Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  I was suddenly busy. After playing ‘Being Maria’ I could make a farm and play my game, happily running through the work routine that Stew and I would follow. I’d also had the brilliant idea of finishing my novel this way – with Natasha telling Jason to go back to his wife, and then marrying a kind farmer she’d met in New Zealand, and working alongside him all day in dungarees, tending their crops and animals.

  I was even sorry when Audrey said that we were leaving, as I was so taken up with the film and the novel, but she promised me that The Sound of Music would be on in a lot of places all over the world. The suitcases were on the bed now anyway, and there was little I could do. ‘Where are we going?’ I’d ask. There was the jokiness that wasn’t even funny. She’d say somewhere that sounded far away like ‘Timbuctu!’ ‘What country is it in?’ ‘Neverland.’ ‘No but really Mummy?’

  Penang sounded real at least. Where was it? What had she been doing? Had something happened to make her suddenly decide that we were off again?

  ‘Three questions.’ Penang was ‘in Malaysia, it had beaches’. I asked her what she had been doing, but she ignored me. I tried asking if she had done anything interesting, and she finally relented and said that she’d had one fun expedition and had wished I was there. She was with someone who was a famous inventor, and they had been in a car that travelled on the water.

  ‘It was very odd when it drove off the edge of the harbour and splashed down into the sea,’ she told me, ‘but was great fun once you got going and drove it through the water.’ I wondered who on earth this man was, and if he was about to enter our story.

  It seemed that he wasn’t and was never mentioned again. The intriguing anecdote was all I would get, and was part of a mysterious life that she appeared to sometimes be leading when she was away from me: one that would only be revealed in odd jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit in anywhere at all. This piece had apparently been discarded now, and a couple of days later our show was ‘back on the road’.

  By the time we had boarded our plane she had already found a new friend. The lady who was sitting next to us seemed to like her a lot, and they soon fell into conversation. After a while the woman, who was perhaps a bit older than my mother, became upset – something about her son that had saddened her – and then I could see it coming; I dreaded these moments. One of my mother’s worst traits was giving firm and persuasive advice to complete strangers; it never sounded quite right to me when her own life was so completely off the tracks, and I wanted to shout ‘Stop!’

  The woman she was now talking to had taken out a pad of paper and, perhaps in exchange for some life-changing advice, was writing down an address in Penang. Audrey folded and popped the note in her bag, which was already a bottomless repository for such scraps.

  Occasionally, when it seemed we had come to a particularly difficult fork on our mysterious road, and there was a question of where, what, when, how, my mother would rummage through her bag, randomly pulling out these bits of paper like some odd party game to determine our next move, frowning at them: ‘Now who was Bertrand? Was it that nice man with the moustache who stopped his car and gave us a lift when we got lost somewhere near the Pyramids? … rather handsome’; ‘Oh, Luxembourg … where is Luxembourg? It sounds like it’s near France?’, and so on. I had learnt to dread them, but also to feel the thrill of a lurch into the unknown.

  She was very pleased with this latest scrap. ‘She’s invited us to her club, the Penang blah blah blah,’ she said, as if a job was well done, her eyes bright with hope. ‘She knows quite a few people out there, I think.’ I remember the view from the window of the plane, of an island with silver ribbons of water around it, and my mother saying excitedly, ‘Pearl of the Orient.’ By now I had learnt to detect in her voice that note of both hope and despondency, as if she already half expected to be let down. I imagined the next time we would be looking down at this island from a plane; it would be when we were leaving and we usually left places with that sense of disappointment, but buoyant in our hope that in the next place things would be better and we would really strike lucky. Pearl of the Orient? Her middle name was Pearl, and her most worn piece of jewellery was the rope of pearls that one of her ‘fiancés’ had given her on their engagement. The pearls had an unusual arrangement, and women would ask about them with interest. She loved that. She would say, ‘Yes, they were given to me by a fiancé. Sweet Perry; he was a member of the Guinness family – yes, that Guinness – but in the end … well … it just wasn’t the real thing.’

  She would pause with that cheeky smile and raised eyebrow. ‘Though luckily the pearls are!’

  It was another story that I wanted to know more about. Who was Perry, and why wasn’t he the real thing?

  The lady and my mother were chatting happily when a tremendous jolt shook the plane, followed by another loud crunch and then terrible confusion. People were wailing, children and babies were crying. My mother was shaking, holding my hand too tight. Out of the window a band of furious flames was racing across the wing with roaring engine noise. It was so frightening I could hardly believe it was happening.

  Mass panic now rippled through the plane, with passengers shouting to the stewardesses, those lovely BOAC ladies, who somehow managed to calm everyone down. My mother wasn’t calming down, her whole body was trembling and I found myself comforting her, saying, ‘It will be all right, Mummy.’

  ‘What if it isn’t?’ she whispered. ‘This can’t be it!’

  Our whole life was built around an idea of ‘this can’t be it’ and a perpetual sense of something incredible waiting for us just around the next bend; so to have never reached Oz, and to die now, hurtling through this blue sky down into the canopy of jungle below, was unthinkable.

  We felt ourselves losing height and the captain announced in an unflappable it’s-completely-routine voice that we had suffered a malfunction and would be making an emergency landing. The crew reassured us that we were now flying over Borneo, a runway was ready for us and we would be landing there shortly.

  My mother was panicking even more, and didn’t believe there was a proper airport or runway. The view from the window, which we could only glimpse through a stream of black smoke, revealed nothing but thick green forest. But here we were, descending rapidly into the jungle, then the plane flattened out and there was red earth flashing past the window and too fast a great bump and scraping onto something. And then we stopped. People were crying; they were happy too.

  We drove from the airport for miles along what we were told was one of only two roads on the island and saw hardly any people. Those we did pass stopped to stare at our convoy of cars.

  On our way to the hotel in the city of Kuching the lady sharing our car said, ‘Thank God for the Aurora.’ The Aurora Hotel was once an outpost of imperial luxury, and still retained some colonial elegance. When we arrived, my mother looked around it and decided it would do.

  ‘Hmm, it is pretty dead, but at least we aren’t! And we’ve been in worse places,’ she said, with relief, which was true.

  The hotel had high ceilings with whirring fans, a restaurant with tablecloths, and even a piano bar with a rather bad elderly crooner.

  ‘Well, he ain’t Dean Martin, and this sure ain’t Caesar’s Palace!’ Audrey said. I liked it when she said ‘ain’t’ as it sounded cheeky and as if we were in a film.

  The BOAC staff were madly sorting out rooms with the hotel reception, and tea and sandwiches were provided in the lounge area where someone from the airline made a speech saying that this was ‘a very unusual incident’ and had occurred because of a flock of migrating birds flying into the plane and damaging a propeller. He told us that flights were being laid on as soon as possible to take us on to Malaysia and every arrangement was being made ‘for our safety and comfort’.

  The following day we made one or two attempts to explore, but it was too hot and we soon came back to sit under a fan on the big leather chairs in the lounge with iced tea. Audrey was looking at m
e out of the corner of her eye, and I could tell it was one of her rare moments of self-doubt, as she embarked on something that might not be a good idea.

  It was not a bad moment to ask a question.

  ‘Who was Perry who gave you your pearls, and why wasn’t he the real thing?’ Our recent adventures were beginning to make us see a little more eye to eye. Our double act had survived this rackety life so far, and I was earning my stripes as a more equal member. Too much had been revealed, perhaps, over the Roger affair for her to treat me like a baby any more. It seemed that she was going to tell me.

  ‘Perry was great fun. I suppose I thought that, as I’d lost my true love, the boy who I thought I’d marry, then I could at least have a good time,’ I had heard Auntie Grace call her ‘a good-time girl’ once and been surprised as she didn’t seem to be having a good time at all.

  The glitter of social success might at least distract her from her grief at losing James, she had reasoned, and this dazzling life would, naturally, be provided by a man. If Britain didn’t have Hollywood stars, it did have aristocrats, and the elusive glamour that my mother had yearned for, that she saw hanging around the heads of Hollywood actors like a gaudy halo, she also found in any title or upper crust name.

  My mother’s spells in London now showed her that there was a new bohemianism that disguised class. She might not make it in Mayfair, but she could have a go at Hampstead, and in bare feet. That spring of 1948 she was still only twenty-two, and she put aside her Forties suits and cocktail dresses for slouchy trousers and kicked off her shoes to dance with her new boyfriend Perry Guinness in jazz cellars and to lie on the grass on Hampstead Heath. It was a far cry from the chilly bedsit in Maida Vale and her still-piercing memories of James.

  Post-war London was bombed, exhausted and poor. But the rich picked up their lives where they left off, and the country-house parties still had lavish meals, hunting and dancing till dawn, just as they had before the war. Perry called Audrey his ‘little cutiepie’ and took her everywhere with his ‘crowd’. Her new flatmate, Heather, with whom she shared a Hampstead cottage, came along too. Heather was what Audrey called ‘shabby posh’. She never used make-up or brushed her long blonde mane, and always wore the same old camel coat covered in the hair of her Labradors. Audrey quickly acquired an old camel coat and love of Labradors.

  Her friend Duncan had an old pink car he called Mrs Frequently because of how often she broke down, and would take them on eccentric jaunts such as picnics in candlelit caves. He held all-night parties in his Bayswater flat at which Audrey met girls who smoked with long cigarette holders and said shocking things. Audrey added this early beatnik look to her own repertoire of styles.

  Jazz musician George Melly sometimes came along to the parties, and he now helped Audrey to get a job at a new jazz venue called Club 11 in Great Windmill Street, taking tickets at the door. It was one of the first clubs playing bebop, and when she wasn’t at the door selling tickets she could now climb the rickety staircase to the rehearsal room, to watch musicians like Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth let rip with this urgent and thrilling new music. In the afternoons they’d sit in the dingy club listening to George Melly, in his zoot suit, unleashing a storm of hilarious and wicked anecdotes.

  This bohemian scene was distracting her from her broken heart, and at the weekends there were visits to big country houses, where Audrey learnt to mingle with Perry’s baronet cousins and their wealthy friends. As she copied Heather’s casual style, pulling on wellington boots and going on bracing walks after long Sunday lunches, then curling up in front of log fires to read Country Life, it appeared that she had successfully buried her Liverpool working-class past. Her gift for mimicry made her seem one of them and her gift for storytelling earned her a place at the dinner table.

  But she knew that it was only because she was on the arm of Perry that she had access to this exclusive club. When they weren’t in Soho jazz clubs they were in the houses of his friends in Park Lane and Mayfair. It was the life she had dreamt of and the pain of James was at last receding, so why had she suddenly realized that it wasn’t the real thing?

  I had a feeling that the story stopped here because it involved my father, and I knew that one day I would have to ask her some difficult questions but that the right moment hadn’t arrived. She now talked about him very little and this saddened me but I wanted her to mention him first, not me. I thought of him every night before I went to sleep, and again every morning when I woke up, but it felt like my secret, and for now I simply hugged the memories quietly to myself. One day I would ask, but not just yet.

  15

  Pearl of the Orient

  I REMEMBER THE HEAT, and the cycle rickshaws, and the deafening roar of surf on a white sand beach. I remember monkeys with tufty beards and their babies clinging to their middles, a snake temple and a man seated on the ground with a python around his shoulders. I remember red Chinese letters and a sign saying PRECIOUS PAGODA and the yellow of the pagoda towers behind. I remember the funicular up Penang Hill and big colonial villas with dusty gardens and cool rooms, sparsely furnished with bamboo furniture.

  Or do I? How much of these memories comes from photographs shown to me on our return I’m not sure. Back in Southport there would be the darkened lounge, the glow of an electric fire, and the endless slide shows with the click of the carousel turning and the Kodak colour images popping up on the screen, as my mother relived our travels as if they were just extended holidays. Of course the audience might only be Auntie Grace and Uncle Phil, sitting a little tight-lipped and disapproving with their very small glasses of sherry, so it was probably wise of her to play things down. This process normalized the experience, and turned us into intrepid tourists rather than the desperate pair we really were. ‘There’s Sally at the old fort. Oh and look, there’s Sally with the monkeys at the botanical gardens.’

  I have freckles and pudgy legs and smile and smile for the camera. ‘And there’s Uncle Les getting us a rickshaw.’ Friends of my mother who got past the acquaintance stage were always given the prefix Uncle and Auntie to make my use of their first name sound more polite. She had heard someone refer to me as ‘precocious’ and this alarmed her. It may have threatened her idea of me as her innocent little companion.

  We had stayed for some time in ‘Uncle Les’s’ villa up on a leafy hillside, but I slept in a guesthouse in the garden. He must have been a boyfriend, a lover, but I had no sense that they were in any way ‘in love’. My mother would say that you didn’t just kiss a frog and he magically turned into a prince; that was just a fairy story. In real life you kissed a frog and then ‘set your mind into turning him into a prince’, but it was hard to imagine how much effort it would take in the case of Les. He was a pleasant man, friendly, but impossible to remember when you weren’t actually with him. Even looking at the cine films or photographs later, it was difficult to recall anything about him. Poor Roger from the cruise was memorable, and I could even recollect George from the Kill Devil Hills for his sad awkwardness. But Les never said or did anything to surprise you, although my mother would tell people that Les was quite the life and soul of the party. His house was very big, so he must have been rich, and he didn’t need to go to his office every day as he owned the company, so he could play golf and go to the club and give parties where he could be the life and soul.

  I once again began to feel terribly trapped and with a growing fear that this could be for ever. There were peacocks in the garden of his house whose strangled miaow was the first sound of the morning, and I woke up to it feeling hot and marooned. A Chinese lady called an ayah looked after me, but didn’t speak very good English and our time together was uncomfortable for both of us. Time moved slowly as my panic grew.

  Yet again I was saved by a story. One desultory afternoon in the shady lounge of the Penang Club, I turned on the big black and white TV in the corner to discover that among the Chinese and Malay programmes there were American TV shows. After the advertisement
s for Ovaltine or Tiger Balm, there suddenly appeared a beautiful blonde, swooping out of the star-filled sky on a broomstick, to thrillingly zingy Sixties music. She flew by, writing in glittering stars the word Bewitched. She then popped into her kitchen and, with a twitch of her nose, turned her witch’s hat into a frying pan, kissed her bemused husband, became a cat and jumped into his arms to become the adorable Samantha again.

  Bewitched was a blast of the America I had hoped we would find when we visited New York, or Kitty Hawk, or Palm Springs, but we never quite did. The series was set in a place we never visited: a sun-drenched suburbia of happy families with bright modern homes and perfect lawns. Samantha, who I adored to the point of pleading to change my name to hers, was both all-powerful and deliciously lovable.

  But this TV Samantha was a witch, something my mother often claimed to be and had made our special secret. Samantha’s mother tells her that they are quicksilver, a fleeting shadow, and that they live on the wind and in the sparkle of a star. It was exactly the magic that my mother longed for – a superpower that would set her apart from mere mortals with their dull routine lives – but she seemed to wiggle her nose and nothing happened.

  The show offered an interesting insight into marriage. Samantha’s husband was handsome and fun and she loved him; but he was also the butt of the joke. It seemed as if he should be in control, with his important job in an advertising agency and lots of money, but whenever he tried to command his wife to stop using her magic she just gave a wicked laugh and played another trick on him. If I couldn’t be Samantha, then I longed to be Tabitha, their pretty baby daughter who had such a seemingly normal, happy home, but also a mother who could do anything just by twitching her nose.