Campari for Breakfast (36 page)

‘It feels as though she’s been with me all this time, in the embodiment of you,’ I said. ‘She sent you to tell me the truth, even though you didn’t know it.’

‘Too much secrecy is never a good thing,’ said Aunt Coral.

Then she opened up a bottle of her purest medicinal whisky to help ease all the pain. I won’t ever forget the way she looked at me and my new Grandfather so fondly, though I think she felt quite a little outsider in such a great twist of life.

Weds January 6 1988

It’s now just a few days before I leave for Greece, and a bitterly cold day.

I went to hand in my notice at the Toastie on Monday, and Mrs Fry asked me to come in for a coffee. The café was still closed for the holidays, but Icarus was at work doing the community service of duties – the dishes – as penance for his lies.

Mrs Fry apologised for having been severe in the past and said I should ask for a job again if ever I wanted one in the future. I felt like a company girl, part of her team, a lifer, and she said I was a first-class waitress. And then, as though they’d rehearsed it, Icarus sat beside me and she was ‘called away’.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm. Loudolle made me do it.’

‘I understand,’ I said, and I did, because she had probably put a spell on him. ‘There’s no harm done, we can still be friends.’

‘In fact I was wondering if you’d like to go out for a drink before you go?’ said Icarus.

If he had said that one month earlier, my heart would have tangoed out of the Toastie. But the landscape is very different now. The mountains are topped with Joe.

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘that would have been lovely, but I’m going away and I’m not back till April.’

‘In April then.’

As Aunt C sometimes says, doesn’t everyone love a winner? But I have different loyalties now and looking at it on paper, I have a definite preference!

‘I’m really sorry, Icarus, but I just don’t think we’re on the same wavelength.’

‘What’s a wavelength?’ he said.

Loudolle couldn’t face me, but instead left a designer notecard on my bed before going back to Alpen. I felt smirched that she’d been in my bedroom, but softened when I read its disclosures. The picture it bore was of a vintage perfume bottle designed by Yves Sean Laurent, and inside it read:

Hey clever you
,

I just wanted to say I’m so sorry I lost my head. I just think that you’re so amazing, and I wanted to write just like you. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Let’s go get lunch or something next time I’m back in the country.

I hope we will always be friends.

Love, love, love

From

Loudolle X

As
if
we would go and get lunch! Just like we were Aunt C and D on the brink of being lifelong friends! It was going to take more than the sending of an insecure card for me. Forgiveness isn’t instantaneous, but I will try for the sake of Delia.

Speaking of which, Delia went into a little decline after the gala, and Aunt C said we had to look out for her. Not that I think that everyone who has a bad hour is going to commit suicide, but once it has happened you worry. I found one of her letters to herself outside, mashed almost to a pulp but still just legible. In it she said she felt she ‘existed to reassure happily marrieds it was possible to survive being alone’.

But there is a silver lining for Delia, because she has found Admiral Gordon. It turns out that their love has been growing through all that time spent on the Italian. I’m not sure if they have been off to bed together or anything yet, but they have plans. He is taking her to visit his nanny, who is ninety and lives in a hall.

We ordered a plaque for Mum with bright-gold lettering and put it next to Cameo’s dolls’ plaques as she asked, where the wind could sweep over it and the sun could beat down on her name.

We stood and paid our respects when it was set, sombre under the mizzle. Our coats and cheeks were covered in rain so fine it barely wet us. Johnny Look-at-the-Moon came too. He wore his best suit. We must have made a strange picture as we bowed our heads to remember her name. Daughter, Aunt, and Father, I am sure she would have been astonished.

And in years to come, when we have all passed away, there may come a jogger who’ll think they have stumbled on graves of family pets. Mitzi, Mae, Cameo, Buddleia. Sadly missed.

‘Let’s go in,’ said Aunt Coral after a short time. She always has a cut-off point for such sorrow, and I think I understand why now.

We had to say goodbye to Johnny, as he needed to be on his way. I watched him walk down the drive, as I had the first time I ever saw him. He headed towards Clockhouse Lane, and disappeared once again, like magic.

‘I hope he’ll be back,’ I said.

‘So do I,’ said Aunt C.

We spent the next few hours making cakes, thawing in the warmth from the oven, and found ourselves with a rare opportunity for one of our satisfying ‘chats’.

‘Why do you think that Cameo pointed the finger at Major Laine?’ I said. ‘It seems quite awful when she knew she’d been to bed with Johnny.’

‘Maybe she thought Laine could be the father. Maybe she was hurt and angry, maybe she was protecting Johnny, maybe she got her dates muddled. Maybe it was all of the above; we have the rest of our lives to speculate.’ This she said with an air of weary sophistication, cracking an egg into a bowl with a terrible lack of skill.

‘You think she’d been to bed with both of them?’ I said.

She gave me a peculiar smile that contained something looking like sympathy.

‘But a married Major and a lowly coal boy,’ she said. ‘Father would have bust a nut.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, piping up with further questions, ‘why she didn’t tell you about Johnny. You wouldn’t have told anyone, would you?’

‘Because she loved me,’ said Aunt C. ‘Look in my Commonplace.’

‘But I’ve read your Commonplace, there’s nothing in there to tell me.’

‘Go back and look at the letter I wrote to Johnny when he was sent to the front.’

‘I’ve read that too, it’s a nice letter, very newsy.’

‘I wrote it at the time of censors and snoopers and spies,’ she continued. ‘I felt unsafe in many ways, to expose my true feelings, so I decided to write it in a code. That way I could be certain I could say what I wanted without Johnny understanding my message. It was just something I wanted to express without the consequences of
anyone
knowing, just my own little secret to treasure in the privacy of my thoughts. Father and Doctor John used to communicate with each other in a code, so I just borrowed their idea. I decided that the first word of every fourth sentence should spell out another sentence. I
think
you’ll find it on Aug 12 1944, if I’m not mistaken …’

Some time later after old flames had been recollected, we were sitting down to eat the cake, when suddenly Aunt C bellowed, ‘Stop! No, wait!’ she said. ‘We never take them alive.’

For the Admiral had forgotten himself and was about to hoover a spider. I think, compared to the mystical Johnny, that the Admiral is somewhat an unlikely possibility for Aunt Coral. But a possibility in itself is obviously no bad thing. And Aunt Coral thrives on possibilities, almost more than on realities. Maybe if she grows to be fascinated about parking spots, and the Admiral becomes more romantic and learns some respect for spiders – maybe then they’ll be one of those couples who’ve been friends for years and then suddenly marry. Whereas someone like Admiral Ted did it the other way round, and was married for centuries before spending the rest of his days with the cricket. And someone like my mother had what they call a clandestine relationship, which means hidden, and someone like Nana Cameo had only the briefest passions, and before any of these things happened, they were all just possibilities, and I think I agree with Aunt C, that possibilities can be preferable to outcomes.

Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 5

Green Place, Jan 6 1988
(Age 65 but look older!)

A new year, a new illness. My ear has erupted with a savage gunge, and there is no doctor unless it’s an emergency. During a fitful sleep I dreamt Green Place was a college, of Romance, Literature and Chivalry; Father wouldn’t approve. Nor would he have approved had I kept Sue’s inheritance. Talking of which – there’s something I need to do. I will star it on my list.

I have spent many hours crying over the past week, as I have not cried for years. Johnny unlocked all my lost ones.

Sue asked me once: ‘Why do you think we have a memory? Is it so we can remember who we are and how to get home, or is it so we can live on after we’ve died, in the memories of the people who love us?’

Dear me, she’s too young for this sort of thing.

Still, it is a New Year and I shall not give into black dogs. The sun is burning like a giant strawberry in the sky, crimson as of 7am, and I have a date with the Admiral this afternoon, to walk into town for the band.

I wish I had known him longer, wish that when he looked at me, he recognised all these lines as visitors, remembering the radiant twenty-five-year-old I was, and always having that in mind when he sees me. I litter the place with snapshots of myself in my heyday, to display the full gallery of Corals he has not been acquainted with, but it doesn’t have the same impact as long-term knowledge, or remembering. Perhaps Johnny might see me this way? But it seems his eyes were always for Cameo.

The difference between us has taken forty years to merge. If anything he looks the elder now. A woman of sixty-five and a man of sixty-three is nothing, but a girl of sixteen and a boy of fourteen, not so. And the difference between coal boy and Green Place girl is also not what it once was. Though we were not ‘born equal’, we have become equal through the small battles and triumphs of our own lives.

There goes Sue, she just walked down the drive in a peachy little outfit, her limbs full of bounce and vigour, and I find myself thinking that it will only take a few good nights’ sleep, and the skipping of dinner, followed by a brisk run down the drive before I will look like that again too. But even if that were actually possible at sixty-five, I still want to eat and drink till I’m full and stay up late drinking cocktails. I remember I asked Father on his eightieth birthday, how it felt to be eighty, and he replied, ‘I don’t know.’

But I’m so glad Sue’s been with me this past year. It’s wonderful to live with the hope of youth, even though she has been to a dark place already. Her innocence, and her way of seeing the world as if she were an alien just landed. She makes me remember to wonder and to look.

‘Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.’ (Anaïs Nin)

MOSCOW SLAMMER

(for the Common Cold with Ear Infection)

1
 Boil: Fennel seeds, Methi seeds (from Indian shop), 6 lemons, chunk of ginger

2
 Steep

3
 Add honey

Drink at least 3 cups

After a few hours the patient shall feel much friskier and be able to get stuck into life.

A snapshot of the Egham borders

Early moon in the afternoon sky, ping pong in a distant garage. Fern fronds uncurling, carpets of snowdrops. Patches of bracken flanked by yesteryear hazel. I once pressed a switch from that hedgerow. I keep it in the back of my book and it often falls out when I open it, a little bit of 1930 in 1988, like the whisper of distant voices in this building, never to be forgotten.

Sue