Three Pretty Widows

by Barbara Else

  Bella fetches a chair, climbs up and hauls the ferret from the top shelf. She blows the dust off and wraps it in a plastic bag. ‘Are you sure you don’t want …’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Lydia. ‘I know what you mean about your mother’s things but …’ She opens her arms in a gesture exactly like Barnaby’s. ‘What’s the point in scoring off him now?’ She holds a tissue to her eyes and nose. ‘Oh, the bastard. He’s bloody won again. That’s typical.’

  ‘James,’ says Bella gently. ‘Please choose something for yourself and Jason. Something for Kirsten too.’

  He shakes his head. ‘We’re cool.’

  Bella picks up an art deco powder compact, a tiny Egyptian brass cat and a letter opener with the head of Charles Dickens as the handle. She puts them in his hands.

  He nurses the little treasures. ‘Yeah — Barnaby was cool too.’

  ‘Sometimes he was excellently cool,’ says Bella.

  ‘And sometimes not.’ Lydia crumples the tissue and tucks it into her bag. ‘Younger brothers are very complicated animals.’ For a moment it looks as if she might hug Bella. They restrict themselves to smiles.

  The shop door closes on Lydia and James. They lean into the wind as they move off. Damn — Bella forgot to ask Lydia to give back Eliot’s ugly little boots.

  She locks the door and retreats to the back of the shop. The hat-stand in the workroom seems to tilt towards her, taller than ever. ‘Bugger off,’ she whispers. But she can’t get rid of Barnaby. It is more difficult than ever. Still not a tear for him either, not really.

  What about Eliot? Part of it is that Bella doesn’t think she deserves him, even should he want her and he’s not coaxed away overseas. All right, it’s true he may not deserve her either, though he is a model of patience and endurance, such a saint (except on that one hot night in early summer when the moon rose up like a brigand). Bella has known for years (all women do, it’s one of the things that girl-talk’s all about) that once you have a man and think you’ve earned him, after the first few months of bliss you commonly find out you’ve bought a saint with battery not included. A pig in a poke. A rescuer, a co-dependent, brute, nohoper, fake. God’s Gift to Women sometimes turns out to have been purchased at a liquidation sale. Two dollars, any item, limited time, no guarantee — just like God’s Gift to Men, but girl-talk doesn’t often touch on this.

  Is Eliot a liquidation bargain? Shop-soiled saint? Would one year of happiness with Eliot be enough for her if that’s the way it happens?

  Oh yes. Indeed it would.

  This is not the way it was supposed to be.

  My bloody mother should have come. If you love someone you want to hold on to them. I’m thoroughly offended by her wanting nothing but the ferret. But everyone’s allowed one big mistake. My family was a big mistake. That’s more or less what families are, I suppose, a collection of individuals united only by the way they can press each other’s buttons.

  My stuff, my hoard of things — will Bella sell the lot? All right, it’s what a shop is for, but in the circumstances … I want Maggie to have something. A set of teaspoons. And for Louise, the Edwardian nutcrackers would be entirely appropriate. But I’m still floating in and out, not able to touch or do, communicate with Bella in any way. What an infuriating kind of punishment this is. Why punish me?

  Checklist: I always had good intentions. Some of those damned Commandments are bloody tricky, so good intentions have to count for something.

  Never bow down before a graven image. That’s one I kept, in the spirit it was meant at any rate. I collected graven images, didn’t worship them. I tried to get a good price wherever possible.

  The name of the Lord in vain? The Lord can’t have been too serious about that. Surely. God, I hope not or I’m stuffed.

  Keep the Sabbath day holy. I never opened the shop on a Sunday. I wouldn’t call it keeping it holy, though; more in the nature of high time I had a rest.

  Thou shalt not kill. And no adultery. No stealing. No false witness. This seems to have become an exercise in self-justification. How very unattractive.

  I was a funny guy. I told jokes well. I managed them well too. I helped people have a good time. I had a damn good tenor voice. I was tall. Just on six foot is tall.

  Tomorrow was always a new day, the day I was going to put things right. Eternity has no tomorrows, damn it.

  I am getting really pissed off. This is eternity? It stinks.

  chapter twenty-three

  Where, oh where is Anna?

  Quite apart from being increasingly worried about not hearing from her, Ruth is off tomorrow and has decided she must ask Anna if she had anything to do with the nasty little packet Walsh found, which caused Ruth to spend nearly three hundred dollars on three hours in an hotel room sleeping with someone’s husband — her own very tired one. How deeply they had slept. Walsh, genuinely this time, is off later this afternoon, back to the Pacific to make soothing utterances to a small island nation. So much for coupledom. And family life? Hollow laugh. Walsh hasn’t seen Anna for a month, apart from her brief appearance at the event — sorry — the funeral.

  The scream of cicadas filters in the kitchen window. ‘Do we really have a daughter?’ he asks. ‘We haven’t woken up and discovered it was a dream, those years when she dyed her hair daft colours and wore ludicrous new fashions, and I was obliged to be gruff and patriarchal when all I wanted was to sit down with a whisky?’

  Ruth pulls her coffee mug towards her heart: it splashes on her baggy t-shirt. ‘When I die, I’ll be like Queen Mary after her troubles with Calais. You’ll find the name “Anna” tattooed on my cardiac muscle.’

  Walsh shakes his head as if there’s water in his ears. In the Ministry, you don’t have to know much history, just pretend you do. Anyway, he is dealing with scatterings of alternately sun-kissed and hurricane-swept nations in the world’s largest ocean, not with Olde Engelonde and La Belle France.

  ‘Why did we have a child?’ asks Ruth. ‘Go to work. Don’t answer. It was just a verbal sigh.’

  Walsh’s mouth wiggles one way then the other like a caterpillar. ‘I guess you had to be there.’ He puts his mug into the sink, shipboard neat, drapes both arms round Ruth and rests his face against her hair. ‘We’re all right, at least.’

  ‘We’re both still alive,’ says Ruth. ‘That has to be a plus.’

  ‘Even though I am too old for passion. Perhaps I always was. Did I ever tell you, when I was a kid I used to make secret bargains with God? I’d never do anything evil if He’d ensure I had a quiet life.’

  ‘Not a good idea to make a deal with God. He’s got all the power, you haven’t. A bargain with the devil might be different. There’d be a slim chance you could outwit him. People outwit him in stories. Some stories. Not very many.’

  ‘How did we get from Anna to the devil?’ Walsh asks. ‘Don’t answer, I’m running late. I’ll see you in — oh hell, it’s going to be weeks. Love you.’

  She rubs his shirt sleeve over the tattoo, kisses his cheek and wonders if he is a little pale on it. The front door slams, his car backs out of the garage (he’s fixed the door! Good husband!), and Ruth’s alone. A year ago, she’d have been hurtling to the airport for a business lunch in Auckland, a segment on a TV magazine show, or tidying the house before an interviewer arrived to do a piece on her for a book on Miraculous in Mid-Life or Women Who Have Reached The Top. She had hated being so busy. So busy meant that she lost touch with Anna. Now, the lack of busyness means — what? She’s had her hour in the sun, and still no Anna.

  Sun’s bad for your complexion, anyway. Smoking’s bad for the skin as well. Ruth’s never smoked apart from the occasional hippie roll-yer-owns that were fashionable accessories in the seventies. If smoking pot were illegal, and everyone who’d done so were convicted and unable to hold a position of responsibility, this country would be run by … Ruth can’t come up with an answer … yes, she can: Bella. Bella is the only person Ruth knows who would never have smoked p
ot. Nor done the least wicked thing. You can’t count living with Barnaby for two months before they married as wicked, and one night with Eliot is neither here nor there. Bella is so pure it is a liability. Look how she freaked out in New York when anyone else rushing off to live there would surely expect a bit of sex ‘n’ drugs or whatever else in the fast lane — otherwise why go?

  Shame clings to Ruth’s chest like a monkey: fretting about her own problems, criticising Bella. Not trying to find Anna. She dials Eliot’s number.

  ‘Hullo,’ says Bella. ‘It’s the real me. I’m just out of the shower. It’s me.’ Bella sounds as if she needs reassurance on the matter.

  ‘I’m off tomorrow,’ says Ruth. ‘Just wondering how you are.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Bella. ‘I mean, I don’t know, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Like an animal hiding in thick vegetation and hoping — though rather doubting — that her own saliva will heal the injuries eventually.’

  There is a pause. ‘Um — how are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ says Ruth. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  Down the phone comes a little noise like a cat wondering whether to remind people that it’s suppertime. ‘Oh,’ Bella says. ‘You know.’

  ‘I don’t know lots of things,’ says Ruth. ‘Like, Anna. I’m off tomorrow and I haven’t seen her for days. Have you, by any chance? Should I freak out?’

  ‘Oh,’ Bella says.

  ‘I can’t ask any other friends about this.’ Ruth hadn’t realised she needed to spout on about it, especially not to Bella. She is the least obvious woman in the world to spout on to. ‘But you’re the obvious one, Bella,’ says Ruth. ‘With no kids of your own, you won’t be judgmental. For God’s sake, don’t be judgmental.’

  ‘Um,’ says Bella. ‘I don’t know how to be helpful. But I do think you should be worried, actually.’

  ‘And?’ prompts Ruth.

  ‘Anna thinks — well, what she thinks can’t be true for all sorts of reasons.’ Bella’s voice is thin and tattered all of a sudden. ‘She — I thought she said she thought she could be having Barnaby’s baby. Of course she couldn’t. But then she said she’d lost it.’

  Laugh is one word for the noise Ruth hears leap out of her own mouth. Another word for it is whoop. Scream would do as well.

  ‘Ruth? Anna has to be deluded — Ruth?’

  ‘Delusion is a common state round here,’ Ruth manages to say. ‘I think I’d better call Walsh.’

  But the priceless Ruby Secretary says he’s in a meeting that will last till he has to catch his plane. Ruth tries his cellphone with no luck. She tries the scungy flat again, but another exhausted-sounding flatmate says that Anna hasn’t been around for days.

  ‘You should have told me!’ says Ruth.

  ‘Why?’ asks the flatmate.

  ‘I’m her mother!’

  ‘Uh.’ There’s a pause. ‘Well — she’s left. Her stuff’s gone. Sorry.’

  Ruth ends the call without screaming at him what she’d like to about being irresponsible — it’s all too close to home. She calls the lab: the discontinued sound.

  Ruth should phone the police. They’d think she was stupid. She is stupid. God, a real mother wouldn’t dither. She’d dash round town and home in on her child by maternal radar.

  She has no phone numbers for any of Anna’s friends. No twenty-one year old gives his or her parents the phone numbers of their friends.

  The university. Ruth grabs her bag and car keys. But. A Friday, it’s enrolling day. No parking spaces on the streets outside, unless it is a five-minute zone or — Ruth swings the Mazda into a space reserved for the handicapped and scrawls a note to prop inside the windscreen: Desperate mother, please don’t tow.

  She hopes it will be simple enough to ask a student where to find the enrolling desk for Anna’s subjects, but it isn’t. Longlegged babies with beards, babies with holes in their jeans, hands armoured with thick silver rings, babies with stylish neon hair.

  She asks at the desk in the library. The librarian is very pleasant but shakes his dreadlocks at her. She asks at Human Resources, where the assistant looks bewildered. Ruth gives up. She returns to the handicapped space.

  Her car has disappeared.

  Shit.

  She’s too disheartened to trace it and she’s had enough bus rides. A taxi driver might talk cheerfully: that, she could not stomach. She’ll walk home. It will take at least an hour. In the heat. The exercise will do her good or kill her. She takes a path down through the Gardens. A sneaky tear or two slides out from under her sunglasses. She’ll go down Tinakori Road, see if Bella’s in the shop. She can’t go into hospital tomorrow, not if she hasn’t found Anna.

  She walks past the top of Bowen Street — down there are the Houses of Parliament where Walsh is getting his last briefings before soaring off to the sun-kissed atoll, with a Hawaiian shirt packed so that he’ll blend. He loathes Hawaiian shirts as much as he loathes Hawaiian music. Hell, for Walsh, would be a delay for all eternity in an airport lounge, with Burl Ives singing ‘Pearly Shells’ for ever. Ruth doesn’t want life without Walsh. She’d take hell and the Muzak, as long as she were with him.

  What would be hell for Barnaby? Ruth hopes he isn’t in it.

  Two figures are outside the shop window, peering in. She crosses the road to avoid them but one of them calls out.

  Craig. Oh double shit. And the other is Ms Nausea.

  Ruth hopes her face doesn’t show how uncomfortable and pissed-off she feels. She has never felt less glamorous in her life.

  The editor glances at Ruth’s dirty sneakers and the coffee dribble down her front. ‘Unexpected meeting,’ she comments, unnecessarily. Nausea is a bitch. ‘Craig’s looking forward to meeting up with you.’ Craig doesn’t look eager at all, he’s rubbing his nose. ‘I was thinking of some shots of you at — oh, somewhere casual and down-market might be best. Vancouver, Granville Island, that’s very industrial.’ She turns back to stare in the gallery window.

  Oh, to hell with it. Ruth beckons Craig aside.

  ‘When you popped around that time,’ she hisses, ‘did you take everything away with you?’

  He blinks. He blushes.

  ‘It’s inexcusable!’ The words shoot out like corks from bottles. ‘I spent enough years tidying up after my daughter, I don’t want to have to tidy up after people who shouldn’t have been in the main bedroom anyway.’

  Craig blushes more deeply. ‘You — sent me to fetch something.’

  Did she? A wisp of memory appears: something to do with Walsh’s Greek sea captain’s hat which hangs, usually, on a brass hook above the Scotch chest with his medals in the top drawer. She hasn’t seen the hat for days.

  ‘Forget it,’ says Ruth. The way Nausea looked at her — Ruth must go on with the face lift. Another coating of tears slides out beneath her glasses.

  She sets off down the street, so distressed she nearly misses the road she ought to take. Thank God she has to walk up Pitt Street — it’s so steep that anybody who passes her will think her gasps are weariness, not despair. Isn’t it lucky, there’s always a sunny side to the worst situation. Isn’t it hilarious, how there’s always a funny, sunny side? Oh yeah?

  ‘People have lied to me.’ Anna slammed her schoolbag on the floor. ‘There isn’t an Easter Bunny.’ Ruth had forgotten to tell her about the Easter Bunny — she was a negligent mother. What would the child do when she learned about Santa and the Tooth Fairy? How would Ruth and Walsh ever be able to tell her about her father? ‘Why was I ever born!’ shrieked Anna.

  Good question. Very good. How can Anna possibly be having a … Ruth trudges up Pitt Street, sweating, looking for the funny, sunny, hilarious side of life. She begins to sob aloud, even more tears than at Barnaby’s funeral, because she has to pass the Wadestown Veterinary Clinic and Cattery where the vet used to be so kind to Ivan — Ivan who, each time he lay down for a snooze, seemed to be practising to be road kill.

  chapter twenty-four

&n
bsp; Jocasta burns. Midsummer, in Yorkshire, is a soft heat, sweet heat — midsummer here is cruel, scorched clean. After the weeks of round and round the deck of a purring ocean liner, polite trips to and from the dining room and cabin, she walks and walks, hungry for movement on dry ground that doesn’t tip from side to side. Her arms and shoulders darken in the harsh antipodean sun. The soles of her feet harden on the harsh antipodean pavement up and down Queen Street, up and down Dominion Road, Mt Eden Road, the road so hot it melts. Tar sticks to the soles of her English sandals. Heat shimmers off the pavements in this place they call a city but is a sprawl of villas on land pimpled with volcanic mounds. The sharp leaves of the flax, the toi-toi, cordyline, cut her soft English hands when she touches them. The wounds burn too, until she finds what duplicates to her English herbs exist on this side of the world. New weapons for her repertoire. What fun.

  She is growing older, maturing; the bloom of gentle English skin is scoured from her face. It suits Jocasta here. She glitters. Hardens.

  There is so little to go on, just a maybe, a perhaps, it was so many years ago. But there might have been a married couple for a week or so with a child about six years? Was it a boy? There was that vicar and his family who passed through; there were a few new chums who arrived around that time, pale children clinging to them, little boys and girls who badly needed a dose of unrationed butter and a wedge of cheddar cheese. She is careful not to make enquiries too overtly: here, she would be easy to trace, as her child is not. If there’s a fuss, official questions might uncover more than Jocasta wishes.

  But there are surprises. Lord, hear our prayers. And let our cry come unto Thee. There are very big surprises when she has to travel south after faint old clues. This new city is a tumble of boxes on hillsides of dark green, a bowl of harbour stirred up in sharp grey waves. She settles here, though settle is not quite the word. She buys a house, unpacks, sets out her little shelf of shoes, the slippers with the bells on, the pair of stout black boots for a five-year-old, with only one toe-plated so it looks as if he’s worn them, and keeps alert for opportunities to move closer to the goal.