Except . . .
Margaret had got there first.
From across in the living room a loud incantation rose up. The members of the indigent funeral crowd, buoyed by excitement and enlightenment of all kinds. Margaret turned for a moment towards the boisterous prayer, only to find Mrs Maclure tugging at her elbow. ‘I need your help,’ the small woman exhorted, pulling Margaret away from the box room with an insistent grip. ‘They’ve had a little too much to drink, I think.’
Margaret glanced back towards the two old women, bending their heads together now to speak in whispers across a blue-and-yellow divide. ‘I just . . .’
But Mrs Maclure was nothing if not persistent. ‘It has to be now,’ she said. As though it was a matter of life or death. ‘Or who knows what might happen.’
And Margaret went with her. How could she not? It was the way Barbara had brought her up.
When Margaret returned from sorting out the indigent funeral crowd, sending them on their way one by one, she found her mother lying on the lilo in the box room like a whale washed up on a beach. Barbara’s mouth was agape, her flanks heaving as though she had just escaped from being harpooned and dragged up on deck to be sliced and diced.
Help me, Jesus. Help me, Allah. Help me, God.
(And, in the end, they had.)
Margaret couldn’t help noticing how the blue-and-yellow plastic sank beneath her mother’s great bulk. She could just imagine how uncomfortable it would be to lie on now, assuming she ever managed to get her mother back up and onto her feet.
In the end that was achieved with the aid of Mrs Maclure, the last member of the indigent funeral crowd left standing after a send-off that had become an Edinburgh legend before it had even run its course. ‘Here, dear,’ she said, appearing once more in the box-room doorway as Margaret tugged at her mother’s thick arms with little success. ‘Let me help.’
Together they hauled and cajoled until Barbara was sitting up once more, wheezing out a final demand. ‘Is she gone?’
It wasn’t really a question. But all three of them knew who she meant.
For the other Mrs Walker had disappeared just as suddenly as she had arrived, vanished somewhere as surely as the dead Mrs Walker was gone too. One into the embrace of the crematorium’s gas jets, the other to some place back across the ocean. Over the hills and far away, perhaps. Or somewhere much further than that. Margaret searched every inch of her mother’s flat in the hope that she was mistaken. But she knew even before she began that it was a hopeless case. The other Mrs Walker had left a hole in the air when she went. Nothing to mark her strange passing but a curl of orange peel discarded on the floor.
‘I needed to talk to her,’ Margaret said to Mrs Maclure, eyes wild with everything that she’d missed.
‘That’s a pity,’ said the little wolf-like woman, pinioning Margaret for a moment with her own eyes like small bits of jet. ‘But some questions are best left unasked, don’t you think?’
There was one thing, however, that did appear out of nowhere once the stranger from the west was gone for good, discovered in Barbara’s hand as Margaret helped her up. A tiny translucent limb, severed at the elbow and veined with cracks. The long-lost arm from a grubby china cherub. Home where it belonged at last.
EPILOGUE
Springtime in Edinburgh, 2011
They measured the box room the day after the wake, Barbara seemingly recovered from her confrontation, all her faculties just about intact. The room was long enough for a daybed, if they threw plenty of stuff out.
‘What’s a daybed when it’s at home?’ Barbara leaned against the doorframe, propped up by one of her two NHS sticks. She wasn’t wholly complete yet, having been to death’s door before turning back. But she was still standing. And there was something triumphant in that.
‘It’s like a chaise longue, but more comfortable,’ Margaret said.
‘What do you need that for?’
Luxury, Margaret thought, the first time she lay down on it. Of a first-class kind.
They tidied the room together, Margaret lifting each item of junk, Barbara giving a shake or a nod of her head. The pile for the charity shop grew and grew. As did the pile for the tip. A heater with a broken dial. An iron with a frayed flex. The box room appeared to increase in size as the recycling heap grew ever larger and the stash of things to keep remained small. A mangy fox fur. A blouse scented with linseed oil. And something in a large cardboard box.
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Barbara enquired.
Margaret opened the lid and held up a shiny gadget for her mother to see. ‘It’s a juice machine,’ she said.
There was also an old Christmas tree, its bendable silver branches folded up inside its tube as though they had been folded up all year. ‘What about this?’ Margaret said.
‘Oh, that old thing.’ Barbara gave a shrug.
‘Why didn’t you put it up this year?’ Though Margaret already had an inkling of why that might be – was just waiting for her moment to strike.
Barbara shrugged again. ‘Past its best,’ she said, gathering up her sticks as though the chore of clearing the box room was suddenly complete. ‘I’ll keep it though.’
‘What for?’
‘Next year, of course.’
Later that evening Barbara and Margaret sat together in the living room indulging in a final toast to the dead. ‘To Mrs Walker.’ Margaret raised a glass of wine, dark as bull’s blood, filled to the brim. Be prepared. Wasn’t that what her mother had always taught?
‘Whoever she was.’ Barbara raised her glass too, just a single finger of rum covering the bottom of her tumbler.
‘She was here,’ said Margaret. ‘I think that’s what counts.’
‘And now she’s not.’ Barbara smiled, then drank her measure down in one gulp.
Margaret smiled into her glass too. Contrariness was buried deep in her mother’s bones, but still Margaret could tell that something was different. Ever since the epic funeral it was as though Barbara’s life had taken on a subtly different hue.
On the living-room mantelpiece the china cherub stood in pride of place now, all its limbs complete. It had been polished and filled up with small flowers to mirror the green shoots appearing across the ground outside. Spring rampaging all over Edinburgh, a city putting on its best possible face.
Next to the cherub was a photograph. Two dead, sleeping children retrieved from the depths of Barbara’s handbag, back in the light at last.
‘Gave me the creeps when I was young.’ Margaret shivered.
‘We don’t have to keep it,’ said Barbara.
‘But we should. They look so peaceful. And we don’t have any other photographs to put in its place, besides the one of Mrs Walker.’
Barbara coughed then, a small wheezy thing, put down her rum glass and pulled a cup of tea towards her from where she’d left it balanced on top of the TV guide. Margaret wondered if now might be the time to bring up the missing painting, a picture that seemed to have vanished just as two dead, sleeping children finally rose from their grave.
But as though to forestall any questions that could only ever prove awkward, not to mention revealing, Barbara took something from the pocket of her dressing gown instead. A silver teaspoon with a very thin handle, a tiny figure attached to the end.
Margaret spluttered, red wine sprinkling the front of her cardigan. ‘Where did that come from?’
St Andrew, patron of women who would be mothers. An apostle spoon just like the one in Mrs Walker’s kitchen drawer.
Barbara stirred her tea with the spoon, the small chink of silver on china. ‘Inheritance,’ she said. ‘From my mother.’
‘You don’t have a mother.’
‘Everyone has a mother,’ Barbara said, disappearing behind the rim of the cup. ‘If you only know where to look.’
Margaret knew then that now was the moment. Who Dares Wins (and all that).
Except . . .
It was her mother who da
red first.
Barbara put down her cup and pulled something else from her dressing-gown pocket. ‘You might as well have this,’ she said. ‘No point waiting till I’m dead.’
Margaret couldn’t remember the last gift she had received from her mother. Unless she counted the blanket with the torn satin trim handed over on the first day she arrived home. But there it was, held out in her mother’s hand. Another photograph, of a newborn baby this time.
‘Who is it?’ Margaret said.
‘Can’t you tell?’
And then, of course, Margaret could. For holding the baby up so that the whole world could see was Barbara, smiling as though, at just that moment, all her dreams had come true.
Margaret gazed at the photograph, something inside her shifting. A mother and her baby, in her hands at last. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s . . .’
But Barbara wasn’t finished yet. ‘Did you get the note?’ she said.
‘The note?’ Margaret was confused.
‘From Mrs Maclure.’
And there it was, in the pocket of Margaret’s cardigan. A small piece of paper folded over several times. Margaret held the note in one hand, the photograph of her and Barbara in the other. She knew now where paperwork could lead. Then she opened it.
LOST, it said. CAN YOU HELP?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you: Clare Alexander and everyone at Aitken Alexander; Maria Rejt, Sophie Orme, Claire Gatzen and everyone at Mantle and Pan Macmillan; my fellow writers in Ink Inc. with particular thanks to Pippa Goldschmidt, Theresa Muñoz and Sophie Cooke; Kate Tough; Brownsbank; Ivan Middleton; Jamie Reece at Mortonhall Crematorium, Edinburgh; Frank Davie, formerly of the Edinburgh City Mortuary; James O’Reilly of the Procurator Fiscal’s Office, Edinburgh; Dr Robert Ainsworth of NHS Lothian and Edinburgh University; DI Willie Falconer and PC Emily Noble, formerly of the Edinburgh Enquiry Team; Christina Paulson-Ellis; Peter Brunyate; Audrey Grant and all my family for their continuing love and support. It goes without saying that any and all mistakes (and inventions) are, of course, my own.
The Other Mrs Walker
MARY PAULSON-ELLIS lives in Edinburgh.
She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from
the University of Glasgow and was awarded the
inaugural Curtis Brown Prize for Fiction in 2009
and the Literature Works First Page Prize in 2013.
Her short stories and non-fiction have been published
in a variety of anthologies and magazines including
New Writing Scotland, Gutter and the Herald.
The Other Mrs Walker is her debut novel.
First published 2016 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2016 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-9393-4
Copyright © Mary Paulson-Ellis 2016
Cover Design: Ami Smithson, Pan Macmillan Art Department
Photographs: Boxes © Jeremy Gibbs/Trevillion Images;
Mannequin © plainpicture/neuebildanstalt/Jordan;
Necklace © plainpicture/Fancy Images; Shoe © Sandra
Cunningham/Arcangel; Spoon © Shutterstock; Orange ©
plainpicture/Bildhuset; Glass © Shutterstock.
The right of Mary Paulson-Ellis to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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