We should be going with her, but my grandmother insisted on this arrangement (separate cars for second wives), and Ruth either didn’t care enough to protest, or knew better. My sister, however-her ocean blue eyes are dull and clouded, staring at nothing, and dressed in black, she looks mostly dead herself she hardly notices when my stepmother breaks away to head to the chapel on her own. My stepmother seems quite fine, actually, enduring this hideousness as if it were any other day with my grandparents-she’s had years of practice being a lowly American, and my father’s second wife at that. My stepmother, Ruth, grips my sister Katie’s hand as the valet helps my grandfather descend to the car-for my sister’s sake more than her own. Standing beside the remains of my family, I’ve never felt more like a stranger. Add an unhealthy dose of botulinum toxin, and there’s your visual.
Imagine, if you will, a sharper, crueler version of Maggie Smith, and you’ll have some semblance of an idea of my grandmother. Never mind that my grandfather can’t do steps-Lady Sylvia could not care less. My grandmother can’t quite disguise her pleasure at the optics of our black-frocked family standing on the grand staircase of the grand entrance as we pretend to wait for the cars in full view of the mourners passing by on foot. His light blue eyes are clouded over and staring at nothingness as he leans on his cane, his hand trembling. I tried to heal him when that was a thing I realised I could do. Now, however, he sags beside my grandmother, half of his face twisted into a permanent grimace after a stroke two years ago.
Hunter of pheasants, of foxes, but not of fortune-that he inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father, and on it goes. Lord Elliot II, was once a strapping, reed-backed but jolly Englishman’s Englishman. This is quite literally our ancestral home, built in the fifteen hundreds by Henry the Somethingth. Next to her, my grandfather softly droops under the grand dome above us, painted by some hideously famous artist centuries ago.
Imagine it: five of us gathered like a wilting bouquet, my grandmother the lone thistle standing. W E ARE A TEARLESS, TINY crowd, we survivors of David Shaw.
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