Folio 6 ~ A Dream-Parasol

The two elderly ladies watched the waiter disappear into the spectral mist of steam that swirled in the middle of the room. The waiter, rubbing the back of his head and bitterly regretting adding the extra ‘es’ to ‘premises’, nevertheless, walked with the jaunty air of a dog that had successfully bullied a rabbit into fleeing back down its burrow.

Gertrude looked a little crestfallen, but Clarice, aiming her ear trumpet towards Caroline’s ear, bellowed, “D’you know what the time is?”

Caroline, who was feeling relieved at not having to give a recitation of the Vicar of Bray after all, but also a little sad that Gertrude was so obviously disappointed, was determined to be as polite and helpful as she could be. And so she pulled out of her pocket the fob watch that the strange, dust-covered, ancient man had given to her in the park. Its hands still hadn’t moved. She shook it hopefully, but nothing happened.

“I am afraid it’s not working – it’s broken,” she told the two ladies.

“Well, which is it, child?” snapped Gertrude, a little sharply, “not working or broken? The two aren’t the same thing, you know?”

“Well it is with this watch,” Caroline answered, feeling the pilot-light of a really loud argument beginning to burn between her ribs.

“What does it say?” asked Clarice, leaning over the table and trying to read the face.
Caroline looked at it.

“A quarter past four,” she announced

“WE’RE LATE!!” yelled Clarice in alarm.

“But, it’s not WORKING!” Caroline replied. Her anger was now swiftly replaced with the blurred flutter of confusion (and a teaspoon full of amusement).

“We’re STILL late!”

“No,” Caroline tried to explain, “it said a quarter past four when the kind old gentleman gave it to me this morning!”

“And WHEN was that?” Gertrude asked, clearly in a state of agitation.

Caroline thought for a while... Well, she left her flat just before 9 o’clock and then she walked to the park (well ran – but running for Caroline is much the same as walking), sat on a bench and ate 2 whole Jaffa cakes (including some crumb scrunffling and licking of fingers) and then she met the strange gentleman who walked in his own cloud of dust. She wrinkled her nose (to show to the ladies that she was thinking really hard) and said, “Twenty-three minutes past nine.”

Clarice shrieked. It was a marvellous, glass-shattering, jaw-dropping shriek. It was a shriek that made even the lady singing Wagner temporarily falter (on a particularly high note).

“If it was a quarter past four at twenty-three minutes past nine this morning, we must be REALLY late now!” Gertrude gasped. Her face was ashen. She scrabbled for her handbag and a fox stole that was draped over the back of her chair. The fox winked at Caroline as it was wrapped around Gertrude’s (rather scraggly) neck.

“Come on Clarice!” she called, “get your bags. Waiter! CALL A CAB!!”

The waiter, with a worried look on his face, hurried out of the door, followed by a flurry of ferocious, bombazine black. Caroline was rather relieved that her hosts had left. She was beginning to find their conversation a little wearing and so, cheerfully looking around the tearoom, she settled down to the last three pieces of Battenberg cake.

What is the perfect simile for happiness? Great writers have cast their lives to the fires of absinthe, sold their souls to the devil, and enrolled (at great expense) to ‘Horace Binn’s Correspondence Course for Aspiring Grate Authors’ to find that one, matchless description. That is because none of them had seen a Caroline contentedly munching Battenberg cake. It is, therefore, perhaps a shame that sitting opposite Caroline’s table was a struggling unknown writer. Readers will be gratified to know that, yes, he did wear a dusty black beret and he had a gloriously straggly beard and he wore a long shabby rain mackintosh with copious pockets. He looked up and quickly jotted down in a Moleskine notebook, ‘as happy as a small girl in a yellow summer dress and gumboots chomping on the marzipanny bit of a Battenberg cake’. The heavens were silent; Shakespeare was about to topple from his lofty perch as the greatest of writers. With an exultant ‘Hah!!’ the writer snapped the cap back on to his fountain pen, leaped to his feet, rushed out of the door and promptly lost his notebook. His name was Rainer Rilke.

*Readers’ Note*
Readers need not be too upset for him because I think he wrote some other stuff too (but, it has to be admitted, never quite as good as that).

Caroline was just pondering whether ‘the proprietors’ would take a 'dim view' of the licking of the plates, when she noticed in the corner of the room a tall distinguished gentleman smoking a nargile (a Turkish water pipe). He had one of those faces that was both pleasing and awful. Readers of cheap fiction would here be reading that his was a face of ‘cruel beauty’. Fortunately, you will be pleased to know, you are NOT reading cheap fiction. Oh no - far from it. The man had a face which was ageless and (note the wonderfully subtle and {incredibly clever} nuance I add here!) ... timeless. It was as if his skin was made of porcelain; cold, unreal, but devastatingly alluring. In fact, he had a face of cruel beauty. A thin pencil moustache sliced, glossy black, across his upper lip. His eyes, one green and one coal-black, were kind and distant and as fierce as my old maths teacher. However, what piqued Caroline’s curiosity wasn’t his appearance but the contraption from which the gentleman was smoking. It was made of gleaming brass and glass and some rather exciting snaky tubes. And so, shoving the last half slice of Battenberg into her mouth, she got up and thwap, thwapped in her gumboots over to where the he was sitting, legs crossed, upon a large plush-velvet cushion.

The man looked up and saw Caroline staring down at him with bulging cheeks and saucer-like eyes and he flinched. Now, I am not sure if I have clearly described this man. He was distinguished (military style), imposing (authoritative), and he had a face of cruel beauty. He was the type of man most would flinch away from – in other words, he would be the ‘flinchee’ rather than the ‘flincher’. But, nevertheless, in this instance he visibly flinched. Furthermore, he not only flinched, but he inadvertently swallowed (rather than exhaled) which resulted in a turmoil of smoke, bubbling and eye watering splutterings. Now, in his defence, it must be admitted that although Caroline had a VERY dainty mouth (she could probably fit only 4 marshmallows in it at one time), her cheeks did bulge rather alarmingly with Battenberg cake. Caroline watched all this with great interest; still munching away. The man took out a silk handkerchief from the pocket of his velvet dinner jacket pocket and wiped his smarting eyes with it. His fingers were long and bejewelled with ornate rings that sparkled with fire and colour.

An irritating tickle had lodged in the back of the gentleman’s throat and refused to budge, even after the most explosive of coughs. He dabbed at his eyes again (now very red). Caroline, not really sure whether what she was watching was normal behaviour when smoking a water-pipe, decided to open the conversation and so she gave a quick snuffle of her nose and said, “Excuse me. Is that your umbrella?” Bulging cheeks are one thing, but bulging cheeks and a snuffled nose (even a quick one) are an altogether different basket of thing-a-mees. The man proceeded to have another coughing fit, whilst simultaneously gurgling noisily and waving frantically with his hand.
‘How odd,’ she thought, ‘and how absolutely WONDERFUL’.
Caroline decided that smoking a nargile looked to be of immense fun and that she would have a go as soon as she got home.

The man wiped away something strange (and a little bit slimy) from the end of his nose and tried to recollect his impressive and distinguished demeanour. He looked at the little black silk parasol that was neatly furled on a very long, cane handle.

“Yes, it is,” he said, rather coldly and looking at the girl standing in front of him even more coldly.

“It looks a bit odd,” Caroline remarked, studying with a critical eye. Fully unfurled, it wouldn’t cover an area larger than a biggish dinner plate ('unfurled' is what we umbrella-ists call 'open').

“It is my Dream-Parasol,” the gentleman replied haughtily. He checked his thin black moustache to make sure that nothing untoward had lodged in it following the unpleasantness with the coughing fit. In some way, he found this young girl with sphinx-like eyes and yellow dress and gumboots faintly unnerving. It was a new sensation for him. And it was distinctly odd and distinctly NOT wonderful.

“Oh,” said Caroline cheerfully, “that sound marvellous. I think I would like a Dream-Parasol. What do they do?”

“Well this one is mine,” snapped its owner, “and it catches dreams of course. And then sets them loose again.”

“How?” asked Caroline.

“Don’t you do anything, but ask questions?” the man irritably retorted.

“Why?” asked Caroline.

“Oh never mind,” he sighed. He felt his strength sapping and his will to live curl up beside his resolve in the wicker dog basket of his soul. “Where is that damned waiter? I need a spot of tea to restore my equilibrium.”

“He went outside to get a cab for the two old ladies,” replied Caroline in her most grown-up and helpfullest of voices, “but I don’t think he would be of much use to you - he is a bloody philistine, you see?”

The man gulped and made strange jerking movements into his hankie.

‘That tobacco,’ thought Caroline, ‘must be incredibly strong.’ She looked at the glass bowl, that bubbled so gloriously, and blinked twice. She couldn’t quite believe what she saw...

Folio 5 ~ Tea and the Vicar of Bray

As silent and as sudden as a ghost, the waiter appeared at the table and poured into 3 little glasses a syrupy rich ruby-dark liquid. Its steam carried the scent of spices and honey and exotic far-off lands and a teensy bit of the taste you once tasted in a dream, but have never been able to remember properly ever since.

“Wonderful!” beamed Clarice clasping her hands together, “There is nothing quite like Turkish tea.”

Caroline had never had Turkish tea before, but it smelt half of adventure and the other half butterflies. And the greenish light that shone down through the skylight sparkled so gloriously through the liquid and made such beautiful swirling patterns of ruby and gold on the tablecloths that she thought it must taste like fairy music. She took a little sip and then turned her full attention back to the Battenberg.

“The answer, you know, is ‘three-score and ten’.” Gertrude said suddenly (and with an air which suggested a certain amount of disapproval).

“What is?” inquired Caroline happily munching the thick rind of marzipan.

“The answer to the question, of course!”

“But what question?” persisted Caroline, now beginning to chomp through one of the squares of pink sponge.

“To the question of, how many miles there are to Babylon!” replied Gertrude irritably, “How many miles to Babylon? Three-score and ten...”

“... can I get their by candlelight? Yes, there and back again,” interrupted Clarice.

“Grammatical error!” yelled Gertrude, banging her spoon against the silver sugar bowl and making it ring.

“You said, ‘can I get their by candlelight’ and you should have said, ‘can I get there by candlelight’. You must write out ‘their is not there’ fifty times before lunchtime.”
Clarice crumpled in a heap.

“How can you tell?” Caroline asked, “They both sound exactly alike to me.”

“I can smell them. Words have scents and grammatical errors are like smells in the wrong place. ‘Their’ smells like cherry blossom in the rain. Not unpleasant, but cherry blossom on Christmas Eve? No, no! It just won’t do. All wrong, all totally wrong. Clashes with the cinnamon and nutmeg of ‘candlelight’. A scent in the wrong place is nothing more than a smell - Scents in the wrong place must be dealt with at once or they will get out of hand. Grammatical errors are the bramble bushes of words. They creep, you know. I used to be a school teacher.”

‘Well I am rather glad that you are not one of my school teachers’ thought Caroline to herself.

“And I am rather glad that you were not one of my pupils,” retorted Gertrude severely.

“Tea! Another cup of tea!” shrilled Clarice, quite recovered from her rebuttal and rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

Caroline, who had not quite finished her first glass (even though it did shine a wonderfully rich deep red), swiffled a finger around her tea plate to mop up the last of the crumbs of her Battenberg. Clarice waved to the waiter who scurried over with a glittering pot.

Meanwhile, the grand lady who had been singing was now talking in earnest tones to her ethereal accompanist. The accompanist was raking his long bendy fingers through his towering piles of hair. The lady then turned to her audience and announced,
“I would now like to sing Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle. Would you please try to refrain from over-much coughing in the quiet bits – it ruins the ambience.”

“What a pity,” sighed Gertrude, “I do like a good cough.”

“And now my dear,” bellowed Clarice, once more poking her ear trumpet down Caroline’s ear, “you must tell us all about yourself. First of all, how many marshmallows can you get in your mouth?”

“Oh, and how may seconds does it take for you to do a really good yawn?... A good one mind you, not one of those snivelling little apologies that go for yawns these days,” interjected Gertrude excitedly.

“And does your blood flow through your right knee or your left knee first?” rejoined Clarice.

“And what is the brightest colour that you can imagine?”

“Or what is the sweetest song you have ever sung?”

“Or what was the second thought that came into your mind when you awoke on May 7th, two years ago?”

“And when was the last time that you listned to see if the clouds were talking to you?”

“And what was the worst maths sum that you have EVER done?”

“But before all that,” Gertrude insisted firmly, in a slightly raised voice and placing her hands flat on the table, “you must first climb up on the table and give us your rendition of The Vicar of Bray.

“Oooh yes you must, you must,” Clarice cried, clapping her hands which made her beads rattle and her chins jabber up and down in sheer delight and excitement.

“Ahem,” ahemed the waiter, who was still standing over the table, “I would caution the young madam against collambering in her gollapsing boots upon the tables, the proprietor tends to take a dim view of gumboot marks upon the fine linen.”

The table fell silent and those sitting around it fell even more silent.

However, Caroline was rather relieved as she wasn’t too sure whether ‘Royal Ann’ came before or after ‘William’ when ‘I turned cat in pan’. Or, for that matter, where ‘George in pudding time’ came into it all. History can be such a confusing thing if you have to keep joining it up.

“And one other thing, whilst we is still on the topic of merriment and mirth,” intoned the waiter, mirthlessly, “the management of this here establishment...” he was beginning to get into his stride now and was rather enjoying a sense of authority that he thought he had lost forever, “... looks rather blackly, if you take me drift, upon young ladeez standing up and a-hollering and a-caterwauling and otherwise upsetting the other patrons (he rather appeared to like that word, so said it again), ... PATRONS on these premiseses (now the last ‘es’ undermined the whole affect, but we will have to be gracious and accept the spirit in which it was made).”

The waiter took a quick look at Caroline who was staring cat-like at the cake. He wasn’t too sure if she had been upset by his little monologue and so he turned to her and added, “No offence missie, but rules is rules and I cannot allow the screeching and howling, no matter how pretty your spotted yellow dress is. I have to think of me regulars, you see?”

“Bloody Philistine!” bellowed Clarice, delivering a hefty blow to the waiter’s head with her ear trumpet.

“Tsk tsk,” tutted her companion, “PLEASE Clarice, not in front of such young ears.”

“Oh, don’t worry about the gel,” replied Clarice dismissively, “I told you she’s as deaf as a... as a...” her words tailed off into the sweet steamy air.

They looked across the table at Caroline who, apparently oblivious to the world around her, was concentrating intently upon writing in a little notebook that she had taken from her pocket.

“There,” said Clarice, triumphantly, “what did I say? The poor wee scrap hasn’t heard a word we’ve been saying. What a tragic little thing she is.”

Caroline’s notebook was full of all sorts of treasures that she had picked up. There were pressed daisies from the summer parks of last year and an autumn leaf that was as red as wine, and an old bus ticket, a feather (probably belonging to a phoenix), some crumbs of Jaffa cakes (which weren’t really meant to be there), some things she copied from a book of poetry that made her eyes widen and the world become full of enchantment and adventure, and, at the back, there was list taken from a geography book which named all the places with the most magical names and to which, one day, she planned to visit.

And now, under the word ‘palimpsest’ (which she had written earlier), with a blue ballpoint pen, she carefully wrote down Clarice’s rather wonderful description of the waiter. She was not too sure how to write it, so she wrote, ‘b..l..u..d..e..e..y..f..i..l..a..s..t..y..n..’ It certainly sounded a useful word. It was rather like palimpsest, it played nicely around the mouth and felt good on the tongue.

In fact, it sounded just the right sort of word to call the rather annoying curate with funny eyes who kept knocking on the door and asking her Mother for, “a few alms, dear lady, in the name of our sweet, dear, gentle, Lord Jesus, to aid my adventures [hahaha, snort] among those tragic young ladies of easy virtue.”

* Important Legal Note to Readers *

In view of the laws of libel, I [the author] would like to stress that the curate mentioned above is, of course, purely, totally and completely a figment of my [the author's] imagination. I [the author] would never even breathe the suggestion that a real life curate would exhibit even the minorest hint of these traits.

I thought I had better make that clear ~ knowing what a scaberous, litigious bunch of bastards all curates are.

Thank you.

The waiter, satisfied that there was no danger of his ‘regulars’ being subjected to the caterwauling of a young girl in a spotted yellow dress and gumboots, moved off, leaving an air of hurt disdain in his place.

Folio 4 ~ The Turkish Tearooms

Caroline alighted in a part of the city that she did not often visit. An imposing archway led onto a colonnaded arcade with dark varnished wood and ironwork so creamy-white that it made you want to lick them. The city’s pigeons scrabbled with scratchy claws on the glass ceiling.

There was nothing exactly wrong with this part of the city, but it was full of shops with tastefully arranged (in a minimalist sense) handbags and shoes in the windows and Caroline had never seen the need of such things. Once, she did actually own a shoe, but it was not as comfortable or as useful as a pair of red, rubber gumboots and the tadpoles escaped through one of the lace eyelets (something which would never occur with a good – or come to that even a fairly poor – pair of gumboots). And what was the point of a handbag when you had two perfectly good pockets in the front of your dress? Anyway, handbags would get caught up when you squidgeedled through gaps in fences and holes in hedges.

Nevertheless, windows are created for the sole purpose of looking through and so Caroline, with impressive thoroughness, set about scrutinising each shop window with an apparent disregard to the shopkeepers, who seemed to take exception to their windows being huffed upon. Her gumboots, on the arcade’s polished marble floor, made a satisfying squeechy noise; almost as satisfying as the sqwurlch of a particularly boggy bit of mud. In fact, so taken up was she by the squeech, squeech, squeech she was making, Caroline hadn’t noticed that, by now, the number of shoppers that filled the arcade were thinning and that the shop windows were no longer filled with shoes and handbags, but begun to display rather wonderful and colourful arrays of coloured glass bottles, others shelves of leather-bound books and, yet others, strange instruments made out of polished wood and brass.

Rather unexpectedly, the shopping-alley curved suddenly to the right and tucked into the corner was a little window; the lower half was screened by a net curtain, in which a huge and splendid aspidistra was displayed. Beside the window was a door and on the door was a big brass twistable doorknob that, in the dim light, shone like a candle flame. Such brass knobs are made to be twisted and so Caroline squeeched up to it and giving it a firm twist and with one boot braced against the lintel she tugged at the door. After a few tugs, the door swung open with the ring-a-ting of a brass bell (which also shone like a flame). Caroline peered into a room that was filled with clouds of steam and bees-wax polished wood and the most delicious sweet smells she had ever smelled. Ornate dainty tables were scattered around, all draped in crisp, white, starched-linen tablecloths. And upon each table, large ornate silver ware was set. Along one side of the room ran a dark oak counter upon which a huge samovar hissed and boiled and from which great clouds of steam kept erupting into the air. The entire ceiling comprised an elegant arch of glass – rather like the glasshouses that stood unloved in the gardens of old houses. The glass was old and greened with age and the light that shone through it was watery; mottled and greenish. It gave the feeling of standing underneath a wave that, just as it was about to break over the top of you, had been frozen into a solid block of ice. Condensation dripped from the glossy leaves of the potted ferns and the aspidistra.

To one side of the room stood a highly polished black grand piano at which an aesthetic, wan gentleman, whose hair was a huge toppling pile, like the towering waves of regency wigs, played with fingers that seemed to merely brush the keys. A smaller aspidistra, in a blue and white porcelain pot, was perched on the floor beside him. Beside them both stood – or rather teetered – an enormous woman, as if rising from the floor like a tumbling, top-heavy and velveteened, thunder cloud. Her operatic alto voice boomed around the walls. Hands clasped in front of her, she sang in rattling vibrato:
“My body lies over the ocean,
My body lies over the sea,
My kidneys lie under the curtains
Oh bring back my splee-heen to me...”

No one appeared to be taking any notice.

At one of the tables two, rather severe looking, old ladies sat. They both wore voluminous black dresses of bombazine and paramatta silk that smelled of camphor and mild disapproval. One had on her head a black crepe bonnet and, perched on the end of a hook-like nose, wore a pair of round spectacles whose lenses had fogged over with condensation making her look blind. The other matriarch, who was rather rotund and clunked with beads, looked up as Caroline entered and took out a pair of pince-nez from a crocheted pouchette.
“Hmmm,” she said, looking rather critically at her red gumboots, “ You, gel. Come over here and have a cup of tea and a slice of cake.”
The ladies looked rather ferocious, but the cake, which was a particularly colourful Battenberg, looked rather delicious and so Caroline walked over to the little table and sat down.
The lady with the pince-nez scrabbled under the table and drew out a large ear trumpet which she held up to Caroline’s right ear and bellowed into it, “How many miles to Babylon?”
“I beg your pardon?” replied Caroline swiftly judging which slice of the Battenberg contained the thickest amount of marzipan.
“You see Gertrude? Deaf as a dodo,” cried out the woman, smacking the ear trumpet in triumph against the table, “I knew as soon as I saw her, that this poor wee scrap of a mite is as deaf as a dodo.”
She then proceeded to pat Caroline on the head and to coo in sad voice, “Poor, poor thing. T’is such a shame poor wee hen, and such a brave, BRAVE little gel.”
“The expression, Clarice,” interjected Gertrude, “is not deaf as a dodo. It is deaf as a bat.”
“Bat’s aren’t deaf,” retorted Caroline who was wanting the pleasantries to quickly end and the apportioning of the Battenberg to begin.
“Nonsense!” the thin matriarch creaked back on her chair in shock, “Everyone knows that bats are as deaf as... as... deaf as dodos.”
“Ahaha! See? I told you so!” cackled Clarice in triumph and giving the waiter, who was passing by the table, a hefty whack round the back of the legs with the ear trumpet.

“Well they’re not,” Caroline was sure the slice to the left under the thin end piece was definitely the most marzipanyist and she was just about to hoik it out with her finger.
“Oh so we have a chiropterologist in our midst do we?” sneered the bespectacled widow with a nasty sneer, “And, tell me young lady if you are so wise, Goosey, Goosey Gander whither does thou wander?”
“Upstairs and downstairs” Caroline replied feeling a little miffed that there was still no offer of cake.
“OOOHH! Good, Good,” clapped Clarice with delight, “She knows her Milton doesn’t she?”
“Well be that as it may, but she shouldn’t speak with her mouth full. And let that be the end of the matter.” And with that Gertrude took a sniff of a little pot of smelling salts that was at her elbow.
Caroline was just about to say that her mouth was far from full when the first widow suddenly announced in a loud voice.
“Tea!”
She then replaced the ear trumpet in Caroline’s ear and bellowed into it, “Lady Grey or Orange Pekoe?”
“Um,” thought Caroline (on the very edge of a huge and shuddering nose-snuffle, which she only just managed to contain, as she had found that elderly ladies tend to take a dim view of snuffled noses).
“No matter,” cried Clarice happily and handing the plate of cakes over to Caroline, “It’s all the same here; Lady Grey, Black Dragon, Orange Pekoe, Formosa Oolong, Lotus Flower, Gunpowder, Blue Sky, Russian Caravan, Lapsang Souchong.”
“Why?” asked Caroline, digging down into the pile and extricating, with practice long born out from playing Pick-Up Monkeys, the marzipany slice that she had been earlier eyeing.
“Why! Because here, it all comes out as thick Turkish tea, of course.”