A Winter Bride (7 page)

Eventually she reached the Rutherfords and rang the bell. Nobody opened the door. The rules about not answering the phone also applied to the doorbell.

Carol let herself in. She shuffled up the hall and burst into the dining room. ‘The baby’s coming.’

Everyone turned to stare at the interloper. Cigars were being smoked, brandy drunk. The food had been cleared away but the aroma of roast chicken lingered.

The money caught Carol’s eye. Bundles and bundles of it stretched the length of the table. Carol stared at it, then at the gathering before shouting, ‘For God’s sake. I need to go to the hospital.’

Johnny remained motionless, gazing at her, mouth open.

Alistair stood up and came to her, took her arm and led her to the living room.

May was hot on his heels, shouting at Johnny to get up off his backside and take his wife to the maternity unit. ‘You’re going to be a father.’

Johnny appeared looking pale and glazed.

‘He’s drunk,’ May said, ‘Alistair, you’ll have to drive.’

They bundled Carol into Alistair’s car. There was fuss. There was panic. They left Johnny standing at the front door, still looking pale and glazed. In the rearview mirror, Alistair saw May smack him on the shoulder and point to the car, plainly chastising him for not getting into it and accompanying his wife to hospital.

At the front desk of the hospital it was obvious why Carol and Alistair were there. She was hugely pregnant, in pain, sweating and anxious. Alistair looked awkward. Carol was trundled off in the wheelchair. Alistair was shown into a waiting room.

He was sitting nervously on an uncomfortable chair when the matron of the maternity ward stuck her head round the door. ‘Mr Rutherford?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did you leave it so long? Your wife should have been here hours ago. Having a baby is nothing to be casual about.’

Alistair opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t Carol’s husband. The matron – a woman who rarely allowed herself to be contradicted – raised a silencing hand. ‘Your wife wants you to stay. We’ll let you know as soon as the baby arrives. Won’t be long.’

At two in the morning Alistair was ushered into the ward. Carol was sitting up in bed, looking tired, but beautiful, he thought. The baby was in a bassinette beside her. A nurse lifted her out and handed her to him. ‘Say hello to your daughter, Mr Rutherford.’

He glanced at Carol.

‘Please,’ she mouthed. She wanted a husband here. Right now, anyone would do.

He held the child, whispered hello. Kissed her head. Marvelled at her tiny fingers.

Carol watched. How gentle he was. And so handsome. Some people’s beauty grew on you. It wasn’t a matter of cheekbones and lips. It was the kindness and intelligence in the features that made them beautiful.

Carol had always envied Nell’s taste in fashion. Now she realised that it wasn’t just clothes that Nell chose wisely. It was also men.

Alistair came over to her, kissed her cheek, and told her the baby was gorgeous. ‘You’d better sleep now. You’ll be tired.’ He said he’d better let everybody know there was a new little girl in the world.

Watching him go, Carol knew then she’d married the wrong brother.

Chapter Six

What’s in the Green
Cupboard?

By the time Carol and Johnny became parents Nell had been dating Alistair for almost a year and a half and was a regular at the Rutherford home. ‘You’re one of us,’ they told her. ‘Part of the family.’ She stayed over at the weekends and often went to their house straight from work on weekdays. Compared to the Rutherfords, the McCluskys were dowdy.

Everything in the McClusky house was old. The meals, nourishing but bland, were eaten in silence. Nancy’s culinary repertoire extended to ten recipes – one for every day of the week, one for birthdays or for when visitors appeared, one for Christmas and one for New Year’s Day. The family loved one another. They just didn’t show it, or mention it.

The Rutherfords were different. New things appeared in the house – kitchen gadgets, towels, lamps, bed linen – almost on a weekly basis. Their meals were lavish. May was a messy, flamboyant and extravagant cook. She presented Nell with food she hadn’t known existed: stroganoff; chicken curry; pork cooked in milk. She used ingredients that were strangely new and mysterious to Nell: tomato purée; garlic; turmeric; herbs. May crushed, pounded, chopped, stirred, and flambéed with gusto. Hair tumbling out of her bun, face glistening with sweat, she’d expound to Nell about the state of the world, the battle of the sexes and the wonderful weakness of men.

‘Women,’ May declared, ‘operate from here and here.’ She thumped with clenched fist her heart and her stomach. ‘Heart and gut. It’s all intuition and feelings. Men operate from here and here.’ She tapped her head and pointed to her groin. ‘They use their minds and their cocks. Nothing more. And they’ve the cheek to laugh at us women and call us fragile. Hah.’

Nell was dumbfounded. She didn’t know that people over the age of twenty-five talked about such things; certainly her mother didn’t.

The Rutherfords gathered every evening round the table in the dining room, toasted the back lot, ate, drank, laughed and told exaggerated stories about the day they’d just lived through. Like the McCluskys, they loved one another but the difference was that they showed it. They touched. They hugged. They called each other love or darling or honey. They took Nell’s breath away. She wasn’t sure if she loved Alistair, but she was infatuated with his family.

She first visited the Rutherfords in the November after she’d started dating Alistair and had been overawed. ‘Ma wants to meet you,’ Alistair had said. ‘You’ve to come to dinner on Saturday.’

She’d said she would. But when Alistair had advised her not to wear anything silly – ‘You know, like that jumper that slides off your shoulder’ – she’d suspected that this wasn’t an invitation. It was a summons. May Rutherford liked to inspect any girlfriends that lasted longer than six months. At the time Nell and Alistair had been together for almost eight.

Nell had gone straight from the shop and had changed out of her working outfit into a simple red dress and black patent leather shoes in the cloakroom before meeting Alistair. ‘Good meeting-the-boyfriend’s-mother outfit,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine. Just let her boss you about and she’ll love you.’

Nell said she wasn’t awfully keen on being bossed about.

‘But my mother is good at it. It’s her calling. She was born bossy. She bosses everyone and everything. She bosses the plants in the garden, wags her finger at them and dares them not to grow. She’s a maestro. Bossing is her art form. People feel privileged to be bossed by her. In fact, if you are in her company, and she doesn’t boss you, you feel left out, sort of neglected.’

May had barged up the hall, arms spread. ‘Nell, here you are. We’ve been dying to meet you.’ She’d held her by the shoulders, looked her up and down and smiled. ‘You’re just lovely.’ She’d turned to Alistair. ‘You’ve got yourself a good one this time. Alistair says you like Italian, so it’s lasagne for supper with baked Alaska for afters. We’re going all international tonight.’ May was in the habit of announcing her menu to guests as soon as they arrived.

Nell had been swept up the hall and into the living room and introduced to Alistair’s father, Harry. He’d stood up, strode to her, and had pumped her hand. He prided himself on his handshake: a firm grip and crisp up up-and-down movement. ‘Good to meet you at last, Nell.’ He’d waved Nell into a seat by the fire and had said to Alistair, ‘She’s a corker.’ He’d turned back to Nell. ‘What’ll you have?’

Nell had floundered. She hadn’t known what to ask for. At home, her parents kept a bottle of whisky and a bottle of sherry, which were opened once a year, at five to twelve on New Year’s Eve. If you were female you got sherry, whisky if you were male. Anyone deviating from this rule caused consternation.

Alistair had said, ‘She likes a rum and coke, Dad.’

Harry said, ‘Excellent,’ and went to the huge drinks cabinet that took up most of the far wall, ‘May?’ he asked.

‘Oh.’ She’d flapped her hand. ‘I’ll have a wee G and T.’

This room was vast, high ceiling, bay window. It was chintzy. May Rutherford was fond of a frill or two. A huge fire had blazed in the hearth. The central heating had been on full blast.

May was taller than Nell had imagined. And she was forceful. She expected nothing more than to get her own way at all times. Her hair had been pulled off her forehead, fixed at the back of her head in an untidy bun; wisps escaped and had hung either side of her face. Her lips had been painted alarmingly red. She would have been daunting, but for her smile and for the concerned way she’d sat on the sofa, hands folded neatly in her lap, leaning towards Nell and asking how her day had been. She’d seemed genuinely interested.

‘Good,’ Nell had said. ‘We were very busy. I like that; you don’t notice the time passing.’

May had clapped her hands. ‘Good girl. You enjoy a bit of hard work. Nothing else for it in this life. The only thing that’ll get you anywhere is good old fashioned down-and-dirty hard graft.’

There was something about this family, Nell had thought. They were down-to-earth, energetic, enthusiastic, easy to get along with and utterly, fabulously rich. May, though, was clearly the boss: a throaty-voiced, over-active despot in this chintzy, overheated world.

As they had taken their seats at the dining-room table, Alistair had nudged Nell. ‘Ma must like you; she’s put out the posh glasses.’

They were May’s pride and joy, fine gold-rimmed crystal glasses that only the privileged drank from and the very trustworthy were permitted to wash.

Before they’d started eating, May had filled everybody’s glass and had sat back nodding to Harry. He’d risen, lifted his glass, looked round at the gathering and shouted, ‘To the back lot.’ Everyone repeated the toast, Nell included, though she hadn’t a clue what they were talking about.

The meal had gone well. May had fussed. She’d bustled to and from the kitchen carrying overflowing dishes, heaping food onto plates, insisting that everyone eat. ‘C’mon, Nell, have some more lasagne. Put some meat on your bones. You’re too thin.’

She’d kept glasses topped up, and all the while, had quizzed Nell about her family.

‘We’re not well off,’ Nell had said. ‘Compared to you, we’re poor.’

Alistair had sighed, slapped his forehead and said, ‘Don’t mention poor to my mum. She’s a world expert on being poor.’

May had taken a swig of her wine, and then had pointed at Nell with her fork. ‘Do you have electricity? Is your bathroom indoors? Do you eat regularly?’

Nell said, ‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re not poor,’ May had replied. ‘Me, my mother and three brothers lived in two rooms. My father buggered off when I was three. Never saw him again. We’d no electricity. The bathroom was two floors down and across a muddy back yard. If you needed to go in the middle of the night, you didn’t. You crossed your legs and hung on. There were rats. Often the only thing I had to eat was a slice of bread and the top of one of my brother’s boiled egg. I went barefoot in the summer. In winter, I wore hand-me-downs. We burned the furniture to keep warm and when that was finished, we burned the door. Cold; I’ve known cold. I’ll never let myself be cold again.’ She glared at Alistair who was playing a melancholy tune on a pretend violin. ‘Oh, you can mock me. You’ve never been cold or hungry in your life. If you had, you’d know the fear of being poor. It’s humiliating. Nell, eat your lasagne and have some more salad. And leave some room for your pudding.’

When the meal had ended, May had waved Harry and Alistair away from the table. ‘Take your coffee and drinks through to the living room. Nell and me’ll clear up. C’mon, Nell. I’ll wash, you dry.’

Until that evening, Nell hadn’t thought about kitchens. She’d never considered them to be beautiful, and had never thought of lingering in one. In fact, it was a relief to leave the kitchen at home. Walking out of that room meant that the dreary business of preparing food and clearing up after that food had been eaten was over. It was time to relax.

May’s kitchen was large. She’d swelled with pride as she stepped into it. ‘This is where I’m really me,’ she’d said. ‘This room makes me happy.’

Food was cooked on a huge range. Copper pots hung from the ceiling; herbs grew in pots on the window sill. One wall was lined with shelves containing over two hundred cookbooks. Nell’s mother had one cookbook, a battered, splattered collection of wartime recipes, which she rarely opened.

May was a passionate cook. Food and love were one for her. A well-fed family was a happy family. The surest route to anyone’s heart was through the stomach. ‘Well, most of the time,’ she said. She had nudged Nell and winked. ‘But, your children would grow to walk away from you, if you made them face the day on nothing more than the top of a boiled egg.’ Hungry families fought. She knew this; it was a knowledge that moved through May’s veins, beat with her heart and rested in her bones.

The far wall of the kitchen was made up of floor-to-ceiling cupboards, each one with a door painted one of the colours of the rainbow. They were packed with food. Nell had never seen so much in her life.

The yellow cupboard had been filled with packets of pasta, rice, flour, sugar, lentils, packets of tea, jars of coffee; the red full of tins: meat, tuna, fruit and vegetables; the blue, jams and jellies; the orange door fronted a fridge stuffed with cream, butter, cold meats, milk, and wine. Behind the violet door was a packed freezer. The green door was locked. Nell had asked what was in this cupboard. May had replied that it was her little secret.

‘I like to see my family fed,’ she’d said. She’d filled the sink with hot water and set about washing the plates. ‘What do you think of Alistair?’

‘He’s very nice.’

‘Nice? Nice? Don’t mention nice to me. I don’t like it. It’s a mean little word, tepid, means nothing. Alistair’s a good, kind, gentle soul. He is a bit logical, I admit. But then most men are. It’s one of their failings.’

She’d told Nell to pile the dried plates on the counter. ‘I’ll put them away later. See, men think in straight lines. Women think in curves. It makes them rounder people. Do you like men, Nell?’