Three Pretty Widows

by Barbara Else

  Bella tries to laugh again: a horrible sound comes out. ‘I know more about that than you, Anna. He decidedly was not a family man. He had three wives and not a child by any of us.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ murmurs Eliot.

  ‘He changed his mind.’ Anna is still blushing. ‘And if it’s possible that he could have a child, well … he was always much larger than life. It would be — like a vessel, for his energy, what do you think?’

  That the world has not moved on since the Dark Ages. But — Bella feels her forehead crease and a headache start to stab. Barnaby may well have had an affair with a younger woman — but it wouldn’t have been with Anna. Would it? He’d known her since she was born. Though, if he felt his manhood was impugned — what a dark and clear-edged purple word, impugned —

  Bella finds she is completely mute. Barnaby and Anna. If Barnaby were that desperate and it’s true, and Anna’s pregnant, then she ought to pour that wine out.

  ‘I cannot think of anything more ridiculous.’ Bella’s voice is surprisingly strong now that she’s found it.

  ‘Ridiculous?’ Anna cries.

  ‘Anna, please,’ Eliot says. ‘We are exhausted.’

  ‘I knew I’d screw this up. But there’s plenty of time.’ Shaking her head, Anna swings the bell of her black skirt and lets herself out the front door. Ruth and Walsh should have slapped her at least once while she was growing up. Bella wants to run after her and slap her now.

  Eliot strides into the hall and Bella hears him lock the door again.

  ‘Is that young woman a little witch or simply seriously misguided?’ he mutters as he returns. ‘Barnaby’s energy? It drove us all mad.’

  ‘He didn’t want children,’ Bella says. ‘He truly didn’t.’

  ‘Of — course not.’ Something in Eliot’s voice sounds ill at ease.

  ‘So what was Anna saying?’

  Eliot pours himself another drink but immediately puts the glass aside and thrusts his fists deep in his pockets.

  ‘Eliot? What do you mean?’

  He rocks on his feet. ‘For God’s sake — whether he wanted to or not, Barnaby couldn’t.’

  ‘Pardon?’ says Bella.

  ‘If I tell you, if I’m honest with you, Bella, I only compound my betrayal of a friend.’ He’s turned red, too. ‘Oh hell. The man had a vasectomy when he was married to Louise.’

  The world cants around Bella.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know how or when or even if to tell you. Chap talk, you know, over the whisky. It’s not the kind of thing you go around mentioning. It was going to be his birthday present to Louise but then she left him,’ continues Eliot. ‘He’d had enough of kids when he was married to Maggie, with her lot.’

  Bella seems surrounded by an electric silence. Eventually she manages a weak grimace. Eliot’s hand comes up again, almost as if he hopes they’re back to the moment before Anna arrived, before the pizza folk. But the mood is killed completely. The mood has mummified and shrivelled, tipped and slid away like a dead thing in the mind of someone who half an hour before was ripe for love. Eliot drops his hand — poor man, what a dilemma he’s been nursing.

  And Barnaby. What a liar by omission. Whether he was having an affair with Anna or not — a vasectomy, before he’d even met Bella. What a fool it makes her look. What a double, triple fake the bastard was.

  chapter five

  Jocasta knows. Grief lies as heavy as a stone upon your throat, your chest and belly. You keep moving, breathing, speaking, even coping, but it slows your gestures, numbs your brain and weights your heart. We never know when it will avalanche upon us. It plummets down, then slides away to lie in wait for when we least expect its crushing mass again.

  Grief needs feeding. So does hatred, in a different way.

  Jocasta knows how everyone is linked, by lies, by truth, by secrets. Jocasta knows we’re all so different yet we’re utterly the same.

  When she was five years old, Jocasta saw her first dead person. It was a fine spring day, late April, with daffodils nodding above the ditch in the lane outside. Four men in heavy brown boots carried her grandfather home on a plank, a buff-coloured blanket bundled over him, and laid him on the kitchen table. Jocasta had done the cat sat on the mat and was waiting patiently for Grandma to come and have a look. She had to whisk her slate and pencil out of the way. She still remembers how Grandma eased the blanket back, and how she saw the thick worsted of her grandfather’s trousers, the stitching on the pocket, the firm line of the side seam, before one of the men drew her aside. Jocasta’s mother ran in from the laundry, saw the corpse and started wailing, her pretty face becoming patched with red. Jocasta was intrigued. Her grandmother’s face was solemn as she tucked the blanket back over Grandad and his — well, his one leg, though her look put Jocasta in mind of the time there wasn’t enough bread pudding to go around and she pretended very cleverly to be sorry.

  A fifth man came in carrying a sack. It held the leg that had been cut off by the train.

  ‘Under the table,’ Grandma said, but then the neighbour’s beagle lolloped in. ‘Up on the sideboard, then.’

  Jocasta suspected Grandma would not have changed her mind if the men had gone. But there they were, their hats held to their chests, boots scraping on the flagstones of the kitchen floor.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing, lass,’ murmured the man who’d brought the sack. ‘This’ll change things in this house. Ah, dearie me. It’s a sad house that loses all its menfolk.’

  Jocasta’s mother shot a nasty glance at Grandma and wailed louder. Her grandma’s expression brought bread pudding to Jocasta’s mind again.

  Grandfather’s death did change things, and a lot. The burial was on a cool blue day with white clouds scudding high. ‘Good washing weather,’ Grandma murmured, as if it was a wicked waste of that brisk breeze. Grandma grew as lively as Jocasta once the funeral was done. Jocasta’s mother made acerbic comments about the old woman using recipes from her herbal to make the old man dizzy on the platform, but Jocasta knew how daft that was. It was Jocasta who had made his sandwiches that day.

  Jocasta was her Grandma’s favourite girl.

  Jocasta was the favourite of a lot of people, the prettiest girl in the village: hair sleek as a canary’s wing, grey eyes. Old Mr Wainwright used to sit on the dry stone wall at the end of the village street, offering to share his liquorice, the sort that came in a long root, like a dock, a wrinkled yellowish brown, sweet but not pleasant to eat. Jocasta used to smile and shake her head. Mr Wainwright thought she was a pretty, timid creature, but she didn’t like to chew the root, that’s all. She thought the old man tedious.

  From early in her childhood, folk had said she was the prettiest around. Even when they went into the larger town of Whitby for this reason or the other, people said so. It was a cold bleak coast in winter. The wind off the North Sea pinched and thinned the cheeks of other girls and made them blotchy. Jocasta’s cheeks were roses. Grandma’s recipes kept Jocasta’s teeth pearly, her hair a thick buttery yellow. In a household without men, it was important to be pretty to increase the chances of another man coming along and wanting to be part of it — even if you didn’t let him in. Men were a fascination to Jocasta. She seemed to fascinate them, too. Their eyes followed her as if they couldn’t help it; they dropped things and their limbs knocked into chairs. As Jocasta grew much older and learned what men could do, both kind and wicked, she found them even more remarkable. They thought they were in control, but in their hearts, their secret hearts, they knew they had no prayer of it at all. Jocasta realised that very early from the defeated look in Mr Wainwright’s eyes each time she shook her head, said no to his root of liquorice and paced across the bridge on her way back home to Grandma.

  Curb Jocasta? What a laugh. A girl like that?

  Jocasta, aged fifteen, in a cotton pinny with a pattern of dark blue flowers over her pert chest and smooth young stomach, used two knives to cut a lump of butter into a bowl of sifted flour. Sun flowed i
nto the kitchen from the window on the side that faced the inland road. She sliced three apples, laid them in the dish, spooned the mixture over and slid the apple loaf inside the oven. What sort of oven did she use, in 1939? An old-style, black-tiled cooker with an iron door, and a swivel handle that grew so hot she had to grab a red-checked cloth to turn it. Peter sat on the stool near the window and watched her. The stream of sun licked over his clasped hands on his awkward young man knees.

  Peter had black eyes and a red red face, like the poppy man in the fairy tale by Housman, the man with strong black eyes and the steadfast love. The red-faced man agreed to be turned into a poppy and waited all summer for the princess to brush him with her lips. He didn’t care that he might fade and die before she did so. He wanted only a chance, a piece of happenstance, some luck. He hoped that she might kiss him, for without the princess and her love he’d die in any case.

  Peter looked at Jocasta, at the wooden spurtle she was stroking with her finger, rolling the streaks of dough into tinier smears of creamy white. He glanced over at the oven door, and took a breath. His face grew redder with the things he couldn’t say. She took a breath herself of the summer air, the warmth of sun and heat of baking loaf. She read in his eyes what he was hungry for and smiled to let him know she understood.

  Jocasta’s mother, pretty as she was, had not found herself another man, though many showed a passing interest. Now and then Jocasta wondered if there’d ever been a real father in the house. There was a photograph of her mother in a white dress with her hair about her shoulders but none of her standing with Jocasta’s father. Jocasta had never seen a wedding certificate, nor heard what the day was like when her father (‘dead before she was born’) was married to her mother. No matter how bright your eyes, how red your lips, men walked by once they saw the way those eyes scowled, those lips turned down and were sour. It was also true that Jocasta’s mother didn’t seem to like her pretty daughter, nor her own mother, Jocasta’s Grandma. Was it jealousy, perhaps, or something other? Jealousy’s a canker in a house. A canker is an eating sore; it corrupts, corrodes, destroys — but anxiety can be misinterpreted as envy. Jocasta knows that now.

  Suspicion is a canker, too.

  ‘Never mind what your mother might suspect or know,’ Jocasta’s Grandma said. ‘Some men are better off out of it, and some women better off without them. What’s past is past, and done is done, so there.’

  With or without a man, and jealousy, worry or suspicion notwithstanding, the three women rubbed along. The house did well enough and it was more than a simple cottage. Jocasta’s grandmother had a private income as well as what she earned from herbs and simples, and her mother worked for a chemist down in Whitby, keeping the accounts. Jocasta was to stay at school another year.

  But this hot summer, with talk of war about, Jocasta wondered for the first time what it might be like to find out more about men. She was a sensible girl. She knew if things got out of hand she’d need to think about penny-royal, or parsley at least, in great quantities. She was confident she’d find out what to do. She knew where Grandma kept her special recipes.

  Peter wasn’t a boy; he was old enough to know what a man should do. And red poppy is a mild sedative. The heat of Peter’s eyes made Jocasta feel strangely languid, and she liked it.

  She brought the loaf from the oven, sliced Peter a wedge while it was hot, spread butter on it and laid the moist slice on a plate from her grandmother’s tea set. It wasn’t the best china but it was Jocasta’s favourite, with a simple ring of gold around the rim and sprays of flowers on a band of creamy blue.

  Peter said something at last. ‘Your eyes are just like cornflowers.’

  Jocasta snorted. ‘They’re grey.’

  ‘Cornflowers, that’s right.’ He grinned. ‘The faded kind.’ His face grew redder. ‘I meant, they’re round, and your lashes are long, like petals.’

  ‘You’ve been practising saying that,’ Jocasta said. ‘I’d say you should practise some more.’

  She put a silver spoon out of the drawer and on the table; the sun shimmered off its bowl. She took another slice of loaf and a cup of lemon-balm tea upstairs to Grandma. Grandma had not been well, had a cough in the middle of summer. She was trying syrup of forget-me-not to ease it.

  ‘Don’t you go walking with Peter,’ said her grandmother when Jocasta had plumped up her pillows.

  Jocasta had no intention of walking. Not far at any rate. There was a bit of woodland close enough, on the way to the cliffs. It would be sheltered, quiet and private in late afternoon. Her mother wouldn’t be home till nearly sunset.

  chapter six

  Bella dreams about silver teapots. She’d always cleaned the silver when she came home from art school. Her mother’s house was a haven in the world of bills, boyfriends, daily failures and social expectations. Polishing the silver was a task her mother didn’t like to do herself, along with vacuuming the staircase, especially up against the stair rods where dog hair collects in drifts. Doing the stairs and the silver was a quiet way for Bella to show her mother she loved her. Her sister never thought of it. And a brother never cleaned silver. As she rubbed softly, softly, Bella liked to see the tarnish disappear and her face begin to glimmer up from the distortions of the surfaces.

  After her mother died and they began to sort out the possessions, nobody wanted the family silver. No time to clean it, thanks, they said. Then Bella said she’d like it, and her sister grabbed the coffee pot, sugar bowl, cream jug, as well as the best teapot with ball feet. Her brother seized the cake plates and said his wife should have the brooches: silver and pearl. Bella was left with the EPNS tray with the surface wearing off in little craters, and a large metal teapot, enchanting in a portly art deco style, but only Britannia metal.

  In Bella’s dream, she discovers another silver teapot, left over and waiting for her, more imposing than the one they’d thought the best, with fine fat feet like lion’s paws, a round bulky body and a squat uplifted spout. She cradles the lovely strange thing in her hands and lifts the lid. It has an inner shell. Bella’s never seen a teapot with a solid shell inside. She is amazed: Barnaby has never told her teapots could be made like this; not even Jonah in the Metropolitan knew about teapots made this way. Mustard pots, yes, not teapots.

  The inner shell lifts out, and to her further astonishment she thinks it is the moon — but no, it is shaped like a duck. A hollow silver duck with chubby cheeks and a vacant expression.

  In her dream, Bella knows she is the duck. She slips the shell inside the pot again before anybody notices and laughs.

  Ruth’s strange dazed afternoon dealing with shocked Bella, grieving Eliot, has become a stranger, hazier evening with Craig and the whisky, and the bottle of wine that Bella left untouched; and Craig has left tucking his shirt in, thanking Ruth but also apologising in what seems close to a state of alarm.

  Ruth has been a predator. She lurches from the spare room and upstairs to her own bed before she understands that the pain in her insides means she is ravenous. Dragging on Walsh’s dressing gown, she stumbles down again. She finds a fork, heads for the darkened living room and eats nearly all Jocasta’s pumpkin casserole straight out of the iron dish. A pumpkin became Cinderella’s golden coach with a transformed rat as a coachman. That rat must have thought it was dying when its nose drew in, its chest barrelled out to fit a coat with buttons, its front paws turned to hands and its tail shrank up to nothing. It was murdered again, in a way, when it changed back to a rat at midnight. The midnight of truth, boing-oing.

  Ruth sits in the gloom, the curtains open; and a golden pumpkin moon rises through wreaths of cloud. The casserole is savoury, consoling. The iron dish is heavy on her lap. Moonlight glints off the handle of the fork.

  She’s done a very silly thing. If this is what menopause does to your brain — turns it to mush that makes use of whatever comes by with fetching tousled hair — Ruth doesn’t like it. She’d rather have hot flushes, thanks. All the time of life is
doing to her, as well as widening her midriff, is making her tired in the afternoons and overly demanding of an inquisitive though dim young man at night. Flirting is one thing. Flirting’s kept her entertained for years. But going all the way? Uh-uh. Not until now. Dear God. But she’s finally got him out of the house at last.

  What will she do, to put Craig off if he still wants to meet her in Vancouver? More excuses. More evasions. Stupid Ruth.

  She leaves the iron dish on the carpet near the sofa and climbs the stairs to bed. One thing she can’t avoid, although she wants to, now the shock of his death has quieted, is Barnaby’s funeral. And once that’s done — no, she cannot bear to think of afterwards, what ought to happen, as well as what she has already planned.

  The pumpkin moon dwindles to a silver apple and Ruth floats like a poisoned seed beneath the skin of sleep.

  Jocasta does not dream. Not in her bed. She sits in her front room: a lamp glows by her side. Pumpkin makes a lovely pie. There’ll be pie in the sky when we die. She knows that the pumpkin is a member of the melon family. It used to be called the pompion, also the English melon, and melon was sometimes corrupted to million. The English Million, what a grand name for romance.

  The moon hangs like a cradle over the harbour. Winken, Blinken, and Nod: she hums the tune. A ship glides in the silky dark; lights twinkle on its bow and round its funnel. Behind her, on a bookshelf, are books of course, and trinkets from around the world, and shoes. Small shoes.

  Jocasta does not dream while she is asleep.

  It is early evening of the next day — the day before the funeral, Ruth has several hours of abortive work behind her, the house still in a mess, grey stalks in the vase on the dining table — Bella’s wine has helped them not at all — and two spoonfuls of pumpkin casserole left. At least Ruth has carried the dish into the kitchen.