The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  ‘Confidential.’ There had to be at least one thing Margaret could keep to herself now that she was living back at home.

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  And Margaret was determined that she would. But she held out an olive branch anyway. This was the first proper conversation she’d had with Barbara since she’d returned. ‘I have to clarify a couple of facts, that’s all. Date of birth etc.’

  ‘So it’s a short-term thing then.’

  ‘Yes, well . . .’ A quick exit or a new mattress. Margaret hadn’t yet decided which might be the more desirable.

  ‘It’s just, I might need the room,’ Barbara mumbled into her glass. She seemed as keen as Margaret that no new roots be put down any time soon.

  ‘That’s fine.’ Margaret tried not to be offended that the mother she hadn’t seen for years seemed so keen to have her out. ‘It shouldn’t take me long to track down any next of kin.’

  And there it was again, that tiny wraith flitting across Barbara’s face like a spirit hurrying from its grave.

  ‘Children. Brothers or sisters. Cousins. That kind of thing.’

  Barbara had never had any next of kin herself, other than Margaret of course. ‘Adopted,’ she once said. ‘Dead before you were born.’ As though that explained the total absence of any sort of family records, either the living or the paperwork kind.

  ‘It’s for the money,’ Margaret said. ‘Someone has to pay.’

  ‘Aye well, every penny counts.’ Barbara lifted her glass to her mouth even though it was empty. ‘And what happens if you don’t find any next of kin?’

  Margaret couldn’t help but notice how her mother’s fingers trembled on the tumbler. ‘Then the council will sort it. Decide whether to bury or burn.’

  Janie was overburdened. ‘There’s a bit of a waiting list.’

  Lots of bodies. Festive season. Mortuary stacked high.

  ‘The basic searches have been done and now we just need a quick result.’

  All the paperwork backed up because of snow, because of ice, because of too many days off over Christmas and New Year. Because of general lackadaisical attitudes. Because of illness caused by inebriation or cold. The inability of a person to come through from Glasgow. The person from Glasgow having got trapped up north. Or just the inconsideration of lots of lonely people dying at this time of year.

  ‘The police can’t help, there’s been a murder.’ Janie grinned then, a brief parting of frosted bubblegum lips.

  ‘Sorry?’ It was Margaret’s turn to frown now.

  ‘Taggart.’ For a moment Janie sparkled under the modulated strip lights.

  But Margaret had been south for too long. ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’ Janie turned and tapped something into her keyboard. ‘It’s just that everyone is very, very busy at this time of year.’

  More for less, thought Margaret. ‘I understand,’ she said. The usual post-Christmas, post-New Year glut of cutbacks, holidays and cold weather. Just like any other job, in any other town.

  ‘You’ll be attached to the Crown Office via us – a sort of temporary arrangement. They ask us sometimes, when no one else can help. Between you and me, they fear another Mrs Johnson.’

  ‘Mrs Johnson?’

  A spot of pink appeared in the very centre of each of Janie’s cheeks, bright amongst the pastel shades. She hurried on. ‘There is no salary, or benefits of any kind. The cuts, you know. We’re all on a pay freeze.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Margaret. Who wasn’t on a pay freeze, so much as a pay Armageddon.

  ‘We’ll pay on receipt of an invoice for services rendered.’ Janie tapped on her front teeth with a biro. ‘But no expenses.’ She was particularly firm on that.

  Margaret nodded. Hard times indeed.

  ‘Who was Mrs Johnson?’ Margaret called after her mother, who had levered herself out of her chair and disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘Mrs who?’ Barbara clattered away in the cupboards.

  ‘Johnson,’ Margaret shouted above the din.

  ‘Oh, her.’ Barbara shuffled back into the living room clutching her glass with three fingers of rum now sloshing up the sides. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘For five years.’ Barbara lowered herself into the armchair again, thighs touching armrests on both sides. She was still wearing the quilted dressing gown, threads dragging from the hem.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When they found her. She’d been dead for five years.’

  Frozen to the mattress, nothing but a few strands of hair spread out where once her head had been.

  ‘She’d turned into a mummy.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You heard.’

  And Margaret revised her vision to include leathery hands and feet, the stiff creep of blackened skin. ‘How did they know it was five years then?’ she said.

  ‘Most recent post through the door and the oldest. Counted the years in between.’ Barbara sucked some rum up between her teeth. ‘It’s amazing what you can learn from junk.’

  Which perhaps explained why nothing in Barbara’s box room had ever been thrown out.

  ‘What about her neighbours?’ Margaret said. ‘Didn’t they miss her?’

  ‘The florist downstairs mentioned that she hadn’t seen her for a while.’

  ‘And the electricity? Or her council tax?’

  ‘Direct debit.’ Barbara put her tumbler down on the table by her chair and picked up the remote control. ‘That’s what happens when you automate.’

  So Edinburgh had hidden depths after all. As neglectful and careless as any other sort of town, despite its elegant facade.

  ‘Did you go to her funeral?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘It was before my time.’

  Margaret tried to imagine any time that had been before her mother, but could not.

  ‘Anyway – ’ Barbara shifted in her seat – ‘they didn’t have the rota then.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It got set up later.’

  ‘Because of Mrs Johnson?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Outside after the interview (a drop of five floors in a silent lift to the slush of a car park she didn’t recognize from when she’d gone in) Margaret understood that it all came down to money. The pursuit of it. The need of it. The loss of it. The lack. She’d looked up the word ‘indigent’ at the local library before she went to the interview.

  A needy person.

  That was what it said. Which seemed to Margaret rather a good description of herself.

  Somebody had to pay, even when you were dead, and it wasn’t going to be the state if the state could find someone else. Every penny counts. Wasn’t that what Barbara always said? Especially when there were no pennies left. Austerity Britain. Margaret had been feeling its chilly winds blowing through her bones for some time now.

  Down in the hidden car park amongst wet piles of ice, Margaret opened up the slim brown folder Janie Gribble had given her along with the job. The folder was empty except for a three-page police report saying nothing untoward had happened and a letter from Janie confirming payment of an invoice for services rendered should Margaret get a result. The amount wasn’t exactly a fortune. But it was enough for a quick exit should a quick exit be required. For a moment the prospect of London rose before Margaret like a flame. Then she saw again the look that had crossed Barbara’s face when she realized it was Margaret at her front door rather than some other spectre. Relief. Of a sort. If only for a second. So perhaps there was a reason why the lucky coronation penny had fallen to heads after all.

  Margaret’s client turned out to be an old lady too. One more of the neglected, the lonely, the misplaced, the lost. Margaret’s heart gave a small pitter-patter of recognition. She felt an affinity with her client already and they hadn’t even met.

  There was nothing in the folder to suggest why her client had exited in the way that she had. In a solitary ro
om, in a solitary flat. Hair stuck to the back of an armchair. In fact there was nothing in the folder that gave any indication of who Margaret’s client was at all.

  ‘All we need to confirm is Full Name . . .’ Janie had said.

  Nothing to say when she was born.

  ‘. . . Date of Birth.’

  Where she came from.

  ‘. . . Place of Birth, if possible.’

  Or what she believed in.

  ‘Religion. Plus any family, of course.’

  All Margaret had was a surname, Walker, and an appendage, Mrs, that might or might not have been correct. Mrs Walker. Once here. Now gone. Lost to the second coldest winter on record.

  Janie had signed Margaret’s offer letter with bubbles over the is instead of dots. ‘What we want is paperwork.’ She had been very particular about that. ‘Everything else is irrelevant.’ She held out the folder to Margaret by way of dismissal.

  ‘But where should I start?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘You should start in the mortuary,’ Janie said. ‘They uncover all sorts there.’

  1933

  The party was to be in the garden if the weather was fine.

  ‘Thirty-three, like the year. A grand age to be.’ Eight-year-old Clementine watched as her mother laughed, hair like pale fire lifting in the breeze.

  ‘What if it’s wet?’ said Alfred, pausing for a moment in his task of shovelling dirt.

  ‘We’ll pray for sun.’ Dorothea bent to her fledgling flowers, wilting and flat. Yet another failed attempt to conjure magic from the shallow river-gravel beds.

  Clementine looked up to the grey sky from her own small patch of earth, gritty and full of broken bits of china. She had prayed once before, at the christening of the twins over three years ago. Little Alfie and little Dottie, draped in linen and lace, knitted bootees tied with white ribbons around their soft white flesh. ‘Oh, how lovely they are,’ all the guests had murmured. ‘Bright as the promise of a new day,’ before they had knelt to pray too.

  Down on small round knees, crouched in a pew, Clementine had prayed for shoes with button fastenings. ‘Please, Lord, please.’ Though she had known, even then, that she should have been praying for the souls of the twins. It hadn’t worked, anyway. Three years on, and she was still confined to boots.

  At the end of the service, as if to make up for her bad thoughts, Clementine had stayed in her pew staring up at the chapel window when everyone else had been gathered around the twins.

  ‘Little angels!’

  ‘Little dolls!’

  High at the front, all criss-crossed with trails of lead, the window had been a blaze of emerald and gold and red. Clementine couldn’t help but notice that in the glass all the children went barefoot. Suffer little children, it said, to come unto me. But as far as Clementine could tell, the children seemed happy enough.

  The priest came by, picking up hymn books. ‘It’s pretty, eh?’ Reached out to place a hand on the top of Clementine’s head.

  Clementine slid sideways, out from under his touch. ‘Where are they going?’ Her voice rose like a small bird’s into the cool arc of the empty chapel.

  ‘Why, child . . .’ the priest had said. ‘To the promised land, of course.’

  Outside now in the back garden of the tall, narrow house, the first spot of rain fell onto the bare curve of Clementine’s neck. Alfred turned his face to the heavy sky, dirty hands on dirty hips. ‘I’m going in,’ he said. ‘To light the stove.’

  ‘All right,’ said Dorothea, abandoning the flowers she had cherished only a moment before. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Clementine looked back at the dark patch of ground that was meant to be hers and drew a rough pattern into the earth with a broken twig. A stick girl in a triangular skirt. Oh my darling. Then she scratched the picture out. She watched her parents disappear through the back door, Dorothea’s long fingers slipped inside Alfred’s fist. Clementine knew she could remain in the garden for as long as she liked, crouching in the mud. Even if she ended up filthy. Feet and hands all black. Her parents never did instruct her, unless it concerned the twins.

  Another drop of rain fell from the heavens, a dark stain on Clementine’s pale head. She touched a finger to where it had landed.

  Upstairs she knew the twins would be stirring, ready to rouse like two daisies cleansed by a shower of spring rain. Two faces bleary with sleep and the warmth of a shared blanket peering out from a high window, rubbing their faces on the backs of plump hands. Fingers tapping and scraping at the glass. ‘Clemmie! Clemmie! Clemmie!’ Ready to crawl and to clutch. To run pitter-patter all over the house in their soft leather shoes.

  But Clementine could run too. From the front door to the back. From the top floor to the cellar. From one bedroom to another. Away, away, away. From stubby, grasping fingers and little pitter-patter feet. To hide in the cool passageway of the pantry with its meat safe and its jars. In the scullery with its copper. And the coal-hole under the street. There she would crouch in the dark, black dust clinging to the hem of her skirt, listening for two pairs of feet as they pitter-pattered outside. Calling to them in a whisper, ‘This way, this way!’ Watching for eight fat fingers and two fat thumbs to come crawling around the edge of a door. Then leaping out, shrieking like the devil she knew herself to be, before running off once more as they tumbled into the grime.

  In the garden she would leave them lying on the small patch of manicured grass, while she disappeared. Two toddlers with golden hair, rolling on the lawn. She had taught them to count. One. Two. Three. Four. All the way to a thousand. Just like Alfred had once taught her. She’d hide amongst the undergrowth, surrounded by the crawl of insects and the tickle of long grass, silent and still, until they couldn’t wait any longer. Then they’d come running. ‘Clemmie! Clemmie! Clemmie!’ Trying to find her latest den.

  ‘Clementine. The twins are up.’ Dorothea’s call had an edge to it, like the blade of a pair of silver scissors. She had been in a bad temper for weeks now, brushing and brushing her hair as if to brush it all out. Clementine had no idea what she had done wrong.

  She crouched down further in her current favourite nest, knees to chin, hidden from all who might try to search. The far end of the garden was an overgrown, jungly sort of place, a wasteland of couch grass and brambles, tangles of ancient raspberry canes and a single forbidden tree. Here, Clementine hollowed out one secret place after another. Nests fashioned from dead grasses. Hidey-holes dug from the earth. She buried treasure in amongst the nettles. Dorothea’s bobby pins. Alfred’s waistcoat buttons. A small china arm rescued from between two floorboards beneath her parents’ bed. Also a knitted bootee laced with white ribbons, buried deep in the dirt.

  The rain began to spatter, dripping from the leaves on the trees above, sliding from the bushes, tall grasses bent low in the wet.

  ‘Clementine!’ Alfred shouted from the back door, throat rough with ash from the laying of the fire. ‘Come and play with your brother and sister when you’re told.’

  But still Clementine waited, down in a hunch, counting as Alfred had taught her. One elephant, two elephant, all the way to a thousand. It always took them a long time to search.

  The day of the party, the sun shone. Clementine had been praying for good weather every day for a week. This time it had worked.

  Out in the garden there was a table covered by a cloth and every piece of Dorothea’s favourite tea set, white and gold; a teapot garlanded with small china flowers dancing around the rim. The table was laden with good things to eat, everything on the never-never, but tasting all the better for that. There was a plate piled with scones, studded with cherries. Jam gleaming inside a small blue saucer. A bowl full of cream whipped into peaks like the snow on the Alps. Clementine had already stuck her finger into that and licked off the results.

  There were small cakes topped with glistening icing.

  ‘Fairy cakes, for my little fairies,’ Dorothea had declared as she put them out.

  Sandwi
ches cut into finger-sized lengths.

  ‘Dainties for my little darlings.’

  A bowl of summer berries, sprinkled with sugar.

  ‘Precious jewels for my little gemstones.’

  And oranges, peeled and segmented, laid out in a circle on a wide china plate.

  From the middle landing of the tall, narrow house Clementine stood and watched as her mother dressed for the tumult of guests she was expecting. Dorothea moved to and fro, languid in the heat, naked except for a pair of faded knickers draped around her hips. Alfred stood behind the tall mirror watching his wife.

  ‘I could get a passage to America,’ Alfred was saying. ‘There’s plenty of work over there.’

  Dorothea held up a dress covered in pink sprigs. ‘How about this one?’

  ‘The promised land, that’s what they call it.’ And Alfred laughed his infectious laugh.

  ‘Or this?’ Dorothea draped a length of tatty chiffon around her neck.

  ‘There’s a fortune to be made if you’re prepared to risk it.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Dorothea plucked a pale-blue wrap from the bed and twisted it through her hair.

  ‘You know we have to do something.’

  Dorothea dropped the wrap to the floor and picked up a slip instead, all rippled and frayed around the edges. ‘Can’t you get another job?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve tried, but it’s hard. Everything’s difficult right now.’

  Dorothea raised her slender arms and let the slip slither over her head, long strands of hair rising with the static. ‘What about the children? We can’t leave them behind.’

  Alfred held open the cotton frock with the pink sprigs. As Dorothea stepped inside he pulled it up over her thighs and hips and the swell of her breasts. ‘We may have to at the start,’ he said, hooking the thin straps over her shoulders, then lowering his face to the hollow of Dorothea’s breastbone. ‘It wouldn’t be for long.’

  ‘How long?’ Dorothea’s fingers lingered on the curve of her stomach as she buttoned the dress all the way up the front.