Cake Conjuring

CAKE CONJURING

I had been putting off clearing out my Pop’s house for weeks now. As the last of my family still living it seemed like such a final and incredibly sad thing to do. It felt like throwing the last sod on the grave. I knew that it would be a huge and painful job. Pop had been in the nursing home for eighteen months before he died and as far as I was aware no-one had cleaned or sorted out the house, so it was likely to be a horrible mess.

John said that he would come with me to help and so did my best friend Geraldine who knew Pop well from when we were kids, but I felt that I had to go on my own, at least for the first few days. It was daunting because it meant a 600 kilometre drive, staying in what was effectively an abandoned house. But it would be done.

I took the journey in two days, stopping over in a one-horse town in a typical example of a motel that seemed to have had no improvements for forty years. And there was a mouse in the room, running across the TV, which in the middle of a mouse plague I hardly felt able to complain about. It did make me worry more about I might find at Pop’s house though.

I arrived in Danville just as the sun was setting and decided immediately not to stay in the house, so checked into a caravan park. First light the next morning I went to IGA and bought buckets, mops, cleaning products, all the things I might, surely would, need. Then I gathered my wits and went to the house.

Surprisingly, from the outside, it looked perfectly normal. The garden was as neat as it ever was, lawn mowed, bushes cut back, paths swept. Not what I expected but a pleasant surprise. There must have been some ongoing arrangement with a gardener to keep things in order.

The verandah was another story but to be honest, it was like that when Pop lived there. Rotting and splintering floor boards and a mismatched collection of furniture, decaying cane chairs, tables with laminate separating, and in pride of place, a bulky old fifties lounge, its innards bursting out through a variety of holes, mould patterns decorating the remaining plush fabric.

For a moment I thought that I had the wrong key or that I would have to go back to the shops to get some WD-40 to spray in the keyhole, when all of a sudden it gave and the door croaked inward. Inside, I was startled to find the hallway completely empty, apart from a lacy decoration of cobwebs across the tongue and groove ceiling. The house was giving me some surprises.

Turning right into the large kitchen I saw that it too was in order, the floor swept, the benchtops empty of clutter. The fridge was turned off and the door wedged open, showing the clean, empty shelves inside. The only things out of place in this pristine room seemed shocking by comparison. Upside down on the draining board were two delicate cups and saucers and two little plates. I remembered the fine bone china set, painted with violets and bearing a gold rim, that Nanna used to bring out for visitors. I loved them but was never allowed to touch them as a child and could only look at such treasures through the glass doors of the china cabinet.

What the hell were they doing there? And more importantly, what the hell were two identical cups, saucers and plates doing set out on a lace cloth on the kitchen table? And between them, on a blue plate and under a glass dome, were two slices of iced chocolate cake. The cake had definitely not been sitting there for 18 months, it still looked moist and fresh. In fact, it looked delicious and I was tempted to have a bite. But it was too bizarre. Who had laid this elegant table and who was supposed to eat the cake? For a moment I thought that someone must have heard that I was coming and put it there for me, but no-one knew, and anyway they would have left a note. Surely.

I felt a chill. What if someone was living in the house and this was their morning tea. What if they were still there, in bed perhaps. I stood still and listened but there wasn’t a sound, other than a magpie trilling in the garden. I knew I would have to look, so going back into the hall, I opened the next door on the right into what I knew was Pop’s bedroom. Now it turned out to look exactly as I had anticipated. Full to overflowing with odd bits of furniture, clothes spilling out of the wardrobes and chests of drawers, books and newspapers stacked against the wall. The large mahogany bed had been stripped revealing a stained ticking-covered mattress, but everything else looked like Pop just got up and left. Which wasn’t quite how it happened.

As for the other rooms, they were mostly empty apart from the odd pile of detritus and an unusually large number of shoes, men’s, brown, not all in pairs. Curious. The living room was neat and tidy but extremely cobwebby and dusty. Nothing to see here.

I realised that the only room with a bed was Pop’s and that provided a good incentive for me to continue staying at the caravan park. I had been dreading sleeping in that house. Now my major objective was to go through the stuff in Pop’s room to find anything worth saving and then to get someone to come and take away the rubbish. It shouldn’t take too long.

I closed its door and switched on the fridge so that I could keep the milk, cheese and hummus that I brought with me in it. I was so happy that it and the rest of the kitchen was clean. Then I made myself a cup of tea with my own teabags and while drinking it I sat scrolling on my phone until I found a rubbish removal guy and a real estate agent, rang them and made arrangements for them to meet me at the house the next morning.

The rest of the day I spent trying to find something valuable, for financial or sentimental reasons, amongst Pop’s things. The personal belongings such as his wallet would be at the nursing home where he died so a visit there was another thing on my list of jobs. I wasn’t anticipating finding anything precious.

By four o’clock I’d had enough so I packed a box of assorted papers, four watches, one of them men’s, the rest women’s, a little velvet case with some jewellery, clearly my grandmother’s, Nanna and Pop’s wedding photo in an ornate frame, a small cobalt blue vase, and the violet tea set, in the back of my car. As I had only eaten crackers and hummus all day, I decided to find a cafe and have a coffee and something to eat but I hadn’t counted on it being a country town and everything was closed. So I went to the pub instead and had a beer and some salt-and-vinegar chips while going through the large envelope of papers I’d collected together at the house.

Much of it related to Pop’s old business, he was a used car dealer, and the rest were letters and bills and miscellaneous crap. Wrapped in a perished rubber band were some old blue airmail letters, gradually disintegrating into dust fragments. When I tried to open one it fell into three fragile sheets, but the writing, in a lovely copperplate, was still legible, even if the name of the sender wasn’t. They appeared to be love letters, written in the 1980s, and I assumed for a moment that they were from Nanna, although why she would be writing to Pop I had no idea. I didn’t think they were ever apart.

Once I had looked at three or four of the letters I realised that they were from another woman, with the signature B. Nanna’s name was Ailsa. The letters were very loving and more than a little steamy. Shocking stuff! B appeared to be in New York at the time but they had clearly met in person at some point. I didn’t know what to do with this information and then reckoned that I didn’t need to do anything. Everyone affected was dead, at least on my side of the story. Whether B was or not I hadn’t a clue and didn’t really care.

I had a pretty disturbed night, which was hardly surprising I suppose. Too much to take in as well as a growing sense of loneliness and loss. After a coffee made from a sachet of instant I went back to the house, determined to get everything sorted so that I could go home. My home.

The house looked the same when I arrived except when I entered the kitchen I was shocked to see that once again, the table was set for tea with two pieces of chocolate cake, even though I was sure that I had thrown the cake out. Then I noticed that the cups and saucers were old thick white ones, no doubt because I had removed the delicate violet ones the day before. What on earth?

I was standing in the kitchen feeling stunned when the real estate agent Bill and the rubbish removalist, whose name was Brody, turned up at the same time. I sent Bill off to have a look around by himself while I showed Brody what I wanted removed, all the time thinking that I was going mad. I told the removalist that I wanted everything gone and he seemed pleased that he might score some decent old furniture, not that there was that much.

Back in the kitchen, sitting opposite each other at the table, with cups of tea in front of them, was Bill and a sweet-faced old woman wearing a floral frock and a pretty clasp in her silver hair. The woman seemed very sad and on the brink of tears and when I came into the room she looked at me mournfully.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in quavery tone. ‘I didn’t realise....., I hoped that he would be back, that he wasn’t really gone.’

Bill stood up and introduced us. ‘This is Evelyn Turner, we all call her Bunny but I can’t remember why. She was a good friend of your grandfather’s.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you Evelyn. Bunny. Is it you who has been leaving the chocolate cake?’

‘Yes. I’m really sorry that I haven’t brought enough for all of us,’ she said, looking at Brody.

‘I’m sure we can share, Bunny,’ said Bill, as he fetched a knife from the drawer.

‘You must be wondering why,’ said Bunny. ‘Why the cake when George isn’t .... I used to come every day, and I would bring cake. I would make a big one at the beginning of the week and just bring two slices. It was his favourite. But diabetes and..... I thought if I kept bringing it, he would....but he didn’t.’ She looked down at her old papery hands clasped in her lap. ‘Now he never will.’

We all sat in silence for a moment, the only sound that of Brody trying to swallow his cake quietly, and failing. Then I remembered something and jumped up, going to my bag in the hallway to fetch the aerograms. I went back to the table and leant over Bunny, pressing the letters into her shaking hands and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

‘Pop needed to keep you close too Bunny. I found these in his bedside drawer.’