To my Granddaughter, Polly

And to my Granddaughter, Polly, I leave absolutely nothing.

Jemima Harrison paused, knowing what people would think. She could hear the words, hear the tone of voice, see the puzzled and outraged expressions. 

     “There must be some mistake!”

     No, thought Jemima, there is no mistake. None whatsoever. And I am entirely of sound mind.

     “But they were so close!” Jemima would be the last person to argue with that. Polly, of all her family, thought she tried not to let it show, was the dearest to her heart. Dearer even than her mother, though she felt guilty about that. Stephanie was always a good, kind, sensible girl, and had become a good, kind, sensible woman. Yet – and she couldn’t help it – her smile did not warm her as Polly’s smile did, and she do not feel the same thrill of pure joy when she embraced her , as she did when Polly did. From the minute she first saw her, an angry but exquisite scrap in the maternity ward, determined to win the yelling competition, and yet then, in an instant, her anger fading and her yelling replaced by dimples and gurgles, she knew that she would be her little soul-mate.

     Her name was Pauline Elizabeth, but she was only ever known, except occasionally by a teacher who was mad at her, as Polly. 

     Some folk said that when she was little, she was, on every possible occasion, Jemima’s shadow. But that was not entirely true. Polly was nobody’s shadow. She was a vivid, bright, glowing presence. One thing that was clear from the start was that she was going to look like Jemima – have the same blue-black hair and hazel eyes that, in the right light, had a flicker of gold in them. Those looks had skipped a generation. Oh, Stephanie had been a very pretty little girl, and was a very attractive woman, but in a milder, more tempered way, with brown hair and eyes. 

     It wasn’t just, or even mainly, a question of looks, though. Polly had the same habit as Jemima of tossing her head back a little when she laughed, of scrunching up her unusual eyes when she was concentrating, and of never seeming to walk at a normal pace, but always either dallying or scuttling. 

     Unlike Jemima, she had been born into relative affluence, and never known want, and Jemima had always been perfectly happy about that. She had never believed all that guff about adversity being good for the soul, and tended to automatically toss aside a novel (and she had a weakness for family sagas) that laid on the poor but happy with a trowel. 

     Oh, her childhood hadn’t been desperately unhappy. She had never suffered any abuse, though her father had made it plain that the birth of another girl hadn’t filled his heart with joy, and had never gone hungry, though she had looked enviously at her schoolfellows’ packed lunches with chicken breasts and little pots of fruit when often she had a jam sandwich she’d had to make herself. 

     Still, she had been blessed with a brain, and though her parents made it plain they didn’t exactly approve of her going to university (though they weren’t averse to boasting to their neighbours on the East Holt estate about their clever daughter) they didn’t try to stop her either.

     They probably knew they had no chance, thought Jemima, with a wry smile. But she had been lucky enough to be born at the right time, too. There were still full maintenance grants, and you didn’t have to pay for tuition. It was possible to survive, if you were careful, without any need for parental approval or contribution.

     Always a voracious reader, Jemima had devoured Brideshead Revisited and Testament of Youth, but had known all along there was no chance of her going to Oxford, and wasn’t even sure she wanted to. She was quite happy to settle for a newly built campus university 50 miles from home. And, to her surprise, her mother paid her coach fare. “You – might as well make the best of this chance you have,” she muttered, giving her a quick kiss as she did, and Jemima would never be sure if that kiss was begrudging and because you ought to kiss your daughter when she left home, even if you had never been one for kisses and cuddles, or if she had wanted to kiss her and hug her more fondly, but old habits, or lack of them, died hard.

     So far as she could remember, though of course she got presents for her birthday or Christmas (mainly off her friends, though she was never one of those students who had a retinue of friends) this was the first and last time anyone had given her something for nothing. 

     She followed her mother’s advice – not that she’d ever had any notion of doing otherwise. She was seen as the kind of student who wasn’t exactly priggish or stand-offish, but made it plain that she had far more interest in her studies than she did in socialising for the sake of it. Some of her fellow-students did grate on her nerves, though. For all they drank like fishes (and she was fond enough of a glass of wine or a lager and lime herself, but kept it strictly to weekends) and she knew perfectly well that what they were smoking (this was back in the days when there was often a fug of smoke in lecture halls and canteens, and though she never smoked herself, she didn’t think anything of it) frequently wasn’t tobacco, they seemed more like fourteen year olds than people who must have been at least eighteen. It had grated on her when her father said, referring to her determination to go to university, “I’d been working and earning a wage for three years at that age,” and yet now she could half understand some of his frustration. 

     Maybe that was part of the trouble with Polly. Oh, Jemima was heartily glad that there had never been the slightest suggestion of her working at fifteen – it was just something that didn’t happen nowadays – and had never begrudged her beloved granddaughter having a good time. Yet she wondered if at least the necessity to do a Saturday job, or even do some chores about the house might have been no bad thing. 

     She willingly admitted that Polly was cleverer than she was, and always had been. She was bright, with an especial flair for languages, which she majored in, and a natural hard worker, but Polly was the kind of person who, if she hadn’t been so popular, might have been referred to (a phrase Jemima always thought was ridiculous) as too clever for her own good. 

     After university, Jemima did a year at Teacher Training College, and got a job at the local high school. Her memory was still razor-sharp, and yet sometimes those couple of years teaching seemed like an indistinct smudge that it wasn’t worth polishing back to brightness. She hadn’t been actively miserable. She had no vocation, but wasn’t one of those disastrous teachers either, and her pupils were no angels, but no young hooligans either. She gained a reputation, and there were worse ones, of being strict but fair, and didn’t dread going to work, but didn’t look forward to it especially either. 

     What she did enjoy was, finally, being able to enjoy a few of life’s pleasures without having to count every penny. Because Jemima had never been a mean woman. She had never even been a fastidiously frugal one, though she knew that Polly thought she was. A teacher’s salary wasn’t untold riches, but it was more than enough to allow her to take a holiday in France – in a quaint little hotel in Normandy. Even, or perhaps especially, on holiday, Jemima was always on the look out for new reading matter, and she discovered a series of French detective novels with an endearing, though irascible, female sleuth called Madame Henri. She devoured them, and took them home, and when the other teachers didn’t want her to be left out of the what we did on our holidays talk, she told them about her new literary passion. Of course there was a degree of eye-rolling and words unsaid that didn’t need to be said about, typical, goes on holiday, and all she can talk about are books, but she wasn’t the only bookworm, nor the only detective fiction fan, in the staffroom, and more than one of her colleagues clamoured for more information about Madame Henri. So Jemima decided to have a go at translating them. Now it was by no means the first translation she had done – dating right back to O-levels (as they were still called then, and would be for a while!) she had translated texts from German or French into English as part of her coursework and exams. She had always enjoyed it, but now found that it was truly satisfying, and seemed to give her pleasure twice-over in the novels. The detective fans in the staffroom begged for new chapters, and she thought, well, isn’t that a thing! A crusty non-existent middle aged French woman has made me more popular than I’ve ever been in my life.

     But a plan was formulating in her mind. Yes, she was, on the surface, enjoying school more. But she was enjoying it as a result of her translation, and that was something she loved and, she realised, was good at it. She sent a few specimen chapters to a publishing house that she knew had published translations, and they said they were very interested.

     Of course, I was lucky, thought Jemima. She didn’t doubt that other manuscripts as good or better than hers had landed on the desk that morning, but Madame Henri must just have reached the right person at the right time.

     Within a few months, she was taken on as a full-time translator, and only then, for caution was a habit she found hard to break, did she hand in her notice at the school. The headmistress, a kind, no-nonsense woman whom she’d always liked, said, “We’re sorry to lose you, Jemima, but this is your great chance, and of course you must take it.”

     Jemima rarely consciously used the phrase work ethic, it just was second nature, if not first nature, to her, to settle down to work, and working from home made no difference. It wasn’t long before she was one of the country’s most highly regarded translators, and though she always carried on doing translation work and would never have envisaged giving it up, she asked the help of a friend who knew more about such matters (she was of the firm belief that it was always better to ask for help than to risk making rookie errors) and opened her own translation bureau. By this time she was also happily married to Ian, a literary agent she had met at a conference, and Stephanie was born, sensible Stephanie who never gave her any trouble.

     I couldn’t have a more loving daughter, but I think I always took her for granted, Jemima thought. It was so easy, when, decades later, she became a grandmother that she felt an instant rapport with Polly, who looked like her, and had her mannerisms, and was droll and precocious and so charming in her ways.

     We spoilt her, Jemima realised, with a sigh, and I’ve been one of the worst. She had never thought, and didn’t now, that you could ever spoil a child with too much love and attention. That only helped them bloom and feel secure and happy in their own skin. But they had always let her get away with things because of her charming smile, had always made excuses for her and pleaded her case with her teachers. Despite that, she did do well at school – at least in the subjects she liked. 

     Jemima didn’t like to think about Polly’s first year at university. It was a horrid year all round. Ian died, it wasn’t unexpected, and he himself was calm and brave, saying that his girls as he called Jemima and Stephanie and Polly must be happy and not fret. Polly had been close to her Grandpa, and she did fret, and everyone said it was only natural she went off the rails a bit. But only her recent loss and, frankly, the fact that Jemima was well in with her tutor, who was also a linguist, stopped her being sent down. Remembering the fellow-students she had found immature, Jemima had a sudden thought that they were models of sense and sobriety compared to Polly. She was ashamed of the thought as soon as it came – and then she stopped being ashamed of it.

     Polly had left university now, and was drifting around, spending money on friends who flattered her – not that the flattery itself was unjustified. Jemima didn’t expect her to settle down straight away, but did think she should give things more than a couple of days before she decided they were boring and flitted butterfly like to the next enterprise, as she termed them. Or she didn’t bother, and took another holiday – always coming back with lovely presents. 

     Jemima knew that she wasn’t going to make what her mother used to call old bones. The doctor had been frank, though not melodramatic. She might well have a few years left, and, yes, you heard of these miracles and he would be delighted if she proved him wrong altogether, but, especially as she was a wealthy woman, it would be as well to make absolutely sure her affairs were in order. She had written a will, but more than a decade ago, and it was time to update it.

     She had not shed any tears of self-pity, but now she felt her eyes welling up at what she was doing. But she was determined not to change her mind. It was not as if she were condemning Polly to penury and deprivation. Her parents would see to that though –she had to admit – they had always been less foolishly indulgent than she had. But leaving Polly a large amount of money, with no strings attached, whether she inherited it next week or not for a couple of years, would be doing her no favours. And Jemima, who had no time for sanctimonious moralising, still knew it was the right thing to do. Polly had so many talents and she must not waste them. She would write a letter to her, only to be opened out of her death, and hoped and prayed she would understand.

     To my granddaughter Polly, I leave absolutely nothing.

     Then Jemima did break down, and whispered, because I love you, my golden-eyed soul-mate!