Every Woman for Herself

by Trisha Ashley

‘But – I’ve been supporting you all these years, and you’re not even my son!’ Ranulf dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

  ‘You mean that’s what your little experiment with the cotton buds was about? Having us tested out to see if we were the genuine article? Well, I wonder where you got that idea from!’ Em looked unlovingly at Jessica.

  ‘Devious old sod!’ Anne said.

  ‘It does rather make a mockery of your “Breed Your Own Brontës” experiment, Father,’ I said.

  ‘Unless he’s one of the Nurture rather than Nature brigade,’ Em suggested. ‘In which case, it doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t matter to me who Bran’s father is either – he’s still my brother.’

  We all agreed with that except Father, who was still staring down at the letter, turning it over in his big hands as though there might be a retraction on the back: ‘Ha, ha! Fooled you!’

  ‘I thought it was odd that Bran didn’t look like the rest of you. I mean, Em and Anne are the image of their father, but Charlie and Bran—’ Jessica broke off. ‘Are you all right, Ran?’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Father said. ‘I missed the second page – the second result – Charlie!’

  ‘What?’ demanded Jessica avidly, leaping up and peering over his shoulder. ‘Oh my God! Oh no! I can’t believe it!’ She looked up, transfigured with excitement. ‘Guess what? Charlie isn’t Ran’s either!’

  * * *

  ‘I want to speak to Lally Tooke,’ I said into the receiver for the tenth time, tracking my impossible mother across the American continent.

  ‘Well,’ said a voice doubtfully. ‘She’s vury, vury busy just now. May I ask who’s calling?’

  ‘Her daughter.’

  That’s one thing I can be sure of, anyway.

  ‘Her daughter in England, Europe?’

  ‘Has she got any anywhere else?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, ma’am, but if you hold right on, I’ll go see if I can put you through.’

  After several interminable and expensive minutes (at the man formerly known as Father’s expense) Lally’s voice said: ‘Hello? Which one of you is it?’

  ‘Charlie. But don’t ask me my surname, because I don’t have the slightest idea who my father is.’

  There was a pause. The line hissed like a muted python. ‘You know…? Does Ran know?’

  ‘It was Ran who told me. He got some kind of kit and tested me and Bran.’

  ‘Bran?’

  ‘Bran turned out to be not Father’s either. Funnily enough, he already knew, but it just hadn’t registered as being of any importance. His mother’s been in touch with him for years – she’s Professor Podjecki now.’

  ‘Oh, I knew that – I took an interest, because of thinking Bran was your half-brother. And actually, we met once in Prague.’

  ‘Mother, who is my father, if Ran isn’t?’

  She paused. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were Ran’s or not. Either way, you were a mistake, because I was about to leave when I fell pregnant, and I had to put it off until after you were born.’

  ‘So who was my father?’ I repeated. I didn’t want to go into her reasons for abandoning us again, although acute selfishness and enlightened self-interest become something totally other in Mother’s books.

  ‘Have you heard of Brendan Furness?’

  ‘The poet? It wasn’t!’

  ‘Must have been. He rented a house nearby, to get back to his roots because he’d hit a writer’s block, and he was quite a bit older than me, but terribly, terribly sexy, with big, sad dark eyes, although politically totally incorrect on women’s issues.’

  ‘Yes, Maria thought he was attractive, too. That’s who she told Bran his father was.’

  ‘The old goat! He had a heart attack and died the year after you were born – and no wonder!’

  ‘This is my father we’re talking about!’

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t know it, and he’d have run a mile if he did. And he was terribly clever and famous, so I don’t know what you’re worrying about. Look, I’m giving a reading in ten minutes, I’ll have to go and get ready…’

  ‘Don’t you want to know how Ran’s taking this?’

  ‘You just let me know if he throws you out,’ she said, ‘and I’ll send you a cheque. How is your divorce settlement doing?’

  ‘Ducked,’ I said, but I was talking to the air: she’d slithered off.

  Mother is a Pisces, too.

  * * *

  ‘Did you get her?’ asked Em, who was heading the crisis meeting taking place down in the kitchen.

  ‘Somebody bloody well should,’ Anne said. ‘Bran, I can’t believe you never said anything!’

  Bran smiled, but that might have been because of the hot chocolate topped with whipped cream Em had just put in front of him.

  There was one each; clearly this was a time for desperate measures. Flossie had a blob on the end of her black nose, and was trying to get her tongue out far enough to lick it off, her eyes like colliding planets.

  ‘Yes, I got Mother, eventually,’ I said, sinking down onto a chair and wrapping my strangely cold hands round the glass cup. ‘Bran, you and I have the same father.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Bran offered. ‘Dead Poet’s Society. Only we can’t keep society with dead poets – except through their poetry.’

  ‘Quite,’ Anne said. She wrinkled her brow: ‘So, you and me and Em have the same mother, Charlie? And you and Bran have the same father…’

  ‘It means Charlie’s related to all of us by blood, Bran’s related to Charlie through their shared father, so…’ Em paused, thinking.

  ‘We’re all still family,’ Anne finished.

  ‘Of course,’ Em agreed. ‘It doesn’t matter who fathered who now, does it? We are one. We are the Rhymers.’

  ‘Like a tribe,’ agreed Anne.

  I was feeling better. They were right.

  ‘But poor Father – I mean, Ran?’

  ‘Shut himself in his study – shut the Treacle Tart out, and serve her right, the interfering bitch,’ Anne said.

  ‘He must be terribly upset.’

  ‘His theories are terribly upset. For the rest – well, he’ll get used to the idea.’

  ‘But he might not want to have Bran and me here any more.’

  ‘We will just have to see. And it might be immaterial, anyway, since the Treacle Tart doesn’t want any of us here any more. He’s going to find himself playing effing Bungalow Bill in Mango Valley if he doesn’t put his foot down.’

  Skint Old Health

  For reasons that should be obvious, never leave lying about those alarmingly suppository-like waxy-pinkish plastic corks from cheap wine bottles.

  Their inadvertent application would mean an embarrassing trip to the nearest Accident and Emergency department. (And possible entries in both The Lancet and the Guinness Book Of Records.)

  Father looked dreadful this morning, but that was mostly because he’d been shut up in his study on a bender since yesterday’s postal revelations. He let Jessica in sometime, though, because she wasn’t round to wake the girls up for breakfast. Anne went and fetched them down, in the end.

  However, when he did finally emerge, he kissed my forehead, patted Bran on the shoulder, and said, heavily: ‘Well, well – you are still my children, after all; but it’s been a shock. And if that old sod Brendan Furness was still alive, I’d have his balls.’

  ‘Ran, please – not in front of the girls!’

  Febe and Clo giggled into their porridge.

  ‘Ran and I are going to look at the show house together on the Mango estate, this morning,’ Jessica said brightly.

  She’d found time to polish her surfaces and attire herself in a skimpy top and tight, short skirt, though I always think those bras that push up the skin of your chest and then slam it together in the middle are a mistake. From the side she looked like a narrow-chested pouter pigeon.

  We all stopped eating and stared at Father.

  ‘What does i
t matter to me where I live?’ he said, sighing heavily. ‘I’m a broken man, with no son to carry on the family name … no grandchildren of my own…’

  ‘Jessica had better have her tubes unknotted then, and you can try again,’ Anne suggested.

  Gloria stuck her head out of the pantry: ‘I know what I know!’ she said, which was neither illuminating or helpful.

  ‘You can’t sell the Parsonage!’ I said.

  ‘Why not? He’d get lots of money for it, because it’s so big!’ Jessica said brightly. ‘He can’t really afford to keep it up – or to keep all of you … but then, he doesn’t need to, does he? Em can go and live with Chris, Anne’s got a London flat, Bran’s away at his university – he could live there, he doesn’t have to keep coming back – and Charlie can marry Mace: I mean, I know it wouldn’t last if she did, but she can get a big settlement when they divorce and buy her own place. Or maybe she’ll get the cottage.’

  It’s amazing what goes on in that tricky bundle of wires she calls a brain. ‘I’m not going to marry Mace, not even for purely mercenary reasons! I’m going to be happy and successful on my own.’

  ‘Without a man?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes,’ put in Em. ‘And she doesn’t have to marry Mace to have a home. She can always live with Chris and me, and so can Bran.’

  ‘Not when they defrock Chris and turf him out of the bloody Vicarage, though,’ Anne pointed out.

  ‘De-leather,’ I corrected. ‘And he said he would buy a cottage – though I thought you were trying to persuade Chris to move in here, Father, so you didn’t lose Em?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want any more,’ Father said brokenly, although I noticed he’d managed to put away a gargantuan breakfast as usual. ‘I’m a broken reed.’

  He went out with Jessica and the girls, so they could visit the new estate after they’d dropped Clo and Febe off at school.

  I wonder if that house in Passionfruit Place is still for sale?

  Chapter 23

  To the Bone

  ‘I’ve found Kathleen,’ said Mace’s deep, knee-quiveringly beautiful voice. ‘Or rather, she’s turned up.’

  The line crackled like cellophane. Em, who’d just handed me the receiver, struck a ‘be still my beating heart’ pose, hands to her palpitating bosom.

  ‘Shove off, Em,’ I said, and she grinned and went back upstairs.

  ‘What? Can you hear me, Charlie?’

  ‘Just about, Mace. Em brought the cordless phone down, but it doesn’t work very well here. Did you say you’d found Kathleen?’

  ‘Rod found the wedding organiser, and she gave us the phone number, but by then Kathleen had turned up at Rod’s place anyway.’

  ‘But where had she been?’

  ‘Some sort of fat farm, trying to lose nonexistent weight – and funnily enough, it turned out that Caitlin knew all the time, except I’d kept it from her that we were worried about where her mother was.’

  ‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘She was going on about losing weight to get American film parts when I met her at the cottage, don’t you remember? And the coven did say she was dwindling! I bet she’s not as thin as Jessica, though. We’re thinking of using her rib cage as a dish rack.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her, just spoken on the phone. Rod said she looked great, but then, half the actresses he works with these days are walking skeletons, so his eye for normality’s warped.’

  ‘So are you used to being with thin, immaculate women,’ I pointed out. ‘And I’ve no intention of reducing myself to emaciation point – or going in for liposuction, facelifts or even bikini waxing – I’m staying au naturel.’

  ‘You don’t need to lose weight – you go in and out in all the right places – and I like you just as you are, especially au naturel,’ he assured me, and I could hear the wicked smile in his voice. ‘I wish you were here now, so I could show you how much. And I’m not the only one who misses you: Caitlin talks about nothing but Upvale and the Rhymers. She’s dying to get back as soon as the wedding’s over and she’s done her bridesmaid’s act – and so am I.’

  ‘Will Kathleen let you bring her back, though, without a fight?’

  ‘Yes, under certain conditions. It’s all been a bit tricky. She was mad with her so-called friend for passing on to Surprise! magazine what she’d told her in confidence about our custody argument, because now the newshounds have got their eye on her. But I got together with Rod, who’s a really nice guy, and he’s persuaded her that she should do what’s right for Caitlin – whatever Caitlin wants. And Caitlin’s made it abundantly clear that she wants to come back to Upvale. She’ll see Kathleen as often as possible, of course, but she can do that in the holidays and when Kathleen’s over here.’

  ‘How awful for Caitlin to have to make the choice, though: her mother or her father!’

  ‘Oh, there wasn’t any real contest, darling, but it wasn’t the thought of living with me that swung it, it was life with the Rhymers.’

  It didn’t seem quite the right moment to tell him that actually, technically speaking, I wasn’t a Rhymer any more.

  ‘Kathleen’s been offered a major part in Rod’s next film, which has focused her small attention span on other things. She loves Caitlin in her way, but her chief worry if Caitlin stays with me is what the press will say about it. So she’s come up with a solution – a PR exercise: she wants you to come to London and bring Caitlin home to Upvale straight after the wedding.’

  I nearly dropped the phone.

  ‘Me? Why me? I thought you were going to bring her?’

  ‘I’ll drive her home, yes, but Kathleen wants to show the press that she’s reluctantly letting her make her home with me and her beloved nanny—’

  ‘I didn’t know she had one,’ I interrupted, astonished. ‘It’s the first I’ve head of it!’

  ‘She means you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  ‘But you’re making me sound like an old retainer!’

  ‘That’s the whole idea. A touching scene after the reception, where she hands Caitlin over to Nanny. “I only want what will be best for my little girl,” says film star Kathleen Lovell … Well – you can see how it will be.’

  ‘You’re very cynical!’

  ‘I’ve been around long enough to know the score, that’s all. What I didn’t tell Kathleen is that soon you’ll be looking after Caitlin permanently in your capacity as Mrs North.’

  ‘The third?’

  ‘And last.’

  ‘There’s no guarantee of that, though, is there? If I was mad enough to marry you, one day you’d wake up and see boring old Charlie Rhymer and trade me in for a new model. I’ve already done all that stuff, I’m not going through it again.’

  ‘If you’re still waiting for the magic potion to wear off, forget it. You’ve got so far under my skin you’re now part of me, and I want you for keeps. And better to be the last Mrs North than the first, don’t you think, darling? Did you get my message?’

  ‘Yes – I’m bananas.’

  ‘I’m bananas about you – I have to be or I wouldn’t have turned my house into Homage to Haworth via Upvale Parsonage. Did you get the photos? I walk into some of the rooms and forget where I am; and the conservatory is like a chunk of Kew. Do you want a fountain and fishpond in there, as well as in the garden?’

  ‘You’re wasting your money,’ I said severely, thinking what a long time it seemed since breakfast and Revelations One – and an even longer time since I’d seen Mace …

  ‘When you come down to collect Caitlin you’ll see it, and you can tell me what you think,’ he suggested enticingly.

  Just as well he couldn’t tell what I was thinking at that moment.

  ‘I’ve got some coloured brochures from a tropical plant supplier full of things like pineapple plants and palms, and I don’t know what to order,’ he added, my very own private serpent in Eden.

  ‘I’m very busy with the magazine,’ I said, weake
ning. ‘We’ve been working till all hours packing and labelling, and a Sunday paper came and photographed us, and they’re doing an article about it. Was that your doing?’

  ‘I may have mentioned it to one or two people. And I’m sure Em and Anne and Chris could manage without you for a couple of days, when they know I need you to come and fetch Caitlin. She’s dying to get back, and if you don’t do what Kathleen says, she might change her mind – she’s very mercurial – and whip her off to America instead.’

  ‘But if my photo’s in the paper with a caption saying something like: “Charlotte Rhymer, daughter of biographer Ranulf Rhymer, pictured in the office of her new alternative women’s magazine Skint Old Northern Woman …” and then I suddenly appear in Surprise! or somewhere in the guise of a nanny, aren’t people going to notice?’

  ‘Dark glasses and a nanny-type felt hat,’ he said. ‘I’ll arrange it. And take it from me, Kathleen will be occupying central stage of any pictures, and you will be firmly in the background.’

  ‘Yes, but what if they find out I’m really Charlotte Fry, the Pan Murderess?’

  ‘It was a domestic accident, and no one except the local paper reported it at the time, did they?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘So, how would they find out?’

  ‘Only if someone told them, I suppose … and Angie’s gone home to pack for her cruise.’

  ‘So, what’s the problem?’

  I dithered.

  ‘Mace, I do miss Caitlin, but I’m sure Kathleen could find someone else to bring her here, and—’

  ‘No. She said you or no deal. She took a fancy to you, for some reason. You don’t want me to tell Caitlin that you won’t do it, do you?’ he added persuasively.

  ‘Well, no. We all want her back here. I just don’t – I mean, I’ve never been to London.’

  ‘I’ll send a car, and you can stay here overnight; you’ll feel at home, because I’ve recreated your old Parsonage bedroom. Then my mother will have Caitlin’s things sent over – she’s off to her usual hotel for Christmas – and when you’ve collected Caitlin in a taxi from the reception at the Savoy, I’ll drive you both back. Bring that green dryad dress and I’ll take you to see my new play. It seems to be a success.’