Withering Heights

by Dorothy Cannell

  “Weren’t you nervous?” I asked, inching the plate of biscuits toward me.

  “Well, I was a bit at first, Mrs. H, sitting in that room with the curtains drawn and dance-of-the-seven-veils music piping up from the old-fashioned gramophone. But then I decided it was silly to get the willies over a little thing like being sent back in time. What’s the worst that could happen? That’s what I said to meself.”

  “You could have found yourself stuck back in the eleventh century without your toothbrush or a change of underwear. What if Madam hadn’t been able to bring you back? I’m not sure it does to play around with this stuff.”

  “Thought you might see it that way. It’s why I didn’t say anything when I got here this morning! Or could it be you’re jealous?” Mrs. Malloy stuck her nose in the air.

  I felt myself blush. It was true. I’d always had a sneaking desire to discover if my interest in gothic romances sprang from having once been a Victorian damsel in distress. Had I glided down the turret stairs at dead of night with only the pale moon’s glance to light my way toward the priest hole in trembling hope of finding skeletal evidence of mayhem at the manor? Had I mustered the moral fortitude to spurn the master’s ardent advances and remind him that his invalid wife still clung to life on the edge of her chaise longue and he could never divorce her because he was a Roman Catholic and the scandal would kill his mother? Had I displayed the heroism of a Jane Eyre in refusing to become his mistress? That would depend, I supposed, on whether the darkly handsome master looked anything like Ben when he slowly removed his dressing gown. Would there be tears in his eyes and that wonderfully husky note of desperation in his voice when he begged me to let him set me up in a fabulously expensive apartment in Paris?

  I was picturing the endless nights of forbidden passion, the crystal chandelier that cast its radiant glow over the Louis Quatorze bed, the tumbled silk sheets, and the dear little poodle on its monogrammed cushion when Mrs. Malloy intruded with blatant insensitivity into this most private of moments.

  “You’re the one off in a trance, Mrs. H!”

  “Just thinking your visit to Madam LaGrange must have been an interesting experience.” I poured us both another cup of tea. “Did you find out if you have lived before?”

  “After she brought me out of the trance, Madam LaGrange told me I’d never stopped talking the whole time.”

  “How much did you remember?”

  “No need to sound suspicious, Mrs. H! The veil falls back into place. That’s the way it works. Anyway, it turns out I was in the circus in two previous lives. The first time I was married to one of the clowns and the mother of seven. So it didn’t leave much time for making it up the ladder-”

  “To the trapeze?”

  Mrs. Malloy eyed me coldly. “Put it that way if you like. The ladder of success is what I was getting at.”

  Did the tattered remnants of disappointed ambition explain why she’d emphasized early in our relationship that she didn’t do any jobs that required going up stepladders with a bucket? “Seven children.” I sympathized. “No wonder George is your one and only this time around.”

  “My second life in the circus was lots better. I had a thing going with the ringmaster and the man that trained the elephants, but mostly I fixed on me career as a tightrope walker.” Mrs. Malloy attempted, but failed, to look modest.

  I visualized her walking the length of our clothesline in her ultra-high heels and a taffeta dress, not a hair out of place. The mind boggled.

  “Any other lives in your resume?”

  “Well, yes, so Madam LaGrange said, but I’m not so sure about the last one.” Mrs. M eyed me now with a mixture of awkwardness and defiance. “Leastways, not like I was about the first two.”

  “The circus ones do sound completely credible.” I tried not to look at Tobias, who was clearly smirking behind the paw with which he was pretending to wash his face.

  “I got the faintest suspicion that Madam LaGrange might be making up stories at the end.”

  “No!” If a cat could guffaw, Tobias would have done so. I was truly shocked. Were Madam a fake, she might at least have had the integrity to appear genuine and not crush her client’s fantasies as they flourished. We all need a little escapism, even when completely content with our lives. I with my idyllic marriage and wonderful children was proof of that. And it hadn’t taken long after getting to know Mrs. Malloy to realize she hid the heart of a romantic within her taffeta bosom.

  She now studied the hanging rack of copper pans. “It crossed me mind, Mrs. H, that Madam LaGrange could be working from bits and bobs of information I’d given her about meself when I rang up to make the appointment. Seeing that was last week, I couldn’t remember for certain what I’d said about this or that, but I’m almost sure I told her me maiden name.”

  “Is that important?”

  “I’m getting to that. There we was yesterday evening, sitting at the table with the shadows drifting about and that Taj Mahal music piping away like it wouldn’t stop even if you smashed the gramophone. All properly spine-tingling, I was thinking, Mrs. H, when it came to me that Madam LaGrange seemed a mite bored. Once or twice I caught her looking at her watch, and all at once she says that me last incarnation, before this one, was as a cat in the late eighteen hundreds.”

  “A cat?” I reached yet again for the plate of biscuits. This required at least two digestives. “I suppose that would explain why you’re so fond of fur coats. What sort of cat? A pedigree or a regular old-” I was silenced by a baleful glare from Tobias.

  “Old tabby? That’s what you was going to ask, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Malloy’s false eyelashes twitched.

  “No, I wasn’t!” I said, through a splutter of crumbs. “Not that there is anything wrong with being a tabby. Tobias is one”-I shifted my chair away from him-“and he’s always thought he was the whiskers. I’ve known lots of other tabbies, wonderful people-I mean cats-all of them. Every one, without exception! But I am sure you were a pedigree, Mrs. Malloy. Probably a Persian. Or a Siamese?”

  “Tabby was me maiden name.”

  “Oh!”

  Mrs. Malloy sighed deeply. “I think it’s one of the reasons I got married so many times, trying to put the sound of it as far behind me as possible. You’ve no idea, Mrs. H, what it’s like to have a name that makes you the butt of spiteful jokes.”

  She was wrong about that. Being named Giselle is not conducive to happiness when you are a plump child completely lacking in grace and athletic ability. There had been no malice aforethought on my parents’ parts. It was understandable that my mother had hoped I would follow in her satin shoes and become a ballerina and that my father had naively assumed I would inherit her ethereal beauty rather than his portly build. Having soon realized their mistake, they had done their fond best to put matters right by adjusting to an Ellie who was not born to pirouette. Even so, there had been no getting away from my full name completely. It is impossible to keep dark secrets from your schoolmates, especially the ones whose mission in life is to make you wish your parents kept you prisoner on a diet of bread and water.

  “I can’t count the times the other kiddies teased me, calling out, ‘Here, puss, puss! Come and have some Kittycat, puss!’ ” Mrs. Malloy sat staring into space. “But I’ve got to remember as how it’s been worse for me sister, not getting married even once and so being stuck with the name Tabby for life.”

  Now I was the one to stare. Mrs. Malloy had never previously said peep to me about having a sister. “I thought you were an only child.”

  “We don’t speak. Haven’t done for years.”

  “A quarrel?” I was always good at suggesting the obvious.

  “Me and Melody never did get on.”

  “Melody?” I found this harder to grasp than the concept of Mrs. Malloy being a tightrope walker… or even a cat. There is that little matter of age appropriateness when it comes to names. Mrs. Malloy, although she would have denied it to the death, was in her early sixtie
s. Presumably, her sister was of a similar age and should by rights have been a Barbara or a Joan or maybe a Margaret. A Melody is never supposed to be older than fifteen, either in books or in real life. It isn’t possible to believe there will ever be nursing homes peopled with residents named Tiffany, Megan, or Stacie.

  “She’s older than me by a couple of years. But never no maturity. Our relationship went from bad to worse when we was teenagers. She accused me of stealing her boyfriend.”

  “Did you?”

  “’Course not!” Much affronted, Mrs. Malloy sat up straighter in her chair. “I borrowed him, is all. And only for an afternoon, at that. But you’d have thought when I gave him back it was with tea stains all over him. Such a carry-on I got. Miss Melody Dramatic, I called her.”

  “If she was in love with him-”

  “Nothing of the sort. I don’t think he’d ever washed his neck. He was just someone to get Melody’s mind off the other one.”

  “Unsuitable?”

  “A doomed relationship from the word go.”

  “Oh, dear! A married man?”

  “Mr. Rochester.”

  “As in…?” I’d stuck my elbow in my saucer and toppled the cup, much to the chagrin of Tobias, who was sitting on my lap.

  “That’s him. Edward Fairfax Rochester.”

  The man against whom all other gothic heroes must be judged and the majority of them found wanting! The storm had picked up again. Thunder rolled and rumbled in the distance. Lightning flashed. Rain rattled against the kitchen windowpanes. When it ended, would we be left with a blighted oak on the grounds?

  “Melody couldn’t think how to get Mr. R to leave Jane Eyre for her. She said no one else would ever come close.”

  Some might think this a little odd, but having felt much the same way before meeting Ben, my heart went out to the unhappy Melody. I found myself wondering if it might not be possible for her to begin life again, even at this late date, as a primly garbed governess-after establishing, of course, that there was no mad wife in the attic.

  “You shared a love of great romantic fiction. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked Mrs. Malloy.

  “After sobbing herself to sleep for five years, it seems Melody turned in her library card and vowed never again to darken the threshold of a bookshop. All her cooped-up passion went into learning to type. She’s worked for the last forty years as secretary to an accountant in Yorkshire, some small town not all that far from Haworth.”

  “Home of Charlotte Bronte and the rest of her famous family! But why would your sister torture herself that way? Why not get as far away as possible from painful associations with the man of her dreams?”

  “Never happy unless she’s miserable herself and depressing everyone around her. The boyfriend moved home and never again let go of his mother’s apron strings. I’ve not met her boss, but my guess is she’s done a number on him too.”

  “That sounds unkind, Mrs. Malloy.” Tobias wandered off my lap onto hers.

  “I suppose it does.” She had the grace to look shamefaced. “Truth be told, it bothers me the way I never could stand her. My chums in the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association get on me all the time. ‘Your own sister,’ they say, ‘and the only contact you have with her is exchanging Christmas cards. Go and see her. Make up your differences!’”

  “They’re right.”

  “You would say that, Mrs. H! But there’s no explaining it even to meself. Just looking at Melody’s photo gets me hopping mad. That daft expression on her face! Like she’s afraid if she don’t smile just right the camera will zoom in and suck off her nose. I’m not saying as I’m proud of it, but I remember looking at her when she was two years old and thinking, You’re a miserable little cow, Melody Tabby, and always will be.”

  I was doing some laborious arithmetic. “Wouldn’t you have been a newborn at the time? You said she was a couple of years older than you.”

  “Did I?” The rouged cheeks turned a deeper brick-red. “Maybe it’s the other way round. Melody always seemed elderly. By the age of nine you’d have thought she’d started collecting her pension and going on coach rides to Margate with a bunch of gray-haired old biddies. Still, I knew girls at school like that and they didn’t drive me up the wall quite the same way. But then again, none of them was me own sister. I can see what you’re thinking, Mrs. H, but it wasn’t a case of having me nose put out of whack when she came along. This was something different, almost like…”

  “Go on!” I urged.

  “Well, almost like… I’d known her before.”

  “Before what?”

  Mrs. Malloy heaved a pained sigh that inflated her bosom and conveyed clearly that I was being even dimmer than usual. “Before we was born. Into this current lifetime is what I’m getting at. But maybe I was wrong.”

  “No sign of Melody floating around the periphery of your trance?”

  “Not a hint. Madam LaGrange didn’t mention her.”

  Even Tobias looked sorry. And I wondered if I should invite her to spend the night. I pictured myself sitting up with her through the small hours, holding her hand to make sure she didn’t have the vapors or go into a decline. Doing so was something I wouldn’t begrudge, even though with the children gone I’d made other plans for an evening alone with Ben. These had included my sea-foam green nightgown, music from Phantom of the Opera playing in the background, and an atmospheric arrangement of chamomile-scented candles on my dressing table.

  I reminded Mrs. Malloy that it was something to discover that she had been a person as exciting as a tightrope walker in a previous life. And a cat too, if one discounted the possibility of Madam LaGrange’s having made that part up. Come to notice it, in close proximity Mrs. Malloy and Tobias did bear a certain rememblance to each other, around the eyes and the twitch of their mouths.

  “Go on, say it, Mrs. H; you think she’s a fraud.”

  “But sincere about it,” I consoled. “It could be she’d do better in another specialty.”

  “She did say she’s just finished a postdoctoral course on séances and is thinking about going into them full-time.”

  “Well, there you are! Her heart wasn’t really in her session with you.”

  “Still, I don’t think it’d be wise for me to dismiss that bit about her seeing a woman falling in front of a bus in the rain.” Mrs. Malloy’s pious gaze shifted to the windows, where the storm was still going at it, hammer and tongs. “Or that business about the old girlfriend showing up. That sort of thing can ruin the best marriage.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Take Mr. H, for starters.”

  “Yes, do let’s.” Had Tobias presently been within reach, I would have thrown him at her.

  “Not that I think he’d seriously misbehave himself.” Mrs. Malloy solemnly shook her head. “But there’s no getting around it, he’s a very attractive man, besides being able to cook like a dream at home as well as at work. An old girlfriend might go all out-plunging necklines, skirts up to her knickers-to win back the chance she’d missed. Of course, like I said, it wouldn’t come to anything in the end, but-”

  “Interesting you should mention Ben’s culinary talent.” I got up to put the tea things in the sink. “His latest cookery book will be out next month. There’s a review of it, an excellent one, in the magazine Cuisine Anglaise that arrived in this morning’s post. But getting back to Melody, I think that having given Madam LaGrange a try you should attempt the more conventional approach. Go see your sister.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. There’s never been no talking to Melody when she’s in one of her snits.” Mrs. Malloy came up beside me with the teapot. “Like I told you, this one’s lasted close on forty years.”

  “That’s nothing.” I added more washing-up liquid. “For Moses that was a walking tour in the desert, hardly enough time to get sunburn. And speaking of fresh air and relaxation, it occurs to me that you’re due for a holiday. Now don’t argue.” I held up a soapy hand. �
��With the children away at their grandparents’ and my not having any decorating jobs going at the moment, this would be the ideal time to reunite you with Melody.”

  “There is that.” Mrs. M picked up a dish towel and stood with it draped over her arm as if auditioning for the part of a waiter. “And Madam LaGrange did say I was about to take a trip to foreign parts, which I suppose could be Yorkshire, seeing as the people there talk different from the way we do. Then again, I’m not so sure I want to spoil a nice long tiff with Melody by trying to make it up. Especially if it means having to go and see her on me own.”

  I knew exactly where this was leading and I wasn’t having it. There would be no twanging on my heartstrings. My loving duty was to my husband, who I knew was desperate to be alone with me without fear of our three imps capering into the bedroom. As for a former girlfriend daring to show up, I wasn’t worried as I scrubbed the shine off a couple of plates. Hadn’t Ben assured me when he asked-begged-me to marry him that I was the only woman he had ever loved? And aren’t men always especially truthful at such glowing moments?

  The answer, that all dark-browed romantic heroes have their secrets, should have stared me in the face. But, alas, I was as blindly foolish as any gothic miss descending the darkened staircase of a gloomy manor house at dead of night with only a candle’s frail flickering light to ward off the terrors awaiting her.

  2

  Our drawing room at Merlin’s Court lends itself to tranquillity. It was early evening, and the storm had ceased several hours before. Sunlight skimmed the polished surfaces. The scent of roses drifted in through the open latticed windows, and the portrait of Abigail Grantham, first mistress of Merlin’s Court, smiled serenely down from above the mantelpiece. Unfortunately, there was nothing remotely tranquil about Ben’s mood that evening.

  He was seated in the fireside chair across from mine. A softly lit table lamp dramatically highlighted his profile. He was looking dangerously attractive in faded blue jeans and a worn sweatshirt: a lethal combination, as I had often told him. He was wearing his reading glasses, which only added to his appeal. But far from sending loving glances my way, he appeared oblivious to my presence. Eight years of marriage had accustomed me to these occasional down moments. Even so, this was to have been a special evening. If he resented Mrs. Malloy’s spending the night, that wasn’t my fault. I had just persuaded her she’d be better off mulling over a reconciliation with Melody in her own house when he’d walked in and announced that it had been hell driving home in the storm and anyone with any sense would stay put for the evening. She had graciously agreed with him and gone upstairs immediately to lay out guest towels for herself.