The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [190]
“I am cursed to eternal life!”
“Perhaps it just seems like it, Gran.”
“Insolent pup,” she replied as she returned my serve. “I didn’t attain one hundred and eight years on physical fortitude or a statistical quirk alone. Your point.”
I served again and missed her return. She paused for a moment.
“I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.”
I looked into her bright eyes. She wasn’t kidding.
“How far have you got?” I replied, returning another ball that flew wide.
“Well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it?” she replied, serving again. “I read what I think is the dullest book on God’s own earth, finish the last page, go to sleep with a smile on my face and wake up the following morning feeling better than ever!”
“Have you tried Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene?” I asked. “Six volumes of boring Spenserian stanza, the only saving grace of which is that he didn’t write the twelve volumes he had planned.”
“Read them all,” replied Gran. “And his other poems, too, just in case.”
I put down my paddle. The balls kept plinking past me.
“You win, Gran. I need to talk to you.”
She reluctantly agreed, and I helped her to her bedroom, a small chintzily decorated cell she darkly referred to as her “ departure lounge.” It was sparsely furnished; there was a picture of me, Anton, Joffy and my mother alongside a couple of empty frames.
As soon as she was seated I said: “They . . . they sideslipped my husband, Gran.”
“When did they take him?” she asked, looking at me over her glasses in the way that grannies do; she never questioned what I said, and I explained everything to her as quickly as I could—except for the bit about the baby.
“Hmm,” said Granny Next when I had finished. “They took my husband too—I know how you feel.”
“Why did they do it?”
“The same reason they did it to you. Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail. Give way to tyranny and others will suffer just as badly as you— perhaps worse.”
“Are you saying I shouldn’t try to get Landen back?”
“Not at all; just think carefully before you help them. They don’t care about you or Landen; all they want is Jack Schitt. Is Anton still dead?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What a shame. I hoped to see your brother before I popped myself. Do you know what the worst bit about dying is?”
“Tell me, Gran.”
“You never get to see how it all turns out.”
“Did you get your husband back, Gran?”
Instead of answering she unexpectedly placed her hand on my midriff and smiled that small and all-knowing smile that grandmothers seem to learn at granny school, along with crochet, January sales battle tactics and wondering what you are doing upstairs.
“June?” she asked.
You never argue with Granny Next, nor seek to know how she knows such things.
“July. But Gran, I don’t know if it’s Landen’s, or Miles Hawke’s, or whose!”
“You should call this Hawke fellow and ask him.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Worry yourself woolly then,” she retorted. “Mind you, my money is on Landen as the father—as you say, the memories avoided the sideslip, so why not the baby? Believe me, everything will turn out fine. Perhaps not in the way that you imagine, but fine nonetheless.”
I wished I could share her optimism. She took her hand off my stomach and lay back on the bed, the energy expended during the Ping-Pong having taken its toll.
“I need to find a way to get back into books without the Prose Portal, Gran.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me with a keenness that belied her old age.
“Humph!” she said, then added: “I was SpecOps for seventy-seven years in eighteen different departments. I jumped backwards and forwards and even sideways on occasion. I’ve chased bad guys who make Hades look like St. Zvlkx and saved the world from annihilation eight times. I’ve seen such weird shit you can’t even begin to comprehend, but for all of that I have absolutely no idea how Mycroft managed to jump you into Jane Eyre.”
“Ah.”
“Sorry, Thursday