Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  I carried it with me to the dreaded nursery wing, hoping to find a quiet corner to try it out. At breakfast the squabbling had turned into fierce showing off, as the children sat at the long table displaying their presents to each other and shooting jealous looks at the things their siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings had been given.

  I managed to find a quiet corner but was sorry to see that the perfume kit said that an adult must assist. Although the knitting machine instructions didn’t say this in so many words, it was clearly the case after I had spent a long time puzzling over diagrams and tussling with balls of wall and hooks.

  At last we were allowed to go down to the grown-ups and I showed my mother the boxes, but she frowned and said that we would examine them properly when we got home. I noticed that whenever I talked to my mother, Vernon looked at me as if he wished I would go away. I didn’t take it to heart as he looked at the other children this way too but I felt anxious and panicky about how to get through the rest of the visit.

  There was one nice man who asked me my name and asked if he could see my presents. He said his name was Mick and he had only been given soap on a rope in his stocking so I had done much better. He said that he wasn’t too good at knitting but wondered if he could help with the perfume as it looked very interesting.

  We went off and found an empty billiard room with a small table where we could set up our perfume factory. He got out the little stands for the test tubes and put the glass tubes in so it looked like a proper laboratory. He then read out all the names of the bottles. There were the undiluted fragrance oils, then there were the dilutants, and the mixing beakers. The oils had lovely names like tuberose, jasmine and lily of the valley, and the items for mixing and making had interesting names like pipettes, vials and atomisers. Best of all was a beautiful frosted bottle to put your favourite finished perfume into, with a label with flowers on it and a space to write the name of the scent.

  We mixed away all morning. We concocted a face cream in a pot with geranium and lavender, which he said would keep my skin as soft and lovely as it was now. We made roll-on scents with citrus aromas, and finally we made a delicious perfume for the big frosted bottle. It took time to find the perfect mix. Mick said he was learning a lot about scents: what was floral, or musky, or light and citrusy. We kept adding a little of this or that just because we loved the name, like palmarosa which he said made him think of Spanish señoritas. Then there were small slips of paper to dip in and sniff. At last we poured our perfect scent into the lovely bottle and he held down the label while I wrote the name we had agreed on, which was my name: Sally. He sang a song, ‘Sally, Sally, Pride of our Alley’, and said they should use that for the TV ad to sell the perfume. It was the happiest time I’d had for as long as I could remember and the day still comes back to me more vividly than almost any other memory. It must have been a reawakening of the contentment I’d felt ‘helping’ in my father’s workshop.

  When I told my mother where I’d been and what I’d been doing, she laughed and told all the grown-ups. Everyone thought it was very funny because Mick was a famous wrestler, Mick McManus, and not the sort of person who would make perfume with little girls. The perfume making became a running joke, along with something Mick was supposed to have said on television, which was ‘not the ears, not the ears’, and my mother would mimic him, saying ‘not the ears’ as I dragged him off by his ears to play with me.

  After that I made the billiard room my den, taking my books there and a blanket to curl up with. I wore my perfume, ate sweets and managed to feel all right. My mother agreed that the perfumes were very good and wore the one called Sally, which she said was as lovely as me.

  The next day was ‘the hunt’ and my mother said she loved tradition. We went out in our coats to watch the men in red and black jackets mount their horses, then a man took around a tray of drinks. There were lots of dogs barking and running about, and then the huntsmen blew their horn and they all clattered off down the broad driveway. My mother had disappeared and when I finally found her she and Vernon were in a room having an intense chat and she asked me to wait outside. I knew that this was a crucial turning point in our mission. We had searched at least two or three of the four corners of the earth and not found our saviour, but I was now frightened that my mother might have convinced herself that this red-faced man who didn’t like me could be ‘the one’.

  Back in our room, my mother sat with her heated Carmen rollers in to try to get her hair to flick up at the ends. She said that country damp made everyone look terrible. I could see that she was unhappy. She told me that we had been invited to stay for New Year’s Eve as there would be a big party. I knew she hoped I would say that I wanted to go home, perhaps so that she could argue with me, so I didn’t say anything.

  The next day she told me that she had decided not to stay for New Year’s Eve after all. She said Vernon had made it clear that if they were married then they would have to spend some of the time in South Africa and travelling, and he insisted that I would have to go to a boarding school.

  It felt like a brush with the greatest horror I could imagine. I thought of my misery at day school, and then imagined it night and day, for weeks on end and with no escape. It seemed like quite the worst thing I could think of. We trailed back to Southport, my mother suspiciously quiet, and the car windows open to let out the overpowering scent of Sally, which I had rather liberally daubed onto my wrists and neck. I thought about my lucky escape and for some weeks afterwards I dreaded hearing Vernon’s name, just in case he had convinced her of his horrible plan. But he was never mentioned again.

  ‘DO YOU THINK I look like Millicent Martin?’ my mother asked Auntie Ava as we sat having coffee.

  ‘Who’s Millicent Martin?’ I asked, interrupting, which they didn’t like.

  ‘She’s on the television, she’s funny.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do look quite like her!’ said Auntie Ava generously.

  Then Mummy whispered something, and I heard her say, ‘Ronnie was married to her …’

  The first time Ronnie Carroll came over to our house I realized straight away he was the best sort of grown-up: in fact, hardly grown up at all. My mother was out, and Mrs Braithwaite from the Back Flat was putting her feet up. The man who had rung the bell just strolled in when I opened the door, saying, ‘Hello there, you must be the famous Sally!’ which was unusual, as some of Audrey’s friends didn’t know my name. He asked if my mother was home and introduced himself as Ronnie. Then, without asking, he made himself at home, pouring a drink and looking through my mother’s record collection in the cabinet. I asked him if he was hungry and if he would like some of my cake. He said that he’d love that, so I went off to get some for him.

  I’d just raided Mrs Braithwaite’s cupboards to make my ‘cake’, which was really a mixture of her breakfast cereal and some coloured sprinkles I’d found called Hundreds and Thousands. Then I’d used a few other sweet things to make it stick together. I had only done this while looking for food colouring for the love potions I was creating. Mrs B had said to look through her baking cupboard, though why she had one when she never baked I wasn’t sure. But it had so many interesting items that I had got into a creative frenzy.

  I came back with a tray of the ‘cake’ and a love potion. I’d added cochineal to the potion so it was a wonderful pink, with rose petals and leaves floating in it.

  Ronnie said it all looked yummy and tucked in. As he was munching he showed me a record and said that it was his twin brother on the cover, and asked me who was the more handsome. I knew it was him, but I said that the man on the cover had even bigger teeth than he did. Ronnie had huge smiley teeth, and he laughed at that and sang me a song from the record, ‘Ring-a-Ding Girl’, and said that his twin had sung it at the Eurovision Song Contest.

  He drank his love potion and threw himself back on the sofa, saying he was now in love with the whole world, and me in particular as I was his Ring-a-Ding Girl. I said that the
love potion didn’t work for little girls, but would work for the first lady he saw. At that moment Mrs B put her head around the door, and after she had gone we both burst out laughing. He said my potion had failed, but then we heard my mother’s car, Bluebird as we called it, coming up the drive and Audrey jumped out. Ronnie went down on his knees and said he was hopelessly in love, as a small witch had forced him to drink a powerful potion. My mother seemed very pleased, and went off to get ready so they could go out to dinner.

  Ronnie Carroll.

  She brought him into my room with her to say, ‘Night night,’ and he even looked at my books and tucked me in. I went to sleep wishing she would marry him.

  The next day he had gone, but my mother said we would be visiting him in London where he had a mews house. At morning coffee with Auntie Ava she seemed very excited and talked about him a lot. She had met him at the Prince when he was up for a while to play golf with some pals. She said his best friends were Sean Connery, Peter Cook and Bruce Forsyth, that he had been married to Millicent Martin who was a big TV personality, and that everybody said she looked very like Millicent as they had the same red hair.

  The only problem with Ronnie was that he was a hellraiser and a gambler. He had once flown to Las Vegas and gambled twenty thousand pounds away in a couple of hours, leaving only enough for his cab fare back to the airport to fly home. She said that he really liked children, as though that was a very strange thing; that his career was a bit on the skids and that he blamed the Beatles. It was hard to tell from this information whether they were likely to get married or not.

  A couple of weeks later we went down to London and visited his mews house near Park Lane. It had a white grand piano which he played and he gave me the words to a song, ‘You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato’, and I sang along. Then he burst out laughing and said I’d done it all wrong, and you had to say ‘tomato’ in different accents each time. He showed me and we all sang ‘You say tomayto and I say tomaaato’ and it was great fun. Then he took us to an Italian restaurant where he taught me to wind spaghetti around my fork and how to talk in a silly Italian accent. When Audrey was telling him stories I could help her, as she could check things like ‘What was that hotel in Borneo?’ or ‘Was that our man in Cairo, or our man in Palm Springs?’ and then I could add funny things of my own. He loved it and said, ‘You are quite a double act.’ We were staying at a hotel nearby and he walked us back, then I went to bed while they sat in the bar downstairs.

  I was horribly disappointed the next morning when my mother took me to a nursery school in Knightsbridge, saying that although it was for babies I was to stay there for a while, as she had to do some shopping. The girls who were working there said that I could be their helper, but I didn’t believe and knew that I was just being treated like one of the much younger children. I was choked with unhappiness all day surrounded by toddlers, and at times could hardly breathe. I steadied myself by looking forward to the evening and seeing Ronnie. When she finally came they were closing up and the staff had to wait for her, and she hadn’t even bought anything on the shopping trip. She then announced I was to have another babysitter for the evening so they didn’t take me with them and the whole trip was spoiled. On the train on the way home I asked when we would see Ronnie again and she said he was working on a cruise ship for a while, so she hoped to see him after that. We never did.

  MY MOTHER’S HUNT – our hunt – for love seemed to be failing. We had travelled so far, and I had watched her trying so hard, that it was beginning to be too painful to think of her searching any further. I remembered something that my friend Humphrey had said on our cruise, when he had sighed and said, ‘Divine Discontent.’ And that if you really wanted to find love it was closer than you imagined. What had he meant?

  My mother had always shown a brazen confidence about almost anything, so it was a shock when I first saw, as a small child, that this could vanish in an instant. There came a day when we were walking down Lord Street and she stopped dead and quietly drew us into a doorway. She didn’t speak, and the air around us, usually charged with her bright glamour, suddenly dimmed. She had seen something to make her tremble, and we turned back from our outing and went straight home, where she vanished into her room.

  As I grew older I understood that this was a danger: the sight of James Leadsom with his wife and children.

  She always believed that he was the love of her life and with him everything would have been different, and she would have been different. Was this holding us back? One afternoon we watched Gone with the Wind again, and I saw Scarlett’s fantasy of love for the unlikely and inspid Ashley, and how this illusion had blinded her to any other love. Was this what Humphrey meant, when he suggested that something was just always in the way? And why had she married my father and had she loved him? This was perhaps the most important question of all, but who could I ask?

  17

  The Midnight Kiss

  AVA HAD TWIN BEDS, pushed close together with lace cascading down from the ceiling to hang in drapes around the bedheads, and piles of satin pillows. She patted the bed beside her for me to join her, and put the television on. My mother was at the dentist, and our housekeeper was away, so I’d been left with Auntie Ava. She had changed into a frilly frothy dressing gown although it was not long after lunch, and we were in her even frillier frothier bedroom. Anthony had his own bedroom in dark manly colours. He came up with a silver tray of tea for her, as he did every afternoon, and she poured us both a cup, then took a bottle from under the bed and poured some of it into her cup.

  ‘How long have you been Mummy’s friend?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh golly, years and years, darling. Since the dinosaurs were roaming about, anyway.’

  ‘So did you know her when she met my daddy?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Yes, your daddy was a lovely man. It was a tragedy, the whole thing. Very sad.’

  ‘How did Mummy meet him?’

  Gradually, as the afternoon wore on, I got a more full description of those events than my mother had ever offered me. Ava had never had a guarded tongue, or much awareness of children, so she simply told me what she could remember, with no thought for her audience at all.

  ‘She met Neil, your daddy, when she was a beauty queen and he took some photographs for her. It was that awful summer after she got back from America; she was terribly unhappy, never really got over it. But, you know your mum, “best foot forward” and all that, so she did that competition down at the Sea Bathing Lake. It was quite a big thing, the English Rose Beauty Contest – girls from all over Britain went in for it. The girls would walk down the steps in an afternoon dress and long gloves, then parade around the circuit of the lake carrying a card that showed their number, smiling at the crowds and panel of judges.’

  I knew that my mother could smile for England. First her eyes began to dance with laughter, then the joy of it spread across her heart-shaped face and became huge and radiant. She held back nothing, and gave you her whole self in a way that was hard to resist. And of course she knew that she would win; after all, she had been crowned Queen of the May every summer of her childhood, so her belief in divine right was unshakeable.

  By the end of that afternoon she was handed the English Rose crown and sash, as Ava described it all, looking gleeful, any self-doubt vanquished.

  Mum as Miss English Rose, 1950s.

  She now needed pictures of herself to enter into other contests, and her friend Jean passed on the number of someone she knew who was a keen amateur photographer. The photographer was Neil McNicoll, my father, who turned up to meet Audrey at the beach and spent a sunny afternoon snapping pictures of her as she ran and skipped down sand dunes in her bikini, with her hair flying out behind her. I loved these images, with one hand held behind her head in a carefree gesture, and a sweet smile.

  The contest that she had set her heart on was Miss Isle of Man. It held the promise of two things that she longed for: the first was travel, if only in this case a
ferry across to Douglas, the island’s capital; and the second was meeting interesting people.

  In this case the interesting person was Geoff Duke, a handsome motorbike racing champion and hero of the Isle of Man TT Races, who was to be a judge of the contest. She had seen photographs of him and was determined to get there.

  She would pull out triumphantly the photograph of the results of that beauty pageant. It showed a row of contestants – tall, leggy, shapely girls who look like proper beauty queens. But wearing the Miss Isle of Man sash and beaming up at Geoff Duke is a small impish girl several inches shorter than the other entrants. Audrey would giggle, pointing out that it was more about her ‘personality’ and other attributes than just having long legs, and that getting to know the judges well made a big difference!

  Ava laughed to herself at this, and then continued.

  Back in Southport, Neil had been in touch, asking her to meet up again, but she was already off to live in London and she met Perry Guinness soon afterwards. On visits home to Southport to visit her mother she would sometimes see Neil, and was aware that his eyes always followed her at any party. On one of these visits, now engaged to Perry, Audrey bumped into Neil again, and she was shocked to see him looking so ill and drawn.

  Neil had been to Africa during his service in the RAF and had been very sick with malaria. It wasn’t just the disease itself that made him so ill, but other complications and an overdose of drugs that he had accidentally been given at a makeshift RAF hospital. This had badly affected his immune system and liver, and he was now undergoing tests to work out a treatment plan.

  Neil wasn’t like the other, more fun-loving people that Audrey hung around with: he was very direct and open, always totally absorbed by whatever he was doing, whether it was taking photographs, or making furniture or films; and he would talk with excitement about books he was reading, or art and culture. She didn’t know anyone quite like him. He now begged her to have dinner with him and, feeling sorry for him and flattered by the look in his eyes, she agreed, but only after explaining that she was engaged to Perry Guinness, of the well-known Guinness family.