Campari for Breakfast (3 page)

Cara

A SKETCH
By Sue Bowl

Cara turned her face to the new dawn. Childhood lay behind her, just out of reach of her soft hand. What lay ahead was a world of men who would win her. Her eyes smarted with the tears of being torn from her mother. Yet her father, so cruel to send her away so young, had said nothing, just sharpened his knives on the plinny. Suddenly from the distant hills her dear black spaniel ran towards her.

‘Keeper, you must go home,’ cried Cara, her heart breaking with a cute despair.

She rested upon the rude ground, and from thence, her clogs skipped off her feet.

Friday 16 January

It was on Delia’s advice that I put up this notice at the local post office offering my services as a babysitter which would A, ease me fiscally, and B, help me meet new people. She told me that her daughter, Loudolle, babysits in the holidays and makes decadent extra money. (Loudolle goes to a very expensive finishing school in Alpen, Colorado, which is curious, because I know Delia is a little straps.) So as soon as I had settled in, I put up the notice and signed up with a temp agency, Pronto, and within the week I was in a position. Life can be such a whirlwind – who’d have thought I’d have left Titford, moved house and got a job all within two weeks.

It’s a morning job at a café, which I thought might be somewhat chique, so you can imagine when I first arrived at the ‘Toastie’ it was something of a disappointment. The setting is an urbane scene, with a tyre repair place over the road. It’s a canteen style of a café and part of a small parade of shops that follow the curve of a five-exit roundabout just off the A30.

There was no formal interview, or panel, or very much pressure at all, but I did have to go and meet the owner Mrs Fry that same evening at her family’s flat in Egham. She looked like she meant business and had precious little time for small talk, and she offered me the job on the spot, which felt a moment of sheer destiny. It had been worth every tortured minute I spent getting myself ready to look intelligent.

So although it may not be quite the most snazzy of restaurants, I must steel myself to do it as, fiscally speaking, I can’t live on £12.50 a week, not if I want to be well-dressed. The job is ‘Canteen Apprentice’, for the pricley fee of £2 an hour, which at four hours a day, and three mornings a week, will beef up my allowance by £24 to just over the £36 mark. Not the big time, but if you include the perk of working at close quarters with a decadent number of handsome men, I would have done it for nothing!

Mrs Fry has three sons, who I met that first evening. Icarus is by far the best looking, and if he were to show me any interest at all, I predict that I’d fall! But Sandy and Joe are not bad either! And Mrs Fry also has a daughter, poor little Mary-Margaret, who is the spitting image of Mickey Rooney. Life can be most unfair.

Sandy, the eldest Fry, is on a visit from university, and Mary-Margaret, the youngest, still goes to school. Joe has just left like me, and Icarus is a part time biker. Both Joe and Icarus work in the Toastie. It’s at moments like these when I wish I didn’t waver in the column between slimmish and chubby.

I nearly forgot in all the excitement that it was my seventeenth birthday yesterday. Because in the secret back places of my mind I have been worrying about how I would feel on such a day in a world without mum. But it is not the Green Place way to let a birthday slip by unnoticed, and so with some discretion at tea time, Mrs Bunion provided a chocolate cake with candles and ice cream to follow. Then the ladies presented me with a writing folio as a gift for all my thoughts. The Admiral made a gift of himself and got changed into cavalry twill trousers to come down and join us for the cake.

And with the gift of my new job to boot, my mood is surprisingly upbeat. I can’t wait to get to know the ropes. I start on Monday!

Wednesday 21 January

How time flies at the Toastie. I feel I have been there for years!

I work part time, Monday to Wednesday, starting at 7.00 in the morning and ending at 11.00, unless Mrs Fry needs an after-hours. There are five of us working on breakfasts: Mrs Fry calls out the orders and takes the money up at the front, Icarus grills bacon, eggs and tomatoes, Joe makes cappuchinos, and I am on the toaster. Mueslis, fruit, and serial orders have to be fitted in around the cooked breakfasts, which causes a little bit of chaos. Nina Scrafferton is the last of the personnel, and she is a full time girl. She has a hair style so short that everyone calls her Michael.

Mrs Fry describes herself as a laps catholic, but for someone with religion she works us very hard. She’s what I term a jangler, she’s all bunches of keys and bracelets. How I shudder at the sound of her tinkling – though luckily it means you can always hear her coming before she’s actually there.

At 9.30am I come off the toaster and go into the kitchen and start buttering up the deliveries, overseen by Mrs Fry who pounces on me if I use too much butter. When they are ready, the baguettes, rolls and sandwiches are loaded on to the Toastie van to be delivered out to the Egham borders, and to hungry office workers who could hardly imagine the humble beginnings of their lunch.

This is what women like Ivana refer to as ‘life experience’, though she’s never had any. I think of her dossing around Titford in her car shoes and it nearly makes me spit.

It has been Joe who has helped me the most during these first few days. If you burn a round of toast when you’ve got a big queue of customers, the knock-on effect means that you fall behind with your orders and
that
means that pretty soon the breakfasting public will be getting cold toast, or toast that comes after they’ve finished eating. You can spend entire mornings behind with the toast, never managing to catch up the timing, trying to make sandwiches as well, jumping every time Mrs Fry calls your name. Joe has been very supportive, even putting the cappuchinos in jeopardy so that he could help me out.

Mrs Fry is not so patient and makes me go up to tables and apologise for late toast and docks the price off my wages. Nina Scrafferton told me that previous canteen apprentices have cracked.

Icarus hasn’t said a word to me, but I have sensed him looking. He has a shocking pair of blue eyes that take in my every floor. The only thing he’s said to me during this awful week is to ask if I like toast and I’m not sure if he was mocking me. Actually I adore toast and can eat six slices at a sitting, but I wasn’t going to tell him that and shatter all his illusions. Nor did I want to speak against toast, because toast is his mother’s livelihood. In fact I struggled to say anything at all, as his presence renders me speechless. He is dark and over six feet tall with long tousled hair, and much as I find tight trousers a bit obvious on a man, Icarus gets away with them.

Thursday 22 Jan

Every morning around 11.00am there is a lull at Green Place when Aunt Coral and Delia are out shopping and the Admiral is at his club. So after my Toastie shift yesterday morning, I decided to get back into bed in the Grey Room and get cracking with Mr O’Carroll. In the very first chapter he suggests getting together in a writers group. It sounds like a much better way to progress into authorship as it’s very hard to be your own editor, but being new to the area I don’t know enough people to form a group.

On page 5 he says: ‘Once you have got your group together and nominated a guru, you should try the following exercise: write a letter to yourself from a relative or friend, someone who owes you an apology. This is a healing exercise designed to aid you in any blocks. Then share and discuss your letters.’ In the absence of a group I decided to do this on my own. Here it is:

Dear Sue

Forgive a very silly woman writing to you, but I only want to say that I am so sorry I read your private story, and I am equally sorry I misunderstood it. It’s only because I am an idiot and I never had any life experience. It was wrong of me to go under your bed and into your private things. I am a stupid and ridiculous woman and I ask for your forgiveness.

But I am the most sorry for being with your father. I understand that it is far too soon after your mother’s death for me to be carrying on with him and I apologise for this deeply. He is only doing it because he is lonely. I have no excuse.

There was nothing going on before your mother died. You have my solemn word.

Forgive me.

Ivana

Then I realised why the book suggests you work in a group as I spent the rest of the morning sobbing. Dad and Ivana’s behaviour and their special relationship with the truth is like a thorn in my heart and it bleeds all the time. I don’t know how I will ever know what was really going on between them and when it started. Nobody will tell me the truth.

I was still up in the Grey Room when I heard Aunt Coral and Delia get home. One of the problems with living in someone else’s house is that you can’t retreat in your bedroom all day, not if they know you’re at home, so I dried my face and went downstairs.

They were in the kitchen unloading their bags and spotted my red eyes in a nanasecond. I think Aunt Coral was about ready to phone an ambulance. She dropped her shopping and swept me up.

‘Oh dear! Delia, chocolate, quickly!’

There is nothing on earth so upsetting as kindness and it unlocked everything I was trying to hold on to: Mum, Dad, Ivana, toast, page 5, the letter.

‘May I see the letter?’ asked Aunt Coral, and in spite of being a very private person I didn’t hesitate before I went to get it. My heart was crying out to unburden itself, even unto the elderly.

‘Let’s think about the positives first. You are a beautiful girl,’ said Aunt Coral as she finished the letter, clearly launching a rescue mission.

‘Beautiful girl, that’s a positive,’ said Delia.

‘And Ivana is a woman in the last chance salon when it comes to affairs with men,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘She’s a double divorcee and that can’t be easy for her. Women like that can’t help themselves but pounce on every man that arises.’

‘And
you
should know,’ said Delia, which I thought was a little unfair on Aunt Coral, although obviously given a green flag she would definitely pounce on the Admiral.

‘What I am trying to say,’ continued Aunt Coral unthwarted, ‘is that one shouldn’t marry too often or one will become known as a colourful character. But the other side of the coin is that everybody has a hungry heart.’

‘You can’t make me feel sorry for Ivana,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But it may help if you try. You’re very young, but old enough to know that life is cruel. As for your father, it’s true a grieving man will long for a little comfort. We should have a nice talk about it later, quietly on our own,’ she said, glowering at Delia who didn’t know when to stop with her jokes.

I soaked her beige cardigan with my tears and emerged into the sunshine again. Aunt Coral is wise beyond her years.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you should absolutely not attempt to do this kind of emotional work on your own, and in the absence of a group, Delia and I will stand in for you. If you want to continue with the course that is.’

‘I shall write a letter to myself from my ex-husband,’ said Delia, ‘and we can all have a jolly good laugh.’

‘And I could advertise immediately in the post office for more members,’ said Aunt Coral. They were chomping with the bit between their teeth and I was totally carried along. Soon they were steaming ahead debating what we would call it and where we would have it and when it would be and what snacks would be served. Anybody’d have thought that they didn’t have much to do.

When the Admiral arrived home and came in to knock his pipe out in the kitchen, he got infected by the excitement too.

‘Does your group admit gentlemen?’ he asked.

The thought of doing emotional work in a group containing the Admiral was more than Aunt Coral could hold on to. ‘Yes!’ she exploded.

In my opinion Admiral Avery Little is a difficult man for Aunt Coral to have got eyes for. After dinner, when we go and relax in the drawing room, although the Ad is present, he never really joins in the conversation, but is king of his pipe and books. As a consequence he misses all the juicy bits we ladies talk about and only joins in when something really dull comes up, such as all the best parking spots in Egham. But to give him credit the Admiral didn’t miss the fact that I’d been crying, and kindly offered to drop me at the Toastie next week so I don’t have to get the bus.