My 'phone buzzed as I walked across the campus, interrupting a sexy train of thought involving one of my lecturers. It was my twin brother.
"Yes, Owen?" I answered testily.
"Hi Caz, have you heard about Granddad?" Owen's voice sounded not at all apologetic.
"Not apart from that I know he's ill?" Granddad Thomas had cancer and was not expected to see his next birthday.
"Well, it seems it won't be long now."
"Oh no, that's not good." I liked Granddad Thomas; he had been a travelling salesman and had a wealth of risqué tales to tell. "How do you know?"
"Dad's called, he and Mum are going to stay with him and look after him until it's over, and we're gonna stay at Auntie Sarah's for the holidays."
I digested that bit of news with mixed feelings. My first college year ended in a fortnight and I'd been looking forward to a family holiday, but I could understand Mum's need to take care of her father, he was a lovely old man and deserved all the help we could give him. He'd lived in his isolated Welsh cottage all his married life and had sworn to end his days there, so there was never any prospect letting him die in hospital.
I must say that I wasn't keen on sharing my hols with my cousin Ruth, or her brother Kyle, but I could put up with them in the circumstances. Ruth was twenty-one, two years older then me and Owen, and had always used the age gap as an excuse to play chief. Kyle was okay, he was only a couple of months younger than us, but he too was browbeaten by his bossy sister and tended to follow her lead, while Aunt Sarah thought that the sun shone from their respective backsides and would hear nothing against them.
"Dad hasn't said anything to me, when did he call you?"
"Just now. In fact I'd better get off the 'phone because he's probably trying to call you right now. Ring me back when you know what's happening."
"Okay, bye."
"Bye."
I'd hardly closed the 'phone before it rang again, this time it was my father.
"Good morning Carol, I've been trying to ring you." His formal greeting would have told me that this was a serious call even if Owen had not forewarned me.
"Yes, Dad. Owen called to tell me about Granddad."
"Oh, so you know?"
"Yes, Dad, I'm really sorry."
"So you'll be alright with Sarah, won't you?"
He always just used his sister's first name when talking to us, never referring to her as 'aunt', even though he talked of his other sister as 'Auntie Joan'. It's a quirk that I'd picked up on years before and got used to without ever really wondering why.
"Yes, Dad, we'll be fine. You and Mum just take care of Granddad."
"Okay sweetheart, as long as you're sure? Will you get there okay?" His change to 'sweetheart' told me of his relief.
"No problems, we'll just take a different train."
"Okay then sweetheart, I'll talk to you later. Bye." There was the sound of a kiss down the 'phone and he'd gone.
***************************************
The journey to Shropshire and Aunt Sarah's old farmhouse seemed to take forever, but eventually the train regurgitated us onto the platform of the local station and a strident 'Hey, you two' told us that Ruth had come to collect us. Her beaten up Mini-Cooper was waiting in the car park, now sporting a dented door from a night spent lying on its side in a ditch. Ruth was not the most careful of drivers.
"Mum sent me because she's trying to gets some seedlings planted out while the weather's good." Ruth informed us. "But she's got dinner all prepared and ready.
Aunt Sarah ran a small plant nursery and market garden. It had belonged to her husband, Uncle Leonard, until he had realised he liked men more than women and had run off with one of his workers. She inherited it outright when his male lover killed them both by drunk driving.
The journey was relatively uneventful considering Ruth's total disregard of narrow lanes and blind bends, and we were soon toting our bags up to our respective rooms. Ruth was sharing her room with an old college friend of hers named Chloe and her brother and mine were together in a second room, while I was the lucky one with a room to myself. The layout of the house had the bathroom to one side of my room with the two guys on the other side, while both Ruth's room and Aunt Sarah's were on the other side of the central staircase.
Ruth's insistence that Chloe should share with her raised a few eyebrows, especially as Ruth was notoriously defensive of her privacy, but that didn't matter to me. My only concerns were that everyone had to pass my room to go to the bathroom, and I had two potentially noisy nineteen year olds on the other side. But it was only to be for a few weeks, so I expected that I would cope.
Dinner that evening gave me the chance to get reacquainted with everyone and to meet Chloe for the first time. She sat right beside Ruth, and the difference could not have been more striking. Ruth is a sturdy, well built girl, with a round freckled face and sandy coloured hair. She would never be said to be beautiful, and she never gave a damn about make-up, but she had the open, tomboyish type of look that many men go for. Chloe was Ruth's opposite, a dark haired, slender girl with a shy smile and well defined features. She was more like the slim dark haired Kyle than his sister ever was and I could see strangers getting the relationships mixed up.
