Wicked Women (9 page)

I just love the shop.

“What a nice woman,” said Milly. “Saying that. Did she know you or something?”

“No, she didn’t,” said David. “And you’re the nicest woman I know,” and he found that, though the first was a lie, the second was true.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Which speaks for itself: no need for explanation, or excuse.

A
NOTHER STORY, FRIEND, FROM
the Great War, before the dawn of Equality and Peace, before Sisterhood, from the days when women were at odds with women.

My friend Ellen, a poet, lightly declared war on another man’s wife, an artist.

“I can take any man from any woman,” Ellen boasted.

“Oh no you can’t,” said the artist. “You can’t take mine. We love each other too much. And we’re married. Besides, your legs are short and your ankles are thick.”

“We’ll see about that!” said Ellen. “Too short and too thick I’m not talking about!”

What shall we call the artist? Y? Why not? Something universal! Ellen waited and worked and pounced, and stole a baby girl from Y’s husband, or that was how Y saw it. Stole his sperm to bring into the world a new being, who had no business here. (We’ll call the husband X: what else, the unconstant factor?)

Ellen called Y on the phone.

“I did it! I told you so. He loves me,” she said, “not you. He told me so. And here’s the proof of it. I’m pregnant! And, what’s more, I love him in return.”

“I’d rather have her than you,” said X, “now it’s happened.” So Y killed herself. X was sorry. But he didn’t blame himself. In the Great War, men simply didn’t. X turned cold and cruel to Ellen and her child. “Your fault!” he said. “I can never truly love you now, or anyone.”

Now a ghost cries out for revenge. I hear it sometimes in the night, decades later. “Write me,” she cries. “Write me, not them.” I try to understand. The voice isn’t Y’s—Y rests easy, I think. No, it’s Ellen calling. Ellen died too, by her own hand. Y reached out from the grave and stabbed Ellen in the back and dragged her down, and X made no attempt to stop Y, or save Ellen, which he could have, well enough, by smiling, forgiving, sopping up the harm Y did by her own dreadful act of self-destruction. He was the hook; he could have let Ellen off it. But no.

Well, it’s true Ellen started it; it was a fierce war—no holds barred: Ellen deserved it: why should she lie quiet? Let her roam and reproach in the darkness. It’s just that on the worst nights I hear two voices, sighing. I even see two ghosts. One is Ellen’s: talkative and proud in death as she was in life, oddly robust: I don’t mind seeing that: I’m rather pleased she’s around, bearing witness to this and that. But there’s another one, a little one, a shadow wraith, dancing and pattering at her mother Ellen’s heels. I try to close my eyes but the pale image burns through the lids. Orchis was six when Ellen killed her. Six: a peculiar age, all spirit and not enough substance: of course Orchis won’t lie down, why should she?

News of suicide travels fast, by telephone, contacts clicking, interlocking! Oh God, oh God, grim news! News of murder comes faster still, runs by word of mouth from house to house. People knock at doors, stuttering, stammering. Add suicide to murder and the whole suburb reels and buzzes within the hour. Who saw them last? Whose fault can it be? If only this, if only that! We always knew, we never knew, we certainly never thought! Oh dreadful, dreadful! How could she, how dare she? Even as we grieve, anger breaks through. Don’t we all suffer? What was so special about her that she found things intolerable? What was so special about her, that she had to do this to us?

More than you’d ever believe claim friendship, standing as near the frightful brink as possible, staring down into the black pit of blame, before drawing back into the sensible, recovering world. But it’s never over. Decades later the sorrow still comes back, and the anger.

The Great War is now decades in the past, back in the sixties: those were the days when women fought over men, and died for love, or lack of it: but I suppose wars are never truly over, and shouldn’t be, not while we remember their victims.

Well, consider it. Here’s a fine picture for a War Artist. The little child, little Orchis, lying awake, the father far away, disowning, angry. The mother comes with whisky in the sleeptime cocoa: she brings with her a handful of pills. Take just another one, my dear, and just another one. Mother says so! For the cut on your finger, the bump on your head—see, soon all will be well: all troubles cured.

No wonder our children view pills with suspicion: they spit them out; they won’t eat the green-and-red apple; they know the pink bit’s poisoned. You don’t need a stepmother for that. Mothers are dangerous things: they are all witches at heart: give me an apple the same colour all over.

How could Ellen do it? How could any woman do a thing like that? Kill her own child, and then herself? With more competence in death than she ever had in life? No hidden plea for help here: just surety, and certainty, that death is the proper answer to life.

But listen, I tell you, my friend, Ellen did the right thing. In retrospect I see it clearly. I didn’t at the time. I know more now. If a mother kills herself, she must take her children with her: haul them kicking and screaming through the gates of finality. Let that be your deterrent, friend, if ever you’re thinking of suicide. You look a little too sad, act a little too quiet, for your own good. Did it happen to you? The child who’s left must live out the life sentence imposed by the mother. Few children truly survive the suicide of mothers: bodies go on living, but the mother has taken back the gift of life.

“Y
OU ARE SO SELFISH
,” said Edwina to her mother. Edwina was thirty-one. She hated her name. Her parents had expected a boy: “Edwin” had been ready and waiting. They’d just added on an “a” and ignored her thereafter. Edwina was Hughie and Beverley’s first-born. Hughie, Duke of Cowarth, father: Beverley, a fortune-hunter from New Zealand, mother. Now, decades into family disapproval, Beverley was sixty-one; Hughie had died three months back. Edwina had affairs, rode to hounds and drank too much. The family had just about got over the shock of the death. Now it was all wills, or rather no wills, and inheritance, or no inheritance, and who got what title: that is to say whatever sad crumbs of comfort spilled out after death could be picked over and scrabbled for. Hughie had been much and genuinely loved. “But then,” Edwina remarked, “you always were selfish, Mother.”

“What is so selfish,” asked Beverley, startled, “about wanting to live in my own home?”

“Because it’s far too big for you now,” said Thomasina. “Sell the place and find somewhere small and sensible to live, and divide the money amongst us.” Thomasina was the second daughter. She’d been meant to be a Thomas. She was thirty. Now she was pregnant and had long blonde curls. That should show her mother a thing or two. “Little middle tom-boy,” her mother had Once referred to Thomasina: cropped her hair short and tossed her a gun so she could join in the shoot. How Thomasina had cried. So many poor dead birds, falling about her ears!

“We must hear what Mother is saying,” said Davida, the third daughter. Honestly, it was beyond a joke, and Hughie had never even laughed in the first place. He’d wanted a male heir. Davida was twenty-nine. She was a therapist, married to a psychiatrist. Her once bouncy hair had flattened out and grown limp from the strain of wisdom: her bright eyes had turned soulful: her voice gone soft from understanding her own anger, and that of others. “In my experience it is counterproductive to cling to the past,” said Davida, “though we must all find our answers within ourselves.”

Beverley’s answer was to stay at Cowarth Court, on her own, all thirty-one bedrooms of it, three dining halls, two ballrooms, three bathrooms—hopeless, hopeless, one to every ten bedrooms, but the water supply in these Elizabethan mansions is always tricky, and at least Hughie and Beverley’s
en-suite
bathroom was properly serviced, plumbing-wise, and moreover warmed. In their childhood the girls had taken refuge with the horses whenever the weather got really cold. The heating never reached the nursery wing, but got to the stables okay.

Hughie had gambled and drugged the inheritance of generations away, spectacularly, with Beverley intermittently preaching prudence and common sense. The girls had taken the father’s side: Hughie knew how to live in style; Beverley, the feeling went, had the mentality of a New Zealand sheep-farmer’s wife—which was what she had been born to, after all—all practicalities and no
panache.
Now of course there was nothing left to inherit. The family seat, Cowarth Castle, and most of its lands, had been hived off in lieu of tax into the National Trust’s care ten years back. Only dilapidated Cowarth Court and a rather ugly Titian, both made over to Beverley by Deed of Gift during one of Hughie’s bankruptcy panics, remained. But the moral right to these was surely the girls’. They were Cowarths, after all. Their mother was not really even a blood relation, not if you were talking Cowarth. Which they so often were.

But Beverley was proving remarkably stubborn. She declared she would live in Cowarth Court staring at the Titian—which was profoundly under-insured—just as long as she liked. She was unreasonable; the painting would bring in at least four million: they could all have done with their share—who would not?

“Royalty alone is allowed a female succession,” the family lawyer had once explained to Beverley, whose grasp of these matters was flimsy, no matter what her reputation as a fortune and title hunter. “It’s no use looking to them for example. Royal daughters are treated as sons so long as they have no brothers. George VI dies leaving two daughters: Elizabeth gets the throne and all the goodies. The younger, Margaret, gets zilch. Elizabeth’s first-born is Charles; when Anne comes along, she’ll only inherit if Charles dies without heirs. Then Andrew and Edward come along anyway to keep her in her place: she can forget it. But Hughie’s just an Earl, so normal rules of primogeniture apply. That is to say, girls don’t exist. Forget any thought of equal opportunity: male winner takes all. That’s how such a mass of wealth gets totted up to these families over the centuries. Napoleon got rid of the system in France, zonks ago: great egalitarians, the French! Hughie being an Earl, you’re technically a Countess, the girls are Ladies. If Hughie dies—heaven forfend, Lady Cowarth—without male issue, the title and property—such of it as survives his life—will go to the nearest male relative: in this case Hughie’s younger brother, John. Your husband is Lord Cowarth only because his elder brother died in a hunting accident—all too frequent an occurrence in this backwater of English society. Firstborns die; don’t ask me to explain that.”

The original Charter from Queen Mary by which the Cowarths—Catholic stalwarts all—held their land and wealth laid down that what the monarch gave only the monarch (i.e., alas, the Inland Revenue) could take away. It had, in the form of the National Trust, done so. But under the terms of the Charter not even the Inland Revenue could have kept the inheritance away from a direct male succession. Torn between the risk of Hughie’s bankruptcy and the risk of an intermediate heir turning up, the Inland Revenue chose the latter. The husband, after all, was Catholic, the wife well over childbearing age.

“What option does an Earl without heirs have,” Hughie would boom, “but eat, drink and be merry, and spend the lot! If you don’t like it, Beverley, you should have given me a son!” (Three children in three years had finished off what little maternal instinct Beverley had in the first place.) In his apparently careless and scandalous contract with the National Trust, Hughie had ensured that if the girls got nothing, brother John would get nothing either, or only a title, and he had one of those already. Hughie made no will, although he’d had six months’ warning of death, leaving the tricky business of satisfying the girls entirely to Beverley. That too was his habit.

And Beverley came up with the idea of not attempting to satisfy the girls at all: simply keeping what was hers by legal right. The girls settled down to the situation presently. When Beverley died, after all, Cowarth Court and the Titian could be sold, and the funds divided, and in the meantime their mother was quiet, and in mourning, and dwindling in a somehow satisfactory way: a thin, grieving figure in grand surroundings on a low income, wandering dusty halls but at least maintaining the fabric: keeping the roofs mended and the chimneys cleaned. And the Titian was improving in value year by year. The girls would visit from time to time to see it was safe, and their mother well.

John failed in his inevitable legal battle with the National Trust. He didn’t even get costs. Beverley was unsympathetic. “You English nobs think you can live off your past,” she said. “That’s all finished, but you won’t face it.” Which was a bit rich, the girls agreed, considering how well Beverley had done out of exactly that past. And not even a blood relation!

Exactly a year after their father’s death, Beverley asked her three daughters to tea. She told them she had an announcement to make. “She’s going to sell the house!” they rejoiced. “She’s going to sell the Titian! She’s going to move into sheltered accommodation!”

The girls came together in Edwina’s car, though fearfully. Edwina was a ferocious driver. They were surprised to see scaffolding up on Cowarth Court and workmen busy everywhere. “Where’s she got the money from?” They were wild! “Has she made some deal with the National Trust? If she has, we will have her declared incompetent by reason of insanity!”

But Beverley came down the steps towards them serene and cheerful. She was out of widow’s black and into a pale yellow sweater and a very short skirt. She had on 15-dernier tights and the girls remembered how good her legs had always been. Accompanying her was a short but good-looking guy of, they guessed, around forty. Twenty years younger than she. An architect, perhaps? A lawyer? What was their mother up to?

“This is my
fiance,
Brian,” said Beverley. “We’re getting married next week.”