by Nina Stibbe
Giggling quietly, I followed the soft music upstairs to the nurses’ quarters. It was coming from the spare room, as I expected. I didn’t want to burst in, mid-song, and embarrass Mike (mid-kick) so stood outside and waited for the song to fade out—which, if you know the song, you can imagine now. I giggled again slightly at the thought of Mike and, as the song faded away, I knocked gently on the door.
The song started again straight away and I realized Mike wouldn’t hear the knock, so I opened the door. It took a while to understand what I was seeing.
It was Mike and Sally-Anne.
‘But she’s dead inside,’ I thought.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I was looking for volunteers to help with the larder clearance.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Mike, and Sally-Anne giggled.
Walking home along the lane, I noticed the hedge was as thick as it had been all year. Still in full leaf and with some berries. I loved this hedge—over a mile of blackthorn, hawthorn and some elder. The ditch on the field side was like an empty stream with a single strand of rusty barbed wire—unneeded now since the hedge had done so well. Nothing would get through it. Unless a speeding car swerved to avoid a collision with an oncoming vehicle and came off the road. That would go through it.
At home I cried, which my mother said was only natural after such an ordeal.
‘What exactly were they doing?’ asked my sister.
‘Oh, God, they were in some kind of cross-legged, facing-each-other thing,’ I said.
‘Naked?’ asked my sister.
‘Yes, completely naked,’ I groaned and grimaced and relived the whole fucking thing, ‘naked, except for all her hair and his bandanna.’
‘Definitely having sex?’ she asked.
‘Yes, definitely,’ I said.
‘Like this?’ My mother showed us a sketch she’d done using Carrie Frost’s fail-safe people-sketching method.
I looked closely. ‘Yes.’
‘The lotus,’ she said, ‘it’s in The Joy of Sex, very middle-aged.’
I had a couple of days off work and school and read the rest of the George Orwell and started and gave up on Julius Caesar.
I had a long talk with my mother and sister. I decided it was time to start making an effort.
30. Coffee-Mate
What happened then was odd and yet obvious. Lady Briggs had gone to bed early one night and hadn’t drunk her Horlicks. The night nurse—on that occasion Carla B with her cowlick, cleavage and clompy shoes—found her dead on the 9 o’clock round. I was shocked to hear it. I thought about our last conversation—when I’d been tipsy and planning to approach Mike Yu about the kung fu dance.
Carla B was upset and full of self-recrimination at not having picked up on Lady Briggs being poorly. She’d seen her at eight and had asked if she’d like to have her Horlicks warmed up and Lady Briggs had declined, saying she ‘hadn’t the puff to sit up’ and then at half past eight she’d told Carla B she felt as though she’d danced the tarantella and maybe she should return to Room 9, and half an hour later she was dead.
‘Well, she’s in the morgue now, with all the tins and jam jars,’ said Eileen, who had come to take Carla B off for a private pep talk. I sat in the kitchen and rested my head on the table. The owner came in—I could tell it was him because of his jangling buckles—but I was too embarrassed to look up. A chair scraped and a lighter clicked.
‘I’m sorry you’re upset,’ he drawled.
‘Well, she wasn’t paying any fees, so I suppose it’s not that bad for the business,’ I mumbled, ‘but I really, really liked her. I didn’t realize how much until now.’
‘I can’t say I liked her, but I’m bloody sad the old girl’s gone,’ said the owner.
‘I liked her a lot,’ I said. ‘It’s like when a very important dog has died long ago and you know you’ll never have such a glorious dog and you take other, subsequent dogs for granted and don’t realize just how much they’ve come to mean to you.’
I told him how the memory of our dog Debbie had eclipsed poor living Sue until the night she ate the sock and might have died. And we all felt differently about her after that.
‘Except Lady Briggs didn’t sick up a sock and come back to life,’ I said. ‘She died, full stop.’
‘Well put,’ said the owner.
The solicitor arrived then and the owner patted my arm and went to speak to him in private. Eileen came back and told me the owner’s mother had also died, the day before. I wished I’d known and could have offered my condolences.
Paradise Lodge felt strange now with no Matron and no Lady Briggs and Mike having done the lotus sex-position with Sally-Anne. Sister Saleem did the morning routines almost single-handedly and at coffee break said the kindest, nicest things about Lady Briggs. ‘She was a marvellous lady,’ she said, ‘and we must be very happy that she made it downstairs before she died.’
‘She was up there all that time, though,’ I said, ‘just waiting to come down but taken for a recluse.’
‘Yes,’ said Sister Saleem, ‘it was awful, but let’s remember that she made it down and she had a fine time at the end.’
The staff treated me slightly as if she’d been my relative—I suppose because I’d always answered her bell. Even Mike Yu approached me to offer his condolences.
‘She was a great lady,’ he said, ‘and very intelligent and caring.’
‘Yeah, she was great,’ I said, rather snappily, and went to walk away.
‘You know, Lizzie, it was Lady Briggs who told me that Miranda and I weren’t compatible,’ he said, ‘and that Sally-Anne was in love with me.’
‘Sally-Anne?’ I said. ‘How did she even know Sally-Anne?’
‘Well, she called her the quiet little nurse,’ he said.
Approx one week after Lady Briggs had died, it seemed like an ordinary day but Jeremy Hughes, the owner’s solicitor, arrived and went into a meeting with the owner.
Sister Saleem made a tray of hot drinks to take through but the milk had gone off and went into globules on the surface of the coffee and no amount of frantic stirring disguised it. She made another round of coffees but found that every bottle of milk had turned because the fridge had been accidentally unplugged for the Philishave and no one had noticed. So I had to run over to the Piglet Inn. They couldn’t give me a pint but gave me some sachets of Coffee-Mate.
The moment I got back I was sent into the owner’s sitting room with four cups of coffee/Coffee-Mate. I put the tray down on the low table and was about to leave when the owner asked me to stay and told me to take a cup of coffee. I turned and saw then that the Owner’s Wife was also there, taller than ever in sling-backs with heels and piled-up hair and tendrils.
‘Hello, Lizzie–’ she said, and she went to introduce herself.
But I interrupted. ‘Yes, I remember, hello.’
She touched the back of her hair and told me she’d used Linco Beer shampoo ever since I’d put her on to it. She said it to break the ice really—but I must say, her hair did look healthy.
‘It looks very healthy,’ I said.
‘Are you still using Linco?’ she asked.
‘No, I’ve switched to Silvikrin lemon and lime for greasy hair,’ I said, which wasn’t true but I didn’t want to use the same shampoo as her any more.
She looked crestfallen. I felt guilty.
I took a sip of coffee. God, the Coffee-Mate was good. It had transformed the slightly stale catering granules into a strong but creamy cup. It was gorgeous.
‘Isn’t the Coffee-Mate delicious?’ I said.
The Owner’s Wife pointed to Jeremy Hughes; he was trying to get our attention.
‘So, your mother,’ he began, nodding towards the owner, and then, looking at me, ‘that is, Lady Briggs, has made her wishes very clear in her will.’
And that was when I first knew that Lady Briggs was the owner’s mother. No one said it like that but I put two and two together and then asked, just to make sure.
‘Are you saying that Lady Briggs is—was—the owner’s mother?’
And the Owner’s Wife, with a puzzled little laugh, said, ‘Yes, of course she was—but you knew that, surely?’
And I said, ‘No, I didn’t, I don’t think anyone knew that.’
And the Owner’s Wife laughed again and the owner looked sad.
‘I’m sure everyone knew—didn’t they?’ said the owner, grimacing.
‘They didn’t,’ I said, ‘they really didn’t. I wouldn’t have said all that about it being like loving a dog, and sicking up a sock, if I’d known she was your mother,’ I added.
The Owner’s Wife gasped.
‘No! It was a lovely thing to say,’ declared the owner, and him saying that made me want to cry.
The solicitor began his talk. I looked around the room, to keep my tears at bay. It must have been built and furnished according to the highest aesthetic law. It was so perfect. The shape (a chubby rectangle) and the central fireplace, with three long settees in a horseshoe around a low table in front of it. The high ceiling with pretty plasterwork and a central thing from which the loveliest chandelier hung. Glass droplets, not diamond-cut, not fancy-looking but like water, and not grand but just beautiful. Tall panelled doors, diagonally opposite each other. The dual aspect giving the room pretty light and French windows, closed now for privacy, leading out on to a secret glade. The wobbly old glass slicing the view, of fifty different greens and yellows and oranges, into segments.
‘Did everyone know?’ the owner asked his ex-wife.
‘I’m sure they did, Thor,’ said the Owner’s Wife.
‘Does it really matter?’ asked Jeremy Hughes.
‘I don’t know,’ said the owner.
‘No, it doesn’t matter, she’s dead now,’ said the Owner’s Wife.
‘She told me she was the first patient here?’ I said.
‘That’s it,’ said the owner, ‘she was the bellwether, she helped us get patients in the beginning.’
‘Oh, yes, she did,’ said the Owner’s Wife, ‘she showed prospective patients around and said how super it was, dear Allegra.’
The couple had a little talk about her and I gleaned that Lady Briggs had been the first patient at Paradise Lodge because she’d already lived there. It had been her house. It was her money that started the business. It was she who executed the trust fund that later denied the business money when it was being run badly. It was Lady Briggs who denied the Owner’s Wife the right to modernize. And then, it was she who’d demanded a business manager be taken on after the Owner’s Wife had left and things had hit the skids. It was she who’d taken on Sister Saleem. And it was she who’d put Mike Yu off Miranda and told him about the quiet little nurse who liked him.
Jeremy Hughes was eager to get on with the business in hand and coughed.
‘I just want to run through your late mother’s—Lady Briggs’—wishes as specified here.’ He held a wodge of papers. ‘Firstly, as far as they pertain to Lizzie Vogel.’
I blushed.
‘Lizzie, Lady Briggs wished for you to have her collection of books to help with your studies—a marvellous collection of novels and a rare Audubon. She also left you fifty pounds towards your education—should you still be in education at the time of execution—or to be used as you wish.’
‘I hope you love novels?’ said the owner.
‘I’m actually reading the second novel ever to be written at the moment.’
‘Oh, what is it?’ asked the Owner’s Wife.
‘Moll Flanders,’ I said, ‘by Daniel Defoe.’
‘Oh, didn’t he also write Robinson Crusoe?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’
The Owner’s Wife smiled at me but I’d really gone off her now, so didn’t smile back.
‘Thank you,’ I said, looking at the owner, ‘I don’t really know what else to say.’
‘The books are mostly here, in the sitting room,’ Jeremy Hughes gestured behind us to a wall of bookshelves, ‘and on the shelves in the drawing room.’
I gazed at the books. I should have been grateful but I only felt panic and embarrassment at the thought of lugging them all home in a bin liner in Danny’s pram and then, I don’t know, shoving them in the garage.
It must have shown in my face and Jeremy Hughes said I didn’t have to take them immediately, or in fact ever, and that Lady Briggs had written that I should choose the books I wanted and not feel obliged to take them all, or any. The disappointing (for them) truth was that my mother owned a similar collection—to which I had full and free access—but I didn’t say anything and let them enjoy the gesture.
The solicitor turned away from me then and spoke to the owner. It seemed Lady Briggs had left some money plus two flats in Leicester and a house in Norfolk, most of which went straight to him, Harald Anderssen, and some bits and bobs went to the Owner’s Wife, including a tiny watch that she’d already been given and a special painting of some fruit, which I had previously assumed Nurse Eileen had done, it being so out of proportion and wrong-looking.
Lady Briggs had left a small cottage in the next village, ‘Myrtle Cottage’, to Bridget Marie Monaghan, a distant cousin, who the owner said he’d have a heck of a job tracking down. ‘I doubt her name is even Monaghan these days.’
The Owner’s Wife had never heard the name before. ‘Bridget Monaghan,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you had a distant cousin called Bridget, Thor.’
The three of us stood about while Jeremy Hughes talked us through the ins and outs of the will in the most boring way and asked for my postal address and then said I could go back to work. I went back to the kitchen and told Sister Saleem about my inheritance.
‘What a lovely thing,’ she said and stroked my head.
Afterwards, while Jeremy Hughes talked more with the owner, the Owner’s Wife popped into the kitchen to say hello to Sister Saleem and Eileen. Eileen was frosty, which was fair enough.
‘Have you been into the day room to say hello to the patients?’ Sister Saleem asked her.
‘Er, no, I wasn’t sure I should,’ said the Owner’s Wife.
‘Oh, yes, please do,’ said Sister Saleem.
The Owner’s Wife seemed so reduced suddenly. I realized I didn’t like her one tiny bit but because I felt sorry for her I went with her to the day room. The patients were having their coffee and biscuits. I could see from the colour, they’d got the Coffee-Mate too.
‘We’ve got a visitor,’ I said, quietly, and braced myself for a whoop or two, but none of them seemed to remember her, except Miss Tyler.
‘Oh, hello, are you back now?’ she asked.
‘No, no, just a flying visit,’ said the Owner’s Wife.
It was so embarrassing I couldn’t stay and watch and I scuttled back to the kitchen. Sister Saleem sent me back with another cup of coffee for the Owner’s Wife. But when I got through there, she’d gone.
Later, I questioned Eileen and the others. Had they known that Lady Briggs was the Owner’s Mother? And not a single one of them had. They were as shocked and troubled by it as I was.
The day before the wedding day, my mother and sister dashed into town to Green’s the Jeweller to collect Mr Holt’s wedding ring, which had been engraved with a secret love message. And, according to my sister, my mother had forgotten what the message was and it was a total surprise when she read it.
It was this: ‘Shall we?’ Which I thought a bit much and obviously sexual and therefore private.
And on the way home they’d called in at ‘Fresh Blooms’ and bought tons of orange and yellow chrysanthemums and kaffir lilies and picked armfuls of foliage from a railway siding.
31. The Big Day Dawns
I’d set my alarm for 6 a.m. My sister and I had a bowl of Ricicles and went over our plans. She was to be based at home getting everyone ready for the wedding—especially our mother, who wanted to look bridey but not as if she was being sold into patriarchy. My duties were all Paradise Lodge-based and include
d preparing the buffet, decorating the rooms and setting the others to work. Mr Holt very kindly drove me up there since he was nipping into the depot early to get started on the autumn stocktake.
It was a lovely day with milky sunshine and Mr Holt commented on it.
‘Nice day for a wedding,’ he said. And I agreed.
Cheryl, the new night nurse, hadn’t quite finished the breakfasts when I arrived so I helped her for ten minutes before I started preparing the wedding buffet. I was already in the bridesmaid’s dress that Carrie Frost had run up for me with an apron over the top to protect it from splashes of salad cream, beetroot and so forth. The dress was simple, pink and rather ugly, with a high neck and a line of daisies at the hem. I could see Cheryl noticing it and told her about the open-cum-wedding day and I could see the bewilderment on her face.
‘So, your mum’s getting married today and the party’s going to be here—with all the old people?’
It did seem unusual—hearing it like that—and I felt a wave of anxiety.
‘Yes, it’s going to be marvellous, feel free to come along.’
‘I spend enough time here, thank you very much,’ she said. ‘In any case, I’ll be in bed. I’m on nights again tonight.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but if you change your mind…’
‘I won’t,’ said Cheryl.
I’d decided to call the wedding tea a ‘buffet’ to distinguish it from an ordinary tea. I’d changed my mind about skyscrapers and was making the sandwiches heart-shaped instead—using a tart cutter and hammer. This would leave some wastage, but tasty wastage that would soon be eaten. I was also doing ham horns with the ex-cook’s boiled ham. I hadn’t wanted to get it ready the night before because I hated people who did things the night before for convenience sake when everything would be much nicer freshly made on the day. I never wanted to become that kind of person—not for a wedding anyway.
I cracked on and tried not to think about Mike Yu. Cheryl watched me cut the sandwiches as she ate her breakfast and asked awkward questions. And then, thank God, Nurse Eileen came down with a curler in her fringe and a Consulate in her fingers and everything was safe and jolly. Soon Mr Simmons and assorted others appeared and sat smoking at the kitchen table. They all looked smart. Deb-on-Hair had been the day before—all day—and done almost everyone’s hair, including all the staff—except Sally-Anne, who hadn’t had her hair cut for years. Carla B said it looked like something from a shampoo advert when it was down. I could vouch for that. I didn’t say anything but glanced at Sally-Anne.