Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  ‘You are burning your bridges, Ellie.’ And the way Mrs Gogh said that made it sound like a matter of life and death.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mrs Gogh. We did wait until we were quite certain we could manage without the extra pay packet.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to cope, with this sudden bombshell dropped on my lap with no warning?’

  ‘But I am warning you now. As I said at the start, I am prepared to give a fortnight’s notice, or longer if you like.’

  ‘Don’t humour me!’ said Mrs Gogh. ‘I can find a replacement tomorrow. No trouble.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Ellie.

  ‘What really hurts me, Ellie, is the little matter you’ve obviously overlooked, of loyalty.’

  ‘But I have been loyal!’ spluttered Ellie.

  ‘And I have been loyal to you,’ said Mrs Gogh. ‘And then, at the first opportunity, you go and abandon me.’

  ‘I am sorry that you see it like that.’

  ‘How else am I supposed to see it? Fair’s fair, Ellie.’

  Yes, Mrs Gogh had been easy. Sad, but easy. And it had been awful, because as Mrs Gogh turned away, preparing herself to stalk from the shop with all her dignity gathered together, she had knocked over the tray with the sackfuls of laughter…

  Ellie had wanted to run after her. She’d wanted to explain something to Mrs Gogh but she didn’t know exactly what, so she’d left it. Mrs Gogh wouldn’t have wanted to listen anyway.

  Ellie is revived by the tea. Mandy has always made a good, strong cup. ‘Mandy, I want to say that I’m really sorry… Something came over me but I don’t know what.’

  ‘No, Mum.’ Mandy stretches out her hand and Ellie takes it. Squeezes it, dangerously near to a second collapse. ‘Come on, let’s have a look at the rest of the place. No nasty comments, honest. And then you and I are going to have lunch at the smartest place in town. On me. I’m rich now so I’m paying.’

  What if they ever find out what I’ve done?

  Oh, honesty. Oh, truthfulness. Where have you gone and why did I desert you?

  And for what?

  17

  ELLIE HAS BEEN ROUND and round the word ‘money’ so much that it feels as if she’s sat on it and squashed out the meaning.

  ‘I promise I’ll ring you, Mum, and if you’re not feeling like talking you’re going to have to say so. I won’t be hurt. I’ll just ring another time.’

  Over the last couple of weeks Ellie Freeman and her daughter have travelled around the countryside, exploring, having picnics, swimming and lying in the sun and learning to talk honestly together. However, when Mandy ventured, ‘Is everything all right between you and Dad? Is there anything wrong?’ Ellie considered this going too far. She had never, and she would never, discuss her marriage with her children. And anyway, there was nothing wrong—things had never been better. It was lovely but Mandy’s two-week stay was over too soon as all good things are.

  Mandy has gone now, leaving Ellie invigorated and refreshed, and Kevin is sending his news home on extra-large postcards. He is coming back from Greece overland with some friends on what he calls the magic bus. Ellie associates the word magic with drugs, and she hopes that Kevin is not on them. The end of September will soon be here and, prodded into immediate action by Mandy, Ellie has signed herself down for two local classes, ‘Cordon Bleu Without Fuss’ and ‘The Patterns of Poetry’.

  Throughout the summer her meetings with Robert Beasely at the Red Fox have taken place regularly, although he went on holiday for a fortnight to the South of France with Bella’s lively, rather frightening-sounding family. Ellie, half-expecting, half-hoping for a postcard, had felt unreasonably disappointed when none came. She is even nervous about answering the phone on a Tuesday, now, in case it is Robert cancelling. He has never cancelled yet, but she’s terrified that he might. She has become oddly dependent upon these monthly meetings; she relies on the high they give her which carries her along for days.

  Last time they met, Robert explained that Canonwaits were now ready to repay her initial investment and that option was open to her if she chose it. ‘But I wouldn’t advise it,’ he said. ‘Not with the way that company’s going. We should hang on to those shares, Ellie.’

  Ellie was surprised that he’d even suggested selling. She wouldn’t have dreamed of relinquishing her shares, whatever they were doing.

  Ellie had not felt easy with the woman who accepted the poetry money. She was huge, with beaded hair and wearing black robes. Safely outside in the hall again she’d fussed, ‘But Mandy, where can I find women like myself? Where do women like me meet and gather?’

  ‘They don’t, Mum—that’s half the trouble. They’re too busy keeping body and soul together, too busy working. You’ve just got to try and realise that everyone, deep down, is the same underneath. That everyone is frightened and pretending not to be, just wanting to be loved.’

  ‘Some people seem to have a funny way of going about it.’

  ‘Self-defence,’ said Mandy dismissively.

  ‘Perhaps I should have signed on for the karate instead.’

  She would have known, of course, that in this area there are only certain kinds of people who are free to go to classes in the daytime. Her type—lonely, undirected people desperately searching for ways to fill their time, and mothers with little children who have to be home by three-thirty. There aren’t many unemployed round about here… down Nelson Street the class would be full of quite a different type of person with quite different needs… keeping warm and a free cup of tea for a start.

  Still, she’s paid her money so she must go and anyway, Mandy will be most annoyed if she finds that Ellie’s backed out.

  She doesn’t feel proud of the little dish she brings home from the Cordon Bleu course to set before Malc at the table. She doesn’t feel proud, just pathetic and slightly ashamed, like a child bringing home grimy grey scones from a school cookery class. She could have copied the recipe at home out of any one of her cookbooks and she doesn’t want him beaming and commenting like this… as if it is praise from him that has driven her to tackle it in the first place.

  ‘You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it, you know.’

  ‘But I do like it, Elle.’

  She bristles. ‘What, you’d rather have food like this all the time?’

  He shakes his head in the middle of a hot mouthful. ‘No, of course not. But it makes a nice change.’

  ‘Well, I’m not keen,’ and she pushes away her plate, watching him carefully, her chin on her hands as he ploughs manfully on.

  ‘It is called “sole en papillote festa del mare”,’ she says, still watching, as a cat watches a bird, and using the broadest scouse accent she has ever used in her life.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have cleared the dining room because she feels she has set up some sort of ‘occasion’ without meaning to do so. It’s a cold room which smells of disuse and the paste aroma of wallpaper glue gets into the food. The pattern and colours she’d picked for this room—enormous pastel flowers with complicated stem patterns—do nothing for Ellie’s need for security. The surface of the new table is so slippery that every so often they have to retrieve scudding mats. But it’s not funny.

  They eat their pudding in silence and then Malc gets up and goes to his study to do some more work. ‘If you’ll be all right,’ he says as he departs. And she’s not sure what leaves her feeling so wild with anger, because it’s not Malc’s fault that she decided on the cordon bleu. In fact, he had suggested something slightly more challenging. ‘You’ve always been a good cook,’ he’d protested. ‘I can’t see the point in you learning cookery.’

  ‘It’s not just ordinary cookery, Malc,’ she remembers insisting. ‘It’s special.’

  So why is she blaming him now?

  ‘And I’m not going again,’ she shouts across the hall, furiously, in the middle of clearing the table.

  ‘Fine,’ he calls back.

  But that’s not
enough. She wants to go and hit him.

  She talks to the voice while she washes up. ‘Bastard,’ she says.

  ‘You are just disappointed that the afternoon didn’t bring you the pleasure you hoped it might.’

  ‘You’re quite right for once,’ agrees Ellie. ‘It was like dishing up a fillet of failure with a sprig of bloody parsley on the side.’

  ‘And you’re miserable because you didn’t make friends.’

  ‘There was nobody there to be friendly with,’ says Ellie. ‘They all had their own friends anyway and they weren’t about to break ranks for anyone else. Especially not for an elderly newcomer.’

  ‘They would have acted very differently if they’d known about your money,’ says the voice slyly.

  ‘Well, I certainly don’t want people who’d like me because of that.’

  It hadn’t been quite as bad as all that, and maybe Ellie’s hopes had been too high. The woman who took the class had been quick and keen and no-nonsense, so really it wasn’t a suitable place to make friends or to start conversations. It was all a matter of, ‘Now take your filleting knife and slice just here…’ or, ‘No, no, brush lightly with the oil!’ and, ‘I think this crimping could be just a soupçon firmer, don’t you?’ all said with a brisk, encouraging intake of breath.

  The teacher, who was called Vera Bus, had made a little joke at the start. She told them that a certain Lord Houghton had sighed on his deathbed; “My exit is the result of too many entrées”,—and we certainly don’t want to be blamed for any of that,’ said this Mrs Bus. Everyone tittered but Ellie didn’t really understand it. And anyway, it certainly wasn’t funny enough to make anyone laugh.

  Everyone at the class was very ‘sweet’ and polite. And when they had finished they just kind of wandered out with their various dishes, still smiling.

  Perhaps she should give it another chance. After all, she doesn’t have anything else to do on a Tuesday, or a Thursday, or a Friday… and try as she might she cannot find any more dirt in the house and all Malc’s shirts are ironed. She has a race, now, with Maria Williams, to see who can get their washing out first in a morning. When this pathetic little performance first began Ellie had not recognised it for what it was, and by the time she did recognise it she was too involved to pull back. She despised herself for it and told no one. ‘Now you are feeling sorry for yourself,’ reproves the voice. ‘So just stop it!’

  ‘What about joining the WRVS or something like that?’ shouts Malc. He’s obviously not got down to his work; something about her attitude this evening has disturbed him. Well good, and it’s ABOUT TIME.

  ‘Just leave it out, Malc, please,’ replies Ellie quietly, viciously wiping the kitchen surfaces.

  She is wary now, but her hopes rise again two days later when she approaches the Patterns of Poetry class—surely, on a subject such as this one they will all be forced to communicate and not on any superficial level. Ellie knows nothing at all about poetry, but she wants to. She watched Alan Bennett reading some out on the telly recently and decided it wasn’t difficult after all, that the poems he read were speaking to her. He made it so she could understand it—every word of it! She smiles to herself when she thinks about Di and her loud, scornful laugh if she knew Ellie was here. She’s glad Di’s not with her—if Di were here she’d be nudging her now, and whispering. She climbs up the linoleum stairs of the paint-flaked building, noting the funny little black rubber treads on the ends which put her in mind of the council rent office. The posters on the walls point at her accusingly, trying to involve her in Third-World affairs, petitions and protest marches. And Ellie, who has always dismissed this sort of appeal with, ‘I can hardly feed my own family let alone anyone else’s,’ starts when she realises that now, with her money, that is no longer the case.

  She would not miss a few thousand a year. The next time she sees Robert she’s going to tell him she wants to give some of her money to charity. She is immediately humbled by the knowledge that she’s only prepared to give because she won’t miss it.

  But how can you win, then?

  ‘Well, that’s just the point—you can’t,’ says the voice, and it sounds like the Malc of the old days.

  Ellie is surprised to hear the voice in here, outside her kitchen.

  There are unemployed around here after all, and they come out for poetry as they did not come out to the cordon bleu—well, of course they didn’t, because how could they afford the ingredients?

  Ellie arrives at the top of the house where this course is held. She is slightly doubtful when she sees that she’s going to have to sit on a mattress on the floor, embarrassingly close to somebody else. There are no chairs at all in this garret room and only a skylight in the sloping ceiling to let in the daylight. She picks a safe-looking place in one dark corner, but the roof angles meet here, and it’s only after she’s settled down that she realises she has to half-sit and half-lie to avoid hitting her head. She does not want to move.

  One girl with a very straight back is sitting on a cushion with her legs crossed and her eyes closed. The expression on her face is exaggeratedly peaceful. Another of about the same age, just a little older than Mandy, is lying flat on the floor gazing up through the skylight with her arms behind her head. A young man wearing a colourfully knitted Afghan hat and tatty fingerless gloves is rolling a cigarette, and his red silk trousers are tucked into suede tassled boots.

  Ellie’s going to keep her mac on and she’s really glad Di’s not here.

  Slightly more reassuring are the two middle-aged men who saunter in holding hands and wearing trainers and tracksuits. When they see her they nod and they smile and raise their hands in a stately kind of greeting.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ says Ellie, smiling back and looking away hastily.

  Hippies! How often has Malc told her just lately not to categorise people. ‘That’s half your trouble,’ he’s pointed out. ‘You decide what they are, and it’s because of that that you’re frightened of them. Look at your response to Maria Williams! Now you think that all women who wear their hair in that way and who rest their sunglasses on their heads are exactly the same.’

  ‘I never used to do that, and if I do it now then it’s something new,’ she answered him miserably, aware that he was right.

  And yet is this new habit of hers so wrong? Well, look… she knows without being told how these people vote, what kind of food they eat, their attitudes towards medicine, the state, the poor, the rich, the police, education; she knows what kind of books they read and she knows what kind of cars, if they have cars, they would drive.

  They are like children, she thinks, proclaiming themselves while pretending not to be doing so.

  And are they doing the same thing to her? Are they summing Ellie up in the same sort of way—and is she unconsciously proclaiming something, too, in her rollneck jumper and flared beige skirt—or is she hiding… hiding! How much do they think that they know about her? Well, they certainly don’t look as if they are bothering. Nobody, except for the tracksuited men, has even acknowledged her existence. They are all concentrating, very hard indeed, on themselves and for Ellie, this is a new experience. She’s used to being greeted with a smile and the offer of a cup of tea. Where Ellie comes from, making people feel at home is thought to be very important. When she lived down Nelson Street and went about in her plastic mac and her headscarf, summing her up might have been slightly easier, or would it? Down at the club the women Ellie knew wore widely individual colours and styles although the garments were mostly chosen from the same catalogue. Mind you, they did drink the same sort of drinks, they liked the same kind of music and they tended to hold their fags in the same way.

  But underneath, oh underneath they’d been seedling with a million different emotions—yearnings, longings, fantasies, fears… as these people must be, too, she thinks as she watches the Afghan-hatted man bring out a mauve crystal and rub it between his horny hands.

  ‘I must give this a chan
ce,’ she says sternly to herself, knowing how important it is, just now, for her to feel she has succeeded at something. She just can’t go home with another failure under her belt.

  ‘Well, I suppose we might as well start. I don’t know who else is coming but it’s already two-thirty.’

  On the form Ellie took home with her the starting time was two o’clock.

  The large woman with the beaded hairstyle is wearing what Ellie calls ‘genie’ pants and she squats on the floor on a cushion she’s brought with gaudy tassels attached to the corners.

  ‘I see we’ve got somebody new here today. We are glad to have you join us. I will start by telling you that my name is Dawn. Would you like to tell us your name and maybe share something with us?’ Almost all of this is spoken on one, calm note.

  Share? Ellie panics when she says, ‘Ellie Freeman,’ quietly and rather abruptly.

  Dawn nods deeply and waits there, with her head down for a while, absorbing Ellie’s name. She lets her shoulders sag and gives a great sigh before raising her head again with a definite kind of heaviness. Perhaps she doesn’t like the name Ellie. There is a pause and the most fleeting of smiles from Dawn as three more people enter the room and glide to the floor, silently.

  ‘Well, Ellie,’ says Dawn. ‘The rest of us here know each other already; we have been meeting together for some time now.’

  You wouldn’t know that they knew each other. No communicating has taken place…

  ‘Two years,’ says the girl on the floor, still staring up at the skylight as if measuring the time by the clouds that drift by.

  ‘And what we like to do first of all is to go round the circle and invite anyone who wants to, to bring something forward. Perhaps, Ellie, you would like to wait and see what we do before deciding if you’re ready to contribute yet or not.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ellie. At least she can smoke in here, although she can’t see any ashtrays and the man with the roll-up and the crystal seems to be using his hand. ‘That might be better.’