The artist, a man with a half-grown beard and old-fashioned shoes, stood by Mr Nye’s side. He was only young, but he liked to pretend that he knew much more than he did.
‘This one, I think.’ Mr Nye pointed.
‘A good choice.’ The artist nodded.
Between them the two men considered the savage strokes of paint.
Mr Nye leaned towards the small label attached to the wall. ‘What’s it called?’
‘Bucket Girl Number 3.’
‘Bucket girl?’
The artist laughed, biting for a moment at one of his fingernails where it was ingrained with dark paint. ‘It’s what she does. Spends her days carrying buckets of blood. Like a butcher.’ Then he laughed again.
Mr Nye Senior saw the thin stain of red around the top of Mrs Withers’ bowls before she carried them out. ‘Do you paint her often?’
‘Yes. She’s my current inspiration.’ He turned to Mr Nye. ‘Would you like to see more?’
‘I can come to your studio perhaps?’
‘Yes, that would suit.’
The two men shook hands. Both of them understood. Everything was for sale, if the price was good enough.
‘Buying another painting, Father?’
‘Ah, the prodigal.’ Mr Nye turned with a small smirk of distaste to a tall gangle of a young man standing behind him, glass of water in his hand. ‘Where have you been?’
‘At the office.’
‘You work too hard, boy. Got to get out, grasp life while you can.’ Nye Senior gazed at his son for a moment, then past him to where Ruby was weaving her way towards them again. The men all turned at her approach.
‘Who’s this?’ Ruby said as she arrived. Barbara trailed in Ruby’s wake.
Mr Nye Senior gave an inconsequential wave of his arm. ‘My son, William Junior.’
‘How charming.’ Ruby didn’t even wait for the young man to put out his hand, just reached in and kissed him on both cheeks.
William Junior’s colour rose to beetroot before Ruby had even pulled away. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said because, well, that was what one did.
Ruby laughed. ‘The pleasure’s all mine.’
Mr Nye Senior glared. The artist snorted wine into his glass. Barbara stood behind her sister and frowned.
‘Oh,’ said Ruby waving her arm in an inconsequential way too. ‘This is my sister, Barbara.’
The young man, hardly even twenty-one, turned to Barbara and put out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Will.’
Barbara put out her hand too. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Both their palms were damp.
As they shook, the rest of the group somehow glided away and they were left to fend for themselves – little pig Barbara, all grown up now, and the graceless Junior Nye, nothing between them but a thousand naked Rubys gazing down from every wall. The younger Mr Nye, awkward and angled, watched Ruby traversing the room with his father by her side. He unravelled a large handkerchief from his pocket and gave his temples a wipe. Why was it exhibition openings were always so claustrophobic? Even his feet felt hot. Ruby’s little row of sequins winked at him from across the distant floor. ‘Does everyone know your sister?’ he asked Barbara.
‘No one knows my sister,’ said Barbara. ‘Not even me.’
Three weeks, and in the artist’s studio Ruby laid herself out on the chaise longue, the cover rough beneath her naked flesh. A tiny emerald hung loose on a thin gold chain around her neck, spooling between her breasts. She closed her eyes as Mr Nye Senior leaned forwards to arrange her limbs – her legs, her arms, her hips laid out just so. His breathing was heavy as he hauled himself on top, trailing a finger from her collarbone to the pale ring of her nipple, then down across her stomach to her hips. These he fitted under his own with a confident hand.
Beneath his own hot limbs, Mr Nye Senior felt the sharp edge of Ruby’s hipbones rising in a desultory fashion to meet his own. She smelled of death, that was what he thought. Of the soap which Mrs Withers used to wash all her girls. He thrust once, then twice, as beneath his chest a small emerald pressed sharp into his skin. Thrusting again, head bent, he saw once more the pearls embedded in Mrs Withers’ neck. The thick mounds of her arms. Mr Nye Senior liked flesh. A wad of it. Easy to grasp. But Ruby’s flesh was almost impossible to hold, all splayed and white, slithering beneath him like some sort of fish. He thought of the woman in the motorcar, her feet all limp, and grunted as he came, a generous spurt. Once, twice, three times, pulling out at the end. His sperm trickled down Ruby’s leg to stain the cover of the chaise. Her startling eyes regarded him as he rolled away, first one colour, then the next. Beneath her skin he could feel already the azure that ran cold in her veins.
Three weeks, and Barbara and her longing and her solicitor’s son (forever Junior, however old he got) were engaged in a damp embrace in a seaside boarding house. There was nowhere to wash but a small sink in the corner. The bed was hardly wider than the one she had slept in as a child, two sisters embracing, knees tucked in behind knees, breath hot on the back of the other one’s neck.
Barbara kept her eyes open the whole time they did it, watching the ceiling, the walls, the light bulb and the curtains with their small blue flowers as they danced and tipped. It was Nye Junior’s first time. And hers too. He fumbled with where to go. Got it wrong more times than not. Pushed and pinched at Barbara’s soft flesh as he plunged and bucked about. His body was taut and bony, all skinny and flat, while hers was plump and florid, like a girl brought up on a farm.
As Nye Junior hung over her like a crab, bumping against the frame of the bed, Barbara knew that he was thinking of it too. Ruby, head back. Ruby, legs spread. Ruby waiting for it all. Not of a hand-sewn dress with a crooked hem and carefully ironed pleats, but a twist of orange peel and the scent of a warm neck pulsing for a moment next to his own. Still, as Nye Junior finally pushed his way in, once, twice, three times, before he gasped and it was done, Barbara thought of all the good that might come from their awkward embrace.
A father sitting by a fireside.
A mother sewing buttons on a shirt.
While upstairs, on the highest, furthest floor, a child would be smiling as it turned over in its sleep. Not a trap, as her sister, Ruby, might call it. But a family, all of Barbara’s making. One that she could keep for herself.
2011
The building on the outskirts of London was as grey and austere as the residents trapped inside. A train ride away from the centre of it all (on the periphery once again), and Margaret came to her next destination – an old people’s home stuffed full of ancient, incapacitated humans left by their relatives to die. It would not be an edifying end to finish in a place like this, nothing between her and her Maker but slop spooned from a plastic bowl. But then, as Margaret was discovering, most ends were not edifying, however it was they came.
The Walker file had not proved edifying, either. Or not as much as she had hoped. A thin cardboard wallet with nothing in it but a copy of an old admissions form.
‘Where’s the rest?’ Margaret had asked Mrs Plymmet, turning the cardboard wallet this way and that. No birth certificates. No marriage certificates. Not the sort of paperwork Janie had hoped for at all.
The woman had just shrugged, tightening the belt on her coat as though she really ought to be getting away. ‘Destroyed,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps there was never anything else.’
‘But you’re certain this is the same Mrs Walker as my client?’
‘Well, it’s the only Mrs Walker that we have on our books.’
The form had been as stained and yellow as Mr Nye Senior’s teeth. It dated back to just before the war. Seventy years, give or take, ancient history as far as Margaret was concerned. There was certainly nothing in it that referred to a Mrs Walker of around her client’s age.
But there was an address. A home for the elderly out on the fringes of London, a last outpost for its residents before the certainty of death. Also a name. Dorothea Walker. Someone new r
aising her head to gaze at Margaret from the shadow of the past.
The manageress of the old people’s home met Margaret at the door. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘Mrs Fielding. But call me Susan. Do come in.’ She was wearing a smart tailored suit of jacket and matching skirt and, as she led the way indoors, she gave off the faintest hiss of nylon rubbing against nylon. An echo of Barbara, pursuing Margaret from the north.
The entrance hall was a strange combination of the institutional and the grand, a floor clad in vinyl and a ceiling as high as a house. The smell of industrial detergent lingered in the air, punctuated by a whiff of something floral sprayed from a can. Nurses and staff from all continents criss-crossed the wide floor, some wheeling trolleys, one pushing a cart covered in plates, more wielding bedpans and trays full of pills. They appeared from one passageway and disappeared down the next, bustling in soft-soled shoes, while somewhere, out from the very fabric of the building, Margaret was sure she could hear voices calling, high and plaintive, rather like the sounds of children playing outside Mrs Walker’s flat.
‘Welcome to my Home!’ Susan Fielding smiled as though she owned all that she surveyed, urging Margaret through to a small office partitioned off a section of the hall. It was a space not unlike Margaret’s box room up north, but crammed with paperwork this time rather than wall-to-wall with junk.
Susan Fielding sat down behind a utilitarian desk, rearranging her suit to make sure it didn’t get creased, and said, ‘So you’ve got an indigent, have you?’
‘Yes,’ Margaret replied. ‘Maybe. That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
‘A Mrs Walker. About eighty or so?’
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘Well . . .’ Susan Fielding tapped at a blue plastic ring binder on the table before her. ‘I’ve checked my records and no one of that name or age appears to have stayed here.’ She frowned as Margaret raised a hand. ‘Or a Dorothea, if that was what you were about to ask.’
‘Oh. That’s a pity.’ Margaret was disappointed. She’d only been in the home for a few minutes and already her one lead had dropped to nought.
‘Yes, it’s a shame,’ Mrs Fielding agreed. ‘I like to help out if I can. Especially with those left all on their own.’
‘Do you get a lot of them?’ Margaret hadn’t imagined an indigent rota being required in a place as imposing as this.
‘Oh, yes.’ Susan Fielding leaned back in her chair for a moment. ‘I’ve been to more funerals than I can count where it’s just me and the crematorium officer to see the person out.’
‘But what about their relatives? Don’t they attend?’
‘Often there aren’t any. Or they’re impossible to trace. Or our clients have simply outlived them. It happens more than people think.’ Susan Fielding gave a little shake of her head. ‘They say we all die alone, don’t they? But these people do so more than most.’
‘These people?’
‘London attracts them.’
‘Who?’
‘The neglected. The abused. The abandoned. The lost.’ Susan Fielding ticked the categories off on her fingers as though they were a register of museum exhibits rather than the collected remains of the human race. ‘They have to end up somewhere and this is where they come. We try to look after them as best as we can.’ She paused for a moment, plucking something from the lapel of her jacket. Then she looked at Margaret. ‘And you, Ms Penny, do you live in London?’
And for the first time since she returned south, Margaret wondered if London was the advantage she had once thought.
Margaret had been six years old (or thereabouts) when she and Barbara landed in the northern city that became the only home she’d ever properly known. Thumbnails bitten to the raw, still wetting the bed at night more often than not. ‘Don’t worry, runs in the family,’ Barbara always used to mutter, but it was still Margaret who was made to strip yet another rented bed of yet another urine-stained sheet.
‘Why do we have to move again, Mummy?’ she had asked as they sat in another launderette watching the sheet circle inside an industrial-sized washing machine. She already missed the dirty heat of London summers. The rumble of Underground trains like monsters growling beneath the streets. And once a man who tickled her, while upstairs all the babies cried.
‘Because – ’ Barbara swiped her headscarf at Margaret’s thumb where it was stuck in her mouth – ‘we just do.’ Whatever else Barbara had once been, she was Mrs Penny now.
They came with a battered suitcase and they never left. Over the hills and far away. The latest in a series of anonymous, rented rooms strung out from south to north, nothing but barely furnished bedrooms and knickers left to drip-dry into the sink. Carpet sweepers and tinned soup. Buckets of Flash and ten pence pocket money for the corner shop. Parma Violets in see-through wrappers and the soggy cardboard of a Sherbet Dip.
‘Will we stay this time?’ Margaret asked as they packed up the suitcase once again and made their way to the last bus north.
‘Perhaps,’ said her mother. Which, Margaret discovered later, was about as good as it was ever going to get.
They arrived in a cold and huddled Edinburgh to a flat that was all high windows and gaping ceilings stained with damp. Except in the narrow bathroom, where the ceiling was low slung and clad in an orange kind of pine that turned out to encourage mould. At night the Edinburgh wind rattled through the ancient window frames, keeping Margaret awake. The floors were covered by a cheap kind of carpet that created electricity when she rubbed at it with her socks. The furniture came from second-hand junk shops, so battered Margaret could have scratched, stabbed, burned or gouged out filthy messages on the underside had she not feared that Barbara would find out at once. She slept between yellow nylon sheets from the nearest Woolworths and an eiderdown that her mother seemed to have owned for a hundred years, hoping beyond any realistic proposition that she would not pee again in the night.
The flat was on the third floor of a tall, black tenement that wept water when it rained. High above a bookie’s and a pub, six flights of dark, narrow stairs. It was noisy day and night with constant buses, the shouts of gamblers and drunk people advertising their lack of anything better to do. The neighbour who shared the landing with them took in men for a living. The woman on the floor below never answered the door. For food there was a chip shop. For pleasure there was a pub. Also a sauna that Barbara insisted Margaret run past when she made her way to school.
The children on the street congregated around the door of the close when they discovered a newcomer had appeared: bare legs, dirty skirts, trousers too short at the ankles. ‘Where are you from?’ they said, picking at their noses and wiping their fingers on their grey school V-necks in a way that would have horrified Barbara if she could see.
But Margaret never did know the answer to that.
Now, at the residential home for the abandoned down south, Susan Fielding offered coffee. ‘It helps with the workings of the mind, don’t you think?’ she said, going to a cupboard and taking out two mugs and a bowl of sugar lumps. Though Margaret preferred red wine for that.
Just as in Pati’s wonderland of a flat, a small coterie of objects lined Susan Fielding’s desk. A miniature china dog. A stone painted and varnished with a picture of edelweiss. There was even a pair of silver sugar tongs that belonged in an Edwardian tea party rather than on an office desk. Keepsakes. Mementoes. Reminders of the dead. Or a horde of useless objects left behind by those with no one else to take them on. Margaret ran her thumb over the smooth surface of a tiny matryoshka doll secreted in the pocket of her coat. Did Mrs Fielding inherit all these treasures, she wondered. Or was acquisition just a perk of the job?
Susan Fielding reached for the tongs, plopping one lump of sugar into each of the steaming mugs as though they were small pets that needed to be fed. ‘Hot and sweet, Ms Penny. Hot and sweet.’ The tongs glinted under the bright office lights as Susan Fielding’s teeth glinted too. The manager turned one of the cups towards
Margaret, before taking a small, satisfied sip from her own. When she put the mug down the trace of her lips was marked out on the thick china rim in a sort of orange kiss. ‘Now,’ she said, moving a pile of paper from one side of her desk to the other. ‘Shall we get on?’
Margaret put down her mug. ‘But I thought Mrs Walker wasn’t in your records.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean her. I mean Dorothea.’
‘But you said she wasn’t in there either.’
Mrs Fielding gave a shake of her head. ‘Oh, you won’t find Dorothea amongst these records.’ She tapped at the blue folder with one determined finger, then turned towards another pile of files. ‘Dorothea was one of the dispossessed.’
Awkward. Recalcitrant. Unwholesome. Mad. Before it became a residential palace for the elderly, the Home had been something else instead. An asylum with long corridors and tall, echoing rooms; beds stretching out from wall to wall. ECT and insulin treatment. Lobotomies and drugs. One thousand patients wandering the wards with no one to mark their passing but nurses dressed in starch.
‘All gone now, of course.’ Susan Fielding waved a hand in the air as though she had swept away the crazy people herself.
‘What happened to them?’ Margaret was intrigued. Lost to the earth, to the sea, to the four winds north, south, east and west? Or an armchair, perhaps, in an empty Edinburgh flat.
‘Dispersed,’ Susan Fielding declared. ‘Or buried in the grounds.’ Her voice dropped lower. ‘Or cremated and disposed of somewhere else.’
Disposed of. That was one way of describing what happened once the blue jets of gas did their job.
‘And Dorothea Walker?’ Margaret was still hopeful that this, her only lead, would result in some solid revelation.
‘Mad as a hatter,’ Susan Fielding declared. ‘Died before they could throw her out.’
The Other Mrs Walker Page 17
