The Other Mrs Walker

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  Barbara watched as Clementine touched the ticket as though to make sure it was still there, then lifted it out and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket. She looked back at Barbara where she was standing in the dark with her jaw hanging down. ‘Have you got the money, at least?’

  ‘Money?’

  Tony’s share of blackmail. The proceeds from the very first Penny Family Business – all Clementine’s hard work. A thousand dollar bills (or thereabouts), locked up inside a wooden box and hidden beneath Tony’s bed. Alongside whatever else he could get his hands on. Watches and promissory notes, silver tie pins and coins of all sorts. No way for Clementine to get it back unless some small person purloined a key from Tony’s waistcoat pocket while he was occupied doing something else.

  Barbara shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. For the note hadn’t mentioned money.

  ‘Christ!’ Clementine’s voice cut through the inky blackness like a scalpel. ‘Bloody hell.’

  And Barbara couldn’t help it. ‘You shouldn’t swear, Clemmie,’ she said. ‘It’s bad. Mrs Penny said so.’ Even in the vast wilderness of London at night, Barbara still managed to sound prim.

  Clementine laughed then, a hollow thing thrown up into the sky, empty of everything Barbara had expected or hoped. ‘For God’s sake, Barbara. You shouldn’t believe everything that Mrs Penny says.’

  Somewhere to the south a plane sputtered and droned, the last of a mission to the east returning home injured and late. Its engine dragged nearer, a grinding, high-pitched sound. Both girls looked up. Something was not right. Suddenly, Clementine crouched close to the ground and closed up the lid of the suitcase. Click-clack, that’s that. She shone her torch into Barbara’s face again. ‘You should go home now, Barbara. It’s not safe.’

  Barbara raised her arm to her eyes once more. ‘But what about . . .’

  ‘Don’t argue. Just do as you’re told.’

  Barbara squinted, tried to make out the shape of her sister behind the dazzling beam. ‘Aren’t I coming too?’ Small bundle hanging by her side.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Why would I take you?’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘But you were going to take Ruby.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  At least, that’s what Barbara thought her sister said. For suddenly the torch was gone and Barbara was enveloped – by shadows and dark things, obstructions looming up at her out of the night. In front of her there was a scuffling. She put out her hand, touched nothing but empty air, stepped forwards and hit her toe on the edge of a stone or a brick. She stumbled, dropped her bundle, fell back. When she scrambled up again the torchlight was already six feet away, maybe more, a small pool darting this way and that as it travelled rapidly in the opposite direction over the destroyed ground. Twirling hair, shiny gadgets, the scent of orange peel in the night. Barbara Penny’s promised land walking away forever into the dark.

  She called out, ‘Wait!’ Stumbling after the light. ‘Wait, Clemmie. I brought you this.’

  A love token.

  A promise.

  The seal on a pact.

  The torch beam stopped then for a moment, Clementine’s voice ringing out in the darkness hard and cold as a bomb casing dropped on a concrete floor. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ruby stole it.’

  Ruby, hands all over the insides of a suitcase.

  Ruby, folding stolen treasure into a small square of serge.

  ‘I’m late now, Barbara. I don’t have time for your silly games.’ Clementine’s voice was cool, like the bottom of an ocean where a million sailors had sunk slowly to their deaths. ‘If anything happens it’ll be your fault.’

  ‘But I got it back for you.’ Barbara waited, until at last the torch began its dance back to where she was standing. Two girls, two sisters. One nearly nineteen and all grown now. One with all her growing still to do.

  Together they stared down into the small cup of torchlight illuminating Barbara’s hands. A red eye glittered back, surrounded by five sharp points. Clementine’s star-shaped brooch, where it belonged at last.

  Clementine spoke first. ‘She didn’t steal it, Barbara. I gave it to her.’

  ‘But Stanley . . .’

  ‘It isn’t from Stanley. It’s from Tony.’

  Ruby sitting on a bed.

  Ruby sitting on a knee.

  Ruby letting Tony kiss her: a promise to her older sister made and kept.

  ‘He gave it to me ages ago.’

  A small girl locked in a cellar, eyes rimmed with soot.

  ‘It’s nothing but a trinket.’ The torch beam swung away again. ‘Have it if you want.’

  The pool of light danced off once more, quicker this time. Now here. Now gone. Now here again. Then lost. Hurrying, hurrying into the darkness, over piles of rubble, over huge blocks of broken stone covered in weeds.

  Barbara watched as it vanished into the black, then appeared again even further away than before. ‘Don’t leave me, Clemmie,’ she called out as the light got smaller and smaller. ‘Wait!’ But her voice was nothing now, a tiny echo calling to no one but herself.

  Disorientated in the darkness, she stumbled first this way then that, bruising her knees and holding her arms out in front as though to ward off the worst. She wasn’t certain whether to wait or to follow. Or whether just to go home. There was no one to tell her what to do now. Not Tony or Mrs Penny. Not Ruby or even Clementine. Not any more.

  Ahead of her, across the wilderness, Clementine’s torch was nothing but a tiny winking star. Barbara watched it disappear for the last time as she began to cry. Above them, a pilot, almost nineteen and not long to live, spotted it too. He locked onto the pinprick of light dancing on the ground. Home at last. Then set his final course.

  An explosion of light. A tsunami of hot air. A wave of splinters and of brick. Dust rolling across the ground towards her like an enormous desert storm. But what Barbara remembered most before the cataclysm came, was the silence. Her life suspended for a millionth of a second, as though it might take a whole other turn.

  Alfred returned from the hills.

  Dorothea resurrected.

  Two little twins crawling from their hideaway with grass seeds in their hair.

  When Barbara opened her eyes she found herself gazing at stars, a whole sky of them gazing back. A thick layer of dust had covered her body like a blanket, from the very top of her head right down to the soles of her feet. Her bundle had vanished, tossed away somewhere by the blast, as she had been tossed too, up into the air, landing out of sight of anything she recognized. Her skirt was all crumpled. Her hair all this way and that. And the pin from a star-shaped brooch had got stuck sharp into the centre of her palm, reminding Barbara of everything she had tried to do right. And everything she had managed to get wrong.

  Barbara got up, legs wobbling as though a wardrobe really had come tumbling down on her head this time. She unstuck the brooch from her hand and sucked at the little bead of blood that took its place. Then she wiped her hand on her sock to try to get it clean. She attempted to wipe dust from her coat as best she could, but just made it worse. Mrs Penny would not be pleased. Then she looked around to try to find her sister, Clementine.

  At the edge of the wasteland, a huge fire roared. There was shouting and the sound of a siren blaring. An enormous arc of water falling into a void. Smoke hung thick and choking all about as Barbara stumbled towards the place where Clementine and her little beam of light had disappeared into the dark. Then she stopped. For in front of her there was a crater. And inside the crater, there was nothing at all. The suitcase and all its treasures vanished forever into a fiery pit. Clementine blown away forever too. Nothing left behind but a charred ID card, just waiting for the authorities to discover it and return it to the family stamped: DECEASED.

  What was it Clementine had said? If anything happened, it would all be Barbara’s fault.

  There were two things about 14 Elm Row that were different when Barbara made it home. Number
1 – there was a hole opposite their house where someone else’s house had once been. Number 2 – Ruby was sitting in the middle of the street.

  ‘Help me, Barbara. Help me, please.’

  The only time Ruby had ever asked her twin that.

  Ruby’s skirt was all rucked up around her waist. Her hair ribbon was torn. Her legs were folded beneath her at a funny sort of angle that made Barbara’s stomach flip. And in Ruby’s hand, nestled in the palm, was Clementine’s lucky coronation penny. Not so lucky now.

  Barbara meant to say, ‘Ruby, it’s me.’

  She meant to say, ‘Don’t worry.’

  She meant to say, ‘I’m back.’

  But what she said was this: ‘You know we’re not allowed outside when the Warning goes.’

  Badness. It ran through the Walker family like mercury through a silver tube, just as Mrs Penny had said.

  2011

  Clementine Walker Shaw was worth a fortune – at least, that was what she said. A fortune in oranges, growing like weeds by the side of the road. ‘Florida,’ she said when Margaret enquired. ‘USA.’ As though Margaret might not know of it. The promised land indeed.

  Eighteen, nearly nineteen, twirled hair all scorched, suitcase blown from her hand, covered in dust from mortar and bricks, from rubble and earth, from all sorts of disasters, before she managed to resurrect herself and squeeze onto a boat. Clementine had promised herself then that she would only ever look forwards, and never look back. But promises had never been something Clementine Walker Shaw felt the need to keep.

  Over eighty now, but tall still and straight, hair like a silver river flowing from the crown of her head to the tips, Clementine Walker made her way down the aisle of the chapel unaided but for a cane inlaid with tortoiseshell, tip-tapping on the cold tiles as she walked inexorably to the front. Her eyes, as they landed on Barbara’s disbelieving face, were as startling as they had been the day her sisters were born, six little orange pips sucked dry pushed deep down the side of their crib.

  In the face of her approach, everything stopped. The choir faltered. Pastor Macdonald stared. The indigent funeral rota turned as one to look, shuffling and gawping in a very non-Edinburgh way. Even the coffin’s descent was halted before it disappeared forever into the irretrievable depths. The funeral had already been a special occasion, but now it was about to become something even more extraordinary than that.

  Amongst the clumsy hats and sensible windcheaters of the Edinburgh crowd, it was clear that this woman did not belong to the Athens of the North. She was much too well dressed for that. Her coat was as black as the darkest Edinburgh night. Her gloves as close-fitting as a second skin. Her shoes were fastened each side by tiny ebony beads. And her legs, old now and riven with veins, were clad in the thinnest of gossamer tights.

  ‘Am I too late?’ the old woman demanded as she processed to the front of Edinburgh’s small crematorium chapel leaning on an elegant black stick.

  On the contrary, thought Margaret, staring at the new arrival. You have timed your entry to perfection, for maximum effect.

  Beside Margaret, Barbara sagged as though punctured, almost dragging her daughter to the floor. Her face had turned as bloodless as the remains of Mrs Walker, laid out now inside her wooden box. As the new arrival gazed at Barbara with those startling eyes, unmistakable despite all the years that had passed, Barbara let out a small moan as though mortally injured through the heart. Her chest set up a great wheezing and wailing as if it were Barbara who was about to descend to the underworld with nothing but a small trail of orange pips to keep her company at the last.

  On the woman’s elegant lapel, pinned above her heart, was a brooch, star-shaped, the red stone at its centre like a tiny drop of blood. It winked at Margaret in the low chapel light. Even so, Margaret had to ask.

  ‘Who are you?’

  All the murmurings and the susurrations of the indigent funeral crowd fell silent then, as though a bomb were about to drop. The woman gesticulated with her cane, pointing its slender tip towards Barbara, or perhaps the coffin; even afterwards Margaret could never be sure. Then she said it.

  ‘I’m her sister, of course.’

  The funeral ended in the same confusion in which the dead Mrs Walker had existed for the past few weeks. A mishmash of exclamations and gasps, chatter and excitement, shuffles, whispers, even the occasional shout. The organist struck up with a hymn, ‘Abide with Me’, as the choir picked up the River Jordan for its last few beats. Pastor Macdonald attempted to finish his eulogy, voice straining as he exhorted his congregation to praise the Lord in the face of this obvious sign of deliverance from the west.

  But no one was paying any attention. All eyes were on the stranger arrived from out of the Edinburgh mist, sitting now in the front row alongside Margaret and Barbara Penny as though by some divine right. The old woman clad in elegant black was silent as all around her the indigent funeral crowd thrummed with excitement, craning to get a good look. She sat poised and composed like an artist’s model, staring resolutely towards the coffin at the front, occasionally gazing up at the small coloured windows positioned high beneath the chapel’s roof.

  The choir sang its way out as the organist lumbered to a close and Pastor Macdonald repeated ashes to ashes several times, as though to make sure the thing really was at an end. It was only as the coffin started once more on its inevitable descent that the old woman stood all of a sudden and stilled the demented crowd. They fell into silence as she moved slowly forwards to leave a gift all of her own on the surface of Mrs Walker’s last abode.

  A love token, perhaps.

  A seal on a pact.

  But it turned out to be neither of these things. Just a plain old orange of the kind one might buy in the street. The last thing any of the funeral crowd saw as Mrs Walker’s coffin descended at last into its final berth.

  Outside in the damp February rain, after the funeral had come to its chaotic, unruly end, Mrs Walker’s long-lost sister explained. ‘I eat one every morning for breakfast,’ she said. ‘From my own personal crop.’

  Peeled and segmented, displayed like a wheel of fire on a blue stone plate. A reminder of sun burning in a prairie sky. And of a small girl sitting alone on the bottom step of a narrow stairway, waiting and waiting for her father to come home.

  What more proof did Margaret need that this was indeed a relative of the dead? Still, it would have been a dereliction of duty not to ask. ‘What’s your name?’ she said. It was a genuine question.

  The lady with the long velvet coat, dark as midnight, smiled. ‘You can call me the other Mrs Walker.’

  And amidst all the confusion and the windcheaters, the general pandemonium, that was how it was left.

  At the front door of the chapel, Barbara was wheezing now as though she might expire right there on the steps, no need for further hospitalization or even a residential home for the terminally old. ‘Take me home,’ she whispered to Margaret, squeezing out the words as if they constituted her dying request. She refused to look at the startling stranger.

  ‘I can give you a lift if you want?’ The other Mrs Walker’s voice was a strange combination of old England and new America, something irresistible in its tone. She made her offer as a car, black and glittering with raindrops, glided to a halt in front of the chapel doors.

  Margaret frowned. ‘Have you been following me?’ she said, even though she knew it wasn’t entirely polite.

  ‘Of course,’ the other Mrs Walker said, as though it was an obvious fact rather than a mystery only just solved. ‘How else was I to discover where my sister might live?’

  ‘So lovely to meet you. Hope to see you again.’ Barbara’s voice was faint as she uttered the standard pleasantries accorded to a stranger. Say one thing, mean another. The Edinburgh Way of bringing something to an end.

  ‘But what about the wake?’ said Margaret. Sandwiches made of soft white bread. Rum in dark bottles. And three kinds of cake. All laid out in the kitchen at The Court. She d
idn’t want this stranger to miss out on that.

  ‘I’m sure she’s got other things to do,’ Barbara gasped, tugging at Margaret’s arm as though to steer her towards the waiting taxis.

  ‘Oh no,’ replied the other Mrs Walker. ‘That was why I came.’

  Despite its bulk, the black car only had room for one other passenger. Or so the old woman said. ‘Shall we toss for it? Heads or tails. You choose.’ And from a small purse hanging from her wrist the other Mrs Walker produced a silver dollar, shining in the low February light.

  But for the first time since Margaret had returned to Edinburgh, she got there first. There in her palm, held out for anyone who wanted to see, was a lucky coronation penny. Britannia on one side wielding her trident. A king who should never have been a king imprinted on the reverse. For a moment there was silence as two old women stared down at the flat brown thing. Barbara’s eyes bulged beneath the brim of her lilac hat. While the other Mrs Walker just began to laugh. Let the king decide.

  So he did.

  ‘Heads,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Tails,’ said Barbara.

  And the other Mrs Walker flipped the coin into the air.

  Up, up it went, everyone watching, mouths open, breath held as it made its lazy turn. Then down, down, plummeting towards the wet ground, bouncing once with a chink on the cold stone before rolling off towards the chapel door. Margaret pursued the coin as it faltered and toppled into the shadows.

  ‘Heads,’ she declared from inside the chapel.

  Of course.

  The inside of the black car was as luxurious as Barbara’s box room was not. Leather, soft, with the dull sheen of money, large enough for plenty of passengers should that have been what the owner desired. Margaret stroked the seat as she clambered in, tucking little paws and a fox tail inside her lapels. As the car set off with a soft purr, gliding away from the chapel, she looked back out of the smoky glass of the rear window to see Barbara standing at the front of the indigent funeral crowd, jaw dropped down. She was propped up by two grey NHS sticks and Mrs Maclure.