‘Well, I suppose that gives us some sort of connection,’ Janie said. ‘Religion, at least. Shall we say Church of England? She came from London, didn’t she? Like you.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, though she didn’t remember telling Janie that she was from that great metropolis down south.
‘And have you any idea why she was in Edinburgh?’
‘No,’ said Margaret. For a moment a dead fox’s small paws dug into an area just above her breast. She had pondered that question several times herself on the train ride north and come up with a blank. Mrs Walker was nothing but a refugee in a cold land, just like her, waiting for the next move to somewhere else.
Janie sighed. ‘I’ll need to add the nut to the official file, I suppose, just to keep things clear. Have you brought it with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret and fished for it in the pocket of her coat.
But just like Mrs Walker before it, the dusty Brazil nut was gone.
‘Sorry,’ said Margaret, pulling out orange peel and a small tin pig in amongst a spray of sausage roll crumbs. ‘It seems to have escaped.’ Followed by a lucky coronation penny. Not so lucky now.
Janie was annoyed. ‘Well, what happened to the brooch, then?’ she said. ‘That at least would prove the connection beyond any doubt.’
Small and star-shaped, with a red stone at its heart. Margaret had asked about the brooch herself before she left Rose & Sons for good, along with all the other jewellery listed on the receipt. A shiny coffin. Or a larger hearse. Perhaps even some flowers. Margaret knew it was money that mattered. Emerald necklaces with earrings to match could buy a very good funeral should there be any of the treasure left.
‘Sorry,’ the young woman had said. ‘Sold long ago, according to these records. Anonymous buyer. Handled by a solicitor’s firm. Nye & Sons?’ And she raised her eyebrows. ‘All except the brooch, of course. That just disappeared.’
Margaret had wondered then where the brooch had gone. She would have liked to hold something in her hand that her client had actually owned – passed down through the family from mother to daughter, perhaps. Jewellery. Wasn’t that what women left behind, more often than not?
‘It wasn’t in the flat, was it?’ Janie sounded hopeful for a moment.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Margaret, shifting the fox fur so that its paws hung less dangerously beneath her coat. She could tell already that her invoice for services rendered might not be quite so swiftly forthcoming as she had hoped. It seemed Mrs Walker’s story wasn’t over yet.
‘Well.’ Janie pushed away her forms for a moment. ‘Perhaps you’d better go and find out for sure. We can’t close the case without it.’ She rapped at her teeth once again with her biro, tip-tap and that’s that. ‘Besides . . .’ She lowered her pen now and pinioned Margaret with the pale glitter of her eyes. ‘Everyone leaves something behind, if you only know where to look.’
1980
The call had come on an ordinary September day, wind tossing dirty leaves all about the Edinburgh streets.
‘I have to go to a funeral,’ Barbara had said, standing by the sideboard in their latest living room holding the telephone receiver as though for the first time ever it had delivered good news.
Seventeen-year-old Margaret could hear the dialling tone from where she was sitting at the table, hair hanging across her face, turquoise painted onto her toes. ‘Whose funeral?’
‘An old friend. In London.’
‘What old friend?’ As far as Margaret was concerned, her mother didn’t have any friends. Not in Edinburgh and not in the south either.
‘None of your business.’ As usual, Barbara hadn’t been interested in illumination, only in what might happen next. ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Can I come?’ For the first time in several months Margaret saw a future opening up before her in a flare of chatter and smoke.
‘No.’ Barbara seemed particularly firm on that. ‘You’ve got to get a job.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.’
And as Margaret knew already, there never was going to be an answer to that.
Down, down in the big city in the south, the original Mrs Penny lay dead on a slab. An old lady eaten away by cancer, from the inside out, finally succumbing to the fact that no one (not even her) could go on forever, however hard they tried. It was serendipity really, Barbara thought, when she arrived at the undertakers’ all belted up inside her latest coat. Mrs Penny always had said there was a cancer at the heart of the Walker family. Now it had eaten her too.
Barbara watched as fluids ran in one tube and Mrs Penny seeped out of the next. Trust the only mother she had ever known to select embalming. Preserved for as long as possible, even in the grave.
The funeral director was pleased to meet Barbara at last. ‘They’re burying her in the Old Church plot.’ He dipped his head in acknowledgement of their arrangement. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’
‘Thank you,’ Barbara replied, all her discreet enquiries finally adding up. Barbara was nothing if not efficient; Mrs Penny had taught her that.
‘Nye & Sons are organizing it,’ the funeral director went on. ‘No next of kin left, they said.’
‘Really.’ Barbara put a finger to the patterned scarf firmly knotted at her throat. She would see about that.
The office just off Ironmonger Lane had not changed one bit. The stoat still winked from the mantelpiece. The books still ran from ceiling to floor and back. That girl still sat behind a huge desk, older now and with more rings on her fingers, hair still gleaming like a helmet of bronze. Barbara Penny was ushered in to sit before Mr Nye Senior’s desk once again, hands clasped on her handbag, legs firmly crossed. What was it about life, she thought then, that it had this circular motion she could never quite escape?
Mr Nye Senior was older now too, hair just starting to recede, a smooth blue vein lying beneath the skin of his forehead. He didn’t come out from behind his desk this time, just coughed for a moment before he started, leaning back in his chair until it creaked. Then he read Barbara Penny the relevant bit from Mrs Penny’s will.
When he was finished both of them sat looking at a slim box of silver apostle spoons that lay before them on the desk. Barbara Penny’s inheritance, such as it was.
‘Who did Mrs Penny leave the house to?’ Barbara knew there was treasure to be had in London. Bricks. And mortar. And slate. Why else would she have bothered to come south?
Mr Nye Senior flicked his eyes away from Barbara for a moment. ‘It will be sold.’
‘And the proceeds?’
‘To the Children’s Society. In memory of her work.’ Mr Nye Senior curled his fingers around the silver blade of a paperknife. ‘A very worthy cause.’ He lifted the knife, let it gleam for a moment in the low office light. ‘Not that there will be many proceeds, I shouldn’t think. The house is very run down.’
Over the other side of the desk, in the upright chair, Barbara uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. Middle-aged now, Rainmate secure in her bag. Her arms were thick, with flesh just starting to go loose. ‘Perhaps it might be possible for me to make a claim,’ she said. ‘As her daughter.’
‘Her adopted daughter,’ corrected Mr Nye Senior, putting the blade down again as though he was on more secure ground now.
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Only if the adoption was official. Approved by a court, I mean.’
‘Was it not?’
Mr Nye Senior gave a wave of his hand. ‘Not as far as I know. I don’t have any certificates, I’m afraid. War and all that. Unofficial adoption. Happened a lot at that time.’
Barbara leaned forwards. ‘Perhaps you might be able to help me prove it. Given your expertise in sorting things out.’
Mr Nye Senior just smiled, a smile of ever-diminishing returns. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said, looking around the walls of his office at all the naked women. ‘A conflict of interest, perhaps.’
‘A conflict
of interest?’ Barbara frowned.
‘There was the matter of the painting.’
‘The painting?’
Mr Nye Senior nudged at the blade of the paperknife with the tip of his index finger. ‘I seem to remember asking you about it once.’
Twenty minutes later, in a dark corner of a gallery on a busy London street, Barbara Penny stood in front of a painting covered in a savage sweep of oil. The girl in the portrait was impossibly young, laid back on a green chaise longue, nothing to wear but a pair of shoes to match.
A gallery warder stood beside Barbara, hands in gloves just like the ones Barbara used to wear. ‘Our most recent acquisition,’ he said. ‘Not popular. But important, in the British tradition. It’s rather alluring, don’t you think?’
Skin flaring like the centre of a jet of gas. Eyes that followed Barbara wherever she stood.
The warder indicated the label down on the right. ‘Bucket Girl Number 1. The artist did a whole sequence.’
Including a small brown painting, dirty in more ways than one, living in the bottom of Barbara’s chest of drawers, reminding her not to forget.
‘He’s dead now. Tragic, really.’
Tweed suit. Bare feet ingrained with paint.
‘Drank himself to death. Quite common really. Amongst the artist types.’
‘Where are the rest of them?’ Barbara held a slim box of silver spoons beneath her arm. Ten out of twelve. It was something, at least.
The warder shrugged. ‘Who knows? Around and about. They pop up from time to time.’
In a vault. In a crate. In some collector’s house. In a container shipped overseas for someone else’s delight.
‘Rarely out of storage now, not fashionable yet.’
Disappeared into a void, into a lacuna of time and space. Yet still Ruby always managed to be handled with gloves.
‘Thank you,’ Barbara said to the warder as another woman came clicking down the hard gallery floors towards where they stood. ‘I’ll remember where it is now, should I ever come again.’ Then she turned to where Jessica Plymmet had arrived beside them. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You have something for me, I think.’
Two women, two sides of the same coin (almost, but not quite) sat together in the gallery tea room, both still wearing their coats.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Jessica Plymmet, cup of tea by her elbow, forgetting that it was Barbara Penny who had made the arrangement rather than herself.
‘That’s all right,’ said Barbara. ‘Anything I can do to help.’
‘It was lucky, I suppose. That you phoned when you did.’
‘Yes,’ said Barbara. Though even then she didn’t really think ten silver spoons was quite as much luck as she deserved. Barbara wondered for a moment what had happened to that coronation penny, disappeared years ago from some dingy Edinburgh flat. She could have done with some luck now that she was back in the south.
‘I wrote to you,’ Mrs Plymmet said, lifting her teacup and regarding Barbara over the rim. ‘Several times.’
‘Really,’ said Barbara. ‘You must have got the wrong address.’
Mrs Plymmet blinked as though that was an unlikely scenario. ‘And where do you live now?’ she asked.
‘Oh, here and there.’ Barbara looked away. ‘You must come to visit sometime.’
But she never did give Jessica Plymmet the address.
Together the two women, both survivors of a sort, put down their cups and lifted forkfuls of Victoria sponge to their mouths instead. Icing sugar fell to their plates like a first sprinkle of snow, jam running through the middle of each slice like a thin seam of blood. It was Jessica Plymmet who made the first move.
‘How is your daughter?’ she asked.
Up, up amongst dark buildings in the Athens of the North, seventeen-year-old Margaret packed a bag. Four pairs knickers, two pairs tights, a jumper all sloppy across the shoulders and a pair of jeans impossibly tight. She laced black boots at the ankles, slung a canvas satchel across her chest (borrowed from a friend and never given back), and tucked a lucky coronation penny into a pocket pressed close against her hip. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough for a new beginning. A life full of chatter and smoke.
For Margaret was leaving. Margaret was on her way out. Over the hills and far away. Heads to the south. Tails to somewhere else. Away from tall grey buildings. Away from tenements that wept in the rain. Away from a city where all anyone talked about was the weather, even when they meant something else.
‘Get a job,’ her mother had said. ‘If you want to make something of yourself.’
So Margaret had. Three months’ work experience in a local solicitor’s office, courtesy of a phone call to one of her mother’s associates. The only advice Barbara gave her when she found out was this: ‘You’ll need to wear a skirt.’
Margaret had arrived on that first day with her hair freshly combed and her legs clad in nylon that dug in at her crotch. ‘Ah, the new girl.’ The senior partner had rubbed his hands together when Margaret was brought in to make his acquaintance. Just seventeen, a faint hint of brown on her lips, pancake applied with care to her cheeks. Margaret stood on the heavy woollen carpet in the partner’s office and watched as he rubbed one hand across the other, over and over, as though he never could get them clean. Despite his seniority (or because of it, perhaps), the senior partner did not invite Margaret to sit. He leaned back in his chair instead and said, ‘Great future ahead, if you know the meaning of hard work. Look at everything your mother has achieved.’
Barbara Penny, a ‘Mrs’ with no husband, a mother with no womb, a woman who worked her fingers to the bone every week but never seemed to enjoy anything in life. If I end up like my mother, Margaret thought then, I’ll kill myself. But she had no intention of that.
Margaret managed one month and three days before it was done. ‘No stamina, young people,’ the senior partner murmured down the phone to Barbara when she enquired as to what had gone wrong. ‘Don’t know how to help themselves.’
‘What did you do?’ Barbara demanded, standing in a kitchen scrubbed until it almost wasn’t there.
‘Nothing,’ Margaret insisted, lounging by the counter eating a slice of toast without even using a plate. Crumbs fell to the kitchen lino that Barbara had polished only the night before. ‘It wasn’t like I thought it would be,’ Margaret said through a mouthful of jam. As though that explained everything.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ Barbara got down in an awkward kneel on the floor, work skirt pulled tight against the back of her thighs. She brushed the crumbs into a dustpan with a vigorous flick of her wrist. ‘Life’s not all picnics and roses.’
Not that Margaret had ever thought it was.
‘Sometimes it gives with one hand,’ Barbara said, rising and tossing the crumbs into the pedal bin, ‘and takes away with the next.’
Margaret swallowed the last bit of her toast and went to put on some more beneath the eye-level grill. She knew that her mother was right. For she had taken exactly what she wanted. And given something away too.
Barbara left for work ten minutes later (floor all swept, door closed with a solid thud) and Margaret locked herself into the damp, scanty bathroom, twisting in front of the mirror to catch a glimpse of the bruises just starting to blossom on her hips. The fingerprints were clear to see, a crescent in brown and yellow pressed into her flesh. Margaret touched her finger to the place where the skin was still tender. He had been rougher than was necessary. Quite unpleasant, given what she had been offering. Still, Margaret had got what she needed from the exchange. Pound notes in large denominations, lifted from the senior partner’s desk while he went to wash himself in the sink. Enough for a quick exit. When the time came.
Margaret picked up her mother’s lucky coronation penny from where she’d laid it on the edge of the bath – weighed it in her hand. Heads to the south. Tails to somewhere else. Margaret spun the coin on the cold tiles of the floor as bathwater ran fast and hot. Let the king decid
e, she thought.
So he did.
In the cafe at a gallery down south, a small package was passed from one woman to the next. ‘Your sister asked me to give this to you,’ Jessica Plymmet said. ‘Should I ever come across you in the flesh.’
Barbara Penny’s hand twitched slightly as she picked up the envelope, her name written across the front in Ruby’s looping, childlike script. ‘What is it?’ she asked, as though opening the envelope might lead somewhere she did not want to go.
‘I’m not sure.’ Jessica Plymmet understood why Barbara Penny might be wary. After everything she had read in the Walker file, she couldn’t be certain where it might lead, either.
Barbara picked up her empty cup for a moment as though to read the tea leaves peppering its insides, then set it down again when they turned out to be no use. She put a finger to the knot of her scarf, tight now like a noose hanging above a trap. Then she lifted the small envelope and began.
It was a papery thing, small and thin. But Barbara was not deceived by that. A love token, perhaps. The seal on a pact. Or something to remind Barbara of everything she had ever done wrong. And everything she had tried to do right. The reverse was stamped with the name of a psychiatric unit somewhere on the outskirts of town. Tall and grey. Looming out of its grounds as it had done for over forty years. Barbara paused for a moment as she ran her thumb over the insignia.
Then she lifted the flap.
Inside the envelope was a page from a magazine, folded so many times the picture was almost rubbed out. Still, Barbara knew exactly what it would show before she flattened it out. A man, a woman and two children, sitting at a table in a kitchen with a very shiny floor. She unfolded the picture carefully so as not to rip the paper. Then she stared down at what was inside.
It was Barbara who spoke first this time. ‘Where is she?’ she said. Beneath her pancake, colour had vanished from her face.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 24
