‘Well, it’s customary,’ says Edmund. ‘She is my daughter, after all. And my first grandchild, come to that.’
Mary says something like ‘humph’.
‘Of course, I call them,’ says Beatrice, ‘the me generation. Because all you hear from them is me, me, me, me, me. We used to know what had to be done and accept our responsibility.’
Nessa turns the volume down again. ‘Hilarious. Going round and round in circles. Don’t suppose Edmund’s going to make it up to the hospital for a good few hours yet. I’ll offer to give him a lift when I come off shift. I suppose you’ll be wanting to sponge a ciggie off the hired help, then?’
I shake my head. ‘Thanks anyway.’
‘So I hear you did the honours in the birthing suite.’
I pull a face. ‘Don’t know if it hasn’t put me off for life. They don’t exactly tell you about the blood, do they?’
‘Of course not. Do you think women would let men near them if they knew the whole of it?’
‘I know a few who wouldn’t, anyway. So how did you hear?’
‘Village. Living in an English village is like working on a tabloid newspaper. They’re all obsessed with uncovering the doings of the upper classes. It’s like a local sport. And self-feeding, of course. Because the more they find out the more paranoid people like your family here get and the more they try to cover up. And everybody pretends to everybody else that they’re not doing it. Clam up like cats’ backsides when they think the family might get to know about it. Spill like beer kegs when they don’t.’
‘Which, I suppose,’ I say gloomily, ‘is how come I never knew about Tilly’s mother.’
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Seriously? Rufus never told you that?’
‘No.’
‘Wow,’ she says again. ‘Strikes me you and your hubby have a bit of a communication problem.’
‘No we don’t.’
A raised eyebrow.
‘We don’t. He just … doesn’t tell me stuff, is all …’
‘That’s what we call a communication problem where I come from.’
‘I thought you said you came from Melbourne.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’
‘OK. You’re right. Even I can’t deny that someone not telling me something like this might be a bit weird. Why didn’t he do it? I keep asking myself, and I can’t come up with a rational explanation.’
‘I’ve got a theory on that as well,’ she says.
‘Well, I’d guessed as much.’
‘I think they believe that if you pretend something doesn’t exist, then eventually, it won’t have. And besides, I don’t think it’s such an important thing in Rufus’s mind as it is in other people’s. Lady Mary is his mother, after all, and whatever Tilly thinks of her, she’s always doted on him. You have to remember that. He’s the darling baby boy. It probably just slipped his mind.’
‘Slipped his mind?’
A shrug. ‘You’d be amazed. And besides. It doesn’t change your relationship to her. She’s still your mother-in law.’
‘My luck.’
We mooch about in contemplation of this for a minute.
‘So, what does the village have to say on this one?’ I ask.
‘How so?’
‘Come on. The amazing vanishing wife. There must be some goss.’
‘Oh yeah. Of course. They reckon Edmund did away with her to avoid alimony.’
I look at Nessa. Nessa looks at me. I can’t tell if she’s joking or not.
‘By all accounts, she wasn’t a very satisfactory wife. Or not by Wattestone lines, anyway.’
A bit like me, then. I stay silent, waiting.
‘Right, well,’ she begins.
Arms crossed, I look at her.
‘OK. Well, the story as it goes out there among the proles is something like this. I guess you must have noticed that Edmund is quite a lot older than Mary?’
I nod. ‘I sort of gathered that it was a bit of a habit in this family.’
‘Well, yes and no. It’s true, for sure, that Beatrice got herself married off to a guy who could barely get out of his bath chair, but actually Edmund was quite a normal age the first time he tied the knot. I mean, surely you must have wondered a bit? Mary would have had to have been, like, fourteen when she got up the duff if she was Tilly’s mother, and that’s going it some, even for people of their class.’
‘I guess I wasn’t thinking. I guess I thought she was older than she is. Put it down to the famous English complexion.’
Nessa sparks up a new ciggy.
‘Nope. She’s as young as she looks. Wasn’t much more than eighteen when Lucy disappeared. That was her name, by the way.’
‘I know. Tilly’s calling the baby after her.’
‘Good for her,’ says Nessa.
‘So?’
‘Oh, yeah. Right. Mary’s a goddaughter of Beatrice’s, you know. Daughter of a playmate of Edmund’s.’
‘Oh, God, not again. That’s a bit yuk, isn’t it?’
‘A bit, I guess. I’d say the likelihood was that Beatrice had had Mary lined up all along and Lucy was not only an aberration but a serious inconvenience. And the not-having-sons thing would have been close on a final straw.’
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘’Fraid not. She’ll have been lined up in some sort of nod-and-wink agreement from practically the day she was born. No use to anyone for anything else, after all, being a girl: the only thing she’s good for is keeping the bloodlines intact.’
‘It’s medieval.’
‘I don’t know. A lot of religions deal in arranged marriages and no-one thinks it’s odd, after all. People like Beatrice believe that they’ve been given their position by God and it’s their religious duty to maintain the status quo. You know how superior God-botherers always seem to feel? It’s the same thing. Of course, if Lucy had been a breeder I dare say people would have gradually got used to it, but as it was, they were looking at the end of the bloodline, even if he’d got divorced. If he’d remarried someone his own age, the chances of dropping an heir would have been pretty slim. As it is, women like Mary are largely brought up to get themselves wed off and pop out a couple of boy-spawn, and part of that includes doing it before they’re thirty.’
‘You make her sound like a brood mare.’
‘Not far off. It’s all done on breeding. And given Edmund made his own choice the first time round, I dare say he didn’t have much option but to follow orders the second.’ Nessa pauses for breath, takes in another gust of nicotine with it. ‘Aaaah,’ she says, breathing out, ‘norepinephrine. Can’t beat it.’
‘So come on. Shoot.’
‘Oh, right. What do you want to know?’
‘Um … everything?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what I know. Which is probably more than you’ll get out of anybody here. Tilly wasn’t but a little thing, and I don’t suppose Rufus has ever been particularly curious. She was OK, so far as I hear. Beatrice didn’t like her much. Middle class. Jewish too. I heard there was some sort of stink from her side when she married Edmund – religious separatism, again, ordained by God and that. Possibly one of the things they had in common. Anyway, all accounts, they held a funeral service for her the day she got married and never made any contact after.’
‘Sheez.’
‘It was the nineteen fifties.’
‘I though anti-Semitism was the problem …’
‘Oh, believe me, babe, it can cut both ways. Especially back then. Not that I’m saying that this lot would have welcomed her with open arms. Believe me, they weren’t exactly dancing for joy at the prospect of Jewish offspring.’
‘Oh right. You do surprise me. I’d never have thought it of ’em.’
Nessa laughs one of those would-ya-believe-it laughs. ‘Riddled with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the upper-class olds. You know that’s what they mean, don’t you, when they lower their voices and tell you someone’s ‘clever’ in that tone of voi
ce?’
‘Oh. Oh right. I see. I didn’t realise.’
‘Yes. And it’s one of the reasons they’re nervous of clever people. They’re not particularly threatened by clever per se. Most of them don’t have the brains to be threatened. No. They’re afraid they might be Jewish.’
‘So this chick was clever, then?’
‘A degree in Latin or somesuch. Nothing useful. But that’s the way people talk about her. They’ve picked it up in the village, though I think most of them would be pretty appalled if they knew what they were really saying. ‘She was clever,’ they say. And usually they wink. I think they think it means she was neurotic, or something.’
‘OK.’
It’s always interesting how people will interpret simple words in different ways. My parents, for instance: if they said someone was clever, they’d probably mean that they big-noted themselves. Either that, or that they were some type of illywhacker.
‘So what’s the real story?’
‘Well, I think some of it’s probably spot on. She wasn’t a hundred per cent right in the head. I don’t know. It can’t have been easy for her, poor thing, locked up in this bloody great pile with only Beatrice and a few of Beatrice’s servants for company, and Edmund arsing about the place thinking his one act of rebellion was enough, more than likely. Probably just expected her to fit right in without any help. Them being so perfect and all.’
This is disturbing. I am finding this disturbing. The similarities between father and son are suddenly a lot clearer to me. For all I know, I could be Rufus’s final kick over the traces before he capitulates to a life of gin and hunting. And where does that leave me?
‘OK. And?’
‘Well, she went a bit gaga. She was fine at first: got involved in the village, started teaching down at the school. That was back when they still had a school. But people started noticing things, after a bit. Funny stuff. Just odd things. Losing stuff, at first. She’d open up her bag to hand out the homework and find she’d brought the stable accounts with her instead. Or she’d get to the shop and find she’d left her wallet down at the house. Stuff like that.’
‘Well, that’s not all that odd.’
‘No. But it got odder, over time. Her clothes. All the people who were kids then remember her walking down the high street in Stow one day with, like, a great big tear down the back of her dress. All her foundation garments hanging out for everyone to see. Or she’d have, like, stains, or odd shoes or something. And after Tilly was born, she got increasingly weird. Paranoid. Stopped talking to half the people about the place. Accused a couple of folk of spreading rumours and stuff. And she got this thing about the house. Started telling people it had it in for her. Turned up at a couple of county-type parties in some sort of mumbling state like a zombie. They’d just invented post-natal depression about that time, so people thought it was that. Beatrice actually turned quite nice about it at that point, funnily enough. Used to sweep in and settle bills and explain things away. I don’t suppose it was from any particular urge to look after Lucy, mind. More the usual don’t-let-the-common-folk-know-too-much-about-our-business stuff. And maybe some protection of Edmund, I suppose. Anyway. Poor cow. The depression never seemed to let up. It got worse with time, if anything, even though the doctor had her on a pretty ferocious drug regime by that point. Barbiturates and Valium and the like. There was talk of ECT at one point. Beatrice asked Marjorie Slatter – that’s Sharon’s mother-in-law. She died ten years or so ago – about it, because she’d had it when she got bad with her nerves, whatever that means. Asked her in confidence, of course, so it was all round the village in no time. But I don’t know if they went through with it. It certainly didn’t do any good if they did. She started going AWOL. Was found wandering a couple of times in her nightclothes, once over by the Rollright Stones, once all the way to Cirencester. Never seemed to know what she was doing there.’
‘Poor bitch,’ I say.
‘Too right. And Tilly. Neglected’s not the word for it. Spent most of her time being brought up by Roberts, if she was lucky. Otherwise it was dump ’er on whoever came in handy – mostly the grooms and the ground staff.’
‘Mmm.’ Well, it certainly explains the constant need to apologise for her presence. ‘So what happened?’
‘It’s hard to say. It went on for a while like this. Obviously. As I said, Tilly was four by the time she went. But the AWOLS got bigger, and longer, and by this time the rows between her and Edmund could be heard all the way to the village. I mean, obviously, half of them would happen in the village. She’d come storming out of the place and he’d come after her, and she’d be going ‘You hate me! You want me dead! All of you! You’d rather I was just gone, wouldn’t you!’ and he’d be going, ‘Darling, you’ve not taken your medication’ and, ‘Come on. Come back. You’re making a fool of yourself’ and stuff like that. You can’t expect thirties man to know what to do in circs like that, but Edmund was particularly inept. And then one day she took an AWOL and just never came back. Poof. Vanished into thin air.’
‘How do you mean, vanished?’
‘I don’t really know. No-one knows exactly how she went. Chucked a spaz in the middle of a dinner party and by the time the men were done with the port, she was gone. Took a suitcase, not much else, and one of the cars was found at Moreton station a couple of days later.’
‘Good God.’
‘Yuh. Of course they all kept it quiet down at the house. Hoping she might turn up somewhere, I suppose. But there came a time when people started noticing that she wasn’t there any more, and eventually Mrs R let slip that she’d done a bunk, and that was that. That’s what I heard.’
‘Hold on. That was that? Are you serious?’
A roll of the eyes. She pauses to take another drag of her cig. ‘Well, no, of course that wasn’t that. But I wasn’t there at the time, so I don’t know the details overmuch.’
‘Surely there must have been some sort of kerfuffle? You’re not saying she disappeared and no-one did anything?’
‘Of course not. They had her on the missing persons’. Put up posters all over. Dragged the moat and everything, but they never found a sign of her. But to be honest, I don’t think they made all that much effort. She’d become, you might say, a bit of a burden. Truth be told, they must have been pretty relieved to be shot of her. So, no: he didn’t go chasing off trying to track her down. He just waited seven years and divorced her for desertion. Probably a pretty good solution as far as he was concerned. If there’s one thing Edmund can’t be doing with, it’s high-maintenance women. If anybody’s going to get any maintaining around here, it’s him.’
‘And her family?’
She spreads her hands. ‘I told you. She was dead already as far as they were concerned. I don’t suppose they even let them know.’
‘Shit,’ I say, bringing all my articulacy to bear. ‘Bugger me dead.’
‘Yeah. I don’t think it was exactly the top time for anyone. That was when Edmund took to the gin, of course. And Mary came to stay soon afterwards – she’d been here at dinner the night Lucy went, so there wasn’t a lot of dissimulating to be done about it where she was concerned – and sort of picked up the reins and got rewarded with the wedding ring.’
‘But good God! She was only eighteen! How could she possibly have taken a place like this over at eighteen?’
Nessa pauses to inhale another lungful. ‘Well, obviously it wasn’t just her. It was a nice cosy cabal of her and Beatrice together, with the dedicated backup of Mrs Roberts and Mrs Roberts’s mother. I don’t think she found it too difficult, especially as I dare say everyone was going out of their way to remind her that she was the Chosen One.’
‘Oh my God. Poor Tilly. And poor Edmund.’
‘Yeah. Sort of explains a bit, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say, ‘how Rufus could possibly not remember to tell me something as … well … significant as this.’
‘You would wonder,
wouldn’t you? You know what? I think it’s all a matter of perspective. I mean, obviously it’s a big thing as far as pretty much everybody else would be concerned, but as far as Rufus is concerned, it’s something that happened a long time before he was born. After all, they’d hardly be the first family to gloss over history for the sake of convenience, would they? And Mary is Rufus’s real mum, after all, and she’d been in place for so long before he was born that it’s like the waters had long since closed over Lucy’s head.’
‘God, families. I have to say I never thought Edmund would’ve had it in him.’
‘Well, I guess that’s where Rufus got it from, eh? And I think he learned his lesson pretty good. He’s not stepped out of line since. The only thing is, looking at you, and Rufus, and the way those women are going on, I can’t help but worry that history might be repeating itself.’
‘Oh, don’t. I’m not blind to the similarity. Still. Maybe I’m made of sterner stuff.’
‘I hope so. For Rufus’s sake as well as yours. I’ll tell you what: you’re amazingly patient. Haven’t you ever been tempted to lose your temper? Just really let rip?’
‘Er, yeah. I have that.’
‘Well, why didn’t you? I know I would have by now.’
‘That’s not my way of doing things. I don’t like losing my temper. It always causes more harm than good in the long run.’
She looks at me, speculatively. ‘Funny. I’d have got you figured for a chick with a bit of a mouth on you. Especially – don’t take offence – now I’ve had a look at your family.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I say, ‘you’ve got me figured wrong.’
And then I shut up, because the truth is that I haven’t lost my temper in over two years, because I know, when you do it, that bad things happen.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Souvenirs of the Apocalypse
We think we’ve evolved so much as a society, but really, we’ve just moved the goalposts. We’ve developed a new set of pieties over the past fifty years that are just as abusable as the last lot, and we’re too damn arrogant to see it. So that, now that women have finally persuaded men – and each-other – to take rape seriously, we’ve also spawned a type of ruthless harpy who’ll scatter accusations about, for revenge, or for profit, regardless of the cost. And now women have hard-won the right to work, we use it as a justification for shirking our responsibility to the vulnerable, a cudgel as hefty as any of the old moralities.
Simply Heaven Page 34
