As did I. But I didn’t say it. What was the point? Nobody wanted to hear my problems. Not even my own family. "That’s alright," I replied, slightly shocked that he bothered.
"But you were careless," he added.
"We’ll say it was mutual then."
He began to leave, then turned back. "Actually, it was more your fault than mine."
That said, the Pompous Ass marched out, very upright and proper, Lucy trying to hold on to his sleeve.
Chapter Five
Now we come to my birthday and the perfect end to a stellar year, the trampled cherry atop thirty-three years of mediocre cake. In the same week I dealt with Mrs. Chippchase and the Pompous Ass, my manuscript—slaved over for so many years of late nights — received the fifty-seventh form rejection from a literary agent.
Oh, and yes, Jack had left, I still didn’t have another job, my school was about to close and I was deemed redundant. Next term they would begin moving out furniture and children. By Easter they expected to move the bulldozers in. I’d considered chaining myself to the gates, but I very much doubted my body, even if I gained another stone, would be enough to stand in their way.
None of this, however, troubled me quite so much as the fact that I was awake and yet dreaming. The madness, which began barely a week before, in that dry cleaners, trickled like rainwater through a crack in my foundation. Every morning, since Jack walked out in a huff, I woke to discover my notebook on the floor by my bed, pages ransacked and rearranged, new lines written in. Someone wrote over my story, correcting and adding to it. It was out of my hands. On my thirty-third birthday, I was superfluous to my own life.
I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of merlot and my manuscript before me, ready for more editing. That pirate had managed, somehow, to find a way out of those pages to torment me in the flesh, and now I had to get him back inside. If I didn’t, my heroine would come out herself to find him. She grew stronger every day.
"Bring him back to me."
I felt her inside me, alive and kicking.
The phone rang and I jumped, knocking my wine glass with one elbow. It crashed to the kitchen floor, a shower of glass shards spinning under the fridge and lying in a pool of blood-red. Well, that was that.
My mother's voice squawked through the phone. "Thirty-three today. How the time flies!"
"Ummm."
"Have you had a good day?"
Not since I was thirteen actually, but thanks for asking. Had I any sadomasochistic tendencies, I might have answered her question about my day with the truth, looking for a little crumb of sympathy, but I knew better. So I said, "Yes. Fine. Thanks."
"Guess who I saw in the precinct today?”
"Who?"
"Guess."
I don't care. "Who?"
"Just guess, Grace, for pity's sake!"
I sighed. "Elvis Presley?"
"No, silly! Old Mr. Scroggs—the one whose junk shop you used to spend all your pocket money in."
"Antique shop."
"He asked after you. Fancy him remembering you after all this time! Now if it was Marian he remembered, I'd understand that. Everyone always adored Marian. She's the memorable sort."
"Yes. She's a charmer."
"Anyway he wanted to know if you're still writing. I said, yes, she’s still scribbling her stories – never grew out of that. He’s just had a hip replaced. He’s got to be nearly ninety and still pottering about. I said to your father, if he looks as good at that age it will be a miracle. Of course, the mind goes. You can replace all the other parts, but you can’t replace that."
"Ummm."
"Your father insists he saw a robin in the garden this morning, but it was only a dented coke can blowing about. I tried to tell him, but he’ll argue until he’s blue in the face. Just like you."
I’d never heard my father argue with her about anything; he was lucky if he could get a word in.
"None of his trousers fit round the waist anymore, but will he admit he’s put on a few inches? No. It’s the trousers. I must have shrunk them in the wash, he says, as if I haven’t been washing his clothes the same way for thirty-five years."
Strangers at a bus stop might have had more scintillating conversation, but this was one of her duty calls. She had no urgent information to disperse, so it labored and ground down into exclamations about the weather and what I ate for dinner, because, of course, I never ate properly according to her. I’m sure there were many important things we could have told one another, but as usual all those things went unsaid, replaced by nonsense.
After a stilted report on a shopping excursion to Marks and Spencer—heavy hints that I was getting slippers for Christmas, because I always shuffled around in "those dreadful furry things that aren’t fit to be seen" —and a curt review of my father’s failure to get the Christmas tree lights to work, she finally found a little surge of excitement. I started writing out a shopping list while she regaled me with a tale of woe about the woman who cuts her hair – a woman I’d never met – having complications from a hysterectomy. I muttered the usual responses, and she ended the call with a crisp, "Well, I’ve got to go and put the tea on for your father, before he electrocutes himself."
No sooner had I put the phone down, than my sister rang, singing perkily, "Happy Birthday to —"
"Thanks. I got your card."
"Are you going out tonight?"
"No. It was cancelled."
She laughed, and I knew she threw her head back to do it. Marian had glossy hair that belonged in a shampoo ad. "How can your birthday be cancelled, silly?"
Silly. She got that from our mother. "Jack left, remember?"
"Yes, of course. Poor Grace."
Honestly, I was relieved he wasn’t there to see me falling apart. I dealt much better with my problems alone, and he never knew how to handle my "moods", as he so quaintly called them. He didn’t know what to do with me. No one ever did.
"Have you heard from him since?"
"No." And I didn’t expect to hear from Jack again. It wasn’t as if we parted on the best of terms, when I turned down his half-hearted marriage proposal. Of course, Marian remained friends with all her ex-boyfriends, while I wished freak accidents involving nutcrackers and melon-ballers on mine.
"Well, life doesn’t have to stop, does it?" she exclaimed jauntily. "You should go out anyway." She didn’t linger long over that depressing idea, however, and was soon rushing onward. "Now you’re coming for Christmas lunch. You can’t be alone at Christmas."
How could I get out of that one? It wasn’t really feasible to have any excuse. I didn’t even have a cat that could be theoretically sick. I was a childless spinster in tatty old slippers and I ought to be grateful for any invitation to partake in the faux Dickensian merriment of others.
While Marian chattered away, I stared at the fridge door, where I kept a photo of the two of us.
Marian was graceful and slender as a willow. I was, as kind people would say, "curvy" or, in the words of an overly eager college professor once, "Rubenesque". My clothes always managed to look second-hand. In the photo, taken one New Year’s Eve, her arm was around my shoulders, her head leaning toward me, brilliant smile, everything perfectly posed. I looked as if I wasn’t even aware of the camera, until the flash went off, blinding me. One eye was half closed, my mouth wide open. My shirt, which I could have sworn was actually two sizes too big when I bought it, stretched across my chest, the buttons working valiantly under pressure, like sailors manning the lifeboat winches on the Titanic. My cheeks were flushed, and there was something hanging off one ear that looked like – and probably was — a slice of Parma ham.
"Oh, Grace, guess what?" she exclaimed, giggling like a ten year-old.
"What?"
Grand pause. "I’m getting married."
"Who to?"
She snorted. "Clive, of course, silly!"
Trapped in that coffin-sized kitchen, my life drained out through the soles of my feet.
&n
bsp; "And you’re going to be a bridesmaid," she laughed, adding, "You would have been my maid of honor, but I had to ask my friend from college. Because I was hers last year."
I assured her that I really didn’t mind at all. If she had other people lined up for bridesmaids, I’d happily step down. However, it was already decided. I couldn’t get out of it. Visions of purple silk and hoop skirts filled me with the hysterical desire to run, screaming, into the street, while banging saucepans together over my head. If I truly went crazy, they couldn't make me be a bridesmaid, could they?
"I know you and Clive got off on the wrong foot. But you have to get to know him. You always jump to conclusions about people right away. You don’t give them a chance."
"Ummm." My future brother-in-law said things like, "Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed" and "Are we having fun yet?" Clive had two spoiled children by a previous marriage and encouraged them to be loud and insufferable, because, in his opinion, that was the only way to "get anywhere" in this world. He took them to fancy restaurants, where the progeny threw food and insulted the waiter. Furthermore he wore cardigans with bright diamond patterns, and he smoked a pipe. ‘Nough said.
"You are happy for me, Grace, aren’t you?"
"Of course." I suppose, being the elder sister, I should have cautioned her against the mistake, but she’d never listen to me. And who was I to offer relationship advice? Once again, what should have been said was not. Why break with tradition?
"Poor Grace," she cooed, "Now, we have to find someone for you." Surely it was next on her list, after achieving World Peace.
Poor Grace; people said that a lot. It made them feel better. It would probably be etched into my gravestone.
Suddenly my fingers found the drawer handle and pulled. I searched at the very back, behind the tape measure and the corkscrew. There she was. I drew the photo out —the blurry scan of a half-formed child. Tucking the phone under my chin, I used both hands to fix it to the fridge with a magnet. There. Now you can come out of the dark, Genevieve.
Genevieve. Genny. Why did I call her that? I’d never given her a name before.
"Actually, I know just the man for you, Grace. He’ll straighten you out. He’d be perfect!"
"I’m really not interested in meeting anyone right now."
But Marian was already fixing me up for a blind date, rolling onward and over me, her breathless sentences streamed like late-breaking news across a TV screen.
I made no further attempt to stop her. I was already fading again, drifting into the pages. Words fell around me, slowly building a three-dimensional reality, into which I gladly escaped.
Chapter Six
Genny
1533
Rain-speckled clouds, blown in on the tide that day, greeted the frosty earth to wrap a mischievous fog over the narrow, wattle and daub houses in our grim row. My spirit was limp and melancholy, like the wet shirts hanging in the Widow Tuppenham’s scullery, but here was my sanctuary. Hidden between the weeping, white flags of linen, I was out of Old Mother Chippchase’s sight. Now I was widowed, I had more opportunity to escape her house without suffering punishment on my return.
Water dripped slowly from the drying shirts, each bead falling through the air silently to shatter, with a sad "blip", onto the dimpled flagstones beneath. The maid, having hung the last shirt, sat beside me, pushing her hip into mine, until I was obliged to shift over and make room.
"If you ask me," she said, as she always did, even though nobody ever asked her anything, "Master Culpepper wears too much lace on his sleeves for a schoolmaster."
Ah, the sweet-tempered Master Robert Culpepper, a man I considered a real gentlemen and the Good Lord knows they are few and far between. He was far too respectable to be seen entering the Widow Tuppenham’s establishment, and that was, no doubt, why the maid spoke of him with scorn.
Although the sign above their door read, "shirts laundered", that was only an afterthought. It was a service Widow Tuppenham offered her "gentlemen" – and I use the term loosely in this case — but certainly not the manner in which she made her coin. No one else on our street had a worded sign, so she was vastly proud of hers, claiming it attracted a higher class of customer. It also attracted the spit of Old Mother Chippchase, who complained our street was "besmirched" by that woman’s presence. Every day a steady stream of gentlemen, many of them sailors bringing her exotic gifts from faraway places, passed under that sign. As a consequence, the Widow Tuppenham had many things that we did not, including lemons, in such steady supply that she used the juice to lighten her hair. I considered the existence of lemons with great skepticism, until she showed me one. She also showed me a thing called a pineapple; a wicked, foreign thing, it was certainly not something a good, God-fearing young woman should ever look upon. I looked at it quite a few times, just to be sure.
Since she could neither read, nor write, the Widow Tuppenham called upon me whenever she received a billet doux from one of her gentlemen. I read them to her and sometimes wrote her reply, if she felt inclined to send one. She repaid me with little trinkets, such as rings, or brooches, which I collected in a small wooden box, hidden under a floorboard in the pantry. Thanks to the Widow Tuppenham’s correspondence, my eyes were opened to a great deal more than they should be, my imagination inspired frequently to scandalous and wanton flights of fancy.
This morning, however, there was not a solitary inspiration in sight.
Abruptly the maid stuck her finger under my nose, showing me a wart she’d tried to remove herself by various methods and which had subsequently turned a lurid shade of green.
Now, I enjoy a gruesome sight as well as anyone, but not so much when thrust under my nose without warning and before breakfast. Thankfully, I was saved by the clanging of the bell, and I volunteered to go. It was time I returned to my own chores in any case, so I went down the narrow passage to the Widow’s door and heaved it open.
"Is your mistress within?"
The day, begun so wretchedly, suddenly became interesting. I knew how those humble shepherds felt, when accosted by the Archangel Gabriel in all his glory. Even his teeth were white and straight and apparently all in their place. His scent filled that narrow hallway; spice, wood smoke and pine trees. I took a sly, deep breath of it, because it was rare for a man to smell so sweet.
Alas, Master Robert Culpepper, formerly the man by whom I judged all others, was momentarily erased from my thoughts. I cursed my own fickleness, for this was no Archangel; only Satan himself could so tempt me from thoughts of the worthy Master Culpepper.
I jabbed a finger toward the parlor, where the Widow Tuppenham sprawled, bulging out of her corset and with the crumbs of her breakfast still clinging to the corners of her plump, scarlet lips. The stranger’s eyes narrowed, but even through thick, long black lashes I saw that brilliant shimmer of silver grey, like the sky sitting low over the sea on a stormy day. "I’ll go in then, shall I?"
My tongue – usually shamefully succinct — forgot how to function, so I merely nodded.
He looked over his shoulder. "Shan’t be long," he said, disappearing into the Widow’s parlor. Someone else had come to the house with him. Too busy admiring the handsome stranger, I paid the other man no heed. Until something, stinking and sweaty, slapped the side of my head.
"You must be the one who does the laundry."
Another of Satan’s minions had entered the house, sat himself on the bench beside the door, removed his shirt and tossed it at me. Naturally, he assumed I was the one who did the laundry in this house of ill-repute. What else would I be?
"How long will you stand there, with your mouth flapping like the privy door in a gale? Snap to it, wench." Unlike his companion, he was hatless, his hair shaved within an inch of its life. There was a restlessness about him, even as he sat, morosely contemplating his muddy boots. Dirty and ill kempt, his own scent was one of seaweed and old leather. The Lord only knew what filthy contagion he brought with him.
"Are you slow-witted, as well as mute?" he demanded, whereupon I dropped his shirt to the ground and wiped my clogs upon it. I daresay it was pure shock that caused his mouth to open wide and leave it thus.
"God speed," I said politely, slipping through the door and leaping, like a scalded cat, to the safety of the neighboring house.
* * * *
"Where have you been, hussy?" Old Mother Chippchase sat in the parlor, soaking her corns. I gave her no answer, but ran on to the pantry and back to my chores.
My attention wandered, however, for today I wallowed in lust and envy.
If the Widow Tuppenham could have a handsome lover, why could I not do the same? Now I was free of the odious Jacob and, if I was to be accused of sin in any case, I may as well make the most of it.
Only one prospect came to mind, however. Exceeding handsome, learned and always tidily dressed, I never once saw him spit upon the ground, or heard him expel any foul gases. True, I saw him scratch his buttocks once, but I could overlook it, having witnessed far worse fiddling and groping of parts in other men’s hose.
And who was this paragon of manly virtue? Master Robert Culpepper. I swooned slightly at the mere thought of him — his long, slender fingers and soft lips that were never dry, or chapped, even in winter. Once, on a warm day, I saw him with the ties of his shirt undone and the glimpse of that little bit of flesh, dappled with pale golden hair, sent me into palpitations so that I completely forgot my errand in the marketplace.
Yes, he could surely meet my needs and more than that — lest you think me concerned only with appearances — he would bring me learned conversation, an item of even greater rarity in these parts than a pineapple.
Abruptly I found myself thinking of the slovenly villain who tossed his filthy, stinking shirt in my face. Conversation was certainly not something he had much of. I would be surprised if he could string any coherent words together, unless they were commands; however, his eyes communicated more than his tongue and in language unfit for the ears of an innocent maid.
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