Queenie Malone’s Paradise Hotel

by Ruth Hogan

  6

  Tilda

  The woman in the mirror looks ridiculous. She looks ridiculous and uncomfortable, like someone dressing up in her mother’s clothes. And she is. The woman in the mirror is me. I have absolutely no idea why I’m so bothered about what I’m going to wear to Miss Dane’s for tea. I don’t even want to go. I hardly know the woman. My impression of her is part battle-axe, part busybody, part Women’s Institute and part my old Latin teacher; the sum total of which for me equals ‘just plain scary’. I have only brought jeans with me, and for some reason, I’m afraid that these will be regarded as too scruffy by a woman with such fond attachment to her A-line skirts and pearl-button blouses, which is why I’m standing in front of a mirror looking utterly ridiculous in one of my mother’s skirts. I have asked Queenie to come with me, but she refuses, saying that she hasn’t been included in the invitation.

  ‘It’s just tea,’ she says, clearly amused at my outfit indecision, ‘not the Royal Variety Performance. You’ll look lovely whatever you wear.’

  The clock in the sitting room chimes four. I am now faced with the choice of being punctual and looking utterly ridiculous, or late but feeling comfortable. I have wasted half the day looking for the key to the walnut box and I still haven’t found it, and so I gave no thought to Miss Dane’s invitation to tea until the last minute. In keeping with my recent catalogue of small but significant acts of rebellion, I decide on jeans. After all, she can hardly put me in detention.

  Miss Dane, of course, makes no mention of my lateness as she opens the door to me minutes later. She greets me warmly, but seems to be expecting someone else as well, as she checks the hallway outside before closing her front door. She shows me through to her sitting room and then goes into the kitchen to fetch the tea. The tea service is Clarice Cliff, the tea is lapsang souchong, and the biscuits are Fortnum & Mason. Miss Dane is clearly not a woman who keeps things for best, and at her age, who can blame her? Although on closer inspection of her sitting room, perhaps she simply doesn’t differentiate between Sunday best and workday wear. The exquisite teapot is wearing a brown, knitted tea cosy that has Women’s Institute bazaar running through every stitch. The Hummel figurines on the mantlepiece stand shoulder to shoulder with cheap Wade bunny rabbits and puppies that I can remember squandering my pocket money on as a child. The ramshackle pile of shiny coal is heaped into an expensive-looking Majolica punch bowl, and a majestic, cast bronze statue of a stallion is being used as a doorstop.

  ‘Now, are you warm enough, my dear? Come over here and sit by the fire. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to pour the tea? You’re less likely to rattle the china than I am.’

  I wouldn’t bet on that. Although I have to admit that Miss Dane’s face looks slightly more benevolent in the soft light of the fire, one sudden move from her and I’ll be straight into a perfect Latin declension of the noun ‘table’ or reporting in somewhat stilted conversational Latin that the soldiers have laid waste to the citadel. I feel as though she is testing me; assessing my social skills to see if I pass muster. After all, she carried the whole tray of tea things from the kitchen without spilling a drop. Old age has apparently done little to weaken her body, and I suspect it may have even sharpened her mind. I manage to pour the tea without breaking anything, but I’m definitely not having a biscuit. I don’t want to push my luck and drop crumbs everywhere, or forget myself and dunk. Now I need to think of something sensible and polite to say. Perhaps I could comment on the weather or enquire after her health. I have no idea why her opinion of me matters in the slightest, but for some reason as unfathomable to me as the shipping forecast, it does. I simply don’t want her to think badly of me, and at the same time I’m annoyed with myself for caring. I needn’t have worried. It seems that Miss Dane’s purpose is interrogation rather than conversation.

  ‘How are you coping? She was an extraordinary woman, your mother. You must miss her dreadfully?’

  Am I obliged to answer this, or do I get a phone call and a solicitor first? Miss Dane has honed a natural talent for plain speaking into a martial art. Her question has caught me off balance. What I want to say is ‘mind your own business’ – not to be rude, but because I don’t want to talk about it, and in any case, it’s not that simple. The truth is I don’t know, but my answer is, ‘Oh, I’m fine really. Thank you. Actually, we weren’t that close.’

  Miss Dane recognises a fob-off when she sees one. She must have been a schoolmistress. Why else would I feel like a fifth former who’s just given a particularly weak excuse for not producing her homework?

  ‘But, my dear, she was your mother, and you were her only child.’

  The cheeky little girl who still lurks somewhere deep inside me longs to reply, ‘Yes, thank you Miss Dane, I’m well aware of that’, but the silence of a guilt-ridden fifth former prevails. Miss Dane watches me closely as I line up my teacup with the teapot on the tray, so that both handles are facing in the same direction.

  ‘Do I make you uncomfortable?’ she asks, almost gently.

  ‘Most people make me uncomfortable, eventually.’

  This is torture by afternoon tea. I tell myself not to be so pathetic, and take a sip of the hot, black, smoky contents of my cup.

  ‘Your mother was very proud of you, you know. She always looked forward to your visits.’

  She clearly wasn’t going to drop the subject. Well, fine; let’s debate the matter, shall we? ‘This house believes that Tilda’s mother was a loving and devoted parent’, with Miss Dane proposing the motion.

  ‘She didn’t like me,’ I counter.

  ‘Of course she did!’ An empty assertion.

  ‘She sent me away to boarding school. I hated it.’ Good point.

  ‘She must have had an excellent reason.’ Pathetic general rebuttal unsubstantiated by any facts.

  ‘She drove my father away. He never came back.’ Answer that one.

  ‘Well, that’s how you saw it then, my dear, but you were only a child. There may have been mitigating circumstances of which you were unaware.’ I don’t want to hear this.

  ‘Yes, I was only a child. But I was there, and you weren’t.’ Subject closed.

  I am hot, and I can feel my face burning. It has nothing to do with sitting next to the fire, and everything to do with sitting opposite Miss Dane. How dare she tell me my life! She knows nothing about it. I take another sip of my tea. It tastes bitter in my mouth. I’ve had enough of the tea, and the company, but I remind myself that Miss Dane is an old woman who has also lost someone with the death of my mother. She probably has precious little company, and my mother was someone she counted as a friend.

  ‘She loved you very much, my dear.’

  Her voice is softer now, but more intense. She leans towards me and fixes me with her calm, grey eyes.

  ‘She was always talking about you, and that is why you must forgive me if I speak out of turn. I have heard so much about you that I feel as though I know you. She told me about your every achievement, professional or private, great or small, with such obvious love and pride. You were the most important thing in her life.’ She shakes her head sadly and adds, almost inaudibly but not quite, ‘Too important, perhaps.’

  I take a larger gulp of tea than I had intended. The black liquid is still very hot and burns my mouth and throat, but the pain is a welcome distraction. I feel as though I have turned over two pages of a book at once and lost the plot. My reality is slipping out of focus like a view through a rain-streaked window. I do not recognise at all the woman she is describing as my mother. She is describing the mother I longed for, dreamed about, prayed for. The soap powder paragon. The mother who never came.

  ‘Do you like cauliflower?’

  Miss Dane’s peculiar question is an even better distraction than the scalding tea. It catches me before I fall too far.

  ‘My niece insists on doing my shopping for me, although I’m quite capable of doing it for myself. The wretched woman is always bringing me things I can’
t stomach. This week it was cauliflower. I can’t stand the nasty knobbly things.’

  This is how I come to leave Miss Dane’s with a burnt mouth, a spinning head and a cauliflower. As I reach the front door, she lays her hand on my arm.

  ‘I am sorry if I have upset you, my dear, but the things I have told you are things that I believe you need to know.’

  She smiles at me for the first time I can remember. Yet I might still have dismissed her as a batty, slightly scary old busybody, had it not been for her parting words:

  ‘Next time you come, why don’t you bring your dog?’

  Back in my mother’s flat, sitting rigid with fury at the kitchen table, a hundred questions roar and scream inside my head like wailing banshees. Why did my mother never tell me she was proud of me? Why did she send me away? Where did my daddy go? Why didn’t I know she loved me? Who the hell was she when she wasn’t with me? My hands are shaking as I take a match from the box in front of me and strike it. As soon as it burns out, I strike another and another. I am only allowed ten matches a day, and after all ten, Eli crawls out from under the table and sits at my feet. But I am no calmer. I try to cool my scalded throat and boiling anger with glass after glass of chilled white wine from one of my mother’s wine glasses. It’s like throwing water onto a blazing chip pan. My rage explodes into molten wreckage and I hurl the precious wine glass into the butler’s sink. The vicious shards of glinting glass fly and spin and ricochet before settling into a jagged mosaic that is a mirror of my own destruction. It’s strange how the sound of smashing and shattering is soothing to the unquiet mind. Too much wine, too quickly, on an empty stomach has made me unsteady, and I lean back against the pine dresser, which is more rickety than I thought. The top section wobbles threateningly and the next smash I hear is not soothing at all. A small striped pot, one I remember fondly from the kitchen of my childhood, lies in sad pieces on the floor. Nestled amongst the blue and white fragments is something gold and shiny. It is a small brass key.

  7

  Tilly

  It was too hot. Not the happy sunshine hot of flowery cotton dresses and stripy, swingy deckchairs, but the sulky, sticky hot of clingy nylon shirts and sweaty plastic stacking chairs. Lunch was horrid and Tilly would be glad when it was over. Not the food; the food was all right. Fish fingers, instant mashed potato and tinned baked beans. The potatoes in the garden were running to seed, and the peas were being eaten by the birds. Tilly’s mother was smoking a cigarette for her lunch. She wasn’t very good at it, but Tilly thought that it must be because she was still a beginner. She’d only started about a week ago, and didn’t seem to have got the hang of it yet. She smoked as though she was daring someone to tell her not to. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it very much. Tilly thought she was probably just doing it to be awkward, the way Tilly sometimes put her shoes on the wrong feet and her cardigan on back to front when she was having a sulk about something and no one was paying any attention. But this was more than just a sulk, and that’s why lunch was so horrid. Her mother’s mood was like a boil waiting to burst. Tilly had learned to be careful when her mother was like this. She had often played a game with her daddy called ‘The Kraken Wakes’. Her daddy would pretend to be a fierce, dragon-like monster who gobbled the flesh of children and then crunched their bones. While he was sleeping, Tilly had to tiptoe past him and touch his nose without waking him. He always leaped from his chair and grabbed her just as she thought she had won. He would roar and growl ferociously, and she would laugh until she cried. But now her mother was the Kraken it wasn’t fun any more. It wasn’t a game; it was real. Tilly carefully cut her fish fingers into neat little rectangles and chewed each piece five times before swallowing. She put her knife and fork straight like soldiers on either side of her plate while she counted each five chews. She dipped each piece of fish finger once in the blob of tomato ketchup on the edge of her plate and ate five baked beans on each forkful. Every time she took a drink from her beaker of orange squash, she replaced it on the table in exactly the same place, with the picture of the dog on the beaker facing her. Tilly thought that if she concentrated really hard on what she was doing, she wouldn’t do or say anything that might accidentally upset her mother and awake the Kraken. It was like weaving a magic spell, but instead of using toads and bat’s blood, she was doing it with fish fingers. For pudding it was banana custard. It was cold.

  Just as Tilly was chasing the last piece of banana around the dish with her spoon, and wondering what would happen next, Auntie Wendy arrived like a rainbow in a storm-sooty sky. Tilly felt as though the piece of elastic that was being stretched to breaking point, and which tied her to her mother, had been cut. Auntie Wendy laughed uproariously at her mother’s smoking.

  ‘Good God, Gracie! Who do you think you are – Marlene Dietrich?’

  Auntie Wendy’s cheeks were glowing, and despite her billowing cotton dress awash with pink cabbage roses on a clotted cream background, and her kitten-heeled, strappy sandals, she looked hot and thirsty.

  ‘Put the kettle on, love. I could murder a cup of tea.’

  Her mother got up to make the tea, managing a weak smile. Tilly’s attention wandered back to Auntie Wendy’s sandals. She loved grown-up ladies’ shoes like these. She loved their clippety-click heels, their pointy toes with bows on top, and their dainty heel straps. Her brown leather T-bars from Clarks were so ugly and clumsy in comparison, and she was only allowed to wear her red ones for best. Auntie Wendy smiled at her and reached inside her handbag for her purse.

  ‘Here you are, Tilly,’ she said, handing her some coins. ‘Why don’t you pop down to the shop and buy yourself an ice cream?’

  This could only mean one thing. Auntie Wendy was going to talk about things that she didn’t want Tilly to hear. Just this once, Tilly didn’t really mind. She was glad to escape her mother’s crushing sadness and simmering temper. She knew that something was badly wrong, but she didn’t know how to make it better. It was the mummy’s job to make things better, and she wasn’t a mummy. And the banana custard had had skin on it, and lumps that weren’t banana, and it wasn’t a proper pudding anyway. An ice cream might go some way to making up for it. Even so, Tilly couldn’t resist hanging around by the back door after she had closed it, just long enough to hear Auntie Wendy shout good-naturedly, ‘And don’t you be standing there listening, young lady!’

  Tilly could still hear her laughing as she closed the garden gate. The shop was three streets away, with no main roads to cross, but Tilly was rarely allowed to go on her own. Since her daddy had gone, though, things had changed. While she was with her, her mother minded everything she did and said closely. The slightest wrongdoing was picked up, and any mention of her daddy was greeted with silent disapproval, angry shouting or vague dismissal. Tilly didn’t know where she was. It was as though someone had changed the rules and forgotten to tell her. The uncertainty scared her more than the shouting. And she still didn’t understand why her daddy had gone away. On the day he left, he had swung her up into his arms, told her to be a big girl and to look after her mother. She had begged him not to go, but he had kissed her on the top of her head and replied, ‘Somebody has to earn the pennies.’ She offered him all the money in her piggy bank to stay and his eyes were wet with tears as he shook his head and waved goodbye. These days, when Tilly was allowed out to play, or went to school, it was almost as though she was forgotten about. If she was late home it was barely noticed, and her mother never asked her where she had been or what she had been doing. Tilly was sure that the soap powder mummy wouldn’t forget about her children like that. Still, the new way of things had its advantages. More freedom meant that the edges of Tilly’s world were sneaking outwards like a pool of spilled milk, and she was ready to make the most of it. As Tilly tried to decide what flavour ice cream to have, suddenly and unexpectedly her eyes flooded with tears. She always had an ice cream on the way home when her daddy took her to the cemetery to see Granddad Rory and Grandma Rose. Till
y didn’t see them very much because it was a long way away, but she loved them dearly. Grandma Rose was a loud, happy woman who wore deep pink lipstick and tight skirts that made her walk with a wiggle. Granddad Rory smoked a pipe and was always telling jokes with swear words in them. They would sit on a bench while Tilly arranged the flowers on their graves where they were buried side by side, and she always had an ice cream on the way home. Her mother never came with them to the cemetery. Tilly went with her daddy on the bus, and he told her that it must always be their special secret. He said that her mother wouldn’t see Granddad Rory or Grandma Rose, so it was better not to tell her. Or anyone else. Now that her daddy was gone, she realised that she couldn’t get to the cemetery on her own. She might never see them again.