The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  Acclaim for The Baeuty Room

  ‘… a superb writer. I was totally there in that house and in that atmosphere. It’s incredibly sensual and physically realised. I found it both gripping, in that I kept creeping away to read it, and disturbing, in that I felt a lingering sense of that atmosphere, almost a dread. Also very sexy …’

  Lesley Glaister

  ‘The Beauty Room is tightly written, terse with gripping sexual tension’

  Isla Dewar

  ‘Regi Claire’s vision is fresh, unusual, and subtly delivered in The Beauty Room. Her sharply imagined opening scenes swiftly focus intense, often unexpected emotions, and these are intriguingly extended throughout. Colourful and haunting, this is a novel which long remains in the mind - an impressive debut, and a welcome addition to the Scottish literary landscape.’

  Randall Stevenson, author of The Oxford English Literary History: 1960-2000

  ‘… a search for love is at the heart of this ambitious first novel … dramatic … shocking and rebarbative … an impressive debut novel, elegantly written with a generous cast of cleverly drawn complementary characters’

  Carl MacDougall, The Herald

  ‘… The Beauty Room is a sensitive account of the process of bereavement. Claire’s symbolism is inspired … Although not for the prudish, it is full of insight and fine writing which will stay with you…’

  Marion Baird, The Scotsman

  ‘…Celia’s repressed sexuality emerges with a bristling electricity that fairly crackles off the pages. … In facing her family history Celia has to come to terms with her ambivalent grief for a mother who hasn’t shown her love but has demanded it in abundance. Strange and menacing … beautiful writing…’

  Clare Simpson, Scottish Book Collector

  ‘…The Beauty Room fairly hums with sexual tension.’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘a fine tale of intrigue and tension in the Swiss gem trade’

  Caledonia

  ‘original and enjoyable’

  The List

  This eBook edition published in 2013 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2002 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  © Regi Claire, 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 0 7486 6322 3

  eISBN 978 0 85790 779 0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Version 1.0

  for my mother and Ruth and Ron, with love

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  ‘SMACK HER! Smack her!’

  Inside the Roth home at Anders, Celia had just been made to stand on her head. Seven years old, half-naked and choking.

  With the shutters pulled to, the lounge had a dim underwater feel. The white carpet, seared here and there by sunlight, glimmered pale as sand. The casement window was open; the curtains hung stiffly, baked solid in the ovenheat of another Swiss summer. Celia’s new polka-dot bikini clung to her bottom as if she’d been swimming.

  ‘Smack her, for goodness’ sake!’ she heard her mother scream again, high above, and she felt herself being lifted bodily and shaken, her scalp and elbows scraping the floor as her mother’s grip around her ankles kept slipping, chafing her skin.

  ‘It’s all my fault, my fault. I gave her –’ The voice of her grandmother was heavy with self-reproach but she didn’t come any nearer, her sandalled feet tiny and furtive between the two armchairs.

  ‘Well then, do something! Smack her, hard, that’s the only way to get it out!’

  Chair legs and sofa legs, coffee-table legs, human legs shuddered and swam before Celia’s eyes, turning into a mangrove of changing shapes, bloated and stick thin and impossibly twisted, splintering, disintegrating … Her face was running with wet. She retched, and retched. Her head was about to explode, her ears had gone deaf. She was breathing lungfuls of dust but no air. No air –

  ‘SMACK HER!’

  The sandals got suddenly bigger: her grandmother was bending down, her sea-green eyes reduced to dark pools of distress, her Cupid bow lips drooping, her old woman’s fingers twitching as they reached out towards her, claw-like …

  Ever afterwards it wasn’t the exquisite lips and eyes Celia remembered, only those hands, every single knotted joint of them. As soon as her grandmother held something out to her, a thickly buttered bread slice perhaps, or a piece of homemade apple tart, a new nightdress even, she’d see those misshapen knuckles and her mouth would go dry, her throat constrict into a compulsion of swallowings.

  The fingers had hardly hit Celia’s back when the dust in her nose released itself into a body-racking sneeze. With a final retch her throat unclenched, expelled – and she slumped free, on to the carpet. Free and alive.

  As she lay there heaving and clutching at her throat, she tried to focus on the sweet an arm’s length away. Banded red, white and brown like a large marble, it was covered in swirls of blood and slime, matted with hairy fluff where it had rolled across the carpet. Celia moaned, closed her eyes. And allowed herself an extra moan because for once in her short existence it was her, and not her brother Walter – five years older and five years more loved and adored – who was centre stage.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, little one. I’m so sorry,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you, Mum? Smacking’s what’s done the trick. Thank God!’

  Then the weight of a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right now?’ Already her mother’s tone had cooled to the detached proficiency Celia had learnt to equate with affection.

  Quickly she let her lids slide open. Her bikini top was askew, exposing two pale-pink nipples like blind eyes. She ignored them. Gave her aching throat one last rub, and grimaced. No use prolonging her ordeal. Something itchy had started to trickle along her spine, down her thighs and arms, a mixture of sweat and old carpet freshener, traces of moth repellent, the ghosts of unwashed feet. She was glad to get up.

  ‘I shall never buy the boiled sort again, never ever, don’t you worry,’ her grandmother vowed gently, but the words felt like smacks.

  All Celia wanted now was to go to Lake Constance as they had planned and not lose any more time, in case Walter arrived home early with his pail load of slimy tail-thrashing trout from Uncle Godfrey’s fish farm out of town. Her mother and grandmother would fuss over him no end. Praise him as the man of the house, the mighty hunter – as if scooping up fish with a hand net was such a big deal. In a diffuse way, though, Celia knew their fussing had a lot more to do with the fact that her father was no longer around.

  Let’s go, she lisped to herself, Let’s go, pleasepleaseplease. She pictured the afternoon hours spread out like the shimmering surface of the lake, with herself in the middle splashing and paddling, or licking a triple ice cream on the hot shingle.

  A hiss of running water sounded from the kitchen down the corridor, then her mother returned with a small plastic
basin and a rag to clean the blood trail off the carpet.

  Walter came wheeling his bicycle round the corner just as they were getting into the car, his pail swinging precariously from the handlebars. Celia saw his damp brown curls glisten in the sun, far superior to her own ‘rat’s tails’, and she wrinkled her nose, trying in vain to snuggle herself into the garage-cool upholstery of the back seat. She couldn’t help watching the cleft in his chin widen as he laughed – couldn’t help touching her own lower jaw, which leaned out of her face like the witches’ in her Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  For a while the boiled sweet featured as Horror Exhibit Number One: suitably rinsed and wiped, it was displayed in a cork-stoppered jar on top of Celia’s chest of drawers.

  She showed it to everyone. Her friends Lily and Nita giggled and asked to have a feel. Walter smirked and Auntie Margaret, who wasn’t a real aunt but Lily’s mother and her own mother’s best friend, called it a ‘dreadful monster’. Grandfather simply nodded his moonfaced head, then carried on polishing the furniture in his antiques shop. Uncle Godfrey and his housekeeper inspected it with puzzled smiles. And her mother’s clients fled to the safety of the Beauty Room.

  One day Celia took it into the yard to let Charlie, the black labrador that belonged to old Frau Gehrig from upstairs, have a sniff. He wagged and grinned civilly enough (or so she thought), his lips pulled back a little further, his velvety red tongue flopped out a little more … and his eyes blinked shut in ecstasy. Then he ambled off to his kennel, leaving nothing but a slobber on her palm.

  1

  NOW THAT HER mother is dead, Celia has all the time in the world. No more trips to the nursing home night after night, announcing her name to the security camera and waiting to be buzzed in. No more smells forcing her to strip and wash endlessly. No more anguish, doubts or guilt. From now on she’ll sleep undisturbed, eight hours of bliss, and rip each day from the next in one clean tear.

  Celia glances at her watch. Ten to ten: the man will be here soon. She strides over to the lounge window and yanks aside the net curtains for a better view of the street. A cold February day, the sky sullen above the tall apartment block opposite. What’s left of the snow has frozen over again, forming a thin crust of white on gardens and rooftops. A red Fiat slows for some patches of black ice the salt lorries must have missed, then accelerates away down the side street. The ash tree out front is waving its soiled-looking branches at her.

  Nothing doing, it seems to say, nothing at all.

  She scowls in reply. Schildi, her neighbours’ tortoiseshell cat, is stalking through the snowdrops around the tree base, tail in the air, squinting up at the suspended wooden bird feeder where three sparrows and a robin are squabbling over their morning’s ration of sunflower seeds. With its snowy slanting roof and the arched openings on each side, the feeder reminds her of a miniature house – or an oddly peaked skull whose eye sockets are grey with snowlight. She stares at it. Until the tree is shaken by a squall that scatters ice crystals and twirls the feeder on its cord like a merry-go-round. Celia smiles to herself, then turns away from the window, curiously relieved.

  But her cheek has grazed the bunched-up night curtains and the sensation makes her flinch. She’d always loathed those curtains; their texture’s too grainy, their colour too much like putrid skin. ‘Silver Sand’ was what they’d been marketed as in the catalogue, and her mother would stubbornly insist on the term.

  Celia fancies she can hear her voice even now, a harsh whisper from the sofa which sets the air around her trembling:

  Celia, please, it’s getting dark. If you didn’t mind drawing the silver sands?

  The silence afterwards is interrupted by her own rapid breathing as she begins to raise a hand, then hesitates in mid-reach. Whatonearth is she doing? It’s light outside. And her mother is gone. GONE. Sealed inside that box of polished wood and brass and satin, two metres underground. No need to obey her requests and demands any longer.

  Moments later, though, Celia lunges out with both arms. ‘Yes, I know what I’m doing!’ she cries and pounces on the curtain folds, grabbing fiercely. The cloth gives with a shriek. There’s no stopping her now; she wrenches off the metal hoops with the last few putrid-coloured tatters. The net curtains are child’s play by comparison; their weak plastic rings break like a sudden wave and she collapses in a heap of fabric and dust, laughing herself into a sneezing fit. One clean tear, she thinks. A start of sorts.

  No voice had tried to restrain her. No one. Dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her aquamarine silk blouse, Celia glances at her watch again: three minutes to ten. Better get rid of this mess before the man appears.

  Time, of course, isn’t the only thing she has in abundance now.

  There’s the money, too.

  And space. Perhaps that most of all. With her mother’s death, space had exploded around her, expanding indefinitely until she could hardly see the corners of the room she happened to be in, as if the sharp winter sunlight had obliterated them, abandoning her in the vastness of a desert.

  Eventually, a good week after the funeral, she’d rung up a decorator.

  ‘You won’t believe your luck,’ exclaimed the woman who’d answered the phone, ‘someone’s just cancelled a contract job.’ The men could start pretty much immediately, she said, and would it suit if Herr Lehmann called round, now let me see, on Tuesday?

  No, Celia didn’t believe the woman’s spiel, not one word of it. But, yes, Tuesday did suit.

  Seven minutes past ten: Lehmann’s late. Celia stands on tiptoe and stretches hard, her fingernails scrabbling at the metal of the empty curtain rail ineffectually. For an instant she feels like a small girl again, trying to prove she’d grown up so her mother would be happier with her, the way she used to be with adults, and Walter – until he left home. Celia groans, caught up in emotions she’d thought were buried as deeply as contaminated waste. Her body sags against the window sill. Outside everything is hushed: not a single car in sight, the branches of the ash tree frozen into stillness, Schildi and the birds scared off. Even the apartment block and the half-timber farmhouse next to it, behind the fenced-in rows of vegetable beds, seem to have sunk into hibernation.

  Several seconds pass before Celia rallies herself – forgodsake, woman, you’re nearing forty! She tugs open the window and leans out, willing the man to materialise. She hopes his van will be emblazoned, ‘Painters & Decorators’ splurged in large rainbow letters all over its sides to let the whole neighbourhood know that she, Celia Roth, is beginning a new life.

  This is the first time she has made a decision that’s bound to leave a mark. To change things. Things as opposed to ideas. Things are visible; ideas and opinions can be hidden away. At last she’ll be able to mar those pastel walls – those fleshy pinks and creams, those flaccid greens. New paint will stick and so will the paste under new wallpaper. Even steaming won’t ever return the place to its previous state of unholy insipidness. Something will remain. And that something will be hers, and hers alone.

  All at once Celia notices how naked the window has become without the curtains, like an enormous peephole inviting others to pry – strangers, neighbours; Rolf and Carmen from upstairs, old Frau Müller in the farmhouse, the shabby tenants of the apartment block. You’ve got nothing to hide, she reassures herself, nothing to fear. And anyway, there are the outside shutters. They clank closed easily enough.

  ‘But don’t say later I didn’t warn you, Frau Roth.’ The decorator is dressed casually in shirt sleeves, no jacket, and sounds a little petulant.

  Celia smiles at him – words of caution no longer have power over her. Instead of smiling back, he regards her with a mixture of distrust and tired belligerence. Since he set foot in the flat his professional pride has been hurt over and over – a room at a time, as it were. He swallows another Kambly caprice biscuit, washes it down with his coffee, then slicks a blond-bleached curl behind his ear.

  ‘More?’ Celia asks. She has snatched up the coffee pot and the
liquid can be heard sloshing about inside. She feels suddenly uneasy, wonders whether she is trying to placate Lehmann after rejecting his suggestions earlier so gracelessly. Or whether she’s simply pandering to his good looks. He is in his mid-forties, she’d guess: a man in his prime. With thick curly hair almost down to his shoulders, the way she remembers Walter’s before he had to get it cut off for the Rekrutenschule, his compulsory five-month stint in the army; and a freckly round face like a boy’s, confused a little by the thin nose, sharp teeth and Vandyke beard of the grown-up. His eyes are unwavering – pin-prick pupils in a softness of blue – and they unsettle her. He is wearing a wedding ring. Celia is holding the pot slightly tilted above his cup, ready to pour. ‘More?’ she repeats, feeling increasingly exasperated, and guilty. ‘Or have you had enough?’

  His eyebrows, lashes and the Vandyke are black, his natural colour presumably. Just like that hearse-style van he’d arrived in, quarter of an hour late – jet black and waxed to a gleam, with the firm’s name curlicued discreetly, far too discreetly, in gold on both doors.

  ‘No, that’ll do. Thanks.’ Alex realises his hand has covered the coffee cup as if the woman had proposed strychnine. Of course he isn’t afraid of her. She’s a bit screwed up, that’s all. Kind of sleek and wide-eyed, unnerving with that wet-gel straight hair right over her breasts which swell so unashamedly against the water green of her blouse. Like he used to imagine mermaids when he was a kid. But Christ, what a nightmare of a colour scheme for her flat! It’s always the same story: first the I-know-what-I-want rashness of choice, then – with the wallpaper still blistered and the paint not yet dry – the stunned silence, finally the murmurs of regret, shrill complaints and acts of sabotage (usually involving some phantom pet that just happens to be moulting).

  Not to worry though. The woman’s old enough. And once she’s put her name on the dotted line, well, what the heck … He starts gathering his brochures and sample files while Celia reaches for the order form on the coffee table, signs and dates it, her face glazed with obstinacy. Having fetched a bundle of notes from the rosewood bureau in the corner, she relaxes at last. She smiles to herself, aware of his gaze travelling up and down her front, and counts out the money.