Everything looked ready to be seen.
I needed Mateo. He never spoke about his work, but I pictured him like this, poring over bits and pieces, looking for patterns in a collection. I needed a good eye. An organizer. A curator.
But maybe that was it. That was what seemed strange. Everything had been made ready. Everything was ready to be seen. Like the start of every day at the shop. Everything was dusted and arranged as if at any moment, the time might come to unlock the door and let the day begin.
Was that how I remembered my gran? Ordered, polished and ready? I wasn’t sure. I remembered the soft woollen rug with its tangled fringe, the warm electric fire and the bowl of marble eggs. I remembered her soap. Imperial Leather, and it smelled like the forest and cinnamon and sandalwood. And like geraniums, too, but without the prickle in the nose. The bar sat beside the bathroom sink – a heavy block the colour of maple cream, I thought, or the Caramac bar she would set out on the tea tray for me beside Felicity’s mug. I remembered Gran standing at the sink, scrubbing our grey underwear with her Persil powder, sighing that our homemade camp soap never got anything white. She pinned the laundry to the line in the garden and I remembered chasing Felicity through the cities of sheets and shirts, the wind itself white and clean. Then I remembered Gran combing out my hair in the evening, and Felicity saying yes, it was all right, as Gran lifted me up on the table to cut my hair off at chin level so it swung. Just like a wee land girl, she said. Muriel used to wear her hair like that. You need a Kirby-grip over your eyebrow and then you’ll be jaunty.
I remembered Gran working hard and liking beautiful things. I imagined her readying this room. Standing here by the shelf, straightening the books and the photo frames. Maybe she caught her own eye in the mirror, too, and looked and wondered when, and then set things in order for me. Muriel said she knew I was coming. So, she knew she was going. And she made things ready.
My grandmother was tall, as was my grandfather. The height of the mirror was telling. As was the height of the bookshelves and the shelves where the boxes sat. Some were labelled in my grandmother’s precise script – what my mother would call ‘educated handwriting’: Photographs. Felicity’s letters. Recipes. Buttons. Then there were the boxes marked with Granddad’s scrawl: Pebbles. Scribbles & Poems. Feathers. Maybe.
I pulled out the desk chair and climbed up. Felicity would like the recipes. An easy to keep, I thought. The box held neat bundles of pale-blue index cards bound with sensible elastic bands and marked with white tags. Soups. Vegetable Sides. Game. Puddings. Sweet Treats.
My gran’s coconut macaroons were the most exotic objects in my childhood. And her golden cheesy fish, baked in a casserole and covered in breadcrumbs that crackled in the middle and bubbled at the sides. Chicken in mushroom sauce meant a whole chicken breast just for me, and a white napkin to spread across my lap. Water in a cut-glass tumbler. Margarine.
I leafed through the recipes, hungry for the familiar. But you can’t flick through memories like that. They don’t turn on like the lights. You need to kindle them and wait.
Sloe gin
1 lb sloes
8 oz white sugar
1¾ pint gin
Sterilize a good strong darning needle in a candle flame, then use it to prick the tough skins of the sloes all over.
Place sloes in large bottle and add sugar and gin.
Seal well and shake. Keep bottle in a cupboard and shake every second day for the first week. After that, shake once a week and gin will be ready to drink in two months. Lovely at Christmas.
Note – Muriel’s mother says to try this with brandy and blackberries.
To dry rosehips
Wash your rosehips, top and tail then finely dice and dry them on newspaper in the sun.
Tip the dried rubble into a metal sieve and shake gently to remove the tickly hairs. They will easily fall away, leaving you with clean dried rosehips, ready to be used for tea, jam or jelly. Good for preventing colds and as a treatment for stiffness.
Coconut macaroons
Line a sandwich tin with sweet pastry.
Mix in a bowl:
1 cup coconut
¾ cup sugar
1 switched egg
Smooth into tin and bake at 400˚ for about 25 minutes.
Sweet pastry Felicity likes
2 lbs plain flour
1¼ lbs margarine and lard (mixed)
½ lb sugar
2 eggs
Pinch of salt
Makes a lot so a child can play with extra as pie is readying.
THE BOX LABELLED FELICITY’S LETTERS WAS A NEATLY bound archive, the envelopes marked BY AIR MAIL/PAR AVION. I remembered these. The paper thin as onion skin. The blue-and-red marked edges and the acrid taste of the glue. I could see Felicity bent over the table in the cabin, writing by candlelight. She filled page after page and sometimes let me add pictures, too. Her ballpoint felt important in my fingers and awkwardly precise, my smiley birds looking far scratchier than they ever did drawn in crayon on Bas’s cut-open paper bags.
Felicity drew pictures, too – little sketches perched at the beginning of paragraphs or squeezed in along the margins. There were babies’ faces and Rika’s hands. The table in the birthing house with its neat rows of instruments set out ready. A chipmunk in the woodpile, its eye reflecting the shape of the treetops against the sky. The rough-roofed cabins. The road into town and the patterns of leaves. And among all the details and the sketches, in letters that predated me, I found stories I’d never read before.
Montreal, January 1969
Dear Mum and Dad,
I guess I should start by apologizing for my last letter. Way too abrupt and I’m sure you were shocked. I could have managed it with more grace. Still, I wanted you to know about the baby, and I didn’t know how to say it gently. I shouldn’t have written what I did about keeping it or not. Let’s just pretend I never did, okay?
It’s beginning to feel like a real baby now. When I wrote before, I just felt sick and tired, but now it’s moving about a lot. There are most definitely feet and elbows in there. The textbooks say it’s supposed to feel like butterfly wings, but that’s not right at all. A bit like hiccups, maybe, but with a completely different kind of anticipation. Jenny and
