The Perfectly Imperfect Woman

by Milly Johnson

  Marnie half-choked on her ham and mustard. She shouldn’t have laughed, she really hadn’t meant to.

  ‘Anyway, I want to know all about Mr Fox,’ Lilian went on, reaching for a cheese and pickle. ‘Do you have a photo of him that I can see?’

  ‘Oh, I never thought to bring one,’ lied Marnie. The truth was, she didn’t have any. The first time she’d taken out her phone to snatch a selfie of them, Justin had covered his face as if he were an A-lister with no make-up on and she was the paparazzi. He wasn’t photogenic, he’d excused. It doesn’t matter, it’s for my eyes only, Marnie had replied but he’d insisted no. He couldn’t afford to take any chances of it getting into the wrong hands. He’d meant the hands of Suranna, his wife, of course. Marnie had been cross at his presumption that she’d plaster it all over Facebook if they had a row. What sort of person did he think she was? But she hadn’t wanted to cause a fuss, so she relented.

  So, no, she didn’t have a photo of him. Neither could she ring him on his mobile, she had to wait until he rang her. Nor could they venture out in public like normal couples or stay the night in a hotel. Not yet anyway. Not until his uncoupling was completed. Marnie felt her jaw tightening with agitation. Best to change the subject, she thought, and steer clear of Justin-talk.

  ‘I found Wychwell on the internet. It looks beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Oh it is,’ Lilian agreed with an energetic nod as she reached for a cheesecake square. ‘It’s tired though, so awfully tired. I’ve not given it my best. I resented it for so many . . . good GRIEF what a disgusting taste.’ Her features scrunched up and her tongue waggled in her mouth like a Maori doing a Haka.

  Marnie followed suit, picking a square from the top plate to see what Lilian meant. Bland, rubbery, with a soggy, too-thin base. If there was one thing she was an expert on, it was cheesecake.

  ‘My, that is a let-down,’ she said. ‘Gelatine overload and too much cream to cheese ratio. What do you think, Lilian?’

  ‘I haven’t a bloody clue,’ returned Lilian. ‘I couldn’t make a cake if my life depended upon it. I only ever go on those silly forums to cause havoc. I’m a bored old lady who can’t sleep and I ache everywhere. Playing devil’s advocate is one of the few pleasures I have left.’

  Marnie stared at her soundlessly, then she threw her head back and laughed. ‘Really, oh my, Lilian, you are brilliant.’

  Lilian smiled. ‘I’m awfully sorry if you thought you’d found a fellow patissier but trust me, the world of baking is much safer with me outside it than within.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Marnie, thinking that it really didn’t. She was having a lovely time with Lilian although she did look much older than her sixty-six years of age. But for all her bodily wear and tear, her mind seemed as sharp as a box of needles. Lilian halted a passing waitress in her tracks and demanded, with politeness, that the bill reflect the uneatable cheesecake offering. She had a beautiful voice, thought Marnie. Her speech was crowded with rounded vowels and that secret extra ingredient that distinguished her from people such as Gabrielle, who could never have achieved that intrinsic tone, not even with a million elocution lessons. The magic voice equivalent of the contents of Mrs McMaid’s tin.

  The waitress nodded. ‘Mrs Abercrombie buys them in but the woman that makes them isn’t very good.’ Then her hand shot up to her mouth. ‘Oh ’eck. I shouldn’t have said that . . . I meant they’re made in-house but the cheesecake woman isn’t very good.’

  The knowledge couldn’t be undone though and that nugget of info stored itself in Marnie’s memory for another time.

  ‘Then you should tell Mrs Abercrombie to find someone else. Especially at the prices she charges,’ snapped Lilian, not accepting the excuse. As the waitress scuttled off, Lilian whispered to Marnie, ‘Tasted worse than something I’d make.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Believe me – that bad. Anyway, moving on, did you visit your sister for her birthday?’

  Blimey, thought Marnie, she has the memory of an elephant. Did she really tell Lilian it was her sister’s birthday as well? What else? It might be easier to make a list of everything she hadn’t told her.

  ‘No,’ said Marnie. ‘We don’t do family birthdays really. Apart from sending a card . . .’

  ‘Yours to them arrives on time, not so the other way around.’ She answered Marnie’s wide-eyed look seconds later. ‘You didn’t tell me that, I guessed.’ She tipped the teapot over Marnie’s cup and then her own, sharing the last of its contents.

  ‘We are a dysfunctional family par excellence.’ Marnie smiled sadly. ‘We—’

  ‘My dear girl,’ Lilian butted in. ‘Unless you have the Dearman name, you have no real concept of dysfunction. Although I do have to say that your sibling makes my younger sister appear a saint by comparison, and that’s quite an achievement. Rachel ran off with our uncle who managed to kill them both in a glider.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s awful,’ said Marnie.

  ‘Rachel was a psychopath,’ sniffed Lilian. ‘Totally devoid of feeling. I didn’t shed a tear over the thought of her being dead, though I shed gallons when she was alive. I remain convinced she murdered our nanny—’ she broke off, waved her hand and shook her head. ‘I can’t talk about her. She’s spoiling my mood. Let’s talk about you; you said you didn’t know why your mother ever had children.’

  Marnie gulped. ‘Did I?’ Although she must have said it, because she’d always thought it and it wasn’t the sort of thing Lilian could have made up. She’d often wondered what Judith Salt had been like before looking after a toddler whilst pregnancy took its toll; and before her husband left her the month before Gabrielle was born and moved to Thailand to be with a clutch of women he’d hooked up with on the internet and never even met.

  ‘I didn’t have a proper relationship with my parents either,’ said Lilian. ‘Maybe that’s why fate put us together. Two kindred spirits.’

  Marnie nodded. It said something about the state of her life that the person she had most in common with was an old lady whom she barely knew.

  ‘I wanted so much to be told I’d been adopted when I was younger,’ Lilian went on. ‘But I had too much of the family resemblance to be denied . . .’ Her voice momentarily trailed off before she launched down another conversational avenue. ‘Did you ever find out who your real parents were, Marnie?’

  ‘No.’ Marnie licked a blob of Chantilly cream from her finger. ‘My birth wasn’t originally registered. The authorities were tipped off that a child was abandoned in an empty caravan – that was me. Irish travellers, they thought. I have no way of knowing . . . well, a slim chance because I suppose anything is possible these days.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t say that I’d try to find them even if I did know.’ I’m not sure I could set myself up for another disappointment, she said to herself, but not aloud. She felt Lilian’s chilly hand fall on top of hers and she saw how thin the skin was. She had the hands of a ninety-year-old.

  ‘I knew even before my sister blurted it out when I was fourteen that I was adopted,’ Marnie went on, seeing a GIF of Gabrielle in her head screaming at her:

  I’m glad you’re adopted, you bitch. I’m glad we’re not real sisters.

  Marnie remembered the top note of shock that hit her first. The relief came second and bloomed to euphoria because it explained everything.

  ‘. . . I’d always known I wasn’t the same as them. For a start, Mum and Gabrielle and my “father” are all blue-eyed blondes.’ She flicked her long black hair over her shoulder and pointed at her cat-green eyes. ‘I can’t tell you how many times it’s been said that I look Irish.’

  Lilian studied her. ‘Yes, I noticed that immediately,’ she agreed. ‘Your lovely sharp cheekbones and colouring. Unmistakably you have Irish blood in you.’

  ‘And my sister can eat three potatoes more than a pig and stay the same weight and I can put on a stone just from watching her do it.’

  Lilian Dearman hooted with laughter.
/>   ‘She was named after an angel, I was named after a deranged woman in a Hitchcock film. I think that says it all.’

  ‘Ah, but a very beautiful woman,’ said Lilian. ‘One with spirit and beauty and guile.’

  Marnie agreed that she had spirit and guile all right. Her mother had never suspected how much cheesecake and jam she had eaten that summer of her tenth year.

  ‘We lived next door to a lovely old lady . . .’

  ‘Mrs McMaid,’ Lilian interjected.

  ‘Oh, I’ve told you about her too.’ Quelle surprise.

  ‘Only a little. Carry on. I want to hear more.’

  Marnie caught a waft of Lilian’s perfume as she waved her hand encouragingly for her to continue. It was very like the one Mrs McMaid used to wear. She’d had a large ridged bottle on her dressing table with a tasselled squashy pump which dispensed the scent of midsummer whenever it was pressed.

  ‘Well, she baked cakes on a continual loop for other people: the church, local bakeries and sometimes just to give away to poor souls who needed cheering up.’ Marnie didn’t realise how her features softened when talking about the old lady, but Lilian saw. ‘I think, though it might sound melodramatic, that she was the first person to show me any real kindness. She let me lick cake mixture off the spoon which was highly illegal in our house and I nearly spontaneously combusted at the first taste of her home-made raspberry jam. But she died at the end of the summer and autumn seemed so much colder without her in it. The first thing the new people did when they moved in was to dig up all her lovely raspberry bushes.’ Marnie sighed. ‘And the price they charge for them in supermarkets nowadays.’

  ‘So you like raspberries, do you?’ asked Lilian, with a disproportionate interest in the answer.

  ‘I love them,’ smiled Marnie.

  ‘We have lots of raspberries in Wychwell,’ said Lilian, adding cryptically to the air. ‘It’s a sign.’

  Sign of what? wondered Marnie, thinking that Lilian might be a little more batty than she’d initially given her credit for.

  ‘Tell me more about your Mrs McMaid,’ Lilian prompted. ‘She sounds marvellous.’

  ‘She was – totally and absolutely marvellous. She might only have been in my life for a few weeks but I’ve never forgotten her. If I close my eyes sometimes, I can drift back in time. I can be in her front room with the massive squashy sofa and the crocheted cushion covers . . .’ And the scent from the pink roses which she cut from the bushes in the garden and put in coloured glass vases around the room. I can be breathing in Mrs McMaid’s heady floral perfume and watching her scraping the vanilla caviar out of the beans as she stands at her scrubbed kitchen table. ‘I think one day I’d like to have a cottage like Mrs McMaid’s.’ She wasn’t sure she’d spoken that aloud until Lilian Dearman replied to it.

  ‘I have a spare cottage if ever you wanted to stay. The previous occupant was a very special old lady. Jessie was our last May Queen. Died doing “Agadoo” in the local pub on her ninety-second birthday. It was quite the most ideal way for her to go.’

  Marnie gave a soft chuckle. ‘She sounds formidable.’

  ‘Oh she was,’ nodded Lilian. ‘And a superb tenant. A perfect match for Little Raspberries.’

  ‘Little Raspberries?’ repeated Marnie.

  ‘All the cottages in the village have names: Little Raspberries, The Nectarines, Peach Trees . . . I renamed them myself when Father died. Lionel – the vicar – thought it might help me to put my stamp on the place. Oh, that reminds me . . . do you read?’

  ‘I love to read,’ said Marnie, watching Lilian bend to retrieve something from her bag. ‘I read a lot, anything and everything. At the moment I’m halfway through an account of the Great Train Robbery.’

  ‘Oh, I adore crime books. The grittier the better. I especially love a good murder mystery. I think Hercule Poirot and I would have got along very well had we ever met. But I don’t suppose he ever came up to the North of England. Shame.’

  Marnie smiled tentatively, not sure if Lilian was joking or not. She reached over to accept the coffee-table book which the old lady was holding out towards her.

  ‘Talking of crime, this is about Wychwell. Lionel did it as a labour of love and I only had five copies made. It’s not for public consumption, you’ll see why when you come to read it. Take it, then you’ll be acclimatised to us when you come to visit.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marnie. ‘I’ll bring it back the next time we meet.’

  ‘Oh no, keep it dear. It’s a present. You’ll realise what a foul lot the Dearmans were, despite the name. Nothing dear about them at all. Bunch of bastards. Lionel did it very well; pulled all the skeletons out of the cupboards, which is why I can’t let people like Titus Sutton read it. Titus is a distant relative and has mentally rewritten history . . .’ Lilian leaned in as if Titus Sutton might be within hearing distance and tapped her temple. ‘In his head the Dearmans belong to a noble lineage, friends with royalty, rich as Croesus and God’s right-hand men. Not the case at all; they were cruel arse-lickers. Although Lionel didn’t quite use that expression when describing them, being a man of the cloth. “Toadying” was the euphemism he plumped for.’

  Marnie thought she might enjoy reading about the Dearmans. She needed to get her teeth into something this weekend to stop her thinking about what might be happening over at Justin’s house and Buster Edwards and Ronnie Biggs weren’t really doing it for her.

  ‘My family have owned Wychwell for generations,’ Lilian went on. ‘Henry the eighth gave the manor to my ancestor Edward Dearman as a reward for his loyalty when he was looting all the monasteries. Frightful man, according to history. Two-faced bastard. Staunch Catholic but knew which side his bread was best buttered. It was he who cursed us all.’

  ‘Cursed us all?’ Marnie echoed as a question.

  ‘Oh, you’ll read all about it in the book. He had a witch drowned in the well outside her cottage in the woods, hence the name of the village. Some harmless bugger who happened to have a black cat and grew comfrey, probably. She’s supposed to haunt the place. I’ve never seen her myself but some say they’ve seen orbs of light through the manor windows at night. Usually after a heavy session at the Wych Arms, no doubt.’

  ‘How very sad,’ replied Marnie. ‘Is the well still there?’

  ‘Somewhere, but we lost it,’ Lilian said with regret. ‘Her cottage was burned down and the well closed up to seal in the bad luck, which was unfortunate as it tapped into a spring and was the only clean water around. Probably why she was so healthy and the rest of the village was riddled with pox. It didn’t get rid of the curse at all. Of course, it might have helped us if we’d fornicated outside the family occasionally.’

  Macaron woman on the next table slammed her china cup down onto her saucer in a gesture of disgust. It had no effect on Lilian whatsoever.

  ‘Do come for the May Fair, Marnie. Everyone dresses in medieval costumes, or as witches, apart from the Suttons who prefer their country tweeds. I can show you Little Raspberries. You never know, you might take a liking to it.’

  ‘Thank you, I’ll put it in my diary,’ said Marnie, not committing herself to a promise because country fairs weren’t really her scene and she had other plans for that May Day weekend. Lord knows why Lilian Dearman was so keen to show her an empty cottage. She could hardly live in it and commute to Leeds every day, if that was what she was thinking.

  The waitress brought the amended bill and Lilian snatched it deftly up from the table.

  ‘Let me get it,’ insisted Marnie.

  ‘Absolutely not. I invited you here, so the onus is on me,’ replied Lilian, foraging in her bag and pulling out a purse which was battered and bright purple and fat with notes. ‘You can get the next one.’ She counted out the exact cost and then added a fifty-pence piece to the saucer.

  ‘Okay, I will then,’ Marnie said as Lilian struggled to her feet, stiff from sitting down for so long.

  As they walked out, Lilian took Marnie�
��s arm for balance.

  ‘It’s no fun at all getting past sixty when you have defective genes. I’m old before my time.’

  Marnie didn’t comment, though she remembered how sprightly Mrs McMaid had been in her eighties. Even after all these years, Mrs McMaid continued to pop into her thoughts on a regular basis.

  As the duo walked into the street and then around the corner, Marnie knew instantly that the huge vintage black Rolls Royce parked very badly must be Lilian’s. It made every other car near it look like a Matchbox toy.

  ‘We always have the best weather at the fair. It hasn’t rained on our May Day celebrations for over a hundred years. The bloody weather hasn’t cursed us at least,’ Lilian said, opening the door to the Rolls and sliding her stick across the seat into the passenger side footwell.

  ‘Oh my,’ gasped Marnie as she took in the beautiful interior of the Roller. With its walnut dash and many dials, it looked more like the cockpit of a private jet.

  ‘It was Daddy’s car,’ said Lilian. ‘Hideous man. He hated it so he never drove it. That’s why I can because I don’t have any memories of him associated with it. I’m thinking of leaving it to my groundsman when I die. You’ll like him. One of very few men on the planet who isn’t a bastard.’

  Marnie couldn’t help the giggle that escaped from her lips. Poor Lilian must have suffered at male hands in her life. It wasn’t really anything to laugh about but her delivery was just too funny.

  Despite her frail frame, Lilian turned to Marnie and embraced her with a grip worthy of a WWE wrestler. As she did so, Marnie caught a whiff of face powder and talcum and the bottom notes of that lovely perfume and as a picture of Mrs McMaid puffed past her brain like the lightest of warm breezes, Marnie now knew for certain that they both wore the same fragrance. How delightfully odd and wonderful, she thought.

  ‘Dear Marnie, you are exactly how I thought you’d be. What a joyous hour I’ve had,’ Lilian said, with feeling. ‘Do come and see me soon. May Day falls on a Sunday this year so we will be celebrating on the actual day rather than the nearest weekend to it. Always has stronger magic when we do that.’