Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War

by Vernon Coleman

  `Don't you like it? asked Jenkins.

  Mrs Caldicot, who had been staring into space without seeing anything, focused her attention on her dinner partner. He seemed blurred and she was suddenly aware that she had tears in her eyes.

  `The food,' he explained. He nodded to her plate, virtually untouched.

  `It's very good,' she assured him.

  `Are you all right?' he asked, concerned. He reached across the table and touched the back of her left hand lightly with the tips of his own right hand.

  Mrs Caldicot turned her hand over, grasped his fingers and squeezed them gently. `I'm fine,' she whispered. She looked at him for a long, long moment. `I just don't remember ever being quite so happy,' she explained. When she'd spoken she felt embarrassed, though she did not really know why.

  `Penny for them,' said Jenkins.

  Mrs Caldicot didn't answer straight away.

  `Penny for your thoughts,' Jenkins explained unnecessarily.

  For a moment Mrs Caldicot still didn't answer. `It's been a beautiful evening,' she said, her voice hoarse with emotion. `I've never done anything like this before,' she added. She tried to stop the tears because she didn't want to cry.

  `You must have been to the theatre even if you haven't seen a ballet!'

  Mrs Caldicot shook her head. `My husband and I didn't do things like that,' she said. Her voice felt stronger.

  `But when you were younger? When you were courting?'

  `We went to the cinema a few times.' She shrugged. `Westerns mainly...,' She looked at him and smiled. `I'm not complaining,' she said. `My husband never treated me badly.' He hadn't. He had never hit her. Never publicly criticised her.

  `It gives me a lot of pleasure to be with you,' said Jenkins softly. She suddenly realised that she was still holding his hand. Slowly, she relaxed her grip. But his fingers did not move away from hers.

  `Don't let your meal go cold,' said Mrs Caldicot.

  They both ate. Mrs Caldicot was glad he hadn't said anything else. She enjoyed their silences together. She wasn't sure enough of herself to be able to share her feelings with him yet.

  Afterwards, he drove her home. It had been raining and the streets were glistening. The reflections of the street lights sparkled on the wet pavements and she thought how romantic everywhere looked. Even buildings which in the brightness of daylight seemed drab and dull seemed strangely exciting in the darkness of the night. She did not mention any of this to him because she was slightly embarrassed at having such silly and romantic thoughts.

  When they said goodnight he kissed her on both cheeks as she'd seen French people do on television and he held both her hands in his and squeezed them lightly. Long after she'd climbed into bed she lay awake going over every moment of the evening in her mind. At twenty past two in the morning she realised that the bedside light was still switched on. She turned it off, snuggled down beneath the bedclothes and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Gerald, the man from the commercial department of the estate agents for which Derek worked had telephoned her early the following morning. He sounded excited. When he picked her up in the Mettleham Grand Hotel foyer an hour later he still sounded excited. If he had been a woman he would have been described as `bubbly'. He wore a cheap suit which didn't fit him terribly well but didn't look as bad on him as it might have done because he wore it with an expensive shirt, a silk tie and a pair of what looked like expensive Italian loafers with gold coloured buckles on the sides. He had a chunky, gold coloured bracelet on his right wrist and a chunky gold coloured watch on his left wrist. He smiled a lot and smelt of something unusually delicate which reminded Mrs Caldicot more of a woman's perfume than a man's aftershave. She thought he looked like a cross between a gigolo and a second-hand car salesman, and when he took her arm as they walked out to his car she was conscious of, and secretly rather enjoyed, disapproving looks from a gaggle of matronly and arthritic women who were clambering out of a mini bus.

  `I've got just the place for you,' he promised her as he drove furiously through the early morning traffic. He seemed unusually fond of changing gear and kept one hand permanently resting on a shortened gear stick which was topped with a polished walnut sphere. `You'll love it! It only came on the market yesterday afternoon.' His car had a tiny air freshener hanging from the driving mirror and a `No Smoking' notice stuck to the front of the glove compartment. The air freshener reminded her of Mr Caldicot for it, too, made the car smell rather like a public lavatory. The car was spotless inside, without so much as a sweet paper on the floor.

  `The important thing is that it must have enough rooms,' said Mrs Caldicot quite firmly.

  `Oh, this place has got absolutely oceans of space!' Gerald assured her. He turned and beamed at her and looked back at the road just in time to avoid a head on collision with a double decker bus. `You'll love it!' he promised.

  `I'm sure I will!' agreed Mrs Caldicot, digging her fingernails into the car's fake velour upholstery. She closed her eyes as they seemed to head straight for an elderly and innocent pedestrian who had recklessly chosen that moment to attempt a crossing of the road. She wondered why she had felt safe with Jenkins, whose driving could hardly be described as cautious, while she felt distinctly unsafe with Gerald at the wheel.

  `Lovely secluded grounds, emergency fire escape and fitted carpets throughout,' said Gerald, as excited as if he himself found these advantages irresistible.

  Rather tentatively Mrs Caldicot opened her eyes. There had been no sudden scream and no interruption to their progress but despite the absence of this expected evidence of motorised manslaughter she had still half expected to see the pedestrian draped across the bonnet and the windscreen spattered with blood. `That's nice,' she said, surprised at how calm her voice sounded.

  `Here we are!' said Gerald, a few moments later, driving in through the absurdly gothic iron gates which guarded the driveway up to The Twilight Years Rest Home.

  ***

  Mr Fuller-Hawksmoor, the former proprietor of The Twilight Years Rest Home, and Mrs Caldicot's hapless adversary in the now famous Cabbage War, had suffered a deadly blow when Mrs Caldicot and her followers had walked out.

  Without their weekly payments splashing into his bank account he had quite quickly found himself unable to satisfy the bank's insatiable demand for cash. What made things even worse was the fact that after Mrs Caldicot's appearances on television his previously untarnished reputation as a caring individual (untarnished only because no one had cared enough to make the effort to tarnish it) had been besmirched so badly that no other old people had been prepared to enter through the stuccoed portals of The Twilight Years Rest Home. Without in any way meaning to, Mrs Caldicot had succeeded in ruining her former host. The bank, the true owners of The Twilight Years Rest Home, had foreclosed with all the sensitivity and remorse of a boa constrictor swallowing its prey. The few remaining disabled and incontinent residents had moved out and onwards to cleaner sheets elsewhere, and Mr Fuller-Hawksmoor had spent a dull and unproductive morning at the local unemployment exchange struggling quite unsuccessfully to persuade a 16-year-old girl with halitosis of anaesthetic proportions that `Nursing Home Proprietor' was an acceptable and acknowledged occupation.

  `How much do you want for it?' asked Mrs Caldicot.

  Gerald, standing next to her on the gravel turning circle beneath the front door, tossed the keys to the front door up into the air and almost caught them. `Don't you want to see inside?' He bent down and picked up the keys. He was not in the slightest bit embarrassed by this example of fate in action.

  `It's just what I'm looking for,' said Mrs Caldicot. `How much?'

  Gerald went back to his car, brought a briefcase from the back seat, opened it and took out a printed brochure which had a space where there ought to have been a photograph of the home. He put the briefcase down on the ground.

  `We haven't got the photos back from the printer yet,' he apologised. He handed the brochure to Mrs Cald
icot and pointed to the price.

  `How much would the monthly payments be on that?' she asked.

  Gerald, bent down, took a calculator out of his briefcase and pressed the keys a few times. Then he held the calculator up so that Mrs Caldicot could see its tiny screen.

  Mrs Caldicot did some quick calculations of her own. It was much less than a quarter of what they were paying to stay in the Mettleham Grand Hotel.

  `That's far too much,' she said, surprising herself by her shamelessness. She made a counter offer.

  `I'll have to get back to you on that,' said Gerald frowning.

  `I'd like to see inside now, please,' said Mrs Caldicot.

  `Of course!' agreed Gerald, as though as it were the most natural thing in the world for a client to make an offer to buy a property and then to ask to look round it. He picked up his briefcase and took out a mobile phone. `If you don't mind looking around by yourself I could ring the bank and see what they say to your offer...' he suggested, keen to strike while Mrs Caldicot's iron was hot. He opened the front door as he spoke.

  `That's a good idea,' said Mrs Caldicot, suddenly overwhelmed by a barrage of memories, most of them unpleasant. She tried to smile at him but no smile would come. She disappeared inside the building, stepping over the inevitable pile of leaflets, free newspapers and unsolicited mail which is tipped through the letterbox of any empty or abandoned building within hours of the previous owner's exit, and wondered how long it would take for the smell of cabbage to disappear. Maybe, she thought, she could festoon the whole building with little disinfectant air fresheners like the one hanging from Gerald's driving mirror.

  It seemed strange to be back.

  She wandered around and it rather reminded her of the Marie Celeste. The carpets, curtains and furniture were all just as they were when she had left. In the living room there was an open copy of the Radio Times lying on the seat of a green, plastic covered easy chair. In the dining room the salt and pepper containers were still standing in the middle of all the tables. A few assorted catering tins and boxes of unwanted food stood on the shelves in the kitchen. A tabloid newspaper, neatly folded, lay on top of the refrigerator. In the bedroom which she had shared with her two friends there was a metal kidney dish on a bedside table and a bottle of pills had been abandoned on the mantelpiece. These small physical memories made it look as though the residents had been spirited away by aliens, leaving everything behind them as it had been.

  Mrs Caldicot stood for a moment and then heard a noise from down below.

  `Hello! Mrs Caldicot? I've got some good news for you!' she heard Gerald say. Mrs Caldicot walked down the stairs towards him. Still clutching his mobile phone he had stepped into the hallway.

  `The bank has accepted your offer,' said Gerald. `I didn't think they would but I put in a good word for you...'

  `That's very kind of you,' thought Mrs Caldicot who didn't believe him for an instant. `I don't believe you for an instant!' she said, laughing.

  Gerald, who was not in the slightest embarrassed by this, smiled at her.

  `Take your time looking round,' he said. `I'll take you back to your hotel when you've finished.'

  `That's very kind of you,' smiled Mrs Caldicot, who rather thought she might be pushing her luck to accept another ride in Gerald's disinfected vehicle, `but I'd quite like the walk.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  It took the estate agents, the banks and the lawyers a week to make all the arrangements so that Mrs Caldicot and her friends could move back into what had, in its previous incarnation, been known as The Twilight Years Rest Home. It took Mrs Caldicot another week to arrange for all the existing furniture in the building to be taken away and sold at auction; for a team of decorators to paint the whole of the inside of the building and for a supply of new furniture to be delivered. While she waited for these improvements to be made Mrs Caldicot traced all the disabled and incontinent former residents of The Twilight Years Rest Home and told them all that they could, if they wanted to, come back to stay with her and the other residents.

  The careful, cautious and indomitably pessimistic Derek had insisted that the whole process would inevitably take at least a month to six weeks to complete but Mrs Caldicot had succeeded in speeding things up by the simple expedient of issuing an ultimatum.

  `If we aren't moving into the building within two weeks the whole deal is off,' she had told Gerald, and because she had meant it Gerald had believed her. Anxious not to lose his commission Gerald had convinced the solicitors and bankers of Mrs Caldicot's determination. Since they, in their turn, were also keen not to lose their hefty fees, the unnecessary administrative and bureaucratic delays which normally hinder any legal process were suddenly dismissed for what they are (unnecessary administrative and bureaucratic delays) by the only people who have the power to push them aside: the administrators and bureaucrats who had created them in the first place. Mrs Caldicot's appearances on television had given her a strong image which she knew was undeserved, but fortunately this knowledge was not widely shared.

  To begin with Miss Nightingale, Mrs Peterborough and the others were more than a touch reluctant to leave the Mettleham Grand Hotel. They had grown to like living there; having become particularly fond of the Sports and Leisure Complex. Mrs Caldicot had, however, managed to overcome their resistance by promising them that they would have their own leisure and fitness centre built onto the side of the building.

  `It won't be run like a nursing home,' she told them. `You'll all be part owners. It'll be a cooperative venture!'

  Mrs Caldicot organised interviews for staff and hired a chef, a housekeeper, two waiters and a more than adequate complement of nursing and cleaning staff. She told the housekeeper that she wanted the waiters to wear black suits, white shirts and black ties while the nurses had to wear proper nursing uniforms.

  `You don't know what you're taking on!' Derek kept insisting gloomily, but Mrs Caldicot knew exactly what she was taking on and was excited rather than alarmed by it all. She discovered, to her delight, that the money they had been paying as rent to The Twilight Years Rest Home would enable them to live in comparative luxury.

  `Will we have a Jack Oozy?' asked Miss Nightingale, who had grown exceedingly partial to a daily bubble bath.

  `We certainly will!' Mrs Caldicot assured her.

  `And exercise bicycles?'

  `Definitely!'

  `With bells?'

  `Of course!'

  `Of course!' said Mrs Peterborough firmly.

  The opposition to the move, in truth never anything more than a hint of apprehension, faded quickly into a memory and in due course Mrs Caldicot and her followers moved out of their hotel and back into what was known as The Twilight Years Rest Home.

  When their hired coach (Oppenshaw's Char-a-bancs: No Journey Too Short with driver Ted) turned into the drive and passed through the ornate iron gates, the returning residents cheered as they saw the sign which Mrs Caldicot had had specially painted and erected.

  `Home Sweet Home' it said in letters two feet high. Underneath, in only slightly smaller letters, were the words `No Cabbage Allowed'.

  It was a victory and a return of which Napoleon himself would have been proud.

  The Beginning

  You can follow Mrs Caldicot’s further adventures in Vernon Coleman’s second novel about Mrs Caldicot. The title of the sequel to Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War is Mrs Caldicot’s Knickerbocker Glory.

  To find out more about this and other books by Vernon Coleman visit www.vernoncoleman.com

  Everything on www.vernoncoleman.com is free and there are no advertisements but there is a bookshop telling readers how to buy copies of books by Vernon Coleman.

  Copyright Vernon Coleman 2014

 

 

 
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