Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  ‘Ellie, my family might be the right sort of people but they are poor as church mice. I’d have to wait years before I inherited anything worthwhile from them.’

  Ellie shakes her head despairingly. ‘All those terrible lies! And your acting was so good!’

  ‘I only acted out your own fantasy for you. You had it all going in your mind’s eye anyway. I became the person you wanted to see, that’s all. It didn’t require much talent to convince you.’

  ‘What would Malc say if he knew what you’d done—that you’d used him like a piece of old carpet and that you’d throw him out tomorrow if it suited you?’

  ‘It does not matter to me in the slightest what Malcolm thinks of me. The only person to whom what Malcolm thinks matters is you, I’m afraid, sweetie. Now, before I go I would be thrilled if you could show me round. There might be some changes I’ll need to make, and there’s no need to eye the poker like that, Ellie, you’re not the kind of person to go in for violence. If you were, you would have resorted to that before now. Oh yes, there have been times when you have been desperate enough. I do understand you know, Ellie.’ And her tone is one of mild reproach.

  Meekly, obediently, Ellie gets up and shows Gabriella round. She insists on seeing everything, so Ellie has to open the airing cupboard and display the sheets, let down the attic steps and take her up there, too. And all the while Ellie is trying to come to terms with the painful fact that she has been used, that Gabriella is the one who directed and manipulated her from the start, that even her emotions have been directed, from a cool, safe distance, by Gabriella. As if Ellie was a rag doll.

  How Gabriella must despise her.

  And here was Ellie, feeling huge and grand… brimming over with all sorts of silly little hopes. Yes, if she could, if she dared, she would kill her.

  Down in the kitchen Gabriella pokes and pries and comments, she even remarks on the length of the handles of Ellie’s wooden spoons and the sharpness of her knife collection.

  ‘I suppose you had decided on a way of tackling the neighbours, if you had managed to lure Malc back as you dreamed you would, persuading him, eventually, to sell that dratted bungalow to buy this?’

  ‘I was going to confide in the Brigadier.’ Ellie admits that much to her. ‘He’s a broad-minded man, he would have helped me. Given time, I would have worked something out.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure you would, Ellie. I have so enjoyed watching your little game… women are so much more devious, so much more imaginative than men, darling, aren’t they?’

  Gabriella’s darting eyes miss nothing. It is dark before she is ready to leave.

  ‘You approve then, do you?’ asks Ellie.

  ‘Yes, top marks, I approve!’ Gabriella rubs her hands together. She looks just like Miss Bacon did when Ellie handed in a neat piece of work.

  Ellie is humbled and totally humiliated by the elation this approval still gives her.

  At last Ellie can show Gabriella out. The quiet, placid life of the square goes on behind them, soft lighting through curtains, a shadow bending, and on the road the occasional purr of a car, the closing of a door, the soft casting of a headlight. In the porch-light Gabriella’s features are pointed and hard. She should not stand directly under lights like that, and mosquitoes are clustering in swarms round her. But Ellie doesn’t want to attack her, there is something about Gabriella she fears and admires and needs to keep intact. But she shakes her head softly as she closes the door.

  Gabriella slams her car door, rams in her car keys and revs away triumphantly into the night.

  The stairs are tiring. Ellie has been up and down them too many times today. Her legs are aching because she has a great deal of weight to carry. There is something to be said for bungalows.

  34

  SOMETIMES.

  You feel so tired.

  You can hardly move.

  Now—heavy like a slug, sticking to every stair, a silver trail of misery behind her as she winds and mounts, the peace and quiet she’d so enjoyed two hours ago has turned into silence, a frightening wall of darkness on to which she is too small to make an impression. It engulfs her and she is terrified again.

  Ellie has always been afraid of the world.

  Everything in her life has always told her she is unimportant.

  Her simple invitation cards laugh at her now and she smiles back at them as she pushes them into a neat pile, willing, as always, to share the joke, to laugh at herself. Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? If you can’t laugh…

  Ellie weeps. Her large body shakes and she weeps horribly.

  ‘What you’ve got to do is list your goals. See… there’s five pages of space for your goals.’ Ellie remembers how she’d laughed, how they’d all laughed at Margot’s list of goals. Margot had been given this book called Plan Your Own Destiny, and in it were suggestions, in case the readers were too uninspired, thick or too downright boring to have any ideas of their own. Ellie remembers some of them… to become a qualified commercial pilot, a wealthy inventor, a ballet star, a golf professional and then, coming down to earth with a bump, it was kindly suggested that some people might have smaller goals than that: ‘You might just want to be a housewife fattening a family budget with extra income earned through successful spare-time activities.’

  Well! Now then!

  ‘Which role have you chosen for yourself? Success or failure? A continued average, humdrum, aimless, muttering, run-of-the-mill existence as just another member of the common herd…?’ The book crossly suggested that some of its more recalcitrant readers might even have chosen that!

  ‘Take off those blinkers!’ shouted the book, while exhorting you to, ‘Figure out your circuit and rev up your generator.’

  Margot, using the correct jargon, shouted back, ‘You’ve gotta believe, you’ve gotta dream!’

  Margot had put down her goals—to get to be Secretary General of the United Nations within five years, to learn to play the violin like Yehudi Menuhin, to get hung up in chains wearing a school angel costume and be whipped by Dudley Moore, and to be able to say the word ‘Peugeot’ without having to stop and think about it.

  ‘Here, the trouble with yours is that they contradict themselves,’ Di had said seriously, drawing a wet, circular explanation in spilt rum and coke and drying her finger on a sandwich. ‘I mean, if you got to be Secretary General you wouldn’t have time to practise the violin, it wouldn’t matter if you could say Peugeot and you’d probably be so busy shagging your way to the top that you wouldn’t have the energy to dress up and do that with Dudley Moore. You’d probably get to bed and only want to sleep. Your phone’d be ringing all night long with very serious problems for you to solve.’

  ‘And you can’t just sit and wait about for your dreams to come true,’ Ellie remembers saying with urgency. ‘That’s what the book says. If you want to be Secretary General you’d have to go to the library tomorrow and look up everything about being Secretary General, and then you’d have to start climbing up towards that goal. I mean, you’d probably have to learn some languages for a start.’

  Oh, God help me. Because Ellie never had any goals of her own—hers were always for other people: please let Kev get into Cardiff, please let Mandy pass her maths, please let Lil stop drinking, it’s going to kill her in the end. Please let Malc find something to make him happy, something to put that gleam back into his eyes again.

  And none of Ellie’s goals would last as long as a year, let alone five. They changed too frequently, for she was too unambitious, she would never have time to do all the homework the book suggested, she could never be bothered to get up in the night and record her dreams.

  And yet some people know exactly what they want—like the bleak-eyed girl she’d met in the park in London. Like Gabriella…

  Love and envy… am I unnatural, Ellie wonders. My God, am I unnatural to be feeling jealous, not of Gabriella, who possesses Malc and is casual enough about it to be prepared to give him away… but of M
alc for having Gabriella? And should I be hurting because Gabriella thinks so little of me, just as I was beginning to believe that she liked me… After all these years, a woman like that… I had come so far that I honestly thought she liked me!

  And was proud of that.

  Oh God, help me.

  Selfish, Freda would say, if she suspected that Ellie had dreams of her own and was nurturing them. ‘You’re selfish, you are! Think about other people for a change, instead of forever pushing yourself forward!’ She always said this when she considered that Ellie was showing off. ‘Look at me, what d’you think would’ve happened to us if I’d fooled around dreaming all day?’

  And in Mr Wilkins’ study, after her terrible experience with the love of her life, Miss Bacon… ‘Elspeth Thwait.’ He pulled his glasses off his nose with two exacting fingers, he wiggled the golden hooks off his ears. ‘I have been watching you for some time now and I can see that if you are not very careful you will go off the rails completely. You have got yourself in with the wrong set of people. You are not one of them, Elspeth, you are no tearaway, and in your circumstances you cannot afford to be. The sooner you get a job and start earning to help your poor mother, struggling on as she is like a martyr, the better. It is essential that you remember that…’

  But her love for Miss Bacon had given her wings, had given her so many new and wild desires that she hadn’t known where to put them, so she put them ‘down there’ and screwed with Malc in the central heating shed. Over and over again, wilder and wilder, faster and faster, rougher and rougher as if, in that way, she could rid herself of the fury, could drive it out, exorcise it.

  Oh, but she’d been wanting something far wilder than that. Something… oh, too far away, too huge to describe. Too far to touch.

  Strange… she’d found some of it here in this house, in the feelings she’d experienced while doing it up. It was in the choosing, in the wonderful sense of energy; she’d been all-powerful in some little way, all-powerful in her ability to take part in a unique act of creation.

  It was beautiful. Yes, very beautiful. And it came from her, nobody else really, unless you counted Pete Sparrow, but he’d been happy to keep quiet and go along with Ellie’s ideas.

  Gabriella might have manipulated and directed her, Ellie might have been just a tiny, boring counter in Gabriella’s wicked game, but the house is Ellie’s and Gabriella has not contributed one thought, one idea—not one suggestion has been hers.

  Yet number twenty-eight Ridley Place is Gabriella’s now. She’s bought it. She hasn’t needed money, yet she’s bought it.

  Gabriella has the power, the goals were hers. Don’t do this to me, Gabriella, pleads Ellie the beggar into a wonderful embroidered cushion, which is soaking wet with her tears.

  I cannot let it go. If I let it go then the part of me that I have lost for so long and only just found will go with it, and I might as well curl up and die.

  But she has no alternative. Malc is the prize. Malc has accumulated, over the years, into the snowball and now, at last, Ellie can win it back… She hears the rattling, clanking money machines and the wistful lament of the music. Hasn’t she been pushing her money in the slots, standing there, eyes glued to the whizzing oranges and the plummeting pineapples, hasn’t every single thing she has done since winning her money been to do with getting Malc back?

  No, actually, it has not. And, strangely enough, this is the only part that Gabriella would truly understand.

  Ellie worries because of the way her thoughts are taking her; they are dangerous thoughts and selfish ones. She sits up straight and wipes her nose. ‘What about this house?’ she sniffs. ‘I dreamed of us both living in it—that’s why I bought it.’

  ‘No, that is not true and why are you telling lies?’ says the voice very firmly. ‘This house was always yours, Ellie, only yours. There is nothing of Malc’s in it; even the wallpaper in the dining room is vaguely pink, and Malc hates pink. The mattress on the bed is hard, and you know how Malc detests hard mattresses.’

  ‘But it is a double bed—a bed for two people, and his wardrobe is there, waiting for him, still empty.’

  ‘And you are a very large person with lots of new clothes.’

  ‘Am I large enough? Won’t I be lonely?’

  ‘How long is it since you have been lonely, Ellie?’

  ‘But it’s nice to have someone coming home.’

  ‘Is it? I can’t answer that one. Nobody can answer that one—it’s a little bit like Mr Wilkins ordering you to take your eyes down and look at yourself, to look at yourself and see what you must always be… no flying for you, Elspeth Thwait. It has been decreed by some greater being than you will ever be.’

  ‘I know the feeling of being great, I was touched by it once.’

  ‘AND YOU WERE TOUCHED BY IT AGAIN WHEN YOU CREATED THIS HOUSE.’

  Ellie would scratch its eyes out, but the voice does not have eyes. Ellie thinks she is going mad, her brain is redhot like the hard round elements on her old electric cooker in Nelson Street. If she is touched by water she might spit.

  Ellie gets up and slides the music on to the CD player. She pushes the button so that it floods the whole house, for hidden speakers have been built into every room. She stares at her reflection in the gigantic mirror above the fireplace but she’s not going to laugh at the face she sees there, not this time. She goes softly up the stairs. She moves round the house from room to room, dimming the light in each as she goes and drawing the curtains against the sweet-smelling summer night, enjoying the swish of them, taking courage from the thick richness of them.

  There are no germs here and the place is too big for dust and cobwebs ever to dominate it.

  And anyway, Ellie has a cleaner now, a nice energetic young man called Sam who comes in a van decorated with mops and has just started his own business. She was going to invite Sam to her house-warming party—Sam, Norma and John, Pete Sparrow and his men and their wives, all a little odd, all rather eccentric people. How lovely it would have been if she could have invited Di and Margot, too. How perfect that would have been. She could have confessed everything she had done—how they would have enjoyed that! And she could have helped them out financially if she’d given that matter some thought; there is no need for them to hate her automatically just because she’s come into some money. Some businesslike arrangement could have been made… there is always a way.

  Ellie supposes Gabriella will have a party soon after moving in. She hopes that her rival will not change the house too much…

  Ellie fingers all the surfaces with love. Perhaps she is wrong to invest so much emotion in a place, because that, after all, is what it is—bricks and mortar and nothing to get sentimental about. Anyone could have done it, let’s face it…

  But not quite like this.

  No, the house is nothing to do with bricks and mortar, as a painting is nothing to do with paints, as a poem is nothing to do with words and Ellie knows that really.

  She reaches Malc’s photograph and tries to go past but she can’t. His face stares out at her sadly, for it was taken in unhappier times. Were there unhappier times? She has to sit down and clasp it, she even sits on her bed. She is aware that she is acting, like playing a part in a film, but when you’re unhappy you need to follow a pattern or you end up on the floor screaming ‘Mummy!’ It’s not nice, really… and when did Mummy honestly take away the pain?

  There was love between them, once. Yes, there was love, whatever love is. And then it was over and dead. Malc knew, but Ellie clung on to the thing that was left. Her reaction was something to do with the fear of loneliness, of being frightened, a child again in the big wide world. Ellie never mourned, she just clung on to the process of mourning.

  So now she smiles softly, sadly, because there is terrible sadness in wisdom come late.

  It isn’t like that any more. Oh yes, the fear is still there, she can feel its beating wings sometimes, she can sense the cavernous depths of it, she can gauge the
vaulted heights of it. It goes on and on to the stars, if she lets it.

  Because it is nice to have someone come home.

  But not if you’re not there to meet them.

  The decision is easy, really, and she could have taken it years ago. Ellie puts the photograph down… not face down because there’s no need to go that far… but just as it was, there on her bedside table. She goes down the stairs and sits on the sofa and looks at the list of guests she has made. It’s silly… she is certainly not going to have a party, her first party, without her friends.

  So she takes a new card out of the box and twists the lid off her fountain pen—she won’t have biros now, it’s just a little quirk of hers, like keeping the immersion on all day and knowing there is always hot water. The card shines up at her with a vacant whiteness, waiting for the dark blue words, and there is a dotted line for the names she must write, like the dotted lines in the book that waited, all those years ago, to receive Margot’s goals. Actually, Margot would probably have made an extremely good Secretary General.

  ‘Malcolm and Gabriella…”

  Like a signature.

  The ink flows smoothly as if it has been waiting. It is all so simple, really, and yet so violent, relinquishing so much anguish in those two linked words.

  She has written them out and written herself in. She has got herself back, her reassuring, funny, confused, pathetic, emotional but basically likable self: she can never again be truly alone. Not in that enormous sort of way.

  Later that evening Gabriella tells Malc about this absolutely amazing house she has found. ‘And we are going to have to think very hard about our on-going relationship,’ she says briskly.

  While a fat woman in a moonlit garden leans towards the first of her summer roses.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.