Wish You Were Here Read Online Free Page B

‘Granny’s …’ I crossed the threshold to the smell of fresh paint and the sound of James spluttering within. My heart lurched as I walked down the hall. I collided with him as he emerged from the sitting room with a face like thunder, pushing past me, hissing, ‘
Your bloody mother!
’ before storming upstairs to his office at the top of the house. The attic door slammed hard.
    ‘Mum …?’
    I rounded the corner in gypsy girl’s wake to see my mother on her hands and knees, paintbrush in hand, at the far end of the knocked-through sitting room, newspaper thankfully covering the carpet. She was just putting the finishing touches to a heavy sideboard which sat opposite the dining table and which, historically, had been dark oak but was now a streaky shade of pale grey.
    She sat back happily on her heels, popped the brush in some turps in a cup and beamed with pleasure. Then she
pushed her blonde hair from her eyes, stretched out her slim brown arms and gave me some jazz hands. ‘Ta-daa!’ My mother is far more beautiful than I will ever be and, when animated, as she was now, could still dazzle.
    ‘Good
God
…’ I gaped. But not at her beauty.
    ‘Surprise! Don’t you love it, darling? You know how you said you hated all that heavy brown furniture? Well, look! The girls and I have transformed it! Given it all a makeover.’
    ‘All …?’
    ‘
Regard!
’
    She waved an armful of jangling bracelets to indicate yonder, through the kitchen to the garden, where, sure enough, under cover from the rain on the veranda stood a large chest of drawers, a tallboy, a knee-hole desk, the hall table, all now distressed – in every sense of the word – to a stripy pale grey, which, as far as the naked eye could tell, had been achieved simply by dragging a paintbrush full of white paint across them.
    ‘The girls …’ I faltered, staring.
    ‘Oh yes, they helped. They were marvellous. Well, Amelia did. It’s fab, isn’t it?’
    My mother still relied heavily on her sixties vocabulary.
    ‘But it’s James’s stuff, Mum. His family’s. Who knows how much it’s worth?’
    ‘Oh, very little. I had the local auction house come and look at it first and they said it would fetch barely anything. Said people are chopping it up for firewood these days and they simply can’t shift it in the sales. This has transformed it!’
    It certainly had. And, in a way, it was quite nice, and I
did hate the heavy brown oak which seemed to loom oppressively and almost consume me sometimes, particularly on gloomy winter afternoons, but …
    ‘But you can’t just barge in and do it!’ I stormed. ‘It’s got sentimental value, for James at least!’
    ‘I didn’t barge in, darling. I told you, I did it as a present. Like a surprise party. I’ve been planning it for ages. Didn’t for one moment think you’d prefer it as it was.’
    Her china-blue eyes widened in alarm and she became childlike in her consternation and confusion. She got up from the floor.
    ‘You are
so
mean, Mum.’ Amelia rounded on me furiously. ‘Granny’s spent ages doing this!’
    ‘And did Tara help?’
    ‘Well, she put the paper down and washed the brushes, yes!’
    Damage limitation, clearly, on the part of my younger child. I was aware of Tara moving silently around in the kitchen, out of sight, keeping a low profile. I was pretty sure she’d have tried to put the brakes on these two. She appeared in the archway now: petite, pretty and blonde like her grandmother, barefoot in jeans and a white T-shirt. She came across and we hugged silently. Amelia glared at her, daring her to show her true colours.
    ‘It
was
a bit depressing, Mum, all that dark wood,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, but it was your father’s dark wood!’
    ‘I know.’
    It was all in those two little words.
I know … but what could I do?
Against the steamroller of momentum that was my mother and elder daughter, what on earth was my
level-headed younger child to do except suggest they keep the