Campari for Breakfast Page 8

  Dear Aunt Fern,

  Thank you very much for the birthday present, I can’t remember what it was, but I can tell you how much I loved it.

  Cameo X

  She gets away with so much. Being the elder I fear the consequences of things more. Sometimes I wish I were the younger. It seems to be the easier choice. And yet I do understand it works the other way too, for example when M and F gave a dinner for the Aldermen and I was allowed to stay up late and Cameo wasn’t. I found her at the top of the stairs with a tearstained face.

  ‘Can I come down?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re seven,’ I said.

  Business news

  Father is training me up to know the family business, so I am adding a business column to my Commonplace. He is switching from paddy to indigo because there are rumblings within his workers. This means he will major in tea, coffee, sugar, cinnamon and some rubber, which gives him a nice spread of crops. He has also signed a new deal to import more fruit from the Cape.

  House news

  We spent a large part of this afternoon at the worm graveyard. We wanted the full works for Zelda, and Rev Thomas obliged. We held the wake in the eastern tree house, but we had to cut it short because Ross got bitten by an adder. The vet said if it had been July he would not have survived, as adders’ venom gets stronger as the summer progresses. Father says we are living in Tropical West Surrey, which has made Cameo scared to go for a walk unless she’s wearing her waders. But adders are gentle and avoid human contact. The thing they will not tolerate is being nosed at by a dog. Ross is recuperating in the laundry, so perhaps it has all been worth it. Terry has been quite sniffy about it all, he doesn’t like sharing his space.

  At the end of the day I dressed Cameo up, head to toe in adderproof costume, with winter socks and waders, and a little bell she could ring to alarm the snakes, and we went to the wood to pick bluebells before they all disappear. I needed Cameo’s help, because I want to try to produce a fine woodland scent again. (I think I know what went wrong before, I shouldn’t have added the yeast. Last year we had lined up thirty-two bottles in the laundry, filled with our chosen ingredients, forgetting that yeast rises when it is activated, and so we should not have closed the lids. It was very unfortunate, the entire batch exploded.)

  However, it did lead us into the thought of trying our hands at making wine. Mother threatens she will open a vein if we do. But though she declares that my rose splash smells like urine, she is still loyal enough to wear it. So I have to improve or she’ll smell, and we can’t have that. Here is the recipe:

  BLUEBELL CRUSH

  6 large baskets of bluebells (crushed with large stone or bat)

  1 Steep in kettle water at room temperature for no more than 2 hours

  2 Sieve mixture, retaining the crush for compost

  3 Add sugar (not yeast) and boil gently for 18 minutes

  4 Cool the essence

  5 Pour into dainty bottle

  6 Add label

  The bottles are at this moment in the laundry with the dogs. So far so good.

  Sue

  Thursday 23 April

  THE EAST WING at Green Place is now known as the Cobweb Kingdom. Until we all debunked into the dilapidated rooms there a week ago, the Admiral had the Kingdom to himself, with just the squirrels and birds for companions. We found most of the furniture there laying under sheeting like an army of unopened presents. A nest of tables here, a linen press there, the remainder of Aunt Coral’s glory day airlooms shivering under thin cover. There is an old laundry in the basement where you can sometimes hear voices whispering at the sink. Ghosts of former residents I thought, but apparently it is an air lock.

  There must have been hundreds of folk who have died at Green Place over time. My Great Great Great Grandmother Ellen bought the house in the 1840s, when Queen Annes were again in fashion, but there had previously been an even bigger house on the site, which was demolished long before the present house was built. So there have been lost souls wandering this site for at least three hundred years.

  I sometimes wonder why Aunt Coral doesn’t do more research into all of this, but I believe it would only fuel the imagination she is trying to control, leaving her prey to headless horsemen and maidens hanging from beams, in addition to the whisperers at the sink. She tries as hard as possible not to believe in ghosts. ‘For what is a ghost?’ she says. ‘Only the shadow of your shadow.’

  But getting back to the here and now, before I get the willies. Underneath the laundry there’s a cellar, with dusty rows of wine. Aunt C laid down a bottle for me when I was born, and is saving it for my eighteenth birthday. Down the way from the Admiral’s quarters is a room which is always kept locked, and for which there is only one key, held by Aunt Coral in private. No one has been in there for years, not even Mrs Bunion on bat patrol. It is separated from the rest of the Wing by a dividing door and a long corridor, at the end of which are two steps up to the left, leading to the locked room, and two steps up to the right, leading to another bedroom, which is left open. These suites are known as Bluebell Left and Right, and Aunt Coral and Nana Cameo lived in them when they were children. Aunt C is evasive about the locked one, because she says it holds unhappy memoirs.

  In the East–West reshuffle she gave Delia and Loudolle the most up-to-date suite, with its own bathroom with a working electric heater. This suite is called Snowdrop. She moved herself into a den type of room that used to be a study in its heyday, this room is called the Green Den. There isn’t much room for her pink-tasselled bed, but the size of the room means that it is possible to heat with just one small bar heater, and Aunt Coral really suffers with the cold, being only five foot two and mostly of skin and bones.

  I love my new room, which is right at the top of the East Wing and looks down the drive over the buddleia. It is separated from the other bedrooms by a small staircase, with some ominous treads and its own private corridor. This is called ‘Pearl’s Room’, after Aunt Coral’s mother, and is one of the largest rooms in the house. There is a painting of the desert on one wall, which Nana Pearl brought back from the Bush when she finally came back with Buddleia. Funny old Victorians, they really overdid things – Australia was a four-week voyage away back then!

  There are two sets of grand doors which lead on to a balcony, but it’s too dangerous to sit out on. A pity, because I saw myself having petty dejuner out there with Icarus after we’d lain in bed loving.

  To warm the room I have two camping heaters, which make a sound like hot air balloons, but after they’ve got going do well enough if you stand right up close to them. I have just become used to wearing extra layers in bed and I think a lot about summer. I still have to walk over to the West Wing for my bath, as it is too cold to bathe in the East. This daily routine takes the best part of an hour, travelling down the dusty passages in my towels, gooney and coat. I’ve always wondered why the Admiral didn’t wash very much.

  We have cleaned out our vacant West Wing rooms and Aunt Coral has put up notices in the post office advertising for lodgers. Now all there is to do is to wait and see what happens.

  The days seem to melt, like the secret journey of blossom petals on the spring trees. I work, I thrive, I fall to the ground and get blown in the house by the wind. There’s barely a moment that isn’t filled with the Toastie, or by writing, or by pottering around with my knickknacks. I’ve been through my chest of draws and put scented lining paper under my pants. I’ve hand-washed my thick winter hat and scarf, which are now drying on the bottom echelons of my washstand, and on my shelf I have created separate folders for each of my ‘Brackencliffe’ characters, into which I place inspirational notes. I don’t know what it is about spring. It makes me want to fissel.

  Dad didn’t take the fact that I want to excommunicate him sitting down. He has written to ask me to think about it. He said that while he can understand my feelings about Mum, he needs to move on with
his life in order to go on being alive. He also said that he and Ivana were considering having a baby because Ivana was in the last chance salon.

  Moving on with his life I can understand, though it is fast, and having a baby is, I suppose, one in the eye for death, but being together before Mum died, driving her to despair – for that I can never forgive him.

  According to Delia, widowers get into remarriages much quicker than widows do. But Mum’s memory is not even misty. She is still receiving post.

  I am currently going through a horrible phase with a nasty recurring dream in which I am hunting for mum’s suicide note. In the dream I always seem to be looking in a stupid wrong place, like in the kitchen at the Toastie or in the swimming pool at Green Place, and although I know I am looking in a stupid wrong place, I look anyway in spite of myself. I don’t find Mum’s note, but I do find notes from other people written in other languages. It’s like I’ve discovered the world suicide note bank, and though this upsets me, I still search through them all, hoping to find one from Mum, reading through all the despair and farewell, which is somehow understandable in any language, and then I wake up calling for my mother and Aunt Coral comes running.

  At least I have a small silver lining, which is that Loudolle has gone back to Alpen. Before she left the Admiral had taken to watching her swim each morning, getting up at ungodly hours to catch the mermaid. He plucked up the courage to complement her on the last day of her holidays.

  ‘Oh Loudolle, you were definitely hit with the pretty stick weren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘I was clobbered with it.’

  She has no modesty. It is just simply missing. It’s a wonder she can walk around without falling over under the weight of her great big head.

  And although that day was a day of uncommon sunshine, a nasty wind got up and upset all the ground leaves, just as Loudolle has upset the entire household in one foul swoop. I dread what the devil her long summer holidays might bring.

  Aunt Coral has been very strong about it all, and said that she understands the Admiral’s behaviour because his urge to hear the birds once more was strong.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because I’m canny,’ she said. ‘It’s a curse.’ She is convinced it was nothing more than a tender phase he was going through.

  In fact it strikes me we have had a case of great opposites at Green Place this Easter. Loudolle beautiful on the outside, ugly on the in, everything she touches looks like she’s advertising it. And Aunt Coral tired on the outside and lovely on the in. But what good is loveliness that can’t be seen in the world of shallow old men?

  I wish I were tall with slim knees and long hair like Loudolle. But being a large cup size means I must keep my hair short so that I don’t disappear into my cleeverage. The Doctor says my knees are ‘valgus’, which makes them sound like they’re brave, but I looked it up in the encyclopaedia and it means my knees are knocked. Joe has taken to calling me the knock-kneed novelist. I know he’s only joking, but it’s a bit of a sensitive issue. I wonder if Icarus has ever noticed my knees? I wonder how Icarus feels now that Loudolle has left, whether he’ll pick back up with Michael again, or perhaps someone else . . . and I’ve put his eye back under my pillow. Maybe it’s not over after all.

  Monday May 4th

  May is a month of bank holidays because of the work of John Lubbock. He was a Baron and a politician who campaigned for additional holidays and shorter working hours for the poor. I know this because I have been reading the encyclopaedia again in bed. I found a lovely thing he said about books: ‘We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.’ I’m going to put it on Aunt C’s desk as a surprise and inspiration.

  We didn’t get many replies to our ads for lodgers in the end, so the Admiral offered two of his ex-navy friends suites in the West Wing, and they moved into Green Place at the end of last month. Admiral Gordon and Admiral Ted served with him on the SS St Francis when they were all young men. He knew that though they had been looking for accommodation in London, the opportunity to live in a catered mansion would be beyond their wildest dreams.

  Admiral Gordon is a ginger man with a large stomach, and is a hearty outdoors sort of chap who slept up on deck when he was at sea. An expert in navigation, he has been blown away by Aunt C’s marine timekeepers, which she was bequeathed from her Father’s fleet. Over introductory cups of tea, Delia was trying to impress, and told Admiral Gordon that her Mother was a gypsy who cooked everything on one ring and served everything up with strong tea. I’m sure this is to exoticise herself; Aunt C says her mother came from Chiswick.

  Admiral Ted is tall and swanaway, with a long tash that absorbs a lot of his dinner. He comes from a little place called Shooters Bottom, I wish he hadn’t told me that. He’s a helpful sort of chap, and interested in people’s problems, and also a man of caution, who beeps his horn before the bends on the drive.

  Although it feels like we now live with half the marines, the new Admirals have taken to life at Green Place like ducks to water. They pay their rent on time, help with the garden, wolf down the cuisine, and enjoy a game of bowels.

  With three Admirals on site paying rent and being helpful, Aunt Coral should be able to start chipping away at some of her debts. She can also begin to get jobs ticked off her To Do list, such as the insulation of the letter box, and some sanding, drilling and planering, as well as cutting back the ground elder that is so rampant around the estate. Admiral Ted has already started on the latter, and dresses himself in full manly garb for the job, including a waterproof jerkin, trousers with patch pockets for his snippers, and traditional barbershop wellies which he prefers for country use.

  The Grey Room has just gone to a Japanese gentleman on business, whose name is Mr Tsunawa. Aunt Coral promised him that the Grey Room is haunted to sell him the full English country house experience. This involves one of us going and clanking a chain outside his bedroom door late at night. It is a new way of life for us all, but we have quickly adjusted because we need to.

  Thursday 14 May

  From the moment I discovered Aunt Coral sobbing on her bills I’ve made it my mission to help her, so I am in charge of cutbacks and debt management at Green Place. While the money from the lodgers keeps us all in food and heating, it doesn’t do much else.

  As well as leaving her the house, Aunt Coral’s Father also left her his portfolio of shares. The shares are held in steel, coal, tin mines and Marks and Spencer’s, and she also has a punt with some gold. In addition, Great Grandfather Evelyn left Aunt Coral all the remainder of his collections: tapestries, busts and sculptures, a rococo carving in the hall, and a valuable Dick Van Dyke that hails from his Genoese period.

  Showing such favouritism to Aunt Coral and leaving very little to mum caused a great upset at the reading of his Will – though I suppose now we all know why. However my mother was not left without anything as when Nana Pearl died in 1955, she had requested that her bank accounts were formed into trusts entirely for Mum. There was enough to get a deposit, or do up a small house, and they were set up to become liquid on the ‘second death’ (that was Grampa Evelyn), so both Coral and Mum would inherit at the same time. But as Mum died so soon after Grampa Evelyn’s death the trust money was frozen in probate, and it still hasn’t come through yet due to the complicated nature of mum’s death. By law my father has a claim to this as well as me, but at least the slow probate means that it’s protected from him for now.

  Anyway, it struck me that selling some shares would pay off a small amount of Aunt Coral’s debts, but when I brought the matter up last week, she was adamant they remain as rainy day funds, in case she needs her hips done, or has some sort of medical emergency. She also argued that while the money was still in shares it is difficult for her to spend it, as converting shares involves a great deal of admin, and the reading of the Financial Times. I think she just likes to know they’re still there.

  However,
I have also found out that the Bentley doesn’t belong to the Admiral but is in fact Aunt Coral’s. She just loved the idea of having a driver so much that she lent it to him and bought him a chauffeur’s hat. In real life the Admiral only has a Rover, so driving a Bentley’s a coo! But I think he’s a very nice guy to go along with the hat.

  So today I moved on to other tactics, and suggested that the sale of the Bentley would pay off some of her store cards, but she argued she has a very good reason to keep it. The reason is the Nanas. Though she is approximately over sixty-five herself, (which she smallens to sixty-three), Aunt Coral likes to help the aged, and once a week she goes to the home in Egham and takes three of the Nanas there out on a drive: Mrs Dryberry, Mrs Scott, and Mrs Viller. Because of their habitual clothing choices we call them Georgette, Print and Taffeta. They come for lunch once a week which they take on the terrace alf rescos. They share a lot of her interests, such as rambling and Nana Mouskouri. Apparently driving the Nanas gives Aunt C’s life meaning. I also think that because they are so ancient, they make her feel young.

  I worked and worked on her this morning as we sat out by the pool, trying to persuade her that the Nanas would just as soon be driven in the Rover as the Bentley, but she just doesn’t know how to think like a parson. I realised that I would have to explore a more heavy approach.

  ‘If you cut Mrs Bunion down to two days a week, you and Delia could clean for the other afternoons instead of shop,’ I said. You can imagine what sort of a face this was met with.

  ‘Pat’s been with me for ever, I’ve known her for years, she’s part of the building, and there’s her family to consider.’