tea with Anushka

I was summoned to tea with Anushka

 

she is a notorious

acquirer of culture,

haunting antique bookshops

‘abstracting’ volumes of  art,

music, poetry, philosophy,

to dust in her personal library

 

from time to time

anonymous vans arrive

her treasures are documented

carefully packaged, returned

to their rightful owners

 

she is threatened with arrest

and has shelves to fill... again.

 

so she heads off to a town

where she’s not known

browsing antiquarians for the curios,

Persian rugs, ottomans, and 'opulents'

in which she likes to sit surrounded

 

a weathered sign, ‘The Hermitage’

fixed to the railing of her dwelling

hints at Romanov ancestry

 

I play along and buy her vodka -

good stuff, Luksosowa

 

the flat was grubby,

no change there,

Anushka moaned,

‘I’ve sacked the cleaner’

before showing off a bust of Caesar

resplendent on a new vitrine

 

adding would I do her a favour  

and pop to Spar for milk, sugar,

bread, petit fours, and pâté,

(shrimp paste or crab would do)

and put it on her slate?

 

I cleared her tab... again.

 

we drank Darjeeling from bone-china

spread shrimp paste on Mother’s Pride

with sterling-silver butter knives,

 

nibbling Mr Kipling’s for dessert

off an Edwardian lazy Susan

 

‘une cigarette peut etre ?’

 

she used a flickering flame

from a gilt torchère

to light her next-to-last Sobranie  -

 

in the candle glow

she evoked, to me, Rublov’s 

Icon of the Trinity

 

peeping through a curtain

Anushka glimpsed

a plain black van nosing

 

she swallowed hard

and blanched

 

true tears poked through

her ‘natural look’ lashes

I wiped the realisations

trickling her cheek