Whatever Happened to Margo?

by Margaret Durrell

  Nicholas’s description was very apt, surprisingly enough for he tended to exaggerate greatly, as the stranger, a small figure dominated by colour, unfolding a lean childish body rose languidly from my scarlet drawing-room divan to greet me. A pale face, veins finely traced, gave him a delicate look. The aquiline nose was softened by long reddish hair, swept back, and a fiery beard, feathery and unclipped. A flamboyant pink silk shirt, the pointed collar open, was enriched by a muted paisley scarf slotted carelessly through a thick gold ring – an opposing splash of colour against the red beard; his trousers, pale beige cord, were tight – too tight. Swinging a silver-topped cane gently he gave me a generous smile: I noticed a fine set of even teeth.

  ‘Hello there,’ he drawled pleasantly. ‘Forgive the intrusion – two charming little boys let me in.’

  A psychologist too, I was quick to note, for any mother could be won with a soft word about her offspring, however hypocritical. Disinclined to disturb the elusive picture of charm already created by my children, I responded readily while the visitor introduced himself.

  ‘Edward Feather.’

  There was no need for him to tell me he was an artist – his appearance had already told me that.

  ‘Have you come about the rooms?’ I enquired hopefully, yet feeling an odd stir of apprehension at the thought.

  ‘In a sort of way.’ He paused, feeling around for an explanation. ‘Somebody told somebody, and somebody else told somebody that there may be something to let here?’

  So the children had been having an enlightening gossip with someone, I thought accusingly.

  ‘I need a new studio,’ he confessed at last. ‘My present landlady and I do not agree – tiresome mundane woman and constantly on the nag.’ He was disarmingly frank. ‘I have work to do, you see – and it is so difficult to find anywhere suitable here at this time of year, when the holiday locusts are about to storm Bournemouth and brigades of old ladies, swarming out of their winter hibernation, are settling like flies in every available empty nook.’

  It was true. The town now awaited the first onslaught of holiday-makers and landladies sat back like watching spiders to await their prey. Unlike the dowagers, closeted in security, there were many impoverished old people seeking out a life on inadequate means. Though welcomed for their rent through the lean months of winter, now at the approach of the summer visitors and higher rents they found themselves unwanted; chevied, refugees, scouring the papers for fresh accommodation daily, and constantly on the move. It was a sad reflection.

  ‘What exactly do you need?’ I faltered, with sneaking unease, for I knew instinctively that this would be one person who would have to be hidden from my Aunt Patience as he obviously transgressed all her ideas of good breeding. His likeable voice, soft and slightly tinged with a northern accent, while falling pleasantly on my ears would have grated like a dentist’s drill on the tender eardrums of my aunt. Over some things she was adamant, and good breeding was one. ‘No one with an accent is well-bred – the two things just don’t go together, dear,’ she had said so often with pursed lips and a look that defied contradiction.

  ‘I need,’ he told me gravely, watching my facial reactions with more than casual interest, ‘just a simple room to paint in: my work takes me into realms of nudity …’

  ‘Do you mean you want to paint naked men and women?’ I interrupted bluntly as if I had never heard of such a thing.

  ‘But, of course, dear soul. Naked, how else can you show the human form in all its beauty? The essence of innocence is nudity, don’t you think? Unfortunately my present landlady forbids it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I was very doubtful, yet wanting to agree if only to outdo the other landlady. But there was Aunt Patience and my mother’s reaction to consider, and what about the road!

  ‘You don’t agree then?’ he asked, keeping me to the point, and no doubt about to involve me in a technical discussion.

  ‘Oh, it’s not that!’ I explained lamely, ‘I don’t think it would work, that’s all. I think it would cause gossip trouble in the road and so forth.’ I was quite certain now that Aunt Patience would have her first stroke at such a suggestion, and Mother too for that matter. And such goings on wouldn’t go unnoticed by the children I felt sure – they would revel in it.

  ‘You see,’ I went on, explaining carefully, trying to justify my reasons. ‘I personally have nothing against you painting men and women, but someone might object – neighbours for instance. A scandal might start …’ I envisaged the scene with perfect accuracy: buxom women exposed in all their naked glory, or draped tantalizingly in a cloud of gossamer silk, with perhaps a bosom coyly exposed; men, Charles Atlas types, showing … This vision faded abruptly, as Peeping Toms and the children glued to keyholes took over; police banging at the door; a national scandal with sordid headlines: ‘Disgusting Orgies Claim Bournemouth Residents’; court scenes – my mother and Aunt Patience heavily veiled, fighting back their tears, fighting to save the family’s good name … Once a thing like that started one never knew where it would end – it would be as bad as letting brother Gerald loose. My sanctuary was heading straight for trouble, before I was even established.

  ‘I am sorry, you cannot paint nudes all over the place.’ I was desperately apologetic, feeling that I placed myself in the category of the mundane landlady.

  ‘Not all over the place,’ Edward Feather assured me soothingly, giving me a fleeting look of amusement from soft hazel eyes, a coaxing gentleness creeping in to battle my feeble defences. ‘Only in one room.’

  ‘But that is fifty times worse!’ I cried. ‘That would in itself cause suspicion – and what would my other lodgers say, if I get any? In fact …’ I began to enlarge on the theme, ‘there’s an old girl down the road who sits up in her window with a pair of binoculars, and she misses nothing from what I hear!’ We both laughed: the boys had recently passed on to me this little titbit of news, being more than absorbed in the binoculars, which they assured me could also see in the dark.

  ‘It’s a little disappointing to find you so adamant, I must say. I thought better of you.’ He summed me up, half-serious, half-amused, but still persuasive.

  ‘If it’s a proper dwelling place you want I can probably help you,’ I told him firmly, loathing to lose this man on mere technicalities and feeling that I had already lost considerable face. ‘Are you married, or single?’ I enquired tentatively, withdrawing a little to polite reserve, trying to decide quickly which bedsit I would show him and feeling suddenly slightly nervous at the first real venture into the domain of a landlady.

  ‘I have an appendage.’ He dismissed the fact carelessly and arose, showing off his needle-like hips. ‘But let me view the mansion, dear soul,’ he continued with a grandiose air, grossly exaggerating the situation. ‘I will choose my flat – I feel like a change of atmosphere, and I have decided that I shall fit into this place admirably. Nice room you have here, too,’ he remarked, looking round and, putting out a long hand with carefully manicured nails, he patted my knee in a paternal way at my disparaging dismissal of my room. ‘A little woman without a man – perhaps I can paint you sometime,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘With your clothes on, of course!’

  It was an entirely mischievous remark, but I knew he meant it. I replied with quiet and genteel horror suitable to my position, and rose hurriedly to lead the way, yet provoked to pleasant feelings by the obvious flattery. I hastily recalled the sagacious words of my aunt. There must be no familiarity between a landlady and her guests; she must always remain aloof, superior, rent must be paid in advance, and any lapse in payment of rent necessitates immediate action. Large plain notices must be placed in strategic positions: ‘Leave the bath as you wish to find it’; ‘Gentlemen will please lift the seat before using’ (this heavily underlined); ‘The use of newspaper is prohibited’; ‘There will be no entertaining of the opposite sex after 10 p.m. or before 11 a.m.’; ‘There will be no loud laughter’; etc., etc. In fact she had had th
e notices specially printed in red, two of each and had sent them to me with a little note scrawled in her large generous writing: ‘Margo dear, just place these where they will be seen – a most necessary precaution, I feel, if you are going to run your house properly. Your loving Auntie.’

  ‘Come the lamb to the slaughter.’ The laughing, good-natured voice broke my chain of racing thoughts and I turned, a little confused, to conduct my first tour.

  I thought of the day I followed Mrs O’Grady and I could not help thinking that in some ways the picture of eccentricity was almost the same as we swept through the house. My guest looked on with airy approval, dismissing the ablutions with light-hearted indifference, telling me between snatches of poetry and other pleasantries that he hardly ever took a bath owing to an unfortunate experience in the past, and as far as the lavatory went, it could be a Turkish one as far as he was concerned – which in some ways pleased me for I felt that here was a perfect tenant. Deciding at last to rent a big north room – ‘ideal light for a painter’ I was told – which lay in seclusion on the ground floor, with long windows and a large door, he sealed the discussion by placing two weeks’ rent in my hand. I was lucky indeed: a lodger and two weeks’ rent. I was jubilant as I watched the departing figure (who would catch one’s glance in any place) with a mellowed look, broken by immediate remembrance of a point on which we had come to no decision.

  ‘Mr Feather!’ My voice seemed to fill the quiet road, which would certainly attract both Mrs Briggs and Miss Brady if they were about. He turned at my call. ‘Remember, no nudes – at least not completely,’ I compromised a little, after all one could not stop the fellow painting, and didn’t two weeks’ rent lie cosy in my hand?

  The silver-topped cane flashed an indiscernible answer. I stayed a moment to watch with pride my first lodger, a streak of gay colour against Miss Brady’s fence.

  ‘The whole road will know our business if you yell like that,’ a childish voice remarked cheekily.

  ‘It appears …’ I turned and looked at the owner of the voice accusingly, ‘it appears that the whole road already knows our business.’ And I wondered who the somebody was who had told somebody who had told somebody else.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The shrill cry of a cockerel, one of Mrs Briggs’ prize birds, heralded the dawn, and the slow realization that this was the day when my advertisement would bring more lodgers thundering to my door plunged me into complete awareness. The town was already a network of hotels, boarding houses and bed and breakfast notices: was my advertisement going to be noticed amongst the rest, I asked myself fearfully, snuggling down lower in the warmth of my bed, loath to leave my cocoon too soon. I contemplated with envy the ostrich who could bury his head and live while presenting an impenetrable, unworried behind to the world.

  There was a rattling of bolts: I listened indulgently for these were the early morning manoeuvres of my neighbour Mrs Briggs, about to appear at her back door to greet the world – a husky cough, a shuffling noise, a long drawn-out stretchy ‘Aargh!’ How quickly noises became familiar. On good days there would be a song. I waited for the song almost eagerly: there was a longer than usual pause, or could I be wrong about the song this morning? No – for now the strains of ‘Under the Old Apple Tree’ filled the alley between us. Throaty noises, but wholly human.

  Mrs Briggs’ recital came to a sharp close with the knowledge that ‘a woman’s work is never done’, a state of affairs we agreed on daily with the appropriate signs that women reserve for these occasions. A chink of empty milk bottles and the sound of the door crashing told me she had disappeared – but not quite. There was a last faint bellow of sound as she cautioned her family to rise, followed by the prolonged silence of indifference born of habit. Should I follow her example or laze a little longer, listening to the early noises of suburbia? I lay on in easy comfort. Things had moved swiftly in the last few days. Edward and his wife had already moved in: he had come as arranged, and much to my surprise in a conventional way. I had expected a horse-drawn carriage or some other unpredictable method, and had felt a surge of disappointment to find an unspectacular taxi at the gates, jarring horribly with my preconceived vision of Edwardian splendour. He emerged, wrapped in a long duffle coat as if about to attempt a polar exploration. A young woman followed, with thick brown hair hanging to shoulder length. A long black jet necklace and scarlet coat immediately attracted me – I liked her.

  Edward had come first, carrying with tender care a heavy cookery book, his easel, a square black paint-box and a pile of canvases tied together with rope, leaving his wife to attend to the other less important matters. I had curbed my enthusiastic desire to rush out to greet them, inspired by my Aunt Patience’s warning, but a grin of welcome broke through in spite of my resolutions as I waited at the door with a rent book clutched in my hand. Banishing the rent book discreetly out of sight, suddenly embarrassed by it, I took the gleaming black box from Edward and with easy chatter I drew him into the house and made for the high-ceilinged north room which was to be his home.

  Number one lodger was finally over the threshold and to confirm this, there had risen the first signs of strangers in the house, as an unfamiliar aroma of oil paint became noticeable, overpowered by exotic garlic smells as Edward, resplendent in a pale blue smock, had organized first the position of his easel and working materials and then, with vigorous interest, his built-in kitchen – for Edward loved to delight his palate and tantalize his fragile stomach with adventurous dishes. Although Aunt Patience would squirm at such extravagant feasts in the kitchen I felt sure that Mother and Edward would meet together in perfect harmony, once she had recovered from the initial shock of his rather unusual appearance.

  Mother, Simon and Pavlo were still holidaying happily in the company of Leslie and his future bride at the off-licence, half a mile away. This brought me to the sudden alarming thought that if brother Gerald found the family house across the road uncomfortable, he might just decide to descend on me. His antics would ruin any boarding house.

  I had always been tolerant in my dealings with Gerald, but now things were different. He would have to realize that I was going to be a serious businesswoman and could no longer cope with his decidedly odd habits. It was obvious I should never keep a lodger if I allowed him to put one foot over the threshold of my new house with any species of animal – domestic or otherwise.

  An upheaval through the house told me the children were roaming and were already engrossed in a lively conversation with our bearded lodger. Wondering what to wear I left my bed and wandered into the bathroom. My dress should be subdued to create a no-nonsense impression. Grey, perhaps?

  Ready at last in red, with no resemblance to my prosperous aunt whatsoever, I went to restore my children to order and despatch them safely to school, away from what I hoped were going to be scenes of desperate money-making activities. I pottered about the house, doing things that didn’t really need doing, and watched Edward’s wife, heeding her husband’s urgings, setting out to work, her dark hair blowing back from her face as she walked, the red of her coat glowing in the morning mist. She told me that she had been a model and, even now, sat for Edward. She went daily to work in a local store, confidently leaving her husband to run the home; in any case, she said, she preferred to work. And no wonder, I thought, for Edward could cook with a touch that equalled any woman’s, and my own cooking appeared so lifeless by comparison that I was going to rush out at the first opportunity to buy his aromatic range of spices.

  Mother was coming to have coffee with me. It was her first visit since the final completion of my plans. I was eager to show her that my house was at last ready and functioning, my first lodgers installed.

  Eleven o’clock found me waiting anxiously in the bay window. Mr Beetle was deeply engrossed in conversation with Miss Brady, looking like some strange old bird with a frothy feather bow about her neck and a blue velvet coat and matching Robin Hood hat which accentuated her beaky feathers. She had stop
ped cleaning the pavement of leaves and, leaning on her broom, was listening to Mr Beetle with rapt attention. Mother was only ten minutes away, I calculated; where was she? If she didn’t hurry she’d get involved with Mr Beetle. I wandered out to the gate impatiently and spotted Mother a few houses away, walking at a leisurely pace, a large basket over one arm. I could tell by the sudden panic on Mr Beetle’s face that he had seen her too and was overcome at the vision, indecisive as to the next move. I laughed to myself, watching points with interest. Was the faithless man going to leave Miss Brady and sortie with younger prey? He was, for with a final hasty word he crossed the road at great speed, calling out: ‘Nice to see you, Mrs Durrell.’

  Mother’s face fell into grim lines as he joined her, though I really couldn’t see what she had against him, I reflected in exasperation, for surely those mythical rumours of millions made up for his fearsome dentures. I could hear him soliciting her in warm apologetic tones as he tenderly took the basket, provoking a shriek from Pavlo who was settled in its depths.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you, dear Mrs Durrell. I hear you are away for a long rest – I do hope it is doing you good?’

  I had never told him Mother was away for a long rest and, as usual, I wondered who had. Miss Brady, though back to the job of sweeping leaves, kept an observant eye on them.

  ‘Oh yes, thank you,’ Mother answered primly. I could see that she was not enjoying the situation at all. Mr Beetle, sensing that he was not making good enough progress, slipped into a subject in which he knew Mother was greatly interested.

  ‘I had a strange and mysterious discovery,’ he said cunningly, letting Mother digest his words. ‘I think there is a poltergeist in our midst. Strange goings-on, you know – pots and pans all over the place. My poor dutiful housekeeper is positively alarmed, though I haven’t told her I suspect poltergeists.’