Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  20

  Further Afield

  SINCE THE GATEPOST INCIDENT, my mother had been in a strange and withdrawn state. She drove past Peter Aspinall’s house each night peering at the windows, and she and Auntie Ava had long whispered conversations that I struggled to overhear. Ava called him ‘your Southport Rock Magnate’ and didn’t seem as enthusiastic about him as she had been about my mother’s other possibilities.

  The whole thing worried me, but at least it left me free to follow my new obsession, which was doing as many things as possible that were recommended by The Young Eve. The desperate behaviour of my mother seemed more bizarre than ever, and now that I had this other calm, clear voice to guide me I wanted to follow it in every way I could. It terrified me to think that another travel plan of my mother’s could interrupt my precious project.

  One chapter in my bible described the uplifting effect of a theatre visit and I’d seen a poster for a play at the local Little Theatre. As I was taking so many days off school it was exciting to find a new place to spend cold or wet afternoons – a midweek matinee.

  The following Wednesday afternoon I sat, delighted, among the pensioners and watched a musical called The Boyfriend. I was already something of an expert on film musicals, as my mother had an endless repertoire and I could have performed most of the well-known ones, from Gigi to The Gay Divorcee, tunelessly but practically word-perfect.

  But the real live thing, up there on a stage, amazed me: those lights, those sets and costumes that appeared at first glance to be so clunky and fake, and yet managed to convince us so completely of these other worlds – the whole effect felt like the closest I had come to witnessing magic. It also felt like where I wanted to be, more than anywhere. From a wet autumn afternoon I had stepped into this cosy, plush, red-velvet murmur, waited for the curtain to go up and the lights to dim, and felt completely at home.

  There was a friendly lady in the box office, and I made enquiries.

  ‘Well, there’s the Playhouse in Liverpool; they do marvellous things.’

  Liverpool was twenty miles away but the pull was strong. So it was a Wednesday morning when I stepped up onto the train and sat counting off the numerous stations en route to the city as the low flat landscape scrolled by. Many of these places where we squeaked to a halt had featured in our life, and were places with a story. This somehow made the journey feel further, as though I was somehow travelling back on this adventure through my own past.

  Here was Birkdale, home of the Royal Golf Club where my mother longed to be accepted and never was. It often hosted the famous Ryder Cup, which drew the rich and famous to Southport, and its exclusive clubhouse held dinner dances throughout the year. Even though my mother liked to call it fuddy-duddy, it pained her that she could not be part of its upmarket, snobby social life. I heard her tell Auntie Ava that ‘it didn’t take Jewish members either’ and wondered what the ‘either’ meant.

  Birkdale had sand dunes, and Southport’s only hill where people, though not me, would go tobogganing if there was snow.

  Then there came Ainsdale, where I could see the Sands, a nightclub that my mother would often go to.

  Formby had the richest history for us. It was where James, the real love of my mother’s life, lived with his wife and children. Then on to the unknown and unknowable Hightown and Hall Road to Blundell Sands and Crosby.

  Crosby was very familiar, being the home of Auntie Grace and Uncle Phil, so it was strange to pass it, alone on the train, and see the Angel War Memorial and think that just beyond it was the small house with the horse brasses around the fireplace and pampas grasses on the hall landing.

  Mainly I loved travelling past all these landmarks of my childhood and feeling them change into something quite new. Now they were part of a journey I was on alone, and that somehow transformed them. I thought that one day I might find myself in some of those strange and distant places I’d visited with my mother, and they too would be almost unrecognizable.

  Arriving in Liverpool, I felt like I had travelled to New York. Even on days out there with my mother it seemed huge and exotic. We would go to the Adelphi Hotel’s Zodiac Coffee Bar for toasted sandwiches, a place we loved as it was done out in a funky Sixties style and the waitress would ask what sign you were born under, and then give you the right menu. Mummy made her laugh by saying, ‘Me! I was born under a warning sign!’ We’d sit there and make up silly astrological fortunes for each other. ‘An unusual situation today has left you speechless …’ she’d begin, then she put her finger to her coral lips. And we’d both sit in silence until I finally ‘get it’ and we both collapse in giggles.

  We had once been to the Cavern Club to see the Beatles play, and my mother had held me up and danced with me in her arms, but I was too little to remember it now and it had just become a story. Although London was the ultimate thrill, Liverpool was grand enough to feel like a big city, with its vast buildings coated in the velvety blackness of the centuries and the contrasting ranks of windows catching the low sunlight.

  When the train arrived at Exchange Station, with a jolt and a hiss, I experienced a wave of panic. Navigating the vaguely familiar streets to the Playhouse Theatre, the trip felt the bravest thing I had ever done; but at last I was here, and only had to deal with the box office and dodge the usual questions about the whereabouts of my mother. ‘She’s just dropped me off. She’s gone shopping and is going to pick me up at the end.’ At last I held that magic ticket and I entered the longed-for darkness and pools of illumination.

  The play was extraordinary. The story was very odd indeed, and yet an audience had paid money to come, and were sitting in rapt attention.

  But why? Why did everyone keep talking about a wild duck? As this was the title of the play, it obviously wasn’t just a minor detail but something important to the story.

  I discussed this with a lady who worked at the theatre. She couldn’t help me with the wild-duck issue, but she said that the next production might be more suitable for me and she gave me a leaflet. She was right, and I then became a regular.

  The haunting Irish cadences of Playboy of the Western World were the sounds of somewhere half familiar to me, as if from a dream; the strangeness of Shakespeare’s couples in As You Like It, sticking notes on trees in a forest, speaking that rich poetic language which hinted at some important truths that would be mine if it could only be decoded. These words were spoken by people with Sandie Shaw or Paul McCartney haircuts, and wearing miniskirts and bell-bottoms; strobe lights flashed and pop music played, all of which made the archaic language seem even more mystifying.

  I remember that this thing called ‘history’ suddenly made sense. I saw Greek tragedy played by actors in US army uniforms set against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and Kennedy’s assassination. I saw a Restoration play done with full Hogarthian filth, in dirty costumes and among stinking rubbish as the actors fought and spat their way through the story; and I had the first glimmering that the past is ‘another country’ far more strange than most of the places my mother’s travels had taken us to.

  I would learn many years later that I had in fact chanced on something genuinely amazing. As it happened, these Liverpool theatres, a half-hour train ride from my home, were going through a famously golden era, and at ten or eleven years old I was able to watch actors like Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench and Ian McKellan perform in experimental work that was getting incredible national reviews.

  I felt proud that I’d discovered this phenomenon. The Playhouse had queues around the block, even for the matinee. So I had stumbled upon something that really was as wondrous as it seemed and these crowds of people agreed with me.

  My mother had missed all this, but I’d found it for myself.

  It was around this time of stalking the poor gatepost man that I began to suspect Audrey was regretting the fact I was growing up. When I was younger it had seemed like all she wanted was for me to become an adult, but now she was realizing that this meant I was finding n
ew things of my own and I might not accept her wisdom on absolutely everything. I knew she was hugely missing our double act.

  She still wanted me to curl up on the bed as I used to and she would pat the covers as if I were a small cat.

  ‘Come and be a snuggle pie and tell me what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘Not much,’ I would say. ‘Reading, mostly.’

  I didn’t want her to mock any of my new discoveries, so I secretly hugged them to myself. I realized that I desperately wanted the gatepost man to take care of her now, but there were so many things that could still go wrong.

  I wasn’t sure how much Peter had worked out about my mother’s ways of making money. I knew that she was terrified of admitting to the betting shops.

  Even Ava, hardly my mother’s most astute critic, had spotted trouble. ‘You probably should tell the Rock Magnate a few things, you know?’ she said cautiously.

  Peter had told my mother quite early on how much he loathed gambling of any kind, and that he particularly hated the place opposite the gates of his own factory, a squalid betting shop where he would see the poor workers go in with their hard-earned pay packets and come out crushed and defeated.

  ‘There aren’t even supposed to be places like this on residential streets,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘so there has obviously been some sort of corruption going on.’

  This was particularly tricky for my mother, because the shop in question was one of her own, and permission for it had been bought with those clinking bottles of champagne in the boot of our car, as well as who-knows-what other ‘favours’. Peter had failed to notice that the sign above Miller’s Betting Shop was my mother’s own maiden name.

  She was finally forced to confess, and he was appalled. He tried to find excuses for her – that she was a single woman, desperate, and with a child to support – and she eagerly went along with any exonerating suggestions he came up with. He seemed very upset. She said she would change over the betting shops to hair salons, and was soon busy replacing the seedy chain-smoking managers with pretty receptionists and hair stylists. With this more respectable business to her name, he began to calm down but would at times give her a look that he hadn’t given her before. It was either sadness or suspicion.

  I realized that if Peter was so shocked by her lack of morality, then things were a little worse than I’d thought. In the light of this, her other sources of income were much more worrying. How would he react to the news about her ‘girls’ and the ‘dates’ she arranged and the fact that she was so notorious in the town?

  During one of the rather heated discussions about the betting shops, Peter had mentioned something called a ‘moral compass’, and I wasn’t sure that we had one. I panicked. Their relationship was now looking like a possible lifesaver for us both, but it clearly could flounder if certain things came to light.

  My fears led me to my latest interest, which was an exploration of religion and morality. I’d imagined a voice in my head, rather like that of The Young Eve, but this new voice would be able to tell me what was right and wrong, or good and bad. Perhaps some more ‘goodness’ in our life might also dispel the slightly ‘off’ smell that seemed to hang around us.

  My mother thought I was a crashing bore when I talked about any of this and loathed anything to do with mysticism or religion. We lived a few houses along from St James’s, an ugly red-stone Victorian church presided over by the eager figure of Canon Jones. He was enormously tall and looked like Plug from ‘The Bash Street Kids’. He must have known that our household was in need of spiritual and moral guidance, given my father’s death and my mother’s deteriorating reputation over the years. He had been quite persistent in his visits and would come loping up our drive in his black cassock with bony ankles showing beneath, his beaming face full of a desire to save us.

  My mother would peer out, groan, ‘Oh no! It’s Canon Jones,’ and hide behind the curtains.

  One day, when she was out, I rebelled and let him into the house. We had an interesting chat about good and evil, but I found his views a little on the dull side, to the relief of my mother.

  Then I found something more intriguing. There was a week when I didn’t even pretend to go to school. Each day I walked into town and sat in the El Cabala coffee bar reading my book until the Odeon opened for its matinee showing of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

  Settling in, the lights went down and there she was again, Barbra Streisand in this bizarre, unfathomable tale of Daisy Gamble who has strange mind-reading powers. She undergoes hypnosis to stop smoking, but then finds she has gone back to her previous incarnation as Lady Melinda Tentrees, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat who parades around Brighton Pavilion in fabulous Cecil Beaton costumes.

  In the film’s interval one afternoon, I ate my ice cream and noticed a man sitting near me in the auditorium. He had a rather unkempt beard but a kindly face, so I asked him what he thought of the film. Had he worked out why Daisy kept turning into Lady Melinda?

  He then explained the principle of reincarnation and I asked him what he thought about this idea. He said that he wasn’t a believer himself, but imagined people might believe in it because they felt there were other selves inside them they couldn’t explain, though these were more likely to come from their parents than past lives, in his view. It was a really interesting conversation and I wondered if this was why I felt that there were different selves inside of me, all wanting to be the real me. Did they come from my father, or had I been someone in another life?

  He then told me that reincarnation was popular in India. India! I had been taken with India since I had first heard its name, conjuring fantasies of spices and yellow sunlight and desert palaces.

  My mother had no interest in going to India, despite my pleas. She said it wasn’t ‘us’, which suddenly made it more appealing.

  ‘It might be me, but not you!’ I said and she looked hurt at this, so I didn’t say any more.

  I’d seen a poster of an Indian man down by Pleasureland, the fairground, with an arrow pointing to a brightly painted kiosk covered with images of crystal balls and stars. I followed the arrows and inside there was a small dark man seated on a cushion, wearing a colourful waistcoat and saffron turban. Joss sticks burnt in a holder, and pictures of temples had been stuck to the walls. The man asked me to sit across from him, then he looked at my palm and face for a time. His eyes were almost closed and I wondered if he had fallen asleep.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if inviting a question.

  ‘I wanted to know if I have different selves in me, and which is the right one?’ Then I quickly added, ‘Oh, and what my future holds.’

  Finally he spoke in a heavy accent. ‘You can only seek the true self within.’ He opened his eyes. ‘And one day you will visit India, my country, and also many, many other places. I see you in a big shiny car, in a big city, very successful.’

  This was just what I wanted to hear, and gave a kind of weird blessing to my growing ideas of reinvention. So it felt like a magical prophesy already coming to pass when, one wintry day some months later, India seemed to be coming to me. The gloom of our wide road lit up with the headlights of a removal van followed by two Rolls-Royces, and from these emerged a chattering flock of brilliant creatures, with slivers of neon-coloured saris wafting out from under flapping mackintoshes.

  These women in their gorgeous clothes would emerge from the Victorian porch of the house next door, jangling forth with their arms laden with bangles to strew the house with fairy lights, even though Christmas had long since passed. There were wonderful smells and sounds escaping from the leaded-light windows. There was also a discreet sign in the driveway, inviting visitors to their Sunday-evening puja or religious celebration. There were few Indians in Southport, and Dr Naidoo had bought the next-door house for both his vast extended family and as a place of local worship. Perhaps this was what I was looking for.

  My mother now perked up at the idea of me trying out the Naidoos’ pu
ja; it was entertaining and promised the added pleasure of finding out exactly what went on next door. I had also pointed out that the Beatles, who she loved, were in India and doing just this kind of thing. I begged her to come but she just said, ‘Well you can pray for me, but I’m probably a lost cause!’

  Sunday evening, and the Naidoos’ living room was filled with chairs in front of a shrine. There were pictures of crazy looking gods and set before these was a silver tray covered in incense burners smouldering their sweet smell into the room, and surrounded by bells, fruit, flowers and cups full of rainbow powders. There was a special armchair draped in a white sheet for the Master. Someone explained to me that his physical being wouldn’t be present, just his spirit. There was a bottom-shaped dent in the sheet that I assumed was made by the Master sitting there.

  We sang songs; one I remember was about walking through life ‘with my Master by my side’ and when I sang it to my mother she laughed.

  ‘That’s a Scottish song and they’ve just changed the words’ and she sang: ‘Roamin’ in the gloamin’ wi’ ma lassie by ma side …’

  I feared she would kill the magic if I told her any more. So I decided to keep the Sunday evenings to myself and practise my meditation and the search for my ‘Third Eye’ in the privacy of my bedroom.

  My mother always seemed amazed that I was interested in things that she thought ‘a bore’ and, having mentioned my father very little, his name now came up more often as she would tell people, ‘She’s just like Neil,’ if I seemed to take anything too seriously or challenged her view of the world.

  Perhaps I wanted to be like Neil; I knew I wanted to be something that wasn’t quite her. I’d recently watched A Streetcar Named Desire with awful glimpses of recognition, and was now haunted by a sense of how my mother’s Scarlett O’Hara could morph into Blanche DuBois in an instant, relying too much on ‘the kindness of strangers’ who might not always be kind. I wondered what would become of her if Peter didn’t take her on, and where we would be now if he had not opened his front door that day. He seemed like her only chance, and I hoped she was not going to mess it up. After all every man in our life so far had bolted or been rejected, so what would go wrong this time?