The Forget-Me-Not Sonata(118)

‘I am looking forward to your sister’s Christmas pudding,’ said Aunt Edna to Cecil, passing a greedy tongue over thick lips.

‘So am I,’ he replied. ‘It’ll make me feel very nostalgic for home.’

‘You should have seen Mercedes’ face when I showed her how to cook it,’ said Audrey, laughing. ‘I don’t think she’d ever seen anything like it in all her life.’

‘At least she didn’t have to cook it from scratch,’ Aunt Edna continued, her mouth watering at the thought of lunch.

‘She’d have made a total mess of it, I’m sure,’ Aunt Hilda interjected sourly.

‘It’ll be delicious,’ Audrey reassured them. ‘Leonora brought it all the way over from England in her luggage. It’s the heaviest pudding you’ve ever seen. Poor girl.’

‘Well, on that note, shall we eat?’ Cecil suggested and Audrey nodded.

‘Come on, boys, time to eat,’ she shouted to her brothers, then poked her head around the door to tell the pianists. Louis looked up and smiled at her affectionately. His eyes seemed to be saying, ‘I wish we were alone out there on the pampa,’ and she put her head on one side and smiled back. But her heart was already being pulled in two directions.

They all sat around the long table that Mercedes had prepared beneath the trees in the far corner of the garden. The heat was as oppressive as Hilda’s ill humour and Nelly’s unrequited love, but if anyone noticed they didn’t show it, but dug into the Christmas turkey with enthusiasm. Audrey rested her eyes on her daughters. Leonora sat next to Aunt Edna and her grandfather, watched closely by Saggy Rabbit who peeped out from behind the water jug. Alicia was holding forth about herself, entertaining Albert with her stories that got more and more outrageous as he encouraged her with his hearty belly laughs. Audrey felt her heart inflate with love as she watched them, and then Leonora glanced at her and her little face flowered into a wide smile, the smile of a child who knows beyond any shadow of doubt that she has her mother’s unconditional love.

Cecil watched his wife. He always watched her for she was the sole focus of his existence. Like a perfect apple at the very top of the tree, Audrey remained out of reach and unattainable. She belonged to him in name only. He remembered that evening on the beach in Uruguay when she had agreed to be his wife, tainted now with hindsight, for he asked himself over and over again, had she ever loved him? He drained his glass and reached for the wine bottle.

Then Mercedes walked up the lawn with a large silver dish. ‘Ah, the Christmas pudding!’ Aunt Edna exclaimed, rubbing her soft hands together in anticipation of Cicely’s famous dessert, brandy butter and cream.

‘Indeed, what a treat,’ Henry agreed. ‘And you brought it all the way over from England, you clever girl,’ he said to Leonora.

‘I helped her carry it,’ Alicia interjected, keen to share the praise.

‘And you’re clever too,’ said Rose, turning to watch the maid shuffle across the grass. When she reached them they all stared at the tray in horror. There lay the Christmas pudding, not in the tidy round ball they had all expected, but in crumbs.

‘Good God, what have you done with it?’ Aunt Hilda gasped for Audrey was too surprised to speak. Mercedes, who rarely blushed, turned the colour of the cherry that lay among the rubble. She frowned and shook her head.

‘Señora,’ she said, turning to Audrey. ‘I did everything you told me to. Then as I was putting it on the tray I noticed a glint of metal. Well, I can’t have one of the children choking on a piece of metal so I carefully dug it out with a knife. It was a coin. A coin of all things! In a pudding! Then I saw another, then another. In the end I had to pull the whole pudding apart, there were twenty coins. Twenty coins, imagináte! How they got in there is nobody’s business.’

At that explanation Louis exploded into laughter. He laughed so much that he had to hold his stomach and bend over. Alicia and Leonora laughed too until everyone except Aunt Hilda and Nelly joined in the merriment. Mercedes watched them all as if they were creatures from a different planet.

‘It doesn’t matter, Mercedes,’ Audrey reassured her, biting her lip in an effort to control herself. When Mercedes sulked she could sulk for days. ‘It’ll taste the same. Aunt Edna, why don’t you help yourself?’





Chapter 25



The Christmas holidays dwindled from weeks into days until the twins’ return to England was no longer a vague date on the horizon but a fixed day branded on their minds. They enjoyed long rides in the early morning, before the midday heat compelled them to seek comfort in the cool blue water of the swimming pool and played tennis in the evenings with the other children who moved around the Club in a pack. Leonora looked on them enviously, knowing that she and her sister were going to spend the Easter holiday and the English summer holiday with Aunt Cicely in England. She couldn’t talk to Alicia about her fears because her sister longed to return to school and didn’t seem to miss their parents at all. Her heart was surely made of stone.