A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  “Thanks a lot,” he mumbled. Sulkily he complied. Three minutes later . . .

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Your temperature is 102.”

  Jeremy swore under his breath and then said, “No wonder I feel like death warmed over.”

  “Don’t die, Jeremy!” I exclaimed, running to get him some aspirin. He was sitting in the kitchen, shivering a little, despite the way the old-fashioned wood-burning stove was warming the room.

  “Hah-choo!” he said in response. He paused. “That,” he said ominously, “was a particularly bad sneeze. I don’t think you should come near me. I’d better sleep out on the sofa.”

  “No, I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I volunteered. “You need the bed.”

  He coughed again, too miserable to argue, and he trotted off to the bedroom, flinging himself on the bed, where he fell asleep instantly.

  He slept and slept. It scared me a little. I kept tiptoeing in to make sure he was still breathing.

  But the next day, despite the aspirin, he still had a fever, which climbed even higher. He was coughing and so congested that I put a little pan of water on the hob, to mist the room.

  “Everything aches all over,” he admitted, “even my hair hurts!”

  “What’s the matter with Jeremy?” Shannon asked a few days later, having stopped by to show me some of the new cheese she was making. When I told her, she frowned.

  “I know. There’s something like that going around; the other farm families had it. Better let Doctor Calthrop take a look,” she advised. “He’ll come today if I tell him I’ve got his favorite cheese ready for him.”

  A few hours later, the doctor rapped on the front door, waking Jeremy from the sleep he kept drifting in and out of. The doctor was about fifty, and had curly grey hair, a fuzzy grey beard, and the sort of tweedy suit that seemed more indicative of an absentminded professor.

  He didn’t say much at first, just fell into a sort of tuneless humming at regular intervals between taking Jeremy’s blood pressure and pulse, examining his throat and listening to his chest.

  Jeremy eyed Doctor Calthrop with undisguised dubiousness. But apart from asking Jeremy key questions, like, “Does your throat hurt more in the morning, or is it the same all day?” the doctor basically ignored Jeremy’s gaze and instead talked to me as I hovered worriedly in the doorway.

  “Bacterial throat infection. Seen lots of it this summer. He’ll be needing antibiotics,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Doctor Calthrop handed me some pills, and a cough syrup. “He should eat if he has any appetite. Start him slowly, on toast and tea,” he advised as he packed up his bag. “Bananas if you can find them. Then some clear soup, and rice. If he’s hungry enough for real food, feed him eggs or some plain chicken. Whatever he has an appetite for is okay. Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids.”

  “What about Penny?” Jeremy croaked from the bed. “What if she gets it?”

  The doctor smiled at me. “Call me if you do, but I think you’d have come down with it by now. When he’s been on the medication for three days, you’re pretty safe from contagion.”

  As Doctor Calthrop wrote out Jeremy’s name for the prescription, something must have rung a bell in his mind. “Laidley,” he mused. “Nichols and Laidley? You two must be the ones who screwed up on the Shakespeare, eh?” he asked cheerily.

  “Right, that’s us,” Jeremy said. “Thank you very much.”

  The doctor chuckled. “Keep quiet and calm, m’boy, and you’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time.”

  Doctor Calthrop had barely gone out the door when Jeremy said sulkily, “He’s talking to me like I’m some little kid.”

  “You are,” I said comfortingly, tucking the covers around him again. “Everyone’s a little kid when they’re sick.”

  At first, Jeremy was a good patient and I was a good nurse. But as he started to recover, he became a restless pain-in-the-butt, always wanting to get up and about without realizing that he would only teeter and have to return to bed.

  Meanwhile, I made tea and toast, and I kept the fire going in the stove and fireplace. Then, whenever the rain let up temporarily, I drove into town to search for everything else the doctor ordered.

  The village of Port St. Francis was still thronging with summer visitors, but they, like me, were restless and disappointed with the damp, soggy weather. As with any vacation town, what at first seems quaint soon becomes a bit of a nuisance, once you’ve bought all your souvenirs and fudge and T-shirts, and all you’re really looking for are the basics—bread and milk, soap, can-openers, aspirin, paper towels.

  Furthermore, I know I am not exaggerating when I say that I got a fair share of dirty looks from most of the proprietors, who by now knew me on sight, and who’d been counting on Jeremy and me to make them rich by turning Port St. Francis into a Shakespeare tourist mecca.

  I found myself darting in and out of the shops as quickly as possible, not breathing easily until I was on my way back to the farm.

  The pills did their job, with Jeremy improving enough so that I was able to launder the bedding and resume sleeping with him. Everything was fine . . . until he started to get hungry for real meals again.

  “I’ll make dinner,” he offered, and over my protestations he hurriedly got out of bed, then became dizzy and sat back down on the bed, appearing mightily surprised. “My knees buckled,” he said, looking outraged.

  “Right, it’s called being sick,” I said in as bossy a tone as I could. “Lie down.”

  “You just bought that fresh chicken,” he objected, still clutching the bedpost. “It has to be cooked or it will go bad.”

  “So, I’ll cook it,” I insisted, tucking him back into bed. “The doctor said plain chicken is best. Like roasted, maybe?”

  “A roasted bird is not as simple as it sounds,” Jeremy warned, looking sympathetic.

  “I can do it,” I said stoutly.

  And here’s the thing. I did everything right. Really. Almost. I cleaned it, I dried it, I rubbed it with a mixture of olive oil, fresh sweet butter and lemon; and I put a small onion and some newly picked thyme in the cavity, and sprinkled some nice cracked pepper and sea salt over the bird. The oven was properly preheated, and I also put in a small tray of potatoes, lightly glazed with olive oil and thyme. And I sat there at the kitchen table and snapped the ends off the green beans that I’d painstakingly picked fresh from the garden, and I put them in a steamer pot on the stove-top to gently cook.

  And it all would have made a perfect dinner. Except for one thing. That last essential twenty minutes, which can make or break a dinner.

  In which we both fell asleep.

  Now, Jeremy was entitled to. He was the sick-o. But I was on duty, and I was supposed to stay awake. Maybe I had a touch of whatever he had, because I fell into a thick sleep, sitting on the parlor sofa. But in any case, we were both awakened by the smell of burning chicken. And I’m not talking barbecue.

  “Yikes!” I exclaimed, rushing into the kitchen, stumbling in the dreary darkness of the late afternoon. I raced to the oven door, opened it . . . and smoke poured out.

  I grabbed the oven mitts, yanked the roasting pan out and placed it on the cold stove-top. The tips of the bird’s legs were charred black, and the wings were total goners. The rest at first didn’t look that bad, not black, just mahogany-colored all over, and wizened.

  But upon tasting it, I realized that the burned potato pieces which had exploded and fallen on the oven floor, had totally permeated the chicken with the taste of smoke. The potatoes themselves had become little black billiard balls. Only the string beans had survived, for the simple reason that they’d been cooked on the stove-top, and I’d turned off the steamer and set them aside before I fell asleep.

  “Good God!” Jeremy cried, hovering in the doorway in his pajamas, looking shocked, his hair standing straight up from days of being in bed. “What’s on fire?”

  “Dinner!” I shouted, tears of exhaustion pouring down my cheeks. “The pot
atoes exploded all over the floor of the oven. The bird’s a dead duck.”

  We both started coughing from the smoke, and I flung open the windows, letting in the cold, clammy air. Rain spattered my already tear-streaked face.

  Jeremy now added fuel to the fire by stating the obvious. “You have to watch food when you’re roasting it!” he said in exasperation. Then he flung back my previous remark to him: “Even a two-year-old knows that!”

  Later, I had to explain to him Rule #1 in a marriage: If your mate insults you, do not harbor the exact words of the insult in your bosom and then fling it back at her at the first golden opportunity.

  “Now you’re going to freeze us out and we’ll both die of pneumonia!” Jeremy exclaimed, as the wind whistled in through the open windows, dispelling the smoke and all my hopes of a fine dinner.

  “You’re just trying to get sick and die!” I shouted back. “Either put on a robe and slippers and do something useful, or get back into bed.”

  Rule #2: Never tell a man he’s useless. We spent the next fifteen minutes shouting at each other, reminding ourselves of every stupid thing we’d done on this trip.

  Then I cried in earnest. Then he sulked guiltily. Then we didn’t speak for a half hour. Then Jeremy decided to be big about it, and he insisted on trying to eat some of the chicken, which only made me feel worse. It’s true that the meat wasn’t technically burnt, but it tasted like it was. It was truly hideous.

  But he kept patting my back and telling me that it would have been a wonderful dinner, and that it was an easy mistake to make, and that he didn’t care at all. However, after a few bites, he had to spit it out and admit that the whole damned thing was inedible.

  “I can’t go back into town and shop again!” I wailed, totally exhausted. I’d shopped so carefully, and spent money on highquality goods, and worked hard to get it right . . . and I simply didn’t want to go face those resentful shopkeepers who were still pissed off about Shakespeare. “Look,” I said tearfully, “if I make you some eggs, would you feel like eating them?”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. He glanced round the kitchen. “You could throw those string beans in, they look okay. Add a little cheddar, and you’ve got yourself an omelette. Want me to do it?”

  “NO!” I shouted. One thing my father did succeed in teaching me at a tender age was how to make an omelette. So off I went.

  When I was ready to present it to Jeremy on a tray in bed, it must have looked good, because he sniffed hungrily and then said, “We got any white wine?”

  “Yup,” I said. I poured two glasses, and we both sat there in bed and ate.

  “Wonderful,” he kept saying.

  “And to think it only took me a zillion hours and as many dollars,” I said wryly. “Piece of cake.”

  “Got any cake?” Jeremy demanded. “I want dessert, too.”

  “Biscuits,” I said. “Digestive biscuits. That’s what the doctor said.”

  “As I recall,” Jeremy said smugly, “the doctor said I could eat anything I had an appetite for. So bring on the desserts, and a small glass of port.”

  “Welcome back, podner,” I said, immensely relieved to hear him starting to sound like his old, lusty, cantankerous self. “This case just ain’t the same without you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Afterwards, we settled into bed, and it was quite cozy. We had gotten used to the candlelight at dinner, and sometimes we carried it into the bedroom with us instead of turning on the electric light. I liked the shadows the candles cast, flickering across the room.

  Jeremy glanced at the newspaper, then set it aside. He was still coughing a bit whenever he lay down, so he stayed propped up and tired, bored with the television.

  Now I ransacked my bag for something to read, and came upon the little school notebook from Great-Aunt Penelope’s clubhouse. I started to really examine it, and soon was chuckling out loud.

  “Jeremy, listen to this,” I kept saying, irresistibly compelled to read to him from the “minutes” of their meetings, which were all written in Aunt Pen’s neat, schoolgirl handwriting, with playful flourishes and dramatic narrative. I picked out one of the escapades and recited it:

  “July, in the twelfth day of the 1927 th year of our Lord,” I intoned, “the officers of the Cornwall Summer Explorers’ Club infiltrated the Annual Parental Tea whose guest of honor was the vicar, the minister of Parliament and the earl and the earl-ess. The raid was conducted at the hour 15:30 when the dining table was still being laid.

  “Entry was gained through the windows of the north wall, which was scaled by the President, with able assistance from the Sergeant-At-Arms. Upon successful infiltration of the tearoom, the Prez thence collected various items in a basket and handed them down a rope to the Treasurer, without ever being discovered.

  “The C.S.E.C. thencewith returned to the clubhouse at 16:00, having succeeded in absconding with an assortment of six petits fours, three scones, and a slice each of orange cake, chocolate cake and spice cake. White Tea was smuggled out in a thermos. Devonshire cream and jam were put in jars, which the S.-a.-A. dropped and almost smashed, but which were saved by the Treasurer in the nick of time.”

  “Know what that means?” Jeremy chuckled. “Aunt Pen’s little club made a raid on the grown-ups’ tea party. Why didn’t they just walk in and eat with the adults?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said scornfully. “Where’s the fun in that? Their parents were all in a tizzy because of the illustrious guest list. So,” I said, translating Great-Aunt Penelope’s high-blown prose, “Aunt Pen—the Prez—made Great-Uncle Roland—the S.-a.-A. or Sergeant at Arms—boost her up to the side window, so she could sneak in and pilfer sweets and tea. She actually slung them in a basket on a rope to the Treasurer—Grandmother Beryl. They even made off with milky tea in a thermos!” I marvelled, picturing three kids scampering across the lawn and retreating to the secret room over the garage. “But Great-Uncle Roland nearly queered it all by dropping the jam jar.”

  “Sound just like his namesake, good old Rollo,” Jeremy commented.

  All that night, Jeremy listened intently, as, instead of watching television, I continued to read aloud about the further adventures of the kids’ club, which seemed to escalate in daring as the summer of 1927 wore on. After rescuing a baby bird that fell out of a nest, they chased a viper out of the garage. They bicycled out to a farm to deliver medicine to an old lady who was ailing. They solved a local “mystery” by locating a neighbor’s missing horse out on the moors; and on another day they boldly “recovered” a new wheelbarrow from a town thief who’d stolen it from a neighbor, for which the police commended them.

  All their summer “cases”, mysteries and discoveries were narrated in Great-Aunt Penelope’s utter seriousness of tone, embellished with high drama. After years of hearing about my great-aunt’s sophisticated, mysterious adulthood, I loved picturing her scampering around Cornwall as a thirteen-year-old, with her bright, imaginative sense of romance and excitement.

  “Don’t you just adore her?” I said.

  “I adore your voice,” Jeremy mumbled sleepily. “You’ve never read aloud to me before. It’s so ve-e-ry soothing . . .”

  He tried to stay awake, but soon he was snoring gently. Silently to myself, I read further on until, just around midnight, I reached a passage that was very strange indeed:

  The 21st of August. Officers of the C.S.E.C. discover the Great Lady. Her ghost has haunted these shores for many a decade. We shall give her a proper burial. Only the Black Rod decides where to bring her to her final resting place.

  Below was a verse, The Song of the Great Lady, Our Mascot:When this you see,

  Remember me.

  They say I drowned

  In the stormy sea.

  But I am closer than you know,

  I rest where flowers will not grow.

  I lie beneath the house of fish,

  And I will grant your every wish.

  And with my garden round
me now,

  I watch your father tend and plow.

  Just hop aboard your trusty steed,

  He’ll give you rightly what you need.

  And with the keeper of the stone,

  You’ll find your way back to your home.

  After that, there were only these two short entries:

  The 31st of August. All members of club on deck. Secret outing in search of Greatest Treasure Ever.

  5 September 1927. The great adventure ends for the summer. We seal the door to this room in molten wax. Secrets of the century safe for now, with only those worthy of this trust. Until next year. Adieu.

  There were a few doodles of swirls, whorls and spirals. Then the notebook ended there.

  I was truly exhausted by the wild day of cooking I’d just had, and my eyes were bleary. So I set the book down, blew out the candle and tried to sleep.

  For awhile I just lay there, musing about the little poem. If the notebook had been written by just any kid, I would have easily put it aside with the thought that these were simply a lot of fanciful jottings to while away a summer.

  But this wasn’t any regular, ordinary kid. It was my Great-Aunt Penelope. She who had bequeathed her fascinating legacy to me and to Jeremy and to Rollo. I hadn’t known her very well when she was alive; but much later, in dogging out her mysterious last wishes, I had certainly come to learn that whenever Aunt Pen wrote that she had something important to say . . . well, it behooved her family members to believe it, and to find out just exactly what it was that she wanted only the “worthy” to know.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I allowed Jeremy to sleep for as long as I could bear it, but finally, at nine o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t wait any longer. I made coffee and sunny-side-up eggs with a bit of ham, and toast and marmalade and orange juice. I figured if the scent of coffee won’t stir a man to rise and shine, well . . .