The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (14 page)

I didn't reply directly to this. But I crossed over to the table and picked up a ball gown and a paper tiara. ‘These are lovely,' I said.

After her fourteenth birthday, I began to notice a change in Nicolina. She was gradually becoming beautiful.

When she came into Cunningham's, the old Cunningham sisters stared at her, like they sometimes stared at advertisements for millinery they couldn't afford. And now, every single Saturday, even when it rained, Paul Swinton waited for us, pretending to hoe his cabbages, and we would stand and have long conversations with him about the clouds or the harvest or the ugly new houses they were building along the Mincington road. As we chatted, I would watch his brown eyes wander over Nicolina's body and watch his hands, restless and fidgety, longing to touch her.

Nicolina and I never spoke about Paul Swinton. Though I knew he would one day become her kind and immovable husband, and believed I saw, in the way she stood so still and contained in front of him, that she knew this too, it seemed too soon to mention the subject. And I didn't want her to think I was counting the years until she left my bungalow, for this was not the case. My efforts to love Nicolina were succeeding fairly well. I began making her favourite fruit crumbles with tender care. When she was late home from school, I would start to feel a weight in my heart.

One Saturday in May, Nicolina refused, for the first time ever, to come with me to visit Victor. She told me she had revision to do for her exams. When I began to protest that her father would be upset not to see her, she put her arms round me and kissed my cheek, and I smelled the apple-sweetness of her newly washed hair. ‘Auntie Merc,' she said, ‘be a sport.'

I left her working at the kitchen table and went on my way to Waterford and when Paul Swinton saw that I was alone, he stood and stared at the lane behind me, hoping Nicolina would materialise like Venus from the waves of cow parsley.

I had no present for Victor that day and when I told this to Paul he took a knife out of his belt and cut a blue-green cabbage head and said: ‘Take this and say it's from me and tell Victor that one day I'm going to marry Nicolina.'

A silence fell upon the field after these solemn words were spoken. I watched a white butterfly make a short, shivery flight from one cabbage to the next. I noticed that the sky was a clean and marvellous blue. Paul cradled the cabbage head in his hands. He stroked the veins of the outer leaves. ‘Watching her grow and bloom,' he said, ‘is the most fantastic thing that's ever happened to me.'

‘I know,' I said.

‘I've promised myself I won't invite her out or do anything to push myself forward until the time seems right.'

‘I'm sure that's wise.'

‘But I'm finding it difficult,' he added. ‘How much longer do you think I have to wait?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Perhaps until she's sweet sixteen?'

Paul nodded. I could imagine him counting the weeks and months, cold and heat, dark days and fair. ‘I can wait,' he said, ‘as long as, in the end, she's mine.'

With Nicolina's beauty came other things. She put her Ladies away in a box that was tied with string and never opened. She badgered me to buy the radiogram I still couldn't afford. I found one second-hand. Its casing was made of walnut and it was called ‘The Chelsea'. And after that, Nicolina spent all her pocket money on Paul Anka records.

A boy called Gregory Dillon came round one teatime and Gregory and Nicolina danced in my front room to the song ‘Diana'. They played the same record seventeen times. When they came out of the room, they looked soggy and wild, as though they'd been in a jungle.

‘I think you'd better go home, Gregory,' I said. And he went out of the door without a murmur. It was as though dancing with Nicolina had taken away his powers of speech.

He came back a few days later, smelling of spice. His black hair was combed into a quiff, like Cliff Richard's, and his legs looked long and thin in black drainpipe trousers. He brought the record ‘Singing the Blues' by Tommy Steele, but I told them to leave the door to the front room open while they danced to it. I sat in the kitchen, chopping rhubarb.

Half my mind was on Nicolina and Gregory and the other half was on the changes occurring at Cunningham's, changes which might put my job in jeopardy. The two Miss Cunninghams were retiring and there was talk of the premises being sold to a fish-and-chip bar. That day, I'd gone to see Amy Cunningham and said to her: ‘If the shop closes, please may I keep the ebony hand?'

‘What ebony hand, Mercedes?'

‘The hand for the glove display.'

‘Oh, that. Well, I suppose so. Although, if it really is ebony, then it might be valuable. It might have to be sold.'

‘In that case, I'll buy it.'

‘What with? You spend every penny you earn on that girl.'

I'd never heard Nicolina referred to as ‘that girl' before. I hated Amy Cunningham for saying this. I wanted to give her face a stinging swipe with a tea towel. ‘I'll buy it,' I repeated, and walked away.

Yet when I got home and Nicolina and I were eating our tea in the kitchen, I raised my eyes and looked at her anew, as though I had been the one to call her ‘that girl', and I saw that in among her beauty there was something else visible, something that I couldn't describe or give a name to, but I knew that it was alarming.

‘Nicolina . . .' I began, but then I stopped because I hadn't planned what I was going to say and Nicolina looked at me defiantly over her glass of milk and said: ‘What?'

I wanted, suddenly, to bring up the subject of Paul Swinton. I wanted to remind her that his hands were strong and brown, unlike Gregory's, which were limp and pale. I wanted to reassure her that I had been thinking about her future from the moment she'd come to live with me and that my vigilance on this subject had never faltered. But none of this could be said at that moment, so I started instead to talk about the closure of Cunningham's and its replacement by a fish-and-chip bar.

‘Does that mean,' asked Nicolina, ‘that we'll have no money?'

I carried on eating, although I didn't feel hungry. I wanted to say: ‘I suppose I knew that the young were heartless.'

It took quite a long time to complete the sale of Cunningham's, but because everybody in the village knew that it was going to close, fewer and fewer people came into the shop. It became a bit like working in a hospice for artefacts, where everything was dying. I began to feel a sentimental sorrow for the wools and bindings and cards of ric-rac. Every morning, I removed the glove from the ebony hand and dusted it. Sometimes, I held the naked hand in mine and I thought how strange it was that no man had ever wanted to touch me and that I had never had a purpose in life until I became Nicolina's replacement mother. I stood at my counter, wondering what the future held. I tried to imagine applying for a job at the fish-and-chip bar, but I knew I wouldn't do this. I didn't like fish-and-chips. In fact, I didn't like food any more at all and I saw that the bones of my wrist were becoming as narrow as cards of lace.

Not long after this, some months after Nicolina's fifteenth birthday, during a time when Elvis Presley's ‘Love me Tender' wafted out all evening from The Chelsea, I arrived at Cunningham's to find the ebony hand gone.

I searched through every drawer in the shop and unpacked every bag and box in the stockroom, and then I telephoned Amy Cunningham at home and said: ‘Where is the hand you promised me?'

‘I did not
promise
it, Mercedes,' said Amy Cunningham. ‘And, as I thought, an antique shop in Stratton is prepared to give me a very good price for it. The hand is sold.'

I stood in the empty shop, unspeaking (as people did in the novels I sometimes took out of the Mincington library). I unspoke for a long time. A customer came in and found me like that, unspeaking and unmoving, and said to me: ‘Where are your knitting patterns?'

The following day, Saturday, I couldn't get out of bed. I said to Nicolina: ‘I'm sorry, but you'll have to go by yourself to see Victor.'

She stood at my bedside, wearing lipstick. She offered to bring me a cup of tea.

‘No, thanks,' I said. ‘I'm going to go back to sleep. Give your father my love.'

‘What shall I take him?' she asked.

‘I have no idea,' I said. ‘You're on your own today.'

She looked at me strangely. Her lipsticked mouth opened a little and hung there open and I didn't like looking at it, so I turned my face to the wall.

‘Auntie Merc,' said Nicolina, ‘when you're better, can you teach me the flamenco?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I can't. Your mother was the dancer. Not me.'

The following Saturday, when we passed the cabbage field, there was no sign of Paul Swinton. I stopped on the lane, expecting Paul to appear, but everything was still and silent in the soft rain that was falling. Nicolina didn't stop, but walked on in the direction of Waterford, holding high a pink umbrella. She looked like a girl in a painting.

When we got to the Bin, the Senior Nursing Sister pounced on us and took us into her office, which had a nice view of a little lawn, where an elaborate sundial stood. I saw Nicolina staring at this sundial while the Senior Nursing Sister talked to us, and I understood that both of us had our minds on the same thing: the sudden, swift passing of time.

The Senior Nursing Sister informed us that Victor had fallen into a depression from which it was proving difficult to rescue him. He had broken his Doris Day record into shards and thrown away his shoes. He'd cut open his pillow and pulled out all the feathers and flung them, handful by handful, round his room. I privately thought that, at that moment, he must have looked like one of those ornamental snowmen, trapped inside a glass dome.

‘Why?' I asked.

The Senior Nursing Sister sniffed as she said: ‘Your brother-in-law had become accustomed to watching a white bull that was kept on the water-meadows. Our staff would sometimes be aware that, instead of addressing them, as reasonably requested, he was addressing the bull.'

Nicolina laughed.

‘We knew about that old white bull,' I said. ‘Victor imagined—'

‘The bull has gone,' said the Senior Nursing Sister. ‘We enquired of the farmer as to why it had been removed from the meadow and we were told that it had been put away.'

‘What's “put away”?' said Nicolina.

‘Gone,' said the Sister. ‘Put out of its misery.'

I looked at Nicolina. We both knew that the Senior Nursing Sister was unable to talk about death, even the death of a bull. And I thought this could be one of the reasons why so many people came voluntarily to the Bin, because, there, the words which described the things that made you afraid were differently chosen.

‘We've become alarmed that Victor might inflict harm on a fellow inmate,' said the Senior Nursing Sister, ‘so we have had to move him.'

‘Move him where?'

‘To a secure room. We hope it may be a temporary necessity.'

Neither Nicolina nor I spoke. We stared at this woman, who was unobtrusively ugly, like me. We'd brought Victor a gift of twenty du Maurier cigarettes and I knew that we wouldn't be allowed to give these to him, in case he set fire to the soft walls which now surrounded him.

‘What's going to become of him?' I said.

‘He's receiving treatment,' said the Sister. ‘We expect him to recover.'

We had no choice but to trudge home through the rain, and when we came in sight of the cabbage field, I thought perhaps Paul Swinton would be there and that the sadness we were feeling about Victor might lift a little with his breezy smile. But when we got to the green lane, Nicolina said: ‘Let's go a different way. Let's go by the road and see the new houses.' And she went hurrying on, leaving me standing still as the sun came out and cast a vibrant light on her pink umbrella.

Things began to move quickly after that day, as though striving to catch up with time.

The Chelsea exploded one afternoon, and when I rushed into the front room to see what the bang was, there were Gregory and Nicolina doing the forbidden thing on the floor behind the sofa. Flames were beginning to lick the curtains, but Nicolina and Gregory stayed where they were, finishing what they had to finish, and when I turned on the fire extinguisher, Gregory's bottom was covered with foam, like fallen feathers.

That evening, when Gregory was gone and the fire was out, I told Nicolina she ought to be ashamed of herself. She picked her teeth and flicked what she found there on to the hearthrug. ‘Are you listening to me?' I said.

‘No,' said Nicolina. ‘Why should I be ashamed of myself? Just because you never had a man? And anyway, I love Gregory. When I'm sixteen, we're going to get married.'

I felt very hot. I felt my blouse begin to stick to my back. ‘What about Paul?' I said.

‘Paul who?' asked Nicolina.

‘Paul Swinton, of course. He told me he'd wait for you . . .'

‘He knows that's pointless. He knows I'm marrying Gregory.'

‘How does he know?'

‘Because I told him.'

‘Told him when?'

‘That time when you were in bed. He started to say ridiculous things. I told him they were ridiculous. I told him I was soon going to be Mrs Gregory Dillon.'

I got up and went over to Nicolina. I tried to put my arms round her, but she pushed me away. ‘I want better for you,' I said.