The Ladies of the House

by Molly McGrann

  Even now, if Marie nipped out for a takeaway in the evening, Flavia fretted until she returned. Marie thought she was silly and said so – they lived in a nice area, well lit, busy enough in the evenings and then dead still, for the most part, when they wanted to sleep – but she always hurried home, not wanting her mother to worry.

  The ham and peas were ready. Flavia whisked the gravy, beating out the lumps. ‘You hungry? I give you a big plate, if you are. Nice big plate.’ Ever since Arthur died, Flavia saved the choicest bits for Marie.

  ‘Thanks, Ma.’

  ‘You work hard,’ Flavia said. ‘I know that.’

  Marie had never given Flavia any trouble. Flavia did not go through her drawers and wardrobe because Marie gave her trouble. There were so many terrible things that could happen to a girl. She didn’t read the newspapers, but Arthur had told her stories, tales of horror, all about rape and murder. Innocent girls dragged off. Flavia crossed herself. Not Marie. Flavia kept her close.

  *

  Marie went up to bed while Flavia checked the windows and doors once more. They cleaned their teeth and kissed goodnight. In their rooms, they made the usual noises of undressing and settling in. Then it went quiet.

  Marie could not sleep. She had always slept so well before; now, hardly at all. Some nights she tried to stay in bed, feeling herself to be exhausted – a frantic need to sleep and rest her fevered brain. She lay under the duvet, stick-straight, tranquillized – she hoped – by various remedies she had bought in the shops over the last few weeks, since the problem started. Nothing worked. Her knees had twinges. Her head ached with thinking and, worst of all, she had trapped wind: gas pain that couldn’t be burped, a colicky baby bubble.

  She must get up and walk herself about, force it out. Marie went and stood by the window. If she tried to leave the room, Flavia would wake and want to know what was wrong, for Flavia hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since Marie was born.

  She stood for what felt like hours, looking into the night as if the answers might be writ in the sky: who, what, how, why. There was a fox hunting in their road. Marie watched him and imagined the fox knew that she watched him. Animals had that extra sense; they could hear a curtain twitch, and every footstep, inside or out – by the time a window went up an inch they were gone. The fox ran along the garden walls, jumped gates. Outside their house he always stopped and looked right at her, really looked. Their eyes met.

  She had remembered, out of the blue, the address where her father was found dead on the doorstep fifteen years ago. It meant nothing to her then; she had only been to London a few times on school trips. But now – there was something familiar, some reason for it to occur to her. Sure enough, when Marie looked, it was on the list of properties Mr Wye had printed out: a house in Chelsea inhabited by one Jackie Dolk.

  She made another appointment to see Mr Wye. Marie wanted to know about her father once and for all – who he had been when he was not with them, for he was not with them much. She had come to realize that they had been excluded, she and her mother, deliberately excluded, over a long period of time. There must have been a reason; otherwise he would have shared his wealth with them – shared his life.

  And Mr Wye had finally admitted it to her: her father’s business, his occupation. He had operated without partners, she was told; the army brothers didn’t exist. Her father bought property cheaply in post-Blitz London and only ever used it for one purpose.

  She thought she didn’t hear Mr Wye correctly at first. ‘Barstools?’ she repeated.

  ‘Brothels,’ he said. ‘The houses were brothels. High-class,’ he added. ‘The women were – very beautiful.’

  ‘Brothels?’ Brothels? No wonder he never told her mother. ‘And the people who live in the houses now – did they work for my father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marie thought she would be sick. Old whores, that’s what they were, nothing but nasty tarts. She couldn’t even find the words. Her father – what he had been. She hated him. She had always hated him and now she knew why. Her father was scum. Immediately, from that moment, she wanted them gone, all of them, she didn’t care how old or infirm they were. A whore was a whore, nothing more.

  ‘Get them out,’ she said. ‘Those houses are mine.’

  Mr Wye studied Marie: her beetled brow, shoulders rising, a solid, bullish woman in sensible shoes, ready to charge. Just like her father. ‘Quite,’ he said.

  *

  Marie was twenty minutes late to breakfast and she took her time over bacon and eggs. Her eyes with bags, dull eyes. Flavia asked her if she felt well. Marie always said she was fine. Flavia tried to hurry her along. ‘You’ll be late,’ she said. She handed Marie her lunch in a bag and watched from the window as she set off down the road to the bus stop. Then Flavia got started, her daily adventure through the house. In Marie’s room she found nothing but the usual hoard of chocolates and sweets and crisps. She persevered: behind the curtains, under the rug, a loose bit of skirting board. Nothing.

  Flavia opened a window. Marie said she’d heard the heatwave would go on all summer. That’s what the forecasters said, at least – not that they always got it right. But Marie had caught the sun, for the first time in her life.

  ‘You have freckles,’ Flavia said one evening as they were washing up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Freckles. You never had freckles before.’

  It was true – and so were Marie’s arms, wiping the dishes, brown.

  How was it so, Flavia wondered?

  ‘I eat my lunch outside. I go to the park, to get some exercise.’

  That was enough, at the time, to put Flavia off the scent. Now she stood at Marie’s bedroom window, looking out, feeling the change, wondering what it was all about. The sun bulged, fit to burst with hot air, like it might explode. In Italy, the Judas trees would be flowering.

  12

  Chocolate Bourbon biscuits were his favourite. A handful of perfect sandwich cookies he could crack open and remortar together in doubles that took his breath away. Rita was talking but he hardly heard her. Gently, ever so gently, Joseph eased the top off a Bourbon – it came free with a sheen of cream, just enough to taste.

  Once, he ate twenty-nine Bourbons in one sitting, separating expertly, cream on cream perfectly joined – a real brickie, he was. Jaffa Cakes he swallowed whole, nothing to them, just a bit of air and that soft orange lozenge to nurture his throat. Ginger nuts: good for an upset stomach. Shortbread turned his mouth to paste. Hobnobs were expensive; you only paid for the name. But Bourbons – he ate a sleeve of them every Saturday night.

  When he was little, Mama gave him biscuits if he hurt himself or needed cheering up; she gave him a biscuit when he had a clean plate and again before he went to sleep at night, served up on a tray with a cup of tea. But then, it was never just one biscuit, but three or four or five. Who could stop at one? Even the stale, soggy ones at the bottom of the tin were delicious, melting on his tongue.

  He remembered when biscuits came out of a barrel. They were lucky not to have to buy the broken ones, Sal said – not like when she was growing up and biscuits were raked into a paper bag at the shop, the whole ones put to the side at home in case anyone called. No, Joseph had his pick of biscuits, and not for him the Garibaldi or a Rich Tea, the nothing ones that everybody had. Mama always bought the best, Florentines and Piccadilly biscuits that came in decorated tins. She had them sent from Fortnum & Mason.

  Joseph liked a bit of cake, too. Mama didn’t bake, but there were years when they had a cook and he remembered well her Victoria sponge, jam oozing from the cut, and Bakewell tart and millionaires’ slices, all chocolate and caramel and a crispy bottom, rich as they come. When Joseph went out to ride the buses, he always had tea and cake with his lunch. He loved sticky brownies and lemon slices dusted with sugar and flapjack bars and meringue anything. The tea washed it down – the tea was a straightener after something so sweet.

  If he hadn’t had such a stutte
r, he might have rhapsodized on biscuits and cakes. He might have sung, or at least spoken at length. Had he been a reader of books, especially poetry, words would have come to him that named the sensations, the palate’s pleasure.

  He popped a biscuit in, a Jammie Dodger with a smile, the kind of thing that children ate at parties. The phone rang. It had started to ring lately, but when he answered, there was silence. He put the phone down, only for it to ring again. It rang off and on throughout the day, then nothing all night until the next morning, when it began again. It unnerved him. He tried to speak, to find out who it was and what they wanted, but his stutter always got in the way.

  Joseph bumped up the volume on the telly. Let it ring. He was tired. He’d ridden the 274 end to end that morning, but it was hot and the bus was crowded, more people than ever: the tourist season had begun. Every summer, when the sun came out and the flowers bloomed, here they came, speaking in tongues, stopping in their tracks on the pavement, oblivious to traffic, often lost, just looking around, cameras going. Or they wanted a photo with their friends – did he mind? He did. He couldn’t bear tourists. Sometimes he became so angry he shouted at them: fucking idiots, stupid cunts, bastards, bloody nuisance. He said it loud enough for them to hear, crystal clear. No stutter.

  The phone rang. He ate another biscuit. It rang and rang. Another biscuit – another three, chewing faster as the ringing phone made his heart race. When it stopped, he breathed a long sigh of relief. Then it started again. He began to think that he must answer. The phone rang and rang. It did not cease.

  He got up. Crumbs everywhere. Rita would fuss.

  ‘Mr Gribble? Is that you? At last,’ a woman said. ‘Mr Wye would like to see you. He’ll meet you at the house and he’ll want to look things over.’

  Mr Wye’s letter was still in Joseph’s pocket, soft as a rag now, the words worn away where his fingers rubbed, reading it over and over.

  ‘Mr Wye could be with you tomorrow.’

  The biscuit tin, which Joseph had carried with him out into the hall – he could not say why – shook in his hand as he tried to get the words out. Tomorrow? What day was tomorrow? A calendar hung on the kitchen wall, but he rarely glanced at it. There was no need. Each day passed much the same as the one before, rolling along like an old dog on wheels.

  ‘Mr Gribble?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Y-y-yes.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then. He’ll be with you mid morning.’ The appointment arranged, the facts agreed, Mr Wye’s secretary promptly put down the phone.

  *

  On Tuesday Rita met Hugo Gardner for dinner. He had grown up by the sea and eaten fish every day of his life until he moved to London aged seventeen to conclude his education at King’s College. He was retired from dentistry ten years now. Nineteen grandchildren – he’d had five children of his own. He said, of being a grandfather, that it was another go on the carousel. He’d been a widower six years. He had been to New York three times: twice with his wife, once on his own for a dental conference, where he walked one hundred blocks in an afternoon, from Chelsea to Harlem. A hundred minutes, which was a block a minute. He looked around Harlem and took the subway back to his hotel. Twelve stops, thirty minutes. He had a head for figures.

  ‘Do you now,’ Rita said.

  He believed in the institution of marriage. He had never strayed. His heart was true to his wife. His children, he said, thought he might find someone else now that she was dead. He needed looking after. He admitted that most men did.

  Rita had been married five times. She was unlucky: her husbands always died.

  All of them?

  She couldn’t believe it herself. She knew how it sounded. ‘I’m a proper black widow,’ she laughed. Mind you, she had really only started getting married in her fifties. She had been busy with her career for many years. It was hard to meet the right type in her line of work.

  What sort of work was it?

  ‘I was a companion to an older woman. I gave my whole life to her.’ Rita knew how noble it sounded. ‘But she passed away. Cancer.’ Rita knew about cancer.

  Hugo, eyes wide, took hold of his glass. ‘Another bottle, I think,’ he said.

  On Wednesday, Frank Churchill took her out for an Italian, then pinned her to a bed in the Covent Garden Travelodge. The following weeks were quiet; the mobile phone, when she turned it on, had nothing to report. Rita didn’t mind. The late nights wore her out, if she were honest. She liked her routine: sweet sherry at five, a simple supper on a tray, a whole evening of television until she staggered to bed. She came to slowly in the morning and didn’t rush about, drank a cup of tea, basking in the yellow haze of her kitchen – a real suntrap, it was, especially in this heat – before she went to the house in the Crescent to see how things were. Once there, she tidied up, prepared meals for Annetta and Joseph (having got in the shopping as well) and sorted the bins and the post, what little there was – mostly flyers from estate agents who wanted the house.

  There was just time for a quick cuppa and a sit-down before Joseph came back from the buses. She hardly saw Annetta, who was a hump in the bedclothes, mewling sometimes, easily comforted.

  A few weeks like that: quiet, humdrum, a chance to catch up with herself and pay some bills, clean her flat from top to bottom, and now Rita was on her way to meet Colonel Smith for a drink. Another widower. ‘My grandchildren tell me they don’t know what the bloody hell a colonel is. They don’t want to hear about old times.’ He’d served as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant at the very end of the war. ‘They couldn’t have done it without us. The young lads had all the energy they needed to get through.’ He’d gone on to make a career in the army, with postings in Aden and Abu Dhabi, where they lived like kings and queens, he and his wife. He tried to keep Rita on the phone but she told him they should save their conversation for when they met. Lonely men always wanted to talk, for which they wouldn’t pay.

  Colonel and Mrs Smith. It had a nice ring to it. ‘My name is Richard John-Henry Archibald Smith, but my friends call me Dick,’ he had said before they hung up, leaving her with no idea what to call him when they met. Well. She would play it as it lay. Rita always made a good first impression. She had on her lavender suit, the one she had worn when she married her last husband, Terry Sourbeer. Lavender linen and lilies of the valley to carry into the registry office, and that bit of fancy, her feather fascinator, poking from the top of her head, giving her another three inches – she couldn’t resist. Terry had been a tall man, and Rita was so petite. Even with her fascinator she wasn’t close to his full height. She hadn’t worn it since, and now here she was, full of optimism that Colonel Smith might be the one. She wondered if the Colonel were tall like Terry. If he were short, that would be fine, too. Rita didn’t mind.

  She picked her way among the prams that crowded the pavement. You had to be careful around so many prams; the mothers never looked where they were going, just steamed ahead, or swung round suddenly to charge in the opposite direction, having remembered something they’d forgotten in the shops. Rita’s high heels pecked like chickens. She patted her handbag. She felt people close around her, smelled them, their toothpaste and cigarettes and curry and garlic, washing powder, soap, their perfumes and gels and sprays. Their size in relation to hers: how big they were, now that she was shrinking. That was her bones drying up. Anyone could sweep her off her feet, little as she was.

  It was hot. The sun shone like the life of the party, lighting things up, making everything jolly. Baking them, an almighty furnace. Rita wished for a parasol. She had a real thirst on her – parched, she was. There was a pub, a place she knew, tucked out of the way in Soho. The Dog and Duck, there for years. Cool when she went in, a sort of hush, like visiting a cathedral. Rita sat with a sweet sherry. Oh, that was nice, to get off her feet.

  She had another drink, keeping out of the heat. She always allowed plenty of time before a date; she didn’t want to arrive huffing and puffing. She’d only put the man off. She loo
ked at her watch. Another one, please, Rita said to the barman.

  Sweet sherry made her sentimental. Maybe that’s why she loved it so: it brought love back to her. She thought about her husbands, all five. It was uncanny that they had died one after the other like that, but nothing to do with her. Not her fault. She’d been unlucky. Ever an optimist, though, she clucked to herself, and had another gulp. Rita loved to get married. Didn’t she love to get married? Didn’t she just. She was Mrs Sourbeer at the moment, a name she wasn’t keen on. She had been Mrs McCarthy once. Pat McCarthy worked in retail, as a shop-floor manager at Peter Jones. She married him when she was fifty-five. When she was fifty-six, he developed a mystery wasting disease and within a few months he had died, weighing just five stone. A year later she married Paul, a kindly decorator with his own business. Mrs Berndt, she was then. He was seventy-three when they married but told her he was sixty. He died six months later of a brain haemorrhage. Another one, whose name she sometimes forgot, fell from a scaffold and broke his neck looking in the windows of a house she was sure he meant to burgle.

  Her last husband, Terry Sourbeer, was a real gent, but he passed on from a heart attack after a couple of years. The day he died they had been rowing, him at the top of the stairs, her at the bottom. She was ready to go out, with her hat and gloves on and a mistletoe brooch pinned to her coat. She fancied a bit of Christmas shopping, but that wasn’t what they were fighting about when he dropped dead and tumbled to her feet.

  ‘What on earth did you say?’ Annetta asked.

  ‘It wasn’t what I said. What he said. He couldn’t live with it.’

  ‘Live with what?’