by Jo Mazelis
What had she, Moth ever done to attract such suspicion? She had been far too young for the depravity and cunning of which she was accused, far too young to cast off the wolf’s skin thrown upon her and see it as a thing apart. She was a lamb unbloodied in the ripe pasture of the world, and yet the weight of the predator’s disguise crippled and disfigured her. She had no chance to grow up straight and tall and true, no matter how she strived after goodness.
There was no changing anything, the damage was done. A taxi was on its way up the road to the station, she waved to it and the driver made a u-turn causing another driver to blast his horn. This seemed to prove to her that an alteration in plans always created discord somewhere.
‘To the Grand,’ she said. ‘Then on to Bear Road.’
He was not one of those chatty taxi drivers who felt compelled to discuss the weather or the state of the world. He had a set of beads hanging from his driver’s mirror that she at first took for a rosary, then thought better of it, as his look, sallow skin and a great head of grey black curls told her otherwise. There was a photo fixed to his dashboard; dark-haired girls in brightly coloured party frocks, gathered around an older woman. She would have liked to have a conversation about these girls, ask how old they were now and did he also have sons and if not, was that a sorrow to him? But she had a way of turning such friendly queries into an interrogation, of setting a person on edge.
She ran into the hotel and gave her bag to reception as her room was not yet ready. She half expected to bump into the man from the train, but then he must be off, padding respectfully around the Royal Pavilion, standing behind a fat silky scarlet rope, peering at an elaborately curtained bed or columns topped with copper palm leaves. She should have gone with him, saved him from being – what had he said – an odd fish. Back in the cab, she fastened her seat belt and as the driver pulled off she said, ‘Those are your daughters, I suppose.’
‘They are no daughters of mine,’ he said and shook his head, denying and disowning them with such vehemence, that she felt afraid.
She was entirely ignorant of the fact that certain taxi drivers shared their vehicles with others; that this man sat with these prayer beads and the photograph of the woman and her five nameless daughters day after day with no more relationship to them than to the steering wheel or the gear stick. Nor could she know that his English, still a strange meat on his tongue, had been half-learned from Shakespeare and Dickens as he sat beneath drying octopus in his father’s taverna in Chania, Crete.
Her vision grew blurred as tears poured from her eyes and the unfamiliar streets seemed to flash past in a riddle. She had no idea where she was, where he was taking her.
At last he slowed the engine. ‘Bear Road,’ he said. ‘What number?’
A long row of houses stood on one side of the road with a featureless tall grey stone wall opposite. Above the wall the tops of trees could be seen, green and dense and giving no indication of what lay beyond.
‘I don’t know,’ she said and thought, do cemeteries have numbers? Or churches? Or crematoriums? She opened her handbag to find the paper with all the details, but it was gone. He brought the car to a standstill and turning in his seat said, ‘It’s a long road.’ A car honked its horn behind them and he drove a little further until he found a place to pull in. A long black hearse sailed majestically past, the coffin in the back engulfed by flowers. Four more gleaming limousines followed.
‘It’s a funeral,’ she said. ‘Follow them.’
He raised his hands in despair, but tagged onto the tail of the procession. Further up the road the cars turned one after another and poured through a wide gate in the wall.
The taxi followed pulling up behind a long line of cars. She paid the driver and instantly forgetting her distrust of him, tipped him generously. Gathering herself, smoothing her dress, she walked unsteadily towards the small black-clad gathering. People nodded at her or smiled the strange sad smiles of greeting reserved for funerals. Many of the mourners were youngish, smart and good looking; there was no one over fifty or sixty that she could see. Many of the people dabbed at their eyes or consoled one another with tender gestures; pats on the back, a hug, a long held handshake. More cars arrived, Bentleys and Wolseleys and Jaguars, disgorging another thirty or so people.
Moth felt a pinch of jealousy, if she died how many would attend her funeral? And what would they look like? A hodge podge, a rabble in fraying suits worn for weddings, christenings, job interviews and funerals for year after year, or not wearing black at all, but maroon, like her mother, who had only one good winter coat.
She turned to watch the men slide the coffin from the hearse and began to hear the name Freddie peppering the air around her in many conversations. Freddie or Frederick or darling Fred. Or poor Fred. Brave Fred. And it dawned on her: she was at the wrong funeral.
As the mourners made their way inside, Moth walked back to Bear Road. Once there she stopped and looked around, aghast. There were three cemeteries very close to one another, all with different names. How could this be? She had the sensation that someone was watching her confusion and discomfort, laughing behind their hand.
‘Then you’ll know.’
The words were always there. Then you’ll know. Then you’ll know.
‘Know what?’ she said angrily, her voice strange to her at this crossroad of death, so manicured and suburban under a blue afternoon sky. ‘You never said, Audrey. What will I know?’
At the entrance gates she passed from the dazzling light into the shadow of the trees and found that she could barely see. She hesitated a moment uncertain of her direction, aching for all the lost opportunities of her life, and particularly the most recent. She saw herself in the cool rooms of the Royal Pavilion, a gentleman by her side, cupping her elbow as he pointed to some detail in the hand-painted wallpaper. Then stumbling blindly, desperate now to be gone she stepped into the road and straight into the path of the hearse bearing her aunt’s coffin. The driver was late and as there were no cars following him he was driving at a less than stately pace.
Moth remembered now the beautiful chinoiserie wallpaper that must have lodged in some bright corner of her mind since childhood; a bird, the Paradise Flycatcher perhaps, rising up in the air in an explosion of energy and colour, its long tail feathers like gay, powder-blue ribbons. And she, Moth, flew up in air and only when she fell to earth did she finally know everything.
VELVET
Clive’s wife had to leave before the foal was born. Dawn was breaking and the mare had been increasingly restless; its eyes rolling wildly as if in search of a cause for the mysterious agitation inside her body. The vet was there and the stable owner too, so they had no need of her presence, but she had wanted to see it happen. Witness the miracle of it, despite the blood which habitually made her queasy. She’d once seen a black and white film of a foal being born; the curious sight of those long gangly hard-hoofed legs, slick as hot butter slipping from the mother. But no, it was Julia’s tenth birthday and there was the party to organise.
The tulips stood in straight lines, twelve inches apart in weed-free soil that was grey and dry and hard. One of the girls at the party looked at these tulips from time to time with an uncertain curiosity. Being ten years old she was unable to make a decision about the flowers. The house that the garden belonged to was older than her own and her house was in its turn older than those on the council estate where most of the girls at the party went to school. Julia, whose party it was, was always top of the class, read clever books, was never untidy or unruly, answered questions in class, and drew benevolent glances and words from the teacher as she sat straight-backed, her precise mouth opening and closing on perfectly enunciated words.
After the food, the sandwiches and crisps, the cake and jelly, the children had been ushered into the garden to play, but Julia had gathered six of the girls in the shed and excluded three others. Such a thing had never happened at a party before, the adults were meant to supervise everything,
to organise games like musical chairs or pass the parcel, to hover nearby ensuring fairness.
The three excluded girls, dressed in their prettiest frocks and white knee-high socks and shiny patent shoes, wandered morosely about the garden, restless, uneasy and insulted. The heads of the taller girls could be glimpsed moving about inside the shed through the high square window, but whatever they were doing in there was unknowable. The interior of the shed itself seemed a tempting secret – it might have been filled with books and a writing desk, or every impressive toy and game, Sindy and Barbie and Tressy dolls standing in serried ranks near miniature plastic wardrobes stuffed with miniature clothes on miniature clothes hangers. All the shoes in rows and in pairs. Sindy’s perfect duffle coat with its tiny wooden toggles, Barbie’s air hostess uniform. There might have been a chemistry set in there. A microscope. A full-sized Dalek. An easel and real tubes of oil paint. A sewing machine. A typewriter. Endless sweets. A diskette record player (though no music could be heard).
One of the children banished from the shed was a strange girl who stayed at the periphery of everything, who had acquired a sort of invisibility; she bothered no one and no one bothered her. It was hardly a surprise that she was excluded from Julia’s den, more surprising that she had been invited to the party at all. This exclusion was an alien experience for the other two, yet all three were caught in this no-man’s-land. They were barred from Julia’s inner sanctum and could not go back inside the house. The garden itself had few distractions, there was no swing or slide to play on, no rubber ball to throw or catch, no trees to climb or shrubs to hide behind, no rope to skip with.
The atmosphere of the house and garden, though the three girls could not have named it as such, was stark and oppressive. They were unwanted and under scrutiny, but there was no solidarity in this, they saw one another as shabby reflections of each other; this one strange, this one thin and poor with countless brothers and sisters who yet possessed an aura of goodness. This one with tangles in her hair and dirty, scabbed knees who was always in trouble, always naughty, but without guile or cruelty.
They lingered, or traipsed along the square path, tested the thin green lawn with its sharp blades of new grass, two of them staying together, while the third kept her quiet vigil at a distance. She might grow up to be a nun. Or a prostitute. Never quite of this world.
Storming the clubhouse was out of the question. They did not peer into its window, nor listen at its door. Nor yell nor kick at its creosoted timbers. They did not slip around the side of the house to knock at the kitchen door and complain to her mother that Julia had banned them from her clubhouse, for the mother was as austere as Julia herself, as cold and formal and judgmental with hair clipped short into a mannish helmet just like Julia’s.
Each girl had arrived bearing a gift; toys or games chosen by their mothers, wrapped in pretty paper by them. The presents ensured safe passage over the river Styx and into the delights of the birthday party. To be excluded like this was a terrible thing.
Dull was the afternoon under the weak sun. Dull the featureless garden. Dull the windows of the house that reflected only the dull garden, the pale, cloud-threaded sky. Dull the joyless silence and the scrape of small feet on paving slabs or gravel. The only colour came from the tulips with their sturdy stems, their beautiful goblet-like flower heads, red and yellow and orange.
Experimentally one of the three girls crouched by the flowerbed in order to study one of the tulips more carefully. The stem looked thick and strong and straight with the flower head forming its cup exactly over the centre of the stalk. Perhaps it was this that gave her the idea for what she did next, because to all intents and purposes it looked like a sturdy container for something … but what? Nearby in the dusty, dry-crusted earth she spied a small friendly pebble no larger than a regular marble. She picked it up and carefully, almost tenderly, dropped it into the tulip. The result was disappointing; she had wanted to see the stone nestled inside the flower, hunkering down among its complicated innards, its stamen, pistil and anther. No, the result was sudden and shocking. She let the pebble drop from her fingers and the tulip’s head abandoned its ardent and lovely uprightness, snapped at the neck and fell onto the unyielding earth below.
In a different sort of garden, where banks of flowers grew in massed clumps, the damage might have passed without notice, but here, where the sparseness, the regimentation of their planting was absolute, the one decapitated stem was unmissable.
The girl somehow expected her crime to be immediately detected, for a scream of outrage to emanate from the woman in the house or from Julia in the shed or from one of the other two girls adrift in the raft of the garden. Or perhaps from the flower itself – a high warbling screech of pain: falsetto, indignant, accusing.
A boy might have set to work with glee deliberately meting out the same fate to all of the tulips, but a girl – a normal girl – was not meant to be on the side of destruction, especially the destruction of flowers.
She glanced around, saw no angry parent striding towards her, saw no furious girl mouthing accusations at her from the shed window, heard no furious cry. She picked up the flower head and tried to reattach it by balancing it on the stem, but it only fell again and again, bruising some petals and losing others. Giving this up she attempted a burial, but the ground was hard and unrelenting. Finally she chose flight, putting as much distance between herself and the crime scene as the modest garden would allow.
Julia’s mother looked with fury at the dining table where her daughter and her guests had sat an hour before. The paper plates were littered with sandwich crusts and iced biscuits that had been licked clean, then abandoned. The cherryade Julia had insisted on having seemed to have been spilled everywhere in large and small pools on the white linen tablecloth. One of the Hepplewhite chairs which had only just been reupholstered at great cost had a worrying damp patch on the seat. Little beasts, she thought to herself, utter, utter beasts.
To make matters worse Mrs Brookes had refused to change her day and had cleaned the house yesterday as usual and would not be back until Friday. Well, once the little monsters had finally gone home, Julia would just have to clean up the mess herself. That was only fair. And one had to be fair, didn’t one?
Trust Clive to be away this week of all weeks. Thinking of her husband, she turned sharply on her heel and hurried up the stairs, her court shoes tapping on the polished steps in a satisfying way. She found the key to her husband’s study and let herself in as she did every couple of days or so. Sometimes she wondered if he knew she knew where he hid the key, if so that was just typical of him. She had seen that smug little smirk across the breakfast table once too often to take him at face value.
Everything looked just as it always did. His ‘at home’ pipe was in the ashtray, there was a clean sheet of blotting paper in its leather holder (she had in the past held a blotting sheet up to a mirror to decipher the royal blue hieroglyphs imprinted there). Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes was on the gramophone turntable. A copy of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack1964 lay next to his armchair. Why was the cover yellow, she always thought, shouldn’t it be green? She did not understand men.
If he knew she knew about the key, then what was the point?
She drifted to the window and was surprised to see a strange child sitting on the step near the coalhole. It was trying juggle three misshapen balls, or perhaps they were stones, throwing them high in the air, then tilting her head back to follow their flight in order to catch them. Wearing a dress that must have been made from an old pair of curtains, faded moss green velvet with a drooping sash. Cheap-looking imitation leather shoes. Off-white socks with wrinkles at the ankles. It looked grubby in some unseen and indefinable way.
She was about to bang on the window in order to shoo the wretched thing away when she remembered – Julia’s party! Of course. How could she have forgotten!
But why on earth was this child on her own? Where was Julia? She was meant to keep an eye on
her guests and make sure they did not misbehave.
Just then two more little girls came into view, walking slowly and by the look of it singing some nonsense or other as their mouths were opening and closing in unison.
Silly creatures. She much preferred horses. If she’d given birth to a foal instead of Julia she couldn’t have been more delighted, but that sort of thing only happened to the Greeks or in fairy stories.
She left Clive’s study not bothering to relock it, that would bloody well show him, wouldn’t it? Clip clop down the stairs, briskly into the lounge and out through the French windows.
The creature on the step didn’t even look up and the other two had their backs to her. Faintly she heard their surprisingly sweet voices mournfully singing, ‘How-ow could you use a poor-or maiden so?’
A memory seemed to suddenly scorch her. Of herself when young. Of happiness; the sharp remembrance of a lighter heart.
Walking faster now, diagonal across the lawn, to the shed. Where else would that daughter of hers be? Trying the door, she found it locked and rattled it furiously. A flurry of shushing and shuffling erupted from inside, then silence. She slapped the door with the palm of her hand.
‘Go away!’ Not Julia’s voice. No.
The two little girls who had been singing stood nearby watching her, fascinated, their song frozen in the spring air.
She moved to the shed’s window, peered in. She saw nothing at first, then perceived a figure lying prone on the floor wearing nothing but a pair of navy knickers. Several shiny heads of freshly washed hair encircled her. It looked satanic, the one girl lain out like a corpse, while the others kneeled over her. It took her breath away; she could not quite believe her eyes.
Then a scream made her turn her head. The two little girls who had been singing squealed together in a unified cry. There was the wretched creature in the velvet frock, blood pouring from her nose, down her face and the front of her dress, splashing the concrete path.