Читать книгу The Household Guide to Dying - Debra Adelaide - Страница 16

Dear Delia

Okay, I’ll forget about the wedding cake, but I’d like your advice on another matter. My daughter will wear my old white silk veil, edged in lace. But it is spotted with brown stains and has yellowed around the creases. Should I bleach it?

Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

Never use bleach on silk! Buy some old-fashioned yellow laundry soap. Wash the veil in a tub, preferably outdoors one fine day. Rinse it with half a cup of white vinegar in the water, and roll it up in a towel. Spread it on the lawn to dry, where it will look beautiful as it soaks up the day. Let the light do the rest.

Spring meant that Mr Lambert next door commenced a rigorous routine of lawn maintenance. He devoted every Monday morning to front-lawn weeding. I didn’t need to go out and look over the fence to know what he would be doing: lying prone on the lawn and digging out feral vegetation with an old paring knife. Dandelions, bindi-eyes and other unidentified weeds were ritually extracted this way. Mr Lambert was a retired tax accountant, and I was sure he treated his lawn with the same humourless precision as he would have a column of figures. The lawn remained the blue-green shade of the fairest couch all summer until it turned brown in winter. He must have had his reasons, but I did wonder why he selected wintergreen couch for his front lawn, with its tendency to fade in the cooler months. Maybe because it was a more compliant grass, less inclined to provide asylum to refugee weeds that drifted in with the birds and the breezes. Soon after Mr Lambert moved here several years ago, he embarked on a clearing of the property environs that allowed no resistance. Palms, prone to messy explosions of seeds that banked in drifts and rotted odorously. Fence-hugging vines: morning glory, star jasmine and potato. Shrubs and grevilleas. The one large camphor laurel tree out the back. All were hewn, chopped away, chipped, mulched, removed.

A Mrs Lambert once existed but had passed away. He was never inclined to tell me more than that, except to mention that there was a son, and grandchildren, and I knew visits were few. I wondered if, had his wife not died some years before, his attitude towards the garden might have been more benevolent. But knowing nothing about her, it was impossible to say. Over the years Mr Lambert and I had only a few conversations, and in recent times none. But at one point he told me that he disliked trees. Too untidy. He replaced the front wattle tree with the murraya, and permitted a lone clump of agapanthus to loiter meekly by his front doorstep. His final act of garden cleansing was to dig up the front lawn and replace it with the wintergreen couch. He lovingly sowed it by hand and watered it obsessively, first with a fine mist spray gun so as not to disturb the seeds, then with a watering can. Within weeks it grew into a grey-green velvet carpet.

Archie, the lawn specialist, observed all this with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Lawn was a fine thing if you intended making use of it. Finer if you had the water resources to maintain it – but who had these days? Children playing, summer backyard meals, or just sitting by gazing at something soothingly green. But Mr Lambert’s lawn, huge in proportion to his small house, barely received a passing glance from its owner, except of course when he was tending it. The front window roller shutters remained securely shut most of the time. He never sat on the tiny front porch, never rested on his lawn. And yet he was forever watering it – by hand, during restrictions, making endless trips to the tap and back to drench every centimetre. He fed it liquid fertiliser. He aerated it with a fancy rolling spike. He lay on it and dug out every suspect growth. He rolled it as if it were a bowling green. It was seven by nine metres of perhaps the most perfect lawn Archie and I had ever seen, but which the owner otherwise ignored. I never saw anything so necessary, but so irrelevant, to a person’s life.

I assumed Mr Lambert’s backyard was still a small wasteland of pebblecrete punctuated by a set of plastic furniture, which he kept tilted forward and covered in plastic sheeting. I wasn’t certain, as it was no longer possible to see over the fence since he’d attached sheets of Colorbond steel to frustrate voyeurs. He even uprooted the rotary washing line, replacing it with a fence line that could be neatly folded down. Recently he sliced the necks of all our monstera deliciosa leaves that perched audaciously above the fence. Archie found them thrown onto our side and I pleaded with him not to throw them back. He couldn’t contain his anger at this outrage inflicted upon an innocent plant, and not so long ago I would have flung them over myself, with fury directing my swing. He settled for sticking the stalks back up against the fence so that their withering leaves would at least reproach our neighbour.

It was a beautiful day to be outside idling in the garden instead of trying to remember how to make a fruit cake I once could have made in my sleep. To write it down I needed to remember the ingredients and the method, which was hard when I had always made it from instinct. Never before had I written the recipe down, let alone thought about exact weights and measurements. I had made this cake so many times, but how many kilos of dried fruit did I use? What proportion of raisins, currants, peel and nuts? Did I include cherries? Two bottles of brandy, or one of brandy and one of rum? The thinking would be exhausting even for a well person. Putting off work I tidied my office instead, then walked over to the window, and opened it as wide as it would go. I breathed in the glorious scent. My lungs swelled with the delicate warmth of new jasmine frothing along the side fence and the peppery odour of the council’s wattle, already well into bloom. The wisteria pouring copiously from the vine.

Wisteria. Of course. I found the writing pad on which I’d been jotting down ideas for the wedding, and under Venue added Botanical Gardens. The wisteria would be glorious there. Daisy would look like an angel. Her Botticelli hair against a pale frock – pink or lemon or lavender. The lawn alive with colour, the sky a sharp blue, the whole a brilliant contrast for her Renaissance beauty.

I was fantasising on a grand scale. Daisy at twenty-five or so would probably have her hair cropped short and dyed indigo and wear nothing but black cargo pants and strategically ripped shirts. My sweet darling youngest daughter who was forever preoccupied with dolls and pets and everything fluffy, who would sleep with Kitty if I still let her, who played happy families with her three mice and kept one of them all day in her pocket, who begged for real ducklings but settled for the collection of floating ones she still kept for the bath. Doubtless by then she would have found her true sexuality and be in love with an Irish woman, sharing her passion for body piercing, dog shows and one-day cricket. The more the list burgeoned with details of table decorations and seating arrangements, the more I felt convinced this event was never going to happen. It was more likely to be a commitment ceremony, probably in an ironic location like the old Mortuary Station, or Hungry Jack’s at Darling Harbour, with the dogs (they’d be staffies) wearing purple bows. But if a wedding did take place, there’d be the rudiments of a list to follow. On the off-chance that Daisy would want one, I would have done my bit.

I considered making the cake (and then I remembered, it was half a bottle each of brandy and rum), which would last the years. But apart from the effort involved in shopping for the ingredients, then mixing and icing the thing, I thought doing so would actually confirm Archie’s view of me as a control freak. I would instead leave them the wedding fruit cake recipe, draw it somehow out of my head and write it up properly. I might even give it to Mother of the Bride.

I put the list aside and got on with the real work. Apart from Mother of the Bride’s request, there were ten more emails waiting for replies.

Dear Delia

Remember I wrote some time back inquiring about shopping lists? My golfing friend and I consulted that Mrs Beeton book you mentioned, and now we are wondering if it would be a good idea to write inventories of our households. Linen and crockery, plus our jewellery and stuff. For the children, and grandchildren. And insurance too, of course. Unsure.

Dear Unsure

If I remember rightly, you also told me you were both sixty-five. At this age do you really want to clutter up your lives with more paperwork?