Free Undercurrent by Frances Fyfield

protectively. He smiled, automatically. 'I'm sorry. . .' he began.

    She grinned back. 'I should take more water with it, son, if 1 were you,' she said, and the other three people laughed, too, in relief. Henry felt ashamed, as if he had been drunk, falling down in the street like a bum, to be rescued by a woman a good thirty years his senior and, at the moment, twice his strength.

    Perhaps if he had stunk of booze, she would have dropped him back.

    'I should get home and bathe that scratch if I were you,' she was saying authoritatively. 'Where do you live?'

    'Down the shore. The rooming house with the towers. That way.' He jabbed a finger.

    'I'll walk with you.' Not an invitation, a command.
    And that was how Henry Evans came to be walking home, to a place he had never meant to stay, not in the company of a woman who had haunted his dreams, but with an old lady who might have been his mother.

    He found himself burbling to her about Francesca Chisholm. Probably concussed; ridiculously loquacious; something to be ashamed of later. Maybe that was why he had come away, to burble to strangers in a way he could not to friends. What friends? Which of them had ever understood his overwhelming grief at losing his equally shy father? Take a week off, Henry, it'll pass. It did not pass; it was a subdued madness of grief. Go to a counsellor, Henry. No. No. No. If I have to pay somebody to listen and straighten me out, I'd rather die crooked; I don't want to be straightened out. I want to talk to her. Because hers died too . And I didn't know what it could be like.

    'Why's that?' Granny was holding on to his arm. He forgot what it was he was saying. They were walking on the inside pavement, with the sea, choppy but docile, safely on the other side of the road, a presence rather than a threat. If only he could concentrate on where he was. He could see the turrets of the House of Enchantment coming into focus in the distance. The Holy Grail.

    'Because she'd know what I was talking about. You know what you talk about when you're twenty-two, twenty-three? Your damned parents. I criticized mine, but she was proud of hers.
    Loved him like mad. He wouldn't have been so different from the age I am now, I guess, Francesca's father.'

    'So?' They were walking steadily but slowly. Her grip on his arm had become his grip upon hers, so he slowed even further because he did not want to stop talking. It felt like a turned-on faucet, no, he was steeped enough in English literature to know he meant a tap.

    'She could make me talk. And I only know now how much I let her down. Because she knew me and loved me and then when she got the news that her father had died, I really didn't know exactly what to do. Like she was leaving me, you know? And I had a plan, so I just went ahead with it. Left her to go home alone. No idea what she felt. No idea what she was losing, where she was at. Now I do. I guess I just wanted to apologize. Tell her I tried to turn round.'

    'Of course you do.' Granny stopped for breath. He looked at her for the second time. It was a fine old face, he noticed, encouraging him by attentive silence.
    'She'll have kids by now. Grown-up kids, even. She had a way with them, you know?'

    They had reached the door. For the last few steps he had been dragging her along and in the course of his last recitation, she had been actively trying to detach herself gently, turning away with the cautious consideration of a person about to sneeze.
    'Are you all right?' he asked.

    'Me? Oh yes, of course. You're home now. The boys will look after you.' She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. It had been quite a distance they had walked; Henry wanted to ask her in, offer tea and a ride home. But it was not his house and he did not have a car. She might live miles away. His manners were all adrift; he had talked nineteen to the dozen; he did not know if there was something he ought to do, like offer money or something; he could