Chapter Nineteen
RIVER
There had been nothing else for it but to try his luck with Aunt Sheba. His mother and her sister may not have exchanged a word since the evening Sting had wrapped up his music video filming on the Tor all those years back, Sheba being completely miffed that Heather had ‘cashed in’ on her wisdom without bothering to invite her along to be a groupie too. But River was her nephew, and with no children of her own, he knew he’d soon melt her heart and be granted a free caravan in such a dire situation – even in the height of peak season.
“You couldn’t make it up,” said Alice, as River recounted the tale of her resentment towards Heather, and pulled the car into the driveway which would take them to the sales office of the ‘Baa Caravan Park’ on the outskirts of town – so named because it was housed on the land of a former sheepskin factory.
“You’re not kidding me.” River cringed, as he drove them slowly past the sign – complete with its token sheep jumping over a rainbow, hurdled the speed bump and looked for a parking space. If this were a romantic trip away, he’d have failed miserably. Despite both of their lack of morals that early spring morning, he couldn’t see Georgina standing for the idea of intimacy here, not when she’d got a little too used to The Guinevere’s comparatively luxurious surroundings.
“I can’t believe you’ve put her first, sacrificing our special place, what a cop-out, do I mean nothing to you?” Georgina had screamed when the realisation had finally tumbled down upon her a few days ago in the bar’s backyard, that actually, “we’ve had to move out”, did not mean he’d found the house of his dreams where they could shack up together. And the royal ‘we’ referred to himself and Alice, Georgina not as much as figuring in the equation.
It was becoming more and more of a question to ponder: did she mean anything to him, after all? He opened another filing cabinet in his head and stored away another conundrum. Puzzles: instead of solving them, all he seemed to be doing was creating new ones lately, piling them up in an overflowing in-tray inside a head that felt it might spontaneously combust. If it wasn’t Blake and his reticence then it was Georgina and her jet stream versus cold front forecasts, and if not brother and sister, then it was his mother and her censorship as to the episode at the windowsill with Lennie. Never mind Heather fleeing to the Goddess convention for a little mindfulness, River was beginning to feel that he should have traded places and gone there himself.
Aunt Sheba, sitting at her desk by the window, leafing through paperwork and donning her half-moon glasses, raised her hand to indicate she’d be with them shortly. River parked the car, stretched his arms as if he’d been five hours on the motorway and finally reached the service station for a cuppa, stepped out of his mustard tin on wheels, and ran to the passenger door to play chauffeur.
“Honestly, Riv, there’s no need, I’m not Geor—”Alice stopped herself and pressed her lips together so they were almost invisible, like an old lady before she’d lodged in her false teeth, a little too late to take back her blunder. “What I meant to say was I’m not posh… anymore.”
That was a kick and a half. But then he remembered the thriftiness was his choice; little did Alice know his grander plans, well, not quite yet.
“We’ve met each other in the middle.” He found himself responding in the kind of deep and meaningful dialogue that usually comes from sitting around a drunken campfire, guitar strumming a rendition of Hotel California, goose bumps on T-shirted arms on some Cornish beach where woes are a million miles away.
“You’re right. I think we have. Wanna know something hilarious?”
“I’m listening.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“This is the first time I’ve ever… like ever set foot on a caravan park. Lennie’s RV hardly counts,” she giggled. “I’m actually really looking forward to it. How cosy it’s going to be!”
The difference between the two women in his life, in this bizarre circle which seemed to be running rings around him of its own accord, a circle in danger of turning into a triangle like some tragic ménage a trois, could not have been clearer right then.
Sheba practically flew out to greet them, her approval of Alice only backing up River’s growing realisation.
“Oh my darlings.” She threw herself at them both in a warming group hug, as if she’d known Alice her entire life. “You cannot imagine how long I have waited for this day… Heather to one side, of course.” She suddenly released them, as if the uncalled for mention of her sister couldn’t possibly collude with an embrace.
“Now, now, Auntie,” said River. “We did say Mum was a word to be strictly prohibited.”
“Yes, yes, slap me on the wrist several hundred times now, I’ll try to refrain from another slip up, but you know how easy these things are.” She sighed. “Losing that once in a lifetime opportunity to see Sting, not so much on tour but on the Tor.” She shook her hands and screwed her eyes tightly shut in this spiel that was clearly oh-so-over-rehearsed, “well, that was a hard cross to bear for me, I’m afraid. You’ll never meet a bigger fan of his.”
“I know what you mean,” said Alice. “I’ve long been enamoured by his music: The Police, right through to the modern day, such a skilled artist, he’s really stood the test of time.”
“Never ever,” Sheba added, still in a trance hanging on her very own words.
“Anyways,” said River, poking Alice gently in the ribs to indicate his preferred direction of future dialogue. “Would it be okay for us to take our things to the caravan now, get settled in and unpacked?”
“Why yes, of course.” Sheba mutated to business-woman all over again, half-moons now folding back random parts of her fringe atop her crown, so her forehead resembled the keys on a piano. “Walk this way.”
They followed her along the winding path which opened out onto a play area and sandpit complete with squealing toddlers and watchful parents, and then became more neat and orderly; static homes and caravans facing one another off as if in hierarchical battle, a stony path slicing between them dotted with children on bikes, and walkers pretending to be mountaineering with their Nordic poles. People sat outside reading, eating on their wooden chalet style balconies, enjoying the great outdoors, raising their heads a fraction to give Sheba an acknowledgement style nod, good-afternoon-ing the three of them as they carried their worldly possessions to their latest abode.
“So here we are then,” Sheba announced. “I’ve saved the best for last, literally. I’m not going to make your eyes water by telling you the price this one should be rented out for per week at this time of year.”
Which was so clearly an invite to enquire, leading River to remind his Aunt that:
“I am prepared to foot the bill for this, you know.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t.” Sheba pursed her lips together as if about to wolf whistle. “Family is family.”
“In that case, maybe one evening, we could invite Mum round for supper… and you could come down to join us?”
“Righty-ho.” Sheba tapped her finger on the laminated instructions and welcome pack lying on the draining board. “If there’s anything else you need, you know where I am.”
“Thank you so much, for everything,” Alice shouted to her as she dramatically scooted out of the caravan and closed the door on the two of them, as well as River’s proposition.
“I had to try.” He shrugged.
“This is just incredible. I don’t know how to repay you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I owe you so much. You haven’t let me open my purse since I’ve been back.”
“Do you, really? I tempted you… away to a land that was meaningless, at a time in your life when you had the world at your feet, the love of two parents – that’s something I’ll never know, not to mention a place in the Olympics. And now look at you… holed up in a peasant’s holiday camp.”
“River, no.” She put her arms around him, giving his back a long languorous rub; which he sensed that she sensed was all of a sudden the height of inappropriate, and so began the descent to a pat on the back. “This is hardly Butlins… which I hear is actually very upmarket these days… I made my choice back then, and I made it by myself. I had a tongue and a voice besides, and you know what? I will never regret Avalonia, the places it took me, the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Don’t you ever let me hear you say that again, okay?”
He didn’t answer and so she withdrew from her embrace, looked him in the eye. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said the word.
But it wasn’t okay. Not until he’d made it up to her. Set her back on her path. All he could do right now was trust that Mercedes actually did somehow know more about his life. The idea that anybody else could have better tabs on his destiny than him; that was something that used to frighten him, the reason he had never been into the notion of a ‘God’. And yet, perhaps this very hut without wheels – albeit a brand spanking new one with every home comfort required – was another small puzzle piece slotting into a bigger picture, the one that wise old Mexican woman had hinted at?
Much later at supper, as Alice insisted on trying for the second time to cook them scrambled egg and beans on toast without burning anything, a skill she’d clearly never had thrust upon her as a basic mode of survival in her teens unlike the majority of those who grew up in the early 90s, he started to get a glimpse of what that completed puzzle might look like.