‘You’ll get her home, won’t you?’ Margaret had whispered to the small woman as the other Mrs Walker instructed her driver where to go. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘Of course.’ Mrs Maclure bobbed and bowed. ‘I understand. Family comes first.’
Black hands. Black feet. Hair stuck to the back of an armchair. This was the first opportunity since Margaret had arrived back in Edinburgh to actually get to know something of her client in the flesh.
‘But . . .’ Mrs Maclure had gripped Margaret’s arm before she climbed into the back seat of the car. ‘Don’t forget, dear. The past is a dangerous country. Things there aren’t always what they seem.’
As it was, in the car now, the other Mrs Walker wove a story in response to Margaret’s request that was all about her rather than her sister. Of a troopship sailing away from an English port, full of the wounded and anyone else who could inveigle their way on board. Of crowds waving, handkerchiefs all aflutter, hats lifted, scarves trailing like banners in the breeze. Of a young woman standing alone on the other side of the boat, gazing towards a new horizon and at the cold, choppy waters still to be crossed.
‘I came from the wrong side of the blanket,’ the other Mrs Walker told Margaret. ‘Not in the official records, so to speak.’ And Margaret felt the thrill of a connection she had never quite considered for herself.
The old woman described how for the whole of the journey she only ever stood at the prow, never in the stern, leaving behind a Britain where one rasher of bacon had to last for three weeks. And roast chicken cost a quart of rum. Where eggs came in powder form. And oranges were a luxury only the lucky could afford. She arrived to reupholstered bras and shiny gadgets. To cars as big as boats. To a kitchen with a red floor that shone like a mirror right from the start. At least, that was what she said.
‘I was a war bride, before the war was even out.’ And the other Mrs Walker laughed then as though all the arrangements had happened just like that.
Mrs Walker to anyone who asked. Mrs Walker Shaw before a year passed. Confetti fluttering over her head as she walked down the steps of a clapboard church to a lifetime spent on a wide-open plain.
‘Freshly picked beans! Tomatoes as big as my hand! You can understand, dear . . .’ the other Mrs Walker said, her hand in its fine glove pressing Margaret’s knee, ‘. . . why it was I never came home.’
The other Mrs Walker dipped inside her small bag then and took out a photograph. A man surrounded by four children, all of them grinning, a Polaroid bleached in the hot American sun.
‘My husband, Stanley. Dorothy, my eldest. Stan Junior the next. Then my twins, Alfie and little Clemmie.’ The other Mrs Walker pointed a fingertip towards the small girl in the picture. ‘My own little gem.’
Margaret gazed at where a girl stared back, grinning with perfect little teeth and startling eyes, dark hair all about her face. She knew then that the other Mrs Walker was who she claimed to be. The names told that story, if nothing else. But also because the girl in the photograph was as small-boned and as startling as her ancestor lying now inside a wooden box.
So here they were at last, the deceased’s relatives that Margaret had been searching for all along. Not a madwoman in a lunatic asylum, or two dead children sleeping in their grave beneath a holly bush. But a sister from the wrong side of the bedcovers, and all her descendants, returned from their hiding place across the sea.
Margaret felt in the pocket of her new stolen coat for a photograph of her own, just to be sure. A woman sitting in a chair looking bewildered, wearing some sort of gown. ‘Is this your sister?’ she said.
The old lady removed her glove to take the photograph from Margaret. She looked at the image for a long time before she said, ‘Yes. That’s her.’ Then she lifted her hand and touched the surface of the picture, right where a small ruby stone was pinned above the woman’s heart.
‘Do you know what she was doing in Edinburgh?’ Margaret asked.
The other Mrs Walker paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps she was heading home,’ she said.
‘But she came from London.’
The old woman turned to look at Margaret. ‘So do you,’ she replied.
There was an awkward silence for a moment, before Margaret decided to push on. Who Dares Wins (and all that). ‘Do you mind me asking how you found out she had died?’ She couldn’t imagine Janie’s indigent funeral budget stretching to adverts in America.
‘Serendipity,’ said Mrs Walker Shaw. ‘And a letter.’
‘A letter?’
‘From a representative of the dead.’
Clementine Walker Shaw was a widow of twenty years’ standing living amongst the Florida groves when her life took its next turn. No longer dreaming of oranges but of something else instead. Rooms painted with distemper. Cold iron grates. A kitchen table covered in flour. And a mother singing ‘Oh my darling’, as she brushed and brushed her daughter’s hair. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw them all again. Men in uniform leaning towards her from out of the shadows. An asylum rising from its grounds. And two little girls sitting on the edge of a bed with dirty ribbons in their hair.
Suffer little children to come unto me.
Wasn’t that what the chapel window had said?
Clementine Walker Shaw knew that she had broken most of the Ten Commandments before she was even grown. She had lied. She had stolen. She had slept with them all. But was it too late to make up, now that she was old? She had pressed her hands to her face then, sticky with juice and age, and prayed to whoever might be listening. Help me, Jesus. Help me, Allah. Help me, God. After all, she had been buried once before and survived. Perhaps now was the moment for Clementine Walker to rise again.
She sent the black car out like a probe into the darkness of the past, just in case, chasing Pennys of the right age and name. Followed by letters to a solicitor’s firm that had worked so hard to obliterate her past. Her reward came on an unassuming Florida morning, dropped into her mailbox as she ate an orange laid out on a blue china plate. A small thing, crumpled and lumpy, stamped with the imprint of a psychiatric unit somewhere in England.
Dear Mrs Walker . . .
Containing a brooch, small and star-shaped, with a dot of red at its heart.
Also a note. From Nye & Sons, solicitors, of London.
Your sister asked me to send you this when the time came. Deepest regrets.
Jessica Plymmet paying her debts at the last.
‘I felt it then, dear,’ the other Mrs Walker said, taking Margaret by the wrist. ‘As though my final moment had come too.’
A pitter-patter inside the old woman’s chest, the suck of her breath loud inside her head. Counting, one elephant, two elephant, all the way to a thousand, just as Alfred had taught. Nothing spiralling through her brain but a father who whistled as he walked away. A mother left swaying on a bed. Two small children crawling from their latest hideaway. And a girl with eyes as startling as her own, breathing out a promise to do whatever Clementine said.
Tell no one. That was what Clementine had made the little girl promise.
So that was what Ruby Walker did.
Back at The Court, surrounded by as many of the indigent funeral rota as could fit, the other Mrs Walker sat peeling an orange while all around her people whispered and watched. The stranger’s fingers never faltered as she parsed the skin away from the fruit in one continuous curl.
‘My orchard is beautiful,’ she said, holding out a segment to Margaret. ‘You should visit one day.’
‘I’d like that,’ Margaret said. But she knew it wouldn’t happen. Apart from Margaret having no money, the other Mrs Walker hadn’t told anybody where precisely she lived.
Teacups and rum glasses, sandwiches carved into fingers, three kinds of cake – Margaret busied herself in the kitchen replenishing refreshments for all of their guests. She could hear the other Mrs Walker spinning her story once again. Beans piling up in a colander. Tomatoes as big as her fist. Unlike Barbara, stories were
something the other Mrs Walker appeared to do best.
On the side in the kitchen was a bottle of cheap rum, screw top loose. Standing next to it, a bottle of whisky of a very expensive brand. ‘Duty-free,’ the other Mrs Walker had said as she handed it over. ‘What a wonderful thing.’
Next to the two bottles was Barbara, tumbler filled to the brim. ‘But what did she say?’ Barbara had been interrogating Margaret ever since she and the other Mrs Walker had arrived back at The Court. The liquid in her glass trembled and shimmied to match the tremor in her hands.
‘Why don’t you ask her yourself?’ Margaret took some Bakewells from a box and placed them one by one on a plate as though they were the rays of the sun.
‘Where has she come from?’ Barbara didn’t want to speak to the spectre at the feast. At least, that was how it seemed.
‘America.’
Barbara’s chest gave off a sort of whimper. ‘America?’ The promised land, of course.
‘She was a war bride. Married someone called Stanley. Never came home until now.’
‘But how did she know about the funeral?’ Barbara lifted the tumbler towards her mouth with both hands, teeth chattering on the glass.
‘Mrs Walker’s solicitor got in touch. Jessica Plymmet? You know her, I think.’
Barbara’s hand jerked and rum spilt all down the front of her turquoise suit. ‘What does she want?’ she said.
Margaret frowned at her mother. ‘What do you think? To say goodbye, of course.’
From out in the living room where the other Mrs Walker held court, a great laugh gusted up from the indigent crowd, followed by a smattering of applause. ‘I never knew she had a sister.’ Barbara’s voice was plaintive now, as though she was still a child herself.
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Walker.’
‘No,’ said Margaret. ‘Neither did I. But then that’s life, isn’t it? It takes with one hand and gives back with the next.’
Margaret stood back to admire the tray of tea and cake ready to go out into the midst. She reached for the bottle of duty-free the other Mrs Walker had contributed to the wake. ‘I think I’ll have a whisky. Seeing as it was what Mrs Walker drank.’
‘Me too,’ said Mrs Maclure, appearing suddenly in the kitchen and moving in behind Barbara as though to catch her should she fall.
Barbara made a feeble stab at one of Margaret’s new shoes with the rubber tip of her grey NHS stick. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Nineteen empty bottles,’ said Margaret, moving her foot away. ‘Lined up in the deceased’s flat.’
‘Nineteen?’ Barbara swayed for a moment, as though remembering her own cluster of bottles lined up beneath the sink. ‘Was she ill?’
‘Pain relief, I think,’ replied Margaret. ‘She only had a few weeks to drink them in, but she drank the lot.’
‘My, my,’ said Pastor Macdonald, chuckling from where he had come to stand in the doorway. ‘It’s one way to celebrate the coming of the end.’
Pastor Macdonald was even bigger close up, his face glowing with evangelical zeal and spirits of a different kind. ‘How nice to meet you properly at last,’ he said, clasping Margaret’s hand in his enormous palm. ‘Welcome back.’
‘Nice to meet you too,’ she replied. ‘And where are you from?’ She hadn’t meant to say it. It just popped out. The Edinburgh Way.
Pastor Macdonald laughed and endowed Margaret with his most brilliant smile. ‘Pilrig,’ he said, ‘by way of Leith. And you?’
‘Edinburgh, by way of London.’
‘Ah. And are you a London girl at heart, or a creature of the north?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Margaret looked over to where her mother was trying to squeeze past Pastor Macdonald, wheezing and panting on her way to salvation in the loo. Barbara was holding a grey NHS stick aloft in one hand, a tumbler of rum splashing and dancing in the other. Margaret peered down into her own glass, a small slick of amber liquid smiling back. ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said.
But she had.
Ten minutes later, through a crack in the box-room door, Margaret watched as two women, both old, one fat, one startling in every single way, confronted each other across a blue-and-yellow lilo. From the living room she could hear Pastor Macdonald leading the rest of the indigent flock in prayer. Help me, Jesus. Help me, Allah. Help me, God. But despite his entreaties, Margaret had made her excuses and left. There were other secrets she was more interested in than those that would only be revealed on death.
‘I came to say goodbye.’ The other Mrs Walker obviously had no time for prayer meetings either, standing in the box room propped up by her elegant stick.
‘You’re supposed to be dead.’
At least, that was what Margaret thought she heard her mother say.
The other Mrs Walker laughed, a lark surfing the low ceiling of the box room. ‘I’m like Lazarus,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep me down.’ Then she held out her hand with its tangle of veins and its skin like crumpled greaseproof paper. ‘I thought you might like this.’
Not a love token.
Or the seal on a pact.
But a star-shaped brooch with a drop of ruby at its heart.
The two old women stared down at the small, glittery thing in the cup of the other Mrs Walker’s palm, while from outside in the hall, Margaret’s heart set up a great thrumming against the wall of her chest. It was Barbara who spoke first.
‘What for?’ She seemed to have forgotten all her previous exhortations to be polite to the relatives of the deceased.
‘To say thank you, of course.’ The other Mrs Walker continued to hold out the brooch, red stone winking. ‘For giving my sister the send-off she deserved.’
Barbara was silent for a moment, not making any move to take the gift. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘What makes you think I want anything?’
Barbara rubbed at her face. ‘Because.’
The other Mrs Walker shrugged then as though it was of no matter to her what Barbara thought one way or the other. ‘Perhaps your daughter would like it instead. For looking after my sister, when no one else did.’
From her hiding place beyond the door, Margaret held her breath. Suddenly she wanted more than anything to hold that brooch in her hand. Something passed from a sister to a sister – or from a dead client to her handmaiden, at least. But before she could reveal herself, push open the door and snatch up the star-shaped brooch to pin to her breast, her mother interceded, as only Barbara could.
‘Have you offered it to her yet?’ Barbara’s face had taken on that same look Margaret had seen when she first arrived back from the south. Fear, or something like it. As though whatever might follow could only mean one thing.
‘No.’ The other Mrs Walker closed her hand over the small gift. ‘I wanted to see what it was worth to you first.’
Barbara’s chest gave off a long, painful groan then as though something important might be taken from her unless she decided to fight back. ‘Everything,’ she said finally.
There was silence for a moment as the two women stared each other out. One still towering despite her age, the other crumpled now despite her bulk. Outside in the hallway, Margaret waited with her heart in her throat to see what might be revealed next.
Then the other Mrs Walker shifted slightly. ‘There is one thing,’ she said, ‘that might make it worth my having come all this way.’
And for a moment both women glanced towards something propped up against the box-room wall. Small and brown, dirty in more ways than one. Once of sentimental value, but worth considerably more now. At least, that was what Jessica Plymmet had suggested, when Clementine Walker Shaw enquired about an estate.
Barbara’s chest gave a great wheezy sigh like the last note of an accordion playing its final lament. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
The other Mrs Walker smiled and nodded, as though a deal had been struck. Then she tapped at the box-room carpet with the tip of her cane and said, ‘Your
daughter’s a credit to you.’
Barbara exhaled as if she too knew that some promise had been made and would also be kept. ‘I tried my best . . .’ she said, growing larger all of a sudden. ‘To keep her safe.’
From through the crack in the door, Margaret saw another expression settle on her mother’s face now. Something she hadn’t seen since she was a six-year-old child being picked on in a cold Edinburgh close. Determination. That whatever belonged to Barbara, would stay exactly as it should. And the knowledge that her mother would fight for her only child, to the death, if that was what it took. Margaret stared at Barbara, then beyond her to the painting leaning casually against the box-room wall. Something Margaret had only ever glanced over before, never really studied in the way she studied it now. The painting was of a woman, impossibly young, limbs spread all about in a muddy splash of oil. Greys and browns. No other colour except for something hanging over the young woman’s breast. Not a fox’s small paw or a head eaten away by mange, but a dot of the brightest green, like the eye of a cat. Or an emerald necklace, listed on a crumpled jewellery receipt.
What was it Jessica Plymmet had said as they stood, hidden away at the end of a long gallery corridor, beneath a painting just like this? That she wrote to Barbara before Christmas with news of a mutual acquaintance, long lost. Someone Barbara feared coming through her front door. Only to discover it was her long-lost daughter who had returned instead.
Margaret rolled back against the wall of the hall, heart kicking up thunder beneath her funeral dress, breathing one elephant, two elephant as she realized all of a sudden something that she’d missed. Mrs Walker wasn’t just a refugee from the south, washed up in Edinburgh because it was any old place. Mrs Walker had come to Edinburgh for the same reason Margaret had arrived back. To reclaim something that she’d lost. Something misplaced, perhaps. Stolen, even. Worth nothing once, but considerably more now. Mrs Walker had come to Edinburgh to see Barbara Penny.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 33
