A Death at Lunch

I couldn't have an affair. Setting aside the matter that I would be best suited to one-night stands as I go off people very quickly – a split infinitive, the wrong school tie, straggly eyebrows or indeed hair anywhere it shouldn't be, and I'm out of here – and even then he would have to be a gentleman. By that I mean someone who always has about his person a freshly laundered handkerchief.

There has been a great demand on my part recently for the use of a gentleman's handkerchief. Picture it, if you will. I am sitting in a lovely patisserie in Beccles. We are holidaying in Suffolk for two weeks and I am beginning to see why my Mother never had a holiday, preferring her own home, though she vigorously encouraged others, relishing their absence. My father travelled extensively and, with my mother's full support, learnt Russian and other East European languages so that he could visit those countries at a time when no-one else did. And ballroom dancing. I am seated before an almond slice and a hot chocolate and the tears are spurting dramatically from my eyes and damp is flowing from my nostrils, unbecomingly I guess. I am furious that so many people, including those close to me, treat me like an idiot old person. If I truly were an old person wouldn't I have more time on my hands? Just now I have managed to mount the pavement in my car and run into a rude lamp-post therefore paying Them back by behaving just like The Idiot Old Person They say I am. I am torn between self-pity and rage. 'Who is going to look after me when I am eighty four?' I wail. Self-pity seems to be winning. 'Who is going to take me to the dentist, doctor, nurse and physio?' I open my diary and point to the pages full of appointments for Mr Brain. 'Nothing, nothing for me...I'm falling apart and No-one Cares...' (This isn't entirely true. There is quite a lot for me but I am well into the role and am not prepared to let the facts ruin what is proving to lighten the day of holiday-makers in Beccles. By the way, why is it that people on holiday love to shop? There is a fabulous deserted beach just down the road because everyone is looking for TKMax. Is it to torment those who are not on holiday?) As I dab at my eyes with Mr Brain's ready handkerchief and my sister says, firmly but ominously, that she would 'like to come back to this later', I look down at my rather sodden almond slice and think 'is this how you want to be remembered, Lesley?'

For remembrance seems to be the theme of the holiday. Half my mind is with my friend – and I don't use the word lightly – Leonie, who is dying in a hospice in London.. Leonie, fierce, independent, so full of integrity, one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, full of sentiment but never sentimental. I remember when we shopped together and I made her buy a red silk blouse that turned an attractive person into a beautiful woman...and how we laughed. Breast cancer. Diagnosed less than three years ago.

I think of how human nature seems anxious to leave its mark.

We are staying at Southwold. I have been there most years for forty years and while it is 'discovered' and 'undiscovered' by those seeking the newest trend, it never really changes. Holidays there are like Christmas Eve in an English family home in the 1950's hosted by a middle-class widow who brings us all together and provides every comfort with an understanding that the strictest code of good behaviour will be followed. And we do behave well. We stay in dear little houses, once belonging to fishermen, we shop in the varied and delicious independent shops in the high street, we eat fresh fish and chips at the harbour, and explore the newly renovated stylish pier and lose coins in the slot machines. (I nearly fell down on the last part as I needed change for the 2 penny shove machine and took my £2 coin to the Man in a Booth who, despite it being closed, opened it up for me and gave me two £1 coins, which were totally useless and I was left standing like a ninny but my Younger Sister was there and was able to save the day by tutting and taking my two pound coins back to the man and explaining that the Elderly Person required tuppenny pieces. So I was transported back to childhood when, despite my six year superiority, it was she who was told to see me across the road.)

And I walk...and walk...and walk. Miles and miles along the coast. Trudging on the beach, through the dunes, backwards and forwards to Walberswick, along to Snape, inland past farm and fields and two swans guarding their nest of six eggs, alone except for the man in the red jacket and his black and white dog, and an endlessly changing sky and sea. And thinking and thinking and thinking.

Back at the pier, bravely and privately owned now, its stylish shops and restaurant reflecting the slightly Stepford Wives quality of the town with its impeccable taste and faultless quality, I study the plaques which have been bought to help finance the Forth Bridge of painting and which adorn the handrails around the pier. Some 3000, I think. Some words self-explanatory. 'For Eileen Stevens. 'Nanny' who loved Southwold from her family with love 1925-2000'. Others with less obvious personal stories behind them. 'Willow Frost 31.07.01' I read later that Willow arrived 9 weeks early and there were fears for her survival. Later, happily, Willow came to Southwold for the first of what her parents trust will be many happy holidays. Births, holidays, marriages and deaths...all bound by a common love of Southwold. There, facing the town, is one celebrating another kind of love. 'Kate and Barry. To the moon and back.' Married lovers, I am told, who enjoyed a forbidden adulterous love affair, were found out, stayed with their partners and have only this plaque to remind them of their love....I think of Leonie. I don't think she would have had much time for this story, believing, as I do, that they should have been braver and got on with it. But perhaps they have more to show of their illicit relationship than most of us do.

Walking...walking...walking...I am now walking three hours a day which, I find, conveniently leaves 21 for eating. All those wooden benches along the esplanade...memories of more dead people but no mention of illicit affairs this time. I wonder how many assignations may have taken place in the colourful beach huts which are such a distinctive feature of Southwold. At in excess of £60,000 for each hut now it would make an expensive place and rather draughty for a fumbling, methinks. Perhaps the names so jauntily painted over the doors will give clues. What would you name a beach hut if you had a spare hundred thousand pounds to blow on its purchase and upkeep? Auntie Bong Bong, Stargazer, Goosebumps, Bambi, Gin.N.It? I am torn between jealousy, because I want one of the little huts, and literary contempt at the names, but then I also want to try being 8 again and see if I can make a better show of it the second time round. 'The Doll's House' was used in the filming of an episode of 'Nanny' with Wendy Craig, not herself a stranger to a bit of rascalling, back in 1980. With its red and white gingham curtains, and with talk of new kitchens in the family, I am drawn back in my beach-trudging to thoughts of being a child. It is one of the peculiarities of seaside and nowhere else that makes me look back. My childhood home had a obsessively co-ordinated red and white kitchen. I have a poor memory for events and people during my first 20 years or so but, as I am buffeted by the fierce wind coming straight into my face from Russia, I can recall that kitchen in detail. I can see the copper – a vat in which clothes were boiled, a pre-runner to a washing machine – and a thick stick worn to a point at one end, softened and splintered with use, that was used to stir the clothes. And to beat me. Later, when I think the copper was removed, the old stick was replaced by a cane, for that one beating purpose only, which rested on screws in the immaculate kitchen. It seems unthinkable now that a parent – I'm uncertain if it were my mother or father – should go to the trouble to gather tools and equipment and consider where best to hang a threatening cane with which to subdue an unruly child. But those were different times with different pressures and it would be wrong to judge from such a distance.

One evening my sister and I go to the Fisher Theatre at Bungay. In the preceding month this small but thriving venue has been host to an evening with John Sargeant, a play about Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, She Stoops to Conquer, and an audience with Arthur Smith, the comedian and ,in my opinion, the best of the grumpy old men. But the night we go is special. It isn't in the programme of impressive events and it is only because my sister was 32 years at The National Audit Office that she is able to ferret out the unexpected. So we are seated for an evening of entertainment by Ronnie Rinalde. The theatre management dare not risk advertising Ronnie because it transpires it cannot be predicted that he will be spared to perform. Indeed when he peeps round the curtain, rather timidly, I am still left wondering. Here is a man of very great age – I am surprised later to learn that he is 86, he appears older – who at first I guessed must be in Dickensian costume with carefully bouffanted hair a la Quentin Crisp who famously described himself as one of the stately homos of England. We have been told that Ronnie was so successful in America in the 1950's that he was seen as serious competition to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and on occasions he outsold them. Which, given that he is performing at Bungay, while they are dead, is still true. I am a stranger to the delights of music but even I am in awe of Ronnie who whistles and sings and yodels and imitates birdsong. His recording of 'If I were a Blackbird' was in the top 20 for six months in the 1950's and sold over 1 million copies. It is small wonder that parents resorted to beating their child.

Ronnie's tentative beginning does not auger well. My sister and I have already attracted significant attention from the audience. Incongruous is the word. My sister has dressed, according to Mr Brain, not a man given to incautious swearing and who has wisely elected to stay home, for 'the bloody opera'. In my opinion she has dressed not for the audience of La Scala but for the stage. While I am more subdued, confining my excess to purple tights and a gypsy frock, it is enough to arouse the man seated next to me who will keep rubbing his plastic pack-a-mac against me. It soon becomes clear that Ronnie is too old for singing and can only sustain yodelling and whistling for short periods. (My sister comments, rather loudly, eat your heart out Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.) But he is a consummate professional and so when tired, which he is frequently, he fills the gaps by making the audience perform rather than himself. I have never been entirely clear what actually constitutes yodelling and still am not, but we have a go...and the most remarkable thing happens. Where at the beginning I am so appalled and embarrassed by Ronnie that I am shrieking with hysteria and have to bung Mr Brain's invaluable handkerchief into my mouth and at one stage Ronnie looks down at me and gives a sort of sheep dog trial whistle to shut me up...I begin to fall under his spell. He is rubbish, absolute rubbish. Simon Cowell wouldn't give him a minute. But I'm falling for Ronnie. Bells Across the Meadow. In a Monastery Garden. Birdsong at Eventide...the hits are flowing from him now and where we wondered earlier if he would be able to stand for ten minutes we now speculate on whether he will ever end. We leave the theatre exhausted and my sister comments that our parents would have been pleased to think of us going out together like this, which is interesting given what I had been thinking earlier.

At the end of the holiday we dine at The Crown at Westleton near Aldeburgh which I can thoroughly recommend. I am, however, satiated by so much holidaying and a trifle overwrought. Mr Brain is not helping by flamboyant napkin work. At one stage it looks as though he will bang his head on the underside of the table as he tries to retrieve it. I call for the manager. He is a little piece of French deliciousness at a quiet moment in a meal. I say I have a question and he is keen. If a couple are dining with you and the gentleman, say a man in his eighties for example, dies in the middle of the meal, is his companion liable for the cost of the meal even though it isn't strictly speaking murder or if it is there is no court in the world that will find her guilty. The manager is familiar, it seems, with such an experience. It happened to a guest once – though in a bathroom which strikes me as rather vulgar but it was a Saga party in Jersey – and the police have to be called. The payment of the bill depends on how big it is. Pass me a bottle of your finest champagne and a freshly laundered handkerchief.

For Leonie.