by Alice Castle
Beth knew that her mother was, in fact, a bit of a stripling compared with most of those in the Bridge Club. Indeed, Wendy’s participation brought the average age down significantly. But Wendy had always clung to her ageing widow pose. Beth found this hard to fathom, though – together with her hectic (and apparently fabricated) bridge timetable – it had allowed her mother to sidle out of any childcare burdens. When Ben had been tiny, she’d seen many a granny wheeling a toddler-filled buggy through the streets, and even now she wistfully watched doting grandparents in Dulwich Park on Saturdays when she did her solo kickabouts with Ben, something that she was fervently hoping would soon come to an end.
On the bridge front, Beth supposed that for many of the Club members who’d retired from commuting every day to big jobs, or had successfully steered flotillas of children through the choppy waters of family life, continuing to exercise their sharp minds and get one over on their neighbours via bridge was as important as it had always been in Dulwich.
‘So, people hate to lose face. And they’re not averse to the odd bit of cheating…’
Immediately, Wendy sat up straighter. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, dear. No, no. I mean, there are one or two members who like to remain, shall we say, purposefully hazy about the rules when it suits them. But overt cheating? Not at all.’
‘So, what do you mean, exactly?’ As happened so often in conversation with her mother, Beth felt herself to be losing the scant stock of patience she’d started out with. Wendy seemed to take one step forward, then deliberately pirouette backwards by a giant leap. At this rate, they’d be sitting in Aurora until next Tuesday, and probably be no further on then.
Katie was getting restless again. Beth could feel it, though her friend was so polite that she was hiding it well. Her sporadic stirring of the cooling, undrinkable tea told a subtle tale, and Beth didn’t want to presume on her friendship too far. Katie helping her out in another mystery was one thing – and that in itself was potentially dangerous and almost certainly a terrible idea – but listening to her mother maundering on for hours and getting nowhere was too much.
‘What I mean, Beth,’ said Wendy, ‘is that someone has to be on hand, just to make sure that everyone is playing with, shall we say, their best instincts uppermost. We would never say that someone is cheating. That would be a shocking aspersion to cast. Particularly when we have a number of retired lawyers in our midst; at least one of them an expert in slander. So I was terribly, terribly surprised when Alfie insisted on going outside at break time.’
Finally, Wendy had managed to get the crucial detail out. And not a moment before time, thought Beth.
‘You weren’t expecting Alfie to want to leave the building? So, he was acting out of character that day, doing something that was really unusual for him?’
‘Entirely,’ said Wendy, nodding her head approvingly at Beth. For a moment, her daughter felt the glow of having got something right at last. ‘Alfie would never usually leave me to deal with everyone,’ Wendy continued. ‘Because, you see, during the break everyone comes to the Director with the problems that have been, well, not exactly piling up, but have, shall we say, begun possibly to accrue in the previous hands played, or even at past events.’
‘Everyone likes to bitch about each other during the tea break,’ Beth nodded.
Instantly, Wendy’s little smile of approval was gone, and Beth felt the usual permafrost re-establish itself between them.
‘Really, dear, must you put it like that?’
‘Is that what happens, though?’
Wendy thought for some agonising moments, as Katie and Beth exchanged a quick glance. They were both going to have to excuse themselves soon. Even Colin couldn’t really be trusted outside on his own all day, and Magpie definitely would be up to no good, either lolling on Beth’s new cardigan, which she had foolishly left on the sofa or, her latest favourite pastime, snuggling and shedding generously on the few files of Harry’s that weren’t too top secret to bring home. As for Katie, Beth could see only too clearly the pile of rubble her gorgeous Court Lane house would be reduced to if Wendy didn’t get down to it pronto.
‘Well, I suppose you could call it that, if you must. And really, it is a crying shame. It’s so much easier to sort things out as and when they occur, and that’s normal practice in bridge clubs. When I used to go all the way to Beckenham—’ Wendy paused here to press a beringed hand to her fragile chest, at the thought of the momentous twenty-minute journey she’d endured occasionally years ago. ‘Well, let’s just say people weren’t afraid to raise the issues at the table, right there and then. We’re a little more restrained in Dulwich.’ Her tiny smile was smug. ‘But that kind of delicacy can lead to its own problems.’
‘What sort of problems?’ Despite herself, Beth was starting to get sucked into her mother’s story.
‘Oh, well, you see, unless the person complaining has a really brilliant memory for the cards, all the details can get a bit sketchy. I mean, who can remember who exactly was holding the ten of hearts, say, once the moment has passed?’
Beth shrugged at Katie. Her mother had a point. Beth herself would be hard pressed to know what to do with the ten of hearts, even when it was actually right there in her hand. Would she remember she’d had it, even seconds after it had been played? She rather thought not. Then something occurred to her.
‘But wait a minute, Mum. Didn’t you say you played the same hands on each table in turn? If everyone who sits at, say, East—’
‘Who plays East,’ corrected her mother tetchily.
‘Plays it, then. But you see what I mean. You can just look at the hands and work out who had what. If you have a record of who’s sat where.’ Beth felt as though she’d been rather clever as, despite her mother’s claims, it had been many years since she’d willingly held a fan of cards and puzzled over their meanings.
‘Yes, yes, Beth. But it’s more difficult than that… once the moment’s passed, well, it’s hard to change things retrospectively…’
Beth looked at her mother shrewdly. It sounded to her as though Wendy was flannelling a bit. All right, she definitely seemed to enjoy the added status that went with this Deirdre MacWhotsit lady asking her, even unofficially, to deputise when she wasn’t there. But maybe Wendy shied away from doing any actual adjudication. That would be no surprise. Wendy had never enjoyed getting involved in any of Beth’s own tussles with her brother, Josh. They were rarer than they might have been in some families, as Beth and Josh’s interests were so separate. He’d been an affectionate, though somewhat distant, big brother, but was so lackadaisical and carefree that he’d seemed years younger than responsible, hard-working (and perpetually anxious) Beth.
She remembered, now she was thinking about it, an absurd time one Christmas when she’d wanted to watch one channel on their tiny, ancient telly, and Josh had been mad keen to see something else. They’d bickered over the remote, switching back and forwards like the fairies in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, zapping the princess’s dress from pink to blue. Eventually, they’d settled on watching the third channel – there had only been three back then in the dark ages – which neither had wanted, but had both ended up laughing helplessly, knowing how silly they were being. Wendy, throughout this hours-long tussle, had been conspicuous by her absence.
In any case, she was the type, Beth acknowledged sadly, that would always give a man’s word more weight than a woman’s, and that went double for her son over her daughter. It was enough to give a sour twist to her mouth, and she dragged herself away from the less than happy memories and tried to concentrate on what Wendy was saying now. And to keep an open mind. She looked at her mother challengingly.
‘Yes, well, I suppose what I’m saying is that I wasn’t best pleased with Alfie, sneaking away like that, leaving me to deal with everything… all right, Deirdre asked me, and me alone, to be her unofficial, occasional deputy,’ Wendy went on, ‘but Alf and I had always had an understanding. I needed his help.
And during this particular break, well, it was a nightmare. Everyone seemed to have a problem, some from weeks ago when I hadn’t a hope of knowing what the hands had been, and Alfie was nowhere to be seen. I mean, really, that man was the limit.’
Chapter Six
There was a shocked pause in the little cafe. Even the waiter, who’d darted out of the kitchen for a second, dived back in looking horrified. Wendy fought to get her ragged breath under control, and Beth tried her best not to judge her mother for speaking ill of the dead. By the looks of her, Katie was doing the same, and they exchanged the briefest of eyebrow-raised glances. For Wendy, it had been a long, overtly angry speech. Beth couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen her mother so wound up, displaying her emotions instead of cloaking them in as many layers of obfuscation as she wore scarves round her neck. She’d obviously taken Alfie’s defection very much to heart.
‘So you thought he’d just, what, sneaked off and left you in the hot seat?’
Wendy nodded, biting her lips.
‘And you took that pretty badly, by the looks of things. I mean, you were pretty furious?’
‘Well, at the time, when everyone was coming up to me with all these petty little arguments, I just felt overwhelmed. It wasn’t until I’d been able to deal with the first few that I suddenly thought, where the hell is Alfie, and why isn’t he giving me a hand? It wasn’t like him, and I have to admit, I was really cross.’ Wendy looked down at the scratched surface of the table where her cup was still half-full of unappetising, grey liquid.
‘And what happened next? Did you manage to sort everyone out?’ Beth asked.
Now Wendy started to look even more ill at ease and started a root and branch rearrangement of her beads, keeping her gaze averted from both women. ‘Not really,’ she mumbled.
‘I’m sorry? Didn’t quite catch that?’ Katie leaned forward.
Wendy looked up crossly. ‘Well, if you must know, I sort of… well, left too. I mean, I had to find Alfie, didn’t I?’ She appealed to the women across the table as though she were the accused in a particularly heinous Old Bailey trial, and they were the sceptical judges she had to talk out of handing down a death penalty.
‘So you just, what? Flounced out of the room?’
‘Well, really, Beth. I would never use the word “flounce”. What does that even mean?’ Wendy asked tersely, flicking her scarves up and down in a perfect demonstration, then rattling her beads until they sounded like hail on a tin roof. Katie suppressed a smile and Beth ploughed on.
‘Ok, then, you, erm, swept out… Where did you go?’
‘Well, I went to look for Alfie, of course. He’d just left me like that. I wanted to give him a piece of my… well, I wanted to see where he’d got to,’ Wendy finished a little shame-facedly.
Beth could just picture the scene. A ballroom full of angry, entitled bridge players, all believing with every fibre of their beings that they’d been trumped or overcalled or out-bidded or whatever by their neighbours, and only Wendy to stem the tide. No wonder she’d done a runner. But Wendy being Wendy, she couldn’t admit to it. And even now she’d like to blame as much of the situation as possible on her poor, long-suffering partner. Even though he was actually dead and way beyond helping her sort out who’d been rather sneaky with the ace of spades.
‘So… how long did it take you to find Alfie? And what did you do when you finally caught up with him?’
‘That was the thing, you see,’ said Wendy slowly. ‘It was all so odd. I mean, he wasn’t one for fresh air at the best of times, Alfie. All right, he had an allotment, and yes, his own garden was absolutely lovely, but he got people in to deal with all that.’
Really? thought Beth. You could pay people to garden your allotment? Only in SE21. Elsewhere, such hotly-coveted plots had huge waiting lists and were only awarded to those who had a genuine interest in cultivating fruit and vegetables. But round here, you could delegate anything, even your hobbies. She didn’t know why she was so surprised.
‘I wasn’t sure where to look for him, really. I mean, he could have popped to the loo.’ She lowered her voice as though discussing something highly disreputable. ‘Older men, you know. Prostrate…’
Beth smiled at the malapropism, suddenly thinking of her dear friend Nina, who was a great one for a verbal mélange.
‘But you didn’t, you know, have a check?’ Beth arched a brow.
‘Well, how could I, really, dear?’ Wendy said tersely. ‘I waited outside for a while… but time was ticking on, and people started coming out of the ballroom and, I’m not going to say they were attacking me, exactly, but there had been a bit of a contretemps on table two and they really wanted me to sort things out…’
‘And you’d promised Deirdre McThing that you would. And you quite enjoyed that status, too?’
‘Well, yes, dear. At my age—’
‘Oh, come on, Mum. You’re still young.’ It was a well-worn mantra, but it never failed to provoke a smile from Wendy. Today’s was a little wintry, though.
‘I just mean, you don’t get a lot of pats on the back. Not if you live alone…’ Wendy’s voice was threatening to develop a familiar pattern of self-pitying quavers. Beth, though not entirely unsympathetic, had heard it all before. And, of course, she’d lived it herself, having been on her own for years after James’s death. A fact that her mother always conveniently forgot.
‘You’re not the only widow in the Village, are you, Mum?’ she asked bracingly. ‘But we get the picture,’ she added, glancing briefly at Katie, who nodded. ‘People were lining up to have a good old moan and get you to sort out their squabbles. And you’d much rather have done that with Alfie, your partner, at your side. For a bit of moral support. Fair enough. You must have been getting worried about him, by now, as well.’
‘Yes, I was. All the more so as several of the gentlemen had, ahem, been and gone, and there was still no sign of Alfie. I don’t know why, but I just wandered over to the big window, you know, the one that faces out over Belair Park.’
‘Perhaps you were just trying to get away from everyone?’ Katie suggested gently. Beth sent her a smile, as usual appreciating her friend’s lovely, and extremely handy, combination of tact and shrewdness.
‘Yes, that was probably it,’ Wendy admitted. ‘It was all getting a bit, well, heated.’
Beth knew that her mother really didn’t do heat. She’d managed to live on her own terms for years, unencumbered by the demands of a husband or children. Beth’s father had been tidied away into his grave decades ago, and Beth had got used to soldiering on alone as best she could. The last thing Wendy would enjoy was being held at bay by a posse of querulous elderly bridge players, all absolutely certain – as people in Dulwich always were – that they were right and everyone else was wrong.
‘And what happened when you were cornered by the window?’
‘Cornered? That’s an odd way of putting it,’ Wendy sniffed defensively at Beth, but she didn’t deny that she had been. Her face suddenly grew grave and she paused for a moment before going on, swallowing a mouthful of cold tea in what seemed to be a bid to steady herself. It didn’t appear to work. She slapped the cup down and pushed it away forcefully, splashing a little onto the table. Both Beth and Katie reached for their phones protectively and rubbed off imaginary droplets. ‘Well, however you want to describe the moment, that’s when I – saw him.’
‘Saw Alfie?’
‘Yes, of course, Beth. Who else?’ Wendy said tetchily.
Beth blinked, but supposed she should put her mother’s snappiness down to emotion. It can’t have been much fun to catch sight of her bridge partner’s dead body. But wait a minute.
‘Did you know he was dead, then?’
‘No,’ said Wendy, looking desolate. ‘No, I didn’t. I just thought he’d escaped and left me to face the music with the rest of the club all having a go at me. If you must know, I was pretty fed up with him. And I went outside to give him a, well, a talking-to.’
Oh dear, thought Beth. Guilt was so often a part of bereavement. God knew, she had felt awful enough when her James had died, feeling that if only she’d taken his handful of vague symptoms more seriously, she could have forced him to go to the doctor before things reached the doom stage. But Ben had been so young, and had needed so much of her time and attention…
Anyway, she couldn’t afford to go down that rabbit hole of recriminations now. Here was a situation that she might well be able to help with. It wouldn’t be any sort of restitution for the lack of Ben’s father, but in some small way Beth did feel, with these mysteries she kept getting entangled in, that she was doing something for the wider community of Dulwich. Not that it seemed at all grateful so far.
‘So you rushed outside to confront Alfie, get him to come back inside and give you a hand with all the arguments… and what did you find?’
‘Really, Beth, must you drag me through it all again? I can hardly bear to picture the poor man…’
‘It must be so hard for you,’ said Katie immediately, putting a soft hand onto Wendy’s small gathered fist. ‘We understand, we really do. Don’t we, Beth?’
There was perhaps too much of a pause before Beth nodded her agreement. How could her mother expect her to help solve a crime, when she wouldn’t describe it to her, or show her that one had even been committed? But Beth knew better than to say that. She did her best to ooze sympathy instead. She put her head on one side and compressed her mouth into a line, hoping to imitate an understanding smile. It seemed to work, because Wendy carried on slowly.
‘I suppose I was in a bit of a, well, I won’t say temper, I never get heated,’ said Wendy, bunching her scarves.
No, thought Beth. That would be too easy. You like to poke a few cold daggers into your victims instead. But she was being harsh, she knew. Her mother wasn’t evil, she was just… a mother. This sort of behaviour came as standard. Beth hoped she didn’t do the same to Ben, but realised it was a time-honoured method of control used by women throughout the centuries. People without physical power had to deploy subterranean means to achieve their ends. She didn’t like it, but until things changed, the human race was pretty well stuck with it.
