A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (21 page)

But upon tasting it, I realized that the burned potato pieces which had exploded and fallen on the oven floor, had totally permeated the chicken with the taste of smoke. The potatoes themselves had become little black billiard balls. Only the string beans had survived, for the simple reason that they’d been cooked on the stove-top, and I’d turned off the steamer and set them aside before I fell asleep.

“Good God!” Jeremy cried, hovering in the doorway in his pajamas, looking shocked, his hair standing straight up from days of being in bed. “What’s on fire?”

“Dinner!” I shouted, tears of exhaustion pouring down my cheeks. “The potatoes exploded all over the floor of the oven. The bird’s a dead duck.”

We both started coughing from the smoke, and I flung open the windows, letting in the cold, clammy air. Rain spattered my already tear-streaked face.

Jeremy now added fuel to the fire by stating the obvious. “You have to
watch
food when you’re roasting it!” he said in exasperation. Then he flung back my previous remark to him: “Even a two-year-old knows that!”

Later, I had to explain to him Rule #1 in a marriage: If your mate insults you, do not harbor the exact words of the insult in your bosom and then fling it back at her at the first golden opportunity.

“Now you’re going to freeze us out and we’ll both die of pneumonia!” Jeremy exclaimed, as the wind whistled in through the open windows, dispelling the smoke and all my hopes of a fine dinner.

“You’re just
trying
to get sick and die!” I shouted back. “Either put on a robe and slippers and do something useful, or get back into bed.”

Rule #2: Never tell a man he’s useless. We spent the next fifteen minutes shouting at each other, reminding ourselves of every stupid thing we’d done on this trip.

Then I cried in earnest. Then he sulked guiltily. Then we didn’t speak for a half hour. Then Jeremy decided to be big about it, and he insisted on trying to eat some of the chicken, which only made me feel worse. It’s true that the meat wasn’t technically burnt, but it tasted like it was. It was truly hideous.

But he kept patting my back and telling me that it would have been a wonderful dinner, and that it was an easy mistake to make, and that he didn’t care at all. However, after a few bites, he had to spit it out and admit that the whole damned thing was inedible.

“I can’t go back into town and shop again!” I wailed, totally exhausted. I’d shopped so carefully, and spent money on highquality goods, and worked hard to get it right . . . and I simply didn’t want to go face those resentful shopkeepers who were still pissed off about Shakespeare. “Look,” I said tearfully, “if I make you some eggs, would you feel like eating them?”

“Sure,” Jeremy said. He glanced round the kitchen. “You could throw those string beans in, they look okay. Add a little cheddar, and you’ve got yourself an omelette. Want me to do it?”

“NO!” I shouted. One thing my father
did
succeed in teaching me at a tender age was how to make an omelette. So off I went.

When I was ready to present it to Jeremy on a tray in bed, it must have looked good, because he sniffed hungrily and then said, “We got any white wine?”

“Yup,” I said. I poured two glasses, and we both sat there in bed and ate.

“Wonderful,” he kept saying.

“And to think it only took me a zillion hours and as many dollars,” I said wryly. “Piece of cake.”

“Got any cake?” Jeremy demanded. “I want dessert, too.”

“Biscuits,” I said. “Digestive biscuits. That’s what the doctor said.”

“As I recall,” Jeremy said smugly, “the doctor said I could eat anything I had an appetite for. So bring on the desserts, and a small glass of port.”

“Welcome back, podner,” I said, immensely relieved to hear him starting to sound like his old, lusty, cantankerous self. “This case just ain’t the same without you.”

Afterwards, we settled into bed, and it was quite cozy. We had gotten used to the candlelight at dinner, and sometimes we carried it into the bedroom with us instead of turning on the electric light. I liked the shadows the candles cast, flickering across the room.

Jeremy glanced at the newspaper, then set it aside. He was still coughing a bit whenever he lay down, so he stayed propped up and tired, bored with the television.

Now I ransacked my bag for something to read, and came upon the little school notebook from Great-Aunt Penelope’s clubhouse. I started to really examine it, and soon was chuckling out loud.

“Jeremy, listen to this,” I kept saying, irresistibly compelled to read to him from the “minutes” of their meetings, which were all written in Aunt Pen’s neat, schoolgirl handwriting, with playful flourishes and dramatic narrative. I picked out one of the escapades and recited it:

“
July, in the twelfth day of the 1927 th year of our Lord
,” I intoned, “
the officers of the Cornwall Summer Explorers’ Club infiltrated the Annual Parental Tea whose guest of honor was the vicar, the minister of Parliament and the earl and the earl-ess. The raid was conducted at the hour 15:30 when the dining table was still being laid.

“The C.S.E.C. thencewith returned to the clubhouse at 16:00, having succeeded in absconding with an assortment of six petits fours, three scones, and a slice each of orange cake, chocolate cake and spice cake. White Tea was smuggled out in a thermos. Devonshire cream and jam were put in jars, which the S.-a.-A. dropped and almost smashed, but which were saved by the Treasurer in the nick of time.
”

 

“Know what that means?” Jeremy chuckled. “Aunt Pen’s little club made a raid on the grown-ups’ tea party. Why didn’t they just walk in and eat with the adults?”

“Are you kidding?” I said scornfully. “Where’s the fun in that? Their parents were all in a tizzy because of the illustrious guest list. So,” I said, translating Great-Aunt Penelope’s high-blown prose, “Aunt Pen—the
Prez
—made Great-Uncle Roland—the
S.-a.-A.
or
Sergeant at Arms
—boost her up to the side window, so she could sneak in and pilfer sweets and tea. She actually slung them in a basket on a rope to the
Treasurer
—Grandmother Beryl. They even made off with milky tea in a thermos!” I marvelled, picturing three kids scampering across the lawn and retreating to the secret room over the garage. “But Great-Uncle Roland nearly queered it all by dropping the jam jar.”

“Sound just like his namesake, good old Rollo,” Jeremy commented.

All that night, Jeremy listened intently, as, instead of watching television, I continued to read aloud about the further adventures of the kids’ club, which seemed to escalate in daring as the summer of 1927 wore on. After rescuing a baby bird that fell out of a nest, they chased a viper out of the garage. They bicycled out to a farm to deliver medicine to an old lady who was ailing. They solved a local “mystery” by locating a neighbor’s missing horse out on the moors; and on another day they boldly “recovered” a new wheelbarrow from a town thief who’d stolen it from a neighbor, for which the police commended them.

All their summer “cases”, mysteries and discoveries were narrated in Great-Aunt Penelope’s utter seriousness of tone, embellished with high drama. After years of hearing about my great-aunt’s sophisticated, mysterious adulthood, I loved picturing her scampering around Cornwall as a thirteen-year-old, with her bright, imaginative sense of romance and excitement.

“Don’t you just adore her?” I said.

“I adore your voice,” Jeremy mumbled sleepily. “You’ve never read aloud to me before. It’s so ve-e-ry soothing . . .”

He tried to stay awake, but soon he was snoring gently. Silently to myself, I read further on until, just around midnight, I reached a passage that was very strange indeed:

 

Below was a verse,
The Song of the Great Lady, Our Mascot
:

After that, there were only these two short entries:

 

There were a few doodles of swirls, whorls and spirals. Then the notebook ended there.

I was truly exhausted by the wild day of cooking I’d just had, and my eyes were bleary. So I set the book down, blew out the candle and tried to sleep.

For awhile I just lay there, musing about the little poem. If the notebook had been written by just any kid, I would have easily put it aside with the thought that these were simply a lot of fanciful jottings to while away a summer.

But this wasn’t any regular, ordinary kid. It was my Great-Aunt Penelope. She who had bequeathed her fascinating legacy to me and to Jeremy and to Rollo. I hadn’t known her very well when she was alive; but much later, in dogging out her mysterious last wishes, I had certainly come to learn that whenever Aunt Pen wrote that she had something important to say . . . well, it behooved her family members to believe it, and to find out just exactly what it was that she wanted only the “worthy” to know.

I
allowed Jeremy to sleep for as long as I could bear it, but finally, at nine o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t wait any longer. I made coffee and sunny-side-up eggs with a bit of ham, and toast and marmalade and orange juice. I figured if the scent of coffee won’t stir a man to rise and shine, well . . .

“Hey!” he said, sitting up in surprise when I carried his breakfast to him on a tray. He sniffed appreciatively and peered at it as I set it down in front of him. “That’s quite a yeoman’s breakfast,” he commented. “The only thing missing is baked beans and kippers.”

“You English amaze me,” I said. I bounced on the bed alongside him. As he ate, I gave him the news.

“Aunt Pen’s club had a great adventure!” I announced. “But I can’t tell what it was, because just when it started to get good, she slipped into some kind of poem. See? Can you figure out what she’s talking about?”

Jeremy squinted at the notebook, reading it carefully with his second cup of coffee. Then he just shook his head. “Nope,” he said.

I persisted. “Aw, c’mon. Try harder. You’re English. Figure it out, will ya? It says here,
Only the Black Rod decides.
What can that possibly mean?”

Jeremy munched his toast thoughtfully.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a term from the House of Lords in Parliament, where the Black Rod is basically a sergeant-at-arms. He’s in charge of things like security—making sure people behave, ejecting unruly members, that sort of thing. In medieval times, the sergeant-at-arms was more like a bodyguard to a king.”

“Aha, the
S.-a.-A
.!” I exclaimed, riffling the pages back to the one which listed all the club officers. I pointed to the officer’s name.

“Look at who the club’s sergeant-at-arms was,” I said. “Good old Great-Uncle Roland. In charge of security, you get it?”

“More likely they put him in charge of the dirty work,” Jeremy said, re-reading the poem. “Sounds to me like their dog died and he had to bury it.”

I fell silent for a moment. Looking over the whole thing, that’s exactly what it sounded like. And yet, I felt I had to pursue this to see if that’s really all there was to it.

“I’ve been wanting to take a drive out to Grandmother Beryl’s house anyway,” I said. “Just to keep an eye on it. I think I’ll go poke around there again.” I peered out the window. “It stopped raining,” I said hopefully. “The sky is still full of clouds, but at least they’re whitish clouds.”

Jeremy picked up the breakfast tray and carried it into the kitchen. “I’m going with you,” he announced. When I objected mildly, he said firmly, “Let me put it this way—if I don’t get out of this cottage today, I will go stark, raving mad.”

 

The sun had peeped out a bit already, which gave me the bright idea of cycling to Grandma’s house. Maybe it had to do with Aunt Pen’s club—I felt I had to get into the mind-set of a bunch of kids on summer vacation. Jeremy, who was feeling much better, loved the idea.

So we pedaled down the quiet lane that wound its way around the farm, and then out toward the sea. In the distance I could barely make out the headland and the castle where the mysterious earl was ensconced, counting his shillings or whatever the landed gentry do in their spare time. I guess I had old nursery rhymes on my mind, and I sang one as we cycled along:

When we arrived at Grandmother Beryl’s place, it seemed as if the house and grounds were holding their breath, watching us with an expectation that something was going to happen for which they’d long been waiting.