“I met someone else in the lane.” I didn’t need to say more.
“That would be Hope,” responded Rosemary. “A very interesting woman, although I wish she wouldn’t encourage Jane’s fantasies.”
“Visions, dear, not fantasies.”
Hope! Unlike Susan, the name was, I thought, exactly right.
“Cod’s wallop! I forgot something,” Thora said.
“To explain what kept you and Jane?” Rosemary put a Siamese cat out the side door.
“I was giving Dog a bath upstairs. He had got muddy out in the garden. Always decides to help me dig when it rains. I’d just finished toweling him off when the phone rang for a second time. It was a Mrs. Malloy.”
“For me?” I could have won a prize for asking the obvious.
“Said she was your personal assistant.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And why not? Sir ... whatever he calls himself... has his Miss Chambers, doesn’t he?” Thora scowled. “But back to Mrs. Malloy’s message. I’m to tell you that if ... now, let me see that I have this right—if that scurvy Leonard should show up here begging to know where she is, you’re not to drop a word about how she’s at Gwen’s and having the time of her life.”
“That’s my Mrs. Malloy.”
“Said you’re to be sure and lock your door when you go to bed. Don’t sleepwalk, do you?”
The side door into the conservatory opened and a short, prettily plump woman, of similar age to the bridesmaids, entered. She wore a print dress and half apron and she limped a little as she came, but that could have been because she had been hurrying, A fact made obvious by her flushed face and panting breath.
“Trouble,” she said, leaning up against the door that had clanked shut behind her. “Ted’s had an accident with the pruning shears!”
“Wicked woman!” A snicker followed this screech. “I know what you did! And I’m telling! I’m telling!”
Peering through the foliage I spotted a birdcage. Inside was a green-and-yellow parrot of portly proportions, with a furrowed-feathered brow and that barrow-boy voice.
“That’s what Ted is forever saying to Edna,” growled Thora. “Old Polly there must have heard Ted rant those words a hundred times. He’s always threatening to tell on that woman about something. She didn’t rinse out the sink, she swept the toast crumbs under the carpet, she broke a cup. Poor Edna. She does her best. But she’s seventy. Only a couple of years younger than Rosemary, Jane, and I. But we don’t go out cleaning four days a week. And sometimes she even comes in to work on a Thursday, which is supposed to be her day off. God only knows how she gets through the weekends with Ted.”
Thora preceded me into the kitchen and sat down at the table that was already laid for lunch. “If I’d a kindly bone in my body, I wouldn’t be talking about him like this. And I’d have gone along with Rosemary and Jane when Tom up the lane offered us a ride to the hospital. Nothing happens around here without one of the neighbors finding out in a flash. Would you like to eat now? It could be a while before Rosemary and Jane get back from the hospital. And you must already be starving.”
“No, I’m fine. Let’s wait a bit. They may ring to let us know how things are going. Ted’s injury sounded pretty bad,” I said.
“Could be, but then again you know how men carry on if they knick themselves shaving. Only have to bruise a knee to think their leg needs amputating.” Thora gave a grunt. “Don’t listen to me! Shock myself sometimes. But it gets my goat the way Ted treats Edna. Always accusing her of having some man on the side, because she used to enjoy the lads when she was young. Still, have to hope he pulls through. The man shouldn’t have been climbing up that stepladder to prune that tree. Not that there was ever any talking to him. Odd, though, as Edna kept saying, that he fell with the blades of those shears pointing towards him.” Thora got up from the table and put the kettle on. “Might as well have a cup of tea while we’re waiting for news.”
So the bridesmaids were in their early seventies. My mother had been eighteen when I was born, and if Sophia had had her when she was nineteen and I was now thirty-four ... the numbers added up. My grandmother Sophia would now have been seventy-one. Not old by today’s standards. What didn’t fit the equation was my mother’s older brother, Wyndom, and her sister, Louisa. I brought up this point to Thora, sensing that she didn’t want to go on talking about Ted, when she returned to the table with our cups and saucers.
“Peculiar no one ever told you. They were her half-siblings. Your grandfather, William Fitzsimons, was a widower of thirty-five when he married Sophia. Believe the boy was about ten at the time and the girl seven or eight.”
“I did know that they were several years older than Mother.” I felt as though she needed defending. “We didn’t see a lot of them when I was growing up and it doesn’t surprise me now that she was reticent about anything to do with her past, given her unhappy childhood.”
“Seems strange that your aunt and uncle didn’t mention at one time or another that their mother and Mina’s were not one and the same.” Thora shook a lock of white hair off her forehead and continued to fix me with her brightly inquisitive gaze.
“Perhaps you never met Uncle Wyndom?” I asked.
“Only once or twice, when he was a little boy. Wasn’t at the wedding. Neither of the children came. A hurried affair.”
She might have said more, but I interrupted her.
“He grew into a man only interested in talking about his financial investments, until he lost most of his money. After that he went even more into his shell. He died a few years ago. I don’t remember his ever saying more than a few words to me. And they were probably to point out that I needed to lose weight. His wife, Astrid, lived and breathed, she still does, for their daughter, Vanessa. She has no other topic of conversation.”
“What about Louisa?” Thora asked.
“I call her Aunt Lulu. She’s rather dear, in a naughty sort of way. Almost as though she never grew up. She’s married to a man named Maurice who’s the last word in pomposity. They have a son—my favorite cousin, Freddy. He lives in the cottage at the gates of our house. Aunt Lulu is a chatterer, but not about the past.
“Maybe,” I added soberly, “she and my mother had more in common than they both realized.”
“Same father, for starters.”
“What was my grandfather like?”
Thora shifted Dog’s head off her lap. She got up and checked a couple of saucepans on the gas cooker, adjusted the burners as low as they could go without sputtering out, and came back to the table. “William Fitzsimons wouldn’t have been my choice of a husband. Wasn’t Sophia’s, either. Her father pushed the match. I never could make out why. He and William had rubbed each other the wrong way from day one. I heard them having a heated argument one afternoon, when Jane and I had come down for the weekend to see Rosemary, who was staying here while taking a dispensing course. The two men must have thought the house was empty. Mrs. McNair was out on parish work and we girls had gone to a tennis party, but I had to come back to get another racquet. We’d barely started the first set when I broke a string on mine.”
“What was the row about?” I leaned my elbows on the table.
“Couldn’t make out more than the odd disjointed sentence or two.” Thora squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to bring the memory into focus. “The study door was shut and I didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping. Although”—dimples appeared in her cheeks—“if I’d been caught standing on the staircase it would have looked as though I were either going up or coming down. The door was where the coat tree now is. Rosemary had it blocked up and the study taken out to enlarge the kitchen when we first moved in. But she decided on keeping the fireplace. Cheers the place up in winter.”
“It does add charm.” My eyes followed hers to the far wall. I was lying. In my opinion, the fireplace didn’t do a thing for the room. It was too small, with a tile surround that looked as though it had come out of a public lavatory, and a mean, cramped grate that wouldn’t have held more than two lumps of coal. I had a hazy memory of it from my childhood visit. Perhaps even then I hadn’t liked it. Could it be that the parrot had been brought in to amuse me and had made some terrifying remark or that there had been a scary ornament on the mantelpiece? Would that explain why I had experienced a chilly sensation on entering the kitchen a few moments ago?
In every other way it was a cheerfully functional room with its apple-green paint, pine cupboards, and neatly fitted appliances. On the windowsill was a jug of the same Devonshire pottery displayed on the dresser. And several hooked rugs warmed up the slate floor. Everything was spotlessly clean. Edna must work like a dog, perhaps goaded on by Ted’s taunts. I wondered how he was doing, before bringing my thoughts back to Thora.
“What did you overhear of the argument between Reverend McNair and William Fitzsimons when you came back for the tennis racquet?”
“Something about the abomination of drink. Edna’s mother was mentioned. Her name was Gladys. Used to be the daily help in those days. Everyone knew she tippled.” Thora shrugged. “And it’s true that it had begun to affect her work. Mrs. McNair caught her passed out on the sofa a few times. That was when Edna was brought in to help out. Don’t ask me why William Fitzsimons sounded as though he’d just made a shocking discovery! He had already been curate at St. John’s for two years.”
“Didn’t Reverend McNair”—I kept forgetting I was talking about my great-grandfather—“have a problem with Edna’s mother’s drinking?”
“Must have.” Thora leaned down to stroke Dog, who was now lying by her chair. “He was a crusty old man, given to violent outbursts of temper. Probably never should have married, let alone had a child. He and his wife had Sophia late in life. She always had to tiptoe around them both. Mrs. McNair was one of those interested in everyone’s business. Always out and about on her parish duties, but never making much time to see what was going on in her own family. Luckily for Sophia, they bundled her off to boarding school almost as soon as she was out of her pram. That’s where Jane and I met her—Rosemary, too. They were cousins. Sophia was in the form below ours, but was always grown-up for her age. I’m sure the reason her parents allowed her to have friends come and stay was to keep her out from underfoot. Rosemary they rather liked, because she was a niece and they thought her a good influence.”
This was interesting but we had become sidetracked. “Why do you think Reverend McNair—my great-grandfather— didn’t give Edna’s mother the sack? I was talking to some of the neighbors when my car went into the ditch. And one of them, I think it was Frank or Susan, mentioned her drinking, all this time later, so there must have been quite a bit of gossip at the time about a woman with her tendencies working for the rector and his family.”
“Probably why he kept her on.” Thora got up, opened the oven door, took a peek inside and then plugged in the old-fashioned coffee percolator. “Reverend McNair probably thought he could ‘save’ her.” She lifted a saucepan lid and gave the contents a stir. “Also, wouldn’t surprise me if thrift came into it. Gladys undoubtedly worked on the cheap. Would have had trouble finding another job.”
Thora set down her wooden spoon. “Don’t think I’m saying that, Ellie, because Reverend McNair was of Scottish descent. My own mother was from Glasgow and a more openhanded woman you couldn’t meet. Always inviting Sophia to stay with us during the school holidays. Damn it!”
Thora turned to face me, her brown eyes somber. “If only she’d come that last year. Perhaps then there wouldn’t have been a wedding and William Fitzsimons wouldn’t have taken her with him when he went out to minister, as he was fond of saying, to the poor benighted savages in the Belgian Congo. You can’t know how many times I’ve wished one of them had eaten him!” Thora sat back down at the table with a thump.
I suddenly remembered Ben. “Did my husband say when he would ring back?” I said. “I meant to ask but then Edna came in and everything became a scramble.”
“Promised to phone again this evening.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“They’re all having a wonderful time. Sent his love.”
“Good.”
“Sounds as though you’re missing him.”
Thora’s dimples appeared. I found myself wondering if she had ever been in love. Perhaps the look I gave her posed the question.
“I may be a Miss, but I haven’t missed out entirely. For more than ten years I lived with a man named Michael. We couldn’t marry because he was already married. His wife suffered from a mental illness and had been in an institution from before we met. Michael wouldn’t divorce her.”
I looked at her.
“And I’ll show you my etchings, I told him. But it happened to be true.”
“Your story sounds the sort of thing that happens in books.”
Thora’s expression gave no clue to what she was thinking. “Yes, in one of those gothic novels.”
“I’ve read a lot of them,” I told her.
“They all work out rather predictably. Sad little wife dies.”
“Either by drowning in the ornamental pool in the Elizabethan garden, or from exposure to the elements after wandering out onto the moors in a thick fog.” I didn’t mean to sound flippant or callous, but I sensed Thora wanted to maintain an element of distance in telling her story.
“Leaving the hero and heroine making plans to head down the aisle.” She smoothed out the linen tablecloth. “In our case, Michael’s wife was put on a new miracle drug. She got better.”
“And he went back to her?”
“Couldn’t do anything else. None of it was her fault. If he hadn’t she might have relapsed and neither of us was prepared to let that happen.” Thora went to stand looking out of the window. “She deserved some happiness after all those years of living in the twilight zone. I hear from Michael on my birthday, just a card; but it lets me know he’s all right.”
“And his wife?”
“Took up gardening. For some reason that did get my jealousy juices going. It’s the one thing I’ve always had to hold on to, the part of me that I didn’t have to share. But that’s life. Rosemary and Jane weren’t lucky in love either. Jane’s first marriage ended in divorce. Husband went off with another woman. Then she was widowed twice. Both times after being married only a few years. And Rosemary never got over Richard Barttle, not enough to ever want anyone else.”