‘But you, on the other hand . . .’ A thin dribble of milk slid from Mrs Penny’s wrist as she tested its heat. ‘I can always do with someone who knows the meaning of hard work.’
Barbara glanced at Tony, who dipped his head and leered at her in response. She looked back at the rows of bottles on the kitchen table. The stack of nappy buckets waiting by the scullery to be swilled. Then she stood up, laid her cup and saucer back on the kitchen table and beckoned to the child to follow.
‘No thanks,’ she said.
Working in an office had spoiled Barbara. There was no way she would ever carry buckets for a living now. Besides, she saw the way that Tony gobbled at the little girl’s fingers when they took their leave.
Run, she thought then. Run.
So that was what Barbara did.
North, north, to dark skies and sad men in three-piece suits. From one solicitor’s recommendation to the next. North, north, to Juniors sitting in her kitchen and Associates lying in her bed. North, north, to Partners who would take her out for lunch at obscure hotels rather than visit the kind of places she could afford to call home, bucking and braying just like the first time, though it never did come to the conclusion that she hoped. For Barbara was scarred inside, that was what she always thought. Something rotten in her belly right from the start, just like Mrs Penny had said.
It was one of Barbara’s solicitor friends who suggested her last move, as letters continued to pursue from the south. ‘Scotland,’ he said, pulling his underpants up two skinny legs. ‘Going on holiday next week. Whole other country. They do things differently there.’
Barbara didn’t take much when she crossed from England into the cold world of the north. A cherub with a broken arm. A photograph of two dead children pressed behind cold glass. And a small brown painting, dirty in more ways than one. The only roots Barbara had left.
She crossed the border at midnight, small girl sleeping heavy against her knee. She smiled as they disappeared into the darkness. This would be Barbara’s newfound land – somewhere nobody would see her coming, unless she saw them first.
2011
The hospital lay on the outskirts of town. Another periphery, well away from the centre of it all, not bakers and candlestick makers this time, but car parks and a main road that led directly to the south. Just as with the mortuary, Margaret approached with caution. This was a place where life and death huddled constantly together. She couldn’t be certain what she might find.
Her mother was huddled too: not dead yet, but lying comatose in a bed at the far end of a ward. On one side of her was the grey NHS stick, propped up by the bedside cabinet. On the other was Mrs Maclure.
Mrs Maclure was as bowed and unassuming as she had been when Margaret last saw her standing outside the chapel after the funeral of a person neither of them had known in life. Except this time she was sitting on an orange plastic chair next to an unconscious Barbara and a small machine that blinked on and off with a heart sign to show there was still hope. Margaret pulled up a chair of her own and sat on the other side of Barbara’s bed, uncertain whom she should address. Her mother was incapacitated. And only recently Margaret had used Mrs Maclure’s name to perpetrate a fraud. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. But in the end it was Mrs Maclure who showed her the way.
‘Did you have a fruitful trip to London?’ she enquired with the smallest dip of her head. It wasn’t the first thing Margaret had expected to be asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’ It was out before she could conjure a suitable lie.
‘Oh good,’ Mrs Maclure nodded. ‘Such an interesting place, London. Full of all sorts. Of course you know that, having lived there for . . .’
‘Thirty years.’
‘Really, that long? The way your mother talked it seemed like only yesterday that you went to the south.’
Margaret tugged the corners of her coat up into her lap as though she were a child seeking protection. She didn’t have any kind of answer to that.
Mrs Maclure bobbed for a moment in her chair. ‘And was it a good trip?’
‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Very useful, thank you.’
‘I heard that.’
Certificates in black and red. Births, Marriages and Deaths. Not to mention an unauthorized expenses form. Was there anything that Mrs Maclure did not know before Margaret had announced it first? She decided to change the subject – get back to the urgent matter lying in front of them now. ‘Do you know where they found her?’
‘Oh, out and about.’ Mrs Maclure waved a vague hand. ‘Down in Leith, I think, at some funeral parlour.’
‘A funeral parlour?’
A corpse laid out beneath a sheet.
‘Or perhaps a church.’ Mrs Maclure bowed towards Barbara for a moment as though making a small prayer herself.
Margaret shifted a little in her chair. Either scenario sounded plausible. Ever since she’d turned up on Barbara’s doorstep wearing a stolen coat and clutching a bottle of rum, her mother had seemed obsessed with the prospect of death knocking at her door. Or the possibility of securing eternal life. ‘Has the doctor been round yet?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes, dear.’ Mrs Maclure smiled, revealing those two long canines. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or perhaps someone who really did know where all the bodies were buried, just as Barbara had said. ‘But I told her to come back when you were here.’
‘Thank you.’ Margaret felt suddenly tired, her long night on a slow train catching up with her at last. Also there was something discomfiting about Mrs Maclure, as though she knew more about Margaret than she understood herself.
Mrs Maclure got up suddenly and began to button her coat. ‘Are you going now?’ Margaret asked. Her heart set up a little pitter-patter at the prospect of being left with sole responsibility for her mother.
Mrs Maclure bobbed again. ‘Oh yes, dear.’ She picked up her handbag and tucked it into her side. ‘It’s you she will want to see when she wakes up. Don’t you think?’
DCI Franklin had said the same thing when she drove Margaret to the hospital, signalling, checking mirrors, and pulling out onto the snow-covered roads with unnerving accuracy and speed. ‘She’ll need to see a familiar face when she comes round.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, remembering the last look that had passed between her and Barbara. Fear, or something like it. ‘Did they say what was wrong?’
‘No,’ said the detective, gripping the steering wheel with efficient leather gloves. ‘But she’s still breathing. That’s what counts.’
As they sped through two sets of traffic lights on the cusp of amber to red, Margaret said, ‘How did they know you’d be with me?’
DCI Franklin didn’t even bother to look round. ‘This is Edinburgh,’ she said. And even Margaret understood then what she meant.
Two roundabouts and a zebra crossing taken at speed, and the DCI’s next question didn’t take Margaret by surprise either. ‘You’re from London, aren’t you?’ Janie had obviously done her work. ‘What brings you here?’
‘Oh, just because . . . My mother. She’s older now.’ One never knew when one might need a family to provide the perfect excuse.
The detective glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘London,’ she said. As though she knew there was a story Margaret could tell about that. ‘Very interesting place.’
Margaret held the lapels of her coat closed over the paws of a fox and hoped that DCI Franklin wasn’t warming her up for some sort of confession about the real reason she had fled north. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For giving me a lift. I know you’re very busy.’
‘You’re welcome.’ DCI Franklin revved through another amber light. ‘Anything else, just ask.’
‘There is one thing.’ Who Dares Wins (and all that). Margaret glanced at the detective, who was frowning now as though one favour was just a favour, whereas two was a suspicious act. ‘Have you been following me? In your car, I mean.’
DCI Franklin laughed then, astonished. ‘Foll
owing you?’ she said, turning to look at Margaret. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’
‘Stroke,’ declared the consultant when she came to see what could be done. A woman around Margaret’s age, wearing a pair of smart black shoes with flat heels – appropriate in every sort of way. Margaret slid her own feet beneath the orange chair as the consultant looked at her notes first, then at Barbara and finally at Margaret. ‘Seems she had some kind of shock. Though at her age, with her condition, it could have happened any time.’
‘Her condition?’
Short of breath. Struggling to get in and out of a chair. A stick to help her walk. (Not to mention an obsession with religion.) It turned out that it wasn’t idleness or contrariness or drinking too much rum that Barbara suffered from. It was a heart condition, after all.
‘She’ll need a lot of looking after, if . . .’ The consultant suddenly jiggled the stethoscope round her neck. ‘I mean, when she comes round.’
‘Right.’ Margaret stared at her mother’s face, sunk into the pillow as though into the satin lining of a coffin just waiting for the lid to be nailed down. Was this it then? The beginning of the end. Not shuffling and dribbling around the corridor of some old people’s home, but chopped down like a diseased tree, no questions asked.
The consultant wrote something on her clipboard. ‘She won’t wake up for a while.’
‘How long?’ Margaret wanted certainty. But she knew that, unlike with her dead client, there would be none of that here.
‘Hard to say.’ The consultant frowned. ‘But you can talk to her if you like. Tell her a story. Then she might wake up and tell you one back.’
The story began down in London when Margaret decided to return a coat. Out on the steps of the Chelsea Old Town Hall and Register Office with a clutch of certificates in her hand. Births, Marriages, Deaths. Even then Margaret had wondered if this was what her mother had experienced. That Damascene moment, like a flare in the chest, propelling Barbara towards whatever church she could find. Episcopal. Catholic. Evangelical. Friends. The belief that anything could happen – and probably would.
The suburban road had been much as it was when she’d last come to visit on that cold New Year’s night. Quiet and full of cars parked end to end, everything slick with late-January rain. The house was as solid and intact as it had been three weeks before, too. No boarded-up windows. No soot to stain the brick. Instead it was just new glass bristling in the living-room window and those stained panels above the door – gold, green and red.
Margaret hadn’t bothered to ring the bell. Why compound the offence? Instead she left the coat in a bundle on the doorstep, a parcel of red. She had almost escaped along the path, up, up and away, back towards the north, when the shout came, a rectangle of beckoning light thrown out as though someone inside had been waiting for just this chance. ‘Hello!’ A woman with ashen hair. ‘I hoped you would come.’ Calling for Margaret to return to the scene of everything she’d done wrong. And everything she was now trying to put right.
They stood opposite each other on the narrow garden path, one woman lit up by the glow of a family house, the other standing in the shadow of the past. Two women, two sides of the same coin, ne’er the twain shall meet. Except, of course, they had. A life laid out on a small, stained table in Margaret’s local coffee shop. What was it, she had thought then, that always made her second best?
The woman’s silk blouse rippled in the low light spilling from the front door. ‘Will you come in?’ she asked. And for a moment Margaret had been tempted. That rug the colour of blood. Those walls painted the colour of the sun. But then she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. And she was.
For alarms going off all at once. For the screaming of baby monitors and the howling of dogs. For the wail of smoke detectors. For the shouting, ‘Bloody hell!’ as the flames ran out, crawling over the carpet, leaping up the stairs, consuming everything that lay in their path – a man with hair dark as slate in the rain and two silver-haired children crouching in their beds.
Except . . .
When it came to it, even that had not turned out quite the way Margaret thought it might.
A family house all silent and dark – empty, she hoped. A rag soaked in turpentine taken from her pocket, then shoved deep inside the front door. A match struck hard against the side of a box and dropped through the letter box too. The pop as one ignited the other, a plume of blue flame rising up. Margaret had stood back then, waiting for it all to take hold, happy that he would lose everything he owned, just as she had lost all she owned too. Arson. Criminal damage. The intention to harm. It wasn’t nothing. But it was, perhaps, what he deserved.
Then she’d glanced up.
The two faces gazed down at her like small satellites from behind black glass. They stared at each other for a moment – two silver-haired children, and a woman who should have been their mother, but never was. Sheep stealer. Peddler of fake coins. Or a murderess, perhaps. What was it her mother always said? Nothing but trouble right from the start.
Then it was down on her knees on the freezing garden path, scrabbling scrabbling, scraping together whatever dirty snow she could. Shovelling it through the letter box, handful after handful, hoping for the best. Until the rag lay smothered, not in turpentine this time, but with grit and slush, earth from the gravelly flower beds, blue flames dying out with nothing more than a hiss.
When Margaret looked up again, the two small faces had gone and she’d grabbed the first thing that came to her hand instead. A brick abandoned on the garden path, lobbed with fury against the large front pane. Smashing its way through the window. Splinters of wood, of metal and of glass flying through the air. Someone inside shouting, ‘Call the police!’
Margaret threw something else too, as the clamour started up, just because she could. One of her Christmas clementines, tossed into a room painted the colour of the sun. It landed next to where a man had appeared, standing bemused amongst a sea of shattered glass. Happy Christmas, she’d thought then as she walked away. And a Happy New Year too.
Now, standing on that same garden path as though nothing untoward had happened, the ashen-haired woman held out her arms in a gesture reminiscent of a priest. ‘No harm done,’ she said. And they both knew what she meant. Even Margaret Penny was getting washed clean now.
Margaret indicated the bundle on the doormat. ‘I brought your coat back. You left it in the cafe.’
Draped over a chair next to a small, stained table spread with a life Margaret had once imagined might be hers.
‘Really, I thought . . .’ The woman stopped. Seemed to decide that enquiry led down a path best left untravelled. ‘Well . . .’ She picked up the coat and unfurled it. ‘I appreciate you keeping it all this time.’
The stolen coat was the colour of a tomato ripening beneath an Italian sun. Margaret was sorry to see it go. Somehow it had brought her luck.
‘Yours is nice,’ said the woman as though making social chit-chat. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Oh, here and there.’ Margaret ran a hand across the coat she was wearing, the colour of mulberries foaming in a wooden vat, cuffs worn thin. Mrs Walker’s parting gift to the woman who had resurrected her. Protection of a sort.
The woman with the ashen hair stroked her own coat where it hung over her arm. A warning flag perhaps. Danger. Keep out. Margaret didn’t tell her about the photograph hidden in the pocket. Two silver-haired children grinning in crumpled Technicolor. Home at last.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better . . .’ Margaret indicated the dark street, big cars lined up. They sparkled in the rain, winking at Margaret as though they had a message to impart. She turned back. ‘I don’t suppose you have a black car, do you?’
The woman frowned. ‘No.’ As though Margaret must have known everything about this woman’s life, but chosen not to look.
‘Oh.’ Margaret wasn’t sure whether to be sorry, or relieved. No pursuit from the south, then. A man with hair dark as slate in the rai
n coming after her to beg or to accuse. So this really was it. Right here and right now. Salvation, of a sort. ‘Well, goodbye then.’ Margaret turned to go.
‘Oh, hang on.’ The woman suddenly disappeared back inside the house.
Margaret waited in that rectangle of warm light, not certain whether to follow or hurry off down the street. Somewhere she knew that two silver-haired children might be watching. Maybe even a husband, lurking somewhere in the shadows. But in the end it only took a moment before the woman appeared once more, this time with a big cardboard box in her arms.
‘Would you like this?’ The woman held the box out to Margaret. ‘I heard you might need one.’
Margaret reached out to take the box, uncertain what she might find inside. Another replacement coat, perhaps. Or a bomb to blow her out of existence for good.
‘I found it in a skip down the road,’ the woman went on. ‘But it’s practically brand new.’ Margaret stared down at where the brown cardboard flaps folded one over the other. The woman started to close the door of her family home. ‘It’s a juice machine,’ she said.
On the cabinet beside Barbara’s hospital bed a clutch of tiny green-and-white flowers drooped over the edge of a plastic NHS cup. An illegal offering from Mrs Maclure, left to cheer Barbara up. How was it, Margaret wondered, that certain people always managed to subvert the rules?
Inside the bedside cabinet, bundled inside a yellow plastic bag like a whole coil of gut, lay the clothes Barbara had been wearing when they first brought her in. Large pants, a huge bra, trousers with an elasticated waist and a polyester top into which Margaret could have fitted twice. Margaret sifted through her mother’s clothes piece by piece, remembering the things she had lifted from another woman’s chest of drawers only a few days before. One old lady with nothing but ice on the inside of the bathroom window, another with a wipe-clean roller blind. Two sides of the same coin, ne’er the twain shall meet. But Margaret was starting to understand just which one she would prefer to end up as herself.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 28
