by Eve Chase
For me, embarrassingly, in my sleep, it’s Pa. I was his favourite, Ma says. He called me Margot A-go-go because I was so cheerful and busy, always asking questions that made him laugh: ‘Where does the sky end and space begin?’ ‘If God is everywhere is He in the bristles of my hairbrush?’
I like that Pa called me Margot A-go-go: confirmation of a different version of me, the carefree little girl I was, like the photo of me riding on his shoulders, Pa laughing, running across Kensington Gardens in the rain. Also, a great improvement on ‘strange Margot’, despite Ma and my sisters insisting it was just an affectionate nickname.
Pa’s loss still feels epic yet utterly obscure. My memories are tombola random. I remember his face, the strong Wilde jaw jutting out above his medals, the jaw you see repeated in all the portraits hanging from the walls of Applecote Manor, Pa’s old family house. But not his voice: it’s got muddled with voices on the wireless, voices in my head. Ma says, ‘We’d all be destroyed if we could remember everything, Margot.’ This is her way of picking over the past, as if it were a box of chocolates, I think, ignoring the nasty coffee creams.
Sometimes I think that part of me is forgotten, or lost. And I don’t know if I’ll ever find it, whether it’s something you lose and can’t replace, like an adult tooth, or if it can re-grow. But, more than this, I’d like to know if my skin will ever be like my sisters’, smooth as soap. The red itchy patches at the back of my knees appeared the day of Pa’s funeral and never healed. When the sores are oozing and classmates stare in the school showers, I wonder why, out of all of them, I’m the one cursed with it, if my skin is a punishment for a terrible thing I haven’t done yet. And what that might be.
My skin is the only thing my sisters won’t tease me about, secretly relieved that I got it and not them. It brings out rashes of kindness. Dot lets me sleep in the cooler bed by our bedroom window. Flora rubs ointment into the bits I can’t reach. Pam briskly reminds me that at least I’m clever – ‘which goes some way to compensate for your missing chunks of common sense’ – and that everyone has something they don’t like about themselves, apart from Flora, she adds wryly, since Flora is flawless.
That always makes me laugh. I need my sisters more than I do Ma sometimes.
It’s not that Ma isn’t a good mother. Just that she’s different from other mothers, the ones who didn’t lose their husbands in odd, terrible accidents, who don’t live in tall, narrow, tilt-to-the-left houses on the wrong side of Chelsea, with a sooty stucco exterior, the interior painted the blazing colours of an African parrot – in defiance of English weather and good taste – the rooms strewn with Ma’s marabou scarves, curlers and books.
Nothing works here. The fridge is balmy. We can see the picture on the television – Ma bought it with much fanfare to watch the Coronation – only if we hang up the old blackout curtains. The Hoover sulks accusingly in a wooden box beneath the stairs, awaiting a handyman to offer his services for free in exchange for a smile from my mother. Over the years her smile has won over all sorts of handymen.
Ma hates paying for anything if she can help it. Not for Ma dropping her shillings into a shop’s cash carrier, waiting for it to ping along the wire to the cashier. Ma’s purchases are all on credit. She has complicated bills all over London. She also has the longest legs west of Sloane Square. This helps.
Luckily, the Wildes – Pa’s older brother, Perry, and his wife, Sybil, the ones from Applecote Manor – pay for Squirrels, our bracing boarding school in Oxfordshire, where we are meant to be right now. (They chose a grander, far warmer one in Dorset for their daughter, my cousin Audrey, but it wasn’t enough to save her.) The Wildes won’t give a shilling directly to Ma. It’s no secret they don’t approve – Pa’s parents wanted him to marry a nice steady county girl with a title, and instead they got an outspoken theatre agent’s daughter from Bloomsbury, their very own Wallis Simpson, to tempt their second son astray. Also, Ma doesn’t care much what people think about her, which makes her quite dangerous.
The summer Grandma Wilde died in a deckchair, happily sunbathing dead for an hour before anyone realized, she told me Ma was ‘bringing you up like cats’. I nodded in agreement and sipped my lemonade. It does feel we have as many lives, forced to adjust our manners and allegiances according to the different worlds we inhabit, learning to say the right thing, or not reveal too much, as we move between Ma’s bohemian household, the stolid steadiness of Squirrels Ladies College, then our smart London friends’ polite parlours for tea, buoyed along by the once-grandish heritage of our surname. Flora and I have learned to slip different selves on and off like socks. I’ve not decided who I am yet anyway – I feel like a completely different person from one day to the next – and Flora simply moulds herself to the company she’s in, always meeting expectation. Dot’s strategy is a sweet silence: she observes her surroundings carefully before impinging upon them, pushing her true feelings into her pinafore pockets. Pam can only ever be Pam, always gesturing too hard, saying too much, too loudly, her contours unique and fixed.
Pam’s the one who let slip to the Wildes how our drawing room fills with the laughter of Ma’s musician friends, men with skin the colour of burnt sugar, their accents strange and rich, fingers flying, like birds, over the frets of their banjos. How Ma prefers the company of artists and actresses from Chelsea to the tightly smiling wives of Kensington, discussing their new (cold) refrigerators on sunny street corners. How she seems to survive on Lucky Strikes and our maid Betty’s bewildered attempts – at Ma’s insistence – at Elizabeth David’s cold tomato soup, gazpacho.
We resent the gazpacho intensely: it makes us different from other girls. Whenever we return from school, we pour the bloody mess down the sink and Flora cooks an old-fashioned English roast. We all love Flora for this. Even Ma forks in the soft flakes of beef, unable to help closing her eyes and purring with pleasure, as if the roast is something lost and found, a taste of an easier, more conventional life. She tells Flora she’s going to make a wonderful wife some day – soon, she hopes, to a first-born son, not the impoverished second, like she did, the silly goose. The thought of Flora marrying always makes me stop chewing, my throat closing. I don’t know who we sisters will be without each other to differentiate us. Take one of us away and we’d all lose our balance, like removing a leg from a kitchen table.
But I also want Flora to be happy since happiness suits her – I can never quite trust it, I’d rather rely on thinking – and for Flora that means a husband, children and ‘a comfortable house where I won’t freeze in winter, a housekeeper, a little bit of evolution, that’s all’.
Ma also spends a lot of time thinking about our husbands (even though she hasn’t got one herself), the as yet unknown cast of four men lurking, waiting in our future, like shadows in a long, narrow London alley. To this end, Ma makes all of us walk across the drawing room in front of Patty, her Royal Ballet dancer friend with the mad lettuce-green eyes, ready to whack us on the back of a leg with a tortoiseshell shoehorn if we slouch. My A grades are viewed as a distraction: ‘Unwise to be too clever, Margot.’ Pam’s ambition to be a nurse (unlikely, given her brute impatience if anyone falls ill) is affectionately dismissed – ‘I’m sure there are easier ways of annoying your mother, if you put your mind to it, Pam’ – and dwarfed by the issue of Pam’s athletic ‘sturdiness’, which refuses to be diminished by the rubber roll-on foundation garments that Ma makes her wear to parties.
‘Your faces must be your fortune, girls,’ Ma will shrug. ‘I won’t pretend otherwise.’
The problem is, I don’t turn heads like Flora. Neither do I know how to command attention in a room, like Pam, through sheer, unembarrassable life force. I’m not unpleasant-looking, just not particularly memorable. Given my low position in these rankings, I told Ma it’d be more sensible for me to aspire to a job, teaching, for example, where my face doesn’t matter. ‘Oh, Margot, have I taught you nothing?’ She looked baffled. ‘Look at me, forced into independence! Y
ou cannot possibly envy it. Far simpler to get married.’ She says that being married to Pa was the happiest time of her life. I remember fragments of this, haphazardly sewn together, like the hexagons of different-coloured cloth in my bedroom quilt: my parents embracing in the hall; Ma tenderly kissing the glossy red stump of Pa’s thumb. But, really, the truth is, none of us sisters has any idea what a marriage looks like, day to day, or how it must feel to live with men. With such scant evidence to go on, we just have to believe in it, like the Old Testament. But I secretly don’t believe in that either.
‘Margot.’ Flora tugs me into the corridor, out of my thoughts. She shuts the drawing-room door with a supple flick of her hip. ‘Ma’s not eaten or slept properly in two days now.’
‘Ma could survive on gin and air for months, unfortunately. Excuse me.’ Pam storms past with a piece of toast and marmalade, in one of those moods when she continually searches us out to make a show of ignoring us.
‘I do understand why she’s cross, Flora,’ I say, after Pam’s slammed her bedroom door as loudly as possible.
‘Let’s not be too harsh.’ Flora is kind too, the kindest. Pam points out it must be easy to be kind if you’ve got a face like Flora’s. Even as a young child Flora drew attention, with her violet-blue eyes and moue of a mouth. Now she’s seventeen, she has something else that makes men stutter stupidly. She frowns, and rather than the frown making her look grumpy, it gives her luminous face complexity and depth. ‘It’s hardly Ma’s fault.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘But she and Jack always get back together and then it happens again.’ I become aware of movement at the top of the stairs and look up to see Dot crouched against the banisters, hands wrapping around her spindly legs, looking as though she might dissolve in the watery spring light like a sugar cube, leaving nothing behind but tortoiseshell spectacles. I wonder how long she’s been there.
Seeing that she’s been spotted, she smiles hopefully. ‘Margot, will you play a game of chess with me?’ Suggesting chess is a very Dot-ish way of drifting over a crisis. ‘I asked Pam. She said she’d rather watch her fingernails grow.’
‘Toenails!’ Pam bellows, from behind the bedroom door.
‘Not now. Sorry. We’re trying to work out what to do, Dot,’ I say, in the soft voice I reserve for my little sister.
Dot listens as Flora and I prod and poke our predicament into different shapes. After a while, Flora wanders towards the kitchen, muttering about omelettes. Dot slips away.
I check on Ma, who is asleep now, her cigarette a wand of grey ash between her fingers. I stand watching her awhile, my mother in her ice-cube-blue satin dressing-gown on the battered chaise-longue, the faint lines around her eyes and mouth that she battles with cold creams and finger-pinching and don’t make her any the less lovely but I know bother her all the same. Her vulnerability touches and irritates me. I shut the door quickly, seek out Flora again.
Flora could almost be Ma from behind, willowy, tall, leggy, except that Ma is far more likely to be melting down an almost-finished lipstick, stretching out its life with cooking fat, than making lunch. ‘Get the crockery, Margot.’ Flora doesn’t turn. We can distinguish each other by the sound of sniffs or footsteps, the particular rustle of a certain leg in a certain skirt.
Pam and Dot join us at the table and we demolish the omelettes in seconds. We’re about to fall on Betty’s pound cake, fat slices that would horrify our mother, whose waistline owes much to the long ration-book years, when her voice swims towards us: ‘Girls?’
To our astonishment and relief, we find Ma sitting upright, bare feet planted on the floor, her fingers tucking under her curls at the nape of her neck. ‘I’d murder a strong cup of tea.’ Her voice is frogged with cigarettes, her smile sheepish.
‘I’ll make you one,’ says Flora, not taking her eyes off Ma as she backs into the hallway. Without our eldest sister’s presence, there’s a sense of incompleteness. For something to do until her return, I raise the needle on the gramophone, Ma’s American jazz.
Ma starts to tap out the rhythm lightly on her knee. ‘Oh, this one just breaks my heart,’ she says, with a slow, wistful smile, as if feeling sad is better than feeling nothing at all.
‘Tea, Ma.’ At Flora’s light-footed return, something releases. She slides the tray on to the wobbly bamboo side table: a napkin, a cup of tea, the correct shade of brown, a sugar-dusted sponge finger.
Ma sips, depositing a tea-leaf beauty spot on her lip. She pats the side of the chaise-longue. ‘Here. Sit next to me, girls. I want to talk to you. I’m sure we can all fit. Yes, even you, Pam.’
We squeeze up, warm and squished. Ma lifts the sleeve of her dressing-gown, releasing the smell of oranges and cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass scent. ‘I’ve had some time to think, these last two days.’
‘And drink.’ Pam’s navy eyes flash beneath her heavy brows.
Ma stares down at her hands in her lap. ‘I’m sorry if I worried you all. Really.’
‘You didn’t,’ says Pam, sharply, because Ma doesn’t look sorry enough. ‘It was perfectly obvious you weren’t dying.’
‘Please don’t be so cross, Pam.’ Ma holds her calf, rocking back a little, so that the satin stretches and gleams across her shin. ‘Would you like my sponge finger?’
Pam shakes her head but keeps glancing at it.
‘You certainly look better,’ says Flora, brightly, trying to steer us away from a screaming match. Our rows can be heard in the street. When neighbours whack on the wall, Ma whacks back with the fireside bellows.
‘But we’re meant to be at school,’ I point out. ‘It’s Monday.’
Ma covers her mouth with her hands. ‘What a twit I am. Well, you mustn’t let that fractious old rhino of a headmistress punish you. You must blame me entirely.’
‘We will,’ Pam says tightly. ‘And we do.’
Ma waits a moment, lets Pam’s words settle, the music rise and fall, then clinks down her teacup and says, ‘Well, first, you may as well know that I do intend to live a little while longer. Which is a relief to me at least, although possibly not to Pam.’
Pam scowls but still can’t quite hide a minute flicker of a smile. The next moment, she swoops down on the sponge finger, which we all recognize as forgiveness of sorts.
Heartened, Ma wiggles herself straight, her breasts shaking beneath the satin. ‘Second, who remembers the Beamishes? Old friends of your father’s. Mad Sophie Beamish. Ginger husband, Foreign Office. Enormous ear lobes.’ She parts her fingers a couple of inches.
We shrug, wary of the Beamishes intruding into a conversation that still may career off in the wrong direction at any moment, like a bike without brakes, as charged conversations involving Ma and Pam often do.
‘Well, they’ve only invited me to Marrakesh!’ Ma lowers her voice conspiratorially, widens her eyes at each of us in turn. ‘Imagine. Bunny in the Red City.’
Flora and I exchange an alarmed look. We’d rather not.
Ma inhales before speaking, then the words rush out: ‘They’ve offered me a secretarial job with the consul, girls. A fancy apartment, maids thrown in.’
The sponge finger crumbles as Pam bites into it.
‘Secretarial?’ I splutter. My mother could start a third world war with her typos. ‘Why on earth –’
‘Thank you, Margot,’ Ma clips. ‘They said I’d bring colour, liven the place up a bit. And I speak good French. There’s a girl to type and whatnot.’
‘So you’ve said no, obviously?’ Flora says.
‘Well …’ Ma’s voice wavers, betraying doubt and excitement, like a bride about to marry a man she doesn’t know as well as she should.
‘Dear God,’ groans Pam.
The back of my knees immediately start to itch ferociously.
‘I can’t stay here in London, bumping into Jack and that – that girl.’ Ma’s forehead furrows, and I see the lines that are waiting for her turn to get old. It st
rikes me that she looks, for once, her full thirty-nine years today. ‘And I need to earn some proper money. Margot, stop that infernal scratching.’
‘But Marrakesh.’ Flora blinks very fast, trying to absorb the steamy foreignness of the word.
‘For how long?’ Pam demands sharply.
‘Not long enough for you to forget me,’ Ma tries to joke. But it falls flat. She picks up her cup and attempts to sip some tea, but it is empty. The rest of us have a shocked conversation with our eyes. ‘A few months? A year? I’m not sure. It’ll go in a flash.’
But it is suddenly impossible to imagine Ma not on the chaise-longue by the window, sipping tea, Fang’s paws outstretched.
‘You can’t make this sort of decision now. You’ve been so upset these last two days, Ma, and you’ve not had lunch,’ says Flora, stricken.
‘Flora, darling, I’m quite lucid, and think much better on an empty stomach. You see, as well as earning, I could let this house – there’s a shortage, lots of country families looking for townhouses. Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘What? Something old and damp in SW10?’ scoffs Pam.
‘Pam, listen.’ The room trembles on the edge of a row again. ‘I have four girls to keep in stockings, hats and food on my own. Four. I’ve already sold my best bits of jewellery.’ I feel a fresh flush of shame recalling Ma’s and my last furtive trip to the small dark room at the back of the jeweller’s in Burlington Arcade, the pained passing over of Grandma’s brooches, each one a small glittering scandal, a defeat. ‘The theatre work is drying up. Artist-model earnings? Hopeless. I’m running out of options.’
‘I won’t let you,’ says Flora, eyes glistening. ‘I won’t let you go.’
Ma touches Flora’s smooth cheek lightly with the back of her hand. ‘Flora, my lovely Flora, you are seventeen, leaving Squirrels this year. I want you in Paris by the autumn.’