[Brenda & Effie 06] - Brenda and Effie Forever!

by Paul Magrs

  I’m goggling at Mr Hoffmann, and realizing that I have let down my first two guests of the new season. ‘I can’t apologise enough,’ I say. ‘I don’t know how this has happened.’

  He’s wearing some kind of tweedy walking outfit, with a little cap. He puts on a jaunty air. ‘Well, let’s say no more about it, eh? Everyone has their off days.’

  I was in a sleepy daze this morning, serving them their Full English. I didn’t really talk to them, preoccupied as I was with Effie’s nocturnal ramblings. I remember them being a bit quiet, and snooty. I served them eggs and bacon. ‘The rest of it was all right, wasn’t it?’ I ask, and feel like the ground is dropping away from under me. What have I come to, if I can’t even serve a decent breakfast? What kind of a landlady have I become?

  ‘Well, actually,’ says Mr Hoffmann. ‘I’m afraid to report it was pretty disgusting, too. The eggs were off. The bacon smelled distinctly iffy.’

  His words are like knives in my breast. Really, I’ve never felt shame like it, in all my many long years. How could I not have even noticed that I’ve been giving them substandard service? I could even have poisoned them with my inferior comestibles. I don’t understand this. I can’t see how this could have come about.

  I apologise profusely to the man, and he looks highly sympathetic. ‘But your room? Surely your room is up to scratch?’

  He puts on an agonised expression. His ruddy face is one almighty wince. ‘Actually, it was rather dirty. There was green mould on the sheets and in the curtains. We didn’t like to say or to kick up a fuss, you know. But, since you asked…’

  I almost cry out in dismay. I just about fall over backwards on the dining room carpet. This can’t be right. This can’t be happening to me. I’ve always run a spotless establishment.

  I panic and offer Mr Hoffmann and his wife a stupendous discount, and promise that such lapses will never occur again. He seems more than happy with that, and then he goes to fetch his wife and they leave to spend the afternoon bookshopping in town. His wife gives me a strange look as they pass me in the hall, and as they leave I swear she’s saying something to him about nasty hand towels.

  I spend the afternoon cleaning like a demon.

  I can’t let this place slip. I just can’t. Brenda’s B&B is my raison d’etre. It is what defines me these days. It’s my little sanctuary against the cruel forces of the outside world. Death, decay, muckiness… those are the incessant negative forces that assail the world outside and batter at my front door. I can stem that tide of wickedness by keeping this place neat as a new pin. And that’s what I do. I get on my knees and I scrub.

  But there’s fluff on the staircarpets. Grime in the wainscoting. There’s cobwebs on the lightfittings and algae round the taps.

  I’ve got work to do. Otherwise, this is how everything goes to hell.

  §

  At some stage during the afternoon I get a nice phone call from Robert, and that goes some way to cheering me up. I tell him again what a lovely boyfriend he has found himself, and how Gila is doing a smashing job investigating the mermaid business. I can’t help but think Robert sounds half-hearted as he agrees with me. I hope the shine isn’t fading on his relationship already. It’d be nice to see him settled.

  After his call I get back to my cleaning and it’s as if I’m waging a one-woman war. I stand on the landings with my bucket and squeegee mop. I run the ewbank up and down the stair carpets. I put the feather duster on its bamboo extension and drag silvery webs from the top corners of the ceiling. Then I check that the Hoffmanns are still out before slipping into their room to tackle those sheets.

  The bedding is green and furry. Everything is smudgy and dusty and somewhat damp to the touch. I can’t believe it. Wasn’t I in here, just before my guests arrived? Aren’t these sheets and continental quilts new on?

  If so, there’s something very strange going on here. No matter how distracted I was, I’m sure I’d never go putting manky sheets on a bed. I might get neglectful, but I’m not doo-lally.

  Something is invading my house. Some kind of evil dampness is sneaking in. The dust is falling thicker than it ought to be, too. In fact, standing still before the Red Room’s open window, in the last golden rays of the day, I can see the dust tumbling down. It’s like brilliant snow falling. It almost makes me sneeze.

  I turn, lugging armfuls of whiffy bedding and, just as I’m about to go, I notice that the bedside table is spread with books and papers. I don’t know what makes me do it, but I amble over there on my way out. I cast an eye over those papers and those foxed and cloth-bound books. I know that the Hoffmanns are both academics – both Doctors, in fact. I don’t know what I think I’m going to get out of their jottings and scribblings… but look I do.

  And when I read a few lines from the topmost sheet my heart starts pounding. I get a jabbing sensation of panic in my chest and my face grows hot at once.

  Am I being paranoid? Am I really seeing what I’m seeing?

  I flip through a few other pages. I realise I’m holding my breath as I read descriptions of myself and my house, in terms that I would hardly call very flattering. There are even direct quotations of things I have said to the Hoffmanns since they arrived. Silly, trivial things. Things that are hardly worth noting down.

  What are they up to, those two? And all at once I know the answer to that. For some reason, they are investigating me.

  I shuffle all the papers together, hoping to leave them in the same disarray as that in which I found them.

  That evening, sitting alone in my attic lounge, I hear the Hoffmanns return and clamber up the side stairs to the Red Room. They talk loudly to each other, in those braying voices people of their type have. They are the kind of people who talk as loudly as they like and don’t care who hears them. As if they have nothing to hide.

  But they do have something to hide. I know they have.

  I sit in all evening, squinting at the dust which falls and falls steadily. Much more plentifully than it ought to. At one point I wipe a side table experimentally, and then watch as the dust sifts down like flour, covering it again in less than thirty minutes.

  Dust comes from human hair and skin, doesn’t it? It’s all just flaking fragments of human bodies. That thought gives me the horrors. The idea of slowly being buried in dead, powdered skin.

  I put on my favourite records to while away the evening and I’m sure I’m not imagining that the needle crackles and pops more than usual. So now, above the sound of my favourite tunes, I can even hear the dust, amplified and remorseless.

  If I lay here on the settee forever that falling dust would eventually cover me up. When people realised I’d not been out and about for a while, they’d have to break down the door. Maybe the room would be too full of the dust of centuries for the door to open.

  As I doze off I’m wondering how much dust I myself must have produced in all the long years I’ve been alive. Horrible thoughts to fall asleep to on the sofa. And I hate falling asleep here because my legs are too long, they hang over the end and that plays hell with my circulation.

  I wake with a thick head from dreaming about dust, and pins and needles up both legs. And I wake to the sound of Effie banging on the side door. It’s no surprise now, hearing her demanding to be let in at five in the morning. But I hurry on down because otherwise she’ll be waking up Dr and Dr Hoffmann and I don’t want to give them anything else to complain about.

  §

  ‘This time we went on a longer journey in that luxurious car of his.’ Effie sits on the very edge of the armchair, cradling her spicy tea in both hands. Tonight she looks less dishevelled following her nighttime adventures. She seems almost excited.

  ‘Where did you go this time?’ I ask. And all at once it strikes me. Though she is my best friend, and I would trust her with my very life, I have no proof at all that she isn’t making all of these stories
up. She could be dreaming elaborate dreams and hurrying round to tell me about them. I look at her and try to determine the truth.

  Ah, but I saw the Limbosine in the street, didn’t I? It was sliding down the road outside the Christmas Hotel. I’ve had a glimpse of that dream machine for myself.

  ‘Well Brenda, this time we went much further afield, as we traced the movements of my younger self. He tucked me into his plush backseat and the car zoomed off into the night at impossible speeds. To anyone watching, we would have been just a blur, I think. It was magical, Brenda, the way we soared over the bracken and the gorse of the moors. At first the car clung to the long, swerving country roads, as if for propriety’s sake. Then it abandoned that, and the earth, and we were hurtling through the dales and the valleys, over villages and towns, straight across the hugeness of Yorkshire.

  ‘Every now and then I’d catch glimpses of an old-fashioned motor coach, pre-war, trundling noisily through the hills and vales, with all its passengers’ luggage strapped securely to its roof. I knew young Effie was inside there, sitting on the backseat, where her feet couldn’t quite reach the floor. The loud goodbyes and cries of her aunts were still ringing in her ears and she was trying very hard not to cry as she clutched the box containing her gas mask, a bag of peppermint creams (home made) and a battered copy of ‘The Secret Garden’, which she wasn’t finding very cheering at all.

  ‘All the while she was thinking of the case upon the roof, jiggling along with all the other luggage. Hers contained – beside the ordinary clothes and things – her Panda and that strange scrapbook composed of important pages. Young Effie was being entrusted with a vital mission and it weighed heavily on her. She imagined the bumps and jolts of the coach making her case spring open and sending everything flying across the scrubby moorland.

  ‘I sat in the back of the Limbosine and came out of my trance to find that I was eating peppermint creams, too. I don’t even know where they came from. Then the Chauffear was talking to me.

  ‘‘Have you ever been back to Haworth, then?’

  ‘‘N-no,’ I answered, sounding shakier than I would have liked. I didn’t want him to feel that he was disturbing me any. ‘I haven’t been there since I was a little girl.’

  ‘‘Didn’t you like your time there?’

  ‘I was there for two years, or thereabouts. The small town, in the heart of Yorkshire, right in the thick of the moors… open to the vast, frightening skies… I think I did like living there. I think. But what do kids know? They aren’t given any choice about where or how they live. Those things are decided for them by adults. I was just made to live in this place, with its odd, cobbled, downward sloping main street and its gloomy parsonage and graveyard. And it was all for my own safety. I just had to make the best of it all. But I was a sunny-natured, obedient child, you’ll be surprised to hear, Brenda. I did just as I was told, and I trusted in what my Aunt Maude had told me – that my new guardians would treat me like a queen.

  ‘Deirdre and Val ran the grocer’s shop at the top of the slanting town. It was a musty, magical place, their shop. It smelled wonderfully of rich tea leaves and fresh mint and strawberries, all year round. Blue duck eggs were laid in straw outside their shop’s front door, along with sackfuls of muddy potatoes they grew themselves. Every single potato had been grown into a rude shape. Deirdre used to say Val did it for fun – she somehow made the tatties grow to look like nude men and women, all bloated and booby. Sometimes they looked like people from the town of Haworth, who shopped there. Blushes all round, but to me it was hilarious.

  ‘I was told that these were my aunties, as well. The met me off the coach and took hold of my hand and my precious case and told me that they were related to me along some distant branch of our strange family tree. I stared at these new aunties and wasn’t sure whether I liked what I saw. Val was plump and shy-looking, wearing her linen shop coat out in the street with huge clumpy shoes, one of them with a very thick sole. Deirdre was tall and angular. She seemed very sophisticated to my eyes, with her hawkish nose and her mannish hairdo and school teacher’s clothes.

  ‘‘Darling Effryggia,’ said Deirdre as she bent to hug me. I could tell from her awkwardness that she wasn’t used to hugging anyone. Her elbows jabbed and her cold nose prodded my ear. ‘Your Aunt Maude has told us everything about you. Welcome, welcome, dear child, to our humble town.’

  ‘‘Yes, yes,’ fussed Aunty Val, bustling past Deirdre and pulling me into a warm cuddle. She was made for cuddles, Aunty Val. As I got to know my new relatives I would discover that she would cuddle anything at all – from stray kittens to the vicar to the poor dead rabbits they hung in the shop’s bay window. She would thank them for giving up their young lives for our use – really! She was a strange old bird, Aunty Val. A bit simple, Deirdre used to say, but I never saw anything wrong with her. I’d never been loved as fiercely and easily as that. My true Aunts at home always kept a slight distance. They weren’t cold with me, but they treated and talked to me like a diminutive adult. But in Aunty Val’s eyes I was just a little girl. One she knew must be missing her family and home. She hugged me tight and gathered me up as if she could stow me away in that deep pocket in the front of her grocer’s apron. Leaving Deirdre to lug my case, Aunty Val carried me back to their shop at the top of the town, and I never even noticed the motor coach start up again and chug its way out of Haworth. Leaving me there for how long, I didn’t know.

  §

  ‘Tonight the journey in the Limbousine took longer than before. The Chauffear and I seemed to spend several days in Haworth with my girl-self all in the space of one night. We watched me settle into life above the grocer’s shop. When I saw the room that my new aunties had allotted me, I cried all over again because it was so lovely. Much bigger than my cupboard-like windowless room at home and fitted out with all manner of luxurious, feminine items. Including tiny bottles of curious scents and silver brushes and tortoiseshell combs. Aunty Val would insist on combing out my hair each night.

  ‘Many details I had forgotten, of course, and now they came rushing back. I ate hearty meals with them, and I was taught to cook. We went gathering herbs and mushrooms in the dewy early hours. We tramped over the moors together for exercise, taking their great brindled hound, Keeper. I tended to their allotment with them, bringing back a barrowful of vegetables – rude and otherwise – back to the shop. And on Saturday nights we would queue for fish suppers with the townsfolk, who would peer at me and mutter speculation about where I had come from.

  ‘Aunty Val and Deirdre were well known for their witchy ways, it seemed. And the local gossip claimed that they had performed evil Masses to the devil and conjured me up using mandrake root, fire and brimstone, human blood. My Aunts ignored this tittle-tattle as we queued for our fish and chips. They held themselves with great dignity amid the steamy vinegar fumes and the mumblings around them gradually subsided. I perceived that the townsfolk were actually scared of my Aunts and their presumed powers. All of this I took in my stride, of course, having always lived with talented witches.

  ‘It was only after several days that I learned the significance of the town of Haworth, and why its name had rung a bell inside my head. Avid reader as I was back then, it is surprising that the name hadn’t alerted me before. It was Sunday and, as the rest of the town sang tunelessly in the small church just across the main street from us, my Aunts and I were taking a shortcut through the graveyard on our way to the moor. We were going to spend the day up on the Heights with a picnic that Aunty Val was carrying in a heavy basket. Not for us the mournful dirges and ghastly singalongs in the chapel, or listening to the dreary nonsense spoken by the vicar. We were having an adventure, instead!

  ‘The graveyard was crowded and hemmed around by black, twisted trees. We cut straight across the middle, zig-zagging through headstones and tip-toeing on those that were flat on the ground, or had toppled over one stormy night. At one end of t
he cemetery was the squat, long shape of the parsonage, keeping watch over the dead.

  ‘It was Aunt Deirdre who confirmed my sudden inkling that this was a place I ought to know. In that hectoring, lecturing tone she often put on, she explained that this was the very churchyard where those three Bronte sisters used to play and live, in the last century. These graves were their playground. Those windows were their bedrooms. I had read their books, of course? I blushed, because I hadn’t read them all. Only Emily’s book, ‘Wuthering Heights’, and Charlotte’s ‘Jane Eyre’, of course. But even so, with my limited knowledge of those girls, a shiver went through me at the thought of being in that place. And the prospect of biding so near to them.

  ‘But these slightly gloomy, slightly thrilling thoughts were dissipated by the breezy morning air and the brilliant sun spilling over the moors. My Aunts were nimble creatures, nipping over stiles and hopping over drystone walls without a thought, and then yomping up the steep slopes with the long grass whipping at their legs. Their faces shone with life and vitality as they kept pace with their bounding dog, and I felt so sickly, pale and weak as I struggled to keep up on my much shorter, weaker legs.

  ‘That day we sat on the ridge of stone they called the Heights and Aunty Val lay out this terrific feast of cooked, spiced chicken and cold bean salad. We drank beer (beer! My heart thumped with excitement at being offered something so daring) and nibbled at vanilla slices, squashy with fresh cream. I looked at my new aunts as they crammed their faces contentedly, and I wondered vaguely how they managed to eat so lavishly in these straitened times. And I thought about the cruel gossip they had studiously ignored in the fish shop, and in other places, which accused them of being wicked and ungodly. The townsfolk clearly thought my aunts traded and bartered and did heaven knows what else with the devil. And also, there was some talk of them giving way to unnatural desires and lusts, which was something I didn’t understand at all. Perhaps the gossipers were referring to drinking beer on the hilltop in the middle of the day. Or perhaps it was the cream cakes?