[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

by Paul Magrs

  One ear is badly torn and he has a nasty cut on his nose. There’s a bloody wound in his side where the Crispy Cat slashed him. Those wounds are already filling up with some weird kind of crispiness.

  ‘Will you die?’ Effie asks him.

  He looks at her with fiery eyes.

  ‘I feel quite poorly. And I don’t have any more lives left.’

  ‘You should never have attacked that beast,’ I tell him.

  ‘It would have savaged you both. You wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

  Effie looks gloomy. ‘And now it’s still roaming about in the back streets.’

  ‘I couldn’t let it harm either one of you two. I’m here to protect you.’

  ‘Are you?’ I ask, surprised by this. He is trying painfully to sit up.

  ‘Oh yes. Especially Effie.’

  ‘Me?’ Effie says. ‘Why me?’

  Harold is on his feet, wincing and looking impatient with her.

  ‘Don’t you recognise me, Effryggia, you silly girl?’

  Effie stammers and flusters. ‘I, er, well, I’m not sure…’

  ‘I’m from your painting, aren’t I? Surely even you can’t have failed to realise that?’

  Effie looks genuinely shocked and, I must admit, it is a bit unusual. A cat telling her he has escaped from an oil painting she’s bought. But there are times for scepticism and searching questions and this isn’t one of them. We have to get Harold indoors and see to his wounds.

  ‘Oh, by the way. Well done on the enchanted mice, Effie. He’ll be ever so glad that you’re experimenting with magic again.’

  ‘Will he?’ she says. ‘Who? Who do you mean?’

  ‘Ah, wait and see.’

  Then he succumbs to exhaustion. I pick him up gingerly and he falls asleep, half curled around my neck. I feel his warmth and his ragged purring all the way as we hurry through the last of our journey home to Harbour Street.

  Once in Effie’s sitting room I pick him gently from my neck and lay him on the settee. His wounds aren’t bleeding and he seems to be glowing more brightly. Still doesn’t look quite right though. His fight with the Crispy Cat has knocked the stuffing out of him.

  Effie goes to make some tea and comes back with the brandy bottle.

  ‘What a night,’ she says. ‘Can you believe any of this?’

  She pours and we clink two large glasses together before downing them.

  ‘Now Brenda,’ she says. ‘Tell me everything this cat has told you.’

  I am just about to divulge what Harold said the other night when he was luminescing on my continental quilt, but at that very moment I happen to glance at Effie’s painting. I give a strangulated yell.

  ‘Effie, look! Surely you can’t deny the evidence of your senses this time?’

  She turns to see – almost reluctantly – and downs the rest of her brandy. Then she looks shame-faced. ‘I know. You’re quite right.’

  The oil painting has changed yet again. Now the man has dismounted and he’s holding the young lady in the ermine robe very close. The young girl in the foreground is young no more. She stares out of the gilt frame and her face is the face of Effryggia Jacobs herself..!

  ‘I admit it, she looks very like me,’ Effie sighs. ‘When I was somewhat younger. I was never much of a looker, was I? Such a pale-looking specimen. I look back at her now and think, what an unfriendly girl. No wonder she never had many friends. Who would ever dare to talk to her? Who would waste their time? She looks acid-tongued and bitter.’

  I try to say something complimentary, about how she has a nice figure, but Effie isn’t having any of that. ‘What did that matter? Whitby was even colder during my young womanhood than it is now. We went round ten months out of twelve wearing six layers of woollies, all bundled up like Eskimos.’

  There comes a mewing and a moaning from the settee and I go to Harold, who stirs in his sleep. He’s having troublesome cat dreams from one of his past lives, perhaps. His glowing paws knead the air.

  ‘So you were at Danby’s Auction Rooms,’ I prompt Effie. ‘And you happened upon this portrait of yourself…’

  ‘When I first saw it, it was showing a child I barely recognised as myself. It spoke to me, this picture. I went up to it and that’s when I saw the purple bruises under the child’s eyes and the stringy white hair. That’s when I knew it was supposed to be me – the young, orphaned Effryggia Jacobs. I thought to myself, ‘But who on Earth would have painted a picture of me? Who would have bothered to capture me in oils? And who would have cared to frame it with gold?’

  ‘Well, someone did,’ I point out.

  She shakes her head. ‘This isn’t a normal picture, done with brushes and paint. No artist’s hand and eye ever worked on this. This is magic through and through. It only looks like a painting to the outside world.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Then what is it really?’

  Effie shudders. ‘I’m sorry I lied and denied it before, Brenda, when I said that you were wrong and that the painting hadn’t changed. I was lying to myself as much as I was you.’

  I nod and peer closer at the picture. I examine the very handsome man that Harold described as the Demon King. The Erl King. ‘Who are these people?’ I ask my friend. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I don’t recognise them at all,’ she says.

  I peer at the gentleman and his young lady friend as if I’m expecting them to spring into life at any moment. ‘You know, when he came to me in the night, Harold told me a very interesting tale. About the women who once lived here in your house. Your aunts – this is well before you were born of course – and the youngest sister, Angela, who ran off with a man just like this.’

  Effie pours more brandy out. ‘The cat seems to know more about it than I do. My aunts were quite mysterious, and I never knew Angela at all. When I was little they seemed very old and slightly crazy. Though I was proud of them and thought they were marvellous. And yes, it’s true, now I think on, Angela did run away from them. They never liked to talk about her much. When I was a girl I used to try to imagine her. I pictured her being more like me, and I could have talked to her and not been frightened and overawed by her, as I was by Aunt Maud and Natasha, and Eliza and Beryl.’

  Harold is awake. He’s lying stretched out but one eye is half-open, staring at us.

  ‘She was your mother, Effie. That’s what I’ve been sent back to tell you. I’ve been granted an extra, tenth, life in order that I could come back and show you her image in the painting. I can tell you how wonderful and gentle and beautiful she was. And how she loved you. But she had to go away and stay away from home. After you were born she sent you back here to be looked after by your aunts but she never, ever forgot you…’

  Effie is staring in slack-jawed amazement at the glowing cat. His high, halting voice hangs in the air. He’s still looking dreadful. His cuts and scratches give off a strange, sickly light. ‘Can we see to your injuries?’ I ask him. ‘Maybe bandage you up?’ He shakes his head.

  Effie says to him, ‘This handsome pair in the painting – they’re really my parents?’ She stands before them, as if they’re able to look back at her out of the frame. ‘But where does the painting come from? And why has it come to me?’ There is a desperate tinge in her voice. ‘After all this time. I’m nearly seventy. I’ve spent all my life wondering and not knowing and feeling alone in the world. I thought I’d never know anything about them. Certainly, never see their faces.’

  ‘There they are. There they are, for you to see.’

  ‘Yes, but why?’ she demands. ‘What’s the point? What good is seeing their faces going to do me now?’

  She seems about to burst into tears. I pat her on the shoulder. ‘I think it’s a lovely thing to have. Look at them! So old-fashioned, so beautiful, the pair of them!’

  Effie shrugs. ‘Huh.’ She turns away from the picture. ‘Well, I’m glad they were happy together. Riding off into the flamin’ sunset. Leaving me behind to get on with things here.’


  I want to tell her that, as far as I’m concerned, she’s a lucky woman. I wish I had some evidence of loving parents of my own. And, even if she was abandoned, at least Effie had family to take her in. Her aunts may have been witchy and scary, but they still stood by her and put a roof over her head and fed her and protected her against the forces of darkness and the cold north wind. What the devil did I have? Nothing. Nothing and no one. And I never will.

  Oh, but as that thought occurs to me I feel like a goose has just walked over my grave. A great galumphing grave. I do have a grave, you know. Several, in fact.

  Now I am much too tired and I need my bed. I turn to leave. ‘This evening has taken it out of me.’

  ‘And,’ Effie puts in, ‘The Crispy Cat is still out there somewhere, causing havoc. I don’t think we’ve actually accomplished much on our investigation tonight.’

  I pat Harold good night and he seems to fall asleep again on the sofa, purring contentedly. ‘He’ll be all right there,’ says Effie. ‘Though I’m not sure what I’ll feed him come the morning.’

  ‘I’m sure he can look after himself,’ I tell her and then I leave.

  Then, I’m in the throes of making my first guests feel welcome. I make up beds and fry up breakfasts and I find I don’t have to try very hard to be all smiling and cheery for them. I actually enjoy letting them into my home. I don’t feel at all awkward or strange. It turns out I’m a natural-born landlady..!

  There have been a couple of sightings of the Crispy Cat. A spectral feline was spotted on the cliff-tops and a blurred photo snapped by somebody’s mobile appeared on page two of The Willing Spirit. A few savaged gulls have been found in the harbour and I heard a rumour from Jessie, the waitress at the Christmas Hotel, that her nephew Robert came across something alarming in the sand dunes after midnight last Wednesday. Though what he was doing hanging about on the beach at that time of night I don’t know. You can see some very odd things here. Especially if you go looking for them.

  Jessie passed me this tidbit when I returned to the Christmas Hotel for tea. I went with Effie, who looked drawn and tired as if she hadn’t slept at all in the days since I’d last seen her.

  ‘There’s been no sign of Harold, then?’ I ask, being mother and pouring.

  ‘Oh yes, there has,’ she says. ‘He’s quite definitely back in the painting. I’ve seen his little face peering out at me once or twice. Once he was even winking, in a reassuring sort of way.’

  ‘Ah, bless him,’ I say. ‘I rather miss him, actually. Last night I lay awake, hoping I’d hear his singing on my rooftop again.’

  Hollow-eyed Effie is looking at me across the tableful of fiddly sandwiches and cakes. ‘I can’t help myself, Brenda. There is something endlessly fascinating about that painting. It shows the same events over and over again and I feel drawn in by it…’

  She goes on to tell me about afternoons and evenings and middles of the night with her watching developments in the murky oils. She has grown addicted to seeing the same old Romantic plot being played out repeatedly. Her father woos her mother and then snatches her up; the pair of them cantering away atop his flame-eyed steed. The sickly young girl keeps on being left at home. The marmalade cat keeps on having the burning sword thrust through his chest.

  Effie watches this narrative unfold as if she suspects there is a key secreted somewhere inside it. Something that will make her whole life suddenly unlock and make sense. There has to be a reason for it all, she thinks.

  She eats a squashy cake rather delicately as she tells me about this and I think, No. Not necessarily, lovey. What makes you think there has to be a reason behind everything? Behind anything at all? Why flatter yourself with thoughts like that? I know better than anyone that this life doesn’t work like that. It is random and occasionally horrible or lovely and the thing that superstitious folk call destiny or fate is actually a spiteful thing. But I don’t say anything aloud, of course. I wouldn’t want to upset the old dear.

  Our afternoon tea is a subdued affair. It’s like Effie is only half there. The remainder of her is still at home, staring at the painting.

  More days go by, and in my rooms the guests come and go, carpets get hoovered and delicious breakfasts are served and money changes hands and charming comments get left in my guestbook in the downstairs hall. I feel as if I am starting to fit in around here. A few people say hello in the street as I happen by. They are starting to recognise me, and it isn’t to cross themselves, make the sign of the evil eye or ward me off with burning torches. I feel like I’m becoming one of the locals, just going about my everyday business.

  I don’t see anything of Effie for a few days and I must admit, I feel guiltily grateful not to be getting hourly updates on her spooky shenanigans. There have been no more feral attacks, so it seems the Crispy Cat has gone to ground for a while. Sometimes in the wee small hours I will hear a familiar catty song echoing around the chimney pots.

  La, la, la, la, lah…!

  I fondly imagine that Harold has escaped from the confines of the painting for a frolic about the town. He’s having a night on the tiles again.

  Then, on a Saturday afternoon I’m pulling my shopping-bag-on-wheels up the steepest alley in Whitby on my way to the butchers and I find myself walking alongside that miserable-looking Jessie from the Christmas Hotel. (You can tell she was bonny back in her day. She should have herself done up, somehow, I think. Make the best of herself.) Anyhow, have I heard the latest about Effie, she asks? I say, no, I haven’t done, since I’ve been ever so caught up in my own business just lately and what’s going on?

  ‘It’s just,’ says Jessie, ‘That your friend and mine, Effryggia Jacobs, has been seen in the company of a rather attractive man.’

  ‘Well, if that’s true, good luck to her,’ I say. ‘Some male attention might take her mind off her problems.’

  ‘Has she got problems, then?’ asks Jessie and I clam up at once. I know an incorrigible gossip when I meet one. I lead the way into the butcher and put in my extensive order for black pudding, streaky bacon and sausages. Jessie tells me a little more about how Effie was seen on the arm of this darkly handsome, Byronesque figure, walking along Church Street, the night before last. (Who uses words like Byronesque in the butchers, I wonder?) Jessie has heard tell they were going from one pub to another. Having fun and gallivanting.

  Jessie says, sotto voce, ‘I’ve known ladies who’ve had their heads turned completely all for the sake of some bloke.’

  Oh, she is a miserable woman, I think. I’m not too upset to wave her goodbye on Silver Street.

  I call round Effie’s on my way back, There’s no answer when I knock.

  All at once I know that something isn’t right.

  I put my shoulder against the door and force it open.

  Inside the whole place is murkier than ever.

  ‘Effie..?’

  I creep upstairs. All my hackles are up.

  Where has she gone? All this talk of her walking about the town with some unknown gentleman. It’s got me proper worried.

  In her sitting room it’s very gloomy. When I put the lights on I get a shock.

  The picture is darker than ever, and it’s hard to focus on the shapes of the figures. It’s like night has fallen fully on the world of the painting.

  ‘La, la, la. If you’ve come looking for her, you’re too late.’

  What? You..!

  ‘Forgive me for springing out on you.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Where’s Effie?’

  ‘Where she wants to be. With her dad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why he sent me back into your world. I came to fetch her.’

  ‘Harold, you better tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘He came to claim his daughter. She’s in there now. She’s gone into the world of the painting.’

  ‘I draw closer to the nasty thing and all that mucky darkness is swirling round… it’s like an endless, bottomless lake…’ />
  ‘It’s where she wants to be, Brenda.’

  ‘I’m going in after her.’

  ‘What? You can’t!’

  ‘She’s my friend. She doesn’t want to be in there. She’s been kidnapped!’

  ‘She went willingly..!’

  ‘He had her under a spell! He must have! He took her just like he took her mother. Effie wouldn’t have gone willingly. She loves her life here, in Whitby, in her shop…’

  ‘But… it was my mission… to lead her to him…’

  ‘We’re going to get her back. And you’re going to help me.’

  ‘I can’t… he will kill me… he’ll snuff out any remaining lives I have…’

  ‘She’s my friend, Harold. I’ll not let that Demon fella take her.’

  ‘I can’t help you…’

  ‘Please… Harold…!’

  It’s a golden doorway – a mystical threshold – far more than a simple frame for a painting. He gingerly leads the way and I step out of the dingy sitting room into an even dingier world of sickly yellows and purples and greens. A world of permanent dusk, quite different and much nastier than any fairyland I might have imagined.

  ‘Stay close to me, Brenda. There are strange forces all around us…’

  ‘Ooh, I can feel them.’

  On and on we trudge. For hours, it seems. Through stinking field and bog. Harold seems to know the way. I stumble blindly, with no sense of direction…

  Until, at last, under a limitless purple, thunderous sky, we see something ahead. On the soggy, wind-lashed moor… there is a table with a clean cloth, and two chairs. Effie is sitting there alone, stirring the teapot with her spoon. She looks up, surprised, to see me standing there with Harold the cat.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here!’

  She sounds so vague and spaced out. It’s like she doesn’t have a clue where she is.

  ‘Effie – we’ve come to rescue you. That dreadful man, whoever he is, has dragged you into this horrible place…’

  ‘And I helped him, I’m afraid to say. I am sorry, Effryggia. Brenda is correct. We are here to rescue you.’