Chapter 7: Auntie Snowdrop's Parcel
Five years later - I'd have been about thirteen by this time - and Auntie Snowdrop's parcel still hasn't arrived, and neither had Auntie Pish ever come to visit us in London. Maman always said she wouldn't, that she'd never leave Folkestone. To begin with, for the first few months after the funeral, I had hoped for the promised parcel with every post, but nothing came. By the time it did arrive, I'd long since forgotten about it. And even then, it didn't come in the post.
After Aunty Snowdrop's funeral, Auntie Pish seemed to lose heart. We went down to Folkestone to see her much more often, not to spread snowdrops on the sea - it didn't seem right to do that anymore, not without Auntie Snowdrop there - but because Maman was worried about her. Auntie Pish's memory was not as good as it had been, that was becoming quite obvious to us. She seemed more confused every time we visited. She kept talking on about Auntie Snowdrop as if she was still alive, and sometimes - which was quite unlike her old self - she'd burst into tears and become very anxious and agitated. She'd say such strange things through her tears, snatches of half-lost memories that neither of us knew anything about, mostly about her father, and her mother too.
After one of our visits I wrote something she'd said to us down in my diary when I got home, because it upset me to see her so like this. "Father wouldn't listen, you know. I told him I'd have to go with her, that someone have to look after her. But oh no, he wouldn't listen, he wouldn't listen. It broke Mother's heart, broke my heart too." We had no idea what she was talking about.
As these episodes became more frequent, and made our visits more troubling, I wanted less and less to go down there to see her. I made lots of excuses not to go, football usually. I'm not proud of that now. Maman was not as faint-hearted as I was. She continued to go down to see her on her own most Saturdays, insisting that Auntie Snowdrop and Papa would never have wanted her left alone, that both Aunties on their own ways had been very kind to her when she needed it most. Then Auntie Pish broke her leg. We had a phone call from the hospital and both of us went down there as soon as we could.
Maman and I sat either side of her bed as she complained bitterly about the food, how the nurses kept waking her up to give her pills when she wanted to sleep, and how she didn't want the pills anyway. "Pish," she said. "I don't need pills. I want to get out of here. I want to go home." But mostly it was Jasper she complained about. "It was Jasper who broke my leg. It was all his fault, his and the postman's. I heard the postman come whistling down the path, so I went to the door just like I usually do to pick the letters up from the mat before Jasper gets to them. And what happens? Jasper comes charging down the hallway, barges past me and trips me up. If Martha had been there, it wouldn't have happened. She always goes to the door." She started crying then. "She's not at home, you know. Where's Martha gone? Who's going to look after Jasper? And there's the geraniums, the frost will get them if I don't fetch them in soon."
"Don't worry, Mary," said Maman. "M,ichael and I will look after everything, won't we, cheri?"
"You will? You'll look after Jasper and the geraniums? You'd like to look after Jasper, won't you, Michael?"
Would I! Would I! I could hardly contain my joy.
I turned to Maman. She didn't look happy.
"It'll only be a week or so, I promise," Auntie Pish told us. "I'll be right as rain in a week or so, fit as fiddle, you'll see. "
So we went up to Auntie Pish's house afterwards, and brought her geraniums in. I took Jasper for a run on the beach while Maman tidied the house and turned off the water and locked up. That evening we drove back to London with Jasper in the back of the car. I was over the moon. Jasper was coming home with me! At last I had a dog of my own. Jasper kept smiling up at me, panting with happiness.
But Maman made it quite clear she did not feel the same. "That dog stays downstairs, Michael. Do you hear?" she said. "I will not have him up in your bedroom, and he is not allowed on the chairs in the sitting room, and if he makes messes, you clear them up. Tu comprends?" She sighed deeply. "I just hope that leg of hers gets better soon like she said.
But it didn't. IOt took forever to heal. Maman was back and forth to Folkestone for weeks. Then, while Auntie Pish was still in hospital, she got pneumonia. After that she was too weak to look after herself. Maman found her a place in a nursing home just outside the town - not an easy task because Auntie Pish was very particular. She insisted she had to be able to see the sea from her bedroom window like she could back in her own home.
Meanwhile, at home in Philbeach Gardens, Jasper had become one of the family. He slept on my bed every night, despite all Maman's protests, bit the post as it came in through the door, and chased the cats in the park - there weren't any gulls. Maman never came to like him. She did get used to him, feed him even, take him out for his walks sometimes. But whenever I wasn't at school, Jasper became my constant companion. He came to football with me, chased the ball and made a nuisance of himself. We got on so well, knew each other's thoughts almost. I had the strangest feeling sometimes that he and I were meant for each other, almost related, that somehow Auntie Snowdrop had arranged the whole thing.
Sometimes, on Saturdays, I did go down to the nursing home with Maman, when football was rained off, or when I just couldn't come up with a good enough excuse to get out of it. I never looked forward to going because we just had to sit there in her tiny box of a room - a bed, a bedside table and one chair. I had to sit at the end of her bed and listen to her rambling on for hours. She treated Maman now rather as she had treated Auntie Snowdrop. Maman was kind and attentive and endlessly patient, but as with Auntie Snowdrop, there were never any thanks. Auntie Pish just took her more and more for granted. She was never sharp with Maman sometimes. She could be really nasty.
When I complained about this to Maman, and said she shouldn't put up with it, she'd always make excuses for her. She'd say that Auntie Pish was very old and that old people get like that; that it was only natural that she might be a bit difficult and truculent at her age, how she'd lived through a lot, and had a heart of gold underneath. Maman was always so forgiving.
It was one of these visits, that out of the blue I received at last Auntie Snowdrop's long-forgotten parcel. Wrapped in brown paper and tied up neatly with string, it was lying there on Auntie Pish's bed when Maman and I walked into her room. "Auntie Martha wants you to have this," she said. All these years later - nearly five years now - she still talked of her sister as if she was alive. "She's wrapped it up specially for you. It's breakable, so take care how you open it."
I didn't bother about being careful. I pulled and tugged and jerked at the string until it came away. Underneath the brown paper, the parcel was neatly wrapped in layer after layer of newspaper, each layer folded over carefully. It took forever to open it. I couldn't do it fast enough. It felt like a book of some kind.
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