by Patrick Gale
Soon after their arrival in Bayswater, Mercy had tried to prettify her child, dressing her in frills and sending her to dance classes. She did not do this without a vengeful glint in her eye for the child was so much the reincarnation of Jésus’ mother. Then the girl’s brain began to frighten her so she left her alone to her dungarees and her books.
They had enough money to live in some comfort. Madeleine had always been told that this was ‘family’ money and life insurance for her late father, because its actual source pained Mrs Merluza. Jésus died resisting arrest for molesting some schoolgirls and his mother, Abi, died shortly afterwards, rotten with the twin moulds of spite and grief. Nervous and pregnant, Mercy had sat up all night with the smitten corpse then rung the doctor and notary in the morning. She had sold the nightclub and adjoining flat for a handsome price before any relations stepped forward. Quickly ransacking her ‘mother-in-law’s’ boudoir before she left for France, she found a stash of jewellery hidden in the hem of an ugly fur coat which she had intended to take with her to sell when times were hard again. A few quick scratches on the bathroom mirror proved the stones to be better than paste. Abi had never worn or displayed them so, assuming them to be stolen, but thinking of the future of her unborn child, Mercy had sewn some into the linings of her own scant wardrobe and hidden the rest in the hollowed-out heels of some boots. Sweating like a fever victim, she wore the boots and the three most loaded of the dresses all the way to Paris where she quickly sought out a hungry jeweller. She opened a bank account to earn interest on the money from the nightclub and, as soon as she could walk after Madeleine’s birth, spent some of the jewellery earnings on a nanny, a smart new outfit and a session in a beautician’s sufficiently intensive to secure her work as an assistant in a dress shop. She worked there until Madeleine was old enough to attend school, then upped roots again, moved to London and sold the rest of the jewels. In Paris as a sales assistant and in London as a dressmaker, she worked so hard that she had never needed to touch the ever swelling money from the sale of her former lover’s property.
In the late 1960s, however, London was becoming expensive, so when, on a teacher’s advice, Madeleine was entered for and won a full scholarship to Tatham’s, her mother had leapt at the opportunity to settle in Barrowcester. In those days the city was several hours from London and still ludicrously cheap. Girls had been admitted to the school for only three years and Madeleine had been the first to win one of the ten annual scholarships. Mercy at last felt a shifting of pride, even if the sight of her fast-growing girl in a scholar’s black gown and eighteenth-century waistcoat was something nightmarish.
While Madeleine enjoyed a bargain education (free except for books, which she found or ordered at the city library, and ‘extras’, for which she never asked) Mercy took over a small curio shop in Tower Place. She changed the name from The Treasure Trove to Boniface Crafts and, although the place only opened between eleven and four each day, did a thriving trade selling overpriced jerseys and unpleasant local pottery. Her taking in lodgers had started with a kind offer made to some enquiring tourists who had just relieved her of an especially difficult coffee pot.
Madeleine was an ‘academic in the arts’ and underpaid; thus far Mercy could comprehend. The details of her daughter’s curious employment bored, when they did not escape her. Madeleine shared a sour-smelling flat in Earls Court with an African dispatch-rider called Georgene. Mercy went to stay the night there when she visited London for the January sales. Madeleine came home for a fortnight over her birthday in July and for a week at Christmas. She rang once every ten or eleven days to say hello. A spontaneous visit however, like the impending one, was unheard of and alarming. As she made up her daughter’s bed, Mercy sorted out the possible explanations. Pregnancy was hardly likely and, if that were the case, London was surely a safer spot to deal with such things than the watchful confines of Barrowcester. Affection, then? Mercy rejected this as being out of character and more frightening than pregnancy. By the time that the bed was made, clean towels hung out and she was on her way to cut some flowers for her daughter’s dressing table, the reluctant mother had settled for nervous breakdown. Madeleine had gone into a neurotic decline, as was the wont of plain intellectuals, and had come home to collapse; she was in a crisis and needed her mother.
Trying not to peer too obviously into the granny flat bedroom as she pulled a little strip of variegated ivy off the wall to trail from one side of the vase, Mercy felt a slight ache in her ample bosom. The sensation was unfamiliar but even a vague acquaintance, such as that know-it-all Lydia Hart, could have diagnosed an onset of motherly love.
13
In the kitchen that sprawled through the lower half of the extension designed for her by Fergus Gibson, Lydia Hart was busy chopping onions. Clive was arranging some flowers for the table. They were to eat in the kitchen as this was to be a family occasion. Lydia sniffed loudly.
‘Well for pity’s sake,’ Clive muttered, ‘there’s no need to cry about it.’
‘I’m not. It’s the onions,’ she snapped, tipping the chopped onions into a heavy sauté pan which she rattled with feeling over a flame.
Hot olive oil spat through the silence. Clive centred the flowers to his satisfaction, swept a heap of discarded leaves on to his hand and into the bin, then pulled open the cutlery drawer and began to count out four of everything. There was an awkward moment as they met, she on her way to the fridge to find mince, he on his way to the table to lay it. He gestured nervously to let her pass. He set out the cutlery as she crushed a pound of mince into the frying onion to brown it.
‘It’s only that I’m all overexcited and sort of moved,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t happen to us every week. I’m just very happy, really,’ she continued bitterly as she poured boiling water over a bowl of tomatoes.
‘That makes two of us,’ he lied, feeling nothing, as he kissed her cheek, but relief at an opening for such an overture. He held an arm across her shoulders – which always cut her pleasantly down to size – and watched with her as the skin began to break in the heat and slide off the tomatoes.
‘Why do you always make lasagna when he comes home?’ he asked her.
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’
‘No, I like it a lot. It’s just that we never have it when he’s not here.’
‘Tobit’s favourite,’ she said with a sniff.
So it wasn’t the onions.
‘Oh,’ said Clive, and leaving her side he took four place mats from another drawer and laid them on the table. ‘I mean to say, the way you were going on before you told me, I thought she was in a wheelchair or blind or something.’
‘Hateful comparisons.’
‘I’m not comparing. I’m just illustrating the effects of your overreaction on my imagination. Of course her being what she is isn’t a disability. It used to be treated as one but now it’s, well, if anything it can be an advantage. Positive discrimination and all that.’ He opened two bottles of the Riecine they had brought back with them from Saiole last autumn. Tobit gulped wine as if it were air and Clive suspected that, even after champagne, they’d all need a little extra tonight. There was an ominous silence coming from Lydia’s back. ‘Tell me about her,’ he said.
‘There’s not much to tell,’ said Lydia, turning, ‘as I saw her so briefly. She’s incredibly attractive. You’ll fancy the skin-tight pants off her.’
‘Hardly likely.’
‘Just try not to show it, that’s all I ask.’
‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t go for her type. Never have.’
Lydia raised her eyebrows and turned back with a sigh to her cookery.
‘It’s such a pity that …’
‘What?’
Sometimes she detested Clive’s habit of chipping in with a ‘What?’ whenever she was simply reaching for a word or pausing for effect. She detested it this evening. She wished he would leave her to brood. She wanted him to go upstairs and finish in the bathroom so that they wou
ldn’t both have to use it in a rush.
‘Him being the way he was though,’ she started afresh, pointedly, ‘I suppose if he was going to surprise us all by getting married it would have to be someone different.’
‘Do you think she knows about him?’
‘That he’s – that he used to be gay?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Oh, bound to have done. A lot of girls like the challenge. He makes a point of telling people. Well, he did. Don’t you remember, he told Emma Dyce-Hamilton once? God only knows why because he’s far too young to have been her type and poor Emma’s scarcely the sort of girl who needs fending off.’ Lydia snorted then turned her amusement into a sigh. ‘Oh Clive, it’s going to be so odd having to reshuffle the way we think of him. I mean, we won’t have to make little explanations and excuses any more.’
‘Oh I don’t know about that,’ said her husband. ‘Barrowcester isn’t exactly Brixton. I’ll go and finish in the bathroom.’ He walked slowly upstairs, leaving her to make a béchamel sauce and to grate Parmesan.
The bombshell had been dropped this afternoon. At her feet. She had arrived to find Hart’s, her delicatessen, in chaos. Beth, her manageress, had had to go home with flu and three pretty but motiveless assistants had been trying to do the Monday stock-take and serve customers at the same time. At around three, by which hour Lydia had calmed everyone down, tidied up Beth’s slatternly office and finished the stock-taking herself, her son Tobit had drifted in from the spring sunshine, dapper in crumpled linen.
‘Tobit! What a lovely surprise,’ she called out, startled.
‘Bigger surprise than you think, Ma,’ he said, with the sheepish grin he had inherited from Clive and which went so well with his lively green eyes, which were hers.
Sensing danger, Lydia had tried to gesture him into Beth’s office for tea. He had stayed put however, under the decorative gaze of the shop girls. When he had said,
‘I’ve got engaged,’ she had therefore been forced to react as a mother should; no glimmer of doubt in her radiant smile.
‘Oh Tobit, how perfectly lovely! Gilly, this is a celebration. Put up the closed sign and get a bottle of Dom Perignon from Truskers. Half-holiday!’ In the instant bustle of girls lowering blinds and draping cheeses, she snatched a few seconds’ privacy. ‘Tobe darling’, she said and hugged him properly. ‘Who is it? I had no idea that …’
‘Sorry. It’s a bit mean to spring it on you like this.’ He caught her eye and they both giggled. At least he had giggled and she had sort of gasped. ‘It rather took me by surprise too,’ he added and glanced over his shoulder at the door.
‘Is she up here with you?’
‘Yes. It’s her day off so I shut up shop and we both escaped. She’d never seen the place before and I thought, as it was such a lovely day …’
‘Can you both come to supper?’
‘I was hoping you’d ask that. Yes please. Ah, there she is.’ He darted out of the door and brought his fiancée across into his mother’s shop.
‘Ma, this is Gloire. Gloire, meet my ma.’
Smiling harder than ever as her girls seemed to freeze around her, Lydia held out a hand. The immediate impression of her prospective daughter-in-law was one of height, restrained glamour, poise and intelligence. Gloire was perfection as only Tobit could have found for himself. Gloire was also black as the. Well. Very very black.
They had drunk Dom Perignon and the girls had made suitably congratulatory noises and gone on irritatingly about how the bubbles were going up their several noses. Lydia had done her best to charm. Gloire had smiled rather too candidly. Lydia had hugged Tobit again. Tobit had laughed at her. Finally, unable to bear any more, she had kissed Gloire on the cheek and banished them to go sightseeing until sevenish.
Clive and she had spent the last hour simpering liberal platitudes across the kitchen at each other, but she disapproved and knew that he did too, in his way. It upset her that in such a crisis they had been unable to be truthful with each other. She assumed that mixed marriages were common enough in Tobit’s trend-setting circles. It would be harder to carry the alliance off in Barrowcester, but that was her problem, not her son’s. Lydia’s main worry was children. One read of half-caste children having crises through belonging neither to one race nor another. While there was no doubt that any grandchildren produced by Tobit and Gloire would be attractive, intelligent and so forth, she should hate them to be treated as fashion accessories; walking exempla of designer-tag liberalism.
If she was hard on herself, Lydia also dared admit that with him the way he had been, only death could have deprived her of her son. With none of the usual early warnings indulged in by the burgeoning hetero male, he was knocking down the snug exclusivity of their former relationship like so many nursery bricks.
Lydia assembled a faultless dish of lasagna and set it to bake. It was always so much better when cooked in advance and then heated through again. She tidied utensils away into the dishwasher and returned milk to the fridge and Parmesan to the cheese box, cutting off a finger of the cheese to nibble. Clive’s bathwater gurgled in the pipe outside the kitchen door. Lydia glanced at her watch and saw that there was not time for her to bathe.
‘Bugger the Pope,’ she swore and hurried upstairs to give her hair a good brush and to change into something befitting a celebration.
When Tobit sounded the doorbell in ten minutes, she sent Clive down to let him and Gloire in. She flung up her bedroom window, hugging a dressing gown about herself.
‘Welcome!’ she called down. It is hard to talk loudly when one’s head is thrown back, so they did no more than grin shyly up at her. ‘Your father’s on his way down,’ Lydia shouted and realized that she was saying that to both of them. ‘Love that dress, Gloire,’ she added, recognizing one of Tobit’s creations and already beginning to veer out of control. She pictured the girl laughing as she changed in the scant shelter of Tobit’s sports car.
14
Madeleine Merluza held her ticket up for inspection then lit her last cigarette. When she realized that she did not want it, she stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe and returned the thing to its packet for later use.
‘The demon weed, eh?’ piped up the young, ginger-haired commuter on the opposite seat. ‘Gets you in the end, you know. You heard of Buerger’s Disease?’
‘Bugger off,’ said Madeleine.
‘No offence, I’m sure.’
He returned to the perusal of his evening paper and she to that of her novel.
She had been pretending to read ever since they left King’s Cross. Acutely aware, of a sudden, that he had been watching her, she turned several pages with inauthentic rapidity and adjusted the scarlet fabric of her dress over her knees. She then caught sight of her reflection in the window, glared and wondered, as she had done several grim times a day since her spectacularly hormonal thirteenth birthday, why she bothered. She let her mud-brown eyes drift back to staring at the ‘scalpel-sharp exposé of soured marriage’ in her lap and thought again about flinging wide the door and launching her waistless form off the Barrowcester viaduct when the time came to cross it.
Her fear of annihilation was only marginally greater than her dread of public exposure. Her mother had once forced her into a leotard and dumped her, shivering and fat, in a ballet class. Six inches taller than the nymphs around her, she had also been the only one with braces top and bottom and pigeon toes verging on the deformed. Having heard how her daughter had been shunned at her London school for her warts, Mrs Merluza had not thought to have the growths cut out until the last day of the summer holidays. Madeleine arrived for her first day at Tatham’s bandaged like a junior leper. After both these and other, similar occasions she had paced feverishly from river to oven door to bathroom cabinet, only to baulk at the thought of the combined spiritual question mark and physical indignity that would follow hard on the heels of her doing anything ‘silly’. No. Shame was deadly, but death was worse. Marginally.
The clinic had telephoned with her test results during her mid-morning Mars bar and she had telephoned Edmund. He had said,
‘Oh God,’
a lot which, given his elevated status in the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, took remarkably little effect. He had also sounded a mite disappointed that she was still undecided about whether to go through with the pregnancy, which was unorthodox if human. Evidently his bitch of a bog-Irish housekeeper had been listening in and had bought herself return trips to both Lourdes and Connemara on the proceeds, for Madeleine had returned to find her Earls Court flat besieged by reporters. As she climbed out of her Mini a total stranger came up and said,
‘Congratulations, Miss Merluza. What does Cardinal Kilpatrick think of the good news?’
‘It’s Dr Merluza, actually,’ she said, ‘and I think you’ve got the wrong address.’
Another stranger took several photographs of unwed mother-to-be saying bugger off bastard hack as she dug in her briefcase for keys.