by Patrick Gale
Apologetic affec.
Mxxxxxxxx
P.S. Tell Them Mamma’s fallen sick and I’ve rushed to the Tuscan bedside …’
3
The house was a late Victorian, quasi-Parisian pile propped between two self-important, diminutive hotels, the Inverness Plaza and the Kensington Towers. As Domina thanked the cabby for unloading her baggage she noted that it was one of the few non-commercial buildings in the row. One star. Two stars. B and B from £25 a night. The Metropole. The Britannia. Number 33 was blatantly ill-kempt, holding out staunchly against the tide of renovation. She stood outside the moss-flecked porch and looked up to some blood-red geranium that perched on the topmost window-sill. The place was perfect.
The ground-floor window trundled up in a swirl of net.
‘You Mrs Tey?’
‘Hello.’
‘Come on in, love.’
Domina picked up her cases and swung them up the steps. A departing Pakistani handed her her typewriter with a smile.
‘Oh. Thank you so much.’
‘My pleasure.’ He walked on, her eyes on his cheery back, and she found that if she stood on tiptoe she could see over the hedge on the Bayswater Road into the Gardens.
‘Come in, love.’ A plump creature with frizzed, reddish hair and a face like a dried dumpling. ‘I’m Tilly. Tilly Widdowes.’ They shook hands. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Domina checked slightly at the frank statement of nicotine, but the woman had a winning smile. ‘Here, give us that.’ Tilly took a suitcase and heaved it across the threshold. Domina shut the door behind her and set down her case beside the first one. ‘I’ll show you the room first,’ Tilly continued. ‘No point hauling that lot up there if you don’t fancy it much. Top floor, you see.’
‘Sounds marvellous,’ Domina beamed, deciding that Tilly’s voice was trustworthy, and they started up.
The hall and staircase were dark and cool after the fuss and glare outside. Tilly concentrated her efforts on climbing. She tugged at the banister rail as she went and her breathing grew heavier. Behind her, Domina watched the cellulite-pocked skin of her upper arm as it clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed. There were touches of grandeur about them. Huge ornate doors that once led to a first-floor salon now opened on to a piece of landing and three small, modern counterparts. Stretches of elaborate stucco work on cornice and pelmet were broken by plasterboard and fluorescent tubing. Tilly kicked out at a new swing door as they passed it. It had a window of reinforced glass and said FIRE ESCAPE in white letters on a green background.
‘Bloody fire doors,’ she said. ‘You can live as you like when a place is your own, but as soon as you start charging rent those effing inspectors come round. Fire doors, fire-proofed panelling, escape signs. Costs a small fortune.’
‘And they make it so institutional, don’t they?’ offered Domina.
‘Right pain,’ Tilly went on. ‘You’re the first person to ring up.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Been looking long?’
‘No. I only arrived this morning.’
‘You’re lucky. Some girls can look for weeks. Here we are. Not a stunning view, but it’s quieter than the front.’ She pushed open a door and stood back for her visitor.
‘Oh, perfect.’ Domina exclaimed, glad to be counted among the girls. A maid’s room. Under the eaves, so the ceiling bent and was interesting. Fitted carpet. A bed. An armchair. A chair and table. A miniature fridge. A gas fire with a meter. A wardrobe. Domina opened the little white desk and found a sink. The lid swung back against the wall to bring the mirror on its underside into view.
‘You can keep coffee and tea and things on the shelves under there,’ Tilly informed her, ‘but there’s a shelf in the larder for you downstairs, too. Kettle on the landing. And a hoover for when Mrs Moorhouse doesn’t do her bit.’
‘Perfect,’ repeated Domina. She looked out of the window. Not a conventional ‘view’ certainly, not Kensington Gardens or clean creamy porches, but she could peer down into the courtyards below through the network of washing lines and pulleys. There was a broad window-sill for plants, and she could look over the chimney pots to the red insanity of the Coburg Hotel roof. She turned with a laugh in her voice. ‘It’s great. Yes, please.’
‘Thank God for that. I couldn’t face tramping up those stairs too often in one day. Right, love, come on down and we can have a nice drink and a chat. Settle you in.’ She banged the door next to Domina’s as they set off down again. ‘That’s Quintus, your neighbour. Nice boy. Very quiet, though.’ She looked over her nose, ‘Very religious and correct and all that.’
‘How many others are there here?’
‘Twenty all told. They come and go. Quite a few travellers, salesmen and that; they use it as a base to come back to. Then there’s Quin – he’s been here two years now, and Thierry, he’s French by the way, he’s been here a year.’
‘All men?’
‘Mostly. There’s Avril though, on the first floor with the balcony, she’s a lady writer, and Penny the actress, ever so pretty she is, and hard as they come. Girls don’t go in for bedsits as much as boys, though. I think they prefer to find a flat and share with friends.’
They arrived back in the hall and Tilly led her new boarder into her flat off the hall. The main room was ruled by a vast black leather sofa – a four-seater – against one wall, and an imposing television – thirty-inch screen with doors – on the other side. A long-haired dachshund was lying on the sofa, her head drooping over the edge. She raised her eyebrows as they entered and began to growl, curling her lips.
‘Shut up, you old bag; friends,’ Tilly silenced her. ‘Don’t mind dogs, do you? That there’s Grace. Used to belong to my mother-in-law, but she passed away and I just couldn’t have her put down. Filthy temper. I reckon she’s possessed. Make yourself at home. She never bites.’
Domina lowered herself as innocuously as possible into the far end of the sofa and bared her teeth at Grace. She held out a hand for the dog to sniff and roused another round of protest.
‘Grace, shut it,’ Tilly snapped, spinning round on her with lips tight and a finger raised. Grace shut it and, relenting, sniffed the proffered fingers. Then she waddled shakily across the leather cushions and sniffed Domina’s skirt before sinking her head on to her thigh.
‘There,’ said Tilly, ‘just like her old mistress – a right cow, but meek as you please once you let her know who’s boss. What’ll it be?’ Tilly opened a drinks cabinet that had been masquerading as a chest of drawers. A light came on inside. It was full.
‘Gin and tonic, please,’ said Domina, who had been dreading milky coffee.
‘Ice and lemon, love?’
‘Lovely, I mean, yes please.’ Domina was disturbed at the way the animal’s eyes were gazing, restive, up at her. Its posture was unnaturally twisted. Gingerly she stroked its brow. As if at a sign, Grace withdrew her head, shifted her posture, and curled up in sleep at her side. ‘Thanks. Have you lived here long?’ asked Domina, taking her glass.
‘All my life,’ said Tilly, sitting at the other end of the sofa with a large Scotch. ‘Born in the basement. That was a separate flat in them days. Dad ran a funeral parlour down Westbourne Park Grove. My old man was his apprentice and Dad bought us the upstairs here as a wedding present. It was in a god-awful state then. Been empty for years. Roof needing re-tiling, paintwork falling to bits. When Roy passed over five years back, that’s my old man, I sold the business and used some of the cash to do the roof and stick in carpets and extra baths and that. Effing goldmine, now the area’s up and coming. Shame I’m not still young enough to make the most of it, know what I mean?’ Tilly let out a wheezy laugh. Domina smiled indulgently, they both sipped their drinks, then Tilly resumed, ‘Where d’you come from then, er, Miss … ?’
‘Domina, and actually it’s Mrs.’
‘Domina.’
‘Durham,’ Domina improvised. ‘My late husband was a canon of the cathedral there. I taught in
the choir school. English and French. But I need a change. I’ve no children or any relations to speak of, so I thought I’d come down here and try to find a flat and a new job. I grew up in London, in fact.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yes. In Wandsworth. My father was the assistant governor of the prison.’ Domina took a gulp of g and t. She was excited by the developing lie. This was as good as having one’s hair done. ‘Yes, I lived down here till I was nineteen, then I went up to Durham to go to university and that’s where I met Paul, my husband.’
‘Pass over recently, did he?’
‘Just over a year ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all. He was very sick. Hodgkin’s disease. A merciful release, really.’
‘D’your mum and dad still live here?’
‘No. They retired to the Continent. My mother’s half Italian you see, and she owns a house in Tuscany. They’re very happy there.’ A half-truth, this, to give the fiction a backbone. ‘Did you enjoy working in an undertakers?’
‘Great business.’
‘I’ve never understood how people could. Didn’t it ever upset you?’
‘Oh yeah. To start with. Scared the arse off you, pardon me, at first. The first thing to hit you is the smell. Ever been in a basket workshop?’
‘No. But I used to learn basketry and chair-weaving at evening classes.’
‘Smells like that, but worse. Like when you wet the cane to make it all soft and there’s the sweet, dusty smell. It’s the fluids. When someone dies you think they’ve just stopped, like a car, but they don’t. Specially if they died on a full stomach.’
‘The hair and the toe-nails … ?’
‘That’s nothing. It’s the wind that’s dreadful. My first day in there, this man rang up and said he wanted to bring his sister to see his old girl laid out, like, and would we get her ready. Well they always need a good wash – wetting themselves, and worse, you see, like great grey babies they are. So Dad said, find her a dress. Find her a dress, he says, give her a wash and brush-up and slap a bit of lippy on her. You know. Make the old dear look a bit, well, lifelike. ‘Cause it’s a terrible shock for people otherwise. Well anyway, she wasn’t old at all, really, only about forty-two. Cancer, I think it was, but she was quite sweet looking and I wasn’t scared or anything. So, I got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge and that, and started cleaning her up a bit, on the trolley like. Well, it was all hunky-dory till I tried to do her back. You see, if they die at home and get arranged by family, who don’t know any better, it’s OK because their insides get pushed around a bit and the, well, the wind and that,’ Tilly made a face to show that they were women of the world together and Domina was touched by the confidence, ‘the wind and that can get let out. But this old dear had gone in hospital and they’re so bloody careful there. You know. She dies on a bed, and they lift her ever so careful on to a stretcher trolley, then slide her ever so careful into a placky bag for the likes of Dad to pick up in the morning. Well anyway, I takes her by the shoulders and heaves her up, to get her sitting up like, so’s I can reach her back and the nape of her neck to wash off the sweat, and I swear to God, Domina, she let out a sigh!’
‘God!’ gasped Domina, enthralled.
‘’Course it wasn’t really her, I mean it was just all the farts and burps and that sliding out at last through her voice box, but I screamed. God, how I screamed. It was so embarrassing. I just dropped her like a ton of bricks and shrieked, “Dad, Dad, she’s alive, she’s alive!” It’s stupid, really, when you think about it, because you should be happy if someone came back to life and that. But all you can think, when you’re standing in one of those places, is how much you don’t want to see them move. It’s like they’re not the same, because they’ve been a corpse.’
‘There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know,’ said Domina, ‘and that’s what exactly happens in a crematorium.’
‘No one ever told you?’
‘Never.’
So, delighted to have a fascinated audience, Tilly told her the secrets of her old trade: the ins and outs of embalming fluid, the bags of neglected still-born babies that no one wants to deal with, and the way that corpses seem to sit bolt upright in the furnace for the seconds before they crumple into ash and bone. Then she showed Domina the bathrooms and the communal kitchen. The idiosyncrasies of the elderly twin-tub were outlined. A label with her name on was fixed to ‘her’ shelf in the larder. Keys were handed over, and a smart new rent book. Twenty-eight pounds a week including electricity, hot water, and a daily char. Domina paid her deposit of a month’s rent, and went upstairs to unpack. Then, having made her bed with her own sheets, and christened the room with a few squirts of scent, she set off in search of a new image.
4
As Virginia was forever pointing out in her inebriated slurs, Domina ran on well-oiled rails. Her father had inherited his father’s thriving publishing house, Pharos Company. This concern had come into being in an uncommercial, gentlemanly fashion, to print the ungentlemanly and equally uncommercial outpourings of the interbellum literary pride of which he was an adoptive cub. As the texts in his sway progressed from being wrapped in brown paper or displayed on only the more avant-garde occasional tables to being well-thumbed by back-packing Americans and religiously dissected during A-levels, Pharos Company had become synonymous with the best of modern English verse and with the less-readable of modern English prose. (It had been thanks to a personal introduction to her father that Rick, Ginny’s husband, had first challenged the novel-reading public.)
Quietly rich, Jacoby Tey was an aesthete of the old school. In addition to his father’s publishing house, he had inherited a Lutyens ‘manor’ in the South Downs. His wife, Isobella, was the daughter of a Tuscan count. (‘Two-a-penny, cara,’ she would say, ‘but the surnames are so good for cheques.’) The only child in a house where the lowliest soap dish was a thing of beauty, Domina had slept in a nursery decorated in her father’s childhood by Dora Carrington and friends. Isobella was a devout Catholic, he was semi-lapsed.
Once Domina’s education was complete, the couple saw fit to separate. A divorce was out of the question on her part, and tactfully unrequested on his. His infidelities had begun soon after their child’s conception and centred around budding authoresses and the London flat. Isobella would stay in the country with the baby and the dogs, passive, knowing, accepting, inviting said authoresses over for gracious weekends. Hers was a passivity Domina had failed to understand – until recently. The dogs had long since died, as had father, all but a generous clutch of shares in the company had been sold, and Isobella now lived with her philosophical half-sister, Juliana-Costanza, in her family’s villa. When Domina had last visited her there, in the hills near San Giminiano, she had claimed to have loved Jacoby as much in the lecherous dotage preceding his death as she had always done. She opined that they lived apart because it was more practical that way, that she didn’t want to make his girlfriends nervous. Her presence, if only chastely, as a handbag or a waft of good scent, would have required too much explanation.
From her arrival, Domina had been a piece of the house collection. Jacoby dressed her in frocks of unworldly charm, and had her painted, sculpted, photographed and filmed in each phase of her development. Isobella had her baptized, confirmed, heard her catechism and prayers and taught her Latin and Italian. In due course, at the time when the paternal indiscretions were growing too exhausting to mask, Domina was sent to board at a highly-respected convent school a-flutter with genuflecting debs. Crushes ensued: on nuns, on Crashawe, on the Mother Superior, on Sister Charity (games), on Saint Sebastian. The standard of secular education at Saint Mary’s, Clanworth was superior; any efforts on the spiritual side were without great effect. Religion had always been bound up, in Domina’s mind, with aesthetics. Charity, mystery and revelation were less essential than a sense of Tightness, akin to knowing the proper vase for a lily or sensing that plovers’ eggs were pleasing enoug
h to need no further garnish than a piece of good crystal in which to cluster.
Her inheritance was not solely in pelf. Isobella’s ear for voices, her ability to pin down characters and mimic with cruel precision was handed on. In looks, the daughter harked back to Jacoby, with a long, classical body – but too kind, even cherubic a face. Domina’s appearance was modish enough in the mid-sixties, when women had to have Oxfam builds and soft, pearly-lipped faces, but it was unlikely to mature as superbly as her mother’s Milan-coutured one. Her ear for good English came from exposure to her father’s conversation. Even with his temper roused, his cadences had been perfect. His vocabulary had been vast. He gave her the two-volume Oxford dictionary for her thirteenth birthday and she had learnt to read it for the sheer pleasure of tracking down unfamiliar words, then daring to ease them into her talk. Less a tease at school than a merciless slanderer, she could be counted on to provide the sharpest account of any event. Other fourteen-year-olds never said words like ‘lubricious’ or ‘obesity’, contenting themselves with ‘randy’ or ‘fat’; thus she distinguished herself, aroused a certain awe, raised laughs and, through the venom of her enmity, many friends.
It was only when first auditioned for a school play that a weakness was made manifest. Off-stage, Domina was graceful and well-spoken, but with a bowdlerized As You Like It in her sweaty paw, she had lurched around like a new-born calf and her voice had dribbled into her copy. Ever astute, Sister Annunciata (English) had perceived that Mina’s words had to be her own. She knew she had written many trifles for home consumption. Making no promises, she had suggested she write an adaptation of a favourite book for the stage. The Rose and the Ring took the best part of a summer holiday to write. Excellent O-level results fired Domina to persevere. Her mother had delighted in taking her seriously and would dismiss her to the summer-house after breakfast, disturbing her only to bring out jugs of lemonade, a plate of sandwiches, or to call her out to tea on the lawn. In the evening Isobella would act as secretary, and type out the day’s work, a fidgeting Domina at her elbow. The words were largely Thackeray’s own, but the exercise taught the girl the foundations of stagecraft. At her father’s suggestion, she had taken as models the family editions of Galsworthy, Shaw and Barrie. Thackeray’s subversive whimsy was consequently buttoned into the confines of a well-made play, but for this very reason the nuns could find no objection to staging the thing as a Christmas play the following term.
