Simply Heaven (43 page)

‘Hey, kid.’ I’m staring in rapture at the baby. You know what they say, how you don’t get what it’s all about till you see one that’s attached to someone you love? Well, this baby looks so like Rufus it’s like recognising a stranger. Family resemblance, I know, but … she’s got his expression: she’s got that frown he gets when he’s trying to work something out. She’s all slimy and bloody, and she really is a little miracle. And I’m thinking: this is what ours would look like. If we made one, it would come out looking like this. And, I swear, I feel a great lurch somewhere between my heart and my womb, a lurch that makes me feel weak and feverish for a second.

‘They can’t be long, now,’ I say absently, and run my own knuckle down Lucy’s cheek. ‘Nessa was going straight out to look for them. Your mum’ll be here the minute she can, darling.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asks Tilly. Looks up at me, all sweaty and tear-stained, but more than that, suddenly angry. I’ve said the wrong thing somewhere, cast back in my memory to try to work out what it was.

‘Your mum,’ I say. ‘She’ll be here in a minute. Don’t worry.’

‘Not
her
,’ says Tilly. ‘I don’t want
that
bitch.’

Then she stares at me, and the same working-it-out frown I’ve just seen pass across little Lucy’s baby face passes across hers.

‘Good grief,’ she says. ‘You didn’t think Mary was my mother, did you?’

I don’t need to wonder if Nessa’s in the yard. The minute I step out of the door, her voice says, from behind the bushes: ‘Holy Cow. There’s a right old ding-dong going on in Castle Wattestone this morning.’

I duck in to join her.

‘Walls have ears. How do you know all this stuff?’

Nessa winks, and produces a blue-and-white placcy baby alarm from behind her back.

‘Oh, you cheeky minx,’ I say.

‘Necessary tools of the job,’ says Nessa. ‘Even nurses have to take a break from time to time.’

‘So you just spend your life listening in on the family?’

‘Got to have some entertainment,’ she says, stamping out her half-smoked cigarette butt, ‘and besides, I need to know when I’m going to be needed. So what’s all this I hear about Christmas? Sounds like a laugh.’

‘Don’t get me started, Nessa. I hope I never have to live through another …’

‘Folks still at Bardmoor?’

‘Far as I know. I’ll have to go and look for them later. Mum’s switched off her cell so I can’t get hold of them.’

‘That’s mature.’

‘Sure is.’ I gesture at the baby alarm. ‘Let’s have a listen, then.’

‘Cheeky minx yourself.’

Obligingly, she turns up the volume control on the side of the machine.

Beatrice is talking to someone. ‘… shared a governess with Ruth, Lady Fermoy,’ she is saying. ‘Of course, she was part of the old school. Took her duty seriously. None of this chasing orf after fulfilment the young seem to think so important.’

Mary sounds like she’s not listening. She’s talking to Edmund. ‘Poor old Tilly,’ she says, ‘going through that and it’s only a girl. And I don’t suppose she’ll get another chance now, will she?’

‘Nothing wrong with girls,’ says Edmund. ‘Keep themselves clean, at least.’

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to visit her,’ says Mary. Rufus went up yesterday evening, but none of the older generation could be prised from their traditional hunting baths for long enough to go over to Chippy.

‘Well, it’s customary,’ says Edmund. ‘She
is
my daughter, after all. And my first grandchild, come to that.’

Mary says something like ‘humph’.

‘Of course, I call them,’ says Beatrice, ‘the
me
generation. Because all you hear from them is me, me, me, me, me. We used to know what had to be done and accept our responsibility.’

Nessa turns the volume down again. ‘Hilarious. Going round and round in circles. Don’t suppose Edmund’s going to make it up to the hospital for a good few hours yet. I’ll offer to give him a lift when I come off shift. I suppose you’ll be wanting to sponge a ciggie off the hired help, then?’

I shake my head. ‘Thanks anyway.’

‘So I hear you did the honours in the birthing suite.’

I pull a face. ‘Don’t know if it hasn’t put me off for life. They don’t exactly tell you about the blood, do they?’

‘Of course not. Do you think women would let men near them if they knew the whole of it?’

‘I know a few who wouldn’t, anyway. So how did you hear?’

‘Village. Living in an English village is like working on a tabloid newspaper. They’re all obsessed with uncovering the doings of the upper classes. It’s like a local sport. And self-feeding, of course. Because the more they find out the more paranoid people like your family here get and the more they try to cover up. And everybody pretends to everybody else that they’re not doing it. Clam up like cats’ backsides when they think the family might get to know about it. Spill like beer kegs when they don’t.’

‘Which, I suppose,’ I say gloomily, ‘is how come I never knew about Tilly’s mother.’

‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Seriously? Rufus never told you that?’

‘No.’

‘Wow,’ she says again. ‘Strikes me you and your hubby have a bit of a communication problem.’

‘No we don’t.’

A raised eyebrow.

‘We don’t. He just … doesn’t tell me stuff, is all …’

‘That’s what we call a communication problem where I come from.’

‘I thought you said you came from Melbourne.’

‘Ha bloody ha.’

‘OK. You’re right. Even I can’t deny that someone not telling me something like this might be a bit weird. Why didn’t he do it? I keep asking myself, and I can’t come up with a rational explanation.’

‘I’ve got a theory on that as well,’ she says.

‘Well, I’d guessed as much.’

‘I think they believe that if you pretend something doesn’t exist, then eventually, it won’t have. And besides, I don’t think it’s such an important thing in Rufus’s mind as it is in other people’s. Lady Mary is his mother, after all, and whatever Tilly thinks of
her
, she’s always doted on
him
. You have to remember that. He’s the darling baby boy. It probably just slipped his mind.’

‘Slipped his mind?’

A shrug. ‘You’d be amazed. And besides. It doesn’t change
your
relationship to her. She’s still your mother-in law.’

‘My luck.’

We mooch about in contemplation of this for a minute.

‘So, what does the village have to say on this one?’ I ask.

‘How so?’

‘Come on. The amazing vanishing wife. There must be some goss.’

‘Oh yeah. Of course. They reckon Edmund did away with her to avoid alimony.’

I look at Nessa. Nessa looks at me. I can’t tell if she’s joking or not.

‘By all accounts, she wasn’t a very satisfactory wife. Or not by Wattestone lines, anyway.’

A bit like me, then. I stay silent, waiting.

‘Right, well,’ she begins.

Arms crossed, I look at her.

‘OK. Well, the story as it goes out there among the proles is something like this. I guess you must have noticed that Edmund is quite a lot older than Mary?’

I nod. ‘I sort of gathered that it was a bit of a habit in this family.’

‘Well, yes and no. It’s true, for sure, that Beatrice got herself married off to a guy who could barely get out of his bath chair, but actually Edmund was quite a normal age the first time he tied the knot. I mean, surely you must have wondered a bit? Mary would have had to have been, like, fourteen when she got up the duff if she was Tilly’s mother, and that’s going it some, even for people of their class.’

‘I guess I wasn’t thinking. I guess I thought she was older than she is. Put it down to the famous English complexion.’

Nessa sparks up a new ciggy.

‘Nope. She’s as young as she looks. Wasn’t much more than eighteen when Lucy disappeared. That was her name, by the way.’

‘I know. Tilly’s calling the baby after her.’

‘Good for her,’ says Nessa.

‘So?’

‘Oh, yeah. Right. Mary’s a goddaughter of Beatrice’s, you know. Daughter of a playmate of Edmund’s.’

‘Oh, God, not again. That’s a bit yuk, isn’t it?’

‘A bit, I guess. I’d say the likelihood was that Beatrice had had Mary lined up all along and Lucy was not only an aberration but a serious inconvenience. And the not-having-sons thing would have been close on a final straw.’

‘You
are
joking, aren’t you?’

‘’Fraid not. She’ll have been lined up in some sort of nod-and-wink agreement from practically the day she was born. No use to anyone for anything else, after all, being a girl: the only thing she’s good for is keeping the bloodlines intact.’

‘It’s medieval.’

‘I don’t know. A lot of religions deal in arranged marriages and no-one thinks it’s odd, after all. People like Beatrice believe that they’ve been given their position by God and it’s their religious duty to maintain the
status quo
. You know how superior God-botherers always seem to feel? It’s the same thing. Of course, if Lucy had been a breeder I dare say people would have gradually got used to it, but as it was, they were looking at the end of the bloodline, even if he’d got divorced. If he’d remarried someone his own age, the chances of dropping an heir would have been pretty slim. As it is, women like Mary are largely brought up to get themselves wed off and pop out a couple of boy-spawn, and part of that includes doing it before they’re thirty.’

‘You make her sound like a brood mare.’

‘Not far off. It’s all done on breeding. And given Edmund made his own choice the first time round, I dare say he didn’t have much option but to follow orders the second.’ Nessa pauses for breath, takes in another gust of nicotine with it. ‘Aaaah,’ she says, breathing out, ‘norepinephrine. Can’t beat it.’

‘So come on. Shoot.’

‘Oh, right. What do you want to know?’

‘Um … everything?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I know. Which is probably more than you’ll get out of anybody here. Tilly wasn’t but a little thing, and I don’t suppose Rufus has ever been particularly curious. She was OK, so far as I hear. Beatrice didn’t like her much. Middle class. Jewish too. I heard there was some sort of stink from her side when she married Edmund – religious separatism, again, ordained by God and that. Possibly one of the things they had in common. Anyway, all accounts, they held a funeral service for her the day she got married and never made any contact after.’

‘Sheez.’

‘It was the nineteen fifties.’

‘I though anti-Semitism was the problem …’

‘Oh, believe me, babe, it can cut both ways. Especially back then. Not that I’m saying that this lot would have welcomed her with open arms. Believe me, they weren’t exactly dancing for joy at the prospect of Jewish offspring.’

‘Oh right. You
do
surprise me. I’d never have thought it of ’em.’

Nessa laughs one of those would-ya-believe-it laughs. ‘Riddled with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the upper-class olds. You know that’s what they mean, don’t you, when they lower their voices and tell you someone’s ‘clever’ in that tone of voice?’

‘Oh. Oh right. I see. I didn’t realise.’

‘Yes. And it’s one of the reasons they’re nervous of clever people. They’re not particularly threatened by clever
per se
. Most of them don’t have the brains to be threatened. No. They’re afraid they might be Jewish.’

‘So this chick was clever, then?’

‘A degree in Latin or somesuch. Nothing useful. But that’s the way people talk about her. They’ve picked it up in the village, though I think most of them would be pretty appalled if they knew what they were really saying. ‘She was clever,’ they say. And usually they wink. I think they think it means she was neurotic, or something.’

‘OK.’

It’s always interesting how people will interpret simple words in different ways. My parents, for instance: if they said someone was clever, they’d probably mean that they big-noted themselves. Either that, or that they were some type of illywhacker.

‘So what’s the real story?’

‘Well, I think some of it’s probably spot on. She wasn’t a hundred per cent right in the head. I don’t know. It can’t have been easy for her, poor thing, locked up in this bloody great pile with only Beatrice and a few of Beatrice’s servants for company, and Edmund arsing about the place thinking his one act of rebellion was enough, more than likely. Probably just expected her to fit right in without any help. Them being so perfect and all.’

This is disturbing. I am finding this disturbing. The similarities between father and son are suddenly a lot clearer to me. For all I know, I could be Rufus’s final kick over the traces before he capitulates to a life of gin and hunting. And where does that leave me?

‘OK. And?’

‘Well, she went a bit gaga. She was fine at first: got involved in the village, started teaching down at the school. That was back when they still had a school. But people started noticing things, after a bit. Funny stuff. Just odd things. Losing stuff, at first. She’d open up her bag to hand out the homework and find she’d brought the stable accounts with her instead. Or she’d get to the shop and find she’d left her wallet down at the house. Stuff like that.’

‘Well, that’s not all that odd.’

‘No. But it got odder, over time. Her clothes. All the people who were kids then remember her walking down the high street in Stow one day with, like, a great big tear down the back of her dress. All her foundation garments hanging out for everyone to see. Or she’d have, like, stains, or odd shoes or something. And after Tilly was born, she got increasingly weird. Paranoid. Stopped talking to half the people about the place. Accused a couple of folk of spreading rumours and stuff. And she got this thing about the house. Started telling people it had it in for her. Turned up at a couple of county-type parties in some sort of mumbling state like a zombie. They’d just invented post-natal depression about that time, so people thought it was that. Beatrice actually turned quite nice about it at that point, funnily enough. Used to sweep in and settle bills and explain things away. I don’t suppose it was from any particular urge to look after Lucy, mind. More the usual don’t-let-the-common-folk-know-too-much-about-our-business stuff. And maybe some protection of Edmund, I suppose. Anyway. Poor cow. The depression never seemed to let up. It got worse with time, if anything, even though the doctor had her on a pretty ferocious drug regime by that point. Barbiturates and Valium and the like. There was talk of ECT at one point. Beatrice asked Marjorie Slatter – that’s Sharon’s mother-in-law. She died ten years or so ago – about it, because she’d had it when she got bad with her nerves, whatever that means. Asked her in confidence, of course, so it was all round the village in no time. But I don’t know if they went through with it. It certainly didn’t do any good if they did. She started going AWOL. Was found wandering a couple of times in her nightclothes, once over by the Rollright Stones, once all the way to Cirencester. Never seemed to know what she was doing there.’