A Medal for Leroy (4 page)

hall afterwards where everyone talked loudly into each other’s faces, sipping their tea and chewing away all the while on Auntie Pish’s rock buns – she must have made hundreds of them. I kept close to Maman for protection, hid behind her whenever I could. Everyone was kind, but too full of questions I didn’t want to answer. They all wanted to talk about their memories of Auntie Snowdrop, of the songs they’d sung with her, the concerts they’d been to, the coastal walks they’d done. But I had my own memories, and I’d keep them to myself. Again and again they kept telling me how proud she was of me, how she never stopped talking about me.

The tea party seemed to go on forever, and would have been quite unbearable if I hadn’t thought up the brilliant excuse that Jasper needed a walk. Maman said it was a good idea, but not to be too long. So I escaped and we went running off together along the beach. I ran till I could run no more. I skimmed stones, Jasper barked at the gulls, and afterwards we both sat side by side and stared out to sea. It was a dull day, the grey of the sky meeting the grey of the sea on the horizon. It seemed as if Auntie Snowdrop’s death had left the world a colourless place. Grief is grey, I discovered that day.

Eventually Maman came out to find me and fetch me back into the hall. I couldn’t face those people again, I told her. I just wanted to go home. To my great relief, she agreed that we had stayed long enough. She told Auntie Pish I had to be at school the next day and that I had some homework to do, so we’d better be getting home. Auntie Pish came out and walked us to the car, carrying Jasper under her arm.

“Who were all those people in there?” I asked her.

“All your Auntie Martha’s friends,” she said. “Martha sang in the church choir, you know, and in the bath too every night. She had a lovely voice. She loved singing – and football, did you know that? Her two great passions: singing and football. Her favourite team was Arsenal – The Arsenal. She always said I had to call them The Arsenal.”

“Football?” I said, amazed. “She never told me that.”

“Didn’t she? Oh, she was a real Gunners fan, but she kept it to herself. Let me tell you, young man, there’s a great deal you don’t know about your Auntie Martha, a very great deal. Oh, she was a dark horse that one, but…” Her voice faltered then and she turned away. “She was the best of sisters, and the best friend I’ve ever had.” She was still tearful when she hugged me goodbye, Jasper licking my ear as she did so.

“You’ll be all right?” Maman asked her.

“
Pish
, I’ve got Jasper, haven’t I?” she replied, recovering herself as best she could, and trying to smile through her tears. “Jasper and I, we shall be fine. But you will come and see us, won’t you? And thanks for being here today. She’ll be so happy you were with us.” She bent down then and chucked me under the chin. “Your Auntie Snowdrop loved you, you know, like a mother loves a son, that much.” She hugged Maman then. “And they say that no one loves anyone more than that.”

“Quite true,” Maman said.

“But,” I said, “how did you know we called her Auntie Snowdrop? We thought it was our secret.”

“I have ears,” Auntie Pish said, reaching out and tugging gently at my ear lobe. “This boy of yours, he talks to Jasper sometimes, often far too loudly. I may be deaf, but I’m not daft. Boys are always too loud. Don’t worry, I like being Auntie Pish. It suits me, and she loved being Auntie Snowdrop.” She laughed then. “Truth will out in the end. Secrets, like the seasons, they never last, you know. And by the way, Poodle, I shall be sending you a parcel in the post, a present from Auntie Snowdrop; or maybe I’ll bring it up myself one day, turn up out of the blue at your house. I’d like that. I haven’t been to London in ten years or more – not since the War, come to think of it.” She put Jasper down. “Come along, dear,” she said to him. “Let’s go home.”

And off she went up the hill, her stick tapping, Jasper running along ahead. He did stop once to look back at us – his way of saying goodbye, or maybe of telling me that he was thinking what I hoped he was thinking: that he really wanted to come home with me, but he couldn’t.

Later, in the car on our way home, I was lost in my thoughts. Something was bothering me and I couldn’t work out what it was, not for a while. Then it came to me. I asked Maman, “And how did she know I was called ‘Poodle’ at school? Did you tell her?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “You must have told that dog, just like you told him about their names, too loudly, probably. She’s really not as deaf as I thought. That’ll teach you to talk to dogs, to tell them your secrets. You can’t trust them, you know. How embarrassing, to be found out like that.”

“But funny,” I said.

“
Oui
, funny,
mon petit chou
,” she laughed, “very funny.”

All the way home, I was wondering what Auntie Pish was going to send me.

by this time – and Auntie Snowdrop’s parcel still hadn’t arrived, and neither had Auntie Pish ever come to visit us in London. Maman always said she wouldn’t, that she’d never leave Folkestone. To begin with, for the first few months after the funeral, I had hoped for the promised parcel with every post, but nothing came. By the time it did arrive, I’d long since forgotten about it. And even then, it didn’t come in the post.

After Auntie Snowdrop’s funeral, Auntie Pish seemed to lose heart. We went down to Folkestone to see her much more often, not to spread snowdrops on the sea – it didn’t seem right to do that any more, not without Auntie Snowdrop there – but because Maman was worried about her. Auntie Pish’s memory was not as good as it had been, that was becoming quite obvious to us. She seemed more confused every time we visited. She kept talking on about Auntie Snowdrop as if she was still alive, and sometimes – which was quite unlike her old self – she’d burst into tears and become very anxious and agitated. She’d say such strange things through her tears, snatches of half-lost memories that neither of us knew anything about, mostly about her father, and her mother too.

After one of our visits I wrote something she’d said to us down in my diary when I got home, because it upset me to see her so like this. “Father wouldn’t listen, you know. I told him I’d have to go with her, that someone had to look after her. But oh no, he wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t listen. It broke Mother’s heart, broke my heart too.” We had no idea what she was talking about.

As these episodes became more frequent, and made our visits more troubling, I wanted less and less to go down there to see her. I made lots of excuses not to go, football usually. I’m not proud of that now. Maman was not as faint-hearted as I was. She continued to go down to see her on her own most Saturdays, insisting that Auntie Snowdrop and Papa would never have wanted her left alone, that both Aunties in their own ways had been very kind to her when she needed it most. Then Auntie Pish broke her leg. We had a phone call from the hospital and both of us went down there as soon as we could.

Maman and I sat either side of her bed as she complained bitterly about the food, how the nurses kept waking her up to give her pills when she wanted to sleep, and how she didn’t want the pills anyway. “
Pish
,” she said. “I don’t need pills. I want to get out of here. I want to go home.” But mostly it was Jasper she complained about. “It was Jasper who broke my leg. It was all his fault, his and the postman’s. I heard the postman come whistling down the path, so I went to the door just like I usually do to pick the letters up from the mat before Jasper gets to them. And what happens? Jasper comes charging down the hallway, barges past me and trips me up. If Martha had been there, it wouldn’t have happened. She always goes to the door.” She started crying then. “She’s not at home, you know. Where’s Martha gone? Where’s Martha gone? Who’s going to look after Jasper? And there’s the geraniums, the frost will get them if I don’t fetch them in soon.”

“Don’t worry, Mary,” said Maman. “Michael and I will look after everything, won’t we,
chéri
?”

“You will? You’ll look after Jasper and the geraniums? You’d like to look after Jasper, wouldn’t you, Michael?”

Would I! Would I! I could hardly contain my joy.

I turned to Maman. She didn’t look happy.

“It’ll only be for a week or so, I promise,” Auntie Pish told us. “I’ll be right as rain in a week or so, fit as a fiddle, you’ll see.”

So we went up to Auntie Pish’s house afterwards, and brought her geraniums in. I took Jasper for a run on the beach while Maman tidied the house and turned off the water and locked up. That evening we drove back to London with Jasper in the back of the car. I was over the moon. Jasper was coming home with me! At last I had a dog of my own. Jasper kept smiling up at me, panting with happiness.

But Maman made it quite clear she did not feel the same. “That dog stays downstairs, Michael. Do you hear?” she said. “I will not have him up in your bedroom, and he is not allowed on the chairs in the sitting room, and if he makes messes, you clear them up.
Tu comprends
?” She sighed deeply. “I just hope that leg of hers gets better soon like she said.”

But it didn’t. It took forever to heal. Maman was back and forth to Folkestone for weeks. Then, while Auntie Pish was still in hospital, she got pneumonia. After that she was too weak to look after herself. Maman found her a place in a nursing home just outside the town – not an easy task because Auntie Pish was very particular. She insisted she had to be able to see the sea from her bedroom window like she could back in her own home.

Meanwhile, at home in Philbeach Gardens, Jasper had become one of the family. He slept on my bed every night, despite all Maman’s protests, bit the post as it came in through the door, and chased the cats in the park – there weren’t any gulls. Maman never came to like him. She did get used to him, feed him even, take him out for his walks sometimes. But whenever I wasn’t at school, Jasper became my constant companion. He came to football with me, chased the ball and made a nuisance of himself. We got on so well, knew each other’s thoughts almost. I had the strangest feeling sometimes that he and I were meant for each other, almost related, that somehow Auntie Snowdrop had arranged the whole thing.

Sometimes, on Saturdays, I did go down to the nursing home with Maman, when football was rained off, or when I just couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse to get out of it. I never looked forward to going because we just had to sit there in her tiny box of a room – a bed, a bedside table and one chair. I had to sit at the end of her bed and listen to her rambling on for hours. She treated Maman now rather as she had treated Auntie Snowdrop. Maman was kind and attentive and endlessly patient, but as with Auntie Snowdrop, there were never any thanks. Auntie Pish just took her more and more for granted. She was even sharp with Maman sometimes. She could be really nasty.

When I complained about this to Maman, and said she shouldn’t put up with it, she’d always make excuses for her. She’d say that Auntie Pish was very old and that old people get like that; that it was only natural that she might be a bit difficult and truculent at her age, how she’d lived through a lot, and had a heart of gold underneath. Maman was always so forgiving.

It was on one of these visits, that out of the blue I received at last Auntie Snowdrop’s long-forgotten parcel. Wrapped in brown paper and tied up neatly with string, it was lying there on Auntie Pish’s bed when Maman and I walked into her room. “Auntie Martha wants you to have this,” she said. All these years later – nearly five years now – she still talked of her sister as if she was alive. “She’s wrapped it up specially for you. It’s breakable, so take care how you open it.”

I didn’t bother about being careful. I pulled and tugged and jerked at the string until it came away. Underneath the brown paper, the parcel was neatly wrapped in layer after layer of newspaper, each layer folded over carefully. It took forever to open it. I couldn’t do it fast enough. It felt like a book of some kind.