The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  In the parlour, where she was not allowed, Clementine ran a finger along each surface. The table that used to be polished. The rough green curtains, all dusty now along the hem. Christmas this year would be non-existent. The baby was early. Nothing was prepared. Her mother had been upstairs in bed making that horrible grunting sound for days now, the midwife coming and going and coming again. The women from the street had been coming and going too. Pies. Cold potatoes. Bottles of stout. And somewhere a paper bag full of oranges, if only Clementine knew where to look. They hadn’t even retrieved the old pram from the coal cellar where it lay abandoned, all covered in soot.

  Of course, Dorothea had been in bed for much longer than two days. Months, even. More than a year. Working her way through a drawerful of nightgowns, cotton and flannel, frills at throat and wrist. Sitting by her mother’s bedside each morning before school, Clementine had counted, hairbrush in hand, brushing and brushing and brushing. The strands of Dorothea’s hair rose like cobwebs, clinging to Clementine’s cardigan or attaching themselves to her skin. But Clementine didn’t care. She was just waiting for Dorothea to say her name once more.

  On the mantelpiece in the parlour the china cherub was still on display, all plump flesh and rosy cheeks. Clementine stood up on tiptoe now and touched her finger to the little white mark where the cherub’s thumb used to be. What would it be like to lose a thumb? She tucked her own thumb to her palm and waggled her four remaining fingers. Her hand looked odd when she turned it over. Like a mistake. She’d seen old men in the street with mistakes for hands when she was younger. Missing fingers and stumps for thumbs, sometimes missing arms or legs too. War wounds, her mother used to call them. But the men had been too old to be fighting in a war. Clementine crossed the road to avoid them if she could.

  The cherub was forlorn and neglected, dust gathered along the edges of all its pretty flowers. There should be holly poking out of it now that it was Christmas, small sprigs cut from the tree in the cemetery. Clementine used to go with Alfred to collect it, dragging the prickly branches home inside an old sheet. Together they would cover the mantelpiece and the tops of all the mirrors, Alfred lifting Clementine to the high places in his thick, stocky arms. When they were finished there would be red berries scattered across the house like a thousand miniature rubies. One year her father even strung up mistletoe with its tiny moonlike fruit. Then he had made Clementine kiss him, small lips pressed to a face full of prickles, the smell of earth and coal dust as she pushed her nose into his flesh.

  But Clementine knew that the holly would not be cut this year, even though the bushes were covered in a maze of scarlet berries sparkling in the frost. She had gone to look on her way home from school, stood up close against the forest of stiff green leaves until she felt them pressing through her skirt. She’d even held a finger to one green spike until it pierced her skin. A tiny crimson berry all of her own, growing on the tip.

  She rose now on her toes and pressed the little puncture wound against the cherub’s sliced-off thumb. A sharp prick of pain. A tiny thrill. And the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Clementine!’

  Clementine took her finger away and curled it up inside her cardigan sleeve. It was the midwife calling, fat and argumentative. Clementine had seen her with those bowls of water stained pink, sluicing them out in the scullery, bare forearms all florid. Clementine never wanted to have arms like those and she would make sure that she did not.

  She crouched between the table and the empty fireplace, making herself small so as not to be seen. There was a photograph there, hanging against the dark wallpaper. In it two children slept, their faces surrounded by curls, their lips two pouts. It smelled of dust here and of mice droppings scattered along the edge of the skirting board. Clementine waited and listened. She touched a fingertip to the photograph, one child after the other, felt the glass hard and cold on her wound once more. Then she took her finger away.

  Upstairs it wasn’t a boy, but Ruby. Ruby with her eyes so bright, squeezed out from between her mother’s reluctant thighs. Another little girl to join the older one downstairs, pushed out on a gush of fluid, ready to greet the world.

  Alfred smiled down at the small, writhing thing. Why was it not a son? He put a hand out to touch the child’s wrinkled face, those tiny clenched fists. There was a smear of blood beneath the baby’s eye and he wiped at it with his thumb, his nail black against the child’s bright skin.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’ Mrs Sprat pushed in with her towel and her cloths, scooping the baby up and handling it this way and that as though it was a pat of butter needing to be shaped. She cut through the thick, pulsing cord.

  Alfred looked at Dorothea. There was sweat all along her lip. Her eyes were like hollows surrounded by bone. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the midwife, wrapping the baby in a tight muslin square.

  ‘I mean my wife.’ Alfred moved to the top of the bed and laid a hand on Dorothea’s hair, soaked now and dark.

  ‘She’ll be fine.’ The midwife didn’t even look up. ‘Now what’s this one to be called?’

  But Alfred didn’t reply, for Dorothea was arching back in the bed, neck all taut. ‘Dorothea?’

  The grunting began again, urgent and guttural, right in Alfred’s ear. The midwife turned from the basket and came straight to the side of the bed, bending low over Dorothea’s stomach. ‘There’s another one coming.’

  ‘Another one?’ Alfred stood for a moment staring at the midwife. Then at Dorothea as she turned and writhed in the bed. Both of them were surprised. Twins again. One more spin of the dice for a boy. Alfred picked up his wife’s hand, grey against his own stained fingers. ‘Dorothea?’

  Dorothea rolled her eyes towards him then back, dark irises surrounded by white like a cow destined for slaughter. Her hair was stuck to her neck with sweat. She gripped at Alfred’s hand until he thought all his bones would crack. The grunting began again from deep inside her throat, her knees rigid, feet thrashing at the sheet.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Alfred tried to prise his fingers away as Dorothea crushed them tighter.

  But the midwife just pushed him aside as all of a sudden Dorothea let go. Her head flopped back. Her neck all slack. A long groan unwinding from her mouth as out came the next one, floppy and bloody, lying on the sheet like the afterbirth from a calf.

  Alfred stared at the strange creature, blue, almost pickled, curled on a sheet all stained with faeces and blood. Let it be a boy, he thought. The midwife rolled the baby over and wiped at its face. She unspooled the cord from its neck, picked it up by its ankles and dangled it over the bed.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she said.

  Then she delivered the slap.

  Later that same night ten-year-old Clementine looked down into the frayed basket, blanket with a satin trim tucked all around. ‘Hello, babies,’ she murmured. ‘Hello.’ In one hand she was holding the china cherub. In the other the remains of an orange, nothing now but a small pile of peel.

  Two babies stared up at her with unfocused eyes. Clementine hummed as she placed the china cherub on a table by the side of the basket. The babies had feet like the cherub, smooth and pink. Clementine imagined bathing their fat little bodies in the big tin bowl, lowering their wobbling heads down, down amongst the suds, small bubbles popping from their mouths like fish.

  She reached into the basket and touched her finger to each of the babies’ fluttering eyelids – one, two, three, four. The babies blinked at her in surprise, small limbs jerking. One of them has eyes like mine, Clementine thought, as she retrieved six little orange pips from her pocket and pushed them down the side of the crib. Difficult to resist.

  ‘Two again,’ sighed the midwife as she set about packing up her bag. Some women have all the troubles. She had already washed her arms in the scullery sink and scoured out all the bowls. And they weren’t bonny either, not like the last time. Well, one of them at least. The midwife rolled down her sleeves and buttoned her
white cuffs. They weren’t even the same. As different as chalk was from cheese compared to the ones that had gone before. It really was a pity.

  Alfred was talking to Dorothea, who lay limp as a discarded fish skin in the crumple of the bed. ‘Can you think of a name, Dotty? We need another name.’

  ‘A name,’ Dorothea murmured.

  ‘Aye, for the other one.’

  They’d only agreed on Ruby if it was a girl, named for Dorothea’s grandmother, long gone now. But Dorothea wasn’t even really in the room now. She was back inside a dream of another time instead, a lady with burnished hair whispering to her from a bright screen.

  Say it, darling, just say it.

  The prickle of smoke in her eyes and that jacket, rough and smelling of coal dust, pressed up against her face.

  Say it, darling, and I’ll be yours.

  Alfred turned to look at the midwife. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Barbara.’ The midwife was already putting on her thick blue coat.

  ‘Barbara then.’

  The midwife’s cheeks didn’t even flush when he said it. There were a lot of Barbaras on this patch already. All seconds or thirds. Sometimes even fourths. She grunted in Alfred’s direction as she did up her buttons. Some form of acknowledgement was required.

  ‘Aye,’ said Alfred. ‘That’ll do.’ He turned to the bed. ‘Barbara Walker,’ he said, touching Dorothea’s hand where it lay, grey and slack, on the cover.

  But Dorothea was gone, dancing somewhere across a strip of moonlit floor with a man’s rough face tight against her hair, her long, gleaming hair. Say it, darling, just say my name.

  ‘Dorothea?’

  By the time the midwife was ready to leave, Alfred was gripping the railings at the end of his wife’s bed, knuckles as white as Dorothea’s hair would become, voice thick with despair. ‘What’ll I do?’ he kept saying. ‘What’ll I do?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the midwife, as though she’d seen it all before (which she had).

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Alfred looked up at the midwife, then around the room at his limp wife and his oldest child in her darned cardigan. Then at his two new daughters lying in a basket covered by a blanket with a torn satin trim. How was it his life had come to this, he thought, sweeping his arm out in a fury of bemusement, clipping the china cherub and sending it to disaster along with them all.

  The cherub fell to the floorboards with a bump and a roll, little mouth pursed in surprise. Oh! One of its flowers cracked and split. One arm snapped off snip-snap above the elbow, the severed limb skittering somewhere into the dark. Alfred threw his hands to his head and cursed. The midwife stopped buttoning up her cuffs. Dorothea lay in the bed, oblivious. Clementine stared at the small china arm wedged between two floorboards beneath her parents’ bed.

  ‘Christ!’ said Alfred.

  ‘Say my name,’ said Dorothea.

  ‘I’ll put the word out,’ said the midwife (and she did).

  But Clementine didn’t say a thing.

  The midwife let herself out of the front door this time. She never had got the matron to reassign her, even though she’d asked a thousand times. Five years’ hard labour as far as she was concerned. She slid a little on the icy ground as she hurried away. Why was it, she wondered as she picked her way along the slippery street, that the pretty children never got named for her? Still, that first baby – the midwife gave a little shiver inside her thick coat. She had those strange eyes, just like the older sister. Startling, in an unwelcome kind of way.

  Mrs Sprat came to the end of the street, collar up against the threat of snow. In her pocket were six little orange pips, retrieved from down the side of the babies’ basket. Just waiting to choke the poor little things, God bless them and protect their little souls (which blessing Mrs Sprat knew they would need). As she turned the corner, soon to be swallowed herself by the gathering gloom, the midwife cast up a little prayer to whoever might be listening. Never let me have to return to the Walker house again.

  2011

  The Office for Lost People was impossible to find. It took Margaret several goes before she arrived at the correct place, lurking in a dip behind the railway station in the dead centre of town. Snow towered in man-made drifts each side of the entrance as she picked her way in. She was still wearing her inappropriate shoes, not having found a suitable substitute in the box room. Though it seemed unlikely, Barbara’s feet turned out to be much smaller than her own.

  The building was several storeys high, a palace of glass encasing a labyrinth of open-plan offices radiating towards the windows on every single floor. Receptionist. Personal Assistant. Manager of Administration. After thirty years grinding the mill of paperwork, Margaret understood the black hole that an office complex could become.

  Beneath her red, stolen coat the funeral outfit prevailed – fawn blouse and a corduroy skirt falling to mid calf, with the addition of a cardigan wrestled from a bin bag, brown and baggy at the pockets, the sleeves much longer than Margaret’s arms and hands combined. The clothes weren’t pretty, or even becoming, but at that moment they were all Margaret had that might be suitable. Even so, as she made her way towards this palace of death, she decided to keep her coat on.

  ‘This lady’s for you, Janie.’ The girl who escorted Margaret up through layer upon layer of open plan couldn’t have been more thinly clad if she had been living on a beach. A diaphanous blouse, almost transparent. Fishnets with holes ripped in them. A skirt that barely skimmed the very tops of her thighs. And yet she was suitably dressed in a way that Margaret wasn’t. For the Office for Lost People turned out to be as hot as a furnace, rather like the one into which its clients were eventually despatched. The girl had black lines drawn onto her face instead of eyebrows and three miniature silver skulls in her ear. Perfect for Bereavement Services. That was what Margaret thought.

  Janie Gribble, Funerals Officer (amongst other things), was wearing an angora wool sweater in a shade that could only be described as ‘bubblegum’, with nails and lips to match. She looked as though she belonged in Births rather than being responsible for burning a whole city’s worth of bodies to clinker month after month. She conducted an interview, if one could call it that, just to prove that here too in Edinburgh some sort of process prevailed.

  ‘Tell me a little about yourself, Margaret.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Margaret looked at the delicate gold chain undulating across Janie’s breastbone and began to regret the discarding of her previous life over London landfill. A black suit and a shirt with ruffles down the front might have worked wonders here. ‘I used to work in finance,’ she said, tucking both feet out of sight to hide the salty tidemarks rising inexorably across the toes.

  Janie Gribble frowned, a small crease on the smooth sea of her forehead. ‘Finance?’

  Expense accounts. Bonuses. Three-course lunches. A black car with windows designed for one-way viewing only. After which, champagne in the bath. Margaret knew that finance was no longer the recommendation it had once been. But what else could she say? She coughed instead, the cough of the apologist. ‘Spreadsheets. Memos. Data management.’ All gone now.

  ‘And your particular skills?’ Across the desk the gold chain settled into the dip at the base of Janie’s throat, a small, glittering target.

  ‘Well . . .’ Margaret gave a little shrug. Where to begin? A tendency to kleptomania. Life-and-death decisions made on the spin of a coin. Then there was her ability to keep drinking when everyone else had stopped. No wonder her old job had ended in the way that it had – abruptly, with a solicitor’s letter attached.

  Margaret flicked her tongue over her front teeth in case of red wine stains. She’d put away a whole bottle yesterday evening courtesy of the leftovers from a twenty-pound note unfurled from the pocket of a drunk man who’d leaned up against her on the overnight bus. Who Dares Wins. Although Margaret knew even then that in the grand game of life she had dared and lost. She’d hidden the evidence in the bottom of the box-room wa
rdrobe, having discovered Barbara’s own forest of empty bottles taking up the space beneath the kitchen sink. Then, as she lay on the plastic lilo in the darkness, she’d pondered what else she might share with her mother besides the ability to drink.

  Janie gave a little cough, polite but insistent, and Margaret touched her own throat for a moment. Sacking because of threats to the boss, not to mention money siphoned away due to a lifestyle which had always been beyond her, were not the kind of items on a CV that Margaret wanted broadcast. So she decided to go with the answer she had always given her mother when Barbara’s questions about what she got up to in London became too persistent to ignore. ‘I’m very good at admin,’ she said. Her whole life reduced to a five-letter word. And an abbreviated one at that.

  It turned out to be the right answer, however. ‘Excellent.’ Janie glanced at the form in her hand. ‘We’re looking for someone who is good with paperwork.’ She put a large tick in a box. ‘And you know Mrs Maclure?’

  ‘Mrs Maclure?’ Margaret crossed and recrossed her legs, sweaty now behind the knees.

  ‘I thought . . .’ The small crease appeared again.

  Margaret understood at once. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘A friend of my mother’s.’

  Janie beamed. Neat teeth, no red wine stains. ‘Everyone seems to know Mrs Maclure, don’t they.’

  It wasn’t a question. It was the Edinburgh Way once more.

  Back at home, Margaret tried to explain to her mother. ‘I’ll be a sort of investigator.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘A sort of assistant.’

  ‘What, wiping bums and that?’

  ‘A sort of finder of families for dead people.’ The only way Margaret could describe it that made any sense. ‘For people who’ve died on their own without any relatives to take them on.’

  ‘Aye, well, there’ll be a lot of that nowadays. All those old people left to rot.’ Barbara tipped back the last of her rum and glared at Margaret through the bottom of her glass. ‘Who’s your client, anyway?’