The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  At times Celia still finds herself in there, cowering among the shoes and grit and slippery clothes in the wardrobe, or jammed into the bottom part of the bedside table which had always reminded her of the clock case in ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’. Or flat under the bed on the cold fluff-strewn lino, listening and listening to those puppy sounds from above. Whenever it snows and she is alone that sense of locked-in-ness catches up with her.

  Lying quite relaxed now, Celia is no longer bothered by the music from the radio. She deliberately ignores her mother’s ‘pride and joy’, the magnificent waxplant trained arabesque-style over the far wall, and is watching the clouds scudding past the two corner windows – as though they were racing each other round the house. They are snow clouds, she is convinced.

  4

  ‘FRAU ROTH, HELLO? Hello! Frau Roth!’

  Almost eleven, godknows how long they’ve been calling her! She must have dozed off, her bare legs and buttocks have a chill ‘wind-fingered feel to them. For a ludicrous instant she almost expects to be spanked, even the swish of the old cane-plaited carpet beater is in her ears again, cutting through the air. Her mother had often threatened her with it, wielding it above her head, but there was only one time when she’d actually been in earnest, and the soreness afterwards had lasted several days. Celia had been doing magic in her room; she’d heaped some earth, including a small worm and some decomposing leaves, on a kitchen plate, then sprinkled a few of Walter’s hairs and fingernail clippings on top, to be ritually burnt with a candle flame while she was singing, her incantations: ‘Father, come home! Come home! Brother will take your place.’ The loud singing was what had betrayed her.

  Celia rushes her knickers and leggings back on, pulls the blouse down over her hips as she stumbles out into the corridor, past the blare of trumpets and cymbals from the radio she has the presence of mind to turn off.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ she says to the assistant who’s been flipping through the art-deco calendar on the door opposite, the door of her own bedroom. Her voice has a gasping edge to it and he looks at her lazily, the hoods over his eyes rolling up and down like shutters in slow motion.

  He grins. ‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘For your information,’ Celia states, pausing to think of an excuse, ‘for your information, I was sorting through my late mother’s wardrobe.’ She sighs and crosses over to him, reaches out to straighten the calendar that’s dangling there all crooked. Surely he can’t have guessed, surely not? Her hand has come to rest on the side of her face where she feels a sudden itch. ‘What is it, anyway?’

  ‘No offence,’ Dominic gives a sly half-shrug at the creases in her blouse and the flushed ridge-patterned imprint on her cheek which she seems to be trying to hide from him, ‘just wanted to ask for some binbags and, if it’s not too much bother, a cup of –’

  But the woman’s already turned away and is stalking off down the corridor, her green-clad legs looking as stiff and glossy as two freshly painted lengths of wood. Dominic grimaces after her and raises his cap in silent salute. She’s worse than the little old ladies with their rattling trays of cups and saucers and shameless banter. If nothing else, she’ll be good for a laugh with his mates at the Bluebeard Club tonight. He’ll have a gulp of coffee from his thermos instead.

  In the lounge, meanwhile, Alex is kicking limp strips of wallpaper into drifts, whistling along to ‘Message in a Bottle’ and surveying the damp walls and ceiling. Twelve years at least since the last major overhaul, the Roth woman had said (plus, he’d reckon, not too many young visitors either). The plaster is cracked above the window and the fireplace, and there’s the occasional hole – nothing excessive, though. Nothing his All Purpose Polyfilla can’t put right. The paintwork won’t need stripped. A bit of sugarsoaping, a rub with ammonia to get rid of the ingrained dirt, perhaps a little sanding here and there. The only bugger is the cornice and matching rosette in the centre, same as in that perfumed room next door. Not the usual fleur-de-lis but tulips, for God’s sake – he falls silent and slowly marches round the room, his head thrown back – all kinds of bloody tulip shapes. With spiky snarls of leaves and pointed petals asking to be sponged one at a time, please, coquettishly threatening to break off at the first touch.

  Alex tosses his hair. It’ll have to be Dominic’s job; he is more patient and, for all his clowning about, more fastidious, a sucker for tricky problems (no wife and kids to rile him, before and after work). That’s that then, Dominic’s the man. Alex starts whistling again and slaps out the rhythm on the covered-up furniture. With the wind so strong today, the place should dry out soon enough and they’ll be able to get on to the lining and painting well ahead of schedule.

  ‘Goddammit. Dammit! DAMMIT!’ Celia crumples up sister-in-law Lily’s blue aerogramme, then her own unfinished reply, three sheets so far of black pen on bright fuchsia, and hurls the fistful at the clockface behind the kitchen table. The paper balls bounce off the plastic casing with crisp dry pings, innocuously enough. Never budging from her chair, she watches them skitter across the white-tiled floor towards the open doorway.

  She’d received Lily’s letter on Saturday, two weeks after the raging-bull phone call with Walter and his aggressive roar: ‘Mother’s flat is yours now? Yours alone? What a bitch!’ Hoping for some kind of apology, she’d found herself trembling slightly as she slit open the envelope. Then she’d read and re-read the cluttered frilly handwriting which said to accept the family’s ‘deepest sympathy, once again’, and gave a ‘round-up of our latest news’, trying to explain away Walter’s outburst as a ‘temper tantrum, nothing more’, and sending his love (in absentia, for he seemed to be on some trip or other to do with his wine-growing business). Not even a hint of an apology. ‘GODDAMMIT!’

  A pair of feet in paint-spotted Reeboks trample in. ‘Everything okay?’ The Reeboks continue, right over the scrunched-up bits of paper, before coming to a dead halt. ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t see –’

  ‘It’s all right, nothing to be sorry about.’

  The decorator’s hair is dishevelled and matted with dust, his black Vandyke streaked cobweb-grey. He is holding a bucket of scummy water. ‘I was just going to empty this in the bathroom when I heard you. Sounded like you were having problems or something.’ He smiles with his sharp teeth and takes a step nearer. ‘Well, I’m glad to see you’re okay.’ He makes no attempt to leave. Simply stands there smiling down at her.

  Whatonearth does he expect her to do? Celia wonders. Swear some more? But she feels curiously touched all the same. For a moment she blinks up into the blueness of his eyes. They are unwavering, and no mistake. Twin pins that force her to gaze back more steadily …

  Then there’s her mother’s voice, from way back in the past: Watch out, Celia, don’t let yourself be caught with a little sugar-coated kindness or you’ll choke for real. You remember the last time, don’t you?

  Celia starts to cough as something seems to get stuck in her throat.

  Alex, who has suddenly become aware of his bedraggled state, tugs at his hair with his free hand. He isn’t sure exactly what happened. All he knows is that one minute he was smiling at the woman, the next her body had grown sort of rag-doll limp. Except her eyes, which were fixed on his for what seemed ages. Christ, she was weird! Perhaps his first impression of her wasn’t that far off the mark after all: Psychedelia, the mermaid. Either she’s lost her fish’s tail or else she hasn’t quite learnt to swim yet. Not properly, at any rate. For an instant he fantasises about putting his wife into a trance like that, and his sons. Sheer bliss to shut them up at will.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you a favour …’ Celia falters.

  A favour? Alex begins to feel rather uneasy. She sounds much too pleading; ingratiating almost. He doesn’t want things to move so fast. He prefers her more difficult – more off the wall. ‘Back in a second,’ he says, with affected unconcern. ‘I’ll sling this stuff out first.’ Then he turns on his heel and is gone
.

  Dirty overalls, filthy hair, stupid beard, bad manners. No-no-no, Celia tells herself as she tries to unsquash the paper balls she’s retrieved from the floor, the man isn’t worth it. He isn’t really her type. No. She is confused, upset in a way she hasn’t been since Franz’s death.

  She hears Lehmann clear his throat before he ventures, ‘So, you were saying?’

  She barely glances up. Ranged before her on the table are the sheets of her letter and Lily’s aerogramme, a little creased and smudged, yet miraculously untorn. The decorator must have had a wash and general spruce-up in front of the bathroom mirror, he’s come back with his face gleaming. But she doesn’t like him. No-no-no. Doesn’t want to like him. And she is the boss. She’ll be fine. Just fine.

  ‘Having a wee conference?’ The assistant has joined them. He is leaning in the doorway, cap angled back, poking out some earwax with his little finger and grinning his trademark grin. ‘Ready when you are, Alex. Ladders and board are all yours now.’

  ‘Well, I certainly won’t keep you from your work.’ Celia gives an awkward laugh. ‘On the contrary, I was thinking of adding to it. That carpet roll in the lounge, would you mind getting rid of it for me? I’ll pay the council charges, of course.’

  Lehmann is all business now. ‘Sure, take it away this evening. Together with the first load of shutters you want repainted. Peacock blue you said, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She smiles rigidly. ‘Yes. Thank you. And could you start with the lounge, the Beauty Room and the spare bedroom, please?’

  Before closing the kitchen door, the assistant looks back at her over his shoulder, winks, and says, ‘A piece of professional advice, Frau Roth: you might try a steam iron.’

  Celia doubts he is merely referring to the crumpled letters. But she nods anyway. A minute later she is still doing it, nodding helplessly to herself like one of the tiny collapsible bead-and-string toy horses she used to play with as a child. Desperate now to stave off the moment when she’ll have to finish her letter to Lily and Walter, recapturing the conciliatory tone of the first few pages and offering them more of the money her mother had left to her – if that’s what it takes to make Walter happy.

  5

  SHE SPENDS THE best part of Friday morning rewriting that hateful letter to Walter and Lily – with various expurgations of passages she’d scrawled the previous night, after a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and some Calvados – and pausing every so often to picture life at the office, enviously almost. Her first twinge of regret at not being back at work.

  Fridays are the best days at Eric Krüger’s – lazy, chatty and sweet. Lazy and chatty because everyone’s there: Angelina, Handsome Henry and Martin, their salesman. Martin is always keen to help with anything as long as he can talk about his ‘week on the road’, especially the male staff at his favourite motorway restaurants and hotel bars (though he never mentions the jewellers and goldsmiths, Celia has noticed, not even famous Herr Q in Zurich. At fifty, Martin studiously avoids mixing business with pleasure, it appears). And Fridays are sweet. Not just for their delicious proximity to the weekend ahead, but for the more immediate gratification provided by the cartons of meringues, cream cakes and fresh fruit tartlets which Eric never fails to order – ‘as a little treat’ – from the Confiserie three doors up.

  Still, the office will have to wait. She needs more time to sort out her mother’s possessions.

  At midday, the house her own again for the short hour and a quarter of the decorators’ lunch break, Celia clatters about in the kitchen, chopping an onion and peeling some boiled potatoes for a Rösti. The noise from the side street has died down; the last of the employees at the electronics plant must have driven and biked off, or hurried past in their boots, winter coats, gloves, scarves and hats towards the bus stop. Deli-Doris, the young shop assistant and dedicated cyclist at Bänninger’s, the delicatessen on the corner, had told Celia how the plant’s management had introduced a ‘green programme’ that subsidised car-sharing, bus passes and the use of bicycles among the workforce. Celia had smiled and nodded, as required, and wrily thought of the large tax rebates promised, by the cantonal government to businesses which adopted environmentally friendly policies.

  She’s just begun to grate the potatoes into a bowl when the growling starts, far down the main street out of town: a low knocking and thumping and booming, swelling steadily, inexorably, until it becomes a deafening racket of crashings and clashings as the caterpillar tracks roll nearer like thunder made metal, to encroach on the buildings, shaking their foundations, reverberating even in the ice-toughened earth.

  Celia stands petrified. A half-grated potato disintegrates in her hand.

  Not that the column of tanks particularly surprises her. Anders, with its ancient castle complex on the mound, has always been a garrison town, a centre for the country’s artillery; and Walter had been a tank driver in the army. But for a moment she’s had a vision of everything around her falling apart.

  Then she dashes off, potato and all, into the dustsheeted lounge, straight up to the window. The tanks are still rolling by, back from yet another military exercise. They’re monsters, beautiful terrifying monsters, practising to do violence. Compliant for the present, they return to their headquarters on the common, between the canal and the River Thur. Biding their time.

  The floorboards are creaking, the glass panes juddering, close to shattering. Some of the putty is lying in thin grey worms on the sill. If the decorators hadn’t already re-papered the walls and ceiling and given the cornice and rosette a first lick of paint, the plaster dust would be clouding the room by now.

  Celia feels the floor shift imperceptively under her feet. Her whole body is vibrating, her lips are in a tingle.

  The tanks’ gun barrels have been lowered to an almost level position, like the strained necks of big cats scenting prey. Some of the soldiers are showing themselves in the open hatches of the turrets, revelling in the cold rush of air and their sense of power. Celia remembers Walter’s words, reported to her by Lily, that ‘there’s nothing more exhilarating than racing across rough terrain in a tank – nothing, except sex, perhaps.’

  She watches the helmeted heads swivelling about like target seekers. Several of the men see her and wave. She hesitates before raising a hand in reply, sending bits of potato crumbling down on herself.

  Later that day, after a long nap to soothe her battered nerves, Celia swings open her mother’s shiny walnut wardrobe. And it’s like a wave of snakes rearing up. Live snakes hurling themselves at her chest, tails rattling against the inside of the door, vicious and unforgiving. She flinches away covering her eyes. But there’s only a faint flapping noise now so she lowers her arms. Blinks. Then bursts into laughter that ripples way beyond her, into the past and the future, and seems to make the waxplant rustle in its corner.

  She reaches out and yanks the belts off the rail in a quick succession of slaps, flinging them on to the bed where they straddle each other messily: plain-cloth and patterned-cloth belts, a few cracked and cloud-ringed patent leather ones, all of them bent double as if from constant stomach ache, their colours pale and sickly, drained-looking, down to the very buckles even whose metal is hidden under layers of material, bony to the touch.

  Staring at the straggly heap on the coverlet, Celia recalls her mother as she used to be, slim and vain, and how she’d hold her breath for a whole minute if necessary, so the fastener could be forced into the very last hole. In winter the corsets helped; several of the belts were too loose and Walter, the ‘man of the house’, had to punch additional holes into them. Summer with its flesh-bloating simmering heat caused the past-her-bloom beauty no end of twisting and pulling. And violating. Though Celia wasn’t aware of that, not really. Not until a certain Sunday in August a lifetime ago.

  The sun had been fierce that day, even at nearly five o’clock. The air nuzzled and clung to her skin like a hot damp furriness. Heat was bubbling up from the street surfa
ces and pavements, ready to tar her bare feet. She and her mother were walking home from Anders Station – no bus service in those days.

  They’d had lunch at Uncle Godfrey’s trout farm three stops out of town. Walter had stayed on, eager to lend a hand with stripping the fish of their spawn. Encouraged by their uncle, he’d taken to spending most of his free Wednesday afternoons and weekends there, and was paid a little pocket money because he was ‘such an excellent assistant’. But then Uncle was Walter’s godfather, and a bachelor at that.

  ‘A boy his age needs the company of a man,’ Celia’s mother would say to her, repeating the words over and over, like a mantra. Maybe to convince herself and feel less bereft.

  The barriers were down at the level crossing. As her mother proceeded down the pedestrian underpass, Celia loitered by the keeper’s hut in the blinding sunlight, waiting for the fast train from Zurich to come hurtling round the corner in all its twelve-carriage glory, brakes screaming, the slipstream playing havoc with her hair. She’d have much preferred staying with Lily today. They could have cycled down to the common and chased the hares out of the vast maize field by the canal, then had a swim in the Thur, perhaps picked some buttercups and daisies for weaving into gold earrings, necklaces and bracelets.

  The barriers had hardly lifted when Celia felt herself being grabbed by the shoulder. Her mother’s face was shining with perspiration, her eye make-up dissolving. ‘God, what a nuisance you are, Celia!’ she exclaimed and dragged her off down the shadowless empty street. Past the linden tree at the canal bridge where Celia wanted to float some twigs; past the kiosk that sold chilled soft drinks; and past the Frohsinn’s garden restaurant which was full of children having sundaes with their parents, laughing and clinking their spoons and twiddling the tiny paper parasols.

  Yes, Uncle Godfrey used to dote on Walter. Referred to him as ‘the spitting image of dear lost Peter’ if he was in a sentimental enough mood. And instructed his elderly housekeeper, who was fond of children and loved cooking, to prepare Walter’s favourite dishes.