A La Carte

by Jeffrey Archer

  The girls in the office often spoke about her quietly, wonderingly. However does she manage to be so well-turned out, so unflustered, so even-tempered, they asked each other? How does she cope with a child and a boyfriend and a job?

  They had heard all about her little daughter, Jennie. Jennie was six years old, and went to a good school in Wimbledon near the girl’s house. She had straight, shiny perfect blonde hair, like her mother, and round blue eyes, like her mother. They hadn’t seen a photograph because she kept forgetting to bring one in. They forgave her this because she obviously had a lot to think about. She had an excellent nanny, who was a friend of hers, and she spent the weekends and evenings with her daughter and her boyfriend, who adored the daughter too. They must make a lovely couple, the other girls said enviously. So attractive, so shiny, so perfect.

  They had not met the boyfriend because he worked different hours and so could not spare the time to come and pick her up from work but they had heard all about him, oh yes. His job at the fitness centre, his paternal values, his enthusiasm to do the washing-up and the ironing and how he had been the first to leap out of bed and change nappies when Jennie was a baby. Was it a difficult birth, they had asked her, thinking into the future? She had blushed and said no, and they had noticed that she was reluctant to talk about … well, personal things.

  They thought of her as a girl but she was really thirty- two years of age. But her hair was so girlishly, charmingly tied in a ponytail, so gleamingly, brushingly pulled back, revealing her shiny, youthful skin, her small, neat, perfect ears, her round blue eyes, her neat, small, rosy mouth, that they always thought of her as a girl. Her boyfriend didn’t believe in marriage, she said, apologetically, carefully, in their lunchtime chats over a tub of cottage cheese turned pink with salmon flakes. He felt that their relationship was stable and perfect already and why change it? Why indeed? The girls nodded. Why change such a perfect thing, why risk it, why alter the smooth balance for, after all, no good reason?

  She kept herself to herself in the office and the girls understood this. After all, she had a lot to cope with. Sometimes she took days off to go to her daughter’s school play, or the parents’ evenings. Or to take Jennie to the dentist. They thought of her as a role model; they could imagine themselves in her in five years’ time; so neat, so shiny, so organised.

  One day the girl got up and, according to her usual routine, put on the coffee percolator, stood in the shower, dressed immaculately – no snagged tights here – and sat in front of her Ikea pine dressing-table putting on her Beauty Without Cruelty make-up. The natural look, just enough, but not too much. No. That would never do.

  And then the phone rang. Now, at eight o’clock in the morning, this was very unusual.

  ‘May I speak with Miss or Mrs Hardy?’ said a timorous voice.

  ‘Speaking,’ said the girl. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  She’d sometimes forget that she wasn’t at work because the phone hardly ever rang at home. She had a few very close friends and they were mostly girls at work.

  This is your daughter speaking,’ said the strange little voice. ‘Remember me?’

  On the tube the girl went past her stop and had to catch the tube back again. She went up the ‘Down’ stairs and rushed out of the station unusually flushed.

  At work she managed to mangle up the photocopier, set the franking machine for the wrong date and spill coffee over the MD within the first half-hour. Everyone was very surprised and unnerved, because the girl was never late, never hurried, never out of place. Her hair was loose and uncombed and her eyeliner seemed to be crooked.

  At lunchtime she flew out of the office, knocking over a pot-plant in her wake. This was also unsettling because she tended to all the office plants and indeed cooed over and cosseted them rather lovingly.

  She sat in the café waiting for her daughter to come to meet her. The girl who eventually turned up was not at all expected. She didn’t have neat shiny hair or smooth, ironed, neutral clothes. She stormed in rather noisily, wearing a bright purple fringed dress which covered her bottom – but only just – and thick black tights and enormous shoes like big boats. She wore aggressive make-up and her hair was fixed on her head like a cockatoo. Her first words were, ‘Why did you abandon me?’ She sat down fiercely and waited for the answer.

  ‘Oh, Jennie …’ said the girl, her head in her hands.

  ‘I’m not called Jennie. I’m called Andrea,’ said the new daughter.

  ‘Oh, Andrea,’ said the girl. ‘I was sixteen. I was – your age. I wasn’t allowed to keep you, you see.’

  The new daughter sat thinking for a minute or two. Then – ‘I would have fought like hell, to keep a child. I’m dying for a child. I wouldn’t do that to anybody, leave them in the care of the world.’

  Then – ‘Have you got other kids? Ones that you did keep?’

  The girl swallowed and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Have you got a husband? Or a boyfriend?’

  No.

  ‘What do you live like? Have you got a house, or a flat? Do you go to work? What do you do?’

  Stop, please stop! I don’t have a life. I have a nice pine house, a little house at the end of the world and I don’t have a life.

  Would you like to see my house?

  Back on the tube to Wimbledon, the last outpost of humanity. The door opened smoothly. The pine floors, stripped over and over again free of any life. The smooth, white, painted walls, sterilised of any colour. No house room for mistakes here.

  The brand new daughter walked all around the little house. ‘Isn’t it neat?’ she cried. ‘Is it not tidy, shiny, tasteful?’ The girl had no answer for she was watching her huge, boisterous new daughter, who had the shoulders of a bruiser and the wild energy of discovery,

  ‘I can see why you gave me away,’ said the daughter at last. There simply isn’t room for me here. I am not tidy, nor shiny, nor should I ever wish to be.’ And with that she left the small house noisily, clumpingly.

  The girl sat there for a long time and then she stood up. She straightened a print that the daughter had knocked awry in her wake and she smoothed down the covers on the sofa. She swallowed.

  THE CASE OF THE PARR CHILDREN

  Antonia Fraser

  ‘I’ve come about the children.’

  The woman who stood outside the door of the flat, her finger poised to ring the bell again, looked desperate. She also looked quite unknown to the owner of the flat, Jemima Shore. It was ten o’clock on Sunday morning; an odd time for anyone to be paying a social call on the celebrated television reporter. Jemima Shore had no children. Outside her work she led a very free and very private existence. As she stood at the door, unusually dishevelled, pulling a dark blue towelling robe round her, she had time to wonder rather dazedly: Whose children? Why here? Before she decided that the stranger had rung the wrong bell of the wrong flat, and very likely the wrong house in Holland Park.

  ‘I’ve come about the children.’

  The woman before her was panting slightly as she repeated the words. But then Jemima Shore’s flat was on the top floor. It was her appearance which on closer inspection was odd: she looked smudged and dirty like a charcoal drawing which had been abandoned. Her beltless mackintosh had presumably once been white; as had perhaps her ancient tennis shoes with their gaping canvas, and her thick woollen socks. The thin dark dress she wore beneath her mackintosh, hem hanging down, gave the impression of being too old for her until Jemima realised that it was the dress itself which was decrepit. Only her hair showed any sign of care: that had at least been brushed. Short and brown, it hung down straight on either side of her face: in this case the style was too young.

  The woman before Jemima might have been a tramp. Then there was the clink of a bottle at her feet as she moved uneasily towards Jemima. In a brown paper bag at her feet were the remains of a picnic which had clearly been predominantly alcoholic. The image of the tramp was confirmed.

  ‘Jemima Sho
re, Investigator?’ she gasped. ‘You’ve got to help me.’ And she repeated for the third time: ‘You see, I’ve come about the children.’

  Jemima recoiled slightly. It was true that she was billed by this title in her programmes of serious social reportage. It was also true that the general public had from time to time mistaken her for a real investigator as a result. Furthermore, lured by the magic spell of know-all television, people had on occasion brought her problems to solve; and she had on occasion solved them. Nevertheless, early Sunday morning, well before the first cup of coffee, seemed an inauspicious moment for such an appeal. In any case, by the sound of it, the woman needed a professional social worker rather than an amateur investigator.

  Jemima decided that the lack of coffee could at least be remedied. Pulling her robe still further around her, and feeling more than slightly cross, she led the way into her elegant little kitchen. The effect of the delicate pink formica surfaces was to make the tramp-woman look grubbier than ever. At which point her visitor leant forward on her kitchen stool, covered in pretty rose-coloured denim, and started to sob loudly and uncontrollably into her hands. Tears trickled between her fingers. Jemima noticed with distaste that the fingernails too were dirty. Coffee was by now not so much desirable as essential. Jemima proceeded first to make it, and then to administer it.

  Ten minutes later she found herself listening to a very strange story indeed. The woman who was telling it described herself as Mrs Catharine Parr.

  ‘Yes, just like the wretched Queen who lost her head, and I’m just as wretched, I’m quite lost too.’ Jemima raised her eyebrows briefly at the historical inaccuracy – hadn’t Catharine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, died in her bed? But as Mrs Parr rushed on with her dramatic tale, she reflected that here was a woman who probably embellished everything with unnecessary flourishes. Mrs Parr was certainly wretched enough; that went without question. Scotland. She had come overnight from Scotland. Hence of course both the mackintosh and the thin dress, even the picnic (although the empty wine bottles remained unexplained). Hence the early hour, for Mrs Parr had come straight from Euston Station, off her sleeper. And now it was back to the children again.

  At this point, Jemima Shore managed at last to get a word in edgeways: ‘Whose children? Your children?’

  Mrs Parr, tears checked, looked at Jemima as though she must already know the answer to that question: ‘Why, the Parr children of course. Don’t you remember the case of the Parr children? There was a lot about it on television,’ she added reproachfully.

  “The Parr children: yes, I think I do remember something – your children, I suppose.’

  To Jemima’s surprise there was a pause. Then Mrs Parr said with great solemnity:

  ‘Miss Shore, that’s just what I want you to find out. I just don’t know whether they’re my children or not. I just don’t know.’

  ‘I think,’ said Jemima Shore, Investigator, resignedly drinking her third cup of coffee, ‘You had better tell me all about it from the beginning.’

  Oddly enough Jemima did genuinely remember something about the episode. Not from television, but from the newspapers where it had been much discussed, notably in the Guardian; and Jemima was a Guardian reader. It had been a peculiarly rancorous divorce case. The elderly judge had come down heavily on the side of the father. Not only had he taken the unusual step of awarding Mr Parr care and custody of the two children of the marriage – mere babies – but he had also summed up the case in full for the benefit of the Press.

  In particular he had dwelt venomously on the imperfections of Mrs Parr and her ‘trendy amoral Bohemianism unsuitable for contact with any young creature’. This was because Mrs Parr had admitted having an affair with a gypsy or something equally exotic. She now proposed to take her children off with him for the glorious life of the open road; which, she suggested, would enable her children to grow up uninhibited loving human beings. Mr Parr responded with a solid bourgeois proposition, including a highly responsible Nannie, a general atmosphere of nursery tea now, private schools later. Columnists had had a field day for a week or two, discussing the relative merits of bourgeois and Bohemian life-styles for children. On the whole Jemima herself had sympathised with the warm-blooded Mrs Parr.

  It transpired that Jemima’s recollection of the case was substantially correct. Except that she had forgotten the crucial role played by the so-called Nannie; in fact no Nannie but a kind of poor relation, a trained nurse named Zillah. It was Zillah who had spoken with calm assurance of the father’s love for his children, reluctantly of the selfish flightiness of the mother. She had known her cousin Catharine all her life, she said, although their material circumstances had been very different. She pronounced with regret that in her opinion Catharine Parr was simply not fitted to have sole responsibility for young children. It was one of the reasons which had prompted her to leave her nursing career in order to look after the Parr babies.

  Since Zillah was clearly a detached witness who had the welfare of the children at heart, her evidence was regarded as crucial by the judge. He contrasted Catharine and Zillah: ‘two young women so outwardly alike, so inwardly different’. He made this also a feature of his summing-up. Miss Zillah Roberts, who has had none of the benefits of money and education of the mother in the case, has nevertheless demonstrated the kind of firm moral character most appropriate to the care of infants …etc. etc.’

  In vain Mrs Parr had exploded in court:

  “Don’t believe her. She’s his mistress! They’re sleeping together. She’s been jealous of me all her life. She always wanted everything I had, my husband, now my children.’

  Such wild unsubstantiated talk did Mrs Parr no good at all, especially in view of her own admitted ‘uninhibited and loving’ behaviour. If anything the judge’s summing-up gained in vinegar from the interruption.

  Mrs Parr skated over the next part of her story. Deprived of her children, she had set off for the south of Ireland with her lover. Jemima had the impression, listening to her, that drink had played a considerable part in the story – drink and perhaps despair too. Nor did Mrs Parr enlarge on the death of her lover, except to say that he had died as he had lived: ‘violently’. As a result Jemima had no idea whether Mrs Parr regretted her bold leap out of the bourgeois nest. All she discovered was that Mrs Parr had had no contact whatsoever with her children for seven years. Neither sought nor proffered. Not sought because Mr Parr had confirmed Mrs Parr’s suspicions by marrying Zillah the moment his divorce became absolute: ‘and she would never have permitted it. Zillah.’ Not proffered, of course, because Mrs Parr had left no address behind her.

  ‘I had to make a new life. I wouldn’t take any money from him. They’d taken my children away from me and I had to make a new life.’

  It was only after the death of Mrs Parr’s lover that, destitute and friendless, she had returned to England. Contacting perforce her ex-husband’s lawyer for funds of some sort, she had discovered to her astonishment that Mr Parr had died suddenly several months earlier. The lawyers had been trying in their dignified and leisurely fashion to contact his first wife, the mother of his children. In the meantime the second Mrs Parr, Zillah, the children’s ex-Nannie and step-mother had taken them off to a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands. As she put it to the lawyer, she intended ‘to get them and me away from it all’. The lawyer had demurred with the question of the children’s future outstanding. But Zillah, with that same quiet air of authority which had swayed the divorce court judge, convinced him. It might be months before the first Mrs Parr was contacted, she pointed out. In the meantime they had her address. And the children’s.

  ‘And suddenly there I was!’ exclaimed Mrs Catharine

  Parr to Jemima Shore, the vehemence returning to her voice. ‘But it was too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘Too late for Zillah. You see, Miss Shore, Zillah was dead. She was drowned in a boating accident in Scotland. It was too late for Zillah.’ Jemima, sensing
the depth of Mrs Parr’s bitterness, realised that what she really meant was: too late for vengeance.

  Even then, Mrs Parr’s troubles were not over. The encounter with the children had been even more upsetting. Two children, Tamsin nearly nine and Tara nearly eight, who confronted her with scared and hostile eyes. They were being cared for at the lodge which Zillah had so precipitately rented. A local woman from the village, responsible for the caretaking of the lodge, had volunteered. Various suggestions had been made to transfer the children to somewhere less lonely, attended by less tragic memories. However, Tamsin and Tara had shown such extreme distress at the idea of moving away from their belongings and the home they knew that the plan had been abandoned. In the meantime their real mother had also announced her arrival.

  So Mrs Parr took the sleeper to Inverness.

  ‘But when I got to Scotland I didn’t recognise them!’ cried Mrs Parr in a return to her dramatic style. ‘So I want you to come back to Scotland with me and interview them. Find out who they are. You’re an expert interviewer: I’ve seen you on television. That programme about refugee children. You talk to them. I beg you, Miss Shore. You see before you a desperate woman and a fearful mother.’

  ‘But were you likely to recognise them?’ enquired Jemima rather dryly. ‘I mean, you hadn’t seen either of them for seven years. How old was Tamsin then – eighteen months? Tara – what – six months?’

  ‘It wasn’t a question of physical recognition, I assure you. In a way, they looked more or less as I expected. Fair. Healthy. She’d looked after them alright, Zillah, whoever they are. She always looked after people, Zillah. That’s how she got him, of course.’

  Then why —’ began Jemima hastily.

  Mrs Parr leant forward and said in a conspiratorial tone: ‘It was spiritual recognition I meant. Nothing spoke to me and said: These are my children. In fact a voice deep in me cried out: Zillah! These are Zillah’s children. This is Zillah’s revenge. Even from the grave, she won’t let me have my own children.’ She paused for effect.