by Maeve Binchy
Marigold looked like an old trusted friend who has suddenly and unexpectedly been rebuffed.
“Of course you must decide for yourself, and perhaps you have somewhere else in mind. We are terrible, Joy, not to give Pat details of rent and things. We’re simply hopeless.”
“The rent is £20, and we usually spend about £10 a week each on food, and flowers and wine,” said Joy.
That was expensive, but not for what you got. You got a magnificent home, you got lovely meals, you got two very bright nice women to live with.
Pat heard her own voice saying, “Fine. Yes, if you think I’d fit in here with you, that’s fine. Can I come at the weekend?”
That night she wondered what she had done. Next morning she wondered whether she had been insane.
“I don’t know,” said tough little Terry. “If the food’s as good as all that, if the one in the wheelchair does all the work, if the place is like something out of Home and Garden, I think you’re laughing. If you don’t like it you can always move out.”
“I didn’t even look at my bedroom,” said Pat with a wail.
“They’ll hardly give you a coal bin hole,” said Terry practically.
Joy rang her breathlessly that day.
“It’s super that you’re coming. Marigold’s so pleased. She asked me to tell you that there’s plenty of room in your bed-sitting room for anything you want to bring, so don’t worry about space. Any pictures or furniture you like.”
Pat wondered why Marigold didn’t ring herself. She was at home, she didn’t have to avoid a spying boss. Pat also wondered whether this was a polite way of telling her that there were four walls and nothing else in her room.
On Saturday she arrived with two students who ran a flat-moving service. They carried up her little tables, her rocking chair, and her suitcases. They had cluttered up her hotel bedroom ridiculously, and she wondered whether there would be any more room for them where she was going. As they all puffed up the eighty-three steps, Pat felt very foolish indeed.
Joy let them in, with little cries of excitement. They paraded through the bedecked hall to a huge sunny room, which had recesses for cupboards, a big bed, and a washbasin. Compared to the rest of the flat, it looked like an empty warehouse.
Joy fussed along behind them. “Marigold said we should empty it so that you wouldn’t feel restricted. But there’s lots of furniture available. There are curtains and shelves for these”—she waved at the recesses. “Marigold thought you might want your own things.”
Pat paid the students, and sat down in the warehouse. Even her rocking chair looked lost. When she unpacked it wouldn’t be much better. Auntie Delia’s things would look lovely here. All those monstrous vases, even that beaded curtain. Maybe she should send for them. They were all in the little house in Leicester. They would be hers when Auntie Delia died. Strictly speaking they were hers already, since she had rented the house out just to get money to pay for her poor aunt in the nursing home. The rent covered the fees. The tenants didn’t like all the over-crowding from the furniture but Pat had insisted the house should remain untouched since Auntie Delia could get better one day and might come home. She felt slightly disloyal thinking about taking Auntie Delia’s treasures, but surely she couldn’t live in a barn like this while Auntie Delia lived in a world of her own, and the tenants lived in a house that they thought vastly overstuffed with things they didn’t like.
It was morning coffee time, so she gathered from the smell of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen. She was right, they assembled on the balcony, and had coffee from lovely china cups.
“I’ll be sending to Leicester for my real furniture this week,” she said.
“We’ll be dying to see it,” said Marigold, her china-blue eyes lighting up with excitement.
“And I must give you some money and everything,” blurted out Pat. “I’m not much good at this you know, not having shared a flat before.”
“Oh, Joy will look after that,” said Marigold. “She’s so good with money, working in that office where there’s a lot of accountancy. She should have been a solicitor from the start you know, it’s so silly to have waited until she’s twenty-seven before starting her indentures.”
“I’d never have done it at all if it weren’t for you,” said Joy gratefully. “I’d still be working on there and taking my money each week.”
“It would have been pointless,” said Marigold. Her blue eyes looked out over the park, where people who weren’t in wheelchairs jumped and played and ran about.
Pat sighed happily. It was so peaceful here and she had the whole week-end before facing the bank again. Nobody ever told you how easy it was to find a flat.
“Would you like me to do any shopping or anything?” she asked helpfully.
“Joy does that on Friday nights, we’re very well organized,” smiled Marigold. “We have a small deep freeze as well. It helps a great deal.”
While the rest of London sweated and fussed and shopped and dragged themselves through traffic jams or in crowded trains to the seaside, Joy and Marigold and Pat sat peacefully reading, listening to music, or chatting. By Monday Pat felt she had been on a rest cure. She and Joy had done a lot of the washing up, and preparing of things, rougher jobs like peeling potatoes and cutting up meat, and taking out rubbish.
Joy was friendly and eager to do everything, Marigold was gentle, serene, and calm. Pat began to think that she couldn’t have found two more perfect flat-mates.
On Sunday night she telephoned the people in Leicester and asked them to arrange to have seventeen pieces of furniture, some huge, some tiny, collected and delivered to London.
Nobody had telephoned the flat, nobody had gone out. Pat wondered what happened if you invited a friend in for supper. Would they all eat as a four-some? She saw no other way.
She gave Joy £80, and asked what to do about the tenner for food.
“I’ll spend £20 this week, and you spend it next week,” said Joy cheerfully.
Pat wondered where Marigold’s tenner came into it but said nothing. Why upset things? Things are not always so peaceful in life, it’s silly to question just for the sake of questioning.
On Tuesday she rang Joy at work to say that she was going to the theatre so would not be home for dinner.
“Oh.” Joy sounded upset.
“But that’s all right, isn’t it?” asked Pat. “Marigold won’t start to cook until we get home anyway, so it’s not a question of letting her know in advance. I’d ring her at home but I…well, I just thought I’d ring you.”
“Oh yes, it’s better to ring me,” said Joy. “No, no problems. I’ll pop home at lunchtime and tell her, it’s not far. Don’t worry.”
It all seemed very odd to Pat, but she put it out of her mind.
On Thursday her furniture arrived. Marigold was delighted with it. She whirled around in the wheelchair, stroking this and patting that.
“Lovely inlay,” she said.
“We must strip this down,” she said.
“What a magnificent curtain. Wouldn’t it look lovely on the balcony?” she said.
So of course Pat, flattered and pleased, hung Auntie Delia’s bead curtain up on the balcony, where indeed it looked lovely.
That night she asked if they ever heard from Nadia how she was enjoying Washington.
“No, we’ve not heard,” said Marigold.
“Nadia doesn’t write many letters,” said Joy.
“What did she do, I mean what job had she?” asked Pat. Her slight jealousy of Nadia had disappeared, now she had only curiosity.
“She worked in an antique shop,” said Joy.
“Managed an antique shop,” said Marigold.
“Well, she worked there first,” laughed Joy. “But Marigold told her she knew much more than anyone in it, and gave her confidence, so she ended up managing it for Mr. Solomons.”
“She knew twice as much as Mr. Solomons from the start,” said Marigold.
“Anyway
Mr. Solomons fancied her enormously, so that it didn’t hurt,” said Joy with a giggle.
“Did she fancy him?” asked Pat with interest.
“Not until Marigold told her to have some intelligence and fancy him,” giggled Joy again.
“Oh,” said Pat.
Marigold seemed to think some clarification was called for.
“It always strikes me as silly to go to bed with half-drunk people, who forget it, or who feel embarrassed by it, or who do it so often that it’s meaningless, and then refuse to go to bed with someone like Mr. Solomons who would appreciate it, would remember it with affection, and would advance Nadia because of it. It just seems a foolish sort of thing to have a principle about.”
Put that way, thought Pat, it was unanswerable.
“But she left him all the same?” she probed.
“Oh no, she didn’t leave Mr. Solomons,” said Joy laughing. “Mr. Solomons left her. He had a heart attack and went to live in the country, so she managed his place for him, and took a share in the profits.”
“And had a very nice cut and first refusal on everything they stocked,” said Marigold, stroking the little mahogany cabinet beside her, almost sensuously.
“So why Washington?” asked Pat.
“She’s running a little antique shop in George-town now,” said Marigold distantly. “Very different kind of stuff, I’m sure.”
“She got sort of unsettled, and took the first job she heard of,” said Joy artlessly.
“Some silly business with a chap who used to restore paintings, very silly really,” said Marigold. And the conversation about Nadia stopped there. It was as clear a break as if “End of Episode One” had been written in fire in the air.
Out of sheer curiosity, Pat stopped in Solomons’ antique shop. There was no elderly owner type about, so she supposed that the good proprietor’s heart could not yet have recovered from Nadia’s exertions.
She asked how much they would give her for Aunt Delia’s inlaid cabinet if she were to sell it. She described it very carefully.
“About five hundred pounds,” said the young man. “Depends on what condition it’s in, of course, but not less I’d say.”
That was odd. Marigold had said it was pretty but without value. Marigold said she should take great care of it because it might be worth fifty pounds. Imagine Marigold not knowing how much it was worth. A flaw in the lovely, graceful, all-knowing Marigold. A flaw no less.
“Is Nadia still here?” she asked on impulse.
“No, why, you a friend of hers?” the man asked.
“No,” said Pat. “I just know people who know her.”
“Oh, she left here a few weeks ago. Kevin would know where she is.” He pointed out a young and very attractive bearded bending figure, who was examining the frame of a picture.
“It doesn’t matter really,” said Pat hastily, thinking this might be the silly young man of Marigold’s description.
“Hey, Kevin, this lady’s a friend of Nad’s.”
Kevin stood up. He was very handsome in a definitely shabby, ungroomed way. Pat could see that his nails, his unwashed hair, wouldn’t have fitted into the elegant furniture back in the flat.
“I was just looking around, and I remembered that this is where the girl who lived in the flat where I’ve just moved in used to work…” said Pat apologetically.
“Have you moved in there?” asked Kevin flatly.
“Yes, a few days ago.”
“Have you moved all your stuff in?” he asked.
“Well yes, yes I have,” Pat’s voice trailed away. She felt unreasonably frightened.
“Did she tell you it’s worth buttons, peanuts?”
“No,” said Pat defensively. “Marigold said it’s very nice furniture and I must take care of it. Why, anyway?”
“Will you tell her you’ve been in here?” he asked very unemotionally.
“I might, I might not. Why do you ask?” said Pat. She was definitely frightened now, which was ridiculous. She also knew that she would never admit to Marigold that she had nosed around Nadia’s old place of employment and nosed out Nadia’s silly young man.
“I don’t think you will,” he said. “Nadia never told her anything towards the end, she was absolutely terrified of her. So was I. It’s her eyes, they’re not human.”
“They’re just too blue,” said Pat. “She can’t help that.”
“No, but she can help a lot of things. Do you know that she hasn’t polio at all?”
“I don’t believe you,” said Pat, feeling her legs getting weak.
“No, she hasn’t, that’s why none of them ring her at home. She goes out, you know, when everyone’s at work.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, I saw her several times running down the stairs, and taking a taxi. I took a photograph of her once to prove it to Nadia, but she said it was trick photography.”
“But she’s paralysed,” said Pat.
“So she says. It’s nice being paralysed if you get everyone else to do all the work, pay all the bills, and live in fear of you.”
“Don’t you think that someone would have to be mad to pretend to have polio, just to get out of carrying out the rubbish?”
“Marigold is mad, very mad,” he said.
Pat sat down on a reproduction sofa.
“Didn’t you guess?” he asked.
“I don’t believe it,” said Pat.
“Nadia doesn’t to this day,” said Kevin.
“Is that why she went to Washington?” asked Pat.
“She’s not in Washington, she’s back in my flat. In Clapham,” he said. “She told them she was going to the States, that was the only reason that Marigold let her go.”
“You mean she has no job, and just lives in your flat because she’s afraid of Marigold?” Pat said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Go down there and see,” he said. “She’ll be sitting there complaining about the noise, and saying how little light there is, and how cramped the place seems to be. She doesn’t even bother to get dressed properly, she hangs about all day complaining. That’s what Marigold has done to her.”
“Does she want to be back in the flat?”
“She wants it so much I think she’s becoming as mad as Marigold. ‘It was so peaceful. We were so gracious. We had such lovely music, not the neighbours’ trannies.’ That’s all she says, day in, day out.”
“Why did she leave it if she liked it so much?” asked Pat, almost afraid to hear the answer. Everything Nadia said about the flat was so true, there might be some truth in Kevin’s whole terrible tale.
“She left it because I told her that she had given all her lovely furniture to this woman, that she had turned herself into a prostitute for her, that she had cut off her whole life for her, that she was working to support her. I told her to examine all these statements and if she thought they were true to move out. So she did and they were and she moved. But not without tissues of lies of course about Washington, which that nice silly Joy believed but Marigold saw through at once. Marigold didn’t mind anyway, she had loads of stuff, hundreds of pounds’ worth, from Nad over the years, and she’ll always get other slaves.”
“But Joy’s normal.”
“She used to be, when she had a bit of a life of her own, and boyfriends, and big plates of spaghetti with the girls from work. She should have been married years ago and have three nice fat children by now, instead of trying to become a solicitor and earn more money for that Marigold.”
“You’re very bitter about her.”
“I’m bleeding obsessed with her, that’s what I am. She’s ruined Nadia totally, she’s turned Joy into a zombie, there was another one there, too, I can’t remember her name, but she had to go out to bloody Africa as a missionary or something to get over it all. Having left some very nice lamps and some very good old cut glass thank you.”
Pat’s heart missed something of its regular movement. She remembered admirin
g the lamps, and Marigold had said they were from a dear friend who went to Africa and didn’t need them.
It was the end of her lunch hour. She walked out without saying anything. She knew where to find him if she needed to know any more. He would take her home to meet Nadia if she wanted confirmation of it all. She was a free, grown-up woman, nobody could keep her there against her will.
On the way back to the bank she passed an expensive flower shop. It had unusual little potted plants. One of them was very, very blue. It had a long name but Marigold would know it anyway. It would look lovely on the balcony table. It would be so peaceful there this evening after work. It was like a dream-world really. It would be such a misery trying to get everything out of the flat now that she had just got it in. Anyway, why should she? Kevin was just a silly young man. Jealous obviously because Nadia had been so happy in the flat. Anyone would be happy in that flat, it was so very, very peaceful, you didn’t need anyone else or anything else in the world.
Lancaster Gate
* * *
It was funny the way things turned out. If she hadn’t made that huge scene, and cried, and nearly choked herself crying, and admitted all kinds of weaknesses, she wouldn’t be here now. She would be back in the flat, cleaning the cooker, polishing the furniture, ironing his shirts, so that he would think it was wonderful to have all these home comforts and value her more.
She would have gone to the cinema maybe, but maybe not. Films were so full of other people’s relationships, and she kept identifying, and saying “If I behaved more like her, would he value me more?” or wondering why some screen woman could be so calm when everything was collapsing around her. Lisa could never be calm. She could pretend at calmness very successfully, but deep down it was churn, churn, churn. Sometimes she was surprised that he couldn’t hear her heart sort of hitting against her bones, she could hear it thudding as well as feel it from inside, she could actually hear the wuff wuff sound it made. But fortunately he never managed to hear it, and she could always fool him into thinking she was relaxed and at ease. Sometimes the nights that had started with her heart thudding very seriously had turned out to be their best nights, because she acted out the calm role so well. Lisa had often thought how extraordinarily easy it was to fool someone you loved and who loved you.
