Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  When I challenged my mother about it, and asked her to prove her bewitching powers, she twitched and wiggled her nose quite convincingly, but then said it was against the witches’ code to use magic just to make a point.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘why don’t angry witches ride their broomsticks?’

  I just shook my head.

  ‘They’re afraid of flying off the handle!’ she said, trying to get me to play; but I wasn’t going to laugh. I felt like telling her that Samantha appeared to be able to make her husband do anything she wanted, unlike my mother’s boyfriends who seemed to fail us constantly.

  MY MOTHER HAD MET LES at the Penang Club, where she briefly had a job in the office. It was a sprawling place along the seafront with gardens and a swimming pool where I liked to swim. Children were only allowed during certain hours, though, and the rest of the time I spent at the guesthouse reading next to a fan and waiting for the day to end. I would be taken out in the cooler evenings, bought ice cream, but I remember feeling choked with unhappiness and not knowing why.

  When she wasn’t working or with Uncle Les, we explored George Town and took rickshaws to a temple. We visited a night market where giant moths bashed themselves against outdoor lamps and tortoises crawled in boxes. There were picnics, snake charmers, monkeys and a children’s party where I didn’t know anyone but I won at Pass the Parcel.

  How long we stayed and why we left is not clear, but I know that there were rows and tears. I watched several episodes of Bewitched, counting off the days till the next instalment each week, so we were there for quite some time. At last she began to answer questions: yes, she did really like Uncle Les, but no, she wasn’t in love, and no we weren’t going to stay too much longer. She loved something called the ‘lifestyle’ but not the bluff businessman who might provide it.

  As we travelled down Penang Hill on the creaky old funicular she looked across the hillside with its waving palm trees and said, her face swollen with weeping, ‘Why can’t I be like Nellie – you know, in South Pacific? She falls in love at first sight with Peter Finch, this romantic handsome Frenchman, and just lives happily ever after.’

  So this was our South Pacific moment, rather than our Bewitched moment, and it hadn’t worked out, so we moved on to Cairo.

  SABET SABESCUE was a snake, a fat phallic draught excluder, which I kept on my bed. His glittering glass eyes reminded me of his namesake and, in that naive way of young girls, I would wrap around him, my legs either side of his furry sausage shape. I don’t remember when or where I got him, only that I loved him and so gave him that name to remind me of the real Sabet, who was a much more elusive creature. The real Sabet was a man in Cairo whose smile remained, like the Cheshire cat, long after the rest of him had vanished. Sabet’s gleeful grin hovers at the edge of my memory, along with the thrill of driving too fast in his open car with the wind in my hair.

  Cairo had been a disaster before I found him. We were staying in the worst hotel we had ever stayed in; there were pools of water on the lino floor which we had to step over, and it was right next to the mosque whose muezzin woke us at dawn, along with a chorus of barking dogs. My mother was panicking. I had terrible stomach ache and was curled up under the fan all day.

  The room reeked of the hubba-bubba pipe from the grubby café below, a smell that drifted over the entire city as it sucked and bubbled its sweet smoke all around us. The parks were full of it, as young men gathered to obliterate the gentle scent of jasmine and orange blossom that would otherwise have floated on the hot night breeze. It was everywhere we went, filling the big restaurant boat on the Nile where we had dinner, even enveloping the graceful felucca with the billowing sails that we took down the river past fields and farms.

  The only scent more powerful was Sabet’s heady cologne. I have smelt it sometimes on a passing stranger and stopped them to ask its name but never found it out. Later research suggests it had a base of ylang-ylang with notes of black pepper to offset its sultry sweetness. Even a hint of these ingredients takes me back to that time and the heightened awareness I had in his presence.

  I first smelt that scent of his as I approached the bar. I couldn’t say my usual line to him – about looking after my mother for me while I went to bed – as we were staying in our squalid hotel, I knew that we couldn’t have afforded to stay even one night in this palace. It was like something from the Arabian Nights, and we loved the gardens with their glowing lanterns and a buzz of chatter from the wealthy young Egyptians who gathered here after dusk. My mother was sitting at a table among the palm trees with the luminous pool beyond her.

  So I just smiled at the man hopefully, saying, ‘Hello, I’m Sally,’ and he turned to me and flashed that dazzling smile of his. I realized that he was too young for my mother, but very handsome and brimming with fun.

  ‘Hello, Miss Sally.’ He shook my hand and gave a mock bow. ‘I am Sabet Sabescue, and from this moment your faithful servant.’

  The barman returned with our drinks and crisps on a small tray, but Sabet plonked his own drink down on our tray and picked it up, saying, ‘Please, allow me,’ and followed me over to my mother.

  He bowed to her. ‘Madame, this small English rose appeared beside me, and I had to see for myself the radiant beauty of her mother.’ Audrey raised an eyebrow and I could see she thought this was a bit much; but then his friends arrived with shouts, and they greeted him as if he had just won a football match. He was so much their hero, and they were so happy to see him, that my mother couldn’t resist. They all joined our table, and soon we were part of that excited buzz and the sweet haze of the hubba-bubba pipe was swirling around us too.

  Sabet had an office with one entire wall that was a giant tank of glowing tropical fish swimming among coral and a sunken wreck. It had a big dining table where his secretary brought us an Egyptian breakfast of ful medames, a stew of warm beans with cumin and garlic served on smoky chargrilled flatbreads.

  His desk was huge and shiny with lots of toys on it. One was a magic ball, which you could ask any question, then turn it over and the answer could be viewed through a glass window. The answers were things like ‘It is decidedly so!’ or ‘Outlook not so good’. He would ask it questions for me, such as, ‘Is Sally the cutest girl in the world?’ then read out, ‘It is very certain.’

  He drove us around in a big white open-top car, and wore dark sunglasses that he called his ‘gogs’. His nationality wasn’t clear; he had a faintly American accent, but was part-Greek, part-Asian, part-Egyptian, did business mostly in the Middle East, and his friends were mostly Russian. He was somehow too much, too young; his smile too dazzling, his confidence too exuberant. He mesmerized my mother and her pragmatism vanished. Perhaps he had saved us. Before we met him there was clearly an awful problem, and I tried to understand what it was. The awful hotel made me think it was money, so I tried to suggest that we could sell my Miss Gillette ring. She gave me one of her cool looks, and I knew that her wails of ‘What shall we do?’ were not ever meant to be actually answered, least of all by me.

  But a solution must have been found, for we were suddenly piling our bags into Sabet’s car and moving into a hotel that was terribly fancy. We had a huge cool room with a comfortable sitting area with sofas and a TV. My mother told me that she had to go somewhere for a day or two; a chambermaid was booked to look after me, and the hotel doctor came to look at my stomach ache. He checked on me every day, while the chambermaid sat and watched TV on the sofa – it was in Arabic so I just read my books.

  After two or three days I started to panic. My stomach was better and I could go down and sit by the pool, but I didn’t know where my mother was. I had always felt safe in the belief that she would stay away no longer than the number of days she had told me she would, but this time I felt a force stronger than her love for me was at work and I was frightened that something had gone wrong or I had been forgotten. I’m not sure how long it was, but it was certainly some days later before she
finally appeared. I was furious, and asked her where on earth she had been. She said she had just been to see the Pyramids.

  Later, when Sabet drove us out of the gates and down the dusty road to the town, I looked back to see the sign and realized that the hotel was called Hilton Pyramids and that the Pyramids were clearly right there beside us.

  We stayed on for some time, and most days we’d go with Sabet to his favourite Gezira Club, where he loved to hang out as he knew people there. I would be sent to sit by what he called the Lido, which was a swimming pool with a bridge over it. It was always empty and had big leaves and purple flowers floating on the surface, fallen from the trees overhead. When it was quiet, after lunch, large black crows sat on the tables around the pool in the grey muggy heat, which made it feel creepy. I would wander into the old-fashioned clubhouse with its dark red walls and big chairs and find somewhere cool to sit and read.

  That was when we took the felucca down the Nile. My mother had said it would be romantic, and an adventure. We drifted along through the warm air, the water lapping as the boat sailed along, but we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It reminded me of one of my favourite books, The Mill on the Floss, when Maggie drifts down the river, too tired to stop the boat. We all seemed hot and tired and relieved just to be moving along. Sabet was restless, though, and got annoyed with the man sailing the boat. He didn’t like to be taken anywhere; he liked to be the taker. My mother was quieter than I’d ever known her and she hadn’t sung any of her songs for ages.

  Mum, left, with friends.

  ‘Why didn’t the Pyramids have doorbells?’ I tried.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Cos they had horns, so you could just toot an’ come in!’ I said with a theatrical flourish, ‘Tut-an-kham-un! Get it?’ Sabet laughed, but she only gave me a weak smile.

  I pretended to be loving it all, with the felucca’s big white sails ballooning out above us and pretty cushions to lie back on. Sabet cheered up then, and told me one of his stories. It was about Osiris, the god of the dead, who was killed by his brother, and his body was cut up into pieces. His wife had to put him back together again to have a baby with him. He still didn’t come back to life, but he lived on in an underworld of shadows, and the ancient Egyptians thought that this river was his world, with its dark murky depths. We looked down into the waters drifting by and imagined a lost world of these people with their myths and stories. Sabet’s stories were different from my mother’s. My mother’s were often about her, and about people she knew and places she had been. Sabet’s stories were about mystery and magic.

  Sabet had many moods and you never knew which one he would be in, or when it would end and he would change again. He could be quiet and mysterious, but at other times fun, childish and full of mad games. He was terribly generous, so I stopped saying I liked things in case he bought them for me and my mother got annoyed. He had already given me a lovely dress with a sparkly cape for my shoulders and a scented sandalwood jewellery box. He paid for me to have a manicure and pedicure at the hotel beauty salon, and laughed when I screamed as the lady rubbed a cheese grater on the soles of my feet. He helped choose which colour nail varnish I should have; when I couldn’t decide, he said, ‘When you grow up you’ll learn: you have to suffer to be beautiful.’

  He would put an arm around me and say, ‘Me, I love kids!’ and then forget about me again. I didn’t usually mind when grown-ups did that, but with Sabet I minded a lot and wanted him to like me, even though he didn’t really listen when I tried to tell him things. Then suddenly he was going away for a while on business, and promised to meet us once more in England where we would ‘get together in Swinging London and have some fun!’ We never saw him again.

  16

  A Cold New Year

  TRAVELLING WITH MY MOTHER played unsettling tricks with my sense of time. There would be so many endless days and weeks when nothing happened and then, when I was least expecting it, life would speed up and we would be tumbling down another rabbit hole. This was one of those moments, which found us hastily packing our bags, walking up the steps to the BOAC plane in warm muggy air and looking back at swaying palm trees in the early-morning light. Then, only hours later, we were on the other side of the world, in the wintry north of England, driving through a cold grey afternoon with the street lights already lit, and small plastic Christmas trees winking from living-room windows.

  So there we were, back in Southport in the cold, unloved and unlived-in house, rifling through drawers looking for my woolly tights and duffel coat, unwrapping my painted cat ornament from Sarawak and setting it down beside Sabet’s jewellery box on my dressing table. Even the funny brown paper that his present was wrapped in still smelt of Cairo and was coated in the city’s soft sweet dust. As usual my mother went out and I went through to the Back Flat, to say hello to the housekeeper, show her my souvenirs, and eat egg and chips to the sounds of Hughie Green on Opportunity Knocks.

  For my mother the grim spectre of Christmas was now looming, too awful to mention. I was excited to be back in the wintry cosiness, and longed for a really Christmassy Christmas, but it was hard to imagine how it could be achieved. I think that the idea of the two of us alone in that house was as unthinkable to her as for me. So letters had been posted, phone calls were being made, and another plan had emerged. She was suddenly triumphant and back in business. Now we were rushing out to buy smart new outfits and fancy Christmas presents like leather driving gloves in a man’s size.

  It seemed that she had known Vernon Lilford from his visits to Southport, where he had partied with Peter Cooper’s crowd, and now, as a widow, she had hopes of getting to know him better. Vernon had inherited a title and estate at the age of eighteen, and became the 7th Baron Lilford, a title which brought an ancestral home, Heskin Hall, in the Lancashire countryside, but no fortune to go with it. He had lived for some years in South Africa where he manufactured car tyres, but still managed to spend quite a bit of time in England leading the playboy lifestyle popular in the Sixties, accessorized with E-Type Jags and dolly birds.

  Audrey had reason to believe that his marriage to Muriel, or ‘Mu’, was not going well. It was his fourth marriage, and his friends were now putting it around town that he would soon be free again. One had hinted that my mother could perhaps be the fifth Lady Lilford and that Vernon had said Christmas at Heskin Hall would be a chance for him and Audrey to get to know each other better.

  My mother told me that it would be a perfect Christmas, in a stately home, with real log fires and grand dinners and lots of other children for me to play with.

  We drove through the flat, wet Lancashire countryside and it was growing dark when we went up a sweeping driveway to the heavy doors of a Tudor manor house that reminded me of the box for the game of Cluedo. The dark oak-panelled Great Hall had a huge Christmas tree, and the sitting room beyond with its leather sofas and log fires did feel properly Christmassy. But it felt very grown up, with a lot of strangers smelling of whisky and no one my age in sight. Vernon greeted us warmly, and someone led me upstairs to meet the children. I looked anxiously at my mum but she said ‘Scoot and skidaddle’ cheerfully and waved me off.

  We walked along a corridor to another part of the house that was called the ‘nursery wing’. Here the various offspring of the guests bickered and fought each other overseen by a nanny. It seemed that we were having our own Christmas here, with separate meals, and it immediately brought back the old feeling of panic that going to school had given me. This was worse, as I seemed to be expected to stay here day and night, and to even sleep in a room with some of these children.

  After begging to see my mother I was taken into the dining room, where the long table was laid in splendour with candelabras and holly, and the guests in evening dresses were laughing and talking loudly. I whispered to my mother that I wanted to be with her, and she at last gave in and said that I could sleep in her room and she would be up later so I should go to bed now.

  I was then
taken to her room – now our room – and left there. This would have been a relief, but while I was getting my night things together in the children’s wing, one of the older boys had told me that I was very brave to leave the safety of this wing at all. He warned me that Heskin Hall was a famously haunted house and that the bedrooms I was going to were wandered at night by the ghost of a poor Catholic girl; Cromwell’s soldiers had hung her by her neck from the ceiling beams and then cut down her body and let it drop into the lime pit below. She could pass through walls and walked to and fro, moaning softly. I said he was making it up, but he then brought me a book and showed me the part that confirmed the whole story, with dates and pictures of Cromwell and the house.

  I therefore lay in bed in a cold sweat with the sheets over my head, counting the moments till my mother came. I had put my stocking at the end of the bed as my mother had told me to, but realized that Santa was unlikely to risk meeting a moaning ghost and it was probably going to be empty in the morning. I sensed that the whole Christmas was a disaster.

  It felt like hours before I heard someone or something coming into the room. I didn’t dare look in case it was Santa or a ghost, or just my mother. There was no moaning, so I told myself it couldn’t be the poor ghost girl. I heard rustling, and then at last what I knew was my mother getting into bed, and I finally dared to emerge from the suffocating bedding and listen for the sound of her breathing. I at last fell asleep in a lather of anxious sweat.

  In the morning, I was relieved to see that brave Santa had come anyway. He had left me a couple of exciting gifts: a perfume-making kit and a Magic Fingers automatic knitting machine. I loved to make things and had tried to teach myself to knit, but my mother hadn’t been able to help and I had never worked it out. Now the box showed a scarf half made and it promised ‘A Row a Second’. Santa must have known that I loved perfume, so the perfume kit was the perfect present, with all kinds of interesting devices, like rubber droppers and test tubes to measure things to ‘mix beautiful bouquets and aromas’.