Free Faustine by Emma Tennant

had Mr Neidpath said last night that there was ‘no dining-room at present’ when there very certainly was – unless of course he meant that the dining-room was out of use, in preparation for a banquet the following night?
    Yet the table settings, silver platters on lacy mats, candelabra , gold and silver vine and ivy intertwined on tall gold treetrunks, each branch with its cluster of candleholders, the pepper-pots like silver chess pieces, as brightly polished as the rest – all in marked contrast to the decrepitude of the rest of the house – also seemed to suggest a presentationrather than a real meal, eagerly awaited. Didn’t the stately homes of England, as Maureen had taken a distinct pleasure in informing me, ‘have enough swag on the dining-tables in the state apartments – where no one ever eats, mind you’, to house and clothe the horrifyingly large numbers of poor and starving on the streets of London? Isn’t this board prepared for a ghostly festivity – a banquet that exists only in the imagination? Without food, wine or guests, the splendour of the table exists for the benefit of tourists only; a feast without substance or time.
     *
    Muriel will come back tonight, that is all Jasmine has said. I must content myself with that, even if it seems highly unlikely that someone like my grandma would be invited to eat off gold plates.
     *
    Your mother and Harry, Jasmine is saying.
    We’re in a makeshift sitting-room in the cottage on the green. It’s all faded chintz and half-sagging armchairs, as if Jasmine has pillaged an old part of the manor not given over to the exhibition of Lisa Crane. For comfort’s sake I’m sitting on the floor, while Jasmine sits in a low chair that looks as if it’s had any number of nursing mothers sitting on it before it was thrown out (by the vain, childless Lisa?) to the general dumping-yard that is the green, with its storeroom- cum-disused racket court. Jasmine has lit a fire, and although it’s midsummer – and we can hear bursts of shouting from cider punks on the downs, and see the sun on the green beech leaves outside – it’s damp in here and needs the blaze of wood, some of it driftwood picked from the sides of the river, Jasmine says, blown down from the Woodford forest in a storm. It’s slow to get going at first, and Jasmine tells me to fan the flames, picking up a newspaper which, I seewith a now-familiar feeling of unease, is dated over twenty years ago, and which adds to the sense of an enchanted place, marooned like its owner, in time.
     *
    – Of course, I was very pleased for Anna. Jasmine has lit a small cigar, and I’m able, as she peers through smoke into the room, to look at her closely for the first time. I wonder how I can ever have thought her to be my grandmother. Muriel had something special about her – I know I’m not the only one to think or to have thought that – and Jasmine Barr must have always been extremely run-of-the-mill. Her eyes are small – ‘piggy’, as Maureen would no doubt label them – and her mouth has a resigned look, rather bitter but trying to appear friendly, I suspect.
    But then, of course, she is old. The lines that gather round eyes and mouth seem to have trapped her – in this look of slightly irritated submission, perhaps – and it’s impossible to imagine what she would have looked like when she was young.
    Jasmine’s hand, with its lumpy blue veins and washerwoman’s fingers – puckered, and looking as if they’ve spent more than half a lifetime in water, whether rinsing clothes or washing crockery and pots and pans – moves jerkily with the cigar, weaving a further web of blue smoke across her face, confusing further the line where chin meets neck, and a puddingy layer of secondary chins go down to a breast the colour of plucked chicken. I know – and I know I’ve never thought about it with any seriousness before in my life – that I never want to grow old.
    – She changed so much,