by Lesley Allen
A swell of apprehension tugged in Biddy’s chest. It was important that she impressed Terri today; that she showed her she was capable of doing simple, normal things. Capable, at least, of baking a cake. She had barely slept last night thinking about today, but for once it was excitement keeping her awake, and not anxiety. But now, with the reality of actually having to bake this complicated cake and make a cream-whatever-it-was from this striking-looking recipe book by someone as beautiful and sophisticated as Nigella Lawson (who she’d seen on This Morning just a few weeks ago) staring her in the face, she suddenly felt sick. She swallowed three times to push the acid back down her throat. Domestic Goddess? Her? What was Terri thinking?
But if Terri registered the panic, she completely ignored it, and gabbled on about Nigella and her friend Carla, who actually knew someone who’d been at one of Nigella’s dinner parties. So before she knew it, Biddy was creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, measuring out flour and carefully adding it to the bowl; engrossed once again by Terri’s chatter, and absorbed by the recipe, which, despite Terri’s concerns, she found remarkably easy to follow. In fact, it didn’t seem complicated at all.
As her anxiety evaporated, she felt calmer and more invigorated since, well, probably since the last time she had painted. And that, she realised with a stab of irony, was actually the painting that had brought her here in the first place. She looked up at Terri and smiled.
‘Everything OK, Biddy?’ Terri smiled back. ‘Need any help?’
‘No, thank you.’ Biddy shook her head, still smiling. ‘I’m fine, thank you. I’m . . .’ she paused. ‘This is fun.’
‘Great. Terrific. Excellent!’ beamed Terri. ‘It is fun, isn’t it? We shall be the Domestic Goddesses of Ballybrock,’ she sang, and danced a little jig in the middle of the kitchen – which, for some reason, made Biddy think about the disco. Then calmly and methodically, she told Terri about the worst night of her life – and the only friend she had ever had. And she didn’t even cry. Not once. And through it all, they carried on baking: the cake mixture was put in the oven, the crème pâtissière was made and left to cool, the ingredients for the chocolate ganache icing were all laid out and ready to go. By the time she had finished the story, even the washing up was done.
‘Go and sit down, Biddy.’ Terri nodded towards the kitchen table, as she flung a dirty tea towel into the washing machine. ‘Rest your leg. You’ve been standing for ages and I bet you’re exhausted. The cakes will take another few minutes and then they’ll need to cool before we start the really fun bit – the icing!’ she winked. ‘In the meantime, I’ll make us a brew.’
Biddy did feel exhausted, but she also felt strangely relieved. Talking to Terri about all of these events from her past, things that still felt as though they had happened just yesterday, was making her feel different. Lighter, almost. It was as though she was shedding a load she no longer wanted to carry. But as Terri opened the oven door and the smell of the cake, her cake, wafted out, all thoughts of Miss Jordan and Alison Flemming and that awful night evaporated.
Terri placed the cakes onto a cooling rack on the worktop.
‘Look at the size of theses beauties,’ she gasped. ‘Biddy Weir, you’re a natural.’
Biddy beamed and clasped her hands in front of her. ‘I baked a cake,’ she laughed. ‘I baked a cake.’ Miss Jordan would be so proud of me, she thought.
On her way home that afternoon, a strange thing happened. As the bus headed into Ballybrock along the High Whinport Road, just by the shops at the entrance to Breen Housing Estate, Biddy saw a heavily pregnant woman with bleached blonde hair scraped back off her face, a cigarette in one hand, dragging a toddler behind her by the elbow with the other. She was yelling at it over her shoulder and the child, a little girl, who couldn’t have been more than three years old, was crying.
Biddy’s stomach lurched. She’d seen that child before. She knew who the mother was. In fact, she would see them often around this area on her way home from Terri’s. The toddler was usually crying, the mother was usually shouting, sometimes there would be another child or two in tow. And always Biddy would quickly look away for fear of being recognised. But at that precise moment the bus screeched on its brakes, the driver blasting his horn, at what Biddy couldn’t tell. But the sound was enough to make the woman look up and lock her dark, tired eyes with Biddy’s clear green ones. Biddy swallowed, her stomach somersaulted, she gripped the bottom of her seat. But she didn’t look away. This time, for the first time ever, Georgina Harte was the one to break eye contact with Biddy Weir.
38.
As they drew up outside number 17, Stanley Street, Terri wasn’t at all surprised by the state of Biddy’s house. Having only ever seen the exterior in semi-darkness or evening gloom on the couple of occasions when she had dropped Biddy off, she knew it would be antiquated inside. And it was exactly as she had imagined: old-fashioned, drab and fusty, like a living museum of life in the 1950s, just as Charlie Graham had said. She knew from Biddy that her father had lived in the house his entire life, and Terri suspected that the décor had remained the same since Howard Weir had been a small boy.
It was also cold. A heavy, penetrating chill clung to the walls and shrouded the furniture. The absence of radiators in the hall and the kitchen, the only two rooms which Terri saw on that first visit, indicated that number 17, Stanley Street had never welcomed the comfort of oil-fired central heating. It reminded Terri of her grandmother’s house on Park Parade, a terraced row which had been flattened years ago to make way for a modern apartment block. Yet this house wasn’t exactly dilapidated. In the afternoon light, Terri could see that the exterior was in a reasonable state of repair, and she suspected that while he had been able, Mr Weir had kept it well maintained. But heavens, it was in dire need of a radical makeover! Proper heating, new windows and a bloody good lick of paint would make all the difference.
Terri watched Biddy making the tea, registering the significance of the momentary reversal of roles in their relationship. In her calf-length brown skirt, heavy brown nylons, flat black lace-up shoes and grey cardigan buttoned up to the neck, Biddy looked as drab as the house. It was almost as though the two were one and the same, as though the house had absorbed Biddy into its soul and the two of them were trapped in time together.
As they drank their tea, and ate their Kimberleys (Terri had two out of politeness), Biddy spoke about her father, her words tumbling out in a nervous, staccato scuttle, as though she was afraid to stop, to even draw breath in case her memory of him vanished. As they’d just come from the cemetery, Terri wasn’t in the least surprised. She had planned on baking Gypsy Creams that afternoon, an old recipe of her grandmother’s which she thought would be perfect for Biddy to venture by herself. But it was clear from the moment she had come through the door that something was afoot. The girl was subdued, distracted, and paler than normal, her eyes tired and hollow. Such a contrast from the previous week. A bit of gentle probing revealed that today would have been her father’s eighty-first birthday, and on further investigation Terri discovered that Biddy hadn’t been to visit his grave since the day of his funeral. Of course she hasn’t, she chastised herself, as a distressed Biddy explained that it was too far to walk to the cemetery, and there was no direct bus route, but that she felt so very, very guilty. You should have realised, you clut, she scolded herself. You should have offered before.
Less than half an hour later, Terri watched from the car as Biddy placed a bunch of wild flowers from her garden on Howard Weir’s grave. And as they drove off, when Biddy asked her if she would like to go back to her house for a cup of tea and a Kimberley biscuit in honour of her papa, she was glad she was wearing her sunglasses.
Biddy was talking about her grandfather now, Howard. He had died when her father was a boy. She didn’t know exactly when. Or how. But she did know that he had liked his garden. There was a cream rose bush in the back garden and her grandfather had planted it. Her father told her that o
ne day when she was five years old, after she had pulled every single rose in flower off its stem. It was the only time Biddy could remember her father shouting at her, really shouting. He was so cross. She hadn’t realised that she had done a bad thing, and his wrath left her feeling shaken and slightly sick. But she didn’t cry or run to her room to hide. And she didn’t say she was sorry either. Instead, she stuck every single bud back onto the bush with Sellotape. She had watched later through the kitchen window as he stood by the bush, observing her patch-up handiwork, wiping tears from his eyes. And even at such a young age, for some reason she knew that he wasn’t crying because the roses were broken, but because she had mended them. And she had realised then that that rose bush was one of her father’s most treasured possessions.
Then Biddy told Terri about her grandmother, who had died when she was little. She couldn’t remember her at all, but she did know that her name was Margaret because of the writing on the inside of the old sewing basket which sat in the parlour. ‘This is the property of Margaret Weir’, it said. Sometimes, when her father was very ill, near the end, he thought she was his mother. He would reach out for her, calling. ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ he would say, or, ‘Don’t hit me, Mother,’ or, ‘Howard’s been a naughty boy, Mother.’ She mustn’t have been a very nice woman, Biddy had concluded. She must have frightened her father. Maybe she had made him feel a bit like Alison Flemming had made her feel. It made her sad, to think that her father had suffered like that. She was glad she couldn’t remember her grandmother. Maybe it was better to have no mother at all, than a mother who made you feel scared.
Biddy paused and stared into her cup, swishing the tea around.
‘They obviously troubled him, my mother and my grandmother.’ She put her cup down on the table, splashing some of the unfinished tea onto the surface. ‘I hope he wasn’t troubled by me.’
‘Of course he wasn’t, Biddy,’ Terri smiled and reached out to pat her hand. ‘He loved you very much. And he was proud of you. The fact that he kept that painting in his bedroom proves it.’
‘You think so?’
Terri nodded. ‘I know so.’
Biddy exhaled again, blowing up at her nose. ‘OK,’ she smiled, and dipped a Kimberley into her tea.
‘That rose bush you were talking about, is it in bloom yet?’ Terri asked as she stood up to leave, ‘or is it a touch too early yet?’
‘It is,’ Biddy nodded. ‘It always blooms early.’
‘Ooh. Can I see it? I do love roses, especially white ones.’
‘They’re cream,’ Biddy corrected her, and Terri had to suppress a smile.
‘Even better,’ she said.
Biddy took her into the long, narrow back garden. There were two old shabby wooden sheds, a very small one by the side gate beside the coal bunker, and a larger one with a window at the bottom of a moss-covered, paved path which ran down the middle of the garden. Terri could see that the garden was once loved and cared for but had obviously become unruly and overgrown in recent years. In fact, the only blooming shrub was the cream rose bush. ‘Your father was a gardener too?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He spent a lot of time out here, until he couldn’t manage anymore. I feel sad when I see it like this, but I can’t do it myself,’ she hesitated, fiddling with her fingers. ‘I can’t do the weeding and the clearing. It hurts my leg. And I can’t manage the lawnmower with my stick. Mrs Thomas, our neighbour, sometimes got her son, Ian, to cut the grass when he came to visit. It was really nice of her, but I know he didn’t want to do it. He, well, he . . .’ She hesitated, thinking about the look of disgust on Ian Thomas’s face whenever she would go outside to mumble a thank-you for his kindness. She knew that he was repulsed by her. Her face flushed at the memory. ‘Anyway, it was good of him. I know it needs cutting, but I don’t suppose he’ll come anymore, now that Papa has gone.’
‘Well, he might,’ reasoned Terri. ‘Maybe he just hasn’t been at his mother’s much lately.’
Biddy nodded. ‘He has a new girlfriend. Mrs Thomas told me the day of Papa’s funeral.’
‘Well then, that explains it,’ smiled Terri. ‘I imagine he’s been very busy with her. Now, tell me, what are the two sheds used for?’
‘Papa keeps – kept – his gardening things in that one,’ Biddy nodded towards the smaller shed. ‘He built them himself, I think, before I was born. He told me once that he got the wood from the hardware store where he worked.’
‘My goodness, was it Morrison’s?’ Terri asked, remembering the old shop on the High Street.
‘Yes. I think so,’ nodded Biddy. The name sounded familiar.
‘I used to go in there with my own father, when I was a little girl. Just think, your father might have served us.’ Terri had a vague memory of bespectacled men wearing long brown aprons. Was one of them Biddy’s father?
‘He worked in the office, I think.’
‘I see, well, even so, you never know, I may well have seen him at some time when I was in the shop.’
Biddy smiled. She felt a tingle of excitement at this glimpse into her father’s life before she had come along. And the notion that Terri had perhaps crossed paths with her father at some time in the past was oddly comforting.
‘And what’s in there?’ Terri asked, pointing towards the other shed.
‘I don’t know. Papa went in there a lot. Every day. But I’ve never been in it.’
‘Heavens,’ said Terri. ‘A mystery. I love mysteries. Haven’t you ever even peeked through the window?’
‘No,’ Biddy shook her head. Her father had told her when she was very young that the shed was his private room, and all of her life she had respected that.
‘Do you know where the key is?’
Biddy nodded. ‘Yes, but I still don’t want to go in.’
Terri smiled. ‘I understand,’ she said gently, ‘and I really respect the fact that you still value your father’s privacy. It’s an honourable sentiment. But perhaps one day, when you feel stronger, you will feel that the time is right.’
Biddy looked down toward the shed. She could never imagine feeling strong enough to do that. ‘So, do you want to look at the rose bush, then?’ she said in response.
‘Oh yes, please,’ Terri responded brightly, walking down the path. ‘It’s fabulous, isn’t it? And it must be incredibly hardy. Mmmm,’ she inhaled one of the pale cream roses. ‘Exquisite. Do you ever bring them inside?’
‘No,’ Biddy shook her head. She hadn’t cut a single stem from the rose bush since the day she had removed every bud. And as her father didn’t cut them either, or any of the other shrubs that used to bloom in the garden, they never had any fresh flowers in the house.
‘Well,’ Terri beamed. ‘They look beautiful just as they are. Now my dear, I’m afraid I really must go. Bertie will be getting quite grumpy.’ She was tempted to give Biddy a hug, but knew that would be pushing it. She did, however, make a mental note to somehow, sometime, get her garden sorted for her.
39.
As spring settled and the weather improved, Terri began to introduce a walk into their weekly sessions. Not far at first, just a stroll down through her back garden to the water’s edge, or a potter up the lane at the front of the cottage, where the hedgerows sparkled with pale yellow primroses. She knew that Biddy couldn’t walk too far, or at much of a pace, but she hoped that being outdoors would slowly reignite her desire to paint, if only on a subconscious level. Each day they walked a little further, and with each walk Biddy seemed to blossom just a little bit more. Her posture improved, her frown faded and the breeze blew a trace of colour into her cheeks. Terri always kept a baking project in reserve, just in case the weather was poor, or Biddy wasn’t feeling up to going outdoors, and she made sure there was always something freshly made that morning to have with their pot of tea when they returned from their walk.
And with every visit, Biddy appeared more relaxed. She still recalled fragments of memories from her past, but now not all of them were b
ad. The beach ignited positive recollections of days when she would sit at the water’s edge and sketch the birds. Her eyes transformed on those occasions. There was movement to them, and life. They glistened like shards of emeralds. She still had her quiet days, but the frequency and duration of her silences were becoming shorter and shorter as time moved on.
Terri had heard things about Alison Flemming and her cronies that made her skin crawl. The ‘big’ significant incidents were horrendous, yes; but it was the general humiliation, the relentless, exhausting, taunting and teasing that Biddy had suffered day in, day out, for so many years at the hands of these girls, which really disturbed her. She often wondered what kind of adults they had become. Did they ever think about Biddy? Did they carry any guilt? Surely Biddy must encounter at least one of them from time to time, or other folk from school, bystanders in the cruel pantomime which Alison had directed? Ballybrock was a small town, after all, and, despite her desire to be so, Biddy was not invisible. And what about Alison herself? Where was she? What had she done with her life?
Biddy did resolve some of Terri’s questions – nuggets of information gently teased from her during one of her visits. She learnt, for example, that Georgina Harte lived locally, with, from the sounds of it, a brood of children and a nicotine addiction. Julia Gamble, it transpired, worked for a building society in the town – but thankfully not the one Biddy’s father had set up his account in. ‘I don’t know what I would do if she worked in that one,’ Biddy had said, visibly shivering despite the warm spring sunshine. There were plenty of other folk from school who still lived locally, including Vanessa someone, who had started working in the library a few years ago, so Biddy had stopped going there.