The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Come in?’ Beneath his tight collar Mr Nye’s skin flushed the faintest hint of turkey red before returning to its almost translucent state. ‘Yes, yes. Of course.’ He shuffled back to let her enter, both he and his sombre outfit merging to one against the dark interior wall.

  Margaret ducked as she stepped through the door into a narrow passageway, squeezing past the old man to a hint of raw onions and boiled meat. The floor was a crazy maze of tiles, all chipped and broken. Paint peeling from the walls. But beneath the decrepitude there was a cold elegance that told Margaret everything she needed to know. There was money here, or had been once. But more importantly, there was paperwork. Dictated, notated, marked, boxed and filed – little pieces of paper guarding the secrets of those who wished to flannel and obscure. Margaret knew that she was getting close to something at last.

  The passage gave way to a tiny room, low plaster ceiling bowed at its centre as though filled with the accumulated secrets of two hundred years. Just like the passageway, the whole room was made of shadow. In one corner a standard lamp threw out an ineffective cowl of light. There were books, lots and lots of them, looming from ceiling to floor. On the mantelpiece there was a stoat, stuffed, with a tiny hole in its skull. The stoat regarded Margaret through two black eyes, one winking, the other dull. From beneath the lapels of her stolen coat a fox winked back.

  The biggest item in the room was a huge mahogany desk, nothing on it but a blotting pad and three telephones with large circular dials. There was no sign of the woman with the circumspect tones. The prehistoric Mr Nye edged past Margaret to stand behind the huge desk himself, knuckles pressed deep into the blotting paper, hands trembling with the effort of keeping himself up. ‘I wasn’t expecting a visit so soon,’ he said, his voice a remote echo of what it must once have been.

  ‘Just passing,’ Margaret lied.

  ‘Do you live in London?’ Mr Nye peered at her, pupils glimmering like tiny bits of grit.

  ‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘Well, yes . . .’ The stoat eyed her too. ‘Well, sometimes.’ She tailed off.

  ‘Sometimes,’ repeated Mr Nye, as though this slippery answer was all he might expect from a woman like her. The tip of his tongue protruded for a moment from his almost non-existent lips. ‘Well . . .’ he said. ‘I suppose you’d better follow me.’ He scrabbled with one of his cadaver hands towards an edition of British Bankruptcy Law volume 9, grasping and pulling at a section of bookshelf that revealed itself as a door. Open sesame, thought Margaret, to all the paperwork Janie could ever desire.

  Mr Nye’s inner sanctum seemed even smaller than the room outside. Another bulge in the ceiling. Another leering lamp. But what really filled the space was what hung on the walls. Paintings. Hundreds of them (or thereabouts). All shapes and all sizes, from skirting board to cornice. A thousand naked women staring at Margaret.

  Behind her there was a movement in the air, a faint expulsion. Mr Nye appeared to be laughing. Not a joyful sound. ‘My collection,’ the old man said, shutting the disguised door with the faintest of clicks. ‘All my girls.’

  At least that was what Margaret thought she heard him say.

  Mr Nye shuffled himself behind another huge desk. ‘I would offer tea . . .’ He pressed a finger to his temple, where a squiggle of blue beat out a continuous thrum.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Margaret thought it unlikely that William Nye knew where the kettle was kept, let alone the teabags. What mattered here was business, not the niceties of cake.

  Mr Nye’s finger pressed a small dent into his skin. ‘Mrs Plymmet usually does that kind of thing.’

  ‘Mrs Plymmet?’

  ‘My assistant.’

  The woman with the caramel tones.

  Mr Nye Senior gestured to a chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Please sit down.’

  The chair was very upright. An improving, Sunday sort. Margaret eyed it for a moment then did as she was told. ‘Is she working today? Mrs Plymmet, I mean.’ She held her ancient handbag tight in her lap as though to protect herself against some sort of unspecified threat.

  ‘Today . . .’ Mr Nye pushed his finger along what used to be his hairline but was now just an extension of the naked dome of his head. ‘Yes, yes. But I think she’s out.’

  ‘And your colleagues?’

  ‘My colleagues . . .’

  He seemed confused. Margaret understood at once. There were no colleagues, not of any sort. She changed tack. ‘Do you come into the office every day?’ Mr Nye couldn’t deny that he was well beyond working age.

  ‘Not every day.’ Mr Nye glanced around the room before letting his gaze return to Margaret once more. It was surprisingly steady for a man with tremors everywhere else. ‘But I like to come and sit with them once in a while.’ He gestured with a shaky hand to the naked women on his walls, breasts and ankles and hipbones (amongst other things) all thrusting themselves towards where Margaret sat.

  ‘Is one of them your wife?’ Two could play the kind of game Mr Nye seemed to enjoy.

  The old man gave a sort of cough, licked at the crust of white around his mouth. ‘No, no. They’re . . .’

  Margaret eyed the walls again. ‘Yes, they’re very . . .’

  Dirty. In more ways than one.

  Mr Nye’s thin lips stretched back over what remained of his teeth. Margaret couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to be smiling. ‘Do you still collect?’ she said. No reason not to be polite.

  ‘Occasionally.’ Mr Nye flicked his eyes towards a small empty space on the wall to his left. ‘Now and then.’

  Margaret looked at the space too. ‘My mother has one that would fit perfectly there.’

  Small and brown, propped up against the box-room wall.

  ‘Your mother.’ The old man slid his eyes back towards her. ‘Does she live in London too?’

  But Margaret hadn’t come all the way south to discuss the contents of her mother’s box room. ‘How about your son?’ she asked. ‘Does he collect?’

  ‘My son?’ The old man’s eyes gleamed for a moment, needle points in the gloom.

  ‘Nye & Sons. I thought . . .’

  Nye Senior blinked twice. ‘There are no sons.’

  Margaret knew when a line of conversation had been cut. She decided to get on with the reason she had come. What difference did a son lost or found make to her? ‘My client,’ she said, reaching for the slim brown folder. ‘Mrs Walker.’

  She waited for the polite denial of such a person’s existence. But it never came. Instead Mr Nye crouched forward in his chair, hands trembling, tongue tracing the line of his faint top lip. ‘Yes. Mrs Walker,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tell me everything you know?’

  On the train south Margaret had done a résumé for Mrs Walker in the hope that it might prove more elucidating than she knew it really was.

  Shopped at Costcutter, always wore a red coat, dyed her hair red too, smoked Supersize, enjoyed whisky, paid in cash. Thief. Was anywhere between seventy-five and eighty-five years of age (or thereabouts). White skin, blue lips, liver like paste. Wore a skirt, a knitted cardigan, nylon tights, and owned a green dress with sequins along the hem. Left behind an orange on a plate, half a tin of peas, and some sort of nut with something indecipherable scratched in its shell. No paperwork to speak of other than a sheet of newsprint detailing Births, Marriages and Deaths, and a jewellery receipt.

  As they passed the Angel of the North standing broad and proud on its hilltop, Margaret had wondered what would be left of her should the worst come to the worst – a catastrophic derailment, carriages crashed and mangled, everybody inside crisped to a stick. There’d be nothing to identify her but the remains of a red, stolen coat and a photograph of two silver-haired children who should have been hers, but weren’t.

  She hadn’t even said goodbye to her mother, just slipped out of the front door onto tarmac glistening with frost and headed to the train station before anyone else was awake. No black car waiting in the car p
ark to see Margaret go – nothing pursuing from her past. And she didn’t bother to leave a note. How long would it take to raise someone from the dead? A day? Two days? Or a lifetime, perhaps. There was a certain thrill to it. Running. Reminding Margaret of the person she had once been. And could be again, perhaps. For as she’d hurried up the hill away from her mother’s blue-and-yellow lilo, Margaret had known that this could be the new beginning she was after. Besides, what was it Barbara always said? Leave no trace.

  Through the wall in the small outer office of Nye & Sons solicitors, one of three large phones began to ring. Margaret stopped reading through her list of objects lost and found, thieving habits and a jewellery receipt scrawled with the solicitor’s phone number many years before, and waited for someone to speak. A hundred women (or thereabouts) looked down on where she sat.

  ‘William Nye & Sons, solicitors.’ Liquid vowels seeping through the wall.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Plymmet.’ Mr Nye pushed his thin lips once more into what constituted his smile and waited in silence until they both heard the receiver being replaced. Then he pressed a button (also disguised) on the underside of his desk. In the antechamber a bell sounded and a voice echoed through.

  ‘Yes?’

  Mr Nye’s voice echoed back. ‘Mrs Plymmet, will you come in, please.’

  Mrs Plymmet entered from behind Margaret’s chair. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had a client.’

  ‘Not a client, Mrs Plymmet.’ Mr Nye indicated Margaret. ‘But a visitor from the north.’ He made a small sound that could have been amusement, or perhaps something else.

  Margaret turned in her chair. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Mrs Plymmet coloured, just the faintest of blushes under her orange skin. She was old too, but not as old as Mr Nye. More sixtyish than ninety, rings rattling on her fingers where the knucklebones stood out.

  ‘Mrs Penny is enquiring about a Mrs Walker,’ said Mr Nye. ‘I was about to assure her we have never had any clients of that name. Can you confirm?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Nye,’ said Mrs Plymmet, and bent her head in accord.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Plymmet. That will be all.’ The old man dismissed his assistant as though he still came to work every day and told her what to do, rather than the other way around.

  Then he leaned forward across his desk and studied Margaret in a manner that made her feel as though he could see right through her red, stolen coat. ‘I think that’s everything too, don’t you?’ He pointed to a piece of headed notepaper that had suddenly appeared on the desk in front of them. ‘But if you’ll write your address here. Just in case. I wouldn’t want you to miss out if something should arise.’

  Margaret had one last go as they stood on the doorstep, the old man holding her hand for a brief moment with a surprisingly tight grip. ‘Why do you think your phone number is written on the jewellery receipt?’ she asked.

  But Mr Nye Senior was already retreating, disappearing back into the dark.

  Margaret’s real appointment happened in a place not twenty minutes’ walk from Ironmonger Lane, in the dark corner of a monumental gallery, in front of a painting covered in a savage sweep of oil.

  ‘Very valuable,’ the warder said as he led Margaret further and further along a marble corridor towards the designated meeting point. ‘Out of fashion for a while. But worth a lot now.’

  The girl in the portrait was impossibly young, laid back on a green chaise longue, skin flaring like the centre of a jet of gas. She was naked apart from a pair of green shoes, legs laid out all this way and that. Her eyes followed Margaret wherever she stood.

  Margaret waited beneath the strange apparition for ten minutes until the real reason for her visit to London appeared – the details of the appointment written out on the back of a Nye & Sons business card and slipped into her hand as she left. Brisk and resolute, clattering down the marble corridor without a backward glance. A Londoner through and through, hands clasped tight around a bag, hair a helmet of dazzling bronze. She wore a coat that belted in the middle and ended just above two bony knees. The lines around her mouth were set as rigid as her hair, the result of a thirty-a-day habit since she was barely out of her teens. Jessica Plymmet, come to keep her word.

  As she approached, Margaret put out a hand for a welcome shake. But just like Mr Nye, Jessica Plymmet kept hers to herself. So Margaret dropped her hand once more and got on with business. She was in London, after all. Who had time for the pleasantries of life? ‘Thank you for meeting me,’ she said, forgetting for a moment that it was Mrs Plymmet who had arranged to meet her.

  Mrs Plymmet dipped her head in a gesture that suggested it was nothing. ‘Your mother was kind to me once,’ she said.

  ‘My mother?’ That was not the introduction Margaret had been expecting.

  ‘I wrote just before Christmas with all the news – an old friend looking to be in touch.’ The older woman adjusted the collar of her coat. ‘You meet all sorts of people in the law.’

  Solicitors and Associates. Clerks and Partners. Complainants and Complainers. Secretaries toiling away through the back. Barbara had told Margaret often, as she was growing up, how tiring it was to drudge away for fifty years in the service of the courts. But she had never mentioned an acquaintance down in London.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew my mother.’ There was an opportunity here if Margaret wanted to take it. The first person in thirty years who might reveal something about her past.

  But that wasn’t why Mrs Plymmet had come. ‘The phone number . . . on the receipt,’ she said. ‘May I see it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Margaret opened her slim brown folder and took out the receipt from Rose & Sons, jewellers of distinction.

  Mrs Plymmet took the ancient piece of paper, all crumpled and curled, and studied it carefully. ‘It’s our number,’ she conceded, as though Margaret needed this confirmed.

  ‘Do you recognize the handwriting?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘No.’ Mrs Plymmet looked away.

  ‘But why do you think your number was written there?’

  ‘Just in case.’ The older woman stared at Margaret for a moment as though daring her to ask more. ‘And look what happened.’

  She was right, of course.

  Margaret took out her photocopied sheet of Births, Marriages and Deaths, unfolding it carefully to reveal a dusty nut and a flutter of paper scraps detailing a series of girls’ names. ‘Do these mean anything to you?’

  Mrs Plymmet frowned down at the nut. ‘No,’ she said.

  And this time, Margaret believed her. More or less. She folded up the photocopied news-sheet, all its treasures inside, then closed the slim brown folder. For a moment the two women stood in silence, Mrs Plymmet staring at the painting on the wall beside them, Margaret staring at her.

  Then the older woman said, ‘I have something you might be interested in.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s not much.’

  ‘But there is something.’

  Mrs Plymmet dipped her head in acknowledgement and slid a hand beneath her coat. She paused for a moment before pulling out a faded cardboard wallet, tied with a ribbon that must once have been a deep shade of pink.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Walker file.’

  And Margaret felt it at once. That tingle that began in her fingers and travelled like mercury straight to the centre of her heart. ‘Where does it come from?’ she asked.

  ‘From the filing cabinet, of course.’

  ‘Mr Nye denied having a client called Walker.’

  Mrs Plymmet made another gesture, unmistakable in its dismissal. ‘He’s a very old man now. Not what he used to be.’ For a moment her eyes glowed, the colour of a tiger’s hide, before she turned them back towards the folder in her hand.

  Then Margaret understood. Here was a woman just like her. Receptionist. Administrator. Personal Assistant in more ways than one. A dish on the side that never quite became the proper meal. Margaret gazed at the large diamond that
adorned the third finger on the older woman’s right hand. At least Jessica Plymmet had got something useful out of her arrangement. Not just a single, working lady trapped by the follies of her youth.

  ‘It may not be relevant.’ Mrs Plymmet held the file out towards Margaret. ‘But I thought you ought to have it.’

  Margaret reached to take what was being offered. Mrs Walker within her grasp once more.

  But the other woman hesitated, just for a moment, before releasing the Walker file into Margaret’s care. ‘It’s important, don’t you think?’ she said, glancing at the painting once again. ‘To honour one’s debts where one can.’

  1961

  Ruby with her eyes so bright, a stone more precious when cut, steeped in blood much thinner than water (buckets of the stuff), wandered around the gallery as though she owned it. Which, in a way, she did. For tonight it was her looking down from all the walls. Legs all this way and that.

  She shimmered as she walked, slithering through the crowd in an emerald dress cut high at the neck, landing just above the knee. She was only twenty-five, but she sashayed through the throng as though she knew all there was to know of life. Then some more.

  Mr William Nye Senior thought he knew all there was to know of life too. A vibrant man with vibrant hair and a thirst for the unusual in amongst the orthodox. Also a scar on his back where shrapnel had once pierced his insides. ‘Lucky,’ declared the doctor in the army hospital as he dug at the wound. But William Nye Senior knew even then that it had more to do with being in just the right place at just the right time. The mess left behind by the man standing next to him taught him that. Afterwards it was simply a matter of grasping life when it came.

  He watched now as Ruby slid through the crowd towards where he stood – a young woman in need of nothing but a jewel or two to offset the gleam of her hair. Mr Nye delighted in young women and he delighted in art. Here, the two merged. From high on the wall a naked Ruby gazed down at him, dashed onto the canvas with thick sweeps of oil. In the portrait Ruby wore nothing but the same pair of shoes she had on now.

  ‘Her azure veins. Her alabaster skin. Her coral lips. Her snow-white dimpled chin.’