by Maureen Lee
‘The more the merrier.’ Mavis held out an arm and Ace tucked himself inside it. ‘I’ll tell you a story, shall I?’
‘Please!’
Rita left the room as resentfully as she’d entered it.
‘Where are our children?’ Lachlan asked when he and Jeannie were about to push past each other in the packed hallway, which had an eerie appeal on a day like today with the rain bouncing off the domed glass roof.
She told him the children were with Mavis, who would make a perfect nanny. ‘She’s such a lovely person too. I’d love it if she came to live with us.’
‘Why not ask her?’
‘I would, except I don’t think Rita would be very pleased.’
‘Jeannie!’
‘Yes, Dad?’ Surprisingly, Tom had turned up again. He gave an awkward little cough. ‘I was wondering if you needed any gardening done? Disraeli Terrace isn’t enough to keep me busy.’
‘It wouldn’t feel right, Dad, employing my own father, paying him a wage.’
‘It wouldn’t feel right taking money off me own daughter, so you can forget about a wage. It’s just that your hedge needs pruning badly, and a couple of your trees don’t look so healthy. Last year, your roses had greenfly.’
‘Did they?’ Their present gardener frequently let them down. He doubled as a painter and decorator, and the work always took precedence over the gardening side. ‘I tell you what, come and see us one day when it’s quiet and we can talk about it then.’
‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ he said with alacrity.
‘Where’s Mrs Denning? I thought you two were getting married.’
‘I’m not sure if I want another wife at my time of life. I’m comfortable as I am. I thought it best to let things stay as they are with Nora – Mrs Denning.’ He blushed ever so slightly.
‘Are you feeling all right, Dad?’
‘I’m fine, Jeannie. Never felt better. Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. I just wondered.’ It was well over a year since Marcia had made the doomladen prediction that there would be another death and it had been on her mind ever since. Even now, whenever the phone rang, she half-expected it to be the news that Tom had died.
Rose watched her daughter with the man who used to be her husband and felt sick. She reached for Alex’s hand and held it very tightly.
‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ he asked softly. He looked rather tired, she thought.
‘Nothing.’ Whenever she saw Tom, she felt the need to reestablish who she was. ‘I’m Mrs Rose Connors,’ she told herself. ‘Alex is my husband and always will be. Tom’s part of the past. He can never harm me again.’
‘I don’t know why we couldn’t stay at Jeannie’s like she asked,’ Mavis complained. ‘You’re not the only one who doesn’t like driving in the rain. All you have to do is sit and criticise. It’s about time you learned to drive yourself.’
‘I have a show to do tomorrow,’ Rita said haughtily. ‘I need to get back tonight.’
‘We could have left in the morning at the crack of dawn. You’d’ve still had plenty of time, and at least it would have been daylight.’ She wiped the windscreen with her sleeve and grimaced. ‘I can’t see proper.’
‘If you must know, I couldn’t wait to get away. You were driving everybody mad, the way you kept drooling over that baby. It was dead embarrassing. She has godmothers, you know, but they didn’t get a look in because of you.’
‘Mrs Bailey and Sadie sat with me for ages. We had a lovely natter. Every time one of ’em took Chloe, she bawled her head off. They were only too pleased to give her back to me.’
‘Mavis Maguire, the perfect mother.’ Rita gave a sarcastic laugh.
‘That’s what Lachlan must have thought. He offered me a job as the children’s live-in nanny.’
Rita felt the hairs rise on her neck. ‘What did you say?’
‘That I’d think about it.’
She’d die if she lost Mavis. The thought of life without her occupied Rita’s horrified mind for the next twenty miles. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked after the longest silence there’d ever been between them.
‘I ain’t sure, darlin’. It’s a lovely house that Noah’s Ark, ain’t it? I like it better since they’ve had it done up. I’ve always fancied learning to swim,’ she added casually.
‘We could have a pool put in the house in Yorkshire, much bigger than the Baileys’.’
‘Mm,’ Mavis said thoughtfully. ‘You’d never believe the wage Lachlan mentioned. He’s not a skinflint, not like some people I know.’
‘If you wanted more money, Mavis, all you had to do was ask.’
‘He said I’d have a car of me own.’
‘I’ll buy you a car of your own.’
‘A Mini? I’ve always fancied a red Mini.’
‘I’ll order one tomorrow.’
‘Oh, and he said something about a mink coat for Christmas.’
Rita looked at her suspiciously. ‘Are you having me on?’
Mavis burst out laughing. ‘Only about the mink. Everything else is true – and I’m holding you to the pool and the Mini and the hike in wages. I’d love to look after those kids, I really would, but although you can be a nasty piece of work when you’re in the mood, I’d never leave you, darlin’.’
It had been an exhausting day and Jeannie and Lachlan went to bed early. The rain continued to fall in torrents. Fly, whose second marriage was on the line, had come to the christening by himself. He’d drunk too much, even for a man who could normally hold his liquor better than most. He’d been put to bed in one of the spare rooms, incapable of driving back to London.
At midnight, dead on time, Chloe announced loudly that she was ready for a feed. Jeannie switched on the bedside lamp, staggered into her room, picked her up, and took her back to bed – there’d been no suggestion of keeping her with them as they’d done with Ace. The least sound woke Chloe and she associated waking up with food.
Jeannie climbed back into bed, undid her nightdress, and the baby greedily attached herself to her breast. Lachlan was fast asleep. Jeannie wouldn’t have minded someone to talk to. It was a lonely business feeding a baby in the middle of the night. She shuffled around a bit in the hope of waking him, but it didn’t work. She cursed both him and their daughter and gave an extra loud sigh, but still Lachlan slept on.
Chloe was ready for the other breast when the telephone beside the bed rang. It was on Lachlan’s side, so she kicked him awake. ‘Phone!’ she hissed.
He grumbled something about being a famous pop idol and she had no right to kick him, before picking up the receiver.
‘Hello,’ he grunted. He listened for a moment, then shot out of bed. ‘Have you called a doctor?’ There was a pause. ‘Right,’ he said crisply. ‘We’ll be over straight away.’ He turned to Jeannie, his face stiff with shock. ‘That was your mother. Alex is dead.’
‘But he can’t be! We only saw him this afternoon.’
‘It only takes a second to die, babe. Get dressed. I’ll wake up Fly. He can take care of the children.’ He pulled on jeans, grabbed a sweatshirt, and left the room.
Jeannie didn’t argue. She put an indignant, half-fed Chloe on the bed and threw on some clothes. A perfectly sober Fly came in. ‘I’m sorry, Jeannie. Alex was a great guy. It was due to him the Merseysiders got off the ground. You don’t have to worry about Chloe. I’ve got kids of me own. I know what to do.’
The doctor hadn’t yet arrived and Alex was sitting on the settee, his head resting on the arm. He was ready for bed, in canary yellow pyjamas and a black corduroy robe. His eyes were open and his face unnaturally pale with the suggestion of a smile. He looked very peaceful.
‘He died in my arms,’ Rose had cried hysterically when she opened the door. She wore a blue quilted dressing gown. ‘We were watching television and holding each other. After a while, I thought he seemed awfully still. I assumed he’d gone asleep. I moved away, I was going to make us some hot milk and go t
o bed, but he just fell on to the arm.’ She ran to the settee and kissed Alex’s still face, over and over. ‘What am I going to do without you?’ she screamed.
‘Oh, Mum!’ Jeannie pulled her mother away, guided her to a chair, and made her sit down. She stroked the soft brown hair. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’
Lachlan was feeling for a pulse. He shook his head slightly, passed his hand over Alex’s eyes and gave a little sigh when they closed on the world for the last time. Then he went into the kitchen and returned with half a tumbler of whisky. ‘Drink this, Rose.’
‘I don’t want a drink,’ Rose shrilled. ‘I want Alex!’
‘Shush, Mum. You’re frightening the girls.’ Jeannie had only just noticed Amy and Eliza, two ashen-faced ghosts, sitting on the floor in their nightdresses in front of the dying fire. They looked terrified out of their wits.
‘Shall I take the girls to Mum?’ Lachlan asked. ‘She’ll look after them.’
‘If they’ll go. You’d better get their dressing gowns and slippers from upstairs.’
The terrified girls seemed relieved to be taken away from their dead father and hysterical mother. Lachlan had been gone less than a minute when the doctor arrived. He examined Alex briefly and phoned for an ambulance. ‘I’ll give you something for your mother,’ he said to Jeannie. ‘A sedative, very strong. It’ll make her sleep. Try and get her to take it straight away. She’ll feel better in the morning, though not much.’ He smiled wryly. ‘People get used to death eventually. Some take longer than others.’
‘What did Alex die of ?’
‘I suspect a heart attack,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but there’ll have to be a postmortem. I’ll wait for the ambulance, but then I’ll have to go. I have another call to make. In the meantime, perhaps you could get your mother into another room, away from the body. It’s not helping.’
Rose obediently took the tablet and hardly seemed to notice when Jeannie led her into the dining room. She was quieter now, resigned. She sat at the table and began to speak in a low, querulous voice. ‘We were watching one of those old black and white films. Alex loved them. We’d get ready for bed and cuddle down together on the settee. It was our favourite time of the day.’ She rambled on. They’d booked a holiday in Majorca in July. ‘As soon as the girls broke up. But we won’t be able to go now, will we?’ She looked hopefully at Jeannie, as if expecting her to say, ‘Why not?’ and that she’d only been imagining that Alex was dead. It had merely been a bad dream.
‘We’ll just have to see, Mum.’
The voice got slower, became slurred. The ambulance came. Jeannie waited until Alex had left Magnolia Cottage for ever and the doctor had popped his head round the door to say he was going, before helping her mother upstairs into the bed where she’d lain with Alex for fifteen years, the best years. She sat with her until certain that the whisky and the tablet had done their work and Rose was fast asleep.
Downstairs, she made tea, and it wasn’t until then that her own tears fell. She wept for Alex, now lying in a cold mortuary somewhere, for her mother and the fatherless girls. Marcia had been right, after all, but it had never crossed her mind that the cruel finger of fate would point at Alex and not Tom.
Lachlan returned. ‘Mum’s dead upset. She really liked Alex, but then everybody did. She’s only too pleased to help by having the girls. Oh, and it’s stopped raining at last.’
Jeannie threw herself into his arms and sobbed her heart out. They sat holding each other, until Jeannie’s sobs subsided and she remembered Chloe had only had half her feed. ‘I’d better go home,’ she said. ‘Or should you go and fetch her and I’ll feed her here? Oh, I don’t know what to do! I don’t want her waking Mum up.’
‘Chloe’s OK,’ Lachlan soothed. ‘I rang Fly from Mum’s. He made her a bottle. She’s fast asleep. I gave him this number in case there’s an emergency.’
They spent the rest of the night talking, sleeping occasionally, drinking tea, until a glimmer of light began to show through the curtains and the birds began to sing, heralding the arrival of a brilliantly sunny April day.
Alex was buried in the blue velvet suit he’d worn when he’d married Rose Flowers. Rose wore her matching blue wedding dress to the funeral. ‘It’s what he would have wanted,’ she said. ‘If he’s up in heaven watching, he’ll be pleased.’ She was bearing up remarkably well, mainly due to Ida Bailey, who’d been a tower of strength. It wasn’t all that long since she’d lost her own husband, and she knew exactly how Rose felt and which words to use in comfort. The two women had always liked each other, but from now on, they were to become the best of friends.
Life goes on. Jeannie was surprised at how quickly it returned to normal, that she was able to laugh, feel happy, think about other things. Even her mother began to smile, though the smile would never again reach her eyes and there was always something sad about it. She and Mrs Bailey – Jeannie was never able to think of her as anything other than ‘Mrs’ – went on the planned holiday to Majorca with the girls.
‘Ida’s the only person in the world I could have gone with,’ Rose said. ‘She’s still grieving for the doctor and me for Alex. Neither of us feels embarrassed about having a little weep now and again.’
Perhaps Chloe had felt chastened by being abandoned in the middle of a feed and left with a stranger, because from that night on she cried less and slept more. She was growing to be a sunny, reasonably well-behaved little girl, chocolate box pretty with her mother’s summer-blue eyes, though she would always be a more demanding, much noisier child than her brother.
Ace was a happy, supremely contented little boy. The Baileys continued to remark on his resemblance to Lachlan, so much so that she began to wonder if Ace actually was his child. And if that was the case, the same could be said for Chloe. She encouraged herself in the belief that they were Lachlan’s children, deliberately ignoring the similarity to Sean in Ace’s sweet, glowing smile and dark blue eyes, and that Chloe’s face in repose bore the same closed expression as Sean’s and her hair was the same sooty black.
Tom came almost every day to tend the garden of Noah’s Ark. Alex had been dead a year, it was spring again, and Tom was on his knees, clearing the soil of weeds at the foot of the hawthorn hedge, when Jeannie’s mother arrived. She often dropped in at about eleven for coffee. The Survivors were touring Australia and Lachlan wouldn’t be home for another two weeks.
Usually, Rose kept out of the way of her first husband, but on that day she was in the kitchen making coffee when Tom came in for his morning cup of tea. He insisted on keeping to the kitchen when in his gardening mode, old habits dying hard.
To Jeannie’s amazement, she heard them talk for a long time. Every now and then, their voices would rise, as if they were having an argument. She resisted the urge to go and see what it was about and stayed to keep an eye on Chloe, who was playing on the carpet with giant Lego. On the patio, Ace was furiously riding his bike around in circles. Connie could be heard singing while she made the beds.
When her mother came in with the coffee, she was smiling. ‘Your dad’s in a terrible predicament. He wants to vote Conservative, as usual, in the election, but if they win, there’ll be a woman prime minister, Mrs Thatcher. He doesn’t think a woman’s capable of running the country.’ The election was in a few weeks’ time.
‘So, what’s he going to do?’ Jeannie asked.
‘I expect he’ll end up voting Tory. I don’t suppose you remember, but years ago, whenever there was an election, he used to tell me where to put my cross. I did as I was told, of course. The poor man nearly had a fit just now when I said I would be voting Labour.’
‘Is that what Alex voted?’
‘No, love. He was Liberal.’ She laughed drily. ‘Your dad asked the same question. It seems even you don’t think I’m capable of making up my own mind about anything that matters.’
‘I probably won’t bother to vote. I never have before.’ There’d always been far more important things
to think about.
‘Well, you should,’ her mother said reprovingly. ‘The Suffragettes went to prison and were force fed, one of them even died, to win the right for women to vote. You’re letting them down.’
Sean McDowd telephoned from New York the day Lachlan was due back from the tour of Australia. It was May now, and the French windows were open for the first time to a bright, sunny morning. In the garden, Tom was giving Ace a piggy back and Chloe was impatiently waiting for her turn. Tom was softer now, far more indulgent with his grandchildren than he’d been with his own children.
Jeannie had neither seen nor spoken to Sean since she’d stayed at the Savoy two years ago. He asked how she was, and she told him she was fine, and he said that he was fine too.
The formalities over, he said casually, ‘I’ll be in London next week. I thought we could meet up for dinner.’
She scrambled round in her brain for a reply. ‘I never get to London these days, Sean,’ she said in a rush. ‘I’m too busy with the children.’
‘Of course, you’ve got two now. Last time we met you only had one.’
Her head swam. Did he know! Was he shrewd enough to have noticed the nine-month gaps between them making love and Ace and Chloe being born? She decided to change the subject before the silence between them became noticeably long. ‘Your mother came to stay the other week,’ she said.
‘Yeah, she said she had a great time. She loves your kids, Jeannie.’ He paused. ‘She misses having grandkids of her own.’
‘Well, there’s plenty of time. Sorry, I have to ring off. I can see Chloe’s fallen over and she’s crying.’ Chloe was gleefully riding on Tom’s back. ‘’Bye, Sean.’
Jeannie slammed down the receiver and clutched her hot face with both hands. He did know! But he couldn’t possibly know for certain. All he could do was guess. And even if he guessed the truth, there was nothing he could do about it.
As the hours passed, she wondered if she’d seen a double meaning in Sean’s words that hadn’t been intended. She went over their conversation a dozen times and each time it sounded more innocent. Her fears were almost certainly the product of an over-heated imagination – or a guilty conscience. Even so, that she had come so close to thinking he might have guessed the truth was disturbing.