The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  Upstairs in the bedroom, where once Dorothea had brushed her hair, Mrs Penny’s bottle of Innoxa sat on one end of the mantelpiece, while at the other a Brazil nut with the Ten Commandments scratched into its shell still cast its spell. In the wardrobe her fawn blouse hung ready for a special occasion, while in the darkness her suitcase waited, should a swift exit be required.

  In the spare room where the children used to play, Tony muttered and wheezed of an evening, while under his bed, in a box all locked and bolted, a small pile of treasure grew. The proceeds from the first Penny Family Business, going full throttle now.

  On the landing, in a cupboard, lay a photograph of two dead children wrapped in a torn scrap of sheet, while on the very top floor two sisters shared a bed with a narrow iron frame, rolling together in the night, poking each other with sharp little knees and hot little palms. And across from them, where once she had prayed on knees all dirty and bruised, eighteen-year-old Clementine guarded her lair.

  Where was that girl now? Hair falling in twirls. Eyes you couldn’t look away from. Five foot eight and slender with it. Everybody’s darling. Then some more.

  ‘I told her to be home by nine.’ Mrs Penny stood at the kitchen table thumping pastry.

  ‘She’ll be here.’ Tony packed a cherished ration of tobacco into his black-rimmed pipe.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to smoke that in my kitchen.’

  ‘As though I’d dare,’ Tony muttered, and winked at Barbara who was staring at him from her corner by the dresser, having done the best she could with the sodden sheet, which was not much good at all.

  Ruby stood by his knee. ‘Tony . . .’ she said, her startling eyes first one thing then another.

  ‘Call me Father,’ he said, pipe clamped between his teeth.

  ‘Father Tony . . .’

  And Tony laughed, big cheeks wobbling. ‘Good one, little girl.’

  Mrs Penny tutted and wiped flour from her hands onto Dorothea’s apron. ‘Ruby, haven’t you got chores to do? And Barbara, don’t stand there like a dullard. Come here at once and help arrange the tins.’

  Ruby slid herself half onto the arm of Tony’s chair. ‘What would you do if Clemmie never came home, Tony?’

  Tony patted down his jacket with one hand, searching for his matches. ‘I don’t think we have to worry about that, do you?’

  Ruby slid further onto the chair and held out two small fists. ‘Left or right?’ she said.

  ‘Eh? Right.’ Tony tapped at one of Ruby’s hands.

  She uncurled four small fingers and a thumb to display a book of matches stolen from Tony’s waistcoat pocket only a moment before. Tony grunted and picked it up, fat fingers brushing for a moment against Ruby’s palm. ‘Clemmie’s a good girl,’ he said staring now at the place between Ruby’s legs where at any moment a neat little triangle of cotton might be revealed. ‘She knows which side her bread is buttered.’

  ‘Who’s she out with tonight, Tony?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ Mrs Penny’s voice snapped across the room from where both she and Barbara stood at the table, one with eyes glaring, the other with her jaw hung down. ‘It’s not your business.’ Mrs Penny frowned at Tony and gave a quick jerk of her head. ‘And you’ll smoke that outside if you know what’s good for you.’

  Tony heaved himself up from his chair, dislodging Ruby from where she was perched. ‘Time for a puff,’ he said, lurching towards the back door. Ruby made to follow.

  ‘Time for bed,’ said Mrs Penny, standing in her way.

  Upstairs, an hour later, light falling away from the sky, Ruby hung her eight-year-old body from the window in the highest, furthest room. Frightened to let go, Barbara held on to Ruby’s ankles as she’d been instructed. ‘What can you see, Ruby?’ she asked.

  The swifts. The dark clouds sliced with blue. Silhouettes walking through the streets. Ruby could see everything. All of life spread out across London, breathing and sighing in the twilight. She wished she was out in it too.

  Barbara crouched behind her sister. All she could see was the dingy wall, half green, half distemper. And her sister’s neat backside. ‘Ruby . . .’

  ‘Shut up, Barbara, or they’ll hear.’

  ‘I want to look.’

  ‘You’re too scaredy.’

  It was true.

  ‘Tell me what they’re saying then.’

  ‘I can’t hear if you don’t shut up like I said.’

  Down, down at the far end of the street, tall and slender, Clementine Walker leaned in towards a man. Her eyes were still startling. Her breath was still sweet. But she was all grown up now.

  ‘Well, you’re a peach,’ the man murmured into Clementine’s ear, voice thick with several glasses of cheap gin. He moved his head in towards the perfume of her neck. ‘A real soft one.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ she said, fingers travelling along the folds and seams of the man’s overcoat, exploring every tunnel and twist.

  The man brought up his own heavy hands over the back of Clementine’s smart little jacket. ‘A real doll,’ he drawled.

  ‘Yes,’ Clementine agreed, sliding her palms beneath the heavy wool of his uniform and up towards his armpits, feeling for cigarettes in one pocket, perhaps one of those chrome lighters in the other, a hard little rectangle pressed against his chest.

  ‘Like to tease, do you?’ The soldier flexed his thumbs over the wings of Clementine’s shoulder blades where they rippled beneath a blouse with pearl buttons down the front.

  ‘Maybe.’ Clementine arched her body away from him, a delicate curve, then stood back and held out a cigarette for him to light, slid from behind his own ear. The man stepped back too, a slight stagger, patting at his chest and pulling a lighter from the pocket on his uniform. It glinted in the twilight.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Clementine said, holding up the cigarette, fingertips painted a dark gloss.

  The man flicked the lighter. ‘What do you think?’

  Clementine bent her face to the small flame, light flaring on her brow. ‘I think you did,’ she said.

  The man laughed then, a sour exhalation, and snapped the lighter closed. He fumbled at his coat for a moment, reaching for an inside pocket. ‘I think you’re right,’ he replied.

  Back at 14 Elm Row, down in the depths of the kitchen, discussions were flowing. Love words and sex words and words about legs and breasts. The Penny Family Business in full swing.

  Tony sloshed rum, dark and viscous, into his glass. ‘Something big’s coming,’ he said. ‘I can feel it.’

  Tony was having a great war. Too old to fight. Too fat to wield a fire hose. Too contrary to wear a Home Guard helmet. He was an entrepreneur through and through. Girls and Booze and Cigarettes and Rum. Mrs Penny disliked him intensely at times. But what could she do? It was Tony who made the wheels turn.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ She stood over the kitchen table as though it was the Allies’ last defensive line, pressing a hot iron down onto Clementine’s smartest blouse.

  ‘She’s got someone on the go now. Something serious.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Mrs Penny edged the nose of the heavy iron up into the pleats around the collar.

  Tony sucked up some rum between his two front teeth. ‘I can’t breathe for the perfume she leaves behind in the hall.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it will come to anything.’ Mrs Penny lifted the iron away from the blouse with a heft and placed it back on the hotplate. She didn’t want to burn the chiffon. Never knew what treasure it might reap.

  Tony made a gesture in the air, two hands in parallel curving out, then in, then out again. ‘With her attributes that won’t be a problem.’ He laughed, wheezing and coughing up a hack of phlegm which he spat towards the fender, where it sizzled against the grate.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting, Tony.’ Mrs Penny licked her finger and touched it to the heavy base of her iron, where it spat and sizzled too. ‘She’ll want her cut,’ she added.

  ‘Of course,’ said Tony. ‘Got to look
after the prize.’

  Upstairs Ruby sat on the bed she shared with Barbara, leaning in towards Clementine who’d slipped in through the front door like a whisper, nothing but the faintest hint of oranges lingering in the hall to let anyone know she had returned. Barbara sat cross-legged on the floor, shivering in her nightgown. She wished she could sit on the bed too, but there wasn’t enough room for three. One way or another, Ruby always made sure that she got to the right place first.

  ‘What’s his name, Clemmie?’ Ruby gazed up at her older sister, hair all curled and smooth.

  ‘None of your business,’ said Clementine. She put a hand to Ruby’s head and touched one of those fraying ribbons. Her cheeks were still coloured from the night air outside. A faint smell of cigarette smoke lifted from her clothes.

  ‘Is he the one?’ Ruby’s face was eager.

  Clementine laughed at that. ‘Not likely,’ she said. ‘He’s just work. Tony wanted me to take him on.’

  ‘Do you always take on the ones Tony wants?’

  ‘Usually,’ said Clementine. ‘If they’re good for business.’

  ‘What business, Clemmie?’

  Clementine looked at Ruby. ‘Never you mind,’ she said, lifting a fingertip to her forehead and running it along the curve of her eyebrow. ‘Not something you need to know about.’ Then she dropped her hand and smoothed her skirt instead, before twisting on the bed to reach for her bag. ‘Shall we look then?’ she said.

  And two heads, one dark, one mousy, nodded in unison. ‘Yes, please.’

  Downstairs in the kitchen Tony dribbled more rum onto his tongue and looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe we should invite this one to the house. Do the whole number.’

  Mrs Penny was waiting for her iron to heat again. ‘Do you think he’s worth it?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘Could be. She’s got good taste. Can smell money at a thousand paces.’

  Mrs Penny pressed her fists into her waist. ‘I could get a chicken.’

  ‘Could you?’ It was a long time since Tony had tasted chicken.

  ‘Might take a while though. Two weeks, perhaps. Maybe more.’

  Tony giggled then, a strange sound. ‘Just enough time for her to hot him up.’

  A photographic agency, that’s what Tony had called it in the beginning. Little cardboard images of a girl, all twirling hair and startling eyes, posing on a chaise longue, for any gentleman who cared to pay. He sold them in the pubs where women never went, Clementine in her short frock, hair all ablaze, socks frilled around her ankles above a pair of button-up shoes. It was a good living for a while, before she got too old.

  Then the war came. And with it the first Penny Family Business. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers all the way, lined up to take whatever they could. Clementine taking whatever she could in return. Hair curled with hot papers, lipstick begged or stolen, lines drawn up the back of her calves ‘But what does she do with them?’ Mrs Penny asked, though she wasn’t certain she really wanted to know.

  ‘She has some fun,’ Tony insisted, though he never said how exactly.

  Mrs Penny would watch as they set off every evening down Elm Row – a fat man with tobacco-stained teeth and a slender, startling girl, out to do some hunting in the middle of a blacked-out night. Mr Quinn. Mr Nolan. Mr Jones. Or other men just like them, waiting in the shadows for Clementine to walk past. She was only fourteen when it started. Mrs Penny often wondered how long Tony allowed the fun to go on before he intervened.

  ‘Blackmail,’ Tony would announce when the two of them came home, torches held low in the darkness. ‘Works every time.’ Then he’d laugh and pour himself a large rum to celebrate, tucking the proceeds into the pocket of his waistcoat, while Clementine disappeared upstairs with her share. Foreign cigarettes and packets of hairpins. Razor blades and soap wrapped in paper printed with flowers. Once a single square of silk.

  ‘But what will we do when the war is over?’ Mrs Penny said to Tony, standing with her own cut – a tiny bottle of eau de cologne – ready to barter with the butcher’s wife for extra rations.

  ‘God knows.’ Tony sucked at the end of his empty pipe. ‘Get drunk like everyone else.’

  ‘But what if she doesn’t want to continue?’ Mrs Penny loved bacon. But she loved eau de cologne more.

  Tony looked up towards the ceiling. ‘There’s always the next generation to come.’

  Upstairs, two little girls and one grown one flicked through page after page of a foreign magazine. Reupholstered bras. Shining kitchen gadgets. Cars as huge as boats. Glossy pictures smuggled from the promised land where petticoats were made of real netting and lipstick came in every imaginable shade.

  ‘I’d like to drive a car some time,’ said Clementine, staring at a vehicle as sleek as the polish on a church pew.

  Barbara was gazing at a picture of an electric mixer. ‘I’d make cakes every week.’

  ‘I’d eat until I was sick,’ Ruby said, pausing at an advert for chocolate.

  The other two nodded. They all agreed with that.

  The United States of America. Land of the Free. Provider of the Brave. Supplier of soldiers for the Penny Family Business, then some more. ‘One day I shall go there.’ Clementine ran her fingers across an image of a man, a woman and two children sitting at a table laden with dishes. ‘They look shiny, don’t they?’ Sitting in a kitchen with a very reflective floor.

  ‘But how will you get there, Clemmie?’ Barbara said. ‘Won’t it take a long time?’ A land with all of those things couldn’t possibly be anywhere nearby.

  ‘By boat.’ Clementine touched her finger to the picture of the mother.

  ‘But what about the torpedoes?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ruby, pushing an elbow into Barbara’s side. ‘The war will be over by then.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It just will be.’

  ‘When will you go, Clemmie?’ Barbara sounded anxious.

  ‘Soon,’ said Clementine, her voice distant, as though she had already left.

  ‘You’ll take us with you.’ Ruby’s voice was piercing in the gathering dusk. It wasn’t a question.

  Clementine flicked the pages of the magazine closed and laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’d never leave you.’ Then she reached for her bag again and said, ‘Look what else I got.’

  Two small oranges glowing like two small suns in the gloom.

  They hid the leftover orange peel the next day, scattering it inside a small brown suitcase that Clementine kept on top of the wardrobe in her room. Ruby stood on a chair to get it down, scrabbling with her fingers to try to get a grip. Barbara held on to Ruby’s ankles once again, fingertips pressed tight against the bone.

  ‘Don’t squeeze so hard!’ Ruby jerked her leg away from Barbara’s grasp as she tried to ease the suitcase forward. The wardrobe wobbled.

  ‘But what if someone finds us?’ Barbara’s fingers were slippery now.

  ‘They won’t, if you would just keep quiet.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Just count, Barbara, like Clemmie showed us. One elephant, two elephant, all the way to a thousand.’

  Barbara closed her eyes and began. One elephant, two elephant, all the way to . . . But she couldn’t help it. Her hand just squeezed all the tighter at the thought of what Mrs Penny would say.

  Ruby squeaked and kicked out. ‘What are you doing? Let go!’

  But it was too late. The wardrobe wobbled again. The chair tipped. Barbara just had time to panic before the suitcase came tumbling down, sliding over the edge as though from a precipice, thumping off the very top of her head. ‘Ow,’ she cried, eyes all swimmy. She knew she ought not to cry. But it hurt.

  Ruby picked herself up from where she had tumbled to the floor too, along with the chair and the suitcase. She brushed dust from the front of her skirt and went to stand at the door for a moment to check if anyone else in the house had heard. ‘It’s all clear,’ she whispered at last, as though they were on a mission in occupied
France rather than in their older sister’s bedroom. Then she came back over and lifted Clementine’s suitcase onto the bed.

  It was a battered little thing, all scuffed and dented, rather like Barbara’s head. Barbara fingered her scalp where a bruise the size of a precious rationed egg was just starting to bloom. Ruby stretched out two small hands to the suitcase’s metal clasps and pressed down. Click-clack, open up. The promised land within her grasp at last. Then she lifted the lid.

  The suitcase was empty. Ruby stared down into its bare insides – an empty rectangle lined with blue-and-white-checked paper. She frowned, a small crinkle on her brow, then ran her hands all around the bare paper surfaces.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘Just checking.’ Ruby seemed disappointed.

  ‘Checking for what?’ Barbara was whispering now, as though at any moment Clementine might come and catch them digging where she knew they ought not.

  ‘Secrets.’

  ‘What secrets?’

  But Barbara knew already what Ruby meant. Clementine had a lover that Tony and Mrs Penny didn’t know anything about. ‘He’s called Stanley.’ That was what Ruby had said the night before as they lay in bed, knees pressed to knees, fronts pressed to backs, nibbling at their illicit oranges, licking juice from their chins. ‘He gives her things.’

  ‘What things?’ Barbara had asked.

  ‘Little cards and stuff. Jewellery.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I stole some.’

  Barbara knew that was true, too. Ruby liked to steal things just because she could. Pennies from Tony’s pockets. Mrs Penny’s talcum-powder puffs. ‘Never tell, Barbara. You’ve got to promise.’ Holding out her hand, small palm anointed with spit. Tell no one. That was their motto. Though there was always something in Barbara that just wanted to confess.

  Barbara stole too, of course. A lifetime’s habit. She had a hidey-hole out back beyond the stump of the laburnum tree. In it there was a silver teaspoon that was part of a set and a pink pig made of tin that she had liberated from a neighbour’s child.