"Isn't this lovely?"

The blood trickled down from my knee, in a dark red line, towards the top of my sock. It was about 1987, so it was a high lacey sock, pulled up nearly to the top of my shin. Instead of pushing the sock down to safety, I stared as the blood ran towards the white cotton. Then I looked up to find you. You were blurred through my tears, sitting on a bench on the other side of the playground, very far away beyond the roundabout and the seesaw. I bravely made my way towards you.

“What is it, dear?” you said as I approached.

My sister was sitting next to you in a pushchair, so I can’t have been any older than four, but I remember your beige jacket, and matching beige handbag. You would have been wearing beige tights too, you always did. You whipped out an embroidered handkerchief as soon as you saw my knee.

“Here, hold that on there. I will get my magic cream.”

You quickly wiped your hands with a wet wipe, you were never without those, then from your bag you took a rather big pale yellow plastic bottle and squeezed cool white cream on to my wound. You rubbed it in soothingly with your bony hand. I stared at your blue veins and the ring on your finger, with its pretty arrangement of diamonds.

“Grandma, the diamonds on your ring are like a flower,” I said. The cream was working its magic already.

“Yes. Your Grandad gave me that just before we were married. Lovely, isn’t it?”

I did, indeed, find it lovely. Lovely was your favourite word. No, it was more than that. Loveliness was what you lived for. You squeezed so much loveliness into every day that there was no room for anything else. I never saw you sad. I never heard you complain. I don’t think I even ever saw you bored.

Your love of loveliness was contagious. For me as a child, doing even the simplest of things with you was a treat.

“Isn’t this lovely?” you would say as the waitress set down your teapot and toasted teacake. “This teacake is just perfect. Golden brown and still warm enough to melt the butter.”

“Isn’t this lovely?” you would say, as my mother poured red wine into your glass. “Listen to that sound. Gloup, gloup, gloup.”

“Isn’t this lovely?” you would say, as you sat on the sofa with your tea, waiting to hear the sonata I was learning to play on my violin. You always asked, after listening to every complex piece of classical music I was so proud to play, if for next time I could learn the Fascination Waltz.

“It’s just lovely, you’ll see,” you insisted, and then you would prove your point by humming the first few bars, looking at me expectantly, hoping I would hear the loveliness too.

I was above learning that corny tune, and I’m sorry now, but it’s too late.

“Isn’t this lovely?” you would say, as we sat in the open air on the top floor of the boat, cruising down the river Thames, the guide announcing the price of each celebrity’s house, and all the passengers looking suitably impressed.

You noticed a red wine stain on your pastel blue blouse that day as we admired the film stars’ riverside residences. I’ll never know if you really believed it when you exclaimed “Oh, somebody in an aeroplane above us must have spilt their drink.” You must have been joking, but you sounded so earnest, so I’m still not sure.

“Isn’t this lovely?” you said again years later. You sat in your wheelchair now in the gardens of the sheltered accommodation you had been moved to, eating the picnic that I, now twenty-six, had prepared for you. “Just lovely. A picnic with the rhododendrons in bloom.”

It was true, they were quite beautiful. Whole bushes ablaze with pink, red and purple flowers. Then, quite unexpectedly, you turned to me and said:

“When are you getting married?”

“What?” I replied. But I’d heard, and you knew it.

“You’ve been carrying on like this long enough. It’s high time you did things with a bit of propriety. Besides, a wedding is a lovely thing, and to have a baby is a lovely thing, why ever would you not want to do all that?”

We sat without talking after that for a while, chewing on egg mayonnaise sandwiches with crunchy pieces of little gem lettuce, your favourite, and cherry tomatoes.

Then you broke the silence: “Could you pass me my handbag, dear? My hands are a little dry.”

I took your beige bag from where it hung on the handle of your chair; the same one you had carried with you to the playground in the summer of 1987.

“Thank you, dear,” you said, as you retrieved a big pale yellow plastic bottle. Vaseline Intensive Care Hand Cream, the label said.

Of course, I had seen bottles of this hand cream a thousand times since 1987. Every mother and grandmother in England kept a bottle by the kitchen sink, on the bedside table, and in their handbag. I don’t know what was different about that moment. Maybe it was the fact that you pulled it out of the same bag. I was sent back in time with a jolt, leaving me stunned in the playground, watching you look for your magic cream as my knee stung.

How the mechanisms of my subconscious mind took me back there I don’t know, but I did know, now, what you had spread on my bleeding knee all those years ago.

I watched as you rubbed your hands together, even bonier now than they were then. You carefully avoided the diamond flower.

“That’s not magic cream, Grandma,” I said. “It’s not even antiseptic.”

“What?” you asked. Your old ears were used to not hearing everything I said.

“Nothing.”

I pushed your chair back to your flat. That night, I heard you cry out in pain several times. You cried so sharply once that I rose to check on you. I stood in your bedroom doorway. The landing light lit up your face, just enough for me to see that you were sleeping, not crying out anymore, but whimpering softly on each exhale.

The next morning at breakfast I asked you what had been wrong in the night.

“Wrong?” Your lips pursed slightly, “whatever could have been wrong? I slept soundly all night.”

“So you weren’t in any pain?”

You didn’t reply. The newspaper was open in front of you on the page with the pictures of the queen, spread across the table next to your china teacups, the ones with gold rims and dark pink roses on them. There were jars of marmalade and jam too, pink grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar, and hot buttered toast.

“Isn’t this lovely?” you said. “Breakfast together before you go.”