Lara noticed. A plain, blonde young man in glasses

saddened the room, her grandfather, Leslie Brinkworth,

who died of lung cancer before Juliana was born.

‘So Nana threw herself into loving you children,’

Ellen confided. ‘Took her heart off loneliness.’

After an hour Lara fidgeted, tired of censoring

her natural thoughts or doctoring them

before being allowed a sugar-coated exit.

Peggy’s script had been written some fifty years earlier,

the stage set then, her home a museum of the 1930s,

the century streamed ahead but she filtered its arrival.

‘What’s a penis?’ she asked Lara, after guiltily

relishing a racy romantic novel Juliana bought her.

Ellen laughed when Lara told her. ‘She’s always

called it ‘down below’, you see. Another time

with flickering trepidation and boldness in her eyes,

she ventured quietly, ‘A lesbian. What is it, exactly?’

When Lara crossed the portal of No 31 she stepped

out of her personality as if ditching muddy boots,

slipped into the tiny bone bodice of a nineteenth-century

lady, inhaled, and tightly laced up.

‘YOUR MOTHER should have married Stephen Brown.

He’s a doctor now, has a lovely house in Blackheath.’

History’s secrets seeped out when Lara urged Peggy

to recount the good old days, the ones which old ladies

went on about at bus stops, usually while glaring at her.

Not that Peggy ever discussed the split, unpleasantries

were not allowed to sully the air of genteel discourse.

Filling a tray of empty pastry dishes with meat, Ellen

had once revealed, ‘Nana sees Auntie Dora often

but she cut me off when I married your father.’

Great Aunt Dora, Lara despised her, and that Jacob

from Germany – how could he be so prejudiced?

Deftly pulling up weeds around the rose bushes, she once

mentioned a burgeoning desire to visit Nigeria.

Peggy twitched, ‘What do you want to go there for?

You’ll come back looking like a nigger-man, dear.’

Ellen scolded her mother when Lara reported back.

‘What have I said wrong?’ Peggy protested, knitting,

dropping a stitch, ‘She will, if she’s not careful.’

‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Ellen reassured Lara, ‘It’s her age’.

‘Not all old people are like that,’ said Lara.

‘Age has nothing to do with it.’

SUNDAY’S WINTER powdered suburbia with snow,

through the drifts Lara and Peggy trekked west to Mass

in the flurry of chaotic flakes in soundless streets,

houses were iced Christmas cakes lit by fairy-lights.

The taller linked the elder to anchor her limping gait,

in the snow – one penny imprint of a walking stick.

Snow rested on Lara’s hair like soap powder.

Liquid, suspended under her nostrils, were dew drops.

She felt loved in this struggling act of shared walking,

though she saw them as she knew others did,

both cameraman and subject of this unusual picture,

the experience was not always an astral one.

They once asked if she was Nana’s nurse. Bastards.

When people passed she tensed, anticipating hostility.