“Actually, I wasn’t thinking about Ben. At least not for the last few minutes. I was thinking about my mother. I’ve been doing so on and off ever since I got the bridesmaids’ letter.”
“You’ve never talked about her much.” Mrs. Malloy eyed me with unwonted sympathy as the waitress removed our plates. “Terribly sad it must have been losing her when you was so young. What were you, eighteen?”
“Seventeen. The same age she was when she married my father. She was eighteen when she had me. It seems strange now, but I didn’t realize at the time how terribly young she was to die. Thirty-six.” I poured myself more tea and sat not drinking it. “But I suppose children never see their parents as anything but middle-aged, if not actually old. Yet at the same time they believe their parents will live forever. I still half-believe she would have done if she hadn’t fallen down that flight of railway steps at Kings Cross. It was ironic really ...”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. H.?”
“She was a dancer. Ballet. Oh, she was never a prima ballerina. What jobs she got were few and far between and only ever in the corps de ballet. But she gloried in it. It was why she ran away from home and made her way to London, where my father—he was some sort of distant cousin—found her and married her before she could starve to death in a garret.”
“Well, life isn’t known for making sense.” Mrs. Malloy laid a heavily ringed hand on mine. “You just have to hold on to your memories, is all I can say.”
“And I do have wonderful ones.” My eyes misted.
“That’s the ticket, Mrs. H.!”
I reached behind me for my raincoat and slipped my arms though the sleeves, not because I was in any mad rush to get up and leave, but because I was cold inside and out.
“She was so special, a sort of magical person really, and everything she did, from taking pleasure in the violets she grew on the windowsills to reading me a story, seemed to be brushed with a kind of wonder. Yet I have this feeling that I never really knew her. It was as though some part of her was secreted away. I used to think it was because so much of her was wrapped up in my father. I believed that theirs was one of the great loves of all time, and that everyone else, even I, existed for them in a different sphere.”
“But now you see it different?” Mrs. Malloy picked up the bill that the waitress had laid down in the no-man’s-land between us. She checked it over, with the confident look of one who had shown Gwen how to get her sums right when they were kiddies. But at the same time I could feel her concern that I wouldn’t snatch it away from her.
“Not about their love for each other. It’s just that from having talked with my father recently—really talked for the first time ever, I wonder if my mother’s upbringing impacted on her in ways I never understood. It took Daddy years to get over her death. I am so glad he has another chance of happiness with Ursel Grundman, his German lady friend. I phoned him last night but there was no answer.”
“Out cavorting on the Rhine, I expect.”
“I had so many questions for him,” I went on, speaking more to myself than to Mrs. Malloy. Once I got to thinking that I knew nothing about my grandmother Sophia, other than that she died when Mummy was a baby, I realized how very little information I have about my mother’s life before I was born. Just the part about Daddy finding her in London and sweeping her off to the registry office.
“You said he was a distant cousin of hers, Mrs. H.?”
“Yes, he was introduced to her at some funeral. Afterwards he couldn’t put her out of his mind. I don’t know how he heard that she’d gone to London.”
“Word gets around in families.”
“I suppose.” I finished buttoning my raincoat.
“Who was to know that she’d go walking out that door one day and never come back.” Now Mrs. Malloy was misty-eyed.
“It was a Thursday.” I was still talking to myself.
“A woman her age, she’d have thought as how she had a whole lifetime ahead, Mrs. H., to fill you in on things.”
“I came in from school expecting her to be there. Mother was vague about some things, but never about being home for me.”
In my mind I was back at the flat in St. John’s Wood. I could see myself opening the door, it was rarely locked, and tossing my satchel down on a bench in the narrow hall. I could hear the click of my shoes on the parquet floor. I could see myself stepping into the sitting room. It was cluttered and haphazardly furnished, fantastical with its red-and-white toadstool curtains and invitingly livable with its worn comfy sofa and row of bookcases. A door to the right by the windows gave entry into my parents’ bedroom.
As usual that door stood open but my mother wasn’t at the bar which ran the length of one wall, where she did her ballet exercises. No silhouette of her elevated arm and fluttering fingers creating a tree branch on the wall. The only person I saw was myself in the long mirror facing me. No sign of my father. But that wasn’t surprising. He was often out in the afternoons looking for work in a hit-or-hopefully-miss sort of way to augment his trust fund. My feet dragged into the tiny kitchen that held a table and three chairs.
On the one wall that wasn’t turned into a miniature skyline by an uneven configuration of cupboards, my mother had hung my drawings and watercolors from art class. When putting up the last she had said without turning round: “You’re going to win that art competition you entered. These are really good, Ellie. It’s probably an inherited talent, even though your father and I can’t draw a straight line between us.” My eyes went from my still life of a violin, a loaf of bread, and a paisley scarf... to the note under the jam pot on the table:
“Dear Giselle, I have to go out for a few hours. If I’m not home by teatime, could you please fix a meal for yourself and Daddy? Something like baked beans, because I think he’s being a vegetarian this week. Love, Mother.”
Looking back, it was at that moment that my world turned into a series of still lifes ... The phone rang, it was Daddy hysterical on the other end.
“So what took her to Kings Cross?” Mrs. Malloy’s voice dragged me back into the present.
“Daddy thought she might have gone on a job interview. She’d seen an advertisement for a part-time ballet teacher in the evening paper the night before. And she had said she might inquire into it. But why she went really doesn’t matter, does it? She tripped, she fell, she died.” I got to my feet and tied my raincoat belt while looking straight ahead. “Sadly that’s the end of the story.”
“Rubbish!” Mrs. Malloy handed me the bill. “If you didn’t want to reopen the book you wouldn’t be going to see the bridesmaids, now would you?”
She had a point, and as we walked back out into the parking lot under a sprinkling of rain I very much wished she were coming with me to the Old Rectory rather than going to stay with her school chum Gwen.
“It’s a big house.” The time was a little after noon. It was still raining in soft, petulant drops as Mrs. Malloy stood on the pavement of the country road with fields across the way. Her suitcases sat at her feet like three well-trained dogs, while she gave the Fiddler residence the once-over. “Nothing like the size of Merlin’s Court, of course, but enough to keep Gwen hopping from morning till night from the looks of it.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested tentatively, surveying the redbrick Victorian dwelling with its plethora of chimney pots, “she has help in the house.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so.” Mrs. M. pursed her purple lips, which she no doubt considered a perfect foil for the wild-cherry raincoat. “What with Mr. Fiddler being good enough to marry her, he was entitled get a housekeeper out of it, is my way of looking at things. Course, if there’s one thing to say for Gwen it’s that she’s the grateful sort. In a nice humble sort of way. I do hope she did something about them spots on her face. At thirty-five she still had them as bad as any teenager. And never could find a hairstyle that did nothing for her. Sad, isn’t it? Ah, well, we can’t all be blessed with good looks, Mrs. H.!”
Having taken her sweet time batting her magenta lids, Mrs. Malloy proceeded up the broad drive with its neat borders of shrubs and flowers to the front door, where she rang the bell. Her cases did not trot dutifully after her on padded paws. By the time I had made two trips to lug them onto the step, she was already inside the hall. It was rather a grand space with a lot of carved wood and pictures in heavy gold frames. The wallpaper was florid in texture and pattern and it was all a little too rococo for my taste. But as an interior designer I acknowledged the importance of a home being representative of its owners’ personalities.
Looking in on the woman standing with Mrs. Malloy’s hands clasped in hers, I couldn’t deny that the house suited her, from her bleached-blond hair to her high-heeled shocking-pink shoes. “Vulgar” was the word that nipped into my mind. Could this be one of Gwen’s stepdaughters? She had now spotted me over Mrs. M.’s shoulder and with a well-executed expression of delight hurried to welcome me over the threshold.
“Come in, come in! Mrs. Haskell, isn’t it? Don’t worry about the carpet, dear,” seeing me glance down at my shoes that had staggered into one or two puddles on route. “What’s a little rainwater? And it’s a very old carpet. Been in the family for years. Handmade in Algiers. Practically an antique. Oh, you’re taking them off! No need on my account, but I expect you’ll be more comfortable. Nothing nastier than damp soggy shoes, is what I often say to Fiddler.”
“Fiddler?”
“My husband.”
This was Gwen? Poor spotty-faced Gwen, who hadn’t left the shelter of Mum and Dad’s roof until she was thirty-five?
“Such a dear, lovely man. His Christian name is Barney, but I always call him Fiddler. It’s one of our little love jokes, you might say, going back to when I was the nanny to his children and his first wife was still alive. Only of course then I called him Mr. Fiddler.” She batted her eyelashes, which were at least two inches longer than Mrs. Malloy’s, and gave an insouciant giggle. “Now I only call him Mr. Fiddler when in bed of an evening ... or every once in a while of an afternoon.”
I could only smile raptly as she took my raincoat and hung it next to Mrs. M.’s on the oak stand that looked as if it might also have come from Algiers. This Gwen was thin as a rail, in skintight black pants, a cowl-neck sweater, and didn’t look a day over forty—if that. She had a topknot of platinum curls tied with a shocking-pink velvet ribbon to match her shoes, and jangled with jewelry every step of the way. Understandably, Mrs. Malloy looked none too pleased by this turn of events.
“Well, it’s plain to see Gwen’s landed on her feet.” Her voice had more than a bit of a snort to it. “I was just telling her when you come up to the door, Mrs. H., that I wouldn’t have known her if we’d met in the street. And of course I couldn’t be happier for her.”
“I knew you’d feel that way, dear.” Gwen studied the writing on Mrs. M.’s blue sweatshirt with only a slight lift of her winged brows. “Always such a love was Roxie, so kind at helping me with my sums when we were at school. Now it’s payback time. That’s how I put it to Fiddler and as usual he quite saw it my way.” She was now speaking to me in the lowered voice a grown-up might use while a little one was underfoot. “ ‘You help out your old friend,’ is what Fiddler said. ‘Have her here as long as you like.’ And of course I explained to him about that dreadful Leonard trying to worm his way back into her life after all these years. The cheek of it!”
“Mrs. Malloy’s talked a lot about you,” was all I could say with a certain person breathing down my neck.
“There’s no need to go feeling sorry for me, Gwen.”
“Now that’s where I disagree with you,” came the sparkling response. “All your life, Roxie Malloy, you’ve done for others. Putting your own needs and feelings aside, trying to bring a little sunshine and light into other people’s misery. Giving and giving with never a thought of return. ‘Where would I be,’ I asked Fiddler, ‘if the prettiest girl in the whole of Pankhurst Elementary School hadn’t been my own guardian angel when the other kids went around calling me Spotty Face?’”
“Oh, well, if you’re going to put it like that.” Mrs. Malloy was clearly mollified. “Horrible how children can be! It makes you ashamed to admit having been one. But you mustn’t put me on a pedestal, Gwen, just because I don’t have an unkind bone in me body.” She gave one of her pious sighs. “Mrs. H. is always harping on about me being too soft.”
“Every day,” I agreed.
“We’re as God makes us and that’s that.” Mrs. Malloy didn’t add: “With a little help for some of us from the plastic surgeons.” If Gwen was aware of the eyes feeling their way up into her hairline and behind her ears she gave no sign. She was looking at a portrait on the wall. The shadowed figure of an old woman in a rocking chair.
“That’s Fiddler’s mother,” she said. “It was done after she died.”
“Well, I guess that’s one way the artist could get her to sit still,” Mrs. Malloy mused.
“It was painted from a photograph.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“And this is Fiddler’s first wife, Mildred.” Gwen had moved down the hall to point out an even larger portrait. It was of a middle-aged female who looked as though she had sat for years on a bad case of piles waiting for the Grim Reaper to beckon from the shadows. “A wonderful likeness, as you could tell from the resemblance, if you were to see her son and two daughters.”
“The way her eyes pop ...” Mrs. Malloy was clearly beginning to see herself as a serious art critic. “Would that be a symptom of the illness that took her?”
“No, it’s just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses.” Gwen’s smile slipped the merest fraction. “Poor Mildred. She was constantly losing them. Fiddler was always after her, in the kindest possible way, for being absentminded.”
“She looks as though she could be sitting on them and getting a poke up the bum.”
“Probably she was having one of her twinges. Agonizing they could be. The doctor was of the opinion”—this said with a certain emphasis—“that it was amazing how she didn’t die sooner given the terrible state of her heart. There was never a question of her living more than a few years after I came to take care of the kiddies. And I like to think I helped make Mildred’s last days as comfortable as possible.”