by Sara Crowe
I babysat for Mary-Margaret the other day and got a sneak inside Icarus’s bedroom. It was very much a child’s bedroom with pictures of pop groups, and pants on the floor. There were teddy bears on his bed, which is crazy when you think how machismo he is. Though I did spot a big black machine in the corner which looked like a terribly loud gateaux blaster.
Joe’s room by contrast had flowers in a vase and clean towels on his basin. His room resembled that of an elderly gay man and it was interesting to note that in trying to kiss me, he may have been fighting against his nature. I was fascinated to see both their rooms and how much they revealed about the men inside.
Things with Joe are awful at the moment, and most of the time he ignores me, and to make matters worse, he’s even begun to skip Group. I asked him if he’d make good on his promise to take me to Titford, but he said that he was too busy.
Brackencliffe
In the morning Cara arose before dawn and went to the ridge to spy for the runaways. She had tarried there only a moment before Van Day rode up on Peril. The great stallion circled, its clipperty hoofs arucking the earth. The ridge was not like the bedchamber, there was none to save her here.
‘Now where was I,’ said Van Day dismantling, with his great mouth open in yearning.
But like bullets Fiona and Keeper came running, out of the darkness, out of nowhere. Keeper tore into the Master’s trouser and brought him to his knees.
‘Run!’ he barked, and Cara and Fiona fled, leaving Keeper to fight Knight Van Day, who seized the dog by the scruff and took out his revolver.
‘You think that I would be thwarted by a spaniel?’ he said, and threw back his head in laughing.
‘Fuck me’ said Fiona, ‘what are we going to do now?’
‘You’re very unusual you know.’ That’s what Aunt Coral said when I read my last excerpt out to her.
Wednesday 22 July
I haven’t told you yet about the strange new noises I’ve been hearing at night at Green Place. As I mentioned some time ago, Delia says ‘Fuck’ in her sleep, so I put most of the noises down as part of her night-time regime. And Aunt Coral’s bed squeaks up against her desk whenever she turns over. But about two weeks ago I registered a sound as being nothing to do with Delia or Aunt C. It was on a black and starless night, the sort of night that is suffocating. I heard a distinct thud coming from somewhere below me, then all was quiet again, but there was an atmosphere, a presence, like someone was there. My own ability to listen was soon drowned out by my heartbeat, which was so loud that I had to cover my chest with a pillow in order to hear the sounds of the house.
The thud has happened on every consecutive night since, so the night now has a tune that goes: ‘Fuck, squeak, thud, Fuck squeak, thud.’ I can account for the fuck and the squeak, but I can’t account for the thud. It is troubling.
I am not an easily frightened girl; in fact I used to be quite the opposite. Back in Titford I used to spook Aileen when she came to stay by telling her I could see floating heads. Of course I couldn’t, but I loved to scare her, it made me feel I had power. Poor Aileen; I feel bad about it now. No wonder she got in my bed for safety.
It’s not the same at Green Place, however, and I am beginning to feel afraid. Coupled with what is going on in my nightmares, it makes me feel quite dreadful. At about ten I get into bed, exhausted from the Toastie, so I drop off quickly. But then I find myself at the suicide bank reading the notes of every language. Then I awake to the sound of the ‘Fuck, squeak, thud,’ then lie there and hold on to my pillow. Then I fall off to sleep again to see Mr Jewell with his feet up smoking and my mother lying dead on the floor. Then I repeat the process over and over again for the rest of the moonlight hours. It’s always a huge relief when it is time for morning, when I wake up calling and Aunt Coral rushes up to me, avoiding the gaps in the stairs.
Not surprisingly I have been late for work on some occasions and Mrs Fry has said I am on a promise.
Aunt Coral is not alarmed by the thud, and has declared that in her opinion, it must be caused by something which is naturally occurring, such as a badger going for a walk. She says that in all her years at Green Place she has never known any intruders, supernatural or other. Mr Tsunawa is of course delighted by it, believing it to be the work of grey ladies or phantoms. Admiral Ted and Delia don’t even hear it, Delia because she makes so much noise herself, and Admiral Ted because of his tittinus. Admiral Little and Admiral Gordon have said that they can hear it, only faintly, but they agree with Aunt Coral that it must have its origins in nature. Nevertheless, in order to settle my mind, everyone did a full sweep of the house to look for the cause, but we found nothing.
The mere fact that we were searching the house made me step up my search for a suicide note from mum, which up till then had only been happening in my dreams. I can’t stop thinking about looking for it, though I know it’s unlikely I’ll find it. But the more tired I get, the more I want to find it so that I can get some sleep.
I have begun to hunt in Green Place, because I think it is possible that my Mum may have travelled to the house and may have hidden the note somewhere, not wanting my father to see it, and she might have guessed that I would visit Aunt C at some point, or even that Aunt C would find the note and give it to me. But looking for a note in Green Place could take years.
I have even had a look in the Toastie, in spite of the fact that mum could never have known that I would work there. But she might have given the note to someone, who might have followed me when I left Titford, and they might have planted it somewhere for me to find. Plus I really don’t trust Mrs Fry – maybe she’d found it, maybe she’d moved it. It doesn’t take much for me to develop theories.
Perhaps the thud is another message from the other world? Perhaps Mum wants to alert me to something? My poor mind never stops trying to make some sense out of the senseless.
With the work I am doing, added to the nightmares I’m still getting, I am often very tired, which, when you are grieving, makes you feel very raw. I cry at the slightest thing, and am getting a reputation for doing it. I cry when Admiral Gordon talks of the sea, I cry at the sight of small rabbits, I cry when the moon is full, and I cry when it isn’t, I cry at the Toastie and I cry at Group, and I cry when the robins land on the buddleia.
Meanwhile Aunt Coral is defeating the point of having paying guests by hiring more staff. She has got Mrs Bunion back each weekday and has hired Badger full time, and his son, and Glenn Miller the builder. She is unstoppable in her self-destruction! If she even thinks of buying a new handbag, I think I will smack her.
Wednesday 29 July
My life is a dreary toil of pots and potatoes, dreaming of notes and sleeplessness, and into this situation has come another strange noise, as well as the return of my nemecyst.
At the front of Green Place there is a patch of gravel where Aunt Coral grows bamboo. If you tread on it, it makes a loud noise, so when I heard this last night, after hearing the thud, my alarm bells started ringing. I dashed on to the balcony, holding on to the French door in case I fell through, but I could not see anything, not even a badger.
‘Perhaps the badger is varying his route round the front, and he’s too daft to avoid the gravel?’ said Aunt Coral when I asked her about it this morning.
She is very gung hoe about the thought of potential intruders, supernatural or other. But Aunt Coral comes from Aunt Coral land where children run beside bicycles and go to bed at seven, and badgers and ferrets eat shepherd’s pie and all old ladies have chauffeurs.
Monday 3 August
Luckily there’s always so much to do at the Toastie that there isn’t much time to dwell on things. I have moved on from canteen apprenticing to creating some of my own fillings for the potatoes and also to some casual waiting. My speciality dish is coleslaw, for which I use apples spiked with tomato ketchup to give it that extra zip. Waiting tables is certainly nicer than the lonely hours of buttering in the bare back kitchen. The workmen from t
he tyre place swallow such volumes of breakfast that I wonder where they put it all, and they make me feel a million dollars with their bawdy and flattering remarks. I love being front of house, I feel like I belong there.
The best time of day at the Toastie is after hours, when Mrs Fry takes Mary-Margaret home for her dinner. We do prep for the next day, and then we take cappuchinos. Charlie has taught Michael and me to play poker, which she says normally you’d need alcohol for. She had a big win at a party where she drank 75cm of wine. Michael talked a bit about Icarus and how he had dumped her, but confided that she still loves him, so I kept quiet that I do too.
And Joe is thankfully being a bit less frosty, which I think is because he is worried about me, and because he’s fundamentally a nice guy. I wonder if I could ask him again about running me to Titford, as a friend, that is. In many ways it is the last place on earth I want to go to, but I need to check for a note. But I can’t go when Dad and Ivana are there. So I have to wait for an opportunity.
Thursday 6 August
A pro-po my secret love for Icarus, the worst possible thing that could have happened has happened. This morning, after a particularly bad night of dreams and noises, I was looking for the note at the Toastie when Icarus came into the kitchen. Michael and Charlie were front of house, Joe was on the frother, Mrs Fry was on the till and Mary-Margaret was still at school, so we were quite alone. This was the moment I’d been waiting for.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, because I had opened up all the flour jars.
‘I was just looking for . . . nothing,’ I said. And then, as if from out of one of those jars, I heard my own voice waft serenely, saying, ‘Why did you ask me to Sandy’s party?’
Yet it wasn’t really my voice, but the voice of exhaustion that takes over when your editor’s sleeping.
‘Actually Sue, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘It was Joe that asked me to ask you.’
Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 3
Green Place, September 12 1938
(Age 16 but pass for 18)
The fiddleback or violin spider: native to the United States, a fiddleback lives for one or two years and their offspring take a full year to grow to adulthood. They do not usually jump, and only attack when provoked. You will find them in occasionally used bed sheets, such as those on a spare bed, (watch out visitors), and they will hide in shoes, gloves and items of clothing which have lain still for a long time, e.g. stockings strewn on the floor, (watch out messpots). Any disruption to its nervous system can cause unpleasant aggressive behaviour. The way I remember this spider is to imagine it playing the violin. This distinguishes it from its close neighbour the trumpet spider.
This brief study was done as a means of peace-making after a painful dispute with Father. I told him I wanted to study literature at University and he returned that a girl blessed with a scientific brain should not waste it on confectionary, as if Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov can be described as so. For I know beyond any doubt, that all comfort is to be found in literature, all that I need is there in the recordings contained in books. But no, Cameo is art and beauty, and I am brains and duty. One is typecast at birth. It seems I must die to my poetic side if I am to please Father.
My problem is that I do so wish to make him proud. I can’t bear it when he shuts me out. I also drew him a picture of the goliath bird eater which features in my jungle guide, which met with some approval. I didn’t show him the one I did of him later, without his toupee; Mother thought it was a great likeness. He misplaced it after our talk and became in an even fouler temper. We searched the house high and low, before launching a sweep of the gardens. Finally, Sayler discovered a fox’s den in the woods, and inside there was a newspaper, a couple of potatoes and Father’s toupee.
‘I wonder what the foxes wanted with that?’ said Mother, as Father stormed back for his dinner.
But my suspicion that this was NOT the work of the foxes was confirmed by Cameo’s coded winks. If ever I could be accused of being jealous of Cameo, for being allowed to be all the things that I’m not, it wouldn’t last more than a minute before she’d disarm me like this.
And anyway, the bigger picture in the world is giving us all a sense of perspective, with every day rumblings of an outbreak of war with Germany. Just thinking of it takes me far from the mood for Mirabel’s party tonight. But nevertheless I shall record here our outfits, which every other day than today I would have relished, and which walked straight to us out of a dream:
CAMEO will be in charming peasant flounces, in one of the most lovely straw colours which are all over the place this season. Her shawl is a contrasting delicate morning-mist blue. She has based her look on Shirley Grey who has been seen out in it at the 400 Club.
MY DRESS is of tender green crêpe, and I have a headdress of silver rain urchins. It is not unlike a dress you would spot in the carriage drawn by the Windsor Greys.
Our shoes have come from America, on diversion from the Cape. Ecru sparkle T-bars for me, of a shade not seen in this country. Cameo’s are sky-blue and mimosa sandals with stiletto heels which she says are stinko to walk on. But she has been specially allowed to wear a heel, so she is grimly determined to bear it.
They took snapshot photographs of us in our gowns before we left, which are heading for the album labelled ‘Fit for the King’. Being a girl is not without its delights.
Sue
Friday 14 August
‘THE BRONTËS WOULDN’T give two brass fittings for structure,’ said Aunt Coral this morning, as we walked and talked writing on our way to sit outside. She was rehearsing some research about the Brontës on me, for a group that she had in her pipework.
We settled on the terrace and she opened up a deck chair dressed in a modest little bathing suit, and a late summer beetle ran out. The buddleia was host to a great many birds; it was a sad delight to see them. Loudolle was swimming in her bikini and all the Admirals were sunbathing.
I decided to distract Aunt Coral and myself by moving the subject on to some more of the practical issues we faced.
‘Have you bought another handbag Aunt Coral?’ I said, noticing a small tote in hiding under her chair.
‘I told you I was lonely.’ It is becoming her stock answer.
‘Then there’s money to be made out of loneliness, isn’t there? How about the chivalry workshop in the conservatory? Shall we fashion a budget?’
To be honest it is beginning to seem like a silly idea, but at the same time I will try anything, for our prospects of staying at Green Place are growing dark in the shadow of debt. Paying the staff Aunt C insists on employing means that all the extra money from the Admirals’ rent is going straight out again rather than into refurbishing new rooms. On my urging she tried the bank one last time, but she called the bank manager by her Christian name, Linda, which was over-familiar and didn’t afford Linda her status. As a consequence Aunt Coral found herself with a deficit in her over draught.
She owes £4000 at Harrods, her backlog of other unpaid bills is another £3000 on top of that, and those are just the things that I know of; it is obvious that someone like Aunt Coral is going to have more up her sleeve that she hasn’t declared, such as a share in a racehorse called Treasure, on which she flutters each Saturday.
‘Could one of the Admirals apply for a mortgage on the house?’ I said, for it dawned on me as I watched them sitting on their deck chairs that instead of paying rent, maybe one of them would like to buy a stake for their retirement. Aunt Coral sat for a long time watching the Admirals watching Loudolle.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘But you could, couldn’t you, with your steady earnings? You could get ten times your salary or whatever they offer …’ She left it there like a cliff-hanger, and of course I took the bait. Aunt C has never been very moral when it comes to money.
It could be worth a punt, so I put ‘telephone bank’ on my To Do list, rising above the knowledge that at present I have only £16 in my savings. What we need
more than anything is a lump sum to clear things, so at least we can start from zero, rather than a minus.
Aunt Coral looked excited for the first time in ages as we planned the chivalry budget, and she rushed off to find Mrs Bunion to discuss menus, taking Delia with her. Nothing gets them going more than planning an event, nothing, not even Group. I made her promise to come in at under £125 for a whole weekend based on there being fifteen modest students for the workshop. They don’t have to eat caviar. But when Aunt C goes to bed with a figure in her head, she will have added more zeros to it by the morning.
We have set the date for three weeks’ time to allow business to build. It will be a total experiment, but Aunt Coral is thriving, and if it is a success, then maybe we can hold more workshops here and find our way out of the shadows.
Monday 17 August
I was at the Toastie this morning buttering up a picnic when Mrs Fry came in and told me I was to be taken off front of house, and put into the back kitchen for the rest of the summer holidays. She said it was because I had been late on more than three occasions and that the customers need to know whom to expect when they come into the café.
I know the real reason of course. It’s because Loudolle is back and Mrs Fry wants her front of house. It really isn’t fair as she’s often late for work too, but she blames it on jet lag, so Mrs Fry never disciplines her. At least I won’t have to suffer the sight of her and Icarus canoodling whenever his mother isn’t looking.