Every Woman for Herself (6 page)

‘That poseur! Certainly not. No, I’m thinking more of joining the local coven and fully embracing the Ancient Arts – and perhaps a suitable man. Lilith’s running one.’

‘What, a suitable man?’

‘No, a coven.’

‘And just what do you mean by a
suitable
man?’

‘Big, strong, silent and malleable.’

She could add ‘courageous’ to that list of qualifications. I’ve seen strong men turn and run when they see Em coming.

‘That actor’s quite dishy, up at the cottage,’ she mused. ‘And Gloria said his reputation with women stinks, so he’d be terribly suitable.’

‘Em! You wouldn’t really.’

‘What time are you arriving tomorrow?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘Early afternoon, I hope, but snow’s forecast, which will make negotiating Ramshaw Heights and Blackdog Moor tricky. I don’t know why, but that’s the only way I
can
come back.’

‘It’s because you left that way the first time with Matt, and so you must describe the full Circle of Return,’ Em said.

‘It’ll be dicey if it snows heavily.’

‘You’ll make it – the 2CV will glide over the top. Wrap Flossie up well, though. These little spaniels are inbred; she catches cold too easily.’

‘Yes, and the plants, too. They’re all a bit tropical for a winter spin on the moors with the roof down.’

‘You’ll arrive safely. I’d at least know if that were otherwise,’ Em said deeply, then added more prosaically, ‘See you then. Drive straight down to the cottage. The key is in the frog, and Walter will unpack your stuff for you while we catch up with things.’

When I came over Ramshaw Heights I could see Blackdog Moor – transformed into Whitedog Moor – glittering like quartz below me. I felt inwardly cleansed by the bright light bouncing off the vast whiteness.

I
was a bit of a dog at that moment: a complete mongrel. Cropped white head and black clothes hanging long and loose … more Uncle Fester than Morticia.

And speaking of dogs, bubbling snores were coming from the depths of Flossie’s fake-fur-lined igloo, which was on the floor at the front passenger side. The passenger seat itself, and all the rest of the car, was jammed with all my favourite huge plants – figs and lemons, palms and bananas – wrapped in newspaper and layers of bubble wrap, and sticking up out of the open top of the car like so many extras from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. My driving visibility was almost nil.

We’d received some strange looks when we set out on our journey, but the closer to home we got the less notice anyone took. West Yorkshire folk can absorb every last detail without looking directly at you.

Externally I was freezing, my hands stuck to the wheel. Inside, too, was still the feeling that all my organs had turned to ice, which I’d had since the moment Greg died, only now there was just the faintest tinge of warm hope.

‘You’re nearly home, Charlie: everything will be all right now,’ I encouraged myself as we slid down Edge Bank.

But the Snow Queen whispered in Angie’s voice: ‘Nothing will ever be right again.’

‘Maybe it won’t, Angie,’ I said aloud. ‘But at least it will be all wrong in the right place.’

Skint Old Crafts: Stick It, Stitch It, and Stuff It

Hint One: for those of you living south of Luton, I suggest you shred this magazine and reassemble it in a different order with Sellotape, since it will give you hours of fun and make just as much sense afterwards.

I turned down the snowy track behind the Parsonage and slid to a halt, more by luck than judgement, next to the wall of the unseasonably named Summer Cottage.

It’s more of a Hobbit hole in the hillside than anything, with the heavy bulk of the Parsonage threateningly poised above, ready to toboggan down the hill sweeping all before it.

The front of the cottage now sported a ramshackle, half-glazed appendage, painted a vivid shade of Mediterranean blue. The door was in need of a second coat, for the word ‘Ladies’ could still faintly be seen, although I thought the heart-shaped cut-out very tasteful.

Walter had excelled himself.

I was just sniffling a few sentimental tears away when a voice as mellow and melodious as a cello suddenly addressed me from behind, making me jump and whirl around like a Dervish.

‘Are
you
responsible for that excrescence on the beautiful face of Upvale?’

Icy fingers of Arctic wind undulated my numerous layers of loose black drapery, and I had to claw a web-fine woollen scarf out of my eyes before I could see the man who’d spoken.

He was very tall, even taller than Em, and his dark, heavy-lidded eyes regarded me with a sort of weary wariness, as though I was a surprise gift he didn’t want. He was also carrying a giant teddy bear.

‘I don’t think a man who walks about wearing a red duvet and a jester’s hat has any right to criticise my cottage,’ I informed him coldly, although his strange garments didn’t actually look quite as ludicrous on him as they might sound, while my veranda, as Walter would call it, certainly did.

I didn’t mention the teddy bear in case he was sensitive about it. Bran always takes his soft toy, Mr Froggy, everywhere in his pocket with him, but at least it’s small.

‘It’s ski-wear,’ he said, looking down his remarkably straight nose at me.

‘Not in Upvale it isn’t. You might as well have “Oft-Comed Un” stamped across your back; but I suppose you’re the actor – Em said we’d got one in the cottage down the track,’ I said, making him sound like a disease. ‘I don’t think she mentioned your name.’

And the bit of him I could see, between upturned collar and pulled-down hat – high sculptured cheekbones and slightly slanting, droopy-lidded eyes – did look vaguely familiar, even to someone who rarely watched TV or films.

‘I’m incognito.’

‘It’s all right with me. I don’t expect the urge will come upon me to boast about meeting you. Or your teddy bear,’ I added, throwing caution to the winds.

‘My teddy bear?’ he echoed, looking at me strangely, but that might have been because my knitted coat was flying up behind me like black bat wings.

‘Am I not supposed to mention the teddy bear? It’s moving,’ I added, fascinated.

Indeed, it was now not only moving, but muttering. The head turned and I saw a little face screwed up in sleep, framed by honey-brown fur and round ears. Then it snuggled back into the red duvet.

What with that and the Mediterranean veranda I was starting to feel quite freaked. Upvale had always previously stayed the same, my one fixed constant in a threatening world. It was a relief when the actor edged past me without another word (unless you count what sounded like a muttered ‘Crackers!’) and strode off up the lane with his little furry friend.

I prised
my
little furry friend out of her warm nest in the car, and she looked around her with a sort of vague surprise: the world had moved while she slept,
again
.

The door key was in the mouth of the stone frog as usual, together with some small wooden tablets inscribed with what looked like runes, and a bunch of dried herbs. I left those where they were.

We went through Walter’s Folly, and I opened the door of the cottage to be met and embraced by a warm miasma of lavender, furniture polish and bleach. There was no leftover redolence of mistress here, for Gloria Mundi had clearly excised every last iota of their existence. It simply smelled like home.

Flossie pattered across the flagged floor behind me as I climbed the stairs up to the Parsonage kitchen and opened the strangely silent door.

There was a delicious aroma, easily identified as steak and kidney pie with suet crust, and Em was sitting coring baking apples at the kitchen table, and plopping them into a big earthenware bowl of water.

‘You’ve come, then,’ she stated, without looking up from her task. ‘Put the kettle on – you must be frozen. Where’s Flossie?’

With a wheeze like a small pair of bellows Flossie hauled herself up the last step, looking vaguely around, then made straight for the wood-burning stove in the corner like a shaggily upholstered heat-seeking missile.

‘She must be cold,’ said Em fondly. ‘I’ll warm her some milk.’

‘She isn’t cold – she’s been fast asleep in her igloo all the way here. I’m the one who’s absolutely brass-monkeyed, because I had to have the roof open for the plants. Where’s Walter?’

As if on cue the door swung open and in hobbled a gnarled and cheery little goblin. The bridge of his over-large glasses had been bound with a great wodge of Sellotape, and his baggy corduroy trousers were held up by Father’s old school tie.

‘Hello, Walter,’ I said, giving him a kiss.

‘I’ve got no eyebrows.’

‘I know. How are you?’

‘No eyebrows. No bodily hair whatsoever!’ he proclaimed happily. ‘I’ve made you a veranda, and now I’m going to put your plants in it and make a jungle.’

‘It’s a wonderful veranda, Walter – it’s the best one I’ve ever seen. Thank you!’

Beaming like a lighthouse he hobbled off towards the cottage stairs, muttering, ‘No eyebrows … no bodily hair whatso …’

Em plopped the last apple into the bowl and got up. ‘There we are, now we’ll have a hot drink. Don’t worry about your stuff,’ she added, as ominous Burke-and-Hare dragging noises wafted up from the cottage. ‘Walter will bring it all in, and you can arrange it as you like later. I’ve put a couple of greenhouse heaters in the veranda to take the chill off, because there’s no electric in it yet, of course, and the floor’s just the old paving stones. Do you like the colour?’

‘Yes. It’s very bright.’

‘Walter’s choice. Gloria wanted dark green, but I thought that was a bit municipal. You can do your own thing with the inside of the cottage.’

Gloria is Walter’s sister, and they don’t so much work at the Parsonage as inhabit the space at odd hours between dawn and dusk, as the fancy takes them.

‘Where
is
Gloria? Where is everyone?’

‘Gloria is turning out Bran’s room, in case. Father’s in his study composing another epic.’

‘Oh God – who is it this time?’

‘Browning. Apparently, he didn’t produce much good work while he was married to Elizabeth Barrett Browning because he was actually busy writing all her poetry for her.’

‘The same line as usual then?’

‘He doesn’t change. But at least it’s lucrative; everyone loves to disagree with him. Otherwise, the mistress has gone out shopping, and then she’ll probably be picking up the two sprogs from school. Do you know, she wanted them to have Anne’s room because she didn’t like them sleeping in the attic? I told her that Anne locked her room between visits and even Gloria only cleaned when she was there, and that shut her up.’

‘Any word from Anne?’

‘No, but her answering machine’s changed: it just says, “This is Anne Rhymer, leave a message,” and doesn’t mention Red at all.’

‘Perhaps they’ve parted? Not that they ever seemed to be in the same country simultaneously anyway.’

‘Something’s happening – I can feel it.’

‘She will tell us if she wants to.’

‘Yes, or simply turn up. I’m starting to get the idea she might be coming home soon,’ said Emily, her eyes getting that strange, faraway expression. Then it was gone and she was saying briskly, ‘Funnily enough, I’ve had much more interesting foretellings than ever before since I made up my mind to embrace the Dark Arts, but I think I’m going to go ahead anyway. I’ve got three friends coming round soon to tell me about their coven. You know one of them – Xanthe Skye.’

‘I don’t remember
anyone
called Xanthe Skye.’

‘She was Doreen Higginbottom until The Change.’

‘Oh, yes? That will be nice,’ I said dubiously. ‘Didn’t she have a brief fling with Fa—’

I stopped dead, for the man himself, possibly attracted by the smell of freshly brewing coffee, had wandered in: big and broad-shouldered, in corduroys and a shirt rolled up to show muscular arms. He still had a full head of light, waving hair like Anne and Em’s, and though his face was looking a bit pummelled by time, the general effect was large, virile and handsome.

‘Hello, Father.’

‘Oh God! Keep the pans locked up, Em,’ he said resignedly.

Silently she poured out a mug of coffee and handed it to him, and he took two Jaffa Cakes out of the Rupert Bear tin and went back out without another word.

The study door closed behind him with a snap.

While I unburdened my soul to Em she baked a batch of sultana scones and made the biggest treacle tart you could fit in the oven, intricately latticed over the top.

She didn’t say much, but it was comforting all the same, as were the two hot, buttered scones she insisted I eat.

It was quite a while later before the front door slammed and a woman’s voice shrilled, ‘Hello everybody!’

Silence answered her. Even the zooming noise of Gloria Mundi’s Hoover stilled momentarily.

‘That’s her – Jessica. Can’t hear the sprogs; perhaps they’re out for tea or something.’

A woman staggered in and dumped a couple of bulging carrier bags on the table with a sigh of relief. ‘There you are!’

She was fortyish, with a firmly repressed dark downiness and an aura of elegant sexuality – a sort of hungry look about the shadowed eyes. Her body was diet-victim skinny, and the rather bird-billed face perched on top made her look like a duck on a stick.

‘Hello. You must be Charlie?’ she said, smiling.

‘Charlie, Father’s tart – Father’s tart, Charlie,’ introduced Em.

‘Fiancée,’ Jessica said, her smile going a bit fixed. ‘Is that your sweet little dog? Is she all right? She isn’t moving, is she?’

‘She isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. She’s a Cavalier Queen Charlotte. They go into suspended animation at regular intervals.’

‘King Charles?’

‘Not unless he was a bitch.’

‘Take this stuff off my table, Jessie,’ Em ordered. ‘I’m trying to get dinner ready.’

‘I thought we could have something a bit different tonight,’ Jessica said, with a sort of determined jolliness. ‘The girls don’t really like all this meat and stodge, and I’m sure it’s not healthy for a man of Ranulf’s age. And there
are
vegetables other than mushy peas, you know! So I’ve got some pasta, and sun-dried tomatoes and pesto—’