Free Dolly's Mixture by Dorothy Scannell Page A

Benny smiled. ‘I know all about my lovely Adeline.’ I wanted to ask so many questions. Why was Ade leading such an ordinary life, why was she bent daily over a machine when she had possessed this miraculous gift? But somehow I couldn’t. ‘All right, Dolly?’ said Ade, as we came home to ordinariness again. I supposed everything was all right; all I could think of was some Bible saying or other about hiding one’s light under a bushel.
    â€˜Oh, I didn’t ask for my request for Dolly,’ remarked Chas sadly on the way home. ‘What a pity,’ said Ade. ‘Never mind, Dolly, the thought was there.’ ‘Was it a tune you have for each other, like our “Blue Heaven”?’ asked Edie. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘it’s the only tune he knows by title, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I’ve Found You”.’ ‘It’s “Love”, not “Life”,’ shouted Chas, suddenly bereft of the lovely sentimental feeling Ade’s singing had induced.
    In Chas’s days as a waiter, his restaurant was serviced by a Palm Court Orchestra, which possessed a repertoire of about ten tunes. The restaurant comprised three balconied floors, with a deep well for the ground floor and the second floor representing another well in reverse. The orchestra played on the balcony of the first floor. ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ was the sung solo. At the piano was a grandfatherly type of gentleman in evening tails; the soloist (who normally played the cello) was an elderly lady in long, black, satin gown with lace handkerchief at her wrist. For this solo the two figures from the past were accompanied by a ‘gipsy’ on a musical saw. Chas said proudly to Ade, ‘This solo brought the house down, the customers went mad for it.’ Since ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery’ came round about every hour all the years Chas waitered there, it was hardly surprising this ballad stayed with him eternally, even though I insisted it was ‘Life’ and not ‘Love’. ‘Of course, you would be different,’ he said indignantly when I was amused by the incident and remarked that I had always hoped Chas would one day be a finalist in an important quiz, when ‘his’ tune was played, and he would be the only entrant to know the title.
    I thought it a pity Ade had not made a record of her voice. It would be something marvellous to leave for her boys and their children. ‘When I’m gone, Dolly, I want to be gone, I want my boys to get on with their own lives and not hark back to the past.’ She was the least possessive of mothers.

Chapter 7
Shop Talk
    The next year simply flashed past and our shop was looking very different from the Steptoe’s yard we had inherited, cream paint everywhere and, running the whole length of the shop, a refrigerated counter. Chas, much to my annoyance, had ordered this to be specially made. I felt we were doing very nicely and needed less improvements, not more. I had no desire to be a Mrs Sainsbury (in reality we were Mrs Marks and Mr Sparks), for I would rather have spent the money on home improvements, but the shop was Chas’s baby. He insisted, ‘We cannot stand still,’ and I worried incessantly that he worked so long and so hard.
    I had to admit, though, that it was a happy shop – indeed, I can only remember one difficult customer among all the many we served and she wasn’t a customer in the accepted sense in our shop. A foreign lady of Jewish extraction, she was well-dressed, capable and organised. She came to us only for bacon and cheese, and she didn’t come into the shop as a normal person would but hovered about outside, looking up and down the road as though expecting a friend to appear. It only later occurred to me she may have been watching for the rabbi. She insisted the bacon and cheese she purchased should be to the exact weight she