The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  Pushing the stairwell light switch, she feels her skin crawl. Her head hurts. Such a cold empty night; Anders had seemed a ghostly display of shuttered houses, hushed gardens, shops plunged into darkness, deserted restaurants – as if Lent was back in fashion. For a moment she thinks of the angel shapes again, embedded in their sheets of snow tucked into the moonless shadows of the mountains.

  Her eyes scan the landing for any unwanted gifts of flowers: none, thankgod.

  But next to her door handle is a small yellow post-it sticker …

  … she shrinks away letting her keys clatter to the floor …

  … from Carmen. To say the washing machine they share needs a new rubber seal and would she please leave the street door on the latch so the engineer has access to the cellar. Dated Saturday.

  Suddenly Celia hears footsteps ascending from down there. Heavy stamping footsteps.

  Her heart misses a beat, then starts to pump like mad. She stoops for the keys, fumbles the right one into the lock, the blood singing in her ears. After closing the door behind her she leans against it in the dark, listens to the steps outside reach the landing and pause. The landing window is tinkling behind the curtains. She holds her breath, feeling trapped in the crimsonness of her corridor. Picturing her blood being rushed around her body’s arteries and veins, being rushed more and more urgently. Faster. Until the vessels give and rupture at the weakest point …

  The footsteps carry on, past her door and up the stairs. Celia exhales slowly. A false alarm.

  At least her mother didn’t have to bleed to death or choke on her own blood. In the end she had died of starvation. Month by week by day by decaying minute she’d starved a little more. A drifting-away hinted at only by the hollows under her bedclothes.

  ‘There’s nothing else to be done, Frau Roth. I’m very sorry,’ the doctor had told her in the corridor of the nursing home.

  And she had nodded and looked away, not having the heart – or was it the courage perhaps? – to ask, But can’t we help? Can’t we help her … along? She’d looked away as far as she could, past all those closed doors down that corridor bleached bright white …

  Celia is still standing motionless when there’s a rap at her door.

  But she hasn’t heard a thing. There haven’t been any footsteps, have there? No creakings, no squeaky hands on the banister?

  ‘Celia, hello!’

  Carmen’s voice comes as a relief – even if she does sound a little drunk.

  A double-rap follows, loud and jabbing like Celia’s headache.

  ‘Are you there?’

  Celia snaps on the overhead light, then flings open her door to get it over With. ‘Hi, Carmen,’ she says breezily. ‘Yes, I saw your note. Thanks for arranging things with the repair people. I was away for a long weekend. Have they been yet?’ She notices her travelling bag is still sitting out on the landing.

  Carmen shakes her head. ‘No. They said, “Saturday possibly or Monday definitely.” So now it’ll be tomorrow, double-definitely.’ She giggles for no reason that Celia can see.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she inquires and sticks the post-it on the wall inside. There isn’t really much else to say, they are neighbours, not friends.

  Carmen hiccups. ‘Yes, wonderful!’ She breaks into a radiant gap-toothed smile, her tongue stud gleaming. ‘Actually, I’ve just become an aunt and-godmother. My brother phoned from Madrid a short while ago and now Rolf and I are celebrating with some Cava. Rolf’s just fetched another bottle from the cellar.’ She hiccups again and the stud chinks against the back of her teeth like hidden laughter. ‘Care to join us?’

  Celia wonders briefly whether the woman is taking her revenge for the boiler-room episode the previous weekend. Carmen isn’t the type, though. Much too good-natured, too well-disposed towards her fellow creatures.

  ‘Congratulations! Boy or girl?’

  For a minute or so they go through the motions, then, touching the side of her head where the pain has sharpened into nails, Celia says a decided goodnight and thanks anyway but she is too tired right now, and lugs her bag over the threshold.

  Her rucksack, or rather Franz’s rucksack, she’d sacrificed to the Alps. As the train rattled along the gorge, in and out of tunnels and avalanche galleries, with vistas of frozen waterfalls like silvery rips in the mountainside opposite and the immediacy of sheer rock less than a metre away, it had suddenly occurred to her that this was what she ought to have done years ago. After the vertiginous curve of the Landwasser viaduct she’d transferred her toiletries and the extra jersey and jeans to the travelling bag, then unfastened every single zip in the rucksack, unlooped every single cord. By the time they were approaching the viaduct near Solis she was ready. The elderly couple in the seats fecing her had gawked and gasped in unison when she opened the window, but she’d simply smiled at them, saying, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t feel a thing.’ Ninety metres below, the River Albula was a winding band of darkening turquoise in the dusk. At the next stop husband-and-wife had moved to a newly vacated compartment.

  Home at last. And home alone. But this isn’t a film. She isn’t a kid. Come on now, woman. What had Nita said? Don’t worry about things.

  First of all she needs a couple of aspirins.

  She flips on the bathroom light – and stares, amazed:

  The room’s been painted a slinky pearly emerald with flecks of red and gold, suggestive of reptiles sheltering in crevices or the cool shade of leaves, underwater even … Infinitely more evocative than her original request for seagreen. There’s a message on the mirror, in clumsy lipstick letters: A Mermaid’s Bathroom. Sorry you weren’t around to advise … The dots at the end are smudgy pink kisses. In a tiny PS Alex offers to redo the lot if she isn’t happy. And in a PPS he asks, WHERE ARE YOU?

  Celia can feel tears pricking beneath her eyelids. ‘Alex,’ she murmurs, sliding her fingertips over the textured finish. The cool grittiness threatens to graze her skin and sends a chill of pleasure through her. She quickly swallows the two tablets, then gingerly detaches the protective layers of tape and gauze from her palm. The cuts have the look of raw meat. The water as she washes her hands stings and stabs at them with tiny invisible blades. Flexing her fingers is sore, and she dabs on some iodine.

  After leaving a message on Nita’s answering machine to say thanks again for everything, she goes into the kitchen, lifts the black tulips from their agate vase – and drops them straight into the rubbish bin. A mechanical action that requires no effort, still less thought. It’s as if she has become a wind-up toy and someone’s tightened the spring inside her. One step. Then another. And another. She can’t stop, the spring has been coiled so tightly.

  In the spare bedroom she is greeted by a first coat of azure as bright as a summer sky in the Alps. The illusion collapses rudely enough when she trips on the plastic sheeting and lands on her behind. She giggles. A few bruises more can’t do any harm – quite the reverse, they might make Alex more interested in her. For an instant she imagines him kneeling by her side, kissing better every lurid inch of her. She’ll phone him in a minute. But first she has work to do. The floor covering, stippled blue and crimson and purple and turquoise like some modern art installation, flaps under her feet.

  The Valentine cards are strewn higgledy-piggledy over the various jewellery boxes and letters in her mother’s bedside drawer, the way she’d left them Friday night. Their declarations of love, Celia has persuaded herself, aren’t her business. None of her mother’s private correspondence is. She has no right to pry and play the detective. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, my dear, as her grandmother would have said, her lips curved into a smile. For an instant Celia hears the growl again of that barely awake lion in his cage above the cemetery. Then she gets her mother’s lace-trimmed wastepaper basket out of the wardrobe and begins to fill it.

  The tulip cards go first. If there’s anything she needs to know, the past will catch up with her soon enough. Now for the piles of letters. Among them
are several pale-violet envelopes addressed to Mademoiselle Gabrielle, c/o Coiffure et Beauté, 1012 Lausanne-Chailly, from someone called Nicole in Montreux – empty envelopes, so why had her mother bothered to save them? Also a handful of aerogrammes from New Zealand, and half a dozen postcards from herself as a schoolgirl. Celia dumps them all without compunction. But she can’t bring herself to throw out a manila envelope she’s found which contains photos of her parents she had never been shown – photos of their early days together, before Walter disrupted what Celia now sees as a ‘meeting of needs’: her mother with that holding-back look on her face while her father is standing or sitting or lying gazing at her, his mouth smiling, his eyes squeezed up with delight, his hand grasping her shoulder, her arm, her waist. And the other thing Celia can’t bear to part with is her father’s messed-up map of the Hölloch – surely she has the right, if not the duty, to treasure that?

  The drawer is almost empty. Fluff has got wadded in its corners and along the edges. Although she could describe every single piece of her mother’s jewellery from memory, Celia opens box after box. Everything’s there: the antique bracelet fashioned from silver coins which her grandfather had given to her mother on her return from Lausanne; her grandmother’s small round gold watch; the Akoya-pearl necklace she herself had bought as a sixtieth birthday present; the 24-carat gold curb chain with the three pendants in the shape of a gentian, a rose and a stylised cat, allegedly from her father; the brooch and matching clip-on earrings in filigree silver ‘inherited’ from an old friend (Nicole of the violet notepaper, maybe?); the solid-silver torque – ‘just a gift, don’t be so nosy’. And that’s it. No rings. Not even a wedding ring. And certainly no stone-set jewellery – or ‘dwarfs’ treasure’, to use her mother’s phrase.

  The last of the boxes is trailing the frayed end of a black satin ribbon. Hadn’t her mother always said she disliked ‘fancy trims’? A tug and the box falls open.

  Inside is a lock of red hair, tied up in a bow.

  Celia’s own hair is dark brown like Walter’s; her father’s was the colour of sun-bleached molehills and her mother’s a glossy black, with a little help.

  She can’t believe what she’s thinking: Margaret, Lily’s mother! She is the only person with that tint of red, not strawberry red like Lily, but red-hot gold. Titian red.

  Margaret. Whyonearth would her mother keep a lock of her hair? Celia repeats the name out loud, questioningly, tentatively, with long pauses in between: ‘Margaret? … Margaret? … Margaret? …’ More forcefully now: ‘MARGARET! MARGARET! MARGARET!’ Until it becomes a painful boom in her head.

  ‘FORGODSAKEIDONTBELIEVEIT!’ she shouts, over and over again.

  Details begin to slot into the blanks of a puzzle she’s never wanted to solve. The many beauty visits Lily’s mother had been able to afford. The weekly afternoon teas. The small legacy in her mother’s will which she’d put down to mere whimsicalness towards a good friend and client. The way the two women had embraced under the cherry tree while they waited for the doctor. That ominous Carnival Ball when not even Lily knew Margaret’s outfit.

  Margaret. Margaret the person under her mother’s skirts? Was it possible?

  Celia staggers dizzily to her feet. She is pressing her father’s map to her heart like a mascot, perhaps to fend off another round of questions. Questions she couldn’t face just yet.

  As the letters and Valentine cards settle on the black tulips in the kitchen bin, it’s like another eerie déjà vu. Margaret the bestower of tulips? But the voice on the phone hadn’t been that of an old woman, she’s positive. And she definitely would have recognised Margaret. Celia slams down the bin lid, lifts it up again, slams it, lifts it, slams it a third time, extra hard. Who says only mountaineers are allowed their rituals? WHO BLOODY SAYS?

  It’s late, half past eleven, when she dials Alex’s number. She needs to talk with him to touch base again, as it were. If his wife answers, she’ll find an excuse, some disaster involving a paint tin and herself maybe, to allay suspicion.

  But it’s Alex who says (on the seventh ring, she counted), ‘Yes, Jacqueline?’ He sounds drowsy, and irritated. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Hi there, Alex. This isn’t Jacqueline – whoever she is.’

  ‘Celia!’ At once he seems warm and alert. ‘Jacqueline’s my wife. Went on a skiing holiday with the boys yesterday. She almost didn’t leave because Pascal, our …’

  The receiver clamped under her chin, Celia begins fingering the three silk passionflowers – from the door and the chocolate box – she’d laid out earlier on the telephone table, in an act of defiance.

  ‘… his tonsils. And now Jacqueline keeps calling me. Anyway, how are you?’

  ‘All right. Just got back. Thanks a million for my Mermaid’s Bathroom! It’s wonderful, Alex! Here’s a kiss for you!’ Purringly she adds, ‘I’m happy to pay you double – cash, and in kind. If you want.’ She giggles at his indrawn breath.

  ‘Do I? Christ what a question!’ He pauses and there’s a soft thudding creak as he turns over in bed. ‘By the by, I had some trouble getting into your flat Saturday afternoon. The street door was on the latch so I went in and up. Then this leather-clad biker appeared out of nowhere. Acted like a bouncer when he saw me with your keys.’

  Celia laughs, ‘Rolf’s a nice guy and a good neighbour. More bluff than anything. He must have thought you were an intruder or a secret admirer …’ She checks herself. Grabs one of the silk flowers and tweaks off a petal, He loves me. And another, He loves me not. ‘I took off at the crack of dawn, so he wouldn’t have known I was away.’

  ‘A bit sudden,’ Alex comments and goes silent.

  ‘A trip to the mountains to visit an old girlfriend. I stayed longer than intended.’ He loves me. Celia hopes he’ll say, Why didn’t you tell me?

  But he blurts out, ‘According to this Rolf guy I was “the third male to come knocking on that bleeding door” in the space of an hour.’

  ‘What? More men wanting to see me? You’re kidding!’ Ten petals, she observes to herself, that’s bound to end sadly. Better start with He loves me not next time. Carefully she puts the ragged-looking remains of the passionflower down on the table, beside the others. Three men after her and she’d managed to miss them all. Trying to fight phantoms on a sledge run instead, forgodsake!

  Alex has begun mumbling and panting. She is about to ask if there’s something wrong when she hears him whisper, quite distinctly now, ‘So what are you wearing, Celia? Or are you naked already, like a true mermaid?’

  Lying in bed freshly showered and scented after her fim-and-games phone call, her injured hand covered with new gauze, Celia remembers the letter box out front. She’s forgotten to empty it. Yes, forgotten, et voilà. Forgottenforgottenforgotten, she tries to convince herself, in a vague sleepy sort of way, while a voice deep down keeps butting in: not forgotten, ignored. You ignored it deliberately. Coward.

  Barely awake, Celia finds herself back in the cemetery. The memory of the cold makes her flinch and curl up inside her nightdress as if it’s a shell, or a second skin; her knees nestle against her stomach and huddle tightly in her arms.

  My mother visits Nonna’s grave every week – same day, same time, like clockwork, she hears Angelina say.

  Envy, jagged and glittering as crushed glass, cuts into Celia. She hugs herself even harder, so hard her knees start to dig into her breasts, and she has to let go.

  Her last thought is indistinguishable already from what might be the beginnings of her first dream: Thirty days – tomorrow my mother will have been dead …

  25

  WHEN THE DECORATORS enter after a short knock, Celia trembles a little, doing her best not to betray her emotions. Tonight at six is the memorial service Uncle Godfrey had insisted on.

  She addresses Alex as Herr Lehmann and he smiles, then fleetingly places a finger on his lips to say they’re sealed. His gaze seems to draw her towards him, into the here and now, and she has to grip the door
jamb of the store room for support.

  Out of the corner of her eye she sees that Dominic has picked up the mangled passionflower from the telephone table. ‘You don’t like flowers, do you?’ he states with a snort that conveys his distrust of her so openly her whole body winces. ‘Not even bloody real. Might as well finish the job,’ he mutters and, like an insolent kid, starts to pull out the rest of the petals.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Celia says, grateful for the distraction. The trembling is all but gone now and she risks a glance at Alex.

  He is pretending to scowl at Dominic and patting down a few wisps of his Vandyke in a cagey silence – after all, he knows how much she hates those flowers.

  The fuzzy silk petals litter the floor like bird feathers after the cat has had its fun, and Dominic stares at them in distaste. Then he grins over at Alex, who’s still scowling. Why hasn’t the boss tried to stop him, for chrissake? Boldly he waves the two remaining specimens in the air and asks, ‘What about these?’

  ‘Chuck them in the bin,’ Celia replies, before Alex can clear his throat.

  Dominic ignores her and sticks the flowers behind the mirror, between the frame and the wall, in a V-shape. Then he stands admiring them, scratching himself under his baseball cap while the heads on the silk-wrapped wire stems nod at him stiffly.

  ‘Well, we’d better get going,’ Alex announces, but he doesn’t move.

  Celia shrugs. ‘Same here,’ she says, reaching for her poncho on the coat rack. ‘I’ll give you a ring later this morning to see how things are shaping up.’ As she drapes the woollen cloth over her arms, she looks at Alex and lets the tip of her tongue flicker over her lips, casually provocative, as if she’s licking off a breakfast crumb.

  Alex smiles very faintly and opens the front door for her. ‘Right, bye for now,’ he says, so deadpan-sober Dominic looks at him speculatively for a moment, then at Celia, his eyes harrowed to slits under their hoods. Seconds later he tips his cap at her, smirks and turns on his heel, off to the spare bedroom.