Bittersweet (32 page)

“I’m sorry,” Edda said, careful not to speak through her teeth. The bastard, the
bastard
! “You have several motor cars.”

“But I can’t drive.”

“I know, but you can learn, and you are going to learn — why? Because every Wednesday you’re coming to lunch with Tufts and me at the hospital.” The uncomfortable eyes bored into Kitty hard. “You’re surely not
afraid
of Charlie, are you?”

“No, no!” Kitty cried, flushing. “It’s more that he has fixed ideas about me, and one of those concerns the place his wife must have in his life. He polices me! This is too taxing for me, that isn’t worth my doing, and sisters should be packed away with the rest of childhood. Just as if I had made such a colossal step upward in marrying him that nothing before I did the deed has any importance any more! One thing I’ve learned for certain, Edda — Charlie won’t let me live in my sisters’ pockets.”

Edda hadn’t really known what Kitty was going to say, or how she would react to the news of Grace’s threatened change of fate, but not for a moment had she suspected Kitty harboured so much
conscious
resentment of her husband that thus far Grace hadn’t come up. So when Tufts sidled around the door, Edda welcomed her feverishly.

Kitty simply carried on in the same theme once the hugs and kisses were over. “Oh, if you knew how much I hate that house on top of the hill!”

“I seem to remember,” said Edda dryly, “that you had a wonderful time tricking it out, because I was with you on your excursions.”

“Yes, I had something to do then! Now — how could either of you understand? You’re so busy, you do admirable work and you do it well and you get praised and noticed.”

“Oh, Kits!” Tufts cried, feeling more tears, but for a far different reason than Grace and two little boys. “Don’t tell me that you’re not in love with Charlie, please!”

“I must be, because I put up with things. I mean, I don’t dream of walking out on him, and I’m not afraid to walk out on him —” She stopped, shivered. “No, I’m not afraid the way many of the women we’ve seen are — that they might be killed, or so bashed up they’ll never be the same again — it isn’t like that, honestly. All the same, Charlie expects me to be there for him in a second, at the lift of a finger, and if I’m with a sister, he — he
sulks
so! It’s as if I’m not entitled to have any kind of pleasure in other people if he sees that I love them. He’d never lay a hand on me in anger, but he makes me suffer all the same. Daddy’s not involved because Daddy means Maude, and Charlie is nobody’s fool — he knows how Maude affects me. My sisters — oh, very different!”

Tufts kissed her full twin very tenderly. “Dearest Kitty, Charlie is plain jealous. Some people are, and there’s nothing can be done about it, it’s an innate character trait. You have to
put up with it, but you also can’t give in to it. Start as you intend to go on, and that means you must see as much of Edda, Grace and me as you want or need. When Charlie whinges, tell him that it’s hard cack, you’ll see us no matter how he feels. Come on, you can do that!”

And how much of this, Tufts was wondering, lies in the tragedy of a stillborn child? No one knows why it happened, but ignorance is the worst of all private dilemmas. So I suspect he wants to blame her, and she most definitely wants to blame him. Charlie, Charlie, why didn’t you show your grief to her? If you had, she wouldn’t be busy piling up grudges. And he, of course, thinks she is obtaining all her comfort from her sisters. What a pickle!

Suddenly Kitty’s mood changed. The lilac-blue eyes took on a furtive gleam, her face became conspiratorial. “Girls, tell me what’s going on under today’s surface calm. Something is! Jack Thurlow is involved, and Charlie is acting like a prude with an inexpressible secret. I am too unwell, blah, I mustn’t be upset, blah, blah, I can have no interest in vulgar gossip, blah, blah, blah. Tell me, I demand to know!”

Edda’s response was to spring catlike to her feet, descend on Kitty and hug her, kiss her. “Jack Thurlow is the crux of the matter, and I don’t know how else to describe it than to say that I think he must be off his head. The man’s an alienist’s dream come true, riddled with complexes and primal urges, blah, blah —”

They chorused it together: “— blah, blah!”

“— Stop laughing, Kitty! Oh, but it’s good to hear you roar! So good!” Edda cried, wiping tears of mirth and sorrow away. “Men are possessive, we’ve just been through that on the subject
of Charlie, and the main reason why I shall never marry. I refuse to be owned. Our Jack is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and a snail in a racing car, and an elephant hiding behind a grain of sand. All that you see is contradictions. I should know, we’ve been lovers for years. Jack walks through a self-made fog.”

In the instant that Edda spoke the last sentence, Kitty’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s it! A fog! Charlie walks around in a self-made fog too. But Jack’s safe because you won’t marry him. He gets rid of his dirty water without putting a ring through his nose.”

“Lovely metaphors, girls,” said Tufts, gurgling.

“What is Jack about to do that has Charlie convinced will sweep me into a seething snakepit of misery and despair?” Kitty asked, finding a thrill of warmth in her for these beloved women, who could even lift the terrible grief inspired by the dead.

“He’s moving Grace and the boys out to
Corundoobar
tomorrow and marrying Grace as quickly as he possibly can,” Tufts said as she gave Kitty a saucer of sparkling wine. “Drink up, Kits.”

“Not bad,” said Kitty, sipping, “though I suspect that today I’d probably find urine drinkable.”

“Oh, Kitty, I love you!” from Edda.

“Of course you do,” said Kitty on a purr. “Edda, Jack Thurlow has been your excuse for lingering in Corunda since we were in our teens. Do you think that Grace, Tufts and I don’t know he’s just an excuse? What really keeps you here is the mystery of the four Latimer twins, not any outsider like a
man
. Until you go — and you will go! — you enrich our lives, which is what Charlie, being a man, can’t see. Whether Charlie likes it
or not, I’m going to learn to drive, and see as much of my sisters as I choose.”

“All well and good,” said Tufts practically, “but none of it answers the riddle of Jack Thurlow. What do you think?”

“What do you think?” Kitty riposted.

“That it’s insanity. Poor Grace!”

“I agree” from Edda.

A silence fell; they sipped their saucered wine.

“Maude has rather faded from our lives, Kitty. Or at least from mine,” Edda said suddenly.

“Oh, having the use of Daddy’s car, she flits in and out of Burdum House,” Kitty said lightly, setting her glass down with a thud. “The trouble is that Mama lost her joy in living when I married Charlie, who snatched her role from her. They’re both Napoleons, but he has the penis to go with the conceit.”

“Keep up the salt, Kits! Penis indeed! It isn’t a dirty word, but people react as if it were,” Edda said, a laugh in her voice. “How do you feel about Maude these days, little one?”

Kitty grimaced. “Oh, Maude! Our Clytemnestra, or do I mean Hecuba? I lost my terror of her as soon as I went nursing, but you know that. After my marriage she vanished into thin air, a part of the insubstantial pageant faded. Sometimes Shakespeare says things so perfectly there can never be another way to say them. Daddy had her to rights all along — she’s just —
there
. A part of the Rectory furniture.”

A golden head poked around the door, its mobile face impish. “There you are!” Charles flung the door wide. “What is this, a secret confab? Secrets from
me
? I can’t have that, girls!”

“Chook secrets,” said Edda, rising, “and therefore beneath your notice, Charlie. However, take heed! Kitty is coming to lunch in our hospital cottage every Wednesday, and you are not invited, even to poke your face around the door.” She strolled across to tower over him, and punctuated her next speech with an occasional prod of her right index finger in the middle of his chest. “Since you moved her to the top of Catholic Hill, I see hardly anything of my little sister, and that” — poke — “is going to change. You” — poke — “haven’t even organised any driving lessons for her, and that” — poke — “is going to change, too.”

Charles flushed, lips tightening. “A mere oversight,” he said stiffly. “I’ll start teaching her tomorrow.”

“Oh no, never the husband as instructor!” Edda said quickly. “Bert the ambulance man is Corunda’s best driving teacher.”

“Then Bert it shall be,” Charles said, outmanoeuvred. “It’s time to join the others,
ladies
.”

The reception was at its height, the participants sufficiently soaked in the liquors circulating faster than the food to be on the downward spiral to a soft muzziness that would permit the closing of Bear Olsen’s door forever. Maude had taken Brian and John to the Rectory, where Grace was staying, and the widow, freed from them, seemed to become more visible as a person than she had while tied to her sons.

When it happened she was standing with the Rector, Dr. Liam Finucan, Dr. Charles Burdum, old Tom Burdum, Jack Thurlow and Mayor Nicholas Middlewore; her three sisters were
some yards off in a clump that included Matron Newdigate, Sister Meg Moulton, Sister Marjorie Bainbridge and Matron Lena Corrigan. Nurses all.

Grace looks every inch the widow, thought Liam Finucan, from the slight wispiness that had ill become her until now, to the enormous, exhausted eyes, gone near as pale as Edda’s.

Her hands, ungloved, were clamped around a glass of white wine, a picture of stilled function; the line of her jaw as she turned her head to follow the conversation sharp, pure. And, Liam noted, intrigued, all of a sudden every one of the hundred people in the hall had decided to stare at her as if at an actress on a stage. Grace, he sensed, was about to step into her starring role.

“
Jack!
” The word came out like the crack of a whip.

He had been gazing at her anyway, but her tone startled him; he blinked, smiled at her tenderly. “Yes, Grace?”

When she spoke it was in a loud, carrying voice with vowels rounded, sibilants bitten off and consonants crisply enunciated, a voice that told its pricking audience that she had thought about what to say before saying it. “There are wild rumours spreading all over Corunda, Jack, and I’ve racked my brains as to the best way to scotch them. It’s being said that today, with the soil not settled on my beloved husband’s grave, I already have his successor picked out and ready to go. But I have done nothing to cause these rumours, so now, here in public on my beloved husband’s funeral day, I intend to lay the rumours to rest as well.”

“Grace, please,” said Jack, bewildered, “I don’t know what’s troubling you, but here and now isn’t the right time to speak.”

“I beg to differ,” she said, and moved away from the group to stand alone, feet planted sturdily; her wine glass was given to Nick Middlemore as if he were a handy waiter. “This is exactly the right forum to make my feelings known, and once they are known, there can be no mistaken ideas about my future, or the future of my two children.”

Divining what was coming, her sisters stood tensely, yet made no move to go to her; this was one thing Grace had to do herself, unsupported. “Though plans for my future were made with the best of intentions, they were not made with my knowledge or consent.” She pinned an utterly confused Jack on a fiery stare, then smiled at him. “You are very kind, Jack, and I honour you for it, but I am not alone in my present troubles. I have a family, I have many friends, I have very loyal and helpful neighbours. I loved my husband with every part of me, and it will be a long time — if ever — before I can so much as think of any other man. I am a decent woman. My father is the Rector of St. Mark’s. How could I fly in the face of convention for the sake of a material comfort I haven’t known in years? I would be branded a common trollop — and rightly so!” One long, floating hand went out. “Come, Jack, let us be friends. Simple, ordinary friends. I thank you most sincerely, but let there be no more rumours that I am moving out to
Corundoobar
. My home is on Trelawney Way.”

“Bravo, Grace,” said Edda under her breath, eyes meeting those of Tufts and Kitty. Somewhere, deep down, they had all known.

Jack Thurlow stood stunned. He had taken Grace’s hand quite automatically, a look in his fine eyes that Liam Finucan
thought reminiscent of the awareness that comes a split second ahead of the poleaxe. His mouth worked, quivered; then he shook his head. “I —” he managed, then could manage no more.

Oh, you poor man! thought Kitty, seeing Jack Thurlow for the first time as someone other than Edda’s tamed tiger. It isn’t the grief of thwarted love, because you don’t love Grace; it’s the bitter humiliation of public rejection when you haven’t deserved such treatment. How to explain that you brought it on yourself?

Charles stepped into the breach easily. “Yes, Jack, so very kind of you, especially when gossip turned one thing into another far different from what was meant, eh?” He put a hand on Jack’s arm and guided him away.

“Did we all know she’d refuse?” Matron Newdigate asked.

“To accept wouldn’t have been in character,” Meg Moulton said. “Grace likes a fairly hard life, it gives her legitimate grounds for complaint.”

“Living the life of Lady Muck out at
Corundoobar
and sending her boys to board at King’s wouldn’t suit Grace,” said Tufts. “She likes the Trelawneys.”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Lena Corrigan asked, laughing. “Grace is the Queen of the Trelawneys — Way, Road, Street, Lane, Circle and all the rest — and she’s not about to abdicate. It’s taken her the years of her marriage to be crowned, but like Victoria, with widowhood she’s entrenched.”

Edda’s brows rose. “Isn’t that to exaggerate, Lena?”

“In a pig’s eye! You don’t see it because you’re Grace’s twin, but Grace has a gift for the common touch. I mean, because she didn’t last as a nurse, you tend to dismiss her as a useless
ignoramus, but to the women of the Trelawneys she’s a person of superior education and knowledge — she matriculated from C.L.C., so she can reel off history, geography, literature, classical allusions, algebra, you name it. Yet she never, never,
never
rubs anybody else’s nose in their far poorer educations. She has pride in her taste, is a brilliant housekeeper, and never cocks a snook at her neighbours. That’s miraculous! The women of the Trelawneys aren’t a rough lot like us West Enders, but they don’t belong on Catholic Hill either. And Grace is their queen.”