Simply Heaven (29 page)

‘Christ, girl,’ I tell her, ‘I think you’re trapped for life.’

Tilly groans. I insinuate my free arm between the dog and my sister-in-law’s swollen abdomen, and lift the unresponsive form on to the floor, give her a hand, and with three heaves we get her upright.

‘Bit of a palaver, this pregnancy thing.’

‘Really,’ she says, ‘don’t do it. Ever.’

‘Got to be done, I guess.’

‘The sooner they can grow them in Kilner jars, the happier I’ll be,’ she says. ‘A stomach like a laundry bag, veins like road maps, piles like chicken droppings. Men don’t know how lucky they are.’

‘What was that you were reading there?’

She reaches down and picks her book off the floor where she’s dropped it. Flips it over to reveal
The Well of Loneliness
.

‘Never read it. Any good?’

‘Not really. I thought it was meant to be about lesbians, but it just seems to be about wanting to wear trousers and breed horses. I don’t know, maybe it’s a metaphor. Instant soporific, mind you. I’ll take it up with me tonight and guarantee myself some kip. So how do we go about this, then?’

‘Tell you what. You sit at the end with your feet on the floor and I’ll get behind you.’

‘It’s a bit like a
Carry On
film, isn’t it? Do I need to take anything off, Matron?’

‘Not a lot. Maybe just the top three layers or so.’

‘Lucky,’ she says, obeying, ‘it’s not winter yet.’

Oh hell. And there was me thinking that Christmas
was
the deep midwinter. There’s only a few days to go, after all.

I kneel up behind her on the chaise, and start warming her back up with an all-over rub. It’s not easy. Corduroy tends to snag, if you’ve not exfoliated your palms lately. I run through the choice of hairdresser-style small talk in my head. Been anywhere nice lately? How’s work? Lovely weather. Got any holidays lined up?

None of them seems particularly appropriate. So I say: ‘Jesus, girl, you’ve got a back like a board. When was the last time anyone had a go at it?’

This is the equivalent of asking who was responsible for the state of your client’s hair. It either makes them apologetic, and therefore putty in your hands, or confused, which has a similar effect.

‘Never,’ says Tilly. ‘It’s not the sort of thing we do much of around here.’

‘Have you been cricking your neck at all?’

Tilly nods. ‘Like an eight-gun salute, three times a day. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.’

‘I guess I must have mistaken them for real gunshots.’

‘Ha ha.’

I roll up my sleeves, lay my forearms either side of her spine and start rocking.

‘Oh, lovely,’ says Tilly. ‘Ah, God, that feels nice.’

I realise, with a glum little twist, that this is probably the most kindly human contact she’s had in ages. Poor girl. Tilly must have been crying her eyes out for months in the isolation of her room, then getting up and washing her face, because Wattestone women don’t indulge in unnecessary displays of emotion. I’m not sure whether to broach the subject. Hopefully her tongue’ll loosen with her muscles. Otherwise, I might give her a bit of cranial.

‘So,’ she asks, ‘have you found out what the old people are in a tizz about yet?’

‘Oh, yeah. You won’t believe it. I don’t believe it myself. Your gran’s only decided that I’m Rufus’s mistress. She wants me horsewhipped from the property.’’

I feel her tense beneath my arms, then she starts to laugh. ‘Stop! Stop! I have to sit up!’

I cease, and Tilly lets her head fall back against her shoulders. She is shaking with mirth. ‘I d-d-d that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in ages!’

‘Not so bloody funny for me.’

She laughs a bit more.

‘I mean, I don’t get it,’ I say, resuming. ‘How come people can’t just tell her? It’s got to sink in eventually.’

‘Granny’s mind is a weird amalgamation of sponge and granite,’ says Tilly. ‘She soaks up all the tiny nuances of everyday life, but the big picture just washes straight over her. It’s partly because she’s a bit gaga with her age, but it’s just as much that if she simply denies the existence of something that doesn’t suit her, she can usually make it not exist. And if you try to force things, she’ll have a whoosh-dada to end all whoosh-dadas. You saw what she was like this morning?’

‘Hard to miss.’

‘Well, imagine that, multiplied by ten, and going on till the middle of next year. Believe me, you don’t want to get on Granny’s bad side. Nobody does. That’s how come,’ she clears her throat, then mentions the elephant in the corner, ‘they can all convince themselves that she’ll never find out about Hugo. Because it would be so much easier if she didn’t.’

So there we go: it’s out in the open. I make sure I don’t break my rhythm.

‘I was wondering about that. Do you want to tell me about it? I don’t want to – you know …’

A huge sigh. ‘Nothing to tell, really,’ she says, and the strangled little Kristin Scott-Thomas voice is back. ‘Just one of those things … I married a shit and he’s running true to his personality.’

If I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that there’s no point in pushing someone who doesn’t want to be pushed. You’re more likely to make them angry than to help them out.

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘You know, if there’s anything I can do …’

‘You’re doing it.’ She pushes back against my elbow, and the lump does a crunch, dissolves. ‘Hunnh,’ she says. ‘To be honest, this is the most anyone has done in months.’

I start on the lump’s twin on the other side. We’re quiet for a bit, reflecting. Then she says: ‘Well, that’s what you get for making a suitable marriage.’

‘You weren’t to know, Tilly. Nobody really knows.’

‘I did,’ she says. ‘God, everybody in the world knew that Hugo was a bolter.’

‘So why did you marry him, then?’

‘Because I’m stupid. Because I’m wet. Because I was thirty-four, and nobody else had asked me, and I felt a failure, and I saw the way Granny and Mary despise all the local spinsters and I didn’t want to have to cope with the fact that they were starting to look at me the same way. And Granny thought he was marvellous. He’s the grandson of one of her oldest friends, you know.’

‘Jesus. You lot might as well live in a trailer park, the way you intermarry.’

‘Well, you know what they say about the upper classes and the working classes …’

‘Yes, and
you
know that’s just so much bull cooked up by the upper classes to avoid getting their heads cut off.’

She laughs again.

‘So you married this guy to keep your nana happy?’

She doesn’t answer. Then, in a small voice: ‘Well, I’ve got my reward now, haven’t I?’

‘I don’t think that’s quite how I’d put it,’ I say. ‘I’m really, really sorry, Tilly. You must feel awful.’

I’ve got the heels of my hands either side of her nape, pressing in and out like a happy cat. There’s no give at all. It’s like kneading teak. ‘So what are you going to call it,’ I ask, ‘when it’s born?’

‘I thought Henry if it’s a boy. Lucy if it’s a girl.’

‘Lucy’s good.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Henry’s a bit … smoking jacket, isn’t it?’

Tilly laughs again. ‘You’re a blast,’ she says. ‘It’s another family name. My grandfather. And countless others before him.’

‘Lucy’s not, though?’

There’s a slight pause. ‘No. Not a Wattestone name, no. It’s—’

The door bursts open and Rufus stands there. ‘Oh,
there
you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say. ‘Well, here I am.’

‘You do look odd, you two. Like a pair of dogs humping on a lawn.’

‘Nice image. What can we do you for?’

‘Um, well, um …’

‘Spit it out.’

‘Granny wants to talk to you,’ he says. ‘I think she’s finally got the message and wants to welcome you to the family or something.’

Beatrice is waiting for me in the brown study. Nessa is still getting her settled in, propping her into an ancient office chair behind the desk with the aid of half a dozen cushions and, I dare say, some hidden ropes. She’s got the chair set at the highest notch, doubtless in an effort to be intimidating (there’s a footstool placed pointedly on my side of the desk, bless it), and her feet dangle three inches from the floor. Nessa winks at me. I maintain a poker face, but look her straight in the eye for a full two seconds.

‘There you go, Mrs Wattestone,’ she says. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

‘No, that will be all,’ says Beatrice imperiously.

‘Okey-dokey,’ says Nessa. ‘Fair enough.’

Once she’s gone, Beatrice raises her chins and says: ‘Would you care to take a seat, Miss Kalamata?’

I don’t bother correcting her. I mean, in a way she’s got it right. Miss. Ms. It’s a minefield of my own creation. I fetch a proper armchair from where they’re lined up by the wall. ‘So. I gather you’ve something to say to me.’

Beatrice is dressed to kill today. She wears a floaty chiffon dress-and-coat combo in mint, which loosely swaddles her old-lady undergarments. They must be made of pressed steel, because anything that can pummel a sack of marshmallows into human form must be pretty robust. Her face has been whitewashed, and her eyes drawn in with thick black pencil, false eyelashes like pipe cleaners glued to the pinky lids, a crinkly line of marmalade greasepaint slicked across what remains of her lips and bleeding up into the cracks like candlewax. It’s the sort of look that has courtiers dropping to their knees, mumbling about vibrancy and vivaciousness. To me it looks like a couple of bats have lost their echo-sounding equipment and run slap into a factory wall.

She’s topped it all off with a hat. In a darker shade of green than the dress, it’s a confection of silk laurel leaves. Beatrice has an entire wheel-in closet full of hats, all lined up on polystyrene heads whose facial features have been coloured in crudely with crayon, next to her room in the neo-Gothic wing. I stumbled across it once and thought for a moment that I’d unlocked the door to Bluebeard’s cupboard and found the heads of Rufus’s previous wives.

‘Indeed I have,’ she says, and launches into one of those significant pauses.

I give her a good looking at while she’s doing it. The trouble with Beatrice is, she reminds me, more than anything, of a character in one of those old British sitcoms you get playing late-night to fill airtime for tuppence. Mrs Slocombe in
Are You Being Served?
. Whenever she opens her mouth to let out a few more of those strangulated vowels, I half-expect her to start banging on about her pussy. It doesn’t help, you know, when you’re supposed to be treating someone with respect.

‘So fire away,’ I say.

Beatrice, of course, doesn’t. Decades of bollocking housemaids has taught her not to just jump in until your opponent starts to look twitchy.

I give her a cheerful smile.

Beatrice drums her crabby old talons on the desktop. Eventually, she says: ‘Miss Kalamari. I have called you here today to talk woman to woman.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ve been thinking we ought to get to know each other.’

A slight widening of the eyes. ‘I want you to leave my grandson alone,’ she says.

I think about this for a bit. ‘Sorry,’ I reply eventually. ‘No can do, I’m afraid.’

I guess she has been expecting some sort of response like this. Scarlet women, after all, aren’t, on the whole, the sort who just go ‘Oh, OK’, and toddle off. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have made myself clear,’ she says. ‘Rufus is a very attractive young man. Of course he is. Any gel would fall in love with him. I
do
understand that. But this simply won’t do. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

‘Don’t you think that’s sort of up to Rufus?’

Beatrice starts to drawl, like someone in a costume drama. ‘My
deah
,’ she tells me, ‘you don’t understand, do you?’

‘Oh, I think I do,’ I reply. ‘You don’t think I’m good enough for your grandson and you’re warning me off.’

‘And you, poor child, are harbouring some naïve belief that he’ll marry you, I suppose.’

‘Er,’ I say.

She barely takes breath. ‘I’ve seen it all before, of course. Oh, I can’t remember
how
many times. But please, dear, I don’t want you to labour under any illusions. Boys like Rufus don’t
marry
gels like you.’ She waits for this information to sink in.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Beatrice,’ I say.

A sharp expulsion of air through the nostrils. ‘Permit me to remind you that I am a good deal older than you and have probably seen something more of the
real
world.’

Heavens. I’m in the middle of a Barbara Cartland novel. She’ll be telling me he’s a rake next. With a gambling problem and a cruel glint in his eye. Either that or she’ll be calling for Mr Humphries.

‘I know,’ she continues, ‘that you are probably cherishing hopes and dreams, making romantic plans for your future as the mistress of Bourton Allhallows, but I’m afraid, dear, that it simply isn’t going to happen.’

Too right, I think: not if I can help it.

‘You’ll hardly be the first,’ says Beatrice, ‘and I’m sure you won’t be the last. A man like Rufus, with his history and his charm and his wonderful house, is fatally attractive to young women. But he will never,
ever
marry you.’

My eyes wander as I listen to this lecture. There’s a crack in the wall behind Beatrice’s head. It must be an inch wide. I wonder if she’s noticed it. Probably not. Blinded, I should think, by the sand she’s buried her head in.

I realise she’s waiting for me to say something. I think fast. Come up with: ‘Is that what you think?’

‘No, dear, it’s what I
know
.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ says Beatrice.

‘Have you talked to him about it?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘And?’

A sigh. ‘I won’t pretend he’s not attached to you,’ she says. ‘I’m sure he’s fond of you, in his way. But Rufus is a sensible young man. He knows as well as anyone that marriage would be unthinkable. He has a strong sense of responsibility. I’m sure you’ve seen that. Responsibility and duty. These are our family watchwords. They are the words he has been brought up to value above all others.’