The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  ‘Bibles,’ Janie had elucidated. ‘Perhaps medals.’ That was what men left behind. Also leases and paybooks, bank statements and all sorts of other useful things. Women, on the other hand, left jewellery and that was pretty much that. ‘If you find any,’ she continued, ‘we have to send it to UH in Glasgow.’

  ‘UH?’ There was a whole new jargon to the world of the (not quite) dead and buried that Margaret had never imagined she might become acquainted with.

  ‘Ultimus haeres, the last heir,’ Janie said. ‘It’s part of the Crown Office. If there are no relatives, they use the proceeds from the estate to pay for the funeral. It’s all about ownerless goods.’

  Ownerless goods. That was how Margaret had felt about herself as the life she worked so hard for in London vanished in a matter of months.

  ‘And if there aren’t any relatives . . .’ Janie turned back to her computer as though that was a matter of no particular consequence. ‘Then you will make the funeral arrangements yourself.’

  Now that she was inside Mrs Walker’s flat, Margaret knew that it might well come to that. For there was nothing of any particular interest that wasn’t already in the police report. No birth certificate lurking unnoticed in a drawer, no proof of marriage folded beneath a pile of clothes. There were no bank statements, no letters or postcards. No photographs of children or any other human being. Not even of a dog.

  The only heirloom Mrs Walker appeared to have left behind was an orange on a blue china plate, decaying now just like its owner, collapsed from the inside out. Margaret was surprised the police hadn’t thrown it away when they first broke in. But then they hadn’t thrown away the peas either. So perhaps tidying up was her responsibility after all, now that the body had been removed. One thing after another tossed into a black bin liner until all that remained was a slim brown folder full of paper. Nothing to smell or hold on to. No weft or weave. After all, Janie had made it clear that the police had other things to deal with – the stuff of life rather than the detritus of death.

  In the bedroom, nineteen empty bottles were lined up around the wall. Whisky. The water of life. Though not for Mrs Walker, not any more. Just like her, the old lady had been a bedtime drinker. Not hot chocolate, but spirits, one glass after another until her liver had taken on the consistency of fish paste.

  The underwear in the chest of drawers was as described – an old person’s. Margaret took it out piece by piece, as though she could take Mrs Walker out piece by piece, then put her back together again more whole this time. Once she’d finished, she thrust her hands to the back of each drawer, just in case, only to find a couple of rusty safety pins and a scattering of nail trimmings. Also some sort of nut, dusty and grey, something indecipherable scratched on its shell. Margaret took the nut and popped it into her pocket. She was determined to come away with something, even if she had no idea what it meant.

  In the wardrobe a coat hung, quiet and still in the darkness, just waiting to be filled. It was red, like Margaret’s, but darker, the cuffs worn thin. Just like everything else in the flat, it had seen better days. Margaret dipped a hand into each of the pockets, hoping for treasure. But there was nothing except for two or three little pieces of orange peel, stiff and curled.

  On the floor of the wardrobe was a plastic carrier bag, and inside that, a surprise. A simple shift dress, high neckline, no sleeves, elegantly cut. As Margaret lifted it from the bag the fabric slithered and shimmered as though drawn from the sea. A few tatty sequins winked along the hem like the flicker of fish eyes. It was a young woman’s dress, something from a whole other era. Definitely not the kind of thing an old woman would fit into, with her thick joints and low-slung breasts. Then again, Barbara was old and her box-room wardrobe was stuffed full of clothes she couldn’t possibly squeeze into any more either. So perhaps there was nothing unusual in that.

  In fact, the more Margaret moved around Mrs Walker’s flat, the more it reminded her of Barbara’s box room. A space full of leftover items from leftover times. Only the other night Margaret had started to go through the wardrobe in the hope that she might find something more edifying to wear than a mid-length corduroy skirt and a blouse in a distressing shade of fawn. But so far all she’d found were trousers with elasticated waists and a blouse made of chiffon that Margaret knew would rip at the seams the moment she tried it on.

  The blouse had been from another era too, small pleats circling its collar, tiny buttons running up the back. Pale stains of sweat from long ago had spread beneath each arm. It smelt of tobacco and loam, the slightest trace of linseed oil lingering in its folds. It was just the kind of thing Margaret would have loved to wear, if her arms had not got too fat with disappointment and age.

  There was one thing in her mother’s box room that had proved useful, however. A fox. Dead. Transformed into a stole. The fur was all fusty, the head eaten away by mange. But still, as Margaret draped the fox around her neck, for a moment she had been transformed too.

  Now, in the absent surroundings of Mrs Walker’s flat, Margaret adjusted the two tiny paws tucked in beneath her red, stolen coat. She hadn’t bothered to ask Barbara where the fox had come from, or if she could take it for herself. If her mother didn’t want to admit to any dead relatives, why would she bother about a dead animal? She had asked Barbara something else though, with which Margaret was certain she would be able to help. Suffer little children to come unto me . . .

  ‘Matthew 19, verses 14 to 16,’ her mother had replied with a rapid blink of her papery eyelids.

  ‘What’s the rest of it?’ Margaret asked.

  Barbara had begun to cough then, a prolonged attack, frowning and waving Margaret away when she tried to help. ‘The Ten Commandments,’ she declared once she managed to regain her breath, chest heaving like she didn’t have long for this world. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’ She rasped out the latter like some sort of injunction, even though they both knew Margaret had already failed at that. Margaret had stared down at the small block of prose on Mrs Walker’s news-sheet, trying to remember the rest of the list. Murder and adultery. Loving thy neighbour as thyself. But Barbara wasn’t finished yet. ‘Thou shalt not,’ she declared finally, breathing out her message as though it was the ultimate lesson by which one should live one’s life.

  In the gloom of Mrs Walker’s bedroom, Margaret coiled the emerald dress back into its plastic bag. She was starting to understand why Janie emphasized paperwork. Whatever she thought of her client’s few belongings, they weren’t going to be any help in answering the important questions.

  Name.

  Date of birth.

  Where Mrs Walker came from before she ended up here.

  There was nothing in the flat but junk, just like the things Margaret had slept amongst for the past two weeks. Old suitcases. Heaters with broken dials. A wardrobe full of shoes too narrow for her feet. The stuff of life; it really was insignificant after all.

  Except . . .

  She found them on her way out – washed up against the skirting board amongst another drift of ash from a long-dead cigarette. Scraps of paper covered in pencil marks with the shaky demeanour of the elderly. Paperwork, at last.

  Margaret gathered up the small torn pieces and carried them home in her pocket, triumphant. Two bus journeys later, no black car waiting for her at The Court, and she spread them out across Barbara’s kitchen table, moving them around like a game of pairs until they made some sense.

  Moyra.

  Ann.

  Rose.

  And Mary.

  A name for her client at last?

  1953

  ‘Ruby! Ruby!’

  Down in the bowels of a narrow London house, seventeen-year-old Barbara called from the bottom of the stairs towards a room on the highest, furthest floor. It was morning. Eight thirty a.m., and a million spectators expected on the Mall. Another coronation, but for a queen this time.

  ‘Ruby! Are you ready yet?’

  Nothing to do but prepare. Scrub eve
rything clean from the top to the bottom, then once more for luck. Barbara was ready, of course, and had been for weeks. Kitchen chairs all lined up in the hall, waiting to go out into the street. Plates and cups stacked up along the pantry shelf. Bottles of ale for the men. Tea for the women. Three kinds of cake. Sandwiches by the dozen on soft white bread. There were buns with raisins. Biscuits sprinkled with sugar. Crisps with their blue screws of salt. A feast in the making after all the years they had done without. Or enough supplies for an expedition to the slopes of Everest, where even now men with goggles and crampons were wedging themselves into the ice.

  All over London the ragged remains of a long-drawn-out war were being swept away as the city began to live once more. Every day huge holes appeared on street corners in place of the rubble, iron skeletons growing out of the shattered ground to tower over grey streets. Every day men and machines churned the muddy surface of the earth where once there had been nothing but craters. Every day there was the clack-clack-clack of a million typewriter keys rising and falling. The scratch of pens on blueprints, of deals being made and lost.

  All over London people were restless, moving here and there, taking themselves from one place to another. Men surging through rented bedsits. Women hauling babies (and all their other belongings) in deep, carnivorous prams. Small children crawled like flies over old bombsites, in and out of every crack and crevice. Young couples lingered on street corners pretending they had all the time in the world. The whispers and moues of love percolated from the underground, curling to the surface bathed in the smell of jazz.

  London, it seemed, was rising, everything washed clean.

  Amongst all that was new, the old remained too. Number 14 Elm Row, still standing tall and narrow in the middle of the street, all its secrets firmly intact. Outside, the house was in need of a clean coat of paint and a set of replacement railings, its grimy windows and walls requiring a good scrub-down. Inside there were cracks as thick as a man’s thumb between skirting and floorboards, chunks of glass wedged in to capture any movement before it was all too late. In the bedrooms, sheets were cut in two and turned outside-edge to outside-edge before being sewn up the middle. The smell of cheap boiling-meat rose through all the rooms. Despite Mrs Penny’s continued good efforts, everything was just a bit worn down.

  But still, there were signs of change here, too.

  In the garden a tomato plant grew out of the gravel. In the scullery there was a machine in which to wash clothes. In the kitchen there was a shiny metal cupboard where food could be stored – powdered custard and boxes of suet. Eggs, all fresh, six at a time. On the dresser, next to an old tea caddy, there was a jar of lemon sherbets for Mrs Penny to suck while she did the ironing and a bread bin containing Paris buns from the baker’s van. And in the corner of the kitchen by the large earthenware sink, a Potterton boiler – Mrs Penny’s pride and joy.

  But it was in the parlour where the most change had come. Still with its heavy green curtains. Still with its fat cherub, preening and armless in the middle of the mantelpiece. But now the photograph of two sleeping children had vanished. The heavy furniture had been pushed back and covered by white sheets. The dark walls washed down with distemper. A rope had been slung across one corner of the room and draped with a bedspread to provide an alcove in which a person could undress. The sideboard had been cleared of everything but a series of enamel bowls: blue rims, white insides, towels stacked next to them in two piles. The worn cover of the chaise longue was shrouded in plastic sheeting ready for a woman in trouble to lie down on. And by the door, hidden away so no one might see, there was a discreet metal bucket with a fitted lid, contents waiting to be sloshed out in the scullery sluice when the time came. It was the second Penny Family Business, in full swing now the war was long gone. No longer catering to soldiers – blackmail and cigarette lighters, a girl whose hair twirled all about her face – but for those who had fallen in another sort of way. Tony’s latest suggestion as to how they could all help make ends meet.

  ‘Ruby! Ruby!’

  Barbara called again as she climbed steadily to the highest, furthest floor. Barbara never had visited a farm, but her arms were as thick as a milkmaid’s now, fresh from squeezing the teat. She was the working type, always had been. Whereas it was typical of Ruby to lie long in bed.

  On the top landing two closed doors faced each other, one belonging to Barbara, one to the sister who no longer was. Clementine. Girl of hair that twirled. Lover of oranges, of promises not kept. Clementine. Over the hills and far away. Or somewhere much further than that. Gone for nearly ten years now, nothing left behind except a charred ID card stamped with the word, DECEASED.

  And Ruby, of course, sleeping in Clementine’s abandoned bed. Lying in state now amongst Clementine’s rumpled sheets, hair thrown out in a tousle as dark as Clementine’s was once fair. Underwear and kirby grips scattered on the floor where once Clementine’s stockings had lain in small pools. Amongst face powder in pancake form and lipstick worn to a stub. Small palettes of mascara smoothed down with spit. Before she knocked on her remaining sister’s door, Barbara ran two hot palms across the back of her newly pressed frock, all flared skirt and nice printed pattern, ready for the celebrations to come. It was damp outside, a soft rain falling, but Barbara could already feel sweat gathering beneath her breasts. She had sewn the dress herself, as taught by Mrs Penny, but still the bodice felt just a little bit too tight. The front of the dress was covered by an apron, which she smoothed down too before she lifted her hand to knock. Be prepared. That was the motto. For behind the door Ruby was surely still sleeping. And Barbara was certain her sister wouldn’t be wearing any clothes.

  Out amongst the scaffolding of post-war London, fully dressed for some time since, Ruby Penny hurried through the streets. A jewel of a thing, seventeen and counting. Tony’s little gemstone. A little gemstone of her own inside now.

  ‘I can do you a special rate,’ the woman had said on the phone. ‘Seeing as how we’re in the same business. But it will have to be first thing. I don’t want to be the only person in town to miss the main event.’

  The queen of course, the queen. Everybody’s darling on this particular day.

  ‘You’ll need to bring your own change of underwear and a spare towel, just in case. But of course you know all that. Shall we say nine?’

  Silk and velvet. Canadian ermine. Embroidered satin gown, Ruby recited as she ran, pushing her way through the coronation crowds, trying to memorize the details of the ceremony to come, should anyone ask later where she had been.

  From west to east, from north to south, people were heading towards the centre of the town. Just like her they wore their Sunday best, good shoes polished, hats firmly in place. They carried small flags, all red, white and blue, their arms laden with blankets, baskets full of sandwiches and flasks. Children of all shapes and sizes milled and called, laughing and pushing, getting in the way.

  Ruby twisted and turned into any gap she could find. ‘Excuse me. So sorry.’

  She wished she had Clementine’s little suitcase with her right now, the one her sister used to keep on top of the wardrobe in the hope of somewhere other than this. If she had, Ruby could have held it out in front of her, parting all comers, pressing forward like a mermaid at the prow of a ship.

  ‘So sorry. Excuse me.’

  Inside, a set of new linen, a set of silk slips, a set of pristine knickers all enclosed by blue-and-white-checked paper, a new beginning just waiting to bloom.

  Instead it was raining and the suitcase had vanished many years before, just like her sister; gone forever to the promised land, never to return. Shoved into a basket were Ruby’s towel and her spare underwear, grey from endless washing in that cold earthenware sink. Her change of clothes was hidden in the bottom, covered by a tatty blanket with a torn satin trim, as though she too was carrying sandwiches and a flask instead of one pair of knickers, a skirt and a blouse made out of chiffon, with small pleats looping around the neck. />
  She’d risen early, six thirty a.m.; plenty of time to splash cold water on her face in the scullery sink before anyone else came down. She’d put on her smartest skirt and jumper and over that a jacket with three big buttons on the front. Already she was beginning to sweat. Despite the rain, the weather was warm and muggy beneath the smirr, moisture gathering under Ruby’s armpits as she shoved her way through the crowd. Her hair clung to her scalp, not washed for a few days now, in the knowledge that it would need to be washed and washed and washed again once the whole thing was done. Having a child was one thing. Getting rid of a child was something that might take time to rinse away.

  At last the Underground came within Ruby’s reach. She pushed her way down into the dark stuffy tunnel, reciting the names as she waited on the platform for the train to come. Cunningham, Tovey, Noah, Tedder. All the queen’s horses. Eisenhower, Tipperary, McCreery, Snow White. Ruby had memorized the entire coronation service, just in case. Including the queen’s own outfit and the eight greys that would pull her coach.

  Back in Elm Row all the silver cutlery was laid out on the kitchen table in front of Mrs Penny, ready for the feast. Twelve forks. Twelve knives. Twelve dessert spoons. Twelve silver teaspoons with little apostles soldered to the ends.

  Except . . .

  However often Mrs Penny counted, two of the spoons were gone.

  ‘There should be twelve.’ Mrs Penny touched each apostle spoon where it nestled inside its cocoon of purple silk, scowling and then counting again as though it might make a difference. ‘My mother gave me this set. She’d be very disappointed they’re not all here.’

  Barbara frowned from the other side of the table where she stood polishing cutlery with a tea towel. Even now she could not imagine Mrs Penny with a mother. Someone who rocked you in their lap. Someone who sang as they laid you down to sleep. Then again, she thought, as she put down one fork and picked up another, nothing in this house was ever as it ought to be. She had never known a mother who did those things either. And as far as Barbara knew, there should be eleven apostle spoons left, not ten.