Every Woman for Herself (5 page)

‘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.

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.’