Bridesmaids Revisited (16 page)

“Everyone’s tired.” Rosemary got to her feet. “Ellie, especially, has had a long day, so let’s make it an early night. Thora, why don’t you take her luggage upstairs and show her to her room?”

“I took my things up to the second landing just before Amelia Chambers arrived.” I suppressed a shiver. “But would you like me to put my car in the garage? I noticed you have one beyond the side archway.”

“Trouble is”—Thora grimaced—”it’s chock-full with the lawn mower and a couple of wheelbarrows. It’s a scramble to get our old bike in and out. Would you mind leaving your car in the lane overnight? Tomorrow I can move some of the stuff into the shed at the back of the garden.”

“There’s no need to do that,” I assured her. “The car isn’t in the way out there, is it?”

“If you’re sure that’s all right.” Rosemary was moving to the door. “We don’t tend to get vandals around here. It’s too off the beaten path. Jane, why don’t you go and check on Edna and see that the cats are all in for the night, while Thora and I take Ellie upstairs?”

“Go on ahead, Rosemary, and climb into bed, you look done to death.” This suggestion of Thora’s received no resistance and when the two other women went out into the hall she asked if I would like a book to take up with me.

“That would be lovely.”

“Always helps, doesn’t it, to make you feel settled when going to sleep in a strange house. A chapter or two and you’re out like a light. Unless you’re the sort who gets so caught up in the story you can’t put the book down until the last page. By which time it’s six in the morning and you feel like a rag. Better promise me you won’t do that”—she chuckled—“or Rosemary will have me in the doghouse.”

Dog, who had clambered onto the vacated sofa, cocked an ear on thinking he was being brought into the conversation. Thora patted him as she headed towards the bookcase. “Silly old boy,” she said. “You’ve never occupied a doghouse in your life. Spoiled rotten, that’s what you are! Sleeps on my bed,” she added over her shoulder to me. “And always shares a nightcap with me. Ovaltine’s his favorite. Jane doesn’t give her cats milk. Says it gives them diarrhea. So whose door do they scratch on at night? Mine! They know better than to bother Rosemary. She’s not an animal person, except perhaps for having a sneaking fondness for that blasted parrot! I wish the cats would eat it. Tried to show them how to open its cage and offered to grill it, sauté it with truffles, or pop it in a casserole but they’re just not interested.”

“And Polly hasn’t been blackmailing you for thousands?” I said as Thora began pulling books off the shelves and studying the titles. After what I had experienced since being invited to this house, I was ready to believe a bird capable of human wickedness.

“Polly knows I don’t have a bean to my name apart from my pension and that’s gone the moment I draw it. There’s my share of the household expenses and stuff to buy for the garden. Rosemary’s jolly good, made it clear from the start she didn’t expect me to contribute as much as herself or Jane—who is reasonably well placed, although none of her late husbands were rolling in money. Nor, for that matter, is Rosemary herself. William Fitzsimons didn’t leave her any money to keep the house going and there’s nothing from her job, because she didn’t continue on to retirement age.”

“Why was that?”

Thora put the books she had been holding back on the shelf. “Shouldn’t have said anything about that, Ellie. Jane is always telling me I let my tongue wag too much. Think how I chewed your ear off about my love affair with Michael while Rosemary and Jane went with Edna to the hospital. It’s not that there’s any big secret, Rosemary just found the job stressful. And who wouldn’t? My nerves would have cracked the first day if I’d worked in a chemist shop. All those bottles of medicine and pills, I would have been terrified of handing out the wrong thing and having the person drop dead before getting past the perfume counter, let alone out the door.” She was talking a little too fast, just as I did when I was uncomfortable, and she dropped a couple of books on the floor. “Oh, there it is,” she said, looking down, “the one I was looking for; it’s a wonderful old gothic romance written at least sixty years ago by someone I’d never heard of. Found it in a used bookstore, last week. Probably paid more than I should have. But the proprietor said it was worth it because of the leather binding.” Thora was still visibly flustered when she handed me the book, whose title I saw was
Secrets of the Crypt.

“I’ll start reading it as soon as I get into bed,” I promised. But, truth be told, I was more interested in knowing what she was afraid she had let slip, or come close to doing so, about Rosemary.

Could it be that Rosemary had been sacked from her job at the chemist’s for handing out the wrong prescription? Or was it worse than that? Had she been helping herself to bottles of codeine, sleeping tablets, or whatever she fancied? These weren’t nice thoughts to have about one of my hostesses and I jumped guiltily on hearing someone come into the sitting room. It was Edna who had entered. She was wearing her coat and hat—a black felt one, very suitable under the circumstances, and had her handbag strung over her arm.

“I just came in to say I’m leaving, Tom’s going to take me over to my cousin Gwen’s.” She looked from me to Thora. “I gave her a ring on the telephone, I thought that would be all right, Miss Dobson. I told her about Ted and she said she was sure it would be all right with her husband if I was to come and spend the night. It won’t be for more than that. Tomorrow I’ll be feeling more myself. Have to, won’t I? I’m not the first to go through this and I won’t be the last, that’s what I have to keep telling myself.”

“It must be hard,” I said, although given Ted’s abominable nature, it was difficult not to think that in time she would realize she had been granted a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

“Edna, wouldn’t you rather stay here?” Thora appeared to be over her former discomfiture and fully focused on the sad-faced woman with the apron bib showing under the partially buttoned coat.

“Better not. You know I’ve not a thing against Mrs. Pettinger’s cats. But I don’t think on this night in particular I could get a proper sleep with the thought of them coming in to jump all over me. As I said earlier, Gwen can be snippy and her husband’s too much of a ladies’ man for my taste, but well—they are family when all’s said and done. Only thing is, they’ve got another lady staying with them. An old school churn of Gwen’s.”

“That’s Mrs. Malloy, who works for me at home,” I told her. “When she found out I was coming here she decided it would be a good opportunity to renew the friendship. She needed to get away because her husband’s been trying to get back in touch with her after a long separation.”

“Mrs. Pettinger told me he showed up here this evening,” she said.

“Yes. But there’s no need to bother saying anything if Mrs. Malloy is up when you get there. I’ll try and see her tomorrow and tell her about Leonard.”

“Whatever you think best, Miss Ellie.” She smiled. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, on account of being so close to your mother when she was growing up?”

“I like it,” I felt the prickle of tears and my heart warm to her. “Perhaps we can talk about her sometime, when you’re feeling up to it.”

“That’d be nice. And now I’d really better be off, unless you’d like me to pick up those books first.”

Thora looked down at the floor. “Absolutely not, Edna. As if I’d let you! I dropped them when I was going through an armful looking for one to lend Ellie. We were talking earlier and I got the feeling from one or two things we were saying that she enjoys a gothic novel as much as I do. But I couldn’t remember just where I had put it.”

“But here it is.” I tapped the leather-bound volume.

“Your mother wasn’t much of a bookworm; all she lived for was her ballet dancing. Who’d have believed it—her taken so young.” Edna shifted her handbag into the crook of her arm. “And here’s me not stopping to think how lucky I was to have Ted for fifty years of married life.”

“That’s not what you need scolding for.” Thora went over and gave her a hug. “It’s that you’ve taken the poultice off your foot.”

“I couldn’t have got my shoe on with it, now could I? Anyway I’m sure it did its job just like all of your concoctions, Miss Dobson, because I’m walking much better. Oh, I almost forgot,” she said as we followed her out into the hall, “I left a saucepan of cocoa on the stove, just waiting to be warmed up again. There’s enough for all of you. Bye for now. See you in the morning.”

“You will not.” Thora held the front door open for her.

“All right, then”—Edna turned and patted her shoulder—“I’ll wait to come in till the afternoon. And don’t go telling me otherwise. Keeping busy’s pretty much all I’ve got left.” She pointed. “Look, there’s Tom waiting for me just a couple of steps up the lane. Mustn’t keep him waiting any longer.” With this she limped down the steps, firmly rejecting Thora’s offer of assistance, saying it was bad enough being a widow, she didn’t intend to become an invalid, and shooing both of us back inside.

“She’s a dear, wonderful, stubborn woman.” Thora led the way up the staircase with its gallery of photographs, including the one that looked like me, but was of Sophia as a young girl. I looked to see if there was one of my mother. But all I saw were unknown faces.

A wall lamp on the first landing lighted our way. I hadn’t paid much attention on my previous trip upstairs. Now I noticed that the small rectangular space had the same time-worn pine floors as the hall and included an iron balcony swathed in greenery overlooking the conservatory. There were two doors across from each other and another angled into a corner. “That’s the bathroom. The bedroom on the right is Rosemary’s and the one on the left, Jane’s.” Thora turned a corner to our left and proceeded up a half-flight of steps to a similar-sized space, except that this one was L-shaped. I drew a deep breath. This time there was no confetti. No scent of orange blossom. I picked up my raincoat and handbag. Thora handled my case.

The door right at the top was to her bedroom, she told me, before leading me down a strip of faded carpeting and around a corner. We went up a couple of steps into a surprisingly large room furnished with a nineteen-forties dressing table with some of the silvering gone from the mirror. There were also a couple of tallboys, several chairs and tables that looked as though they had made their way up here to get out of people’s way, and a wardrobe with one door standing open, probably because it wouldn’t stay closed unless secured with a rubber band. An iron bed covered with a patchwork quilt stood under windows that were positioned high on the wall and looked as though they might have had bars on them at one time. This must have been the nursery once, I decided, as Thora put my case down on the trunk, the kind I had taken with me to boarding school, that was at the foot of the bed. Had it been Sophia’s, I wondered. My eyes skimmed the couple of pictures and the embroidered sampler on the walls to fix on the spiral iron staircase a few feet from the boarded-in fireplace.

“Rosemary had that built shortly after we moved in.” Thora stood with her hands on her hips, giving the room a once-over. “Provides access to the attics, although we hardly ever go up there. But when we do, it certainly beats swinging like Tarzan’s Jane on a rope ladder. Actually, our Jane is the only one of us who wouldn’t have minded. You wouldn’t think it to look at her”—Thora’s dimples appeared—“but she was a whiz at games when we were at school—hockey, netball, rounders, swimming, and she could run like the wind. She’s still wonderfully fit. Only reason she doesn’t ride the old bike in the garage is because it’s really kept for Edna. And Jane won’t encroach on what she sees as other people’s turf. Besides, she loves to walk. Goes over to see friends in Upper and Lower Thaxstead on foot all the time.”

“But it’s miles.” I thought of my drive from Gwen’s to Knells.

“A bit of a stretch if you’re not used to it, but not all that bad if you take the country road and cut across the fields by way of the footpaths. I’ve done it myself. But this isn’t the best time to talk about stretching your legs, is it?” Thora took the book she had lent me and set it on the small chest of drawers that served as a bedside table. “Let me show you in here.”

I stepped after her into a rectangle containing a shower stall no bigger than a refrigerator, a tiny pedestal basin with a couple of towel hooks above it, and a built-in blanket chest, painted pink with transfers of butterflies, taking up more than its share of room. The toilet appeared to have been added as an afterthought. It was wedged into a corner and looked as though it required a sign above the tank reading Standing Room Only.

“I need to show you how to flush it. You have to hold the handle down and count to ten.” Thora demonstrated as she spoke. “If you don’t, the tank doesn’t clear and it will gurgle away all night. “Count to eleven and it will overflow and you’ll have to put on a pair of Wellington boots before getting out of bed in the morning. Would you like to practice?”

To oblige her I did so and was rewarded by a normal-sounding flush ending with a sort of burp.

“You’re a quick learner.” Thora patted me on the shoulder and returned with me to the bedroom. “I’ll leave you to settle in, unless there’s anything else you think you might need.”

“Nothing at all—you, and Rosemary and Jane, have done everything to make me comfortable.” I sat down on the bed.

“But something’s bothering you.”

“I was just wondering if this was my mother’s room.”

“Don’t think so.” Thora bent and kissed my cheek. “I’m almost sure she had my room. But I can ask Rosemary in the morning. She’ll remember because all the furnishings from William Fitzsimons’s day were still here when we moved in. And she made careful lists of what was what before inviting Mina to come and see if there was anything she wanted, especially those things that were her own.”

“I would have been pleased to sleep in her room if she had been happy here.” I sat with my hand cupped to my face. Thora’s kiss had stirred some memory so that it floated halfway to the surface before drifting back down to the murky depths, to be washed over by the present moment.