by Sara Crowe
‘How can you be so sure?’
He put his arm round me quite naturally, as though he had done it before. I didn’t move it away. I wanted it to be there. I never had Campari for breakfast before; it’s the sort of thing people do on desolation holidays. And the drink and the hour and the quiet led to the first real kiss of my life.
It lasted for many exceptional minutes and then it turned to an embrace that fell amongst cushions and we passed a magnificent hour. No one has ever kissed me in the way that Joe did. He kissed me as though it was urgent, as though, if he didn’t kiss me for a good long time, he might have to have a cold bath. And, for the time that he was kissing me, all anxiety ceased.
All this time I have waited, wondered what it would be like, who would it be, where we would be, and what I might be wearing . . . A white dress, in the long grass, on a beach, or a hammock by a river? But I haven’t been able to see the face of the man kissing me until now. I want to go back and tell the child dreaming in the Titford bedroom, that it will be Joe Fry, in a pinafore, in the drawing room at Green Place.
‘I love being with you,’ said Joe, when we eventually paused what felt like very much later on.
‘The best things in life are worth waiting for.’
The wind outside dropped and as it did the climbers tapped softly on the windows.
‘We must make up for lost time,’ he said, which led to a temperature tremble in my body.
There were no bells or birds as had been forecast, but the sense of being desirable and treasured and feminine. It was like all the money in the universe flew to my account at the love bank, and I had gone from an account in deficit, to a gold account with cards.
The morning moon was so bright and clear it looked like it had been cut in two with a scalpel. I thought it could make a good book title, December Moon by Susan Bowl. It would be about a gypsy.
I was amazed that I still had room for creativity in the presence of love. But these sorts of things are not as linear as I thought, but flatter each other enormously.
The remaining moments of the night sped by carried on shooting stars, showering me in a dawn of ice diamonds, shimmering in the early light. The frost in the air was frostier and the sky a ridiculous blue. Those hours will be forever lodged safe inside my memory, and if I live to be a Nana, they will flash into my mind, like welcome visitors from that winter in my youth.
I wonder if anyone will be able to notice anything different about me tomorrow?
Brackencliffe
By Sue Bowl
And in the fine fields of Sage and Parsley, Cara had many fold ad mirers, chief among whom was a simple peasant called Philip. When Philip first kissed her, her girlhood finally came to fruition, exploding into radiant womanhood at the touch of his workaday hand. From the date of that kiss Cara’s loveliness knew no bounds, and even the men in the field sang a song of her, with her skin as fresh as the snowdrops, and her voice as soft as the day, and her love as sweet as the cider to wash a man’s care away!
With such an ad mirer as Philip, Van Day fell from a top his high horse, and Cara looked back on her childhood and thought in her maiden’s way, that if her life were a tree with bare branches, who wanted for interesting landings, ’twas in looking back that she realised, her branches weren’t bare very long.
Wednesday 23 December
At about 6.54am I woke from a fleeting dream where I was a southern belle running down a staircase, and a swooney beau was waiting at the bottom to meet me. I should say for the record that it definitely wasn’t Icarus!
When we got into work at the Toastie, Mrs Fry didn’t twig me and Joe. Her antenna must’ve been rusty, for we each had terrible helmet rings, which can take a couple of hours to plump out. And I felt euphoric about the silliest thing, such as the light bouncing on a teaspoon.
But Michael rumbled me in the toilets while we were both brushing our hair. She’d changed hers to packet dye chocolate-brown, because she was seeing someone new.
Back in the canteen Mrs Fry was busy making up new names for the coffees when we joined her. Her bracelets jangled over her jotter.
‘Café La La, Café Clever, Café Scrumptious …’
‘Café Amore?’ said Michael, with a wink.
Joe dropped me back at Green Place later on. A storm was gathering its disciples, but Joe couldn’t stay as he had a family dinner.
‘I’m so sorry I’ve got to leave you here alone. I’d be much happier if you had company,’ he said.
‘But I have got company; there’s my visitor.’
Joe had to concede he’d been out-clevered.
There’d been communication from the tramp, in that the card that I’d left him had vanished. Upstairs the locked-room light was switched on again.
I was just about to baton down the hatches for one of my famous nights in, as daggers of sleet started to rage warfare over the holidays, when I looked out of the window and saw someone in the distance flickering a powerful torch. Its bright shaft shone out over hills and the roads, picking up rain in its tunnel of light like fine just-visible pins, illuminating the tarmac with a vicious sheen of water. The plumes of buddleia caught in its beam were still hanging just as they had been in the summer, exactly the same shape, but now brown, as if they’d been smoked. And their scent was no longer of lilac but of tobacco. I opened the window so I could smell them.
But what a sight awaited me: the light flashing up the drive appeared to be Joe on his way back. And there was someone on the back of his bike, sitting side saddle in a skirt. The sight of her bird legs dandling off the edge – I know I will never forget it. Her cold, thin face was full of concern and urgency when they stepped inside.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
‘I was unable to get a taxi,’ said Aunt Coral.
‘I was passing the station and I spotted her waiting in the rain,’ Joe said.
‘Yes, it was blessed, thank you Joe,’ said Aunt C.
‘But where are all your things. Delia, and the Admiral?’ I asked her.
‘I needed to come back without delay. There’s something we need to look at. I don’t mean to be cryptic; it’ll be easier if I show you.’
And without taking her coat off she went into the drawing room.
‘The house looks good,’ she said absent-mindedly, dripping rain all over the floor.
She looked through her important papers, which I had been keeping under heavy covers for her, and drew out the log book of Mrs Morris, the old housekeeper. She turned over a few pages before presenting it to me.
‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it until this evening,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve been so slow. But better late than never. I wanted to get here as soon as I possibly could.’
We ran up to the Grey Room like two crazed surveyors. There was a loose floorboard, and there was a key underneath it. I’d always thought it was odd she should leave it in Titford, right in Red Indian Territory.
I took it up in my hands, as if it were her precious ashes. Here lay the answer surely, in the shape of a small brass key.
‘When did she last come here?’ I asked, with the growing awareness that this must have meant she had planned her death for some time.
‘She came for the funeral, and once more in September,’ said Aunt C.
‘Didn’t you ask her why she’d come?’ I said.
‘I wasn’t here,’ she said.
‘I feel sick.’
When I returned from the loo, Aunt Coral was on the telephone calling through to the Egham Fleet. It took twenty minutes for a taxi to come because it was busy season; I was going to start walking had it taken a moment longer.
The lockers at Titford station are par-owned by the leisure centre, impersonal metal boxes, used mostly for sweaty clothes. Our car drew up into the warm clouds of exhaust that hang at the side of the concourse, filling our noses with the fumes. There were doors clunking, warmth inside cars, and people heading home for Christmas.
&nbs
p; But once we were inside the station, I doubted if ever the platform had been walked for such a grim purpose. The ground was polished and cream under foot, and Aunt Coral held my hand. It was the same floor that Aileen and I used to slide along in our socks if we happened to be taken out with a grown-up to meet friends coming in on the train.
Dread and excitement filled my heart when we stopped at 402. It was almost like going to see her. The door was black as a coffin, and the little white number was chipped. We hesitated for a moment, uncertain if it was the right one.
Aunt C looked at me and gently tried to take the key from my fingers.
‘No, I want to,’ I said.
With a shaking hand, I opened the door, to be met with the sight of two quite plain shoeboxes. I don’t know what I was expecting – guns, perhaps, or a sawn-off head – but the contents seemed much too ordinary in relation to my expectations. I’d imagined stolen money, or drugs, or bloodstained clothes, something fantastic, but not inanimate boxes.
I drew them out, and we returned to the Titford rank. The sound of our steps on the platform was like a solemn military band. I carried my grave treasure tight in my arms like a baby. Aunt Coral had brought her shopping basket, in case we should need a container, but I didn’t put the shoeboxes in, so she carried it along quite empty.
Unfortunately, the next cabbie was a chatterer. Aunt C made valiant conversation, the effort of which she signalled to me via secret squeezes. He went on about the road works on the bypass, and told her he was a Santa in the department store but they wouldn’t give him a grotto.
‘They only provide an elf,’ he said.
Even at such moments as these, it seems there is no time for silence. Although, God bless him, how was he to know?
The moon broke through the night sky like a torch suddenly illuminating the floor of the car, searching the top of my boxes with sad, silver light. The same moon that shone for me and Joe, the same moon that silently watches everything.
Back at Green Place, I went straight into the drawing room, with my hat and coat still on, and Aunt Coral sat in the window. I tipped the contents of the boxes out on the floor. I was shot with adrenalin head to toe; the blood of courage.
She had left me a savings account with her rainy day fund, ten thousand pounds in all. And there were old birthday cards and baby photos, and the things from her empty ‘Blue’ folder. Some snippets she’d made into a collage, with some pictures she liked, her eyelashes from the sixties, and ribbons from her bouquets. A life can boil down to two shoeboxes it seems; to remembered birthdays and holidays. Her life was short, but now it also seemed small.
Odd pages from her schooldays lay scattered on the floor like confetti. There were pages from her days at St Hilary’s, a rambling kind of poem, and something that was addressed to Aunt Coral.
Kitchen Novelty competition, St Hilary’s 1962
Buddleia Garden’s Entry:
ROSE PETAL WINE
Here is a family recipe, inadvertently discovered by my sister.
For the infusion:
Sugar
Champagne yeast (never use bread yeast, it tastes foul)
Cooled boiled water
Method:
1 Activate the yeast by adding sugar and warm water in a bowl. Let it sit for ten minutes.
2 Mix together with the rose petals, add more water to taste.
3 Pour into bottle with scrunched sock in the top.
NB this must allow AIR as fermentation can cause EXPLOSION.
‘My father’ (A poem by BG)
July 15 1986
Who are you?
An emperor, or a king? If I saw you in a café, would I know you? Would I have the nerve to tap you on the shoulder and ask, ‘Are you my Dad?’
To Coral,
The truth has finally made sense of why I have always felt like an outsider, of why I was sent away to school, of all that has been missing.
But I’m actually very grateful that they protected me from the stigma of illegitimacy. They were still my parents because they behaved as such, so in that sense it wasn’t a lie.
But I wish I had known my Father. And my poor Mother. I know so little about her. It is as I say, a gap.
Dearest Coral, I do see that you were an unwilling witness to this, but I wish that there had been truth between us. Love and lies; fascinating misfits, like the terribly uncoordinated little girl next door who is so in love with dancing. As I was once.
I wish things had been quite different. But I don’t blame you at all.
With my love to you always,
Your sister, your niece,
Buddleia
Aunt C did not speak for a while, but just shook her head.
‘It’s too late now,’ she said, ‘to say I didn’t know, I didn’t know.’
Her sobs won their bid to be free, and I held her together for some moments.
Then we continued on through the remnants, sewn all over the floor. There was a bill from the film ‘Now, Voyager’. The man on the bill was lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis. It was in black and white and lay next to a bundle of letters which were written on intelligent-looking paper and did not have any stamps.
On the back of one of the older envelopes was the first verse of a poem by W. B. Yeats that began, ‘Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,’ and ended, ‘Tread carefully for you tread on my dreams.’ At the bottom, in the hand of the letter writer, there was a tender line which read:
‘I would give you all Heaven.’
I recognised the handwriting but could not place it at first. The letters dated back years, and were marked ‘private’ in Biro, which is a red rag to a bull, certainly at times like those.
Aunt Coral was looking at something else at that moment, and so quietly and with some strange guidance from my sixth sense I read the last letter first.
Darling
This is the last I can send you. We must cease all contact.
I shall always be grateful to you for the happiness you have brought me at a time in my life when there were shadows. I do love you, you know I do, but J would not be able to cope.
I’m only sorry it’s taken me so long to be certain I can’t go ahead.
Please understand me. I can’t get rid of my conscience, and I will never be free till I do.
I wish you everything good.
Mick X
The letter was dated September 17, 1986. A week later she was gone.
‘Aunt Coral,’ I said, handing her the letter, ‘I think this is what we’ve been looking for.’
She read it slowly, her hand trembling.
‘Who is Mick?’ she asked, her tone was very cautious.
‘It’s Mr Edgeley . . . It can’t have been for a man, it can’t have been,’ I said.
My shocked tears were not of sorrow but plummeting tears of rage. ‘I HATE HER. How could she do this to me?’
‘But this man was just the tip of it. She didn’t know who she was,’ said Aunt C.
‘I should have been able to stop her. I should have known,’ I said.
‘There’s nothing you could have done, she must have been too unhappy.’
‘But other people get divorced and lose loved ones and they don’t kill themselves.’
‘But she wasn’t other people; so much is a question of character. Just think of all the poets who cannot bear to be alive. Or imagine a spider whose vision extends into the ultraviolet range, they are bound to feel things more keenly, so keenly it hurts so much you will do anything to stop it. You know she was—’
‘Born serious. I know.’
She was trying so hard to make sense of it for me in her own way. She now held me up by my shoulders, for I had become a limp rag, and she looked into my face directly with the kindness of all her days.
‘You made her happy Sue. She said as much in her note. YOU MADE HER FEEL HAPPY. You hold on to that.’
‘I don’t hate her, please don’t think that I do,’ I said, givi
ng all that I had inside me to the expression of undying love.
‘Of course you don’t,’ she said, shivering in her silly little blouse and cardigan.
I laid my head on her shoulder for a long time in the silence, and we sat still amongst the scraps and remembered her. The clock on the mantelpiece, oblivious, carried on with its Westminster chimes.
24 December (Christmas Eve)
This morning there was a letter in the post from life:
Dear Miss Bowl
Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying to you; I have been overwhelmed by letters.
In answer to your question about whether it is better to write from experience or from the imagination, I would say that in the majority of cases, it is better to write from the imagination, most particularly in affairs of the heart.
Although we may not actually know a love in real life, I think it is true to say that the heart knows, and this is because of its close bond with the imagination. The imagination is the best friend of the lover, whether in real or in imagined courtships. You can be your own author in imagination, whereas in real life others have a say.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve known heartbreak, but even a bad experience is copy.
May I take this opportunity to thank you very much for your letter and to wish you every success.
Yours truly
Benjamin O’Carroll
MBA Hons.
They are back! And Green Place is once again buzzing. Admiral Gordon returned from a trip into town this morning saying that a consignment of rabbits is heading for Egham. And he’s ordered one for Delia, to help her to come to terms with the loss of Bertie, who was never successfully identified.
Admiral Ted spent his first few hours home chiselling the front door free from ice, and then sanding it down where it had warped with the rain so it was possible to get in and out normally.
It is just like they have never been away, although I must say, the house looks very different. Gone are the acres of wallpaper, and instead pink plaster glistens, giving off an odour of ointment like Green Place has been sent to the clinic.
I overheard Aunt Coral and Glenn Miller discussing his invoice for works when he popped in today. He was agreeing to wait until she gives him the green flag to present it, which she says will be in the New Year. She told me she has come to the conclusion that it is time to sell off her shares, and what good is rainy day money, if you don’t use it on rainy days?