The Queen's Margarine

by Wendy Perriam

  The phone shrilled through her thoughts. She prayed God it was Melanie, and not Graham in distress again. Gingerly, she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Who? … Oh, Miss Mays … No, of course I haven’t forgotten. Could you give me a bit longer?’

  Stupid to have promised to go round, with all the things outstanding on her list: her father’s bank and insurers to contact, his electricity and gas suppliers, BT, the Inland Revenue; his credit cards to cancel, his outstanding bills to pay, his library books to be returned, his milk and papers stopped….

  In need of consolation, she went to fetch the large, square biscuit tin with the picture of Prince Albert on the lid. Every day of her life, until she left home to get married, that tin had made its appearance after supper, as adjunct to her parents’ post-prandial pot of tea. The biscuits rarely varied: mostly plain digestives and falsely named ‘Rich’ Tea. And, even after his bereavement, her father honoured the traditions of frugality and thrift, and would no more return from Sainsbury’s with fancy chocolate fingers or extravagant real-butter shortbread than invest in new clothes or replace the fraying bed-linen. In fact, the only way he had managed to cope was to carry on as if his wife were still alive; buy the brands she had bought herself, and keep strictly to her timetable and to her watchword of economy.

  She dipped a stale digestive into her mug of milkless tea. The milk in the fridge was semi-solid, and stank, but at least the mug was comfortingly familiar – as old as she was, in fact, and part of a boxed Peter Rabbit set, including a plate and bowl, which had been one of her Christening presents. Sadly, the plate and bowl had broken, but the mug had stayed the course, outliving both her parents.

  The frieze of bunnies leaping in a circle round the top rim of the mug looked enviably fit and frisky. Rabbits had always figured in her childhood: rabbit jellies, rabbit books, even a natty rabbit-skin coat and – somewhat paradoxically in light of the coat – a whole series of rabbits as pets.

  ‘Dad,’ she said out loud, ‘remember Thumper and Snowy and their twenty-seven babies?’

  No answer but a shrill peal on the doorbell. Surely not Miss Mays again, when she’d just spoken to the poor old soul?

  ‘Hello,’ she said uncertainly, disconcerted by the sight of a broad-shouldered, burly man standing on the step, dressed in a brash blue suit and garish purple tie.

  ‘May I offer my condolences,’ he murmured, eyes respectfully downcast.

  Condolences – another odious word: over-formal, hollow at the core. ‘Thank you,’ she responded, ‘but, er, have we met? I presume you’re a friend of my father—’

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have that pleasure. I’ve only just moved into the road, less than a fortnight ago. Johnny Johnson’s the name.’ He thrust out a hot, perspiring hand and shook hers with jovial force. ‘I was informed about your tragic loss by my neighbour across the street. She told me your late father had lived here over fifty years, and …’ – he cleared his throat, continued in a rush, ‘I was wondering if you had plans to sell the house?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she frowned, ‘at some point, but—’

  ‘I do hope I’m not intruding. I realize it’s a delicate time. But, you know, I could save you a lot in estate agents’ fees, if we settled the matter privately between us. Thing is, my business partner wants to move much closer to me, and this house would be ideal for him and his young family.’

  ‘Mr Johnson,’ she said icily, ‘I’m not in any state at the moment to discuss property transactions, let alone—’

  ‘Do call me Johnny,’ he interrupted. ‘Everybody does. And you’re Louise, I understand. Now look, Louise, have you any idea how much these estate agents rake off for themselves in commission?’

  Pink with indignation, she slammed the door in his face. The cheek of the man – to try to wrest her father’s house away when the corpse was not yet even buried!

  She collapsed into a chair – the one where she’d left the baby book – and held the small, square album close against her chest while she wrestled with her feelings. She was probably overreacting, as she seemed to have done for the last thirty-six hours. Insensitive the man might be – certainly premature in his approach – but he might genuinely wish to save her trouble and expense. After all, it was part of her duty as executor to put the house on the market, and it would surely help to have a purchaser ready and willing to move in. Apart from anything else, it would save her constant treks down south to see prospective buyers, all of whom might renege on the deal just as it appeared to be going through. Which would mean she could put Graham first, instead of continually leaving him in the hands of so-called carers.

  Yet she felt sickened by the thought of giving up this place to someone else. Indeed, so painful was the prospect, she began a sort of pilgrimage, wandering into every room to pay her last respects to it, and ending up in the kitchen – the old-fashioned, gloomy kitchen, with its broad-shouldered, bulky cupboards and stained, well-trodden lino. Any typical new owner would rip out the old appliances, replace them with streamlined fittings; repaint the sludge-green walls (chosen by her mother as ‘unlikely to show finger-marks’) in a dazzling, heartless white. The whole house might be remodelled; all traces of her parents lost beneath fresh plaster; her entire childhood and past history blitzed by callous strangers who cared only for modernity. And her father’s garden, with its rows of runner beans and the special bed he’d given her, as a kid of five or six, to grow catmint and nasturtiums – still preserved in tribute to her – would be ‘landscaped’ into conformity and lost beneath smart paving-stones.

  But what was the alternative? To keep the place for ever, as a shrine and a memorial, and commute from Scotland every week to polish up her memories?

  Despondently, she returned to her armchair, wishing she were better at decisions, or at least far better organized. She shouldn’t even be thinking about the problem of the house, until she had sorted out the details of the funeral: which hymns to choose, and readings; what food and drink to serve at the reception. Yet every time she applied herself to such pressing practicalities, it was like trying to build a structure from sawdust and Scotch mist, as if she, as well as Graham, had lost some vital component of her mind.

  Closing her eyes, she let herself be comforted by the steady, rhythmic ticking of the clock. It had ticked throughout her childhood, measuring out the days; signalling getting-up-in-the-morning time, catching-the-school-bus time, homework time, suppertime, biscuit-time, then bedtime. How consoling all those rituals were; the safe and orderly structure provided by her parents, where no one ever overslept, or turned up late for anything, or skimped on work, or forgot their roles and duties. In her present life, such rigour had capsized. Graham had lost all sense of day or night; lost his previous way of life, with its timetable, its schedules, its strict delineation of weekdays and weekends. Now, every day was a weekend, in the sense that he was continually at home – jobless, workless, aimless – and she, too, had lost her job, or at least taken on a new one, as unpaid minder and nursemaid.

  With a sigh of resignation, she began flicking through the baby book again, pausing at the heading, ‘Our Baby’s First Words’, printed in italic script. ‘Dad-Dad’ was the first entry, of course. What else? And ‘Singing brush’ the second. Singing brush – how weird. The sort of peculiar phraseology Graham might come up with; in fact, akin to a ‘blue peapod’.

  Leafing on through the album, she found herself, as a tot of two or three, preening almost coquettishly in her glamorous rabbit-skin coat. ‘Hollywood star!’ her father had written underneath. The next photograph, in contrast, showed her dressed in a drab pinafore and scowling at the camera, her eyes narrowed in ill temper and her bottom lip stuck out.

  ‘Prickly Pear’, the caption read – the name her father used for her when she was fractious or ill-tempered. How extraordinary that she had forgotten it entirely. Or blanked it out deliberately, perhaps. Because she had been fractious – and often, she recalled now to her shame. In fac
t, only at this moment did it dawn on her how difficult she must have been: an obstinate and self-willed miss, subject to mercurial moods, and with lofty, but quite contradictory, ambitions – to be an astronaut, a gangster, a Black Belt and the Queen.

  Yet, whatever aggravation she had caused him, her father had always been her rock: the one she ran to with scraped knees or broken toys; the one who took her swimming, taught her how to fly a kite, spent hours explaining decimal points, or the proper use of adverbs, or the life-cycle of frogs – frequently mugging up the facts beforehand from a stack of library books. He had even prepared her bottles, the first three months of her life, taking unpaid leave from work, so as to be there in the daytime, and getting up several times each night. (Her mother, a martyr to depression, couldn’t – wouldn’t? – breastfeed.) And, judging by the record of her weight – from 6lb 7oz at birth, to 13lb at three months – he had done a creditable job.

  She continued staring at the petulant child, its arms rebelliously crossed, and one bare foot twisted round the other – the very image of prickliness. Is that how Graham saw her: as spiky and sharp-tongued, and bristling with resentment? And had their only son removed himself to Kenya not to avoid his stricken father, but to escape his stroppy mother? And, of course, prickly pears were cacti – desert plants inhabiting an arid, parched terrain. Was she a human desert: stony-hearted, sterile, and too barren and dried-up to dispense any but the most meagre drops of the milk of human kindness?

  She was aware that she was blushing from the unspoken accusations; even her biased-in-her-favour father admitting she could be a ‘trial’, and not only as a child. When he had last stayed with them in Scotland, a good seven months ago now, she had snapped at him for nothing; been overhasty, querulous, and with no excuse whatever.

  Did he even like her, she began to wonder now, desperate at the thought that the close father-daughter bond she had so arrogantly assumed to be a keystone of her life, might be built on a delusion? Just because he’d championed her against hostile teachers, or cruel or feckless friends, didn’t mean he admired her as a decent human being. All her faults and failings seemed to have taken solid form and were being projected on giant movie screens in the multiplex of her head, to a soundtrack of cacophonous reproaches, some from decades back.

  ‘When he tried to stop you smoking as a teenager, you refused to listen and flounced out of the house.’

  ‘Even on your wedding day, you made a fuss because you didn’t approve of his suit. Couldn’t you have let him be himself – a simple man who hated pomp and show?’

  If only she had apologized – on her wedding day, and every day on which she might have caused him pain. And couldn’t she have thanked him for his lifetime of loyal service; explained how much it meant? Now it was too late. Yet, despite the sting of that stark fact, still she couldn’t cry, as if all her grief had solidified into a black, strangulating boulder, damming up her throat.

  She slammed the album shut, no longer able to bear the sight of her own peevish, screwed-up face, and terrified she was about to lose her grip. She had no one else to help her – no husband, son or sibling – so it was imperative to keep control.

  She shut her eyes, slumped back against the cushions, fixed her whole attention on moving further back in time – to those hushed nights in the nursery, when she was too young to have emotions except hunger sated, bliss restored, as she lay cradled in her father’s arms.

  Slowly, almost guiltily, she let herself relax; saw, through half-closed eyelids, bars of dappled moonlight silvering the nursery curtains; shadows of the cot-bars flickering on the wall.

  Yes, she was there again, serene again, in her smocked nightgown and soft shawl; no sound except her father’s heartbeat, slowing the wild tempo of the world. Her adult burdens had faded with the light. Death and grief were meaningless, and Graham was dissolving to a mere shadow of a shadow. Both he and Jake were only possibilities in a distant, far-off future – a future unimaginable and of no interest to an infant. There were only two people in existence now: her father and herself. Inverness and Kenya were no longer on the map. This modest, compact terraced house comprised her sole geography. Of course she couldn’t sell it, or fly back up to Scotland. As a babe-in-arms, she didn’t have the power; was too vulnerable, too small. She must stay here with her father, learning to crawl, to stand, to walk – him beside her always; his bent, braced knee the pillar to her universe.

  The pair of them were quite alone, she sheltered by the bulwark of his body, and staring up intently at his face – a face young again, unlined again, fresh and firm and healthy again, and crinkling in his familiar smile as he whispered, ‘Prickly Pear!’

  At last, she understood. However sharp the spines of the pear, he had always known – and was even now assuring her – that underneath was sweet and succulent fruit.

  River Heights

  ‘And this,’ said Toby, opening the door with a flourish, ‘really is a view to die for.’

  Lauren followed him into the spacious lounge, with its dark-oak polished floor, its twin white leather sofas, solid-marble coffee-table, edgy modern sculptures. Before admiring the view, she stopped and gazed around the room, wondering if this could actually be her – a failure and a nobody – viewing such a ritzy flat? The whole scenario didn’t seem quite real, as if she were playing a part in some lavish Hollywood movie and, at any moment, the director would shout, ‘Cut!’

  As she walked towards the floor-to-ceiling windows, she seemed to be level with the sky, about to burst through all that acreage of glass and go skedaddling across great banks of rolling clouds. And, however sullen those rain-swollen clouds might look, in no way could they dampen her elation.

  Toby led her on to the balcony, with a grand gesture to the impressive panorama, began directing her attention to several landmarks. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit nippy today, but just imagine this in summer!’

  Who cared about the cold? From this amazing altitude, she could see the broad curve of the river stretching out below, and a great swathe of London on the opposite bank, sweeping all the way from Westminster to Chelsea. If she took the flat, she could stand out here in every kind of weather, charting the river’s ever-changing moods; the wind flirting with her hair, and gulls soaring in white flurries past her head. Looking down from such a height gave her a sense of near-omnipotence, as if she had built those bridges, laid out the embankment; even controlled the tides. She had loved the Thames since childhood, when her three elder brothers had taken her canoeing, taught her how to beachcomb, how to catch an eel – brothers who disowned her now.

  ‘Cool,’ she said, ‘having the Thames as your front garden!’

  ‘Yes, I understand from head office that you particularly want a river view.’

  She nodded, unwilling to say more. It would sound pretty naff to start babbling about the symbolism of water – the renewal and regeneration that were part of her new start.

  ‘And as high up as possible.’

  She mumbled her assent. Height, too, was symbolical. She had left behind her low life, her grotty basement slum, all those grubby, grim relationships with losers.

  ‘You can even entertain here. The balcony’s quite big enough. And these chairs and table are solid oak, so they’re completely weather-proof.’

  As he spoke, a speedboat lasered across the water; two drunken-looking cormorants bobbing on its choppy, churning wake. She imagined her guests sitting in the stylish chairs, watching all the different craft: pleasure cruisers, sailing dinghies, the harbour-master’s patrol boat in spanking black-and-white, great lazy, lumbering barges, towed by sturdy tugs.

  ‘But once you close the windows,’ Toby told her, ‘you won’t hear a sound, Miss Armitage. The entire flat’s triple-glazed. And air-conditioned, of course.’

  ‘Do call me Lauren.’ Only fair, when he had volunteered his Christian name the moment they’d first met. He seemed entirely different from the sharp-suited estate agents she had dealt with up to now. In fa
ct, he struck her as eminently fanciable, in his black polo neck and tight black jeans, and, if she hadn’t vowed to put an end to all one-off entanglements, she might have put a teasing hand on some part of his anatomy, or made sure their bodies touched when he was pointing out a feature of the flat. As it was, she was determined to be businesslike; act the part of a wealthy, well-established woman – however fraudulent it felt inside.

  ‘Right, let’s go and see the bedroom now. I know you’re going to love it.’

  Yes, she loved it – and partly for its size. Just that one room was bigger than the whole of her previous flat and, instead of being a cluttered mess of jarring styles and colours, was furnished totally in white: elegant white counterpane on the imposing queen-sized bed; floor-length, white linen curtains; white, fluffy, deep-pile carpet; white marble bedside lamps; white ceramic vase holding tall, white, hothouse lilies, whose cloying, musky, insistent smell seemed to seep into her skin, as she were wearing some exotic scent herself. White was totally impractical, of course, but, as she stood amidst the subtle shades of pearl and snow and ivory, she felt herself being effortlessly released from the smut and grime that had characterized her life to date. This whole block was newly built and newly furnished, with no stains or smears from previous tenants to mar its white perfection – the ideal place for a rebirth.

  Toby was pointing out the variety of lights: strip-lights in the wardrobes; concealed spotlights in the ceiling, fluorescent panels set into the dressing table, and a whole range of dimmer-switches by the bed.

  ‘And the bed itself is adjustable,’ he said, pulling a lever to demonstrate. ‘It also has a built-in massage function. Just press this knob and …’