Campari for Breakfast (27 page)

Although Aunt C’s primary focus is on how to get the money required for all the building works, she still found time to hold one last Group before leaving. There was a forlorn atmosphere, due to finding mum’s note, and all the unpleasantnesses that have gone on, with the theft of the fifty pounds and the ceilings coming down, and the tenants’ imminent departures. And the feeling was matched by the small acts of summer’s slow death outside, one apple after another, and the last few handfuls of rose petals now turning brown on the damp ground.

‘How do you interpret your surroundings? How do you interpret events?’ said Aunt Coral, sipping the first of several Sapphires that went down her neck that evening. ‘A tree falling across the road may be interpreted by one person as a bad omen and by another as a good excuse not to have to go to work that day. Being ditched at the altar may be interpreted as total heartbreak, or the best way of going on a diet. Can anyone else think of any examples?’

We all put our hands up.

‘Sue?’ she said.

‘The dry rot, or rather, the travelling fungus in Green Place may be seen as a disaster, or an alarm call that saves the building.’

‘Excellent Sue, and I hope so,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘And Avery?’

‘The travelling fungus in Green Place may be seen as a disaster, or as an opportunity to go and stay at my club.’

‘Excellent Avery, positive spin on the same point. Joe?’

‘The travelling fungus at Green Place may be interpreted as a disaster or as a chance for Sue to be courageous.’

‘Excellent Joe, well done, but not all the examples need be to do with the travelling fungus. Delia?’

‘The travelling fungus at Green Place may be seen as a disaster or a reason to go to America.’

‘Yes excellent Delia, same point differently interpreted. Goodness, aren’t we all obsessed with the travelling fungus. Loudolle?’

‘The travelling fungus at Green Place may be seen as a disaster or as a chance to learn about travelling funguses.’

‘Thank you Loudolle,’ said Aunt Coral, in a manner of friendly contempt.

I should point out that Loudolle has continued to attend enough Groups to be considered eligible to enter the short story competition. This came about when Delia told her that the prize money was £250. Admirals G and T have now joined up too, having become hooked in over this weekend.

‘And now I have another exercise for you. Imagine, if you will, a scenario such as the one we had at the close of the chivalry weekend, when fifty pounds went missing from my handbag and we had a witness accusing Sue. Now, it reminded me of the time when we had a witness saying it was Sue who had stolen the sausages. And so, bringing the great Agatha Christie into our thoughts on interpretation this evening, let’s ask how might we, taking this scenario as our crime, interpret things differently? All the evidence in both instances seems to point to Sue. There has even been a witness to the fact . . . I throw it open.’

We all put our hands up; you could have cut the evening in half.

‘Sue,’ said Aunt Coral.

‘Just because someone says they saw something doesn’t actually mean that they did. Maybe they said they did. Or maybe they
thought
they did.’ (I added the last bit to save Delia’s feelings.)

‘Excellent Sue, well said, and Avery?’

‘There may have been a perfectly innocent explanation whereby the witness saw what she thought she saw, but interpreted it wrongly,’ said the Admiral defending the mermaid-witch.

‘That’s another viewpoint Avery, well done. And Joe?’

‘It could be that the witness was a liar and didn’t like the person she was accusing,’ said Joe.

‘Excellent Joe, really excellent, yes, it could well be. And Delia?’

‘Or it could be that the witness was telling the truth, and was brave enough to say so, and was only acting in the best interests of everybody, even the thief.’ She did have the wool over her eyes.

‘Thank you Delia, and Loudolle?’

‘Maybe the witness saw what she said she saw but nobody believed her.’

‘Maybe,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘But we can see how many different possibilities there are within a single scenario. Now, all this is leading to something important. I, Coral Elizabeth Garden should like to bear my own witness, to tell you that Sue did
not
take the money from my handbag, and I’ll tell you why. When the sausages went missing from the table, I thought it was most out of character for Sue to have dropped them in the pool and not to have apologised, or gone to fetch more sausages. I therefore suspected at once that there must have been foul play. I still didn’t know who did take the sausages, but I knew it wasn’t Sue.’

We were gripped.

‘Ever since then, I have been on my guard against similar incidents. So when Sue asked me if she could borrow a large sum of money, and I had put the cash in my handbag, I took the precaution of marking the notes by drawing a small red circle on each one, and then, when Loudolle accused Sue of going into my bag and taking the money, I followed my instinct which had been aroused by the sausages and I went straight into Loudolle’s room and searched for the money. And there I found it, hidden in her sponge bag.’

She threw the wad of marked bank notes down on to the table, triumphant, and Loudolle opened her mouth in an unedited cry: ‘So it was you who took my money!’

‘Is that a confession?’ said Aunt Coral, and fear made Loudolle shut her mouth.

‘And furthermore, ladies and gentlemen, I know that the foul play went even deeper than that, because Sue had earlier told me that the reason she needed the loan in the first place was because Loudolle had been blackmailing her, and that the various ransom demands now amounted to the £50 sum. The ransom was to be paid in order to buy Loudolle’s silence over a romantic secret, and Sue had no choice but to ask me to lend her the money, because she didn’t want her secret exposed.’

Please don’t tell them about the eye. Please don’t tell them about the eye
, I was thinking in every part of my being.

‘And therefore . . . if Lucinda Shoot had succeeded in stealing the ransom money from my wallet before I could give it to Sue, thereby preventing Sue from paying it to her, and then making Sue pay the ransom again, then Lucinda Shoot would be going back to college with a hundred pounds and not fifty, leaving Sue bankrupt and taking all the blame.’

There was silence.

‘But Lucinda Shoot made
another
major error,’ went on Aunt Coral. ‘She did not understand that nothing on earth would induce me to allow her to commit such an offence against a cherished member of my family.’

Well, all hell broke loose. Delia scraped her chair back, and the Admiral scraped back his, and Loudolle ran out crying. Joe was in shock and I was gobsmacked, and eventually Admiral Gordon and Admiral Ted managed to calm it all down.

I am overwhelmed with blessings to have an Aunt such as my Aunt Coral. For loyalty and ingenius she has no rival. I know I shall really miss her while she is at Daphne’s. I am determined to save Green Place from falling down. I would hold it up myself if I could.

This is my bedtime reading, which I do not wish to show Aunt Coral, but which seems particularly apt:

serpula lacrymans
(dry rot)

Although it is termed ‘dry’, it requires a level of moisture, and often outbreaks begin due to an escape of water. Traditional hot beds for out-breaks of
serpula lacrymans
were sea ships, and costs of repairs usually exceeded primary building fees.

The insidious, rapidly spreading decay produces a foul odour, closely akin to damp. Unlike wet rots, soft rots or honey funguses, it has the ability to ‘jump’ over materials other than wood, which is why when treating
serpula lacrymans
, plaster, coverings and floors must be stripped back two to three feet in all directions from the outbreak in order to ensure containment.

Metaphorically used to describe unseen corruption in society, or hidden individual difficulties, leading to catastrophe.

Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 4

Green Place, July 4 1954
(32)

Eat, drink and be merry! Final restrictions lifted! At long last, after fourteen years of food rationing, Mother can burn her ration book. We shall celebrate with bacon, potatoes, bananas and the words ‘as much as you like’.

My new job is at The Hospital of Tropical Diseases, researching bites and venoms. Which is sadly ironic because Mother is battling with malaria, or river fever as she calls it, that she contracted in the Bush. She may prefer the red desert to the green borders, the camp fire to the cooker, but such joys of the open air come at quite a high price, and they had to get the fastest ship home.

Little Buddleia has now been packed off to boarding school in the Pennines, Australian accent and all – I wonder what the nuns will make of her! Of course she didn’t want to go but Father says it never did him any harm. And mother is quite unable to move, let alone look after a child.

Poor Buddleia has to endure ice baths and corporal punishment, and complains of a complete lack of toast, though she can smell it coming from the nuns’ kitchens. I felt bad for leaving her in school on her last exeat, but a greater force swept me away in the form of the Botanist . . . more on which later. She sent me a mournful letter, saying she was sorry that no one wanted to share in her leisure time.

On our last visit to Green Place Father went out shooting rabbits and wanted to take Buddleia with him.

‘I will shoot with a camera but never with a gun,’ she said solemnly.

And each time she heard him fire she hung her head and prayed. She loves animals, just like Cameo.

‘They have no voice,’ she says.

It’s awful being seven, particularly if you’ve an old head on your shoulders. She even claims to have joined the school Freedom Party. She and select classmates have requested my help in writing up a leaflet. ‘A way to change the world’ is the title. It’ll be a better place for rabbits.

Green Place news:

The country’s economy and buildings have both been devastated by the war, and some ministers are suggesting that caravans are the solution to our housing crisis. And there I was actually thinking of moving out of Green Place permanently to be with the Botanist. But I don’t feel I can leave Father on his own, what with Mother in the hospital and the papers saying that one large mansion is demolished every five minutes. A demolished house can’t be valued for probate you see, which is why so many have gone.

Father is applying to make us a listed building to preserve us and keep our land. It would be easy if we were Strawberry Hill Gothic or something very definitive, rather than just a lowly, latter-day Queen Anne. He states in his application that the gardens were planted by Gertrude Jekyll, with the supports to the balconies to the front of the building being of a pioneering construction (which is probably why they have rusted through and collapsed). I suggested he add that Green Place was once visited by the Double Duchess of Devonshire, Louisa Frederica Cavendish. The town and country planners go crazy for anyone famous, and might give us a grade 1. (Building of exceptional interest.)

The Botanist:

Edgar Van Campen. 5 feet 6 of perfection, and a genius in the lab. He was saying in the refectory how much he loves quirks on a woman, such as widows peaks, overlapping teeth and cowlicks. I don’t quite have all of them, so I better watch him around Doris Trent.

Sue

Friday 9 October

T
HE DAYS OF
Green Place guardianship are long. I get up and make the first teas before 7am – Glenn Miller and his men need so much tea all the time and one of the plumbers requires a biscuit every eleven minutes. Then I put in a full day at the Toastie before returning to make final beverages and then go to my camp in the attic where I write by the light of my candles. Glenn has been considerate and tries to leave me with electricity at the weekends. He loves a chat and tells me lots of stories about the house. He seems to know a lot about my mother, but then he knew her as a young tradesman.

‘I found her once in the potting shed,’ he said. ‘She was about eight or nine at the time. Mr Garden had banned her from reading
Black Beauty
, so she’d snuck in to read in secret.’

‘Why did he ban
Black Beauty
? It’s not rude is it?’

‘No, it’s not rude at all,’ said Glenn. ‘I think it was banned because it was sad.’

Glenn must have been a nice, reassuring presence around the place for my mum. Over the years Aunt C remembers him hanging out of windows, (paint brush in hand), never quite making an impact on the enormity of the building.

During the weeks the house is busy with the boiler-suited cavalry, and when I am alone on a Sunday, there are always the gardens to hike in and the trespasser traps to check for ramblers. It’s difficult to dress for the weather though. I walk out with my jumper and coat on, and then I have to take my jumper off, and have just my coat, then I have to take that off too, then I end up with both of them round my waist, then I have to put my jumper back on again, then my coat back on too. And so on it goes in the Autumn–Winter crossing.

My favourite spot is up by the Croquet Hut on the sun lawn. It’s a wooden lodge, almost swallowed up by the blackberries, with a staggering view over Egham. If ever, God forbid, Green Place does fall down, I’m going to ask Aunt Coral if I can live here.

She has written to me from Knightsbridge, from a flat with bars on the windows and only a courtyard garden. She has to share her bedroom with Daphne’s cat and she is very agitated about her clothes. Not surprising when she packed near to two hundred dresses, in the hopes of being invited to all the functions of Belgravia Square.