The Perfectly Imperfect Woman

by Milly Johnson

  Lilian struggled to her feet with the aid of her beautiful greyhound stick as soon as her visitor entered.

  ‘Dear Marnie, how lovely of you to come. How are you settling in?’ Then she leaned in to whisper, ‘Have you started making your secret things yet?’ and she tapped the side of her nose.

  ‘The first batch this morning. If I’d known I was coming for lunch, I would have made an extra one.’ She sounds on the ball to me, thought Marnie.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Lilian, ‘next time. Come and sit down. Sheila has made us another wonderful lunch.’

  ‘I brought you some wine; it’s just from Plum Corner but I didn’t want to come empty-handed,’ said Marnie, thinking, who is Sheila?

  ‘Thank you, Marnie. That’s kind of you but you really didn’t have to. We will have it later at the party.’

  Cilla walked into the room with a plate of warm pastries, still wearing that worried look on her face. Then Marnie remembered from reading the Wychwell book that Sheila had been Cilla’s mother, her previous housekeeper. Cilla looked at Marnie as she gave her head a little shake that said, she’s not right.

  ‘This all looks lovely, Cilla,’ said Marnie, emphasis on the name.

  ‘Sheila, dear. Cilla will still be at school,’ Lilian corrected her, patting the chair at the side of her. ‘Come and sit down and let’s eat. How did you sleep in Little Raspberries?’

  Marnie poured out some tea from the large silver pot.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Like the proverbial log.’

  ‘It was always my favourite of all the cottages,’ said Lilian, clapping her hands. ‘I knew you’d like it.’

  ‘I do. It’s very cosy,’ said Marnie, but concern for Lilian was nagging at her too now.

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely day, Marnie. I feel very content today.’

  Lilian started chewing delicately on a pastry whilst staring wistfully out of the window, not at the garden and the lake, but at somewhere far beyond them. Marnie studied her and thought her profile rather beautiful.

  ‘I’m so glad I found you,’ Lilian said at last and turned slowly to Marnie. ‘It is my greatest joy that you came back into my life.’ She reached over for Marnie’s hand and squeezed it hard, desperately affectionate.

  Marnie smiled and wondered if she should ask what she meant. She didn’t want to upset Lilian. She looked happy in her confusion. She tried gently.

  ‘What do you mean, my dear friend? I haven’t been away. Are you mixing me up with someone else?’

  ‘From Ireland,’ Lilian said, as if it were Marnie who had forgotten. ‘I knew it was you. I told Lionel. Have you met Lionel yet?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ said Marnie.

  ‘He never married,’ said Lilian with a laboured sigh. ‘What a waste. Some lady missed out on a wonderful husband there.’

  Cilla walked into the room to check that everything was all right and if Lilian wanted anything else.

  ‘No, I think we are fine, Cilla,’ said Lilian and Cilla’s face relaxed into a smile. Lilian was ‘back in the room’.

  ‘They worry about me,’ said Lilian to Marnie when the housekeeper had gone. ‘And they also worry that when I pop my clogs they won’t be safe. But they will. Safer than ever.’

  Lilian seemed fine after that, episode over, as sharp as if she’d spent all night in the knife drawer, as Mrs McMaid used to say. After a jolly lunch, she took Marnie into the very large formal drawing room to show her the treasures that were exhibited in the glass cabinets there. Marnie wasn’t a great lover of pottery but she did think Lilian’s collection rather impressive. They were all very different but what they had in common were lines of gold criss-crossing over them.

  ‘They were broken and then mended Japanese-style,’ Lilian explained. ‘There’s a name for it that escapes me. I’ve collected them for years. Wonderful, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are indeed,’ agreed Marnie. It was entirely believable that Lilian would rescue broken things.

  When Marnie came to leave Cilla rushed out to speak to her.

  ‘You’ve brought magic with you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen her laugh like she has today in a long time.’

  The next few weeks passed in a blur. Marnie settled into her routine of cheesecake making three days per week. Mrs Abercrombie increased her order by a third and seemed very impressed by the arrangement. Marnie had a rather cursory email from Café Caramba asking when she intended to return to work. Fortified by a glass of David Parselow’s rhubarb and ginger wine, she replied in a similar tone that she wouldn’t be back and also she wouldn’t be working her notice. She was shaking when she pressed send. She had jumped off a cliff and had to pray that the landing was softer than it looked. But what else could she do? She couldn’t go back so the only way was forward.

  She had swapped power suits, high status and traffic-heavy journeys into the city for slow-paced, anonymous baking in a sleepy Dales village. She didn’t know how long this present arrangement would last because Marnie was a doer and she knew she would get very bored very quickly here in Wychwell. She enjoyed thinking up and implementing new ideas, improving the status quo, seeing results, feeling that surge of adrenaline rushing through her veins. Even so, she was enjoying the sunshine and sitting on the bench down by Blackett Stream reading books and newspapers. Film rights to the first three Country Manors books had been bought by Hollywood, according to the Skipperstone Trumpet. Marnie had been equally fascinated by the story behind the novels. The first two books had been out on shelves and the third half-finished before its touch-paper found the match. Then – boom – shops couldn’t buy the books in fast enough, with the result that the author Penelope Black had just climbed onto the ladder of Britain’s richest people – and she hadn’t entered on the bottom rung either. Or he. The identity of the author was a secret which only added to the coffers as people bought into the mystery. Marnie wondered if she should write a book now that she had all this spare time. She’d tried once but given up by page three and decided that she was destined to be a buyer and a reader rather than a seller and a writer.

  Exactly a month to the day after Marnie had moved to Wychwell, Laurence sent her a personal letter, surprisingly. Not surprisingly it wasn’t very complimentary. If she’d lived at Hogwarts, it would have been a howler. Her unprofessionalism in quitting her position without the proper notice period had been recorded officially, he said, by which she read that she’d get a shit reference. She’d been too conditioned to expect the worst when it came to people.

  It became a regular event that Lilian came to her for lunch on Tuesdays and they talked for hours about anything and everything. Marnie loved to hear the stories about the Dearmans, for there seemed to be no end to their iniquity. Gambling, whores, murder, sexually transmitted diseases, bestiality, madness . . . the Dearmans made the Borgias look like the Osmonds. Marnie set a table down by the stream and they ate cheese and pickle and egg mayo sandwiches and the ‘cheesecake of the week’. Marnie read Country Manors aloud to Lilian as they drank a glass of David’s or Lionel’s wine – as bottles appeared on her doorstep as if they had been delivered by an alcoholic fairy.

  Sometimes, Marnie made Lilian laugh lots by exorcising the ghosts of her doomed relationships with her witty narrative. Except for the Justin Fox episode, because she couldn’t forget the sight of pregnant Suranna Fox reduced to doing what she’d felt she had to, and there was nothing funny in that. And sometimes, when it felt safe to do so, they touched on those things that sat deep under the seabed in Marnie’s heart, things that never failed to cause her pain when they were exposed to the salt of the water. Sometimes Lilian cried with her, for her.

  On Saturdays Marnie would lunch with Lilian at the manor. Often they took a walk around the gardens which had been artfully created to appear wild.

  ‘Griff Oldroyd was a master gardener,’ Lilian told her one day as they watched Herv dredging the lake, ‘but Herv is something even more special. The Picasso of horticulture. Teaching�
�s loss is our gain. Thank God that bloody woman of his broke his heart and he fled her and found us.’

  He was a nice man, Marnie had to agree. Always polite, kind; always with a smile playing on his lips. But he was a man all the same, and was therefore to be avoided. Her heart was not at home to callers, even if they were as perfectly perfect as Herv Gunnarsen.

  Chapter 18

  Marnie had been living in Wychwell just over six weeks when she first saw the ghost of the Pink Lady. The days had been especially warm and a thunderstorm was badly needed to puncture the heat. On the evening before the rain came, the air was so thick, it was almost unbreathable and despite having the windows open, she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned until two o’clock then got out of bed to walk around the green to tire herself and reset her bedtime routine. Everything was so silent when she ventured out into the night. The whole of Wychwell was asleep, with their windows open at full stretch.

  Marnie sat on the ornate memorial bench dedicated to Jessie Plumpton and marvelled at how different this place was to any she had ever been to. She had settled into village life far easier than she would have thought possible. She loved the fact that Plum Corner sold such a motley array of goods, though she much preferred to visit it on the days when the owner Roger Mumford was running it and not when Kay Sweetman was serving. She loved that the vicar was like an omnipresent being and Marnie bumped into him lots and he was always up for pleasant chat. She loved the gentle elderly people living there: Dr Court and his wife who were a sweet old cat-loving couple, and Cyril and Alice Rootwood who walked around the green three times a day with their tiny ancient Yorkshire Terrier, Richard. And Lilian and Emelie, of course. She often saw Emelie sitting out in the garden watching the birds gather around all the treats she laid out for them.

  Ruby Sweetman hadn’t visited since with her ‘keep your enemies closer’ fake friend routine and Marnie was glad about that. She hadn’t spoken directly to Titus at all. He had passed her a couple of times in his E-Type Jag and she’d waved him on once when her car had had right of way, but he hadn’t given her the slightest acknowledgement as would have been polite. She’d bumped into his wife Hilary the previous week and they’d said hello. Hilary had asked how she was settling in and Marnie replied, very well thank you. The interchange had been no more than that but Marnie got a surprisingly warm vibe from her. And she’d been taken aback by her voice. She would have expected Hilary to have a mousey squeak, not one so resonant and beautiful. She could have read the news with that voice.

  There was a massive full moon hanging in the sky like a giant shiny bauble. Marnie was staring hard at it, trying to imagine a face in it, when she felt a presence behind her.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  Marnie whirled around to find Herv. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me.’

  ‘Or should that be nightlights. Mind if I join you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ he asked, taking his place at the side of her. A respectful distance between them, she noted.

  ‘No. I thought a walk might help.’

  ‘Me too. Even though we are sitting.’

  His accent was subtle but ridiculously attractive. Marnie felt her heartbeat increase both in speed and volume in the quiet. Bloody pheromones. They were slave to no one.

  ‘Lilian’s garden is looking really lovely at the moment,’ said Marnie eventually, feeling that the silence should be broken.

  ‘I do my best,’ Herv said, with a little laugh. ‘But Lilian, she is full of strange ideas and plant combinations in her effort to stamp out the past. Apart from the lake, the garden is totally different to how it was when I first came. She has changed everything her family had there, every shrub and flower. This year I have to put lilies everywhere. The big ones, the bright ones, the smelly ones.’ And he pinched his nose.

  ‘Stargazers?’ asked Marnie, with a smile.

  ‘She wants them everywhere,’ said Herv, nodding ‘I tell her, “Lilian, you shouldn’t try to change the past, it can’t be done and especially not with big smelly flowers”, but she doesn’t listen. She is stubborn like a mule.’ And he growled in amused frustration.

  ‘She’s been very good to me, mule or no mule,’ said Marnie.

  ‘Where did you live before you came here?’

  ‘South Yorkshire,’ she answered, being slightly evasive. She didn’t want anyone snooping into her background.

  ‘What did you do? Did you have a job?’

  ‘I was head of Beverage Marketing in a firm that produces coffee.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘I was.’

  He whistled, genuinely impressed. ‘What made you have such a life change?’

  My lover’s pregnant wife tried to kill me in front of the whole building and I couldn’t stand the shame of going into the office again, she said inwardly and wondered what his reaction would be if she voiced it. That would stop his pupils dilating when he saw her.

  ‘I wasn’t happy. Sometimes you just need to get away.’

  ‘I recognise that feeling,’ said Herv. ‘When my marriage broke down, I had to get out of Norway. I wanted nothing familiar.’

  ‘You were married?’ She asked out of politeness, though she knew this already.

  ‘Yes, for two years only. I was happy. I thought Tine was too but she was . . . was happier with my friend.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Marnie, with a grimace. Happened to men too, of course; she knew that women could be twats as well.

  ‘Then she wasn’t happier with my friend and wanted me back. I couldn’t. The trust had gone. It was very hard for me. Maybe it was meant to be, because I came here and I feel absolutely in the right place. How could you not love this view?’

  They both looked at the moon hanging above the manor. And then their eyes were distracted. A strange blush-coloured light was journeying slowly from left to right along the gallery.

  ‘Can you see that?’ Herv asked.

  ‘I most certainly can,’ replied Marnie with a gulp. ‘The Pink Lady?’

  Herv was fascinated. ‘I have never seen it before. Wow, it’s amazing. I wouldn’t have believed.’

  The pink light faded to nothing yet they carried on watching, waiting for it to make a reappearance, but it didn’t.

  ‘Do you like ghost stories, Marnie? Ghost films?’

  Marnie’s warning flag shot up the pole. She suspected immediately where this could be going.

  ‘I can take them or leave them,’ she said, wrinkling up her nose.

  ‘There’s a cinema in Skipperstone . . .’

  ‘Anyway, I’d better get to bed, I think my walk has done the trick. Goodnight, Herv,’ said Marnie quickly and stood to go.

  ‘Oh, goodnight. Do you want me to walk you back?’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. Too harshly. ‘Thank you,’ she added in a softer tone.

  She was annoyed with herself then. He was only going to ask her to go to the bloody cinema with him, not propose marriage. God, she was ridiculous. But she knew what would happen and had to stop it from starting. They’d go out, he’d be kind, her starving heart would open up, fed by the morsels of his attentions. She’d fall hard and deep despite feeling that something wasn’t quite right because it never was, but she’d press the override switch and plough on, falling ever deeper and harder. Then the complication would start to show itself, because there always was one. Probably in this case that his heart was still full of his ex-wife, and then her world would come crashing down on top of her and she’d be capsized into a sea of heartbreak. Either that, or Ruby Sweetman would throw herself off a cliff and she’d be blamed for it all.

  No. No. No. No. No.

  HISTORY OF WYCHWELL BY LIONEL TEMPLE

  Contributions by Lilian Dearman.

  In 1844 Sir Rodney Dearman, a friend and drinking partner of Branwell Brontë, driven insane by syphilis, forced the parish priest to conduct a marriage ceremony i
n his church between himself and his prize stallion. Luckily Sir Rodney died before the marriage could be consummated. Though as Rodney was still married to Cordelia, mother of his five children, his actions could be, at best, described as bigamous.

  Chapter 19

  It was Marnie’s turn to go up to Lilian’s for lunch the next day. She hadn’t slept very well at all, but it was less to do with the heat and more to do with Herv Gunnarsen about to ask her if she wanted to go to the pictures. Although, thinking about it in bed, maybe she’d been a bit ahead of herself; what if he’d merely wanted to tell her that there was a horror film showing, and wasn’t proposing he take her to see it? In which case, she’d made a proper tit of herself. Anyway, whether she’d got it right or wrong, she’d probably scared him off for good with her Linford Christie sprint away from him. She was, therefore, quite relieved that he waved at her from across the slope of lawn when she approached the front door of the manor as if there was nothing untoward between them. She hadn’t murdered his ego, after all; she wouldn’t have wanted to do that. And, if he had been about to ask her out, she’d saved him from her blunt refusal by cutting him off at the pass, giving them both the opportunity to keep things platonic and safe and uncomplicated. It was for the best, really it was.

  Cilla was in the hallway filling up a vase with roses when she walked in.

  ‘Morning, Marnie,’ she smiled, full of beans.

  Marnie knew that when Cilla was happy, all was good with Lilian.

  ‘She’s waiting for you in the conservatory.’

  ‘Thank you, Cilla,’ she replied.

  But something wasn’t quite right, she could feel it as soon as she had stepped over the threshold. It was as if the manor had its own moods and they coloured the ambience. Marnie had grown to love the old house and its quirkiness. She loved the old gentleman’s smoking room that was now a snug where Lilian liked to listen to music, and the breakfast room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that made the most of the morning sunshine. She loved the tower and the library full of beautiful leather-bound volumes and hundreds of Lilian’s paperbacks and the magnificent drawing room full of Lilian’s precious broken-mended treasures. The manor’s personality was always very much in evidence, as if it were made up of layers of all its best times. It never felt cold or hostile and despite its size, Marnie knew why Lilian was happy to reside in it alone. But the manor was less like a house and more like a living thing with emotions (and yes, Marnie knew that was bonkers). Today, the manor felt worried. There was something threatening, an electric portent. Just as the skies outside were warning of thunder.