Campari for Breakfast

by Sara Crowe

  ‘What do you mean you can’t afford it? Your mother left you ten thousand pounds!’

  ‘I used that to pay Glenn,’ I said. ‘I wanted to surprise you.’

  ‘Sue!’ she said, in flabberghast. ‘I can’t let you do that.’

  ‘Of course I’d love to go, but I’d be just as happy to stay here.’

  ‘But there’s a world of difference between happiness and joy, and it would give me such joy if you go.’

  ‘But you need the money for the house; it could mean another room for you.’

  ‘I would have lost this house if it weren’t for you.’

  ‘It was your shoes that saved you.’

  ‘Let me put it another way. I insist you go on that course.’ She put her hands on my shoulders, like heroes do in the films when they want to persuade heroines to marry them.

  ‘Imagine I am in bed with a book,’ she said, ‘I who have read all the greats, twice, and the author of the book I am reading is not Dickens, or Defoe or Austen, it is my very own Hampshire-born Sue. Nothing could give me more pleasure, nothing, not even a boyfriend. My darling Sue, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in this life, it is that we must drink the wine while it’s red.’

  She kissed me, and it wasn’t just a cocktail kiss, but a strong kiss of devotion. There was just no arguing with that.

  We walked back to tell Mr O’Carroll.

  ‘Thank you Mr O’Carroll, I would love to,’ I said.

  The rain made a noise like strings of pearls falling on the parquet. Perhaps it was a shower of fortune.

  ‘You shall go,’ Aunt C mouthed from across the room amongst the elite of her salon, nearly stumbling into the Ad with an excitement that made her tipsy much quicker than anyone else.

  Loudolle had gone to Mrs Fry’s with Icarus after the gala, but halfway through the evening I turned and saw the three of them coming into the drawing room. It was as though the saloon doors had swung open, and the baddies had come in.

  ‘Ah, Loudolle,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘How nice of you to come.’

  Then she ushered Loudolle and Icarus into the conservatory and called the entire EHG in too.

  ‘Won’t be a moment, Mr O’Carroll,’ she said, leaving him with Mrs Fry.

  Loudolle looked the picture of innocence, sitting in the conservatory window, Icarus beside her.

  ‘When did you swap the pages?’ said Aunt Coral, getting straight to the point.

  ‘Straight after Group,’ said Loudolle.

  ‘But we were all at home,’ said Aunt Coral.

  ‘You were out looking for the Bentley,’ said Loudolle.

  ‘So you seized the opportunity to swap titles. It’s too fantastic!’ said the Admiral.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘Sorry . . . will that be all?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘I want to talk to Icarus.’

  Icarus looked to his side to make sure there was no one else called Icarus sitting there.

  ‘Tell me, Icarus, have you passed your driving test?’ said Aunt Coral.

  ‘For my bike, but not for a car,’ said Icarus.

  ‘But you managed to drive the Bentley?’ said Aunt Coral.

  Loudolle coughed unserenely and Icarus sat still for a moment of struggle as Loudolle tried to guide his reply with her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said finally, ‘I was only going to take it for a spin.’

  ‘Voila! The thief of the Bentley!’ said Aunt Coral.

  ‘Twirling moustaches!’ said the Admiral.

  It is staggering. So Icarus created a diversion to get us out of Green Place, giving Loudolle a chance to swap the title page of my short story with hers. But she didn’t bank on being asked to read aloud, something a mind with some brains would have thought of.

  Icarus and Loudolle were mortified and made their escape through the conservatory doors, offering up hasty excuses as to the reason they had to be anywhere else. Delia was cringing, because she’d invited Nigel from the Herald and it was too late to stop him from hearing. What a scoop.

  Once we got back to the drawing room, the party began to get going. A complete stranger – well, a friend of Aunt C’s called Poseidon – congratulated me on ‘Brackencliffe’ and said that she was a fan. The Nanas raised their glasses of special fruit cocktail, resolved to wait until midnight to have ‘just a drip of champagne’. George Buchanan the dentist and Daphne were in discussion about fillings. The Ad was talking to Aunt C about the latest legislation on parking in the town centre. In spite of this she looked happy.

  After a while Mrs Bunion came in with a gold trolley, laden with shimmering drinks and we did the countdown with a Scots man on the news. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one …’

  ‘Happy New Year!’ said Aunt Coral, with great rhythm.

  ‘Happy New Year!’ said Joe.

  But I was still thinking about the gauling behaviour of Loudolle.

  ‘I was just wondering if it might have also been Icarus who left me those flowers,’ I said, ‘all as part of their plan?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Joe, ‘Green Place is very easy to get into.’

  ‘I think they wanted to add to my belief that there was a tramp here, so I would believe it was a tramp that stole the Bentley. I’m starting to believe that there was never a tramp here at all.’

  ‘Maybe you might have been . . . Sueifying things,’ said Joe with great compassion and a small rakish grin.

  I looked at him and the goosebumps on my forearm indicated I had undergone a transfusion of love.

  1st January 1988

  ‘Please come quickly Aunt Coral,’ I said, ‘and bring your key.’

  It was two this morning and the locked room light was turned on again. Aunt C was still on a high from the soiree, so I didn’t have to drag her.

  ‘There’s somebody in there,’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s the wiring,’ she said.

  But this time I was determined. The gala and Joe and the scholarship, all had played their part.

  ‘Hello, it’s just Sue,’ I said, knocking. ‘Happy New Year.’

  All was quiet, and then the light went off. There was definitely somebody there.

  ‘Please don’t be alarmed,’ I said. ‘I just want to know who you are.’

  The light went on and then off again, and shadows played under the door.

  ‘Give me your key,’ I said to Aunt Coral, and she went to the keyhole in the dividing door on the landing.

  ‘It’s not there,’ she said. All along she’d kept the key just there in the keyhole of the other door! But I didn’t have time to interrogate her on the matter.

  ‘Hello,’ I said and knocked again. ‘It’s just Sue Bowl.’

  Then, very slowly, the lock clicked and the handle began to turn. Then the door swung open and there stood an old man with long hair lit by the moonbeams.

  ‘Good God,’ said Aunt Coral, collecting herself as though she had seen a ghost.

  ‘Johnny?’

  She had to summon all of her senses before the following conversation took place.

  ‘I’m sure that you’ll understand if I come straight to the point. What I’m wondering is, what on earth you are doing here?’

  The man looked from Aunt Coral to me. He must have been in his sixties, but he still had a frolic in his eyes.

  ‘My wife died, I was down on my luck, so I got a place in the Egham …’ He was hesitant in his approach and spoke with emotional difficulty.

  ‘Go on,’ said Aunt Coral.

  ‘I remembered my days at the house, and I wondered if you were still here. I wanted to come back to see it all again, they were happy days.’

  ‘How long have you been staying here?’ I asked, my mental calendar was spinning.

  ‘On and off since June,’ he said, vindicating Joe’s theory that a family of six could live in Green Place and you wouldn’t know they were there.

  So there before me stood the likely explanation for the sausages, light
s, shower, and ceilings.

  ‘But why should you stay here so long? Didn’t you have anywhere else to go?’ said Aunt C.

  He seemed reluctant to answer, but with a small struggle he continued.

  ‘You see I dreamt there was some evidence of me in this room and that someone was waiting. But my dreams are not what they were, and they’re not always so clear. But it kept on coming back to me, there was something – somebody waiting. Please forgive me, I wasn’t intending to stay.’

  ‘I don’t deny you’re a prophet,’ said Aunt C, ‘I remember that well. But what I’d really like to know is, how did you know where the key was kept to get into Cameo’s room?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to know that too,’ I said.

  And then his expression went into a small anxious frown covering one half of his forehead. It appeared that Aunt Coral’s question had gone straight to the heart.

  ‘Please forgive me,’ he said forlornly, ‘I know that I was unsuitable.’

  Aunt C reacted calmly, though I sensed that her feet were paddling madly under the surface of troubled waters.

  ‘On the contrary, a man with the soul of a poet is totally suitable to Cameo,’ she said.

  She was already level with his revelation, although I had yet to quite catch up.

  ‘But did you find what your dream meant?’ I asked. ‘Was there something – or someone?’

  I was imagining ghosts of sad ladies in linen nighties crying in the locked room. But he pointed at a black smudge on the bed cover, as though that was the evidence he sought.

  ‘It is forty-year-old coal,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘Forty-year-old,’ said Aunt Coral. She was looking at me in the code way she has when she hopes I will catch on to her drift. Something was too hard for her to say and so she had to say it with her expression. And we stood in silence for some time, while nine months of maths crossed three generations of untold things.

  ‘My mother would have been forty,’ I said.

  The man’s face was a picture.

  ‘And I think what Aunt Coral is trying to tell you, if I’m correct, is that you are my Grandfather.’

  ‘I think that’s right,’ said Aunt C.

  He reeled and swayed with the shock of it. He held on to himself for support. I don’t know who was the more astounded, Aunt Coral and myself for discovering him, or he, for the drop of the bombshell that was telling him who he was.

  And then as his frown became more serious, I recognised Mum’s expression in his. It was there in his eyes, like a glimpse of her, and I found it was not inappropriate for me to rush into his arms, even though he was in a poor state of repair and smelt like old turnips. He cried too, in fact words failed us both and tears took over; not only tears of joy and sorrow, but tears of awe. It was unique and overwhelming to embrace a stranger who was my blood.

  ‘You’re the key to my dream,’ he said.

  He cupped his hand gently to my cheek and almost fell under the weight of old sorrows and profound surprises. ‘You look like me!’ he said, in flabberghast, though he was half blind from sobbing.

  ‘I do!’ I said, and I do. It was like what I imagine to be the moment when a Doctor holds up a new-born baby.

  ‘She looks just like the Father,’ the Doctor might say, only here there was a missed generation.

  ‘But where is she? Where is Cameo’s baby?’ he said.

  ‘I think we could do with a drink,’ said Aunt Coral.

  We went downstairs to talk, for there was life and death itself to catch up on. It was very hard for him to discover the baby, the girl, and the woman that he had missed. In just one brief moment he celebrated the birth and mourned the loss of a daughter he never knew.

  ‘It feels as though she’s been with me all this time, in the embodiment of you,’ I said. ‘She sent you to tell me the truth, even though you didn’t know it.’

  ‘Too much secrecy is never a good thing,’ said Aunt Coral.

  Then she opened up a bottle of her purest medicinal whisky to help ease all the pain. I won’t ever forget the way she looked at me and my new Grandfather so fondly, though I think she felt quite a little outsider in such a great twist of life.

  Weds January 6 1988

  It’s now just a few days before I leave for Greece, and a bitterly cold day.

  I went to hand in my notice at the Toastie on Monday, and Mrs Fry asked me to come in for a coffee. The café was still closed for the holidays, but Icarus was at work doing the community service of duties – the dishes – as penance for his lies.

  Mrs Fry apologised for having been severe in the past and said I should ask for a job again if ever I wanted one in the future. I felt like a company girl, part of her team, a lifer, and she said I was a first-class waitress. And then, as though they’d rehearsed it, Icarus sat beside me and she was ‘called away’.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm. Loudolle made me do it.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, and I did, because she had probably put a spell on him. ‘There’s no harm done, we can still be friends.’

  ‘In fact I was wondering if you’d like to go out for a drink before you go?’ said Icarus.

  If he had said that one month earlier, my heart would have tangoed out of the Toastie. But the landscape is very different now. The mountains are topped with Joe.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘that would have been lovely, but I’m going away and I’m not back till April.’

  ‘In April then.’

  As Aunt C sometimes says, doesn’t everyone love a winner? But I have different loyalties now and looking at it on paper, I have a definite preference!

  ‘I’m really sorry, Icarus, but I just don’t think we’re on the same wavelength.’

  ‘What’s a wavelength?’ he said.

  Loudolle couldn’t face me, but instead left a designer notecard on my bed before going back to Alpen. I felt smirched that she’d been in my bedroom, but softened when I read its disclosures. The picture it bore was of a vintage perfume bottle designed by Yves Sean Laurent, and inside it read:

  Hey clever you,

  I just wanted to say I’m so sorry I lost my head. I just think that you’re so amazing, and I wanted to write just like you. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Let’s go get lunch or something next time I’m back in the country.

  I hope we will always be friends.

  Love, love, love

  From

  Loudolle X

  As if we would go and get lunch! Just like we were Aunt C and D on the brink of being lifelong friends! It was going to take more than the sending of an insecure card for me. Forgiveness isn’t instantaneous, but I will try for the sake of Delia.

  Speaking of which, Delia went into a little decline after the gala, and Aunt C said we had to look out for her. Not that I think that everyone who has a bad hour is going to commit suicide, but once it has happened you worry. I found one of her letters to herself outside, mashed almost to a pulp but still just legible. In it she said she felt she ‘existed to reassure happily marrieds it was possible to survive being alone’.

  But there is a silver lining for Delia, because she has found Admiral Gordon. It turns out that their love has been growing through all that time spent on the Italian. I’m not sure if they have been off to bed together or anything yet, but they have plans. He is taking her to visit his nanny, who is ninety and lives in a hall.

  We ordered a plaque for Mum with bright-gold lettering and put it next to Cameo’s dolls’ plaques as she asked, where the wind could sweep over it and the sun could beat down on her name.

  We stood and paid our respects when it was set, sombre under the mizzle. Our coats and cheeks were covered in rain so fine it barely wet us. Johnny Look-at-the-Moon came too. He wore his best suit. We must have made a strange picture as we bowed our heads to remember her name. Daughter, Aunt, and Father, I am sure she would have been astonished.

  And in years to come, whe
n we have all passed away, there may come a jogger who’ll think they have stumbled on graves of family pets. Mitzi, Mae, Cameo, Buddleia. Sadly missed.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ said Aunt Coral after a short time. She always has a cut-off point for such sorrow, and I think I understand why now.

  We had to say goodbye to Johnny, as he needed to be on his way. I watched him walk down the drive, as I had the first time I ever saw him. He headed towards Clockhouse Lane, and disappeared once again, like magic.

  ‘I hope he’ll be back,’ I said.

  ‘So do I,’ said Aunt C.

  We spent the next few hours making cakes, thawing in the warmth from the oven, and found ourselves with a rare opportunity for one of our satisfying ‘chats’.

  ‘Why do you think that Cameo pointed the finger at Major Laine?’ I said. ‘It seems quite awful when she knew she’d been to bed with Johnny.’

  ‘Maybe she thought Laine could be the father. Maybe she was hurt and angry, maybe she was protecting Johnny, maybe she got her dates muddled. Maybe it was all of the above; we have the rest of our lives to speculate.’ This she said with an air of weary sophistication, cracking an egg into a bowl with a terrible lack of skill.

  ‘You think she’d been to bed with both of them?’ I said.

  She gave me a peculiar smile that contained something looking like sympathy.

  ‘But a married Major and a lowly coal boy,’ she said. ‘Father would have bust a nut.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, piping up with further questions, ‘why she didn’t tell you about Johnny. You wouldn’t have told anyone, would you?’

  ‘Because she loved me,’ said Aunt C. ‘Look in my Commonplace.’

  ‘But I’ve read your Commonplace, there’s nothing in there to tell me.’

  ‘Go back and look at the letter I wrote to Johnny when he was sent to the front.’

  ‘I’ve read that too, it’s a nice letter, very newsy.’

  ‘I wrote it at the time of censors and snoopers and spies,’ she continued. ‘I felt unsafe in many ways, to expose my true feelings, so I decided to write it in a code. That way I could be certain I could say what I wanted without Johnny understanding my message. It was just something I wanted to express without the consequences of anyone knowing, just my own little secret to treasure in the privacy of my thoughts. Father and Doctor John used to communicate with each other in a code, so I just borrowed their idea. I decided that the first word of every fourth sentence should spell out another sentence. I think you’ll find it on Aug 12 1944, if I’m not mistaken …’