Dearest S~S so far away. Is it raining? Are the elephants beautifully painted & stepping with barely a whisper despite their size? Thank you for the top tip re: sugar soaping the candle smoke from the wall above the fireplace. Yes, midnight last night found me up a stepladder, cleaning. Well, why not. It really does look a lot better today. That's put off decorating for another year.
But why you may well ask (aside from displacement activity). I couldn't help myself. It's my mother coming out in me. It's the prospect of cousin A collecting me on Saturday & knowing he's never seen this place & wanting his first impression not to be of grubbiness. A long, long time ago, my mum must have been so worried: single woman with two daughters, what to do if she ceased to be. She re-wrote her will a good few times, each time naming a different set of relatives to look after us. And in one, she chose cousin A. They'd have been a beautiful family to join. Mum always looked up to them, such academic prowess, such cultivated Hampstead folk.
And where did the years go? Somehow, after she died, that concept of a huge, extended network of family died with her. We had always seemed to spend at least one day each weekend seeing yet another branch, or inviting yet another set to yet another fine lunch, in the dining room, with those french windows open onto 100 feet of glorious garden, just reach out and grab some mint for the lamb, "Oh, go on, R! Won't you give me a hand? What did your last slave die of?", but I was forever lost in a book, and no help at all, and would just turn up when it was time to eat another magical meal. Such is the luxury of childhood and indulgent parenting.
Back then, everyone was a 'cousin' , no matter how distant. It turns out mum (don't think I ever called her that, 'mother', or 'mater [with ironic tone]'; I even tried calling her by her first name just the once, "Don't you ever do that again, I'm your mother, and never forget it". She must have been the one doing some very one-way networking. Because it all seemed to melt away, or most of it, after she died. I remember, years later, bumping into one of the American emigre cousins at the theatre, and being so shocked: why, here he was in London, and yet I might never have known he'd visited. And then realising he probably visited his siblings often, could easily afford to, and that MP & I were no longer part of that loop. Though I suspect his gang always assumed MP & I were being somehow looked after by my father's deranged leftovers - well, time was spent with them, too much of it, that's for sure, but quite how useful it ever was, was highly questionable.
Admittedly, I think we confused whatever vestiges of determined distant family we had left by our choice of answerphone message. Just around that time, KW came to live with us, and it seemed so cute at the time to let her 3 year old neice record our outgoing message "We're all not here, but we'll come back if you leave a message". Well, it seemed like a good idea. But for years I worried that people would think MP and I had sold up to a family with young kids, gone away without a forwarding address, and that they'd given up on finding us, but we were still there, for years and years, trying to pay the bloody Inland Revenue off, until the time was finally right to go. And so I ended up here, with my mum's dusty, cracking contact books of journalistic leads and relatives long since dead, Yorkshire addresses long since subsumed into the hated Humberside. And so a new definition of family came into being, the bloody determined ones who kept on keeping in touch, irrespective of closeness on the family tree. And indeed, there are closer ties I'd sooner keep a healthy distance from, but we won't go there today. Now wasn't I supposed to be heading for my yoga mat?
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