‘The scullery is our kitchen,’ Kate said, making her way through a frosted-glass door in one corner. Martine followed. It was a long narrow space, stone-floored and brick-walled, surely an offshoot from the main building. There was a dull metal box on legs with brass taps sticking out over it, a sink apparently. Martine gave it a close look, wondering if it was lead and if the dishes washed in it were safe. Besides the sink, the ‘kitchen’ consisted of wooden boards with shelves below and hooks above. In the far corner a two-ring hotplate sat beside a little bar fridge. The flex they were plugged into snaked across the few feet of floor to where it was fed through under the propped open sash of a barred window next to an outside door, the gap stuffed all around with rags.
Kate went back to the task Martine had interrupted, stirring a pot so broad it stretched over both rings of the hotplate and so tall she had to reach up over the side.
‘What are you making?’ Martine said. She was sure that pot was aluminium. Did people really still use aluminium pots to cook in?
‘Stovies,’ said Kate.
‘I’m a—’
‘But I remembered you’re a vegetarian,’ she added, cutting in. ‘So it’s just potatoes and onion. And Marmite for a bit of flavour.’ She balanced her wooden spoon on the edge of the pot and turned back to face Martine again. ‘It really is lovely to have you here. You’re the answer to my prayers.’
Martine smiled at the start of this speech then found her face falling sombre again as she repeated the end of it to herself. ‘You mean … finding me?’ she said. ‘After you’d found out I existed? And all the time looking?’
Kate took the tea towel from over her shoulder and folded it carefully in half then half again. And again. She kept folding until the cloth was a fat roll that wouldn’t fold any more. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’
‘Is Gail coming?’ Martine asked.
‘She’s here.’ Martine looked over her shoulder towards the rest of the house. What had Kate called those other rooms on the far side of the hall? And why hadn’t Gail come to greet her?
‘She’s downstairs,’ Kate said. ‘She’ll be up soon. Or I could get her up now.’
Martine shifted her feet. ‘Don’t disturb her if she’s busy. Do they live down there?’ Kate hesitated. ‘Gail and Leo.’ She hadn’t heard another word about Leo since the fact that he took the tiny cassette to work and went away discreetly while the sisters listened to the message. Maybe that meant he’d give them space today.
‘There’s no one living down there,’ Kate said.
Martine looked towards the floor, at the stone slabs that were worn slightly concave in front of the wooden counters, from generations of feet shuffling and scraping as women stood there.
‘Do you work down there? You said you run a business but you didn’t say what it was, did you?’
‘Tech support,’ Kate said. Martine couldn’t understand why those two words, or the combination of the words and the look on Kate’s face, should trouble her. Kate lifted a broom from where it was hooked on two nails on the back of the door and banged it on the stone in three raps, hard enough to jolt Martine out of her thoughts again.
Kate cocked her head. ‘She’s on her way.’
Martine had heard nothing. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m dying to meet her. And talk. We’ve got so much to say, the three of us, haven’t we? Well, the two of you. I’m dying to hear all your memories of … him. Martin. Your father. Our father.’ She gave a breathless little laugh. ‘I don’t know what to call him. What would you like me to call him?’
‘Dad,’ said Kate. ‘If you like. Or anything you want to. But I would just say, maybe when Gail’s here, don’t talk too much about dying.’
‘Dying?’ Martine said. ‘Martin dying? Of course n—’
‘You, me, anyone,’ said Kate. ‘Dying to meet, dying to talk. You’ll see.’
Martine could feel the word ‘sorry’ starting to form but she bit her lip on it. That was bonkers. In fact, everything about this place was just slightly … what was the word she was reaching for? ‘Dying’ was only an expression. She took another drink to help the awkward moment by.
On the other hand, she could remember what new grief felt like from when her gran died. How unreasonable it could make you. And besides, she should be grateful for ‘bonkers’. An interesting family, a quirky home, was cause for celebration. She had spun so many tales to herself about her dad – the African student, the Deep South preacher’s son (he had become a preacher’s son, over the years, somehow), the London lad with all the sisters – that she had sometimes thought the truth would be a disappointment.
Hardly. She smiled at Kate, at the tall pot of stovies with the spoon balanced on top, at the weird, slummy kitchen. This place and her two adoptive sisters were anything but dull. She held the glass up in a sort of toast to that thought, as she drank again.
‘Here she comes,’ Kate said again. Martine still couldn’t hear anything. This stone-floored room with its bare-brick walls was like a tomb around her. The first she knew was the snick of the latch on the outside door and the creak of the hinge as it swung open, letting in a gust of cold and making her shiver. She took a step back. She could even feel a catch in her throat as if she was going to let out a cry, but she managed to hold on to it. Framed in the doorway was a woman a head and a half taller than Kate and broad across the shoulders. She was dressed in a long purplish-grey tunic that hung to her ankles and her feet were bare, her toes red and white in patches from the cold. As she stepped inside, she left wet footprints on the stone flags. But it wasn’t the strange dress or the bare feet that had set Martine’s pulse rattling. It was the veil. The woman wore a veil of thin grey gauze dropped over her head and falling beyond her shoulders all around.
‘H–Hello,’ Martine said, with a quick darting look to Kate, whose face was unreadable. ‘You must be Gail. I’m Martine. I’ve been so very much looking forward to meeting you.’ She held out her hand to shake.
‘Ssshh,’ the woman said, so quietly Martine might have believed she’d imagined it if she hadn’t seen the veil moving. Gail’s right hand stayed by her side, holding something Martine couldn’t quite see hidden in the palm. Probably a phone, she thought. That was probably the curve of a metallic phone cover.
‘Look, darling,’ Kate said. ‘Look who’s here.’
Gail shook her head. ‘Ssshh,’ she said.
‘Go and sit down, darling,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll bring a plate of food for you.’
Gail shook her head again and there was a twist to her mouth this time. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘You have to stop.’
Then she turned and left, gliding silently on her cold bare feet. The wet prints ran out before she stepped on to the patterned wood of the … dining room, Martine wanted to say, although that wasn’t what Kate had called it.
‘Is she OK?’ Martine whispered, once she judged the woman was out of earshot.
‘She’s fine. She’s just having trouble with feelings of grief. Natural enough. She’s better every day and you being here will help no end.’
Martine nodded. She hadn’t traipsed around a garden in bare feet or covered herself with a veil when her gran died but she remembered those early nights when sleep felt a thousand miles away. If someone had been there to see her they might have found her as odd as she found Gail.
‘And she’s having trouble eating, is she? Upset at you for trying to make her? That can’t be easy.’
It explained the huge pot of potatoes and onions, she reckoned. If it was Gail’s favourite food maybe. Or if she wasn’t going to eat anyway and Kate was sick of thinking up nice meals just to see them wasted.
‘She’s fine!’ Kate said again.
Martine saw a fleck of spit hitting the surface of the pan and noticed a tendon standing out on Kate’s neck. ‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘I am fine, fine, more than fine,’ Kate said. ‘Go and talk to her. She needs you. I’m fine. She’s the one who needs you h
ere.’
Martine stared at Kate’s neck, at the pulse visibly pounding. She couldn’t walk away from this much distress, but what could she say to help?
‘Can’t Leo help her?’ was what she went for. ‘Or, has her doctor seen her?’
‘Leo!’ It was a howl. ‘Yes I did, didn’t I? Leo. A man with a job. I said “Leo”. Like I said “auntie”. Like I said “cat”.’ She was stabbing her spoon into the pot as if to kill something lurking in there.
‘OK, OK,’ Martine said, like she would to an animal injured and snarling. Like she had, once, to a drunk with a broken bottle neck in his hand. Slowly, she backed away and, as light on her toes as she could be, she flitted to the hallway, to the place where she’d left her bags. Her overnight, her messenger, her keys and her phone. And she stopped dead, feeling a whimper grow in her throat. They were gone.
For one moment, just one, she saw herself opening the front door and running down the path, leaving her bags behind her. She could go to the newsagent’s over the road, or the nail bar on the corner and say … what?
The whimper turned into a groan and from behind the half-open door across the hall she heard Gail again. ‘Ssshh.’ Relief flooded her, annoyance at its back.
She tapped and then entered a pretty blue and white panelled room, empty like the rest of the house, except for a couple of chaise longues. Gail had lain down on one and was leaning back, lifting her feet. They were filthy, Martine noticed, with lines of mud between the toes and bits of grass stuck to the insteps. And the hem of her dress was muddy too, clinging round her ankles. It was thin material, almost transparent, and the underneath layer looked like silk. She still held the phone in one hand and was clutching a little leather case with a gold clasp in the other.
‘Gail?’ she said.
‘Ssshh.’
‘Gail, have you put my bags somewhere out of the way?’
‘Ssshh.’
‘Look.’ The annoyance was growing but she tried to keep her voice gentle. ‘Look, I’m sorry for what you’re going through and obviously it was far too soon for me to turn up here. So if you’ll just tell me where my bags are I’ll— Don’t shush me again. I know you’re grieving but—’
‘Grief,’ said Gail at last, in a stronger voice than Martine had heard from her, ‘is the last act of love.’
‘That’s right,’ Martine said. ‘Someone once told me grief is the bill we pay for the love we knew.’
‘Tell her!’ Gail had turned her head and was facing Martine full-on now. She pointed with the hand holding the phone. Was it a phone? Her chest was lifting and falling rapidly and the gauze in front of her face was fluttering with each snatched breath.
‘Is that why you’re wearing a veil?’ Martine said. ‘Is it mourning?’
‘I’m not wearing a veil,’ Gail said. Her voice had risen with her quickening breath and was as high as birdsong now. ‘The veil is between us, before your eyes.’
‘Oh darling, don’t say that!’ Kate’s voice came from the doorway, a sudden wail in the silence.
‘She’s hidden my bags,’ Martine said.
‘Ssshh,’ said Gail.
Kate had a shallow plate of food in each hand, steam curling off them in the cold air as she advanced into the room. ‘I’ve brought you something to eat, my darling.’
Gail pressed herself back into the chaise and raised both hands in front of her. Now Martine could see that the little rounded object wasn’t a phone after all. It was a knife, one of those old craft knives, probably illegal now – what were they called? Stanley knives! As Kate took one more step, Gail’s thumb moved and the blade slid out with a sharp tick.
As silently as she could, Martine set her glass on the floor and got to her feet.
Kate bent over the chaise with her neck stretched, inches from the glinting blade. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘We both know that’s not for me.’ The plates had tipped and thin streams of liquid were pouring on to the floor, chunks of potato thudding down and splashing in the puddles. Martine felt her stomach rise as she edged towards the door.
Tock. The blade flashed as it slid back inside the handle.
‘Look,’ Kate whispered. Her voice was coiling and gentle but as she swung her hand towards Martine an arc of hot liquid sprayed over the floor, catching the front of Martine’s legs. ‘Look!’ Kate’s face was inches from Gail’s now. ‘She’s right there. She’s right here. I brought her for you, just like—’
Tick.
Martine stood frozen for one long empty moment, looking between the two of them, Gail stark-eyed behind the veil and Kate yearning forward as if to peck holes in the air in front of her face. Then she turned and fled, her crepe soles squeaking on the hall floor. She lunged for the front door handle, fumbling and twisting it this way and that until she couldn’t deny it.
‘Did you lock this?’ she shouted. ‘Am I locked in here?’
‘Just till you settle,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll move your car round and you stay here with my sister. She needs you. You’re exactly what she needs.’
Martine went racing through the house to the kitchen to twist and rattle the door handle there. She shouted and pounded on the solid panels. She took a pan from a shelf and threw it at the window. It smashed the glass but bounced back off the bars.
As she fell back against the wall and let herself slide down to squat on the floor, she could hear the thump, thump, thump of Kate’s slippers and the slap, slap, slap of Gail’s bare feet, and very faintly the tick-tock, tick-tock of the knife blade going in and out in time, as they approached her.
TEN
The trouble with most people was that they didn’t sculpt their lives. Oprah had said that, used just that word, and the sound of it in her smoke and honey voice – ‘sculpt your life’, had made Laura shiver with a delight sharp enough to feel indecent. It wasn’t the sort of thrill you should feel all alone in your own living room watching daytime telly with the curtains drawn over. It was like when your hairdresser suddenly started massaging your scalp in the middle of an ordinary hair-washing, as if giving that much pleasure – enough to lift all the hairs on your arms and wring a groan from your throat – was the sort of thing that happened any day of the week. And it was everywhere: even food adverts that followed the glossy swirl of chocolate sauce round the meek white mounds of ice cream in a way that made her think of ice dancers, swooping and whirling, speeding up in tighter and tighter spins then bursting free into a long low lazy loop again, still panting. She couldn’t watch it, couldn’t watch any of it, couldn’t look at herself in the mirror after.
Laura didn’t like to lose control. She liked to plan. People didn’t plan, not in detail anyway. They dreamed. They hoped, long after they should know better. But they didn’t plan. Laura planned. She wanted a baby, just one, and a house. She saw it so clearly she could have drawn a blueprint. And she wanted a business, with no fewer than three employees and no more than six, in a modern building, with a carpark and a reception desk.
So first she needed a man. That was exactly the sort of clear sight most women she knew would shy away from. They’d tell themselves they’d do it alone, they were goddesses and wonderful, and then when it was wine o’clock, they’d admit it wasn’t working and they were beginning to think it never would.
Laura was different. She knew if she concentrated on getting the man and then pegging him down with the baby, he’d be on the hook for her business plan whether he stayed with her and called it love or moved on and called it alimony. She didn’t mind which.
She didn’t mind which man either. So long as he was tall, with good hair and all his teeth, and earned a decent six figures, she could cope with just about anything. And she knew how to snag him too. It was mostly diet and exercise. Even if they were canny enough not to say it out loud any more, at least in mixed company, every man wanted a fit body. She knew plenty girls who spent a fortune at the hairdresser’s and the beauty parlour, even the perfume counter – the clueless fools, when the fact was
that ninety-nine men out of a hundred couldn’t tell the difference between a five-hundred-smacker highlight job and a packet from the chemist. As long your hair was long and clean and you didn’t mind him holding it like a rope, it was all the same. And none of them liked that caked-on look with the boxy eyebrows and ten tones of shading, never mind the thought of kissing wet-look glossed lips. She laughed up her sleeve at them all on a Saturday night, circus clowns. They were out on the pull, and they might as well be wearing signs on their heads telling men to stay away. The perfume was worst of all. They came home from Magaluf laden with duty-free, loving themselves for it, and even that one man in a hundred who cared about hairdos and didn’t mind bronzer, even he couldn’t stomach the guff of them. They were like gardens sprayed with cat repellent telling themselves the cats would be rolling up any minute now.
Laura had long blonde hair she washed every day and left loose. She wore no make-up at all, ever, as far as any man would know. And she smelled of Pears soap and baby powder. She wore heels she could walk in, jeans that fitted her with no rolls bursting over the top, and the best push-up padded bra she could afford under a low top with a pendant necklace that gave them an excuse for looking. And they did look. Then they looked up, cowering with guilt, ready for a frosty stare or even a rude word. But she kept on listening to whatever they were banging on about with exactly the same happy smile on her face, as if she hadn’t noticed.
If she’d smirked at them, making out she didn’t mind, they’d have backed off. No one wanted a slapper who wore a low top and loved it when men looked down her cleavage. But a sweet, fresh-faced girl who smelled like their wee sister after bath time, and didn’t even know when men were taking liberties? Probably didn’t realize how low the neckline was, or even how perfect the rack was? That was the sort of girl who needed someone to look after her.
Not that she seemed to be searching. She was always happy to hear of an engagement, hen night, wedding, even baby shower. She was delighted at the news and thrilled to be included. She loved her job, as far as anyone could tell. She’d drop it if a city-break came up, but she was just as happy to suit herself for three weekends in a row if the man of the moment got a better offer. She was a good driver and kept her car immaculate, but she handed over the keys automatically and let herself be driven without a murmur. She liked a drink, but she never got plastered, never got sloppy. She was great in bed. She knew it and wasn’t ashamed to congratulate herself. She was absolutely bloody great. Responsive and willing, no matter what they asked her to do, but she never pushed it. Never asked them for anything they hadn’t at least hinted at already. And – this was her secret weapon; this was what set her above all the other women she knew and all the other women she heard men moaning about – she didn’t want to talk about it afterwards. She didn’t want to talk about anything. She didn’t talk.
A Gingerbread House Page 10
