Every Woman For Herself

Chapter 4: Sheared Off

Late that night Angie came to the door and beat on it, screaming hysterically, ‘Bitch! Whore! Murderess!’

The last was the only one I felt truly applied.

Fortunately I was sitting in the upstairs bay window, sleep being something I’d lost the hang of, and my legs had gone too numb to go down, otherwise sheer guilt would probably have made me go and let her in.

After a while lights went on in several neighbouring houses, including Miss Grinch’s, and shortly after that a police car coasted quietly up and removed Angie.

There was a faint, receding cry of, ‘Pigs! Pigs! Arrest the murderess!’ and then the street slowly sunk back into dark silence.

I’d been wondering how I could break the news of the accident to Matt, but in the end I didn’t have to, because Angie did it for me.

He phoned to inform me tersely that henceforth all communication would be through the solicitor, and then put the phone down.

I suppose murdering his best friend was a pretty irreconcilable marital difference.

Miss Grinch continued to be my comfort and guide throughout this nightmare. I didn’t know what I’d have done without her, which was a far cry from the way I felt about her before she became the star witness for the defence.

She was now my bestest friend. Not so much a mother figure, as an acidulated spinster figure – everyone should have one, but they are a dying breed.

Em would have come to stay for a few days, but Father’s latest mistress was still infesting the house.

The housekeeping was, and always had been, Em’s preserve, and she wouldn’t stand interference, let alone a takeover bid. Outright war had been declared.

Normally this would all have interested me extremely, especially since one of the combatants was occupying the hallowed ground of my bedroom, but now I moved through the days like an automaton. I signed everything the solicitor sent me; Matt, true to his word, having ceased personal contact.

I’d be lucky if I even got the duck now.

Miss Grinch, like Anne, urged me to get my own solicitor and a better deal, but so far as I could see there wasn’t anything but debts and an absent husband, and I didn’t want half of either of those.

Anyway, I didn’t feel I deserved anything any more.

All I could think of was that ghastly thud as the pan connected with Greg’s head, and I was tortured with wondering whether I could have prevented it: I mean, when I hit him, I wanted to hit him – so was it really an accident? Was there a moment when I could have diverted the fatal downward swing?

I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure. And I felt like a murderess – I had killed someone.

Miss Grinch didn’t understand that. She said God would look into my heart and judge me, but I was afraid He already had. He just hadn’t told me the outcome.

We had had several people round to view the house, though I didn’t know how many were simply motivated by the thrill of blood. Miss Grinch had been conducting the sightseeing tours with a brisk efficiency reminiscent of Anne and Em. Perhaps that was why I liked her so much.

She had also helped me pack up most of the house contents, and soon everything except a few necessities had gone to auction. I didn’t keep a lot – I felt a certain revulsion at the things that reminded me of Matt (and through him, Greg), which most things did. Anything unsaleable had gone to the nearest charity shop, or in the bin.

I sent a small van of things to Em to store for me: the driver was cheap, but he certainly wasn’t willing, especially when it came to my plants. He said he had hay fever and wouldn’t take any of them, so I would just have to fit as many of them as I could into my 2CV when I moved, with the roof open, even though it was pretty cold to be transporting tropical foliage. I gave a lot of the smaller ones to Miss Grinch, who was delighted, so at least they’d gone to a good home.

Eventually there was just me, Flossie, and a few vital odds and ends left. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, we were marooned until after the inquest.

Angie had made banshee late-night appearances twice more on my doorstep, but been removed much faster than the first time.

I had been buying head-sized melons.

Skint Old Gardening Tips, No. 1

Always keep margarine tubs of compost on your windowsills, and whenever you eat fruit, push the pips or stones in. Water daily, and eventually something will come up. The novelty of this method is that you won’t have the faintest idea what it is.

Even in my numb state – which by then seemed part of me, like permafrost – I found the inquest appalling, although but for Miss Grinch it might have been a murder trial, which would have been very much worse.

The kindly coroner treated me like a frail little flower, and Miss Grinch with respect, but was firm about having Angie removed from the room when she became hysterical and demanded the death penalty.

She was still screaming, ‘Murderess! Murderess!’ as she was escorted out.

I knew in my heart of hearts she was right, even though the coroner assured me it wasn’t my fault at all, and urged me to put it behind me. The verdict was brought in as accidental death.

The coroner added a little speech to the effect that people who succumbed to the current craze for heavy cast-iron pans would do better not to hang them from the ceiling, and I’d have to second that one.

By the time I got out of the hearing the reporters from the local paper were encouraging Angie to stage the scene of her life.

She spotted me. ‘Murderess!’ she screamed with a certain monotony, tossing her black veil over her shoulders and then lunging at me with blood-red talons like a deranged harpy. ‘Murdering harlot!’

Well, that was different – but why harlot? Surely it was because I’d resisted her leching husband that he was dead? And she knew what he was like.

Fortunately, one or two people were holding her back, since I was transfixed by all the avid stares.

‘I’ll never let this rest until my poor Greg has justice!’ Angie howled. ‘Wherever you go I’ll find you, and make sure people know the sort of woman you are!’

I wished I knew what sort of woman I was.

‘You’ll never be able to forget it.’

Well, that was certainly true.

‘Wherever you go, I’ll follow you,’ she added, sounding suddenly exhausted, and dangling limply from the hands that a moment before had been restraining her. ‘You’ll never escape.’

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide …

‘Why, Angie?’ I asked. ‘You must realise by now I didn’t mean to kill him. Don’t you think I feel badly enough about it already?’

‘No, but I’ll make sure you know what it’s like to suffer – to be friendless and alone … like me.’ She drew a dramatic hand across her eyes and gave a broken sob.

‘But, Angie, Greg walked into my house uninvited and indecently assaulted me! And you must have known he was serially unfaithful?’

‘Yes, but none of them ever killed him!’

Well, there was that. And the more I protested, the guiltier I felt. Could I really not have diverted that fatal downward swing?

‘Besides, whatever his faults, he loved me,’ declaimed Angie, looking tragic.

‘Maybe he did, but he slept with anyone he could get,’ I pointed out.

‘They weren’t important.’

The voices of the listeners now rose in a babble of questions, but Miss Grinch popped up suddenly at my side, seized her chance, and hurried me through a gap to the waiting taxi.

‘How tall was Greg?’ I whispered as we climbed in. ‘Did you find out?’

‘Five feet, ten inches exactly, dear,’ she replied.

Looking back, I could see Angie still holding forth on the steps like Lady Macbeth.

‘I wish I was dead,’ I said dully. ‘There doesn’t seem any point to living any more.’

‘Clearly God still has a use for you,’ Miss Grinch said placidly.

‘Compost?’ I suggested.

‘We are all God’s compost, if you like,’ she said. ‘Interesting – I’ve never thought of it like that before. However, I am sure he has something in mind for you before that. He moves in mysterious ways.’

‘Like the frying pan,’ I agreed, and we were silent until we reached the house.

Miss Grinch bought the local papers, and thankfully I hadn’t merited the front page. Even with Angie’s theatrics I suppose they can only get so much story from a domestic accident without insinuating something libellous.

I was described throughout as Mrs Charlotte Fry (although I’ve always called myself by my maiden name), and there were several photographs of me looking very small and weird, like a glaze-eyed rabbit cowering under the menacing overhang of Angie’s bust.

My hair was now a clear white for about an inch at the roots.

‘I always wondered about that very dense blue-black shade,’ Miss Grinch said, scrutinising a particularly hideous photo.

‘It was my natural colour.’

‘Believe me, it is a mistake, once a woman reaches forty, to dye her hair a dark colour. Your skin has lost the fresh bloom of youth and the contrast is too severe.’

‘I know, but Matt wanted me to keep it black. He liked this sort of Goth look with the long hair and the dark eye make-up, because he thought it made me look young. He was so much older, so I was a sort of a Trophy Wife, you know?’

‘Yes, but you can do what you like now, dear.’

‘I don’t think I care.’

‘I’ll have my hairdresser come round and do something with it – have it made as God intended.’

‘God intended my hair to turn silver at thirty, like my mother’s, but my eyebrows and eyelashes to stay dark.’

Mother is Lally Tooke and when I see her on the jacket of one of her radical feminist books, or on TV, she looks a bit like she’s wearing a powdered wig, but she also looks good. We have the same big dark eyes, the purplish colour of black grapes.

Matt was always impressed by Father’s fame (or notoriety), dragging his name into conversations like a dog with some malodorous and grisly find. ‘My father-in-law, Ranulf Rhymer …’

He never felt the same way about my far-flying mother, but then, neither do I: that hand did not so much rock the cradle as break off shards and wage a bloody battle with them before leaving the field for ever.

‘You could start wearing prettier colours than black,’ suggested Miss Grinch, who had been pursuing thoughts of her own.

‘I don’t have anything else. Most of my clothes come from charity shops and jumble sales anyway.’

‘Time for a change.’

‘I can’t afford a change.’

‘My hairdresser’s very cheap,’ she assured me, and looking at her frizzed ginger-grey curls I could believe it.

She was right: her hairdresser was cheap. In a moment of madness induced by receiving the decree nisi in the post, I summoned her and had all my hair chopped off: very cathartic.

It was now clipped short and close to my head like a convict’s, but at least it was all silver. I left off the heavy eye make-up, which made me look like a marmoset in combination with the cropped head, but the loose black clothes (I’d lost weight) and big boots now looked ridiculous.

I’d forgotten how to eat as well as sleep, which was why my clothes hung on me, but there was no more money so the escaped fugitive look would have to remain for the time being.

A rare phone call from Mother in America.

The last time she’d called me was after I married Matt, when she’d said that I was a pathetic, downtrodden negation of everything the women’s movement had ever fought for.

Perhaps I was. And perhaps I might have turned out differently had she taken us children with her on her flight from Father; but then again, maybe not.

This time it was a congratulatory phone call, she having heard about Dead Greg.

‘Well done!’ she said. ‘A blow struck right at the heart of male oppression.’

‘More the head, Mother. And I’m not proud of it. I’m finding it very hard to live with the idea that I’ve killed someone.’

‘The guilt was his: it was his own fault.’

‘True, but somehow that doesn’t seem to make it feel any better. Mother, did you know Matt and I are divorcing? We’re waiting for the final bit to come through.’

There was a pause. ‘I’d have loved to have had you to stay with me,’ she said eventually, as though I’d asked. ‘But I’m afraid I’m about to go on a lecture tour for my next book, and – wait, though! – you could come with me, and tell everyone about—’

‘No, thanks,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m going home to Upvale.’

‘You can open the cage door, but you can’t force the animals out,’ she said cryptically, sighing.

Chapter 5: The Prodigal Daughter

It was strange to be going home for good and yet not to be going back to my square, high-ceilinged bedroom, with the teenage-timewarp décor.

Of course, I’d escaped back from time to time over the years, usually alone. Among so many big, self-assured people Matt always felt very much the small Fry in the pond, I think. (Which he was.)

Father, Em and Anne petrified him, but I don’t think he found Branwell threatening, just loopy. When I asked Bran soon after I was married if he liked Matt, he just replied vaguely, ‘Who?’

Matt was always jealous of the stretched but uncut umbilical cord that connected me – and all of us Rhymers – to Upvale, though strangely enough I hadn’t even realised it existed until I tested its limits by running away with Matt.

Even Anne, globetrotting TV correspondent that she was, returned from time to time to recharge her batteries on Blackdog Moor, before going back to foreign battlefields. Wherever in the world there was trouble, there also was Anne in her khaki fatigues and multi-pocketed waistcoat. Wars didn’t seem to last long once she’d arrived – I think they took one look and united against a greater peril.

Since the Ding of Death I’d tried to phone Anne a couple of times at her London flat (stark, minimalist, shared with her stark, minimalist, foreign-correspondent lover, Red), but there had been no reply other than the answering machine. Em said she’d managed to get hold of the lover once, but he’d just said Anne was away and put the phone down.

Anne, Em and Father are all big, handsome, strong-boned, grimly purposeful types, with masses of wavy light hair: leonine. Maybe that’s why they made Matt nervous – he thought he may be the unlucky zebra at the waterhole.

I’m small and dark – now small and silver-haired – like Mother, but I’m not the fragile little flower I look. Bran is slight too, but wiry, with dark auburn hair like a newly peeled chestnut, and strangely light brown eyes. We think he must take after his Polish mother’s side of the family, but we barely remembered her brief tenure as au pair, mistress, and oh-so-reluctant mother; even Em, who is the eldest.

Em had run the house as far back as I could remember, with the help of Gloria Mundi and her brother, Walter. Funnily enough, housewifery didn’t sort of seep into me by osmosis – I had to go out and buy a book. But you can’t say I didn’t try; it’s just that nature intended me to be an artist, not a housewife.

Upvale Parsonage has never seen a parson in its life – that was just Father being Brontëan. It stands foursquare in stone, with a small formal garden of mossy gravel and raddled roses dividing it from the road. Behind it the ground falls away steeply down to the stream, so the kitchen and sculleries are built into the hillside below the road level, facing across the valley.

And even below that is the undercroft, which we call the Summer Cottage, also partly built into the hillside, and linked to the house by a twisting and rather dank spiral staircase with oak doors top and bottom.

The Summer Cottage gives on to the narrow, rough track that leads down to another cottage, derelict last time I saw it, but recently renovated and sold to some kind of actor, according to Em. Then there’s Owlets Farm, where Madge and her old father, Bob, live.

Em had always kept the hinges on the Parsonage door to the Summer Cottage unoiled, so she’d know by the squealing when an alien invader (i.e. one of Father’s seemingly endless string of mistresses) was entering her territory.

But this time the invaders had sneaked in behind her back.

Kitchen Pests

1) Your Father’s mistress

2) Your Father’s mistress’s children

3) Your Father …

‘The van got here OK,’ Em said when I phoned her from my strangely naked house. ‘I had everything put into the cottage, including all the stuff from your bedroom that I’d stowed in the attic. Walter took it all down.’

‘It seems odd coming back to the cottage. Still, I suppose I do still have a lot of things and I’m going to have a car full of plants, despite Miss Grinch having taken some. I don’t know where I’m going to put them, but I’ll need them if I ever paint again. I can’t do it now without the jungle round me.’

But would I ever paint again? I’d had painter’s block since the Great Pan Swing … and if I did paint, would I revert to the old style at Upvale, or perhaps evolve something between the two?

‘You will paint again,’ pronounced Em, like the word of God – or maybe the Word of Wicca – ‘and Walter’s making you a conservatory in front of the cottage, only of course he calls it a veranda.’

‘Out of what?’

‘Someone gave him some old doors and windows, and he’s using clear corrugated plastic for the roof. I told him you needed somewhere like his friend George’s pigeon loft, only much lighter, and he got the idea immediately. He’s been at it a week – I can hear him hammering now.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, a lump coming to my throat at this extra kindness.

‘Father’s been complaining, but he isn’t working – too busy banging away himself. That woman’s so insatiable it’s embarrassing. I caught him carrying her up the stairs the other night, which won’t do his back much good.’

‘He was always like that, though, Em.’

‘This one’s different. She’s got into the house, for a start, with her brats.’

Like Angie’s squirrels. I hoped Angie didn’t follow me here and get in the house, too.

‘Does he mind my coming home for good?’

‘He doesn’t care, just says you’ll have to pay for your keep, so the mistress must be expensive.’

‘He’s right, though, Em – and I can’t stay in the Summer Cottage for ever. He’s bound to want it for the next mistress. I’ll have to find a job of some kind, and rent a place. Matt hasn’t sent me any money since I dinged Greg. I knew it would be the odd duck, and that only if I was lucky, but I don’t think I want his money any more anyway. I don’t deserve it after killing his best friend.’

‘It was an accident, and you’re entitled to some maintenance – we all keep telling you. You’ve got to live on something until you paint again, so—’

‘If I ever paint again,’ I said pessimistically.

She ignored that. ‘So I’ve got you a part-time job, starting Monday.’

Panic clutched me round the midriff with sharp talons. ‘A job! What on earth as?’

‘Helper in the Rainbow Nursery down the road. You don’t know it – they started a sort of self-sufficient commune in Hoo Hall, and there’s a progressive nursery attached.’

‘Montessori or Steiner or something?’

‘Something. They don’t keep their staff long, probably because they don’t pay much, so they’re always desperate.’

‘Do they know I’m a murderess?’

‘You’re not a murderess, and the accident didn’t make the national headlines, so probably not.’

‘Oh, Em, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t know anything about children and—’

‘You can try. Then maybe something else will turn up, or you’ll start painting again.’

‘Vaddie at the gallery keeps asking me for more – but they’ve got everything I’d finished.’

‘You need to get back here and let the moors cure you, and Gloria will brew you up a tonic. You’ll see – everything will be OK.’

Gloria is a wisewoman, and taught Em everything she knows, but she brews the most God-awful-tasting potions.

‘It’ll be odd living in the mistress’s house.’

‘Gloria Mundi’s cleaned it till it squeaks, and I’ve oiled the kitchen door so you can come and go as you like without anyone knowing.’

‘Thank you, Em,’ I said gratefully. ‘I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.’

‘No you haven’t – you know I like organising. It’s that Jessica woman who’s making trouble – you’ll have to help me to get her out.’

‘Father’s mistresses never last long,’ I assured her. ‘Bran’s mother was the longest, but that was only because she wanted to have Bran before she went back home. I don’t think she and Father were communicating in any way once Bran was conceived.’

‘Ah, yes – Bran. He phoned me the other day from outside the university. Apparently the High Priestess of Thoth manifested herself, and informed him that he shouldn’t use mobile phones any more because evil spirits escaped from them into his head. I couldn’t hear him very clearly because he was holding it away from his ear, and then there was a swooshing noise and a splash before it went dead, so I think he threw it into the river.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes, so I’ve put Rob’s taxi on stand-by to go and collect him. I don’t suppose Bran’s students will notice his absence if he has to come home for a break. He doesn’t remember he’s got any, half the time, and when he does he probably lectures them in some ancient tongue they can’t understand. But apparently the book’s going to be brilliant.’

‘There has to be a good reason the University is prepared to put up with his little ways, other than his having an IQ greater than the sum of all the other staff.’

‘He also has a whanger bigger than any of the other staff,’ Em said, which was true; even skinny-dipping in the icy beck as children we’d seen he’d been impressive in that department. But unless the High Priestess of Thoth manifested herself in a more solid form and drew him a diagram, I feared that asset would be entirely wasted.

‘I don’t think that would particularly impress academic circles,’ I said.

‘Perhaps not. I’ve asked them to phone me if he doesn’t calm down in a day or two, and Rob can set off.’

Rob knew Bran’s little ways and was always quite happy to drive down to Bran’s ancient and hallowed university (which had proved surprisingly accepting of his eccentricity) and transport him back without mishap.

‘Well, I suppose you couldn’t put Bran in the Summer Cottage,’ I said, though it still rankled that I’d been the one ejected for the mistress.

‘I had one of my visions – about Anne,’ Em said, reading my mind too. ‘She’s in difficulty, and she’ll be coming home soon, for healing.’

‘Spiritual or otherwise? She hasn’t been shot, has she? I thought you said she couldn’t be shot?’

‘I don’t think it’s that sort of wound,’ Em said doubtfully. ‘But I can’t tell clearly – my predictions are getting more and more fuzzy: I think the vertical hold’s gone. Really, what’s the point of hanging on to my virginity in order to retain my powers, when all I ever see is the boring and mundane? I’ve never clearly seen anything wildly exciting. I really think I might as well explore the darker side of witchcraft.’

‘Well, don’t do anything hasty,’ I begged her. ‘Especially anything … Aleister Crowley.’

‘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.’