by Sara Crowe
We all sat in awe. Aunt Coral had filled her tiny passage with buckets of atmosphere, transporting us in a nanasecond to a badly painted window with a sad woman behind it. I was inspired beyond belief and could hardly wait to get on with ‘Brackencliffe’. It was a very emotional moment for the Egham Hirsute Group.
‘That’s it for now,’ she said, spent from her efforts. ‘Next week we’ll look at red herrings.’
We applauded her as she left the room, a tiny figure in a spring cardigan tottering unsteadily as she walked away. Was she thinking, as I was, of the cliff-hanger in our own story?
‘I’ve got a big football match coming up, on Sunday 5th July,’ said Joe, bringing me back to earth. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to come.’
Though I was not plus about it I thought that I’d probably go. ‘Thank you, that’d be nice,’ I said.
Icarus plays football too and the thought of seeing him outside Toastie hours was quite overwhelming. I am now upstairs alone with his eye, my heart full of excitement and despair. But it is nice to have a date in the diary, albeit with the wrong man.
Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 2
Cutting from the Egham Echo, May 30 1936
Poor Gollywhopper (daddy long leg)
By Coral Garden, age 14
Oh I am not long for this world, so I must savour every moment,
each leaf on the hedge thrills me, and how I wish for more.
It is light in the garden and green and we are many.
I am drawn to the light, when the sun goes down.
Is that some small sun?
I dance towards it for lo, there is the night sun!
I find a chink and I fly in, but how did I get here? How do I go back?
I fly at the light, I fly at the door, but I cannot nd my way out,
With the last of my strength, I cling to life,
My legs fail one by one.
I land forever in a silver cup, it burns my wings, my last thoughts are of the hedge.
And there you will throw me in the morning.
Sue
Thursday 4 June
I AWOKE THIS morning from one of my nightmares, calling for my Mum, and Aunt Coral came running. She made me some breakfast on the terrace, and then gave me her one piece of published verse to critique in order to distract me. She had it pressed inside her Commonplace. Unfortunately her poem only made me feel more upset, and it was as though I were a fountain, raining tears on the frills of her collar, which luckily seemed quite waterproof, so they ran off to be baked in the sun.
‘It’s very depressing,’ I told her. ‘Perhaps you should have dwelt more on his life before he got trapped in the house?’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Poor gollywhopper.’ And we rewrote the poem from all the positive points of view about being a daddy long legs, such as being high on sweet air, and not knowing you’re going to die, and nose-diving martinis and sleeping in herb tubs. Aunt Coral really has a talent for getting inside the minds of the small things.
The sun had risen like a fireball beyond the pool, with the plumes of buddleia like reeds in front of it. The Nanas were already at their sewing, discussing the Queen’s holiday pattern. Delia was cutting trenches of calico and the Admirals were in the depths of the garden, so Aunt C and I found ourselves with a rare moment to talk uninterrupted.
‘I feel as though I have lost fifty per cent of myself,’ I said to Aunt C, ‘and that I have to reassemble myself and find a new fifty per cent. If I’d still been in Titford it would have been a different fifty per cent wouldn’t it? I’d have ended up in a shop selling car shoes, and grown up to wear frosted lipstick, and had so-called friends who didn’t understand me and to whom I couldn’t tell secrets.’
‘Perish the thought,’ said Aunt Coral. She stirred her regular powders into a glass and offered me a pastry. ‘What happened in your dream?’
‘It was like a Film Noir starring Mr Jewell, the librarian at Titford. He was the one working on the day Mum took her life and he was the one who found her. In my dream he was called away from the front desk and detained for a long time by papers in an office. Meanwhile Mum walked into the library and lay down on the floor by the Poets. If he hadn’t been away so long, he would have found her sooner, but instead he put his feet up on his office desk and had a quick smoke. What bothers me is the thought that perhaps she didn’t leave a note because she meant him to find her in time. Why else do it in a public place? But he didn’t find her and she didn’t leave a suicide note, so we either A, haven’t found it, or B, she was expecting to be resuscitated, and this thought distresses me so much, to think that it might have been her cry for help and we missed it.’
‘I know it’s very hard, but you must try not to look backwards. It’s awful, but it may be the case that she just didn’t leave a note,’ said Aunt C. ‘You have no way of communicating with her now. There are some things that you just cannot know.’
‘But I have got a way of communicating with her,’ I said, ‘I have messages from the other world.’
‘Indeed?’ she said, momentarily distracted by the Admiral jiggling grass off his trousers.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When I open The Dorcas Tree to study in the evenings, it always opens at the same place, and my eye is always drawn to the same line which says: “I was sorry I left without saying goodbye.” And even more strange is that it is given as an example of dialogue for a character who has vanished.’
‘A coincidence,’ said Aunt Coral, ‘which is in collision with your quest.’
‘But maybe she really is talking to me from beyond the grave and if so, maybe she will tell me where her suicide note is. I have to hold back so much you know, when I’m out in the world in public. I hope she has gone to Heaven, and if she has, I hope that she still thinks of me. But I worry that she doesn’t, because in Heaven they say there will be no more suffering, so to think of me would make her suffer, so maybe she might not. Maybe I need to go back to Titford and have another look for a note,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘If you think it will help.’
Thursday 18 June
I finally found out who Dean Martin is. He’s Aunt C’s stockbroker and looks after her portfolio of shares. Marks and Spencer is her spiritual home and unfortunately she believes she is helping to keep her own shares in it afloat by doing her weekly shop there. I’ve had the difficult job of persuading her that her shopping alone makes no difference to the share price and that the weekly groceries are better bought elsewhere whilst we are still in a state of economics. She’s still rejecting my suggestion of reducing Mrs Bunion’s hours and revealed a whole other side to herself when I raised the matter again yesterday, threatening to move into what she calls a ‘death house’. She is strongly in denial, and her shopping list is full of dreams. She keeps it on the butterfly table in the hall beside the telephone and updates it daily. Here’s an example of her latest version:
Half the time she buys the items, then practises the art of unshopping them, which she says is almost as much fun as buying them in the first place, except with a tinge of regret.
She has also started to keep her latest To Do list alongside the shopping list, not only to remind her where she is up to in life, but I’m sure as a hint to the Admiral-handymen. She has no shame.
I check it every day, just to see if anything has been ticked off. ‘Make Will’ has been on there since I moved into Green Place, so thankfully there is no hurry.
I desperately want to buy back the handbag she had to take back to Harrods, so I have calculated that if I save a pound a week for 295 weeks, I’ll be able to get it for her in six years, so she’ll have it on her seventy-second birthday. But that is based on her having told the truth about her age which isn’t in her nature.
I asked her how old she was again the other day, to see if I could catch her out, and she said: ‘I’m sixty-one – no, sixty-two – but I don’t have a good head for figures.’ Sometimes she will admit to up to
sixty-four in the mornings; for she’s only to see a pillow for scars to play pirates on her cheeks. But anyway I have now put her handbag on my shopping list.
Saturday 20 June
It is spider season at Green Place and the ivy and hedgerows are alive with them. You can barely throw a blanket over your bed without one jumping out at you, and they love ceilings and piles of clothes, they just can’t get enough of them. Aunt Coral is on constant patrol to the sounds of Delia and Mrs Bunion screaming, plastic cup and postcard in hand, ready to catch and return them to the wild. Every time I see one I am reminded of Mum. Spiders were about the only thing she was afraid of, so Green Place was pretty traumatic for her and the cellar in particular.
The weather is showing great improvements and we must host the shoe auction soon, so ‘telephone Badger’ has appeared on Aunt Coral’s To Do. Badger the gardener has worked at Green Place on and off for ever, although Delia told me there is some awkwardness due to him having had a dalliance with Aunt Coral some years ago. This prompted me to ask Aunt Coral more about her love life. Luckily it wasn’t difficult to get her talking!
Her first proper boyfriend, Gerald, was a letcherer from her Uni, but she never really liked him that much and was unfaithful with a double-first from Oxford. Then she fell for Stringer, a poet she met in an air raid, before meeting Edgar, the egotistical botanist. She was with Edgar for quite a long time – ‘enough time for him to have had four changes of glasses’ – but they never married. She says they each made her feel alive, though she feels that the beautiful affairs they had became the baggage of later years, adding that they were all still great friends, albeit friends who don’t see each other. After all those dandies, I can see why she’d want to live quietly at Green Place, but she maintains she is the marrying type and lives to be in love.
Contrary to Delia’s insinuations, Aunt C insists that she’s only had two gentlemen callers since the sixties: Roy from the post office, and Badger the gardener, both of whom were beneath her.
According to Delia, the ‘affair’ between Aunt C and Badger was in the early days when Aunt C lived alone but for her Father, Mrs Bunion and her shoes. Badger was mad about Aunt Coral, but though he was dark and attractive, he was also married. They had some sort of liaison, which she says Aunt Coral never speaks of, for guilt about his wife, and when Aunt Coral ended it, Badger gave up doing the garden. He was eventually persuaded back by Mrs Bunion, but he is still very lazy – ‘bone idle’ Aunt Coral says. With this kind of work ethic, it’s no wonder the garden is untamed.
Anyway, I imagine Badger has no chance now, as with Loudolle back in Alpen, the Ad is back to flirting with Aunt Coral. How shallow of him to flirt with Loudolle one minute, Aunt Coral the next. Who does he think he is? Gladys Cooper?
Aunt C has been reading a book on the art of horology so that she can chat with him about the recoil and anchor escapement on the pendulum clock. Sometimes her love of him seems to involve a lot of hard work.
Saturday 4 July
The Great Shoe Auction was held yesterday afternoon. Our ads about it were in the parish magazine and the post office for the previous fortnight so we were expecting a good turnout.
It wasn’t the first time there’s been an auction at Green Place – after the war there were many which they held in basic white tents put out on the lawn to make money. Many of the family airlooms were lost in this way, in order to raise enough funds to plough back into the house, or ‘the money pit’ as they called it. In order to pay his taxes Great Grampa Evelyn sold off all the family fireplaces, and he even had offers to buy the drawing room ceiling and the flagstones from the footpath in the garden. The Garrick of London was interested in acquiring the morning room – it was very common to sell whole rooms at that time. Fortunately he didn’t go that far, or I wouldn’t be sitting here now!
Everyone wanted to help at the shoe sale and the Nanas made glorious shop girls. Print was in a dress of tulips with flounces at the de collage, and she had an accessorised tissue bag for she suffers from the cold. Georgette was in cornflower wafts, with contrast olive booties, and Taffeta was in a caramel shift and had arranged her hair in four big curls to sit round her face like a hat. She had three strands of pearls to flatter her.
‘One for each chin,’ said Delia.
When laid out in the garden, Aunt Coral’s shoes numbered two hundred, and as she’d kept all the boxes, the shoes were displayed on top of them in the fancy shoe position, with one shoe resting on the other at a jaunty angle. According to Mr Tsunawa, whose wife knows all about shoes, this is the optimum position in which to display shoes and encourages shoppers to imagine themselves at functions being jazzy. Where we could, we put the matching handbags beside them. There were slingbacks and mules in silver and gold, a batch of pink, blue, and nudey stilettos – she’d had a phase for those – sandals and boots, including short boots, long boots, zip boots, fur boots, knee boots, ankle boots and riding boots, though Aunt Coral can’t ride. There was also a collection of pumps, which are between a shoe and a slipper. On the ground they lay, material evidence of a lonely heart.
The weather forecast had been good, so the event was held outside. Aunt Coral was happier that way; she didn’t want a lot of strangers traipsing in to sit on the toilet. Delia painted a sign which was hung by the Admirals on the corner of Clockhouse Lane. It read ‘Egham size 4 ladies’ and it had a dainty arrow pointing up to Green Place and featured paintings of snazzy high heels.
By mid morning the garden was swarming with a hundred tiny ladies who fell like flies on the shoes, intent on taking them off to the world again, to be worn at a hundred parties. The Admirals made them all feel like a million dollars, so I foreshadowed hints about future events at Green Place such as chivalry workshops to send their menfolk to, like any entrepreneur would do.
Admiral Ted finally began the proceedings and a hush fell on the ladies. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he began to a polite round of applause. ‘Now, to kick off, I have lot 1, which is …’ he read out the label which Aunt Coral had tied to them, ‘gold and tan peep-toe stilettos . . . unworn.’
There was a gasp from the ladies as he showed the dainty article and a hoard of little hands shot up.
‘Do I hear twenty, twenty to the lady at the back, do I hear twenty-five, twenty-five to the lady at the corner, let’s go to thirty, and do I have thirty pounds for lot 1?’
Admiral Ted continued until he was hoarse and all the shoes had been under the hammer, which took most of the afternoon. He was a terrier, and always held out for the best. Aunt Coral watched from the drawing room window with an obvious tear in her eye. Each unworn pair represented a lonely afternoon to her, a party she had never been to, or a luncheon she didn’t attend. I comforted her by reminding her that there’s no point in having lots of shoes in the cupboard – shoes should be out in the world.
‘Lot 192,’ said Admiral Ted. ‘Strappy geranium slingback with matching silken clutch,’ and once more he added in a sombre tone: ‘unused. Do I hear thirty-five pounds for the set?’
More gasps were to follow again and again in wonder at the items. Aunt Coral has impeccable taste. In her imagination she’d been expecting a million invitations, but in life she’d been a lonely lady in a mansion with her cleaner, laying out the doilies, spending her money on dreaming. But now I hope that her lonely days are ‘Going going gone’. (I intend to put the money into a high security account, requiring two signatures and two passports for withdrawals.)
Sunday 5 July
Excerpt from Delia’s calendar (by kind permission)
It was Joe’s football match this morning and it was pouring with rain. So I rang him hoping it would be called off, but he said that they play in all weathers. Aunt Coral preferred to remain in bed mourning her shoes, so I had to go on my own. Though the sale made a whopping £2,000 they had cost her more like £20,000 to buy, and so the £2,000 back was a drop in the ocean, and she’d rather have had the shoes. I reassured her that investing it
in more rooms meant she’d make the money back in rental within a year, and that she’d have the £2,000 back to buy herself more shoes, but she declined into her bed jacket and I didn’t see her again till lunchtime.
At the match, Joe was gangly and kept on slipping over. Icarus was the winger and best-looking player on the field. It was freezing cold and I was glad when the whistle blew because my anorak was soaked through to the lining and I needed to go in and get thawed. They lost 4-nil and Joe gashed his knee and had to be seen by a matron. But over orange segments afterwards it was he who enquired after my health, which Aunt Coral has trained him to do.
‘You look tired Sue,’ he said. ‘Have you not been sleeping? You’re shivering, take my jacket.’
He is becoming Aunt Coral’s protégé; I think she is grooming him to be a good boyfriend. (I wish she’d go to work on Icarus.) Joe always makes me feel like a lady, although sometimes he takes it too far and becomes winsome and unmanly. I don’t actually like too many poems, I prefer a bit of tension, a bit of a challenge in a man. It’s not that exciting if you think someone will marry you tomorrow and follow you about crying.