yeah. That’s coming hard. Sometimes they do. Babies.’
‘Your mum helps a great deal when that happens, doesn’t she?’
‘I do, too. When I stay awake.’
Gran put down her pen and laid her hand flat on the paper. Her skin was tea-brown from afternoons outside, and her veins ran like rivers under thin skin. She wore a thick gold wedding band, and a finer pearl ring set with small diamonds. I thought her hands were beautiful.
‘Was it blue like veins, Granny? Or blue like the sky?’
‘A little like the sky. But more like bluebells. It was a thin, translucent blue, and still very shiny. Perhaps like the blue in the very centre of a candle flame.’
‘Why was it blue? It isn’t blue now.’
‘No, it wasn’t blue for long. Just a couple of nights. They thought it was probably caused by smoke from forest fires drifting over from Canada.’
‘Just like us.’ She smiled when I said that and then held out her hand to Felicity. I kept on with my grinding and she continued. ‘Some people thought it was worse than that, not smoke at all but something to do with nuclear activity, all that meddling about with the atom. There’s one for your protest friends, Felicity. Ban the bomb or the moon will turn blue. They’d run with that one.’
‘I’m sure they would,’ Felicity said. She laughed and shook her head, her hair falling over her shoulders, almost down to her waist. ‘A great slogan. See? You still have a knack for poetry.’
‘Haud yer wheesht,’ Gran said, but she smiled and that was all right and then the sound of the coffee mill changed in my hands, and the crank turned smoothly.
‘Can I open it now?’ I asked. She nodded and told me to be gentle.
‘I will. This is the best part.’ I placed the mill on the table and pulled out the little drawer with its perfect gold knob. Inside, a small mountain of fragrant coffee grounds looked like rich, dark earth, and I imagined I could make out a tiny pathway snaking up the hillside, tiny people walking in line towards the peak. I winked and the hikers looked up into the kitchen sky, my one open eye a shining blue moon above them.
‘Your dad didn’t like any of those explanations,’ Granny said in a voice suddenly tired. ‘He called them all theories. He wanted to believe the magic. Said that he believed we’re entitled to a blue moon every once in a while. I can hear him saying that, can’t you? Just like that. As if saying made it so.’
I was pulling on my jeans when I heard a honk. Under siege again. I opened the curtains but couldn’t see the goose. The day was clear and the sky a swept blue. The house here sat below the level of the road, and the lane to the door ran downhill, but by a trick of the lane’s angle, I could see the sea from the front bedroom window. Out on the water, birds were bright flashes diving white among the waves – gulls of some sort; fish-eaters. Felicity would know. Or Gran. I could only guess. But the goose was unmistakable – a run-of-the-mill, plain-as-my-face Canada goose. There was nothing else it could be. Big and brash and, as if the thought conjured it, there it was again. Another honk blasted from somewhere behind the house. Well, it could have the shed, if that’s what it wanted. I’d spend the morning inside. There were maybe two jobs in hand. Or three. Yes, three. The first was the inventory and that was the biggest. The second was to look for whatever it was that Gran had left me. The third was the difficult one: to decide what to do next.
I’d thought again about the auction house idea but selling everything would be absolute. There’d be no chance to search and sort if I handed the house over to the professionals. And if there was something to find, perhaps I’d better be the one doing the looking.
I took out my notebook and wrote: To keep. To rehome. To let go.
I’d start with the desk. That was sensible. If Gran had left me something, it would likely be there. I opened each drawer carefully but found only tidy stationery supplies. Then an address book and a neat diary, mainly empty.