Three Pretty Widows

by Barbara Else

  I know something you don’t know.

  Her best revenge is in her knowledge. Waiting. The female wolf within the flock.

  ‘You’re Charlotte’s age,’ says the little sun-brown man with his scalp as shiny and polished as a nut. His knees are nut-like too, brown cobbles of sinew and bone. The hind bulges of his calves are roped with veins, his naked feet like monkey’s feet, his toes askew, long joints, hard yellowed nails. He leaps on Jocasta’s bed: one hand grasps her wrist, the other holds a tumbler full of gin. Clever agile man, the monkey man, will leap around her bedroom and never spill a drop. Monkey-man and tiny woman-wolf, witch-wolf, and he never suspects.

  ‘Charlotte’s tired. She’s a good wife but she’s all used up. You’re new. You’re delicate, Jocasta, you’re burned clean. You glitter. Glitter for me.’

  Satin sheets, brocade cushions, gauzy curtains drifting ghostlike in the currents of candle-flame, soft light and perfume. Outside, the wind is hot, seared clean. She stretches, lying on the sheet, her arms above her head. Scarlet brassière, matching panties. Lionel kneels, brown cobble-nut knees on either side of hers, and bends to dart his tongue into her navel. What an odd little man, so entertaining.

  ‘How far can you go?’ Jocasta asks him in a purr, wolf-purr. ‘How high can you rise in your profession? Be honest, be fair, be ambitious, but don’t lie to me.’

  ‘From vicar to bishop,’ yodels monkey-man. ‘That’s simple enough, that’s my goal, it’s very straightforward.’

  She met enough bishops in Hull. As soon as they became ordained their voices changed. Pompous, orotund vowels: she wouldn’t want a tongue that uttered orotund vowels to be stuck into her navel.

  Jocasta keeps her knees tight together and writhes to tilt her hip against his inner thigh. ‘Archdeacon,’ she suggests. ‘That ought to do.’ Cicadas chirr in the trees beyond her window. ‘I’ve heard,’ Jocasta whispers, ‘that in some east Asian countries they grind up cicada cases for an antispasmodic drug.’ She watches him shiver, ripples under his sun-brown skin. ‘And tiny lizards, little geckoes, are believed to be a powerful tonic for the prevention of hasty — do you mind if I say it —’ She whispers: ejaculation. The miniature vicar quivers again. ‘Imagine. Sometimes they’re swallowed whole. Swallowed live. Imagine.’

  Jocasta twines a leg around the vicar’s neck. ‘Charlotte’s had two children. She’s entitled to some peace and quiet. She deserves her afternoons alone with a box of chocolates, a magazine and her knitting. And you deserve everything you get. Believe me, it’s a long time before you’ll have enough of me. Or I of you.’

  Flattery, promises and a steady but rationed supply of navel, gin and more flattery. Good heavens, it is so simple being a mistress. Just like being a wife without the housework.

  He won’t give up all his secrets though, this substitute for a husband. If he has any secrets.

  The wind claws at the windows while monkey-man claws at Jocasta and she claws her way deeper into his life. She’ll discard him in an instant if she wants to, when he’s served as the only link she has with what she wants. It is still such an insubstantial link.

  And the form of words is thus, in the tattered palm-sized Book of Common Prayer (how she loves the pomp and claptrap):

  ‘And the Bishop, knowing either by himself or by sufficient testimony, any Person to be a man of virtuous conversation and without crime’ — (and so on) can admit that man to be a deacon. Then that man can become a priest, if he has shown himself to be well perfect in ecclesiastical administration. There seem then to be no particular requirements set out in the Book of Common Prayer, but note, as Jocasta noted, that in the consecrating of deacons it does set out for the bishop to ask the about-to-become-archdeacon to ‘deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts and live soberly (and so on) in this present world that you may shew yourself in all things an example of good works unto others.’

  Is it a good work, thinks Jocasta, to be privy to secrets about a stolen child and to conceal a mistress? To be perhaps — the faintest chance — the one who stole the child, too?

  Poor Charlotte, thinks Jocasta, to be married to a monkey-man of such good works as Lionel.

  Poor Charlotte, to be married to a man who has prayed in his hypocrisy: From fornication and all other deadly sin; and from the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil. Good Lord deliver us.

  Jocasta thinks she has met Felix now, though momentarily. Little Felix with a new name, and grown to be a man. There are several young men, six foot tall and more, clear-eyed and handsome as a set of brothers in a tale from Grimm, cram-full of energy in the blinding sun, the clarifying wind — which one of them is her Felix? They all come from families that fit the clues and hints, that may have spent some time in England. They’re studying law and mathematics, physics and politics. They all have lovely voices, in the university choir. One of them is her boy, she’s sure of it. It has to be. But she must quell her passion, be patient, endure until she’s certain.

  Whichever one is him, he’s grown intelligent, successful, popular, sought out. They all wear leather jackets with a side zip fastening, like flying jackets. Their hair’s down past their ears and they have thick moustaches, sideburns. A moment only with each one, a brief exchange of words outside the church one wintry, wind-scoured day. One of them is about to be married.

  Whichever one of these six-foot tall young men is Jocasta’s boy, who she last saw when he was less than one year old, he’s grown up to be a perfect little sod.

  part four

  mirror mirror

  chapter twenty-five

  Here comes the bride, fair, fat and wide

  See how she wobbles from si-ide to side.

  Family rumour, historical gossip. Jocasta finds the names and snippets scribbled in faded pencil on the backs of old photos so unsatisfying. What went on under all those petticoats? Behind those walrus whiskers? What do these folk mean to anybody now? Why were they ever born? How were they ever born? But they were, good lord, and numbers of them.

  ‘Our forebears are worthy of unstinted approbation,’ declares the preface to the Genealogical Table of David Calder, as a preface might in a table of Jonas Twitch, Hetty Altrusa, Leon Flinch. The unstintedly admired married forebears arrived in Dunedin, New Zealand, in June 1849. How bitter that wind can be as it whistles straight up from the Antarctic. Scotland may be far colder, but is not this land meant to be subtropical? Think again — adjust your expectations. In the bleak midwinter, husband, wife, eight children aged from one year to twenty-two stood shivering on the deck of the good ship Mariner. Three other children had died of typhus back in Scotland. Two more were born after they settled in Dunedin. Busy Mrs Calder, busy, busy. Old David was a stonemason, later superintendent of roads and bridges under the Provincial Government.

  In the photo of his wife, she’s slightly cross-eyed, as any woman might be after bearing thirteen children. Did you count them? Yes: thirteen. Photographs of the sons, in middle age, show them as pillars of society (though James has a sleazy cast about his eyes).

  And what a range of beauty in the daughters. Look: Janet’s face is like a pudding. Jane has a face like a lime. Maria puts you in mind of a bulldog and Helen smiles like a constipated duchess. There was also Isabella — ringlets, the ribbons, half-smile — Mona Lisa, eat your heart out.

  Isabella’s wedding didn’t go as planned. The groom took ill at the reception and expired just ten days later. But don’t weep — wait and listen. Before six months were up, Isabella had remarried. The best man. So was the illness kosher, as they say? An act of God? Who knows? What secrets lurk behind the half-smiles of our ancestors?

  Here comes the groom, skinny as a broom

  Soon we’ll sing a tragic hymn, lamenting at his tomb …

  Isabella and her second husband had eight children. Within a hundred years, the descendants of the Calders numbered six hundred and thirty-seven. Who can calculate what they might number now? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands, and a
ll perfect little sods?

  Eight children, and Bella has none.

  It is so easy to buy. Money solves all problems, as Jocasta’s well aware. Two young people in a marriage, Ruth and Walsh, both earning money. They’ve got everything: career prospects, each other and a mortgage on a house that nearly has a view of Waitamata Harbour. They’ll move up to a full view later in the five-year, ten-year plan. Walsh is sometimes away of course but they’re happier than Jocasta was with Geordie, him and his expensive hand-made suits and hand-made shoes and pots of money coming in. Ruth and Walsh share. Ruth and Walsh are happy, happy.

  Wrong. Ruth and Walsh have had no kids.

  For some couples, that’s exactly what they want. But not for Ruth and Walsh. Why not? Well. Possessions. Expectations. If you don’t have a child, you are a failure. It’s not so, of course, but you can be made to feel that way. People think they should be sorry for you, and as Jocasta’s learned to say these days, that stinks. Or else they think you’re most unusual. That stinks worse. Oh, it’s all so complicated.

  Walsh, home on leave, suggesting — as happens in a hundred fairy tales — ‘It is time we had a child.’

  But he knew darn well they couldn’t. It had been eight years. The usual way didn’t work. How can the Brave Sea Captain (all right, he mostly teaches maths to the ratings) permit it to be known — how can the Wife of the Brave Sea Captain allow the revelation — that a child is not vouchsafed to them? I mean, gosh, are you a man or what? Are you womanly or not?

  But how they longed for a child, as happens in a thousand fairy tales.

  If you’ve got good friends, they help. They offer buckets of advice on doctors, specialists. Move the double bed so its head’s against the north wall. No, the south. Raise the foot of the bed on bricks. Another voodoo thingy for the laundry — thank you, no. More specialists. Praying didn’t work at all. It was incredibly expensive in those days to do it artificially. It was not available officially, back then.

  ‘It’s not the making of the child, not the process, that’s the right or wrong of it,’ said Eliot one night after a boozy reunion that had gone particularly off-key. ‘It’s the child that results that’s right or wrong. What if you have one you don’t find at all appealing?’

  Yok yok, rugby-club humour, yok yok yok, jokes about the process, yokkity yok.

  But: one step at a time. Four clever people who can think a process through. A lawyer. An engineer. A naval officer. A journalist. And — Nicolas? Oh, Nicolas was gone by then but very present in their thoughts. A crucible of technical ideas, going through the steps of the procedure, organising when they’d need to be together, long discussion of all likely consequences. Swearing on a bottle of champagne that none of them would ever, ever tell. Ruth was a faithful wife. They all agreed on that.

  Magic, with assistance from a loyal friend or two.

  Ruth packs her suitcase. Yesterday’s magic is today’s normal paraphernalia. The laptop. Cellphone. Winter coat because she’s meant to be going to the northern hemisphere and Walsh might notice something like that for the first time in his life (husbands do when you least want it). Her boots and black beret. She adds evening trousers, a lacy top, jewellery in a soft velvet bag that used to belong to her mother. Her briefcase holds a London A–Z, a map of Vancouver, the articles she’s snipped from travel and fashion magazines over the last few months. The laptop has a modem. The favourites on her internet browser include several fashion websites. There’s no need for anyone to travel any more. People will think she emails from half a world away, when it’s just up and over the hill. Ruth can’t quite believe, even now, she’ll go ahead with this duplicity, and this irresponsible attitude to finding Anna; there’s not a soul she can confess it to.

  She is in a very grumpy mood after collecting her car from the tow-away people, but she’s managed to organise everything. She’s left a key with the annoying neighbour, who nonetheless is useful at these times.

  ‘I’ll call you if I think there’s any need,’ Jocasta said.

  Ruth feels relieved but also scared. This dread’s familiar to her now but she ignores it as a witch ignores a cat. About Anna though, her ears roar with fright and shame. She’s told Bella and Eliot that Anna still hasn’t appeared, and she remembered to ask Bella how she is doing. Ruth should, she really should have been helping Bella more.

  She clicks the buckles on her suitcase straps, carries her luggage downstairs and takes a final look around. Walsh will be worn out when he returns. His back will be like crumpled twigs. If she were a nice wife she’d leave a herbal bath bomb with a loving note, to make sure he relaxes. But he doesn’t like baths. She is a nice (deceitful) wife — she’ll leave a message in a few hours time and say she’s calling during her stopover in Los Angeles. Oh shit, she can’t: she’ll be unconscious.

  There isn’t any cat to trap and take down to the cattery.

  Ivan’s a good-hearted gentleman, Ivan is flattened and nice

  Ivan never tries to catch the say-yay-yay-yame lizard twice

  No matter what Ruth sang to him on the short drive over to his holiday home, Ivan would realise: Something Was Up. From the depths of his portable prison, he would enquire: Ur? The questions would grow more urgent: Yargh? Mowr? As Ruth lugged the cage into the cattery Ivan would shriek in a universal language: False arrest! The worst kinds of cruelty are about to be performed upon my person! I was not born to be a hero!

  The last time Ruth, Walsh and Anna were all going to be away, they’d left Ivan in the care of the neighbour. Everyone loved Ivan.

  Ruth weeps the way she did at Barnaby’s funeral, fists clutched to her breast bone, tears spilling like milk from a jug. When she can dry her eyes and they stay dry, she checks that her note to Walsh and Anna is impossible to miss, under the Crown Derby hedgehog on the hall table: Call me on my cellphone, love, and takes her suitcase towards the garage — hell, she can’t pretend she’s left the car with valet parking for a month. Far too expensive. Walsh would question it. This is one thing she hasn’t figured out. She has to get a taxi. Then three days later get herself, all bandaged up in midsummer, from the city to her country retreat. A taxi then as well. The cost will be enormous. Most face-lift patients go home the next day. She’s already arranged to pay for two extra nights to help conceal her secret. She will pretend the difficulty of speaking on her cellphone for the first few days is the effect of bad airline food.

  For next-of-kin on the consent form she scrawled Jocasta Ferral but scribbled it out when she realised she must put Walsh’s name. Just in case.

  I hereby consent to the above patient undergoing the operation/treatment of: (she actually had to write the words — FACE LIFT), the nature and extent of which has been explained to me by my doctor …

  Do you wish a cleric to visit? You have to be joking.

  History of present illness: Growing older. It started the day I was born.

  chapter twenty-six

  A member of the parish. A wealthy member of the parish, and also an excellent cook. An unobtrusive (wealthy, with her hooks into the vicar) member of the parish, saying rhubarb rhubarb, rhubarb in the background … It is important to know that the rhubarb leaf is poison. It’s just as well to learn these things, though you may never use the knowledge. In Britain during World War One some idiot was appalled to see those huge leaves wasted, and a government directive recommended eating rhubarb leaves. It was cancelled before too much harm was done. The leaf also kills any weeds lying under it and can be utilised for scouring dirt off shovels. But we have skipped aside from our purpose, which is to remind you that a woman reaches an age when she can become invisible. She is rhubarb in the background, unless she chooses to be otherwise. Jocasta chooses to be invisible, sometimes.

  She still can’t tell which young man is her Felix. They are all plump-full of arrogance; you see it in every angle of their chins. There are two blonds, one mid-brown, and one with thick black hair. Would Felix still be blond? Would his eyes have become blu
e? In some lights — but not in others — that tilt of the chin, could it be Peter’s? As for other family resemblances, she never saw her own father, not even in a photo.

  One of the young men — the one who’s cut her hedge — no, he’s got that young-man layer of fat. Peter was all sinew. But it could be the quantities of dairy food they get down here, downunder.

  Stay calm. Bide your time. Young men do like to be asked to help a woman out. Especially a pretty, faded woman who seems a little delicate, and who admires their singing so. It makes their muscles fill with blood, with energy and pride — a harmless sexual undercurrent, a joy in their strength and power. A hedge is cut, a heavy piece of furniture is moved, a little money passes hands. There is no need for secrecy; it’s all so minor, as little to be noticed or remembered as a cat treading on a stranger’s lawn, faint footfalls that don’t leave a mark.

  A drunken Saturday night, the quartet has been in full fine voice at the rugby club, and Nicolas is the star. He’s newly married to a lovely girl with mesmerising eyes. They think a baby might be on its way already. The blokes at the club are jealous but they call it comradeship. The four are full of rum and beer. They stumble along the wharf on a Saturday night, still singing in the wind. Lights across the harbour flicker in drifts of rain. Eliot and Walsh stagger on; their bass and baritone joust and twine. Behind them, drunken teasing turns to violence. Barnaby’s the one who punches first, though just with words. Walsh and Eliot reel round and laugh, continue laughing even when one young shape thumps his fist into the other’s chest — more blows are thrown, one crumples to his knees, staggers up and whams his fist into the other’s face. More blows, and one shape disappears.