The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  The most tantalising picture, to Celia’s mind, is the black-and-white wedding photo of her parents. Her father’s shining eyes are almost hidden behind his high cheekbones and old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses as he stands tall and rather wide-hipped in his dark suit. Her mother is leaning away from him, displaying her narrow sashed waist and the tightness of her small breasts under the lacy bodice; her hands are clasped around a bouquet of roses and lilies she’s raised to just below her lips which are parted slightly, as if in secret amusement.

  But these aren’t the pictures her uncle is looking at now. He has chosen a happy family slice of southern hemisphere life: Walter, Lily, and the twins – perhaps ten years old – in their vineyard in Hawke’s Bay, mouths smeared red, a luscious ridiculous clown red.

  Celia has got up and strolled over to inspect the Happy Family portrait. ‘Lily phoned the other night,’ she says casually. ‘We’d quite a nice chat. Walter’s away in Australia. Seems to do a lot of travelling these days. All for the family business, I suppose.’

  She half-faces round, flicking her hair out of the way, over her shoulder. ‘You should have visited them, Uncle, when they invited you. Why didn’t you?’

  He nods abstractedly and sits up more straight, easing the bulk of his body gently, so as not to upset Mitzi.

  ‘Uncle?’ she repeats.

  He doesn’t reply and she suspects that, quite possibly, he wouldn’t know why either. Just a mixture of laziness and a dislike of long-distance flights, strange beds, the kiwi fruit that gives him an itchy red rash, and the noise and wild games of two boys he hasn’t seen in years.

  Celia turns towards the sideboard again. Behind the clutter of silver frames, blending in with their shadows and the thick reflections of antique pitch pine, she’s glimpsed a huddle of something, a greasy-looking piece of brown cloth, crumpled over a tin of furniture wax. Has her uncle taken up wood-polishing as a hobby, following, belatedly, in his father’s footsteps? She picks up the cloth by a corner and, for a dizzy moment, smells the sweet pungency of turpentine tempered with lavender.

  ‘How this reminds me of Walter,’ she murmurs with her back to the old man, unaware of his silent watchfulness. ‘Funny, I’d forgotten about this. But he really got into polishing things, didn’t he, after Father went missing. Used to shine the floor tiles in the kitchen and the bathroom till they were deathtraps.’ She laughs. ‘Didn’t you tell us he once tried wiping gutted fish and their scales came off?’

  Celia, recalls being jealous of Walter. He’d shined his way into their mother’s heart, it had seemed to her, lavishing his affection on the Beauty Room and the challenge of its. surfaces. In lieu of payment he’d get special care and attention. Which invariably meant a closed door, conspiratorial whispers, bouts of stifled laughter and nails buffed to a sheen. It was only when he started his apprenticeship that his home efforts flagged. Then stopped altogether. As did their mother’s fondness of him. Strange, Celia muses, how she could have forgotten. A blatant case of suppression, that’s what, she can hear Jasmin comment.

  It suddenly occurs to her that her uncle hasn’t joined in her memories, let alone chuckled along with her. His head bent over Mitzi, he is combing his fingers through her fur as if checking for fleas. Good old Uncle, all slumped and humped and so palpably uneasy. Obviously Walter isn’t deemed a suitable topic of conversation. She’ll have to try a different tack.

  ‘I found something this morning, Uncle. In Mum’s bedside drawer.’

  At this he winces, lifts blank eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Father’s map. Of the Hölloch.’ She pauses, waiting for his response. When none comes, she continues, ‘But there’s something I don’t understand: how could she have got hold of it?’

  Her uncle breathes out slowly. ‘Oh, didn’t Gabrielle tell you? It was recovered by the search party. The only thing they ever did find of him, poor dear Peter. He must have lost it and decided to go on without it …’

  As Celia contemplates the idea of her father burrowing further into the dark unknown, there’s a knock and Mouse Face pushes the door open with a tray of coffee and crunchy Migros Carnival pancakes salvaged from the depths of her kitchen cupboards – yawning depths, in Celia’s imagination, which stretch into the infinite blackness of underground galleries, lakes and rivers and tunnels without end.

  Later, licking the papery crumbs and icing sugar from her lips, she does her best to forget about that sad memento in her mother’s drawer and, with exaggerated enthusiasm, describes the newly decorated lounge and corridor. The name Lehmann crops up a few times, perhaps more often than necessary. Still, that’s the least of her uncle’s worries; he is glad they have steered clear of subjects too distressing and, yes, why not admit it, too distasteful to him. Visibly perked up now, he asks some questions about the overall colour scheme, quite unperturbed by the bewildering details she gives him, of hues and gradations and types of paint. His cheeks look firmer, his eyes glimmer with specks of gold, like sunlight caught in moss.

  Then, after some office gossip to pave the way, Celia relates the story of the silk handkerchief, severely edited and with a deliberate sad shrug at poor Angelina’s mishap. She feels a little devious but he is eager to be of help, and instead of ending up with one of his spares, she drives off with a small boxful on the seat beside her.

  Coasting along the base of Cemetery Hill on the eastern outskirts of Anders, she is suddenly overwhelmed by its looming mass and has to pull over on to the verge for a short rest. She sits with her head bowed and her hands clenching the wheel. Your mother’s up there, says a voice inside her, dead and buried. And you haven’t visited her grave once since the funeral.

  As she swings the car into her backyard, the headlights play over some frozen tyre marks and compressed scatterings of snow – all that’s left of Alex and his van, and no doubt gone by tomorrow if the most recent forecast is to be believed: a major thaw in the Mittelland, with temperatures soaring to well above ten degrees Celsius. Celia switches off the radio, then the engine, the lights.

  A moment passes. And another.

  She remains where she is, muffled in silence and darkness. Staring over at the fruit trees. Noting their pathetically thin limbs silhouetted against the sodium glow of the sky and the chalky walls of the house next door. Dwarf trees they are, stunted, cultivated for the average-size family garden so as not to occupy too much space. Or pose any dangers. No child would want to climb them.

  Not that Celia had been much of a tree climber in her days. The cherry tree at Lily’s parents’, still standing proud, higher than the two-storey house, had put an end to that ambition early on.

  She remembers as if it was yesterday stretching her hand towards the cluster of sunburnt cherries dangling just out of reach, like tiny swollen mouths bright with laughter. Then … blackness. She hadn’t felt a thing. Not the fall, nor the cuts and sprained ankle, the voices brushing over her. Not until that prayer-request-cry, her mother’s, pierced her to the heart. Like a breath it’s stirring above her now, floating in the stale dust-heated air of the car:

  Dear God, even if I didn’t want her then, don’t take her from me now. Dear God, not after all these years.

  Dimly she had become aware of her mother kneeling at her side and caressing her face, weeping and whispering. Margaret seemed to be there too, her arms round her mother in an embrace, while Lily stood in tears.

  Celia releases the door handle as though to let the voice escape. Or perhaps in the vain hope of getting rid of it. She’d never asked her mother why she hadn’t wanted to have her. At first out of sheer cowardice. Later because she believed she knew the answer. The kinship she felt with her mother had nothing to do with flesh and blood, she’d realised, and everything with independence.

  She won’t see Alex now till Monday. Three long nights fraught with creakings, silences, and the threat of bad dreams. Two long days of more clearing-out. And more of that sadness she could sense seeping into her at Uncle’s. All of a sudden she fee
ls nauseous, coils of barbed wire are twisting inside her belly, and she struggles to get out of the car. The lock on the garage is iced over. She scrapes and jabs at it with the key, then keeps jiggling. Two days and three nights of holding everything in, holding everything together.

  Before going upstairs Celia steps into the boiler room for a bit of instant warmth. It wraps round her like a blanket, soothing the spiky pain that has spread all through her body. The evening of her fall from the cherry tree her mother had baked a chocolate cake for her, decorated with swirls of whipped cream, jelly diamonds, Hundreds and Thousands and the words GET WELL SOON! in pink marzipan. Celia can almost taste the cake now, moist and sweet like heaven in her mouth, then melting into an oddly thin salty flavour while the oil-fired heating blasts away more and more tunelessly. The silk handkerchiefs are still in the car but she is too tired to fetch them.

  She’s about to put off the light when the pivot window, which is partly open as usual, draws her attention. In its right-hand corner, trapped by spiderwebs, are two fluttery objects. Like big watchful eyes. MORE PASSIONFLOWERS, GODDAMMIT! Celia slams the door behind her, shivering as the cooler air of the stairwell smacks her in the face.

  After his initial what-the-hell-ing this morning Alex had laughed at her. ‘Why are you so upset?’ he’d asked. ‘A passionflower’s quite a compliment, no? Plus a follow-up call? Well, well, still waters –’

  ‘You shut up! You don’t understand a fucking thing!’ In her fury she’d pummelled her towel turban as she shouted it all out, starting with the funeral tulips …

  Alex had sobered up instantly and dropped the silk flower back into the box. Then he began fingering his Vandyke and shaking his head. ‘If you need help, don’t forget I’m here too,’ he repeated with a sheepish out-of-my-depth expression every time she paused for breath. Gone was the entrancing needle-sharpness of his eyes, the flippant half-jealous tone, and in an obscure way she’d felt rather sorry.

  NO! Celia has reached the door to her flat and there, tied to the handle, are two more passionflowers. BASTARD! This is going too far!

  Inside the house now! The street door is kept locked and that bastard must have … Trust Carmen upstairs to press her entry buzzer.

  Inside the flat soon! If the night curtain hadn’t been pulled across her landing window, those eyes would have snooped through the garland of roses cut in the frosted glass, straight into her corridor … She can’t go on staying here, it isn’t safe any more. Has he – whoever he is – been watching her and Alex, perhaps? Celia’s nerves are jangling. They’re scraping and twitching under her skin, ready to tear loose. She ought to leave. Or call the police. But they won’t do a thing. Nothing stolen, they’ll say, no damage done, and what’s wrong with flowers now? At best they might suggest monitoring her phone, then let her be.

  The corridor is a shadowless black gullet and she scrabbles for the light switch, clutching the key ring so the house and office keys protrude from her knuckles like vicious metal blades – just in case. Even with the light on, every step she takes seems to ricochet around the house. The floorboards groan under her feet. All the doors are ajar: the lounge door, the store-room door … And there’s a smell of locked-in-ness, much stronger than ever before.

  Then Celia laughs and claps her hands; the shutters have been restored, that’s why. Throughout the flat they’ve been fastened together with not so much as a hairline crack in between. Driving past the house earlier, she’d been too preoccupied to notice. Dear Alex, for all his doubts and disbelief, has made sure she feels sheltered and secure. Celia is grateful to him. Fortressed up like this she’ll be able to spend the night here at least.

  In the Beauty Room, the peacock-blue shutters behind the window and the balcony door give the illusion of a rich tropical sky – a perfect non-pale non-blotting-paper-blue sky. The room itself has grown more bleached and lacklustre, dominated now by the insipid expanse of the blond carpet and the dull ivory; of the walls from which the shelving and flower pictures have been removed. A heap of veneered boards and panels have replaced the vanity cabinet. Celia grimaces at them and mechanically rinses some dust from the rim of the washbasin, then she splashes her face with cold water. Running her wet hands through her hair, she turns towards the wall-length mirror: just like Mitzi she looks, gaunt and exhausted, with wrinkles thick as cat’s whiskers at the corners of her eyes.

  She isn’t old yet, is she? Not that old? Not too old to have children if she wanted to? She could still have a family. She could afford it. If she wanted to. But she’s never felt the urge. Never felt the gooey drooliness she’s observed in other women when they peek into a pram. It’s nice, of course, to gaze into the clear round baby eyes that bounce everything back unsullied and innocent for that one split second: the sun-dappled shade, clouds, the toys hanging from a string, the beholder’s face. Nice, oh yes. Humbling. And yet, she’s always felt a fraud pretending to admire tiny fingernails and thin marbled veins, limp slicks of hair; pretending to enjoy the gurgles, screams and milky sick slobbering out of those red holes.

  Alex has two kids. Boys. ‘A bit of a handful at times,’ he’d told her and pointed to his discoloured knuckle. ‘But I wouldn’t not have them for anything. The older one’s a football aficionado, which keeps me fit too.’ His laughter, and his eyes, had been soft and pleased. No mention of his wife, though, and she hadn’t asked.

  Celia stands staring at the tulip cornice thinking, Two sons, just like Walter. Three–four–five she has started to count the plaster flowers as if compelled. Walter. Is this what he used to do eleven–twelve–next–one’s-broken while he was getting his nails manicured? Counting the tulips up there nineteen–twenty and telling himself this was nothing out of the ordinary twenty-four this filing twenty-five this softening and shaping of cuticles twenty-eight–twenty-nine–thirty this nipping and clipping thirty-three this buffing, et voilà?

  All of a sudden her mother’s voice seems to echo around the Beauty Room for real: Irresponsibility, carelessness, lust–that’s the evil trinity, Celia … You don’t want to learn the hard way, now do you ?

  Celia doesn’t want to hear more. Yanking the door shut, she hurries down the corridor to the spare room. It’s been dust-sheeted because of the steaming and lining Alex started today. Beside the bed she hesitates for a moment. Then, lifting a corner of the sheeting, she grasps the gold-plated drawer handle. Pulls. And grabs her father’s map like a trophy snatched from the jaws of death – that’s how it feels, now that she knows.

  Her hand has knocked over some jewellery boxes and a stack of old letters and postcards. Tucked underneath, held together by a thick green rubber band, is a bundle of cards. Face down – no, front to front, Godknows what more surprises she’s going to find here.

  Celia’s breath hisses a little as she slips out the first card. The rubber band, brittle with age, snaps. And so does her breath, for a second.

  The picture shows a black tulip. A single black tulip, its head tilted slightly to expose stamens and stigma.

  The next card’s the same, and the next: eleven cards in all – eleven black tulips. A vague memory stirs at the back of her mind. Years ago she’d seen a card like this propped against some towels on a shelf in the Beauty Room.

  Now, one by one, she folds the cards open.

  Nothing except the printed words: A Declaration of Lobe!

  Valentine cards.

  Her head’s swimming. So, black tulips too are tokens of love … and her mother did have a secret admirer … someone who’s still alive … and stalking the daughter now, it would appear.

  Before Celia has time to ponder this, the phone begins to ring. Impetuous. Insistent. Ringing and ringing. Making her feel like a spinning top prematurely jolted to a halt. That bastard with his imitation passionflowers, no doubt. Will she answer it or won’t she? The shutters are in place, the door is double-locked – and she’s already lost her peace of mind. Tohellwithit! She tosses the cards and map back into the drawer. But she
won’t hang up afterwards; she’ll contact the police from upstairs to have the call traced.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hello there, Frau Roth. Surprise, surprise: it’s Rita! Could I make an appointment, please?’

  A woman’s oldish voice. Celia is tempted to put the phone down.

  ‘Well, actually, I’m her daughter. I’m afraid my mother –’

  ‘Oh, just tell her it’s Rita Stettler. Back from South Africa at long last. She’ll remember me. The loveliest skin ever, she used to say.’

  Celia laughs hysterically. ‘I’m really sorry, Frau Stettler, but my mother died four weeks ago tomorrow. She’s dead.’

  She lets the line go silent and, rather unnerved, tugs a tissue from the box on the telephone table. Dabbing her eyes, she glances towards the front door and the curtained landing window, then at the coat rack with its swaying dummy-like figures and finally at the oval mirror, which reflects no gnome’s grin, thankgod, nor any ghosts, only one of Alex’s business cards stuck in its frame.

  ‘Celia –’ it says in a sexy angular handwriting. ‘Don’t forget you can reach me on the mobile any time! Take care. Alex.’

  Behind her back, beyond the rooms and their shutters, she imagines she can hear snow clouds puffing and swelling above the matchstick fruit trees and the roofs of the neighbouring houses.