by Joy Dettman
A young Norwegian chap of sixty-odd latched onto her and her seventy-year-old roommate on the ferry to Dublin. His own roommate wasn’t well. A few were seasick on the ferry – the perfect introduction to the city of Cara’s dreams.
Dec 24th: Dublin. Bitterly cold, dark, wet and miserable. Overcoat wet. Wish it would snow. Want to see a white Christmas, she wrote in her notebook, which lived now in the pocket of her wet overcoat, with her smokes, lighter, spare films for her camera, and serviettes. Too much trouble digging deep through her bag to find what she needed in a hurry.
Dec 25th: Still Dublin. Inhabitants undergrown, underfed. Plenty of churches to feed their souls. Colourful Virgin Mary statue on every corner and halfway down every block.
Some of the world’s greatest writers had lived in Dublin. It had been Cara’s Mecca, as Paris had been Jenny’s. In Dublin, she gave up fighting a lunatic shower, washed her face and went to bed, eager to get out of the place.
Ate Christmas dinner with Norway chap, Yank roommate and eighty-three year old. Norway told us about his mate, who wasn’t seasick but had a burst appendix – and whether he gets out of this country alive or not is ‘in the hands of the good Lord and his saintly mother’. God help him and me. Wish I’d stayed home.
Dec 26th: Back on the mainland and heading for Scotland. Different country, different accents.
Scotland impressed her. Maybe Hank the Yank or Lanky Link had a dribble of Scottish blood in their veins. She filled several notebook pages there, and gave up on her woollen headscarf. She’d remember Scotland’s hills, its water, and an old wool mill where a waterwheel still laboured. She bought a tartan beret there, which she could pull low over her ears, and a pair of matching gloves she’d paid too much for – or maybe not too much. For the first time since the plane had landed, she was warm.
Tried for minutes to get a good shot of a shaggy Highland cow when the bus actually stopped for five minutes. The cow was camera shy, wouldn’t pose. Found one at the place they stopped for lunch – a happy cow on a postcard, standing beneath a blue sky. And where the hell had they found a blue sky in Britain?
Dec 27th: Bathrooms from one end of the British Isles to the other are impossible. The longer I fight them, the better my dogbox bathroom looks. Distance truly makes the heart grow fonder. Saw more castles today, and one grand castle in good repair. The bus stopped for an hour there. Rained again. No snow.
Dec 28th: Back to London for the obligatory photographs of Buckingham Palace. Wet, low, grey sky. Only took shots for Mum. Bought her a postcard of the place, perfectly framed beneath another fake blue sky. It’s a con. Got close-up shot of cute squirrel in nearby park, and one of a wet raven guarding the Bloody Tower. Bought postcards of the Crown Jewels for Mum and Georgie.
And it was over.
AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION
A London cab delivered her back to Pete’s pad, to her blow-up mattress and sleeping bag. By the look and smell of it, she hadn’t been the last to sleep in that bag. Hoped the new bloke with the lousy-looking hair hadn’t used it.
Pete and a van full of his mates took her on a bon voyage pub crawl, and if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Too drunk to worry about lice when they delivered her back to their hole, she crawled into her sleeping bag and died until Friday morning. Rose with a hangover to end all hangovers and an itchy scalp she swore was crawling with head lice.
Donated her mattress and sleeping bag to the lousy one, and walked away from the place with her case and zip bag to catch the first London bus that came by. Allowed it to take her where it would for as long as it would – and saw more of the real London from her top-floor perch than its watering holes and tourist attractions.
The bus stopped at a shopping centre somewhere – which had no resemblance to any Australian shopping centre she’d ever seen, but she found a pharmacy.
Three hours and multiple buses, a train and a taxi later, she saw Morrie’s manor house. Be it nerves or London painkillers, her stomach had a hangover that almost eclipsed the one in her head.
No cars. No people milling, no tree-lined drive leading to the door of a house taken root in antiquity, when man had built walls of stone and expected them to stand forever. She’d expected old, stately, manicured gardens, a swarm of wedding guests playing croquet on manicured lawns.
Too cold for croquet?
Scared, sick, wishing she’d stayed in Sydney or at Pete’s – no, she didn’t wish she’d stayed at Pete’s – her scalp crawling beneath her beret, she questioned the cab driver. ‘Are you certain this is the Langdon residence?’
With a little imagination, his thick accented reply may have translated to ‘Old landmark in the area’. Marking what? Paddocks.
He had better manners than Aussie taxi drivers. He carried her case to a worn stone doorstep. No shelter over it, and the sky drizzling again. She gave him his money and away he went, while she hammered a door knocker against a massive door. No butler, no maid came to open it.
She hammered that knocker again and looked up. Window above. No maid leaning out, looking down. No movement. No sound.
Something wasn’t right. Morrie’s father must have died. Or the main entrance was around the side.
She walked left to where ivy covered a wall and most of a small-paned window. Reached high to peep in. No light to see what might be in there. She’d expected action, cars, dogs. There was a car parked down the side, but no entrance.
In his letter, Morrie had said that Bernard and Letty had umpteen siblings, myriad nieces and nephews, and that half of them would expect a bed. They were probably at the church, rehearsing, or decorating it, or gone to the bride’s house for a pre-wedding dinner. Morrie knew the approximate time she’d arrive: she’d told him she’d make her own way out there in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth. Quarter to four may not be England’s idea of afternoon – not in winter.
They had to have maids, someone. The place was huge.
She hammered the knocker again, and continued hammering it. That received a response.
‘Who thart be knocking out there?’ Another weird accent.
‘I’m looking for Mrs Leticia Langdon’s residence,’ she called.
‘What business do ye be ’aving with ’er, lussie?’
‘Would Morrie Langdon be in, please?’
The heavy door was opened, and not by a butler. She was swallowed up by Morrie’s arms and kissed to within an inch of her life. Lousy, hungover, scared, nauseous and exhausted, she couldn’t have evaded him had she tried.
‘Fool,’ she said when free to say it.
‘Don’t be takin’ it personal, lussie,’ he said. ‘’ad ye been a blue ’eeler with the mange, I would a kissed ye, just to get me a taste of Orstralia.’
His smile was too wide, his eyes older, but so pleased to see her.
‘Lovely accent,’ she said.
‘It had you going there for a while,’ he said.
‘This place is ancient, Morrie.’
‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This is the modern bit. It’s only been up since 1739.’
He picked up her case and she followed him into a dark hall, her eyes darting, fighting to see what they might see. This was research. This was learning things she didn’t know. Ceilings a mile high. Fancy panelled walls. Big. A staircase to the left, also big; and an elderly woman approaching from the right – tiny.
Cara was introduced to Morrie’s Aunt Leticia, a dumpy wee dame clad in a frock and cardigan stretched to fit a rotund little frame.
‘I was over there with my Henry, a year or two before he passed, and what a terrible dry place, it is, dear,’ she said of Australia.
She was wearing blue, both frock and cardigan. If Bernard had died, she’d be wearing black.
‘How’s your father?’ Cara asked Morrie.
‘Gone beyond the pale,’ Morrie said.
He’d been on his way to the stairs, but he placed her case down and ushered her to the right and into a long, overheated room, i
ts walls lined with the same patterned rectangular wooden panelling. Was it wainscoting? Old English fiction was full of wainscoting.
‘My God,’ she breathed. ‘You live here?’
‘Live being something of an overstatement, lussie,’ he said.
A beautiful old fireplace. No fire burning in it, but the room was stifling hot after the chill of outdoors. They found Bernard, near lost in a large modern chair. Such a thing should never have been in that room; nor should the television, flashing today’s idea of entertainment two metres from the chair.
‘Are you awake, Pops?’ Morrie asked, from a distance.
Cara approached the little man. ‘Hello, Mr Langdon.’
He didn’t recognise her. She touched his shoulder, told him they’d met in Ballarat. No response. His gaze didn’t leave the television screen.
‘You’re not hearing much today, are you, little one,’ Leticia said. She patted him, then sat in an identical chair, close enough to Bernard’s so she might reach out and pat him at will. ‘She’s Morris’s friend from Australia,’ she explained to her comatose brother.
Cara turned her back on the chairs, on the television, to take in a massive cabinet set against the far wall. It may have been against that wall since they’d built the house. Turned again to the multiple-paned window, then, stifled by the heat of the room, she removed her overcoat and pushed the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows.
‘You have an incredible house, Mrs Langdon.’
‘Aunt Letty’s near enough, dear. I’m aunt to twenty-eight nieces and seventeen nephews,’ she said. ‘Girls run in the Grenville family. I had eight sisters and four brothers. Bernard was the unlucky thirteenth, weren’t you, little one. Our poor mother didn’t live to raise him, and our father wasn’t long behind her.’
Barely a puff of misty white hair, sagging apple cheeks: she was Bernard’s sister, no doubting that. She wasn’t the Leticia Cara had seen in her mind’s eye.
A talking machine, little Letty, she had a captive listener in her baby brother, but not in Morrie. Ten minutes later he ushered Cara from the long room into one somewhat smaller, where a smaller ancient cabinet contained bottles. He selected one and poured a dash of amber into two small glasses while Cara stuffed her woolly beanie and gloves into the pocket of her overcoat, then draped it over the back of a chair.
‘Feeling the ’eat, lussie?’
‘I’ve acclimatised to your winter. I thought these old places would be impossible to heat.’
‘They be expensive to ’eat.’
She took the offered glass, didn’t taste it. ‘So where is everyone? You said you’d have a full house.’
‘A slight change of plan, lussie. So, what be happening in the colonies?’
‘I’ve heard enough accents this past week to last me for six lifetimes. I shared a bedroom with a Yank for six nights, and her voice is still jangling against my eardrum; and every time I dodged her, I ran into a sixty-year-old Norwegian. Tell me about Phyllis.’
‘A horsewoman of some repute; only child of Donald Willis, of Willis, Willis & Willis; a strawberry blonde, a wee bit horsy, not too bad in the hay.’
Bad, bad idea coming out here. Bad, bad idea flying to London in December. Turned her back to him and sipped from the glass. Spirits of some breed. According to Pete, a drop of the dog that had bitten you was the only way to cure a hangover. She sipped a little more.
‘Are you employed these days?’ she asked.
‘Oi be chief moinder, lussie,’ he replied.
‘Who’ll look after your father when you marry?’
‘Phyllis be plannin’ to ’ave the old folk put down–’
‘Will you quit it with the accent and give me one semi-sane reply!’
‘They shoot lame horses, don’t they?’ he said.
She walked to a window to look out at the land. She was here. She’d spend the night in antiquity and take away from it what she could.
‘I didn’t know people still owned this much land in England. I didn’t know there was this much land not built on in England.’
‘Henry sold off half of the estate to pay the death duties when his father died. The developers have been driving Letty mad this past year; or they were until I cut off the phone – with a carving knife.’
‘Have you caught your father’s disease?’
‘There be a second reason for my ’asty disconnection, lussie.’
‘I’ve had the wettest, most uncomfortable, most miserable bloody Christmas of my entire life, Morrie. I’m probably lousy, I’ve got a blinding headache, and in a minute I’m going to vomit. Right now, I’d appreciate a mote of sanity, a handful of painkillers, a hot bath, then a bed with a soft pillow – and if you can’t supply that, then I’d appreciate a lift to some place that can.’
‘We don’t be ’aving no louse killer ’andy, lussie.’
‘I brought my own.’
She had, from the pharmacy. Had bought a bottle of pommy painkillers along with the lice killer and had swallowed two before she’d caught the train. They hadn’t touched her headache.
He emptied his glass, then led her via a different route back to the front hall, where he picked up her case then walked ahead upstairs. She followed him to the upper floor, through a door, a room, to older, bare-board stairs, each step visibly worn in its centre where a thousand shoes had trodden before her own. They led to a rooftop room, unlike the other rooms. Older, much older.
‘Watch your ’ead on them there beams. They be building these places for wee midgets. Oi spent my first moonths ’ere with concoossion.’
‘Early brain damage leads to senility,’ she said.
‘Pops never grew tall enough to bump his head.’
Modern chairs and a television downstairs, and a four-poster bed complete with hangings up here. She stood in the doorway, breathing in the age of it, her eyes feasting on ancient furniture, walls, heavy ceiling beams.
‘My God! You live in history.’
‘Thart I do, lussie,’ he said.
He left her to stare, to run her hand down the post of the bed, carved not by a machine but by man, left her repeating, ‘My God,’ and, minutes later, returned with a glass of water, a bottle of aspros and two towels.
She poured three tablets to her palm, tossed the lot into her mouth and washed them down, while he waited to direct her to a bathroom.
Picked up her case and her zip bag, which contained her louse shampoo, and followed him back down the narrow stairs to the newer section, where he opened a door to a bathroom with a tiled walk-in shower recess. Not as classy as Chris’s, but modern, with a common shower rose and taps that screamed Made in Australia.
She saluted the shower, placed her case and bag down, then reached for the towels he carried.
‘Will ye be requirin’ a back scrubber then, lussie?’
‘Out,’ she said.
He closed the door. She locked it, and didn’t unlock it for an hour, when the bottle of louse shampoo was empty and the three aspros had begun to move to where they were required to go. Kissed her fingers to the shower when she left the room. Clean again, feeling human again, she found her way back to the door that led to the stair that led to the room in the roof. Knew he’d chosen that room for the writer he believed her to be; knew he’d been watching her face when he opened the door. He knew her too well – as she knew him.
Ready to write down her first impressions of Morrie’s house, to describe that four-poster bed, she opened the door into the roof room – and found him seated on the bed.
‘That’s the first functional shower I’ve sighted since I arrived,’ she said.
‘We had a thriving business here until Mum got sick. We charged extra for the privilege of getting concussion in here. Will ye be takin’ it for a month then, lussie?’
‘I fly home on Sunday. I’ll take my case with me to the reception and get a taxi from wherever it is to the airport. I’m supposed to be there by six.’
He nodded
a while. ‘Excellent plan,’ he said. ‘Sadly, there be no reception for ye to be takin’ a taxi from.’
‘Your greeting was very funny, but the humour has worn off.’
‘As has the wedding,’ he said. ‘Worn off.’
Her headache had been easing. The sharp turn of her head brought it back with a thump. ‘You devious bloody swine,’ she said. ‘I should have known you were lying when I saw that name. There never was a Phyllis Willis.’
‘Oh, there be one of them, lussie–’
‘Stop it, I said! Stop that bullshit right now or, by God, I’ll throw this case at your head!’
‘She rents one of Letty’s fields for her horses.’
‘And she’s probably ninety-nine and six axe handles across. There never was a bloody wedding.’
‘Was so,’ he said. ‘And she’s twenty-two.’
‘I hate you.’
‘Join the queue. I’m public enemy number one in the Willis clan. They’re going to sue me for breach of promise and stick my head on a spike at their gate.’
‘Why?’ she moaned.
‘They like trophies.’
‘Jesus, God and Mother Mary, save me from drunken jesters!’ she wailed. Picking up her case, bag, coat, she opened the door. ‘Where can I call a taxi?’
‘Try the Willis place. Down the hill and to your right. Though your head could end up on a spike when they hear your accent.’
She pitched her zip bag at his legs, sent her case spinning after it, then her coat. He picked the items up, one by one, placed the bag and coat on the bed, the case on a wooden trunk beneath a window.
‘She’s been pursuing me since she turned fourteen – or maybe thirteen. She knew I was married. I was paying her father to get you free of me. Around the time your solicitor started sticking his nose into it, the relationship underwent an alteration and she got herself pregnant.’
‘With no help from you.’
‘She near rode me into the ground, lussie. The wee bairn jumped ship, so I jumped behind him.’
‘Get out of my sight. Get the hell out of my room and stay out of it!’