Grandad

Grandad had always been interested in the sea, for as long as I had known him, and for as long as my mum and dad and aunts and uncles had known him too. I don’t know whether his interest predated my grandma or not, since she had died when I was very young, but I assume that it did.

The big old house where Grandad rattled around was full of things like model ships and books about sailing and charts of the coast and photographs from old fishing trips – the home décor of a man who had no-one to please but himself anymore. When we went on holiday to the coast of North Carolina or to visit relatives in Savannah, Grandad would tell me stories about Blackbeard and the other pirates who had haunted the coast, and the naval captains who had hunted them. When I was of the age to want bedtime stories, no-one but Grandad would do when we went to visit him. Even afterwards, I loved listening to his stories at night.

He didn’t just tell pirate stories, fortunately. Quite a lot of Grandad’s tales went back to the days when he lived in Key West, right at the frayed edge of Florida. If what he had told me was anything to go by, he had spent most of his time down there diving, swimming and fishing.

I suppose that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he began to get more frail but it was – he had always been such a larger than life figure in my childhood growing up that it seemed impossible to imagine him not in it. Eventually it got to the point when the house was shut up and Grandad moved into a nursing home. My mum and my uncles talked about selling the house to pay for the care that Grandad would need but in the end it didn’t come to that. Perhaps sensing the inevitable, he began to fade more quickly after he arrived in the home until, tragically, inevitably, he died in his sleep in the early hours one morning.

As ways to die go, it’s not bad – it wasn’t drawn out and he had seen us all the day before. We had gone in to see him in small groups and when my turn came, just as I had sat down on the plastic upholstered chair beside his bed, he beckoned me to come closer.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked, voice hoarse.

‘In the house, Grandad,’ I told him.

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘When you get back, go into the study. There’s something for you in the desk drawer. A small black notebook.’

Before he could say anything else, he began to cough, great hacking coughs, and I pushed the button for the nurse. They told us afterwards that he had just been tired from speaking too much and we shouldn’t worry about it.

That evening, before dinner, I went into Grandad’s study and went over to the desk. There were three drawers and I opened each of them in turn, looking for the notebook. I found it in the bottom drawer, underneath a pile of other papers: a small black notebook, closed by an elastic band. I took it, closed the drawer and took the notebook upstairs to leave in my bag. I had been planning on asking Grandad about it when we went to see him the next day but the news from the nursing home that morning stopped that plan.

Instead, late that night, I took the notebook back to the study, sat in the big armchair by the window that I knew so well and began to read through the notebook. At first it seemed pretty innocuous – just notes about diving trips that he’d gone on with friends of his when he’d lived in Key West. But then it got more interesting – a whole page was filled with what looked like pencil sketches of both sides of an old coin. One side was taken up with a large cross while the other seemed to be an elaborate coat of arms. The next page of the notebook contained a description of a dive down to a wreck off one of the Keys – no information about where precisely – where Grandad and his friend had found the coin. Or was it coins? They seemed to talk about sharing what they had found 50/50 and that wasn’t going to be possible with just one coin, was it? At any rate, this wasn’t a story that I remembered ever being told.

The last page in the notebook that had been used had obviously been used much more recently. The other pages had been written on in pencil – this last page was in fountain pen, in the blue-black ink so familiar from years of postcards and birthday and Christmas cards, unfaded by age.

This is for you, my darling Georgie, it said. Because you always loved my stories so much more than any of the others did. Enjoy yourself and think of me. Then a small map of the study, with a cross in red ink written beside one of the walls. Underneath that was written a quote that I remembered as my favourite from Treasure Island: We must go on, because we can’t go back.

I went over to the bookcase that stood against the wall that had been marked with the red cross (X marks the spot – of course!) and began to look for the old copy of Treasure Island that I remembered from when Grandad used to read to me. When I found it, I pulled it off the shelf. An old cigar box had been pushed against the back of the bookcase, in the space behind the books. I took out the books on either side until I found the ends of the box and then took it out.

I sat down behind the desk and put down the cigar box and looked at it for a while, heart pounding. Then I opened it. It was absolutely full of gold coins. $20,000 worth, give or take, I found when I went to get them valued later.

Bless you, Grandad.