Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  ‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself –

  Yea, all which it inherit – shall dissolve.

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.’

  We all sat and looked at him, mesmerized.

  Later that evening, we were gathered at a big round table with Humphrey, my mother, Maxine and Peter’s parents, and another couple.

  The lady asked me if I liked fancy-dress parties and I said, ‘I’ve only been to one. It was on ice. I was wearing a bowler hat and carrying my school recorder and Mummy just pushed me out onto the ice and I didn’t know who I was supposed to be.’

  My mother interrupted, ‘She was Acker Bilk, the jazz musician,’ and then turned to me. ‘You remember, I told you that you were Acker Bilk.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know who Acker Bilk was. And I didn’t know how to ice-skate. So for the rest of the party I stood holding onto the side of the rink while the other children came up and asked me who Acker Bill was and when I said, “I don’t know,” they laughed at me.’

  The people at the table seemed to be listening, so I went on.

  ‘Then, one day, a funny thing happened. We were in an airport and my mum pointed to a man sitting in the waiting area and said, “There’s Acker Bilk! Go and get his autograph for me.”

  ‘I went and asked him, and while he was writing “To Audrey” I said to him, “I once went to a fancy-dress party as you. Though I didn’t know who you were.”

  ‘He said, “Well, you know now …”

  ‘I said, “Yes, you play the recorder and ice-skate in a bowler hat.”’

  Everyone laughed at that, and I thought for a moment that maybe I could tell stories like my mother rather than always sitting at her side not speaking.

  It was now the shortlist for the fancy-dress contest. Everyone was to walk across the ballroom stage and announce who we were.

  My mother was beckoning me. We had to dance across singing ‘We’re the Flintstones’, and then at the end jump in the air and shout, ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’

  I was wearing her leopard-skin half-slip, and she had back-combed my hair into a strange frizz. She looked beautiful in her ocelot silk wrap with a necklace of chicken bones round her neck. We had had to eat chicken all week to get these and then find something called florist wire, which meant I had to dismantle old flower arrangements that we stole from the restaurant tables. She told me that if anyone asked I could say I wanted to decorate our cabin as a surprise for my mummy. So at every meal I carried back the flower arrangements and unwound the wire from them, which she magically turned into chicken-bone jewellery.

  We now did our song and dance and she said into the microphone, ‘Hey, what did Wilma Flintstone say at the altar when she married Fred?’ Then we jumped and both yelled out, ‘I Yabba Dabba Doo!’ just as we had practised. Everyone gave us a big clap and we got a few cheers. Roger stood up and shouted, ‘Bravo!’ and my mother did a funny curtsey just for him.

  When it was Humphrey’s turn, the compère said, ‘And now we have the legendary actor Humphrey Leighton revisiting his performance as Prospero.’ Humphrey gave some of his ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ speech. He had practised this and when I said I thought it was ‘made of’ he showed me and explained it was in Elizabethan. He did it very well, and to our surprise he got a standing ovation. As he wove his way back to our table through the still-clapping guests, I said, ‘I didn’t know you were famous.’ He made a gesture that meant ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m not really so famous’ at the same time.

  On each voyage there was a Neptune’s Crossing ritual held on the day that the ship crossed the equator, and Dick, the purser, was to be the victim being judged by Neptune’s court. He always greeted me in a friendly way and I was now rather fond of him and curious to see his trial and sentencing.

  He seemed very out of sorts, though, explaining to us girls that he shouldn’t be doing it at all.

  ‘I’ve done the whole damned thing before, pardon my French. So, you see, I’m technically a shellback.’

  We nodded sympathetically.

  ‘And it’s supposed to be done to an uninitiated non-shellback. It was the Director of Entertainment’s turn. But now he’s saying that he’s coming down with something.’

  He looked very gloomy about this.

  ‘So of course, muggins had to step in.’

  He meant that he was muggins and not very happy about it.

  We had all gathered around the pool, the entire population of our floating island, all shuffling about in sweltering heat on the rather small and cramped deck. Some people were wearing swimming costumes and the air was thick with the smell of suntan lotion, chlorine, ladies’ perfume and something else not very nice. Someone announced the arrival of King Neptune, who appeared carrying a trident and wearing a silly hat. Then the victim emerged in his swimming trunks. Maxine said that she was sure my mother wouldn’t love the poor purser after seeing this, as his tummy stuck out and his hair stood on end as they broke an egg in it and rubbed it about. Then people threw pies and tomatoes at him, covered him in shaving foam and threw him into the swimming pool as everyone cheered. I felt sorry for him, particularly when I saw my mother trying to stand near Roger and not really watching the ritual at all.

  The cruise also made stopovers, and Audrey and I had both been excited by the sound of Tahiti, because there was a native feast, which the purser said was a highlight.

  I soon agreed with him about the feast being a highlight. It was almost dark in the vast thatched hut that the coach brought us to that night, except for rows of flaming torches, which lit the strange faces of the wooden Tiki statues.

  Mum, Tahiti, 1965.

  The men who did the floor show were all shiny with hardly any clothes on and the women wore grass skirts with spikes sticking out around them like huge hedgehogs and swung their hips as if they had no bones and were made of jelly. Roger and Jet were at the feast; when Roger went over to look at the traditional ahima’a my mother quickly followed him. The ahima’a was a big pit in the ground with hot stones that cooked the food, which was wrapped in banana leaves. I watched as she and Roger talked quietly as if they were saying something important but I couldn’t guess what it was.

  The next day my mother was subdued and distracted. She was usually against buying what she called tourist tat even if it was something completely beautiful. She was especially against anything that took up any room in our luggage, so I was amazed when I was allowed to buy one of the straw Hula skirts I’d been longing for. It had the dry grassy smell of the South Seas and I loved it even though I then had to lug it around in a separate carrier bag whenever we moved on.

  The native feast was a memorable evening in many ways, as what followed was so unhappy. Roger and Jet got off the cruise at the next stop, to fly home to England, and Roger left a letter for my mother. When she was out of the cabin I found it and read it to see what had made her cry so much. But it said a lot of really kind things: she was ‘a very special lady’ and had given him ‘some super memories that would help with the difficulties that may lie ahead’. He said that he wasn’t someone who could walk away from his responsibilities but he hoped that she would find someone who could give her the happiness she deserved. These nice thoughts didn’t cheer her up at all, though, and she looked pale and sad in a way I hadn’t seen before.

  I was talking to Humphrey the next day when we saw her standing on deck gazing out to sea. He sighed and said, ‘Ah, Divine Discontent!’

  I said that I thought she just wanted to find love, and he said, ‘If we truly want to find love, my dear, we see that it is never really very far away from us.’

  This didn’t seem very fair, as Roger had been married to someone else, and there was no one else nearby. On the other hand it added to my sense that going to all these places was a bit nutty, and I wondered whether there might have been someone per
fectly nice closer to home.

  A few days after this, we were sitting with a friendly couple who were at our table for dinner. They talked a lot about their son who was a doctor and their home in Tunbridge Wells and house in France. They were kind to my mother and asked her lots of questions. We were by an open window where there was a breeze, and the lady said she wished she’d brought her wrap. Her husband jumped up to go to the cabin and get it; she told him he didn’t need to, but then he went anyway. When he came back he put it around her shoulders and poured her a cup of hot coffee. My mother suddenly said she didn’t feel well and ran back to our cabin. I followed her and she didn’t even go in the door. She leant against the corridor wall outside the cabin, crying and doing a weird shaking thing.

  I got her into the cabin at last and tried to cuddle up to her and asked her what was wrong.

  She said, ‘Why does she get a lovely husband taking care of her and pouring her coffee when she’s nothing special?’

  It was a question that baffled me: why no one seemed to fall in love with her when she was so beautiful and entertaining and everyone loved hearing her stories and watching her dance. I had got better at cheering her up, so at last she stopped shaking and we snuggled up together on her bed. She squeezed me hard and said, ‘Anyway, I have my little precious,’ and fell asleep in all her clothes, her face still stained with tears.

  The awful thing was that we were doing the whole voyage all over again as she had signed a contract to work in the dining room, showing people to tables. We were saying our goodbyes and everyone else was disembarking the ship to go home. It was the first time she seemed really worried that I might be bored. She hugged me, and said, as she sometimes would, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be dragging you around like this. But we have some fun, don’t we?’ She promised that we would go to New Zealand and see the cousins I wanted to see. My father had a brother who had gone to live in New Zealand and had two boys who I had never met. She had been thinking of skipping this and I had begged her not to.

  The second voyage of the cruise seemed to go on for ever. The fact that I’d had real friends on the first voyage now gave me a desolate feeling that I could now name as loneliness on these later crossings. The corridors all reminded me of dashing about exploring with Maxine and Peter. The cinema was where we had all spent that first afternoon in helpless giggles over That Darned Cat.

  My mother and I completed the circuit of the cruise more than once, but I’m not sure if we did the whole journey two or three times. After that first one the fancy-dress balls were dull; we always went as the Flintstones, and our shout of ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’ fell flat, and just made me remember Humphrey in his lovely cloak. The ship felt smaller and smaller and the feeling of panic I’d had in the Kill Devil Hills began to come back.

  My mother was in a terrible mood, and sometimes lay on her bed for no reason, just staring at the ceiling. We always collected terrible jokes to tell each other, as she had once said, ‘Even bad jokes can be funny if you tell them right,’ so we would come up with awful ones to test out her theory.

  ‘Why did the sea monster eat six ships full of potatoes?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Cos nobody can eat just one potato ship!’

  But all I got from her now was the faintest smile. She began asking me all the time if I was all right and at last pulled herself together to at least sing songs with me. Our favourite was ‘We’re a Couple of Swells’, which we did with our arms around each other and a skipping dance that we performed along the corridor on the way to dinner and we would laugh when people came out of their cabins and saw us.

  It was a great relief when she finally told me that we were going to disembark for good at the New Zealand stopover to see my cousins and then go on to Australia. I loved the very word ‘cousin’, and would repeat it in my head. I overheard a lady, who my mother had tried not very successfully to befriend, telling her husband that Audrey and ‘that poor child’ were getting off because the cruise was ‘clearly not the happy hunting ground she hoped it would be’.

  It was only some months later that my mother showed me a newspaper page with a large picture of Humphrey and a headline that said ACTOR HUMPHREY LEIGHTON HAS DIED. ‘That’s your nice actor friend, what a shame,’ she sighed. He had given me the book of Shakespeare stories and written in it with his spidery scrawl: ‘To Sally from her friend Humphrey. Live the creative life, my dear. It is full of wonders.’

  14

  The Antipodes

  I LOVED MY COUSIN, Stew, devotedly from the moment we met. He was standing with his brother D’Arcy and his parents – my father’s brother, Donald, and his wife Glynis – waiting to meet us as we disembarked from the ship. My mother waved when she saw them, and I skipped beside her in excitement, for here were my longed-for cousins. D’Arcy was blond and handsome, Stew darker and sturdier; neither had much to say to me but I hoped that their approval could be won. Perhaps I could show them our Flintstones routine or we could all watch That Darned Cat together.

  We drove to their beautiful house in Auckland, right on a big white sandy beach with the surf rolling just beyond their deck where we had a barbecue. My mother said it was a ranch-style house, and had told people that Takapuna Beach was the best place to live and that Glynis and Donald had done very well for themselves. Glynis was now an actress in a soap opera and Donald was in insurance. I heard her tell someone that she hoped they might help her, but I didn’t know in what way.

  My mother didn’t feel we could stay very long, which was disappointing as New Zealand was a place of marvels. It had hot springs and Maoris, as well as my cousins. Stew was very boyish and rather ingeniously building a rocket in their basement. He allowed me to help, and I found it completely absorbing in a way that girly activities rarely seemed to be. Girls usually chattered, which was enjoyable but distracting. Boys, it seemed, liked to work without talking and it made for a different kind of friendship, one that felt deeper because it was unspoken but built on a shared vision. Stew struck me as almost a genius. His rocket was huge and seemed perfectly convincing. We could both get inside it and view the control panels. He would give me a task, like painting the cardboard bits silver, and then we would both work away in contented silence. He seemed to approve of me and said that one day, if he wasn’t too busy as an astronaut, he might have a farm that I could come and help on where we could have cows and horses and a tractor. This was to become my idea of a perfect future: that one day Stew and I could have a farm together. We would work alongside each other all day, feeding the animals, planting seeds and watching them grow through the summer, till autumn came and we harvested our abundant crops.

  The visit was painfully short. It seemed cruel that we had been in so many places where I had absolutely nothing to do, and now when I was busy and completely happy, we were already having to leave. I cried on the plane, but at least I had a dream now. After we left New Zealand this became a happy game of mine – farming with Stew – and the fantasy lingered in my imagination for years. His was the opposite to the jittery distracted energy of my mother; he was calm and quietly devoted to a task with a clear end goal. He explained exactly what we needed to do and why. It made me look forward to the idea of one day having a purpose, a structure to my life – a job.

  Afterwards I would daydream, staring out of windows, as I busily imagined the daily routines and walked us through them. At 6 a.m. we had our breakfast and put on boots to go and milk the cows … and so on till bedtime. It gave a shape to the day that I loved. Or I would find things in our hotel room – belts and rolled-up towels – to mark out fields and farm buildings on a carpet and play make believe as I moved my Barbie and Ken dolls in between these spaces, acting out the daily jobs that Stew and I undertook. I felt a deep satisfaction at the thought of filling a pail with water for a thirsty cow, or pouring grain into its feeding trough. I had never before understood or fully grasped the concept of play, something that made friendships wi
th other children tricky. But now I did.

  The agony of leaving made the next stop feel even more pointless. Sydney was supposed to be hot, but it rained nonstop. My mother had a secret mission of some kind, and it required her to be alone. She noticed that the cinema right by our hotel was showing The Sound of Music and told me that I would like it. So she bought my ticket and then left me there with a key for our room, pointing out how close the two places were and making me promise not to go anywhere else. I had instructions to go back to the hotel once the film finished, and order from room service if I was hungry. Then I should read or watch TV till she returned.

  The cinema was cosy after the wet streets, and families rustled and ate popcorn in the darkness. Then the big red curtain went up, and Maria raced across the mountaintop, swirled her arms around herself in rapture and burst into full-throated song: ‘The hills are alive …’

  I seemed to dissolve into the screen and into her. It was one of those sublime childhood moments when you find something perfect, and life suddenly makes sense. I was Maria and right there in the Austrian Alps with a wonky nun haircut and apron. I was a flibbertigibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown. I was making the Von Trapp children clothes out of the curtains. I was cycling through the countryside and falling in love with their father. When the film finished, as the family walked off across the mountains to freedom, I realized that there was another showing, and waited for it to start all over again.

  After the two shows I was hungry and worried my mother would be back and looking for me, so rushed straight to the hotel room. It was empty so I practised being Maria, rushing around the room, jumping on the bed and singing as loudly as I could into the fresh mountain air. I was exhilarated and in love with life.

  It was quite late when my mother eventually appeared, and it seemed that the mission had not been accomplished. She looked relieved when I suggested that if she was busy I would like to see the film again. The rain continued all week and I spent my time rushing between the cinema to watch two successive shows and then practice sessions in our hotel with room-service sandwiches as fuel for the energetic dance moves. I now knew the film by heart.