Campari for Breakfast (23 page)

Authors: Sara Crowe

Tags: #General, #Fiction

BOOK: Campari for Breakfast

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Some private news:

In these days of shortage and austerity, Cameo’s cup floweth over. She got a job in a cigarette factory because she was heartsick about her American and needed a diversion. And at the factory she met and fell in love with a Major Jack Laine. He came on a private matter to meet with the owner. (Some sort of trade-off for cigarettes is my guess.) He is devilishly handsome, but unfortunately, already married.

Nobody knows except me, and one close friend of his, who, I have it on good authority, has only told four hundred of hers. In spite of my inward misgivings, I expect I am possibly jealous, having no one to write home about but a salty academic who can’t keep his lunch off his shirt. Still, it’s reassuring to know I’m decent enough for a proposal. Gerald asked me to marry him, but I couldn’t countenance being a Podger.

‘I know it’s a secret for it’s whispered everywhere’ (Congreve)

Sue

Wednesday 9 September

A
T ABOUT SEVEN
o’clock this morning, when we were all still in bed, there was a terrible crash. I thought a tree must’ve fallen into the house. It was ferocious, like a demolition gong, or a plane falling out of the sky, or a thunder clap that was strong enough to bring down an entire forest. I heard Aunt Coral run downstairs and the Admiral following after her. When I caught up with them, they were in the kitchen, as were the rest of the tenants – all that is except Admiral Ted, who slept straight through all the noise.

‘Maybe they left an unexploded bomb here,’ said the Admiral.

‘The house is falling down,’ said Aunt Coral. No one accused either of them of melodrama, just in case.

Then there was a second crash, even louder than the first. We were so frightened that we all got down on the floor. A few seconds later came the sound of what I imagined to be a volcano. It so jangled our nerves, that it was ages after peace came before anyone dared to break the silence.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Admiral Little bravely.

‘I’m coming with you. Ted’s up there,’ said Admiral Gordon as he followed suit.

And not wishing to be left alone, we women went up too, convinced we were going to find Admiral Ted splattered all over the floor. We edged in through each door as though we’d had special training, checking each room methodically; it took us quite a long time. Eventually we discovered the problem. The ceilings had come down in two of the East Wing bedrooms. But the knock-on effect looked perilous for
the whole Wing
.

‘I shouldn’t like to say, Miss Garden, I couldn’t put a figure on that,’ said Glenn Miller, arriving within ten minutes of Aunt Coral’s urgent call. ‘You’ve probably got some rot, or woodworm in those timbers. But I can’t understand for the life of me why it should fall,’ he said.

He pulled at a bit of plaster that was hanging by a thread and a whole lot more fell down behind it and disappeared into powders. What I thought had been a volcano was in fact raining masonry.

‘Oh dear,’ he said.

Aunt Coral was in pieces and was having to be given the Admiral’s gooney.

‘So what ball park figure would you say,’ said the Admiral, ‘to put it all back up again?’

‘Well, cor, I think …’ said Glenn Miller, ‘I think it’s going to be dear.’

‘Is it too early for a sherry?’ said Aunt C.

The most chaotic morning followed. In between the ceilings coming down and our hasty retreat out of the East Wing, there were frequent visitors to the front door all bearing tortoises. Aunt Coral wasn’t coping, and Delia couldn’t identify Bertie. Emergency scaffold was arriving, and Glenn Miller called in his men, who came rushing like a boiler-suited cavalry. I was making tea for everybody, and trying to move my things out of the East Wing, and trying to get ready for work, knowing I was going to be late. Loudolle had already swalked off after her usual swim, having milked me the previous evening of a further £3.50.

‘You gonna be late for work, Sue? You want me to tell Mrs Fry?’ she said.

‘Tell her what you like. I hope you fall in a cowpat.’

‘Oh you’re gonna regret that,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget I know things …’

‘And I know you come from Ealing and not Alpen, Colorado,’ I said. But it made no impact. She has no humility about having reinvented herself, and was not to be out-embarrassed.

I tried to comfort Aunt Coral, who was being assisted by the Admiral. Her main concern, as was mine, was the thought of having to leave Green Place.

‘This will wipe out the shoe fund completely,’ she said. ‘We won’t be able to do anything up.’

‘Let’s break the problem into small chunks, which they say you should do in a crisis,’ I said.

But she was beside herself and had lost all sense of proportion, railing that we were all going to have to go into homes because the building was unstable.

‘Mrs Bunion won’t have to go into a home,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard of a home for cleaners. She has a family she can go to. Besides, Mrs Bunion doesn’t even
live
here!
Nobody’s
going into a home Aunt Coral, except hopefully Loudolle. We might go to a hotel or somewhere. We could go somewhere nice.’

This perked her up, and when the Admiral returned I went to phone in sick, which I knew would inflame Mrs Fry, but as Aunt Coral was in no fit state, I knew I had to prioritise her. When I returned she had been given an aspirin and the Admiral was kneeling by her chair.

‘There’s no need to upset yourself, Aunt Coral, there now, there we go,’ he said.

‘But I don’t want to live in a Tupperware, I love feeling the draughts all around me,’ she said, trying to be amusing.

Slowly and gently under the Admiral’s care Aunt C was beginning to rally, but then the moment was gone, to be replaced by a mystery development. Above the suites where the collapse happened there is an attic space, which has been the store for a surplus of boxes and old toys. It is accessed by a pull-down ladder through a hatch in one of the bedrooms, (one of the nooks and hidey holes for which Green Place is famous). Anyway, in amongst the debris Glenn Miller and his team had found an unusual gentleman’s hold all. It was packed with a few items of clothing, which Glenn felt looked ‘too ragamuffin’ to belong to a resident of Green Place. His team had made enquiries among the male residents of the building, and even telephoned Badger to check that the hold all wasn’t his, (at which point Aunt Coral became momentarily mortified), before they came to the conclusion that the hold all didn’t belong to any
official
inhabitant of Green Place. And so, putting two and two together, ‘and making ten’ according to Aunt Coral, Glenn and the team came up with a theory. They were convinced it was the mystery owner of the hold all, a stranger, who had put his foot through the ceiling when he was rummaging in the attic. So by lunchtime, Green Place was crawling with policemen.

‘What I think you’ve got here, Ms Garden, is either a trespasser, or a tramp,’ PC Pacey told us. ‘There’s no sign of breaking and entering, you see, so it’s unlikely to be a burglar. You’ve got a tramp I ’speck. We do see a lot of them out here in some of the larger houses. But the finding of a hold all of clothing on the bed doesn’t necessarily mean that the trespasser damaged the ceiling. From the looks of those timbers those ceilings could’ve come down on their own. If you
were
to manage to catch him, we could charge him with civil trespass. But, unless you catch him red handed, there’s not a lot we can do.’

‘I see,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘Do you mean by civil trespass that the trespasser’s more polite?’ A poor attempt at a joke, but it showed her indomitable spirit.

‘No, it doesn’t mean that the trespasser is more polite, it just means that they haven’t broken and entered.’ PC Colin Pacey was without a sense of wit.

‘Are you telling us that the law considers it acceptable for someone to walk into a house and
sleep
here, as long as he keeps the place tidy?’ said the Admiral, shaking his head in appaulment at this loophole in the law.

‘No Sir, the law doesn’t consider it acceptable for someone to walk into this house and sleep here, but it happens all the time on the borders and people don’t even know it. He might have been here a while.’

Wednesday 9th September, in the evening

By this evening, we were all quite stressed and tired from the events of today. The sultry day led to a sticky night without a breeze to release it. We sat together on deck chairs beside the pool, the Daddy long legs were in the hedgerows and the martinis were on ice. If we hadn’t been in a crisis, it would have been blissful.

‘How are we going to catch him?’ said the Admiral pacing around the terrace.

‘With a trap?’ suggested Delia.

‘With a trap!’ The Admiral was getting excited.

‘What sort of trap?’ said Aunt Coral. ‘You can’t just put a trap out, the fellow might get hurt. And what if it isn’t a tramp, what if the bag of clothing belonged to someone who stayed here once and left it behind when he went? Those clothes might have been there for years. Just because there are bumps in the night, doesn’t mean there’s someone living here. I’m certain no one’s been in that room for years and years and years.’

But the Admiral was inspired with all his hormones raging. ‘If he’s coming in and going out the same way as the rest of us, it should be relatively easy,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of surveillance, of sealing off the exits.’

‘But there are a hundred ways into Green Place,’ I said.

‘What about digging some traps in the woods like you see in the films?’ said the Admiral.

‘
Where
in the woods?’ said Aunt Coral. ‘And what if you catch a jogger?’

‘You would have to be careful that no one gets hurt,’ I said. ‘You have to act within the law.’

‘Baloney! The law’s an ass,’ said the Admiral. ‘Just look at what’s happened here.’

After a great deal of argument we agreed that in the first instance, Badger and Tornegus will dig some deep holes to act as traps, at vulnerable areas of fencing. To accommodate my safety concerns they will pad the holes with soft landings and leave out food and water in the unlikely event that a jogger or rambler should be caught in one by mistake. Plan B is surveillance. We will take it in turns to watch the exits, particularly at 2 to 3am, when the thud tends to happen.

And the greater plan is to re-erect the ceilings as quickly as is possible, and try harder than ever to raise some cash for all the work.

Meanwhile we have moved ourselves back into the West Wing, like refugees from disaster. This time I have the attic where Delia was doing her Italian. It has a skylight, and if I stand on my suitcase I can see out all across Egham. High above everything, from the elite vantage of my eerie I can see, to the left lies Titford and to the right lies Egham and to the front lie the armies of buddleia. The affluent borders sprawl beyond with their twinkling evening lights, where a hundred cars are sealed into a hundred sliding garages, and a hundred sets of car keys are cast on a hundred tables, and a hundred dinners are taken before a hundred fires, and a hundred hungry husbands rush and kiss their hundred wives.

Brackencliffe

Down in the dungeon, Cara’s guard was a good man and could see nae reason not to be nice.

‘What ails ye?’ he asked the maids, when he took in their dungeon meal tray.

‘I n’ery know where my beloved Keeper is,’ said Cara. ‘Last I saw he was held captive by the scruff of the neck.’

‘Whyfore!’ said the guard. ‘You mean Keeper the spaniel? Why, he is yonder in the dog house – the Master has kept him for sport.’

‘We must free him, please help us!’ said Cara.

‘The Missie will kill us all!’ said Fiona. ‘This dungeon ceiling, it pounds!’ For the weight of the Missie dancing with Knight Van Day above them was a fair threat to the building.

And so the guard took pity on them, and freed them under cover of darkness, reuniting them with their spaniel Keeper, whilst above them, Pretafer’s waltzing shook the earth.