Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine . . .
Stroke after stroke, silver strands floating from Dorothea’s head, attaching themselves to the sleeves of Clementine’s coat. Ten minutes to make up for what they had both lost.
It was never going to be enough.
When the time was nearly gone, Clementine glanced over her shoulder to check that the fat nurse wasn’t near, then reached into her bag and withdrew a little compact and a manicure set with a pair of silver scissors that glinted in the light. She opened up the compact and placed it in Dorothea’s hands, pointing to the mirror so that Dorothea might see her reflection – a lady worn thin, but still here, surrounded by a shimmering cloud of light.
Dorothea gazed, entranced, at herself, as Clementine leaned forwards and caught up a pinch of her mother’s hair at the very tip. She made a cut, snip-clip, and at once Dorothea dropped the compact into her lap. ‘I cut it,’ she said. ‘I cut it.’ Gripping on to Clementine’s wrist.
An angel in the night. A cold blade against the warmth of a young girl’s neck.
‘Yes, Mummy,’ said Clementine, touching Dorothea on the arm. ‘I know.’ And she folded the little sprig of silver back inside her manicure set.
‘Time to go now,’ the matron called out. ‘The rockets will catch you if you’re not careful.’
‘All right,’ Clementine replied, picking up the compact. She closed the handbag, then the case, held the hairbrush for a moment before placing it in Dorothea’s lap. ‘Goodbye, Mummy,’ she said bending and putting her lips for a moment to her mother’s cheek. Then, as she rose to go, she folded something else into her mother’s fist. Two dollar bills of a not inconsiderable denomination. And a slip of paper imprinted with the name of a ship.
A ticket to the promised land. Just in case.
2011
Three years on from the Crash, and Margaret could practically smell the money shored up in the houses all around, embedded in the clean red bricks, in the white-pillared porticoes and the neat little hedges cut into squares. It was trapped behind the portcullis security shutters and sunk into the window boxes already planted and blooming even though it was only the beginning of the year. Unlike the cold austerity of Edinburgh, it was as though financial winter had never happened here. No boarded-up shops. No slurry in the gutter. No faded To Let signs or black cars spraying slush all over her coat. Just clean, empty pavements and vehicles as big as tractors, no mud on their wheels.
In her slim brown folder (not quite so slim now) Margaret had the beginnings of a life and death report:
A receipt for an emerald necklace.
An admissions form for a lunatic.
And now a copy of a death certificate for a Dorothea Walker, provided by Susan Fielding in return for a small fee. For where there was death, so too was there life. Or birth, at least.
So here Margaret was, back in the heart of it all, London’s quiet, moneyed lands. A Borough, not a District. Royal, not Municipal. A haven for those who could afford several homes and a boat at the same time. The streets of Kensington and Chelsea, where no one could imagine that anything had ever gone wrong.
The Chelsea Old Town Hall and Register Office was like all municipal buildings built over one hundred years before – solid, with a pediment over the door, exuding benevolence and grace. It was nothing like the buildings constructed out of today’s wealth, all glass and security turnstiles, nowhere for children to roam, or even scratch their names. Even so, the section Margaret required was still hidden away – down the side, through a small door into an annexe carpeted in municipal brown. Births, Marriages and Deaths. Nothing but the ordinary everyday.
The man behind the enquiry desk was small too. He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his blue-striped shirt as Margaret made her request. ‘Have you tried the Internet?’ he said. ‘You can find all sorts there.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Margaret lied. ‘But I thought I’d come in person to get the benefit of your expertise. Besides, I’m in rather a hurry. It’s a matter of life and death.’
Margaret had come in person because the Internet required a debit or a credit card – that small rectangle of plastic which confirmed one had money, or the promise of it, at least. The personal approach allowed her to pay in cash. Here one moment, gone the next, a nice clean transaction, no questions asked. There always had been something about Margaret that sought to leave no trace.
The man slipped his specs back on. ‘Well, I suppose I could help, if it doesn’t take too long.’ Flattery. Worked every time. ‘What you can do is a general search of the indexes if you like, then I’ll do the verifications.’
‘Verifications?’
‘Where I go and check in the archive, then tell you if we have the documents that you need.’
Margaret wanted to ask why she couldn’t just check the documents herself. But then again, these were people’s lives she was dealing with, not just inconsequential pieces of paper covered in black and red type.
‘Eighteen pounds . . .’ said the man, rubbing at his glasses once again. ‘You get up to six hours’ search time and eight verifications, then a fast track on the actual documents. Here to help,’ he said, quoting his Royal Borough’s slogan, or something like it.
Paperwork, Margaret thought. Within her reach at last.
The indexes were on microfiche, ordered by year. Line after line of people’s surnames for each annual quarter, followed by their first name, their dates and the volume and page number the clerk would need to track the actual documents to their final resting place. Margaret searched under ‘Stirling’, Dorothea’s maiden name as per her admissions record and the certificate that marked her death. Straight away it produced a result, hovering in front of Margaret on the small grey screen:
Births Quarter 3: Stirling, Dorothea, 18 July 1900.
Margaret felt a small thrill in her chest as she made a careful note of the accompanying index number. One certificate down. Who knew what might be revealed next? She flexed her fingers, hoping that Dorothea’s marriage had taken place in the same part of town in which she was born, and set out once more on her search.
An hour later, and the lucky coronation penny proved its worth again. Marriages Quarter 2: Stirling, Dorothea, m. Walker, Alfred, 6 April 1922. A new dress, best Sunday shoes, a small hat perhaps, confetti or rice thrown over the bride and groom’s heads before a wedding breakfast of ham, toast and eggs. Margaret sat back in her chair and stared at the line of text crammed in with all the others on the microfiched screen. Dorothea Walker née Stirling, all of twenty-two. Owner of a bone-handled hairbrush and a nightgown threaded with pink. Sweetheart. Wife. Madwoman. Corpse. Mother of two young twins (deceased) and a daughter named Clementine, aka Mrs Walker, dead now too. Lover of oranges, whisky and red coats just like her own. Margaret was pleased that she had something in common with her dead client. One way or another they had both been stripped bare, and now Margaret was finding them some new clothes.
She began searching for her third certificate in 1922, the year Dorothea and Alfred were married, assuming that their daughter was the legitimate kind. Unlike ‘Stirling’, there were lots and lots of ‘Walkers’, many of them with the initial ‘C’. By the time Margaret got from the last quarter of 1924 into the first quarter of 1925 she understood why someone might need six hours. Her eyes itched and wavered as she ran her finger down yet another hazy screen, tracking the many Walker births in quarter two:
Walker, Charles
Walker, Clarinda
Walker, Crispin
Walker, David
Gone too far.
She stopped and slid her finger up the list again in reverse. Doing something backwards sometimes had a way of revealing what had previously been missed. Walker, Elizabeth. Walker, David. Walker, Crispin. Then there it was. The culmination of a trail of orange peel dropped in a gutter.
Births Quarter 2: Walker, Clementine, 12 June 1925.
No longe
r dead, but alive and well once more.
Margaret had checked Births, Marriages and Deaths before, of course, the moment she got to London thirty years since. In through the hallowed halls of Somerset House, just seventeen, nothing to her but a pair of black boots and a canvas satchel slung across her coat. ‘Margaret Penny,’ she had whispered when they asked for her name. ‘19th July 1963.’
They had come back almost before she’d had time to sit. Penny, M., born to Penny, B., Wingfield’s Maternity Hospital (all demolished now). ‘It doesn’t say adopted, does it?’ she asked, more in hope than in expectation. But the woman who had called up the relevant certificate just shook her head. Here was final confirmation of what Margaret had known but never believed. Her mother was her mother. That was the end of that.
The first confirmation had come when she was thirteen years old, doing her homework in the living room of their latest Edinburgh flat.
‘Where do babies come from?’ she had said, digging at the underside of the table with her pencil because she knew now that no one would check.
‘Where do you think!’ Barbara had replied, running her new Hoover up and down the carpet, making the nylon crackle and spark. Barbara had instructed Margaret in the biological facts of life from the moment Margaret could walk. ‘Never get caught.’ That was her mantra. ‘You don’t know where it might lead.’
Margaret sighed and lifted her feet as the Hoover roared along beneath. ‘I mean, where was I born?’ she said.
Barbara released the catch on the Hoover and folded the handle almost flat. ‘Down south, of course. I’ve told you. London.’ Barbara was very taken with the Hoover and its amazing powers of suction, as though she had spent an entire lifetime up to that point just sweeping dust around from one dirty place to the next.
‘But where in London?’ Margaret persisted. A trait that came straight from her mother, as far as she could tell.
‘In a nursing home. All gone now.’ At least that was what Margaret thought she heard her mother say.
‘What about my father, where’s he?’
Barbara pushed the Hoover as far under the sofa as it could go. ‘Over the hills and far away.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Who knows?’ Barbara’s voice sounded far away too as she bent double, just like the Hoover, to make sure she had picked up every speck of dirt. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what I say.’ She straightened then, put a hand to her hair. ‘Besides, none of his business. Or yours for that matter.’
Though, even at thirteen years old, Margaret had thought that perhaps it was.
Still, she didn’t ask again. Barbara’s womb was due to be cut out the next day, which was why Margaret was pondering the miracle of birth while her mother was determined to make the flat nice. ‘Women are cursed,’ Barbara had said when she found out the news. Hormones and bodily changes. Cancer of the breast. ‘Still, it’s best to get rid of what is no use.’ And she’d glared so hard at Margaret when she said it that Margaret had thought she must mean her rather than some vital (but redundant) organ instead.
But that evening, as though to make amends, Barbara had gone out into the gritty chill of an Edinburgh night and got them chips for tea, in paper soft and damp. Salt and the hot scent of vinegary sauce, plates laid out on a tray. Two forks. Two Tunnock’s Tea Cakes for a treat. Eaten in front of a tiny black-and-white television set. It had been a rare moment of peace between them, in amongst all the rest.
The very next morning, with every surface scrubbed, Barbara placed a patterned headscarf over her hair, freshly permed for her encounter with the operating suite. Then she buttoned her navy mackintosh all the way up her neck and said, ‘I’ve asked Mrs Hamill to look in on you,’ as Margaret stood waiting for the obligatory brush of her mother’s brown lips against her cheek. For the first time in a long while, Barbara’s grip on her daughter’s shoulder was fierce. It was Margaret who pulled away first.
Barbara adjusted her coat at the hem and smoothed a hand down the front. She looked as though she was going shopping for sliced white bread and a tin of peas, rather than taking the bus to the Royal where she would go under the knife. ‘Don’t bother to visit,’ she said. ‘Wait until Thursday when I’ll be up and about.’ Then she was gone.
Margaret came home from school that night to an empty flat and waited as she had been told. Homework complete. Teacups ready. A whole packet of sticky Soreen’s Fruit Loaf sliced and buttered. She sat on the edge of the Dralon sofa until it was quite dark, waiting for Mrs Hamill to come and keep her straight. It was only after three hours that she thought perhaps the worst had happened (‘Dead, I’m afraid, a slip of the scalpel, just a mistake’) and went and tapped on the neighbour’s door herself.
‘Gone out,’ Mr Hamill said. ‘Up to see her sister. Be back tomorrow, or the day after that.’ He stank of smoke from a pipe that Margaret knew his wife did not allow.
‘Oh,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘Everything all right, hen?’ Mr Hamill’s dentures shone in the gloom of the close, the gleaming veneers at odds with the decrepitude of his face. He shuffled slightly in the doorway, his camel-coloured cardigan sagging at the waist. ‘You can come in if you like.’ He gestured with the wet end of his pipe, saliva glistening on the stem.
Margaret blushed to her toes, and back. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, yes. Everything’s fine. Goodnight.’ Then she went back upstairs and ate nine slices of Soreen’s fruit loaf all in one go, just because she could.
The next day, with nothing in the cupboard but the usual tins of peas and soup, Margaret took the pound note left by her mother on the kitchen table (‘Emergencies only!’) and went for chips instead. Down, down the dirty stairwell. Down, down the filthy close. Out into the cold Edinburgh night. She discovered then that Edinburgh in the dark was very different from during the day. More rackety. Full of curses and shouts. Men standing in groups on the corner. A sauna with a beckoning light. The pub with its flare of chatter and smoke. Margaret scurried past it all, knowing then that if she ever got the chance, this was the world that she wanted to explore.
Back at home she ate the chips straight from the paper, licking grease and salt from her fingertips before wiping them on the bottom of her skirt. She washed the chips down with a can of sparkling juice and a Tunnock’s Snowball, shredded coconut falling all across her lap. When she was finished she got up and coconut dropped to the floor like a first scattering of winter snow. She didn’t bother to clean up.
Instead she went digging, just because she could, moving around her mother’s bedroom in stops and starts as though marking out a crime scene, wary in case she missed anything. On her mother’s bedside table she found an empty glass, the rim all sticky, and a paperback book with the corners turned down throughout as though Barbara could only manage a page or two at a time before she fell asleep each night. In the drawer she found a comb made of tortoiseshell, all mottled and yellow, and a packet of cigarettes with only two left. Also a dirty teaspoon with a miniature figure attached to the handle. Margaret was tempted by the teaspoon. But she knew her mother would know who to blame if the spoon disappeared, just like the womb Barbara once owned but now did not.
In a drawer on the other side of her mother’s bed she found a slim, square box made of red plastic. And inside that a rubber disc dusted with Boots Best from the tin that lived in the cupboard above the bathroom sink. The rubber disc rose in a small dome, rather like Margaret imagined Barbara’s stomach must have risen up to meet the first cut of the surgeon’s knife. She pressed her greasy fingertip to the rubber and it dipped down then popped back in a small cloud of powdery dust. Margaret stared at the perfect print she’d left behind, then shut the lid of the box, snip-snap, and slid it back into the drawer. Maybe her mother wouldn’t notice. Whatever the rubber thing was, it didn’t look as though it ever got much use.
In the bottom of her mother’s big chest of drawers she found an apron folded into a square and a broken china c
herub wrapped in a blanket with a torn satin trim. Underneath that was a painting, all dirty and brown, smelling of linseed oil and covered in a thick layer of newspaper and dust. And at the very bottom of the drawer, as though Barbara intended to keep it hidden not just from Margaret, but from herself too, a photograph of two children sleeping, in black and white.
In the gathering dark of an Edinburgh night Margaret looked closely at the photograph. The children were pale, lips frozen in two small pouts. Their hands, where they rested on their laps, lay still as the grave. Hair a tumble of curls. Cheeks the colour of porcelain, just like the china cherub. Margaret touched a finger to the cold glass. She had always wanted a family. And here it was at last.
Mrs Hamill came round on the third day. ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, her face all flushed beneath her mohair hat. ‘You won’t tell your mother, will you?’
‘No,’ said Margaret, fiddling with a large brown penny she had discovered tucked away next to the photograph. Something so commonplace she had decided it wouldn’t be missed.
‘It’ll be our secret.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret. Tell no one. She was already good at keeping secrets. Like mother like daughter, she stored them all up.
On the Thursday, as instructed, she went to the hospital and found Barbara sitting up in her bed as stern and unbending as before she went in. There was no sign that she’d just had an operation, let alone one that ended the possibility of new life. Their conversation lasted about three minutes before they ran out of things to say.
‘Are you behaving yourself?’ Her mother was wearing a dressing gown in a shade more suited to a baby than a middle-aged woman who’d just had her womb cut out.
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, wondering when it would be best to enquire about the two sleeping children. A brother and a sister, perhaps. Some cousin from the past.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 20
