Nan peered at the picture.
‘Is this …’ Lisa stopped. Nan had always refused to talk about him, but maybe this time she would.
She huffed. ‘Yes, that’s your father. Buggered off and left your poor mum holding the baby. Not that he was missed. We did just fine without him.’
Lisa stared curiously at the picture. It was the first time she’d seen her father. She didn’t want to be curious about him. She wanted to be indifferent, the way that he’d been indifferent to her, throughout those years when her six-year-old, eight-year-old, eleven-year-old self secretly believed that one day he would turn up and be her daddy.
‘Loved the ladies, that one. A roaming Roman.’ Nan sniffed.
‘He was from Rome?’
‘Of course he was from Rome. He was Roman.’
‘And he’s much taller than I thought he’d be.’ She deliberately kept her voice cool.
‘Not all jockeys are midgets. He was very skinny, like your mother. A pair of matchsticks they were.’
Lisa’s mother had worked at a local racing stables for the owner, Sir Robert Harding, managing all the admin in the office relating to entering the horses in races, charging the owners stable fees and paying the jockeys, which was where she’d met Vittorio Vettese, one of the stable’s full-time jockeys.
Going up to the stables had been a rare treat that Lisa had loved, although she wasn’t allowed to very often. Sir Robert’s wife had had an accident that had left her in a wheelchair and unable to have children. Lisa’s visits tended to be timed for when Lady Mary was away.
‘That’s where you get those knobbly knees from.’ Nan gave another one of her characteristic disdainful sniffs. She had them down to a fine art, conveying a mix of taciturn disapproval and regal superiority.
Lisa glanced down at her legs with a smile at Nan’s typical bluntness.
‘What’s this, then?’ Lisa pulled out a small jewellery box and Nan’s mouth pursed mollusc-tight, her lips pressed together in a vacuum-like seal.
The black box sat in her palm with all the allure of Pandora’s and gave Lisa a misty sense of premonition. Once opened, there was no going back.
Lisa looked at Nan, her thin, stooped frame radiating tension, but she didn’t say anything.
As her fingers brushed the lid of the box, out of the corner of her eye she saw her grandmother flinch, but it didn’t stop her from prising the lid upwards. It reached that point of no return and popped open.
‘Oh!’
The folds of skin on Nan’s throat quivered.
With the tip of her finger Lisa touched the ring of tiny pearls, interspersed with equally small rubies encircling a pea-sized diamond, well petit pois, perhaps, but still significant.
‘Wow, that’s pretty.’ And valuable, in her humble and not very informed opinion. At the very least, old. The rich navy velvet inside the box had faded around the edges and the elegant script on the inside satin of the lid spoke of a bygone age.
Nan sniffed again. ‘Hmm, belonged to his grandmother, apparently.’
‘What, my father’s?’
‘Yes. He gave it to your mother.’ She spat the words out with the unwillingness of a miser parting with pennies. ‘When they got engaged.’
‘So it was …’ Confused, Lisa tried to gauge her Nan’s expression, but the gimlet eyes were giving nothing away, ‘Mum’s engagement ring.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Oh.’ Betrayal and hurt splintered at the same time, making her vision a touch blurry. She had no idea what to say. Why hadn’t her grandmother given her the ring? Hadn’t her mother wanted her to have it?
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ snapped Nan. ‘She wanted it to go back to Vittorio. Said it was a family heirloom and should be returned. She didn’t feel right keeping it.’
Ah, so that explained Nan’s strange reticence. ‘Why didn’t you do it, then?’
Nan shrugged. ‘Never got round to it.’
Lisa couldn’t hide the spark of surprise or the quick instinctive censure she felt at Nan’s admission.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Missy. It wasn’t like I had time on my hands. I had you to look after, a job and a house to sort out. There was a lot to do. And then, well, life goes on and I forgot all about it.’
Guilt took the edge off Lisa’s disapproval. It can’t have been easy for Nan after the death of her only child suddenly having to become stand-in mother to a young, bereaved girl.
Lisa looked at the ring as her grandmother let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘And who knows where he is now? It’s not like he left a forwarding address.’
‘But we shouldn’t keep it, not … not if Mum wanted it to go back to him.’ Saying the words out loud caused a painful pang. Why hadn’t Mum wanted her to have the ring?
‘Well, you’re more than welcome to try and find the bugger if you want. I’ll leave it up to you, but you might as well have it. No good to me.
‘Now are you going to take me to Morrisons or not?’
Lisa snapped the ring box closed, putting it and the photos back into the envelope. She knew from the set of her Nan’s jaw that the discussion was over. She had no idea what she was going to do with them but she tucked the envelope into her handbag.
‘I haven’t got all day, you know.’
Lisa bit back a smile at the irony of the words. Nan filled her days crocheting squares for blankets for Africa, tending her dahlias, doing the Daily Mirror crossword with almost religious fervour, and gossiping and drinking endless cups of tea with her best friend next door, Laura. A trip to Morrisons inevitably took twice as long as it should because she, oblivious to other shoppers trying to reach around her to pick things off the shelves, insisted on checking every price, tapping away on her calculator, to ensure that she was getting her money’s worth.
‘You can have any of those tablecloths if you want them, otherwise they can go down to the charity shop. You can drop them off for me. And there’s a box of biscuits I found you can have. Left over from one of Sir Robert’s Christmas hampers. God knows why he keeps turning up.’
Lisa suspected that with a house-bound wife, fading rapidly in recent months, he was probably rather lonely. He was always quick to accept a cup of tea on his annual visit.
Nan waved the pack of shortbread biscuits at her. ‘I can’t tell him I give half the stuff away. Too fancy by half.’
Nan didn’t do fancy when it came to food. Meat and two veg had been her and Lisa’s staple diet for ever.
‘Your mother’s been gone these past twenty years. Sir Robert’s been carrying paternalism too far, in my mind.’
Lisa had always thought the hampers were rather generous, although she was equally relieved that Nan didn’t expect either of them to eat some of the weird and wonderful contents.
‘Thanks. Are they in date?’ Lisa peered at the tiny ‘best before’ information. ‘Those chocolates you gave me last time were two years past their date.’
‘Nonsense. That doesn’t mean anything.’
Lisa gave an inward shudder. She regularly sorted through Nan’s fridge on the quiet. Eating here was a bit like playing ‘past-the-sell-by-date Russian roulette’.
She waited as Nan pulled on her outsized mohair coat, which made her look like a baby woolly mammoth and was probably from about the same period in history.
‘Don’t