by Sue Margolis
Brenda decided she'd heard enough. Lavender wasn't just evil, she was also a moron. Brenda was about to seize the moment. She put up her hand. Lavender smiled at her.
“Yes, Begonia?”
“Lavender, I was just thinking . . . what d'you reckon to company wives who go in for a bit of extramural how's-yer-father?”
Lavender gawped at Brenda in horrified silence. Anna couldn't decide if this was due to the content of Brenda's question, or her inelegant use of English. There were muffled giggles from around the room.
After a few moments, Lavender took a deep breath and spoke. “If she were found out,” she said in a clipped tone, “it would most certainly affect her husband's promotion prospects. . . . Now then, where had I got to. . . ?”
Brenda had the bit between her teeth.
“Say,” she went on, devilment all over her face, “she had some kind of dodgy past . . . I dunno, s'pose for instance that as a student she shagged a bloke in front of two hundred people at the university rugby club dinner. I mean, if that came to light, don't you think that might be a teensy bit problematic?”
Lavender's expression turned to flint. She could smell enough rats to fill an entire sewer. In a pitiful effort to appear uninterested in what was being said, the other women lowered their heads and began pushing back their cuticles. “I . . . I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about,” Lavender stammered, close to tears.
“Bollocks,” declared Brenda.
There were umpteen sharp intakes of breath.
“I think you know precisely what I'm talking about,” Brenda said evenly. “I'm talking about the woman known as Shagger Hardacre who leaves threatening messages on answer machines and sends abusive letters.”
Lavender gave a tiny, horrified yelp. She produced a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, brought it to one eye, paused for a moment and then shot out of the room.
Brenda and Anna got up and ran after her. They followed her to the kitchen.
They stood in the doorway. Lavender was sitting sobbing at the far end of a long pine refectory table. The end nearer to Brenda and Anna was covered with pale-green-and-gold dessert plates. Each contained a white meringue swan covered in spun sugar and floating on a sea of chocolate cream. A heavenly roasting chicken smell was coming from the Aga. Lavender had clearly spent ages preparing lunch for the group. Despite the woman's abominable behavior, slight pangs of guilt began to prick Brenda and Anna.
The two women stood watching her shoulders heave as she sobbed into the handkerchief. Having prepared themselves for a fearless tirade rather than tears, they exchanged what-the-fuck-do-we-do-now glances. As luck would have it, Lavender spared them from having to do anything. She looked up.
“Brenda . . . I presume you are Brenda Sweet,” she began, doing her best to speak calmly through involuntary sobs. “You will probably never realize how desperately sorry and ashamed I am. Threatening you was the most ghastly, wicked thing I have ever done in my life. But, you see, I was at my tether's end. Giles's affair with you was the final straw.”
“That's rich coming from an old slapper like you,” Brenda said, marching into the kitchen, leaving Anna hovering by the door. “You've been cheating on Giles since you got married.”
Lavender stared hard at Brenda. In the distance they could hear engines starting up and the sound of tires on gravel.
“That just isn't true.” Her tone was almost desperate. “I have never once been unfaithful to my husband. I have spent the last fifteen years raising four children and running this house single-handed, while he carved out an exceedingly successful career in politics, and bedded anything over the age of consent. He always promises each affair will be his last and that he loves me. Then he begs me to stand by him. I always do and I suppose, despite everything I've said about divorcing him, I always will. He's so hopeless, you see. I know he couldn't manage without me here to organize him. The thing is, I know they're only flings because they're always with common types and I'm certain he'd never leave me for a floozie.”
Anna, who had now come into the room and was standing next to Brenda, watched her friend clench her fists and turn purple with rage at this final remark.
“Leave it,” she hissed. “Just leave it.”
“So,” she said to Lavender, “how did we manage to get the story so wrong?”
“You got it wrong because you listened to Fleet Street gossip. One night, eight or nine years ago, Giles and I had a flaming row. I'd just found out about another of his affairs and I said I would sell my story to the papers. He then shot off back to town and got legless with a chap on the Express and gave him this sob story about me being unfaithful. The journalist phoned me. I told him it was all lies and begged him not to run it. Thank the Lord, he was a decent chap. He took pity on me and Giles's story never appeared. Nevertheless, a huge amount of whispering went on and the dirt stuck.”
“What about the rugby club dinner. Is that true?”
“Yes, but I was twenty and high as a kite on coke and booze. Surely you weren't planning to use that against me?”
Brenda could feel another wave of guilt descending. She looked at Anna.
“Only to stop you going to the newspapers about me and Giles. Have you any idea the harm you could do my reputation and my business?”
Lavender stared down at the table.
“Please, please forgive me. I couldn't think what else to do to make him stop. I know I'm supposed to be divorcing him, but you see, I still love him. I just can't put up with his women any longer. I'm so tired.”
With that Lavender got up, went over to the wine rack next to the Aga and opened a bottle of red wine. The bottle in one hand and three long stems in the other, she came back to the table and poured them each a glass. Brenda realized it was the first time in weeks that she had fancied alcohol.
Lavender knocked back half a glass of wine in one go and began crying again. Brenda got up, hesitated for a moment and then put her arms round her.
“Ssh, ssh, 's OK,” she said, realizing she had absolutely no doubts as to the truth of Lavender's story. “You're forgiven.”
Lavender looked up at her meekly, through red pug eyes. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Don't thank me too soon. I mean, my outburst in there can't have done much for your reputation as the perfect company wife. I thought you were out to destroy my career and now I've managed to destroy yours. I s'pose you'll have to give up running the courses.”
For a moment Lavender said nothing. Anna and Brenda could sense she was turning over ideas in her head. Then she wiped her eyes one last time, shoved her handkerchief firmly up her sleeve and banged on the table.
“Give up? Never!” she boomed, sounding like a memsahib determined not to relinquish her bit of India. “I know exactly what I shall do. I shall write to all the people who came today and, with your permission, make up a story about you and Anna being members of the gutter press sent on a muckraking mission, the object of which was to discredit me. I shall lie magnificently about how I outwitted you and sent you packing. What's more, I will announce that I am running a company wife course next month devoted to coping with press harassment. To accompany the course, I will, naturally, provide a glossy handbook outlining my utterly brilliant and infallible ten-point plan for keeping journalists at bay when hubby is discovered tethered to a dog kennel in some tart's flat wearing nothing but a leather muzzle and harness. For this I will charge a fiver on top of the usual course fee. Won't take me more than a couple of hours to write. Truth to tell, the women who come to these things are such morons, they wouldn't know the difference between a manual on dealing with press harassment and a list of Girl Guide instructions for tying knots.”
Lavender drained her glass and placed it triumphantly on the table. “What do you reckon, chaps? Is that damage limitation or what?”
Gobsmacked by the sheer energy and enthusiasm of Lavender's comeback, Anna and Brenda could only smile and nod their agreement.
They finished the bottle of wine and started on a second. It wasn't long before Brenda took her wig off and was telling Lavender about Elvis and how he had abandoned her while she was pregnant and how she'd been a single parent for the last ten years. Finally, Anna decided to throw caution and loyalty to the wind and tell the story of her sexless life with a hypochondriac.
Gradually the atmosphere lightened. The more drunk they became, the funnier everything seemed.
“D'you know,” Anna said, sweeping her glass through the air as if she were making a grand toast, “if Dan did actually . . . you know, snuff it . . . as it were, I would get the life assurance money and the mortgage paid off. I'd be worth over a million quid. Christ. Makes you think. . . .”
All three of them cracked up.
When Anna and Brenda discussed it a few days later, Anna said she couldn't remember who started singing first. Brenda insisted it was Lavender who, after five glasses of wine, ended up standing on the table to deliver what she insisted was a purely ironic version of “Stand By Your Man.” This was followed by Anna and Brenda climbing up to join her and the three of them attempting, and failing, to do “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” in a round.
They were seen later that afternoon, by the woman in the blazer, who had decided to hang around in the hope of gathering gossip, kneeling at the side of the lake in Lavender's garden, trying to race her meringue swans.
C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
DAN FINISHED CLEARING HIS UPPER respiratory tract by pronouncing an especially throaty version of the German first person singular. He'd arrived twenty minutes early for his psychic consultation with the world-renowned Ada Bracegirdle and was sitting in the car, which, in order not to be noticed, he'd parked a few doors up from her house. He was passing the time listening to Woman's Hour and trying to cough up phlegm. As Jenni Murray introduced an item on a Guatemalan lesbian crocheting cooperative's struggle for survival, Dan took his handkerchief away from his mouth and looked inside. He expected to find a small puddle of yellow gluey gob streaked with blood. Instead, all he found was clear, healthy-looking mucus.
Dan's cough had started at the weekend. Nearly a week later it was still nothing more than a persistent and irritating tickle at the back of his throat. The new Dan, who had thrown away his medical appliances and had taken to thinking of himself as a recovering hypochondriac, was trying to convince the old Dan that his condition was nothing more than a minor infection. Old Dan, on the other hand, was preparing himself for the imminent onset of silicosis. As a consequence of his fear, Old Dan thought it wise to keep a half-hourly check on the consistency and color of his pulmonary secretions.
Dan scrunched up his handkerchief and put it back in his trouser pocket. On the radio, the Guatemalan feature had ended with the lesbians announcing their plans to go on hunger strike unless the European Union provided them with free crochet hooks out of its overseas aid budget, and Jenni Murray was announcing a twenty-four-hour BBC hotline number which would enable listeners to donate money to the cause.
Dan looked at his watch. His appointment wasn't until eleven. It was still only ten to. He reached into his pocket for his snotty handkerchief and began wiping the dust off the dashboard. This took about fifteen seconds. Playing around with the position of the car shoulder mirror with the electric button on the inside of the driver's door took another ten. Dan looked at his watch again and decided he could either spend the next nine minutes going round the outside of the car touching up chipped bits of bodywork with the can of spray paint he always kept in the glove compartment, or be early for his appointment. He decided to be early.
He locked the car and turned round to face the outside of Ada Bracegirdle's row house.
He'd been so taken up with his phlegm that he had failed to notice the B-registered brown Bentley sitting majestically on the narrow concrete drive looking down its long nose like faded gentry at a redneck barbecue.
The Bentley, albeit old and bubbling with rust, was the only immediate evidence of Ada Bracegirdle's countrywide fame and success. She'd certainly lavished no money on the house. All the other row houses in the small cul-de-sac had been tarted up. They had frilly Austrian blinds at their windows, brass stagecoach lights on either side of their storm porches, and wrought-iron Spanish guitars nailed to the brickwork. Mrs. Bracegirdle's house, on the other hand, was exceedingly run-down. The window frames were balding and rotting, most of the guttering was loose and tall weeds had pushed through the cracks in the concreted-over front garden. The bell wasn't working, so Dan tapped on the frosted-glass door with his knuckle. As he waited for Ada Bracegirdle to answer the door, he felt an overwhelming sense that his decision to see a medium had been the right one.
Despite a lifelong cynicism about anything “supernatural,” Dan had been convinced right away that his dream wasn't simply another of his occasional nightmares about his mother. He was in no doubt that her spirit had come to him that night and that she wanted him to make contact with her.
As he woke the next morning his mind had been filled with a sense of eagerness and excitement. There were two reasons for this. He was profoundly curious about what she had to tell him, but more than that, he knew that it would be the perfect opportunity to confront her and tell her how angry he was with her. Speaking to his mother's spirit would be almost like having a conversation with a living person. Infinitely preferable, thought Dan, to Virginia Livermead's empty chair.
Lying in bed, he realized it wasn't simply eagerness and excitement he was feeling. Something about him had undergone a transformation. He began patting his upper body and head to check nothing Kafkaesque had happened while he was asleep. His bits felt pretty much the same as they always had. Suddenly he realized the transformation wasn't physical, but emotional. His self-confidence appeared to have surged overnight. He felt brave, bullish even. Suddenly, he didn't give a toss if his mother's spirit flew round the room swearing at him in Yiddish and shaking an accusing ladle. For the first time in his life he was ready to confront her. The thought even passed through his mind that maybe psychotherapy had done him some good after all.
It had taken him no more than a couple of hours to track down Ada Bracegirdle the morning after his dream. Being a Saturday, the Vanguard's cuttings library was pretty quiet. Dan had asked the librarian to find him all the cuts on psychics and spiritualists. In the time it took for him to drink a cup of stewed caffeinated coffee in the canteen and develop palpitations, the librarian produced a thick pile of photocopied newspaper cuttings which he took back to his desk to read. The name which kept coming up over again was Mrs. Bracegirdle's. The articles went back to 1968. Over the last thirty years, it appeared that Ada Bracegirdle had led the police to an assortment of mutilated murder victims, and had correctly predicted dozens of earthquakes and plane crashes. She was now in her sixties, and still traveled round the country lecturing and giving demonstrations of her psychic powers. In addition she also held private sittings at her house in Dagenham.
Dan had found her number in the phone book, and had made an appointment to see her the following Thursday.
The Anaglypta walls inside Ada Bracegirdle's house were yellow with age and nicotine. The place reeked of cats. Dan followed her into the living room. She was just over five feet tall, and fat. She also had bandy legs and the beginnings of a dowager's hump. He couldn't help noticing that her size and shape were almost identical to his mother's.
Mrs. Bracegirdle gave Dan a huge purple-frosted smile and showed him to a worn moquette armchair with an embroidered antimacassar on the back. She threw a scrawny tortoiseshell cat off the armchair opposite. As she lowered herself into the chair she adjusted a bra strap through her imitation chiffon blouse. Her bust, like his mother's, was immense. As a child he used to wonder if his mother's tits were long enough to tuck i
n her knicker elastic. The same thought was occurring to him now.
Ada Bracegirdle picked up a packet of Silk Cut from the coffee table.
“ 'Ope you don't mind, my darlin',” she said cheerily, “only I find I can make contact with the other side much quicker once I've lit up . . . 'elps me concentrate.” She began scraping her finger across a crusty dried-up stain on the arm of her chair.
Dan waved his hand and said it was fine with him. She had a face like a Gypsy. The skin was excessively wrinkled. The eyes were piercing and, despite her age, still very blue.
Ada Bracegirdle stared into the barrel of the cannon-shaped table lighter and lit her cigarette. Just then a man poked his head round the door and offered them tea. He was about forty, with a moon face and cropped hair. Partly concealed behind the door was a zeppelin-sized beer gut. He wore this under a grubby white T-shirt.
Dan strongly suspected that Ada Bracegirdle's kitchen was a rich source of E. coli and politely declined the offer of tea. Ada said she wouldn't have any either as she'd had five cups this morning and another one might mean going to spend a penny while she was in a trance. The head disappeared.
“That's my Anthony.” She pronounced the “th.” “He's my eldest, bless 'is heart. He's been living with me ever since his wife ran off to Tilbury with a tattoo artist. I don't know where I'd be without 'im. He chauffeurs me all over the country in the Bentley.” She emphasized the make of car and waved her cigarette towards the bay window. The Bentley was just visible through the filthy net curtains.
A look of impatience must have crossed Dan's face because Ada Bracegirdle suddenly sat very upright against the back of the chair and took several deep breaths.
“Right, my darlin' . . . I can feel there's a loved one on the other side who is very anxious to come through.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and closed her eyes. “It's a woman. I'm getting the initial G. I think Gertie wants to speak to you. Is there a Gertie who passed recently with her kidneys?”