The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “Is she famous?”

  “Not really. Her name’s Irma Moore.”

  “Irma Moore! Of course. Dirty Girls on Acid, yes?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Chubby’s jewelry began to jingle. “Why, Nigel!” she trilled across the table. “Did you know we have a daughter of a famous poet in our midst? Meredith is the daughter of Irma Moore.”

  Nigel removed his gaze from Mish. “Pardon me, darling, what was that?”

  “You know Irma Moore? The famous poet?”

  “Member at the Club, isn’t she? Absolutely barking.”

  “What I was trying to tell you is that Meredith is her daughter.”

  “No!” Nigel narrowed his eyes as if he were seeing Meredith for the first time. “But you don’t seem...anything like her. Are you absolutely certain she’s your mother?”

  “Oh, Nigel, don’t be ridiculous. Of course she’s sure. She does look like her.” Chubby stood up, a process that involved much straining and hoisting. “I have one of her collections in my study and if I recall correctly, the author’s photo looks just like you. It was taken in the sixties, of course, and her hair is bobbed just like yours. Except she’s wearing something eccentric. An Indian sari?” She squinted at Meredith, who shrugged. “Your mother is such an original. I’ll just ring Didier to pop over to the north wing and get it.”

  Chubby worked her way across the dining room and pressed the button on the wall beside the door frame, and just as she did, a loud, unmistakable crack of gunfire came from somewhere outside—but not far from—the house.

  Barnaby, who had been silent for the entire meal, jumped up so quickly his chair flew backward and narrowly missed smashing the glass door of the liquor cabinet.

  “Do be careful, old chap,” Nigel said in a shouty voice Meredith hadn’t heard him use but she sensed it was close to his usual tone. He turned back to Mish. “That cabinet belonged to our cousin, the seventh Earl of Coventry—he brought it back from his honeymoon in Rome after marrying the daughter of Lord Pemberton. Actually, speaking of Pemberton, did you know he was a great friend of Octavius Paisley, the cricketer?”

  But before Nigel could take a breath and launch into the story, Barnaby shot from the room.

  “What on earth do you suppose has gotten into him?” Chubby drawled, leaning back in her chair and rolling her head back and forth on her shoulders to release tension from her neck. “It’s probably just some local schoolboys.”

  Nigel shrugged and returned to eating.

  Then they heard the scream. A girl’s. And then another shot.

  Meredith rose from the table and rushed outside after Barnaby. The others followed.

  The light from the sitting room flooded the topiary garden. And at the foot of a giant hedge in the shape of a chicken was Petsy, on her knees, her nightdress stained with something thick and dark. Barnaby was bent over, trying, it seemed, to get her to stand up.

  “Paul is dead!” she wailed, yanking her arm away from her uncle and remaining on the ground. “That awful bird just dropped him on the ground!”

  Barnaby stepped back. Meredith saw that Petsy was cupping a fuzzy bulk between her palms—the twitching body of a terrier.

  “My God,” said Chubby. But as she moved toward her daughter, there was another blast of gunfire, this time closer. The surviving terriers pranced in frantic little circles.

  Barnaby sniffed the air. He charged over to a bush in the shape of a toadstool and pulled it aside to reveal Didier holding a shotgun high on his shoulder. The butler aimed and danced back on his feet.

  “Move aside, monsieur,” he said.

  Just as Barnaby made a dive for his arm, Didier took aim and shot again. This time the noise was followed by a fluttering and a thump. Something had fallen out of the night sky. Barnaby walked over and sank to his knees. He sobbed once and went silent. The rest stood there struggling to grasp what had happened.

  It was Chubby who broke the spell by wrenching the dead Yorkie from her daughter’s hands. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, darling, put poor Paul down, would you? You’ll only dirty yourself more. You haven’t been smoking, have you? You smell of smoke. Come inside. Didier is going to put away his gun and make us both hot toddies—aren’t you, Didier?”

  The butler blinked as if waking from a dream. He gave a small, deferential bow to no one in particular, handed the rifle over to Nigel and escorted Chubby and Petsy inside.

  As soon as his wife and daughter had disappeared, Nigel turned to his brother, gun in hand.

  “How many times have I told you those birds are a danger to everyone, including yourself? And now look.” With his free hand Nigel gestured to the carnage on the gravel between the garden hedges. “Stop sniffling like a girl. If Father could see you now he’d...” Nigel paused and then finished his sentence with a disgusted guttural noise.

  Mish tugged at Meredith’s arm, indicating they should go back into the house, but Meredith stood still.

  Barnaby lifted his head. His face was a coiled spring. At first Meredith was afraid he would scream. Nigel might shoot him if he did. Instead, Nigel walked over to his brother and held out the gun.

  “What do you want me to do with that?”

  “I expect you to go straight back to the aviary and promptly destroy and dispose of every last one of those blasted birds,” Nigel directed. “After tonight, surely we can agree they’re a danger to everyone. I simply won’t allow it any longer.”

  “But—” Barnaby began in desperation but then stopped, defeated.

  “Perhaps you could finally take up tennis,” Nigel offered.

  Barnaby got up and, as he did, grabbed Harriet’s bleeding body by the throat. He snatched the rifle from Nigel and set off without a word, across the winding gravel path through the topiary garden toward Pear Cottage and the aviary.

  Meredith followed, and when she finally caught up to Barnaby, he was sitting on a stump outside the aviary draining another tallboy. Beside him on the ground was a burning oil lamp. Without a word, he shoved over on the stump to give her room. She sat down beside him. He reached into his jacket pocket and offered her a can, which she took.

  For a long time they sat and drank in silence. When Meredith began to shiver, Barnaby took off his blazer and wrapped it around her shoulders. She leaned her head on his arm.

  “Shall we?” he asked perhaps five minutes later.

  “What?”

  He took her hand and they stood up. He began to walk toward the aviary, tugging her along behind him.

  “Are you sure your brother meant it?” Now she was the one whining.

  Meredith had never seen anything killed except in the movies, and she had little desire to now. Why was he making her come with him? If only she could get away and run back to the cottage and find her earplugs and sateen sleeping mask... She tried to wrench her hand free but his grip only tightened around her wrist. He had put on his falconer’s gauntlet, which made his grip inescapable.

  He opened the door of the pen and stepped inside. When he raised his arm, the owl swooped to meet him, eyes glittering like topaz in the dark.

  “Well now, Waverly.”

  Barnaby laid the gun down on the floor of the pen and, grasping the leather leash attached to a bracelet on the bird’s ankle, wrapped it around his arm twice. Then he stepped out of the pen. The owl was so large that while he was perched on Barnaby’s arm his head stood higher than Meredith’s.

  “You take him,” he said.

  “I’m not taking him.”

  Barnaby shifted the owl over to his left arm, pulled off his glove and gauntlet with his teeth and handed it to Meredith. She took the glove and slipped it over her cardigan sleeve. Barnaby instructed her to whistle, and she did, the only way she knew how: feebly, through the tiny gap between her front teeth. The sound, though thin, seemed enough for Waverly, who with a great flapping leap transferred himself from Barnaby’s arm to Meredith’s and immediatel
y began picking through her cardigan pockets for dead mice. Holding the bird, heavy on her arm and yet somehow floating in air at the same time, was like lifting a person under water.

  “Now what?”

  “This way.”

  Barnaby wrapped the leash around her bird arm, then took her free hand and led her away from the aviary. They stopped in the middle of the yard. From inside the house Portia gave a warning bark. Barnaby held the oil lamp above his head and stepped back. The lamp was swinging back and forth, and when the light fell on his face she saw his eyes were blazing. He made a call—a strange throaty hoot. Waverly took off, shaking himself free of the gauntlet and causing Meredith to stumble backward. The bird was swallowed by darkness.

  “Aren’t you going to call him back?”

  “No,” said Barnaby.

  For the next quarter-hour Meredith and Barnaby set about freeing the birds. Some, like the peregrines, needed little more than an open door, while others, like the vultures, had to be coaxed out of captivity. Meredith did not ask about their chances of survival, or if they would come back. She didn’t want to hear the answer, and she was sure Barnaby didn’t want to talk about it.

  When they were finished, they both returned to the stump and sat down. Meredith looked at Barnaby and noticed he had a small blob of shit-coated owl down stuck to his left cheek. She licked her thumb and wiped it off.

  As soon as she touched him, Barnaby began to kiss her. She was excited, but not by the kissing so much as by the way he took her in his arms. Gathering me up, she thought.

  He made a sound of surprise.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes, fine. It’s just that you are so amazing.”

  Meredith climbed on his lap and they fooled around some more. Meredith, as always, simply wanted the making-out part to go on and on.

  But Barnaby was already looking around for another place. The lights had gone back on in Pear Cottage, which meant that Mish had returned.

  “Come along,” Barnaby said, taking Meredith by the arm. He led her back toward the aviary and, to her surprise, into the one pen that had been empty from the start: Harriet’s. He set the oil lamp on the floor and the space—you could not call it a room—became apparent in streaks of light. In the middle of the pen was a piece of wood erected as a perch, and at the top Meredith noticed a smallish feathered body slung over one of the upper branches. Harriet. Meredith looked at Barnaby, attempting to conceal her horrified cringe with an expression of curiosity.

  “Is that...?”

  “It was her favourite perch...” his voice trailed off.

  And then, before she could make a comforting noise, he gathered her up again and they resumed kissing. After a while he eased her down on the hay bale in the corner. When she winced, he told her not to worry, that he had just cleaned the pen that morning. She didn’t believe him.

  She reclined and pretended to be Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. If sex outdoors was romantic, why not sex in a birdcage?

  Barnaby coughed. He seemed to be having a problem with her stockings, so she helped him along and while she did, he unbuttoned his pants.

  And then, out of nowhere, Meredith was struck. This isn’t right. It was the only thing she knew.

  “Barnaby, wait. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  He had taken off his glasses and his eyes looked small and vulnerable.

  “Really?” He retrieved his glasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them back on.

  “The thing is, I like you very much—I don’t want you to think it’s anything to do with that because it isn’t. But at the same time, I feel I should tell you that I have another, you might say parallel, agenda.”

  Barnaby blinked. A sacrificial goat encountering an altar.

  “Go on.”

  “The thing is, I’m thirty-five.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Goodness. I thought you were a good deal younger. More like twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Not that it matters in the least.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Anyway, my age in and of itself is not the point. The point is that I’m at a stage in my life where I want to have a child.”

  “Oh, me too,” he said, beginning to smile. “I adore children.”

  “No. I mean now. Or as soon as possible, at any rate. And—” She paused.

  “And?”

  “And, in addition to other things in my life, I’m searching for the right father.”

  Barnaby rocked back on the hay bale beside her. He touched his chin and looked up, then touched his chin again.

  “But we’ve not even had one night together—and what we’ve had has been rather tumultuous at that,” he started, his brain apparently steaming with the effort of cutting through the grog. “Don’t you think—I mean, don’t you honestly think that even a discussion of marriage is a bit premature?”

  “I wasn’t discussing marriage.”

  “Well...” Barnaby shrugged. “C’mon.”

  “C’mon what?”

  “I reckon it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, isn’t it? Having a child together is having a child together, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Not at all. I was the product of a very unorthodox alliance myself, so I can personally attest to that. What I’m trying to say to you is that while I’m deeply interested in having a child, I’m not particularly interested in marriage or even a long-term relationship.”

  Barnaby grimaced in confusion. “Are you asking me to be the father of your baby?” he said finally.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I thought it only fair that I tell you the whole truth at this point in our...liaison.”

  “Liaison?” Barnaby returned to kissing her on the neck, this time more aggressively, while he fumbled with his boxer shorts.

  She extended her arm to help but he waved her off as though she were a houseguest offering to perform some menial household chore.

  Just when Meredith was getting fed up, he collapsed, but not in the way she’d expected (with a gurgle of pleasure into the crook of her neck). Instead, he slid off her and down the hay bale onto his knees, where, to Meredith’s bafflement, he began to weep.

  “I—I—It’s no use,” he stammered, the words bottlenecking in his throat.

  “You’re...crying?” She was irritated.

  Barnaby began to sob, and as he did she sat up and pulled down her dress, brushing the clingy bits of hay off her thighs and bum. She looked down at him, where he kneeled in front of the oil lamp, choking on his grief. She felt the way she imagined a cad does when a conquest blubs for her lost virginity. Sorry, but not too sorry.

  “Look, Barnaby, I hope you don’t think it’s callous of me to say it, but you can always get another bird.”

  “Not if I want to stay here I can’t,” he wailed.

  Meredith watched, horrified, as his body began to convulse. It reminded her of the dying Yorkie.

  She stroked his back and resolved to check the train schedule before she went to bed.

  13

  “I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, darling. Not to mention hypocritical. You’ve always complained that I never take any interest in your life and then as soon as I do you get all up in arms about it.”

  “What are you talking about? I never complain. Not about that anyway.”

  “Haven’t you? I was sure you had at some point. At any rate, I don’t usually. Take an interest in your life, that is. And the point is that now that I am, I think you really ought to be more accommodating. I am your mother.”

  “Yes. You certainly are.”

  “Oh, come now, my duck, don’t be so difficult.” Irma patted Meredith’s knee and produced a small plate bearing a piece of toast and two oily sardines plucked from the tin. “See? I made you dinner.”

  Mered
ith took a bite of toast (she loathed canned fish, while her mother lived off it) and swiped the crumbs from her chin. “Don’t you have any table napkins in this apartment?”

  “It’s called a flat, darling. And I already told you, no napkins. Such a useless expense.”

  “Well, could I at least have my butter ration for this toast, or did you already use up all your food coupons?”

  Irma reached into the fridge, scooped a bit of butter on the end of a spoon and handed it to Meredith. She stood before her daughter, eyes bright, hands in prayer position, like an expectant child.

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “So, may I come visit you on your movie set?”

  “I have conditions.”

  “Fantastic! I can’t wait. A piece of cinematic history in the making. Imagine. Perhaps I’ll finally get discovered.” Irma patted her own cheek appreciatively and laughed while Meredith stared at her in silence.

  “Don’t you want to know my conditions?”

  “Yes, of course, darling. I’m absolutely dying to know, can’t you tell?”

  “One. No bugging the director. He’s busy and, besides that, he’s my boss. Two. No talking to the actors. At all, whatsoever. Unless they talk to you first, in which case, keep it brief. Three. You’re not wearing that thing.”

  Irma’s hands flew to her throat in panic. She fondled her pendant—a petrified tarantula she’d picked up on a trip to Australia two decades ago. (She wore it whenever she wanted to attract attention, which meant she took it off only once a week to bathe.) “But, darling!”

  “Absolutely not. Those are my conditions. Take ’em or leave ’em.”

  Irma sank down onto the sofa beside Meredith, pouting. Meredith resumed reading her copy of American Cinematographer. There was an interesting article about the innovative lighting techniques used in Godard’s Contempt.

  “All right, I agree,” Irma said after a sullen pause. “But don’t blame me if disaster strikes. It’s my protective amulet, you know.”

  Meredith opened her mouth to answer, but then reconsidered and closed it again. There really was no point.

  * * *