Campari for Breakfast (30 page)

The assembled heads tilted in contemplation over the exercise. Before I had even finished writing, Delia stood up to read.

‘The girl I was in childhood is unrecognisable to me now; she has become the child of others, existing in other people’s memories. And the house that I didn’t want to leave, is now just a building in a photograph. Time changes everything, even who we are.’

‘Excellent Delia, well done. Goodness me,’ said Aunt Coral, clipping open her handbag to take out a hanky. She polished off the dregs of her Sapphire as a car turned round in the road outside, momentarily lighting her hair with an evening lamplight halo.

Some of the Group’s spirits had clearly become melancholic, so she swiftly moved to the youth of the group to try and deliver a mood swing.

‘And so . . . have we a future, Sue?’

I began in an old voice:

‘As I look back over my life, favourite moments come to mind. Sitting in my play pen; school days; hey days; arriving at Green Place; my husband, who for many months didn’t even know I was there. Funny to think of it now, following the birth of our dear children: George, Hattie, Henrique, Jason, Claudius, Cordelia, and Annabelle.

Alas, though my mind is still sharp, I’m old and can’t walk very far, and so I live more and more for my writing.

Tomorrow I am going on a talk show to tell them about my books, and whenever anyone asks me how it all began, I will give them the same answer: it began for me with Aunt Coral and The Egham Hirsute Group.’

A silence fell on the hirsutists, and some were visibly moved. Aunt Coral, Delia, Daphne and Meriel all had to leave the room. I was terribly flattered to have had such a profound effect on them. And I still feel a bit high now.

Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 4

Green Place, April 5 1968
(Age 46 but pass for 37)

Local News:

Braeburn Grange at the bottom of Clockhouse Lane has been bought by aspirational new owners. It formerly belonged to Marigold who was a Cheltenham lady and who was happy to call it Braeburn. But as Places, Lodges, Manors, Halls and Parks are the great hierarchy of housing, the new owners have found the need to upgrade themselves to a Grange.

I still think of the botanist sometimes, pottering around in Hampshire. He has a child now, Frederick Alun. All the things I loved about him still call to me over the miles. I wish he had been a hundred per cent horrid and not fifty per cent nice.

Daphne is coming to dinner later on. At the shops I indulged in some luxury loo roll which triggered an outrage in Father. He doesn’t much care for Daphne.

‘You should give her British number three,’ he said.

British number three was the toilet paper we got in the war, when there wasn’t enough money to import large amounts of timber.

‘Like sandpaper,’ said Father baring his teeth, although I would have said it was like tracing paper.

I have a lady arriving shortly from the Cooks directory, her name is Mrs Bunion. She is coming to cook us a meal. Father says he will not come out of his room until she is gone. But needs must; I did not get the cooking gene. I would live on biscuits if I couldn’t have a cook.

Buddleia rang to say she got the job with BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation).

‘Somebody up there cares!’ (That’s the BOAC slogan!)

To Do:

1)   Get estimate for the Turner. (The drawing room has got so damp that the pink summer sky in the painting – a painting that has survived two world wars – has gone green.) However I don’t think I could bear to sell.

2)   Get gardener. (The garden is a mine of tunnels.)

3)   Get bat boxes to try and coax them into the woods. (We have three different species of bat that I’m aware of:
soprano pipistrelle
,
roof void barbastelle
, and the
greater horseshoe
. Their babies are born in June and can end up in peculiar places, such as my handbag. I have started a policy of bat patrol, to move them on.)

4)   Get plumber. (The tank above the great hall leaks and when it rains we have Niagara on the stairs. God but it’s beautiful, who wants a boring old staircase?)

5)   Syringe ear.

6)   Make Will.

7)   Insulate letter box.

Sue

Monday 21 December

T
ODAY WAS THE
shortest day of the year, which means tonight will be the longest night. The sky has been hanging round a weak stump of moon and the stars are too misty to shine. In fact this whole month has had a mist over it, because of Dad’s wedding, and they were all out earlier: black cats, magpies, everywhere I looked there were omens.

At dinner time I sat and had an absent-minded sandwich, before I checked the house on bat patrol. I was half oblivious to what I might find, because the burning question of tomorrow is: ‘Do you, Ivana Schwartz, take Nicholas Bowl to be your husband?’

In my head, I saw the priest blessing them at the altar. Ivana was in her car shoes. Imagination is the nasty little comic of the mind. And when the sun rises, if it does, they will begin their coupledom just like Mum had never been born.

I completed the bat patrol, and was plumping the cushions in the drawing room, when a blast of cold air surprised me rushing in under the door. Then I heard fast steps, eventually stopping in what I hazarded might be the conservatory. I froze for a time before I summoned up the courage to go into the hall to have a look. But I found no man with a gun or chainsaw there, or a ghost or a ghoul or a spirit, only a bouquet of flowers with a note which read:

It blew my evening away! He couldn’t have been from the other world; not if he had been to the florist! It was a shock that was big enough to take my mind off the wedding. So, I decided to leave him some fruit cake as a thank you, with a welcome note beside it.

I preferred to use the phrase, ‘Dear Visitor,’ as it is much more polite than saying, ‘Dear Tramp,’ and there was no way I wanted to cause offence whilst I’m extending the hand of friendship. Perhaps also somewhere in my unconscious, the word ‘Visitor’ is also less scary than ‘tramp’.

Now I am sitting up in bed in the attic. The wind outside is powering itself into a frenzy of banging and tapping. It makes me think of faraway storms raging in other lands, called sweet things like Hurricane Enid. And it is peculiar, and yet strangely reassuring, knowing that the tramp must be somewhere on site. But I’m certain that the storm, and the tramp, and the wedding, will thieve me of a deep, unknowledgeable sleep.

Tuesday 22 December

This morning my card and the cake were unchanged, so I left them out just in case, picking up the paper and letters from the mat to read on the bus.

Sometimes a day can be salvaged by forcing the mind to other things. It can also be swept along by the madness that is Mrs Fry’s Toastie. It struck me that people die at the same time as breakfasts are served and eaten, and shouldn’t everything stop or close each time out of respect? But if everything stopped each time somebody died, the economy would fall. Things can’t stop, and neither can I.

My morning at the ‘Bistro’ coincided with Dad and Ivana’s nuptials, and a heavy day lay ahead. We were parading a sample menu, for the purpose of market research: soup de la rue, saucisses de la mer and camembert served with a juice.

The Mayor and a local celebrity came, and they had their photos with Mrs Fry, which she clipped to the till for posterity and future bouts of showing off.

La Toastie was hung with tinsel and a presumptuous amount of mistletoe, and Mrs Fry conducted herself completely in French. Her hair had been treated to repeated visits so that its sheen could not be outclassed by any of the other ladies.

‘Bien venu a la Toast,’ she said, speaking through a crowd pleaser. ‘Et aussi, j’espere que vous avez le meme que bon appetite!’

‘Are you OK, Sue?’ said Joe. He gave me a killer smile, stolen straight from Icarus.

‘I’m OK.’

And I was. In fact the build up to the wedding was much worse than the day itself, when I was so busy with Mrs Fry’s ambition. Aunt Coral rang through to the Toastie twice to check if I was OK. When the chips are down, you certainly find out who your friends are.

Later on Joe offered to cook me a meal, so we returned to Green Place after a wipe down. It was already dark when we walked up the drive, lit by a sharp half moon and a sprinkling of lights in the windows.

‘Do you leave all those on?’ said Joe.

‘It’s the wiring,’ I said, ‘or it might be the tramp. But there’s no need to be alarmed.’

‘No need to be alarmed?’

As we entered the hall I showed him my flowers. The card and the cake were also still there.

‘See, he must be a goodie,’ I said. ‘He’s even left me some flowers.’

Joe looked a little in flabberghast.

‘I know it’s surprising isn’t it?’ I said.

It was a lot for Joe to take in, but finally he managed to speak. ‘I think you’re jumping to conclusions Sue. You don’t know what sort of a man he is; he might be a lunatic.’

He strode over to the staircase with masterful steps I had not noticed before.

‘He’s been here for weeks. He keeps himself to himself,’ I said.

‘Well when did you ever hear of a murderer who was gregarious?’ he said. ‘Do the police know?’

‘They know, and I have a police radio for security.’

‘Does Aunt Coral know?’

‘She knows, but she thinks he might be a ghoul.’

‘A
ghoul
?’

We checked upstairs, patrolling and switching off the lights.

‘You’re so brave,’ he said when we eventually got to the kitchen.

‘Mum dying makes me more fearless.’

‘It also might have made you more foolish,’ he said.

We had a campfire dinner of jackets with beans and listened to a play on the radio, in which a Welsh shepherd was in a lot of trouble with some of the sheep on his farm. Then we heard a late night news, and after, the hours disappeared in a conversation. At about four o’clock in the morning, when the subject of my being alone came up again, Joe offered to stay.

‘I can’t leave you alone here, Aunt Coral would never forgive me,’ he said.

I didn’t agree straight away but decided to pour us nightcaps from the bar, a cognac for him and I had a Campari, both on ice in their proper glasses. I wanted Joe to carry on telling me I was brave and such things like that.

‘So how many ghosts have you got?’ he said, taking his shoes off and swishing his drink.

‘I’ve never actually seen anything, but theoretically there’s Nana Cameo, the lady, the whisperers …’

‘The whisperers?’ said Joe, in his growing tradition of repeating me.

‘When the shower’s running upstairs, the pipes sing and it sounds like someone in the kitchen is whispering.’

‘When I was ten I saw the ghost of my father a few days after he died,’ said Joe. ‘I woke up and he was lying next to me.’

‘Were you dreaming?’

‘I was wide awake, but nobody believed me.’

‘I’d be happy to wake up next to my dead mother,’ I said.

‘I understand that,’ he said.

‘Sue,’ he said, after a long silence broken only by the noise of ice tinkling in our nightcaps, ‘I’d feel better if I stayed here. Honestly.’

With perfect timing a singing began, coming from upstairs.

‘It’s an air lock,’ I said.

‘How can you be so sure?’

He put his arm round me quite naturally, as though he had done it before. I didn’t move it away. I wanted it to be there. I never had Campari for breakfast before; it’s the sort of thing people do on desolation holidays. And the drink and the hour and the quiet led to the first real kiss of my life.