Going Loco (8 page)

Mrs Holdsworth finished Hoovering her little patch of hall and tottered to the kitchen for her coat. She pocketed the money Belinda had left her with an aggressive swipe, as if she would just as happily trample it underfoot. It had been an unsettling afternoon. Three times she had tried Belinda with conversational gambits of such outstanding ingenuity that she’d had to have a sit-down afterwards. But even ‘Do you think Richard Branson is really the Antichrist?’ and ‘Whatever made anyone invent the scone?’ failed to find their mark. And then, to top it all, this woman in the light mac had unplugged her Hoover.

In cleaning-lady terms, this was a direct challenge that cannot be overstated. It is the equivalent of the glove smacked across your face from right to left, and then from left to right.

From her ground-floor office, Belinda listened as Mrs Holdsworth left. She felt half guilty and half excited by the idea of hurting her feelings. She loved the sense of danger. What if Mrs Holdsworth told her off?

‘I’ll be off, then, Belinda,’ the old woman called. ‘We’re out of Jif.’

‘Right. Many thanks.’

‘Back next week.’

‘Mm.’

‘Did you know the other woman took a key?’

‘That’s OK.’

She heard the front door opened; felt the draught; heard traffic noise. Mrs H was evidently taking her time, deciding whether to pursue it. Then, with a muttered ‘Fuck it,’ the door was slammed, and Mrs H could faintly be heard coughing (‘God Almighty, Jesus wept’) at the garden gate.

Stefan was not expecting to meet his mother-in-law Virginia lurking behind a denuded London plane tree as he walked from the bus along Armadale Road. It was six thirty and dark, which didn’t help. And since she no longer looked remotely like the woman he knew as Mother, he walked straight past her, consulting a little book and talking to himself. ‘Make it snappy or make tracks,’ she heard him saying. ‘You have made a hole in my pocket but I won’t make a song and dance. How do you make that out exactly? Ha! That makes you sit up, for sure.’

‘Stefan!’ she called. She had always liked Stefan, because he was big and handsome; and he had always liked her, too. The
reason they saw Mother so infrequently was only that Belinda was discouraged by criticism, and Mother, unfortunately, had no other mode of communication.

He turned. ‘Let’s make a night of it, baby,’ he said. ‘Oh, hello, Virginia. Didn’t recognize you. Something up?’

Mother’s permanently fixed expression of wide-eyed alarm often gave rise to this question. But on this occasion at least the context made it the right thing to say.

‘I had to see you,’ she said. ‘Who’s Linda? What’s going on?’

Stefan’s eyes swivelled. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you out here in the street? Has there been dirty work at the crossroads?’

Mother pursed her lips. Or, more accurately, she attempted to purse her lips but gave up.

‘Yes, I rather think there has,’ she said at last. ‘I wanted to invite Belinda to the opera tonight. This Linda refused to let me.’

‘Really? She sent you away from the door, like a dog in the night?’

‘I phoned. They wouldn’t let me in, Stefan.’ She pouted. ‘I’ve been out here in the cold. It was someone called Linda and she was very rude. Typical of Belinda to hire somebody who’d be rude to her mother.’

At which point, as they approached the front door, Linda opened it and smiled at them both. She was evidently just leaving, but when she saw them she ushered them inside, gesturing at them to keep the noise down.

‘Mrs Johansson is working until seven,’ she whispered. ‘The dinner will be ready at seven thirty. I’ve rigged up a temporary answering-machine, made a list of the more urgent bills, filed the letters, cleaned the kitchen windows, sprayed the cat for fleas and changed all the beds.’

‘Linda is our new Mrs Mop,’ Stefan explained, somewhat redundantly.

‘The newspapers I took to the dump,’ Linda continued, ‘but I’ve rung the recycling people and they’ll start coming next Tuesday. Um, what else? Your dressing-gown is warming in the airing cupboard, Mr Johansson. I didn’t know what to do with this ice-hockey puck, but I can ask Mrs Johansson at our three o’clock meeting tomorrow. Normally our meeting will be at one o’clock, when I’ll provide soup and a hot dish, but tomorrow I’ll be a little late, as I’ll be having lunch with Mrs Johansson’s agent on her behalf.’

A number of objections raised themselves in the minds of Stefan and Mother, but under this barrage all they could do was laugh nervously.

‘Does Belinda know all this?’

Linda was surprised. ‘Of course not. That’s the idea.’

Stefan ran through the list again in his mind. He frowned. ‘I think the cat was not ours, Linda. We do not own a cat. I fear you have de-fleaed the cat of another.’

Mother made a strangled noise. ‘The cat of another?’ she exploded. ‘Who cares about the cat of another? I’ve never heard anything like it. This is so typical of Belinda. Having lunch with Jorkin? How dare you?’

Linda looked puzzled. ‘I am thinking only of what’s best for Mrs Johansson, and for everybody. Truly, I’m very good at this sort of thing. One of my previous employers said I was like Nature. I abhor a vacuum. Meanwhile, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mrs Johansson has fears that she will cease to be before her pen has gleaned her teeming brain.’

Mother tried to look aghast, but (of course) continued only to look mildly surprised. In any case, it was hard to have a proper scene huddled by the front door, talking in hushed tones for fear of interrupting the sacred work of Belinda.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she hissed. ‘This house! This is so typical! You waltz in here. You just waltz—’

Mother, breathless with exasperation, seemed to be getting
stuck on the insufferable image of Linda waltzing. ‘I mean, here’s an idea, Linda, whoever you are,’ she spat. ‘If you’re doing everything for my daughter, why don’t you just come to see
Così Fan Tutte
with me tonight, then sleep with Stefan afterwards?’

‘Virginia!’ exclaimed Stefan. English sarcasm always outraged him.

But Linda had her head on one side, as if making her mind up. ‘Would you stay there, please?’ she said, and disappeared in the direction of Belinda’s study. They waited awkwardly by the front door, like neighbourhood children waiting for a friend to come out to play.

Linda returned. ‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d love to come to the opera in Belinda’s place. She’s happy to carry on working, and she said it would be a good opportunity for me to get to know you. She also said you know perfectly well she hates poncy opera. So thank you, thank you very much. Is that a Prada coat? I thought so. Look at the tailoring.’

She attempted to give Mother a kiss on the cheek, but was almost shoved away. ‘Poncy?’ Mother queried, obviously hurt. ‘Belinda!’ she called.

Stefan intervened. ‘If the ticket is spare, Virginia, why not take Linda? She takes us by surprise, yet it is a swell idea. Here is a vacuum for her to fill, I think. Surely we should give her the glad hand for the kitchen windows and such. Only the cat of another has the right to bad feeling.’

‘May I call you Virginia?’ asked Linda, with a smile.

‘Of course not.’

Mother was beginning to feel dizzy.

‘You must come to dinner tomorrow night, mustn’t she, Mr Johansson? I happen to know Belinda’s aiming to finish her chapter on Dostoevsky this week, and she’ll be so relieved to know she needn’t do anything.’

‘Poncy?’ Mother repeated. ‘
Così
isn’t poncy.’

Linda waved it away. ‘May I call you Mother?’

‘No.’

‘Well, this is very exciting. Do I need to change first, do you think? Or shall I come as I am?’

Back in her flat, Maggie stroked Ariel and Miranda in the dark, and tried to imagine how she would tell Belinda what had happened. Belinda ought to be informed about a real-life case of doubles, surely? But, on the other hand, the vocabulary was so difficult. ‘I met a double’ would sound like she’d met her own double; ‘I met two doubles’ sounded like she’d met four people, possibly dressed in tennis whites, which was in no way a reflection of what had happened.

If only she had a contact number for Leon! If only she had listened more carefully when he told her the details of his next indie-car yawnfest assignment in Oshbosh, Oklahoma. ‘Off to Oshbosh,’ said his note. ‘You were lovely. I want to see you again. Yours anally, L.’ She couldn’t possibly ask Jago about him: it was imperative that her friends never find out the calibre of person she allowed herself to sleep with. But, there again, Leon’s presence was desperately required, simply to prove to her bloody therapist that she hadn’t made him up.

Olivia in
Twelfth Night,
she reflected, had had such an easy time of it by comparison. ‘Honestly, you look
exactly
like him,’ she had lamely told Noel, Julia’s husband, in the café, when he’d revived her. But he only nodded solemnly and exchanged professional tut-tut glances with Julia. He was a therapist too, naturally. Neither of them believed her. It was a nightmare. They wanted to know why she’d identified herself as Penelope Pitstop, but since neither of them had a sense of humour or had watched children’s television, it had been necessary to abandon the explanation.

‘Margaret won’t mind me telling you,’ Julia was informing Noel now. ‘We’ve been working for several months on a specific complex, relating to her feelings of invisibility. Her greatest fear – I think this is true, Margaret? – is of being publicly ignored and rejected by people who’ve been intimate with her. I think we agreed that of all humiliations this one utterly annihilates you, doesn’t it, Margaret?’

Maggie nodded reluctantly, horrified that Julia should discuss this with somebody else. Julia lowered her voice. ‘We think it’s probably to do with her father.’

Noel looked impressed by this discovery. ‘The father is so often the cause,’ he agreed. ‘And today that fear was projected on to me? Tch, I’m so sorry I hurt you that way, Margaret.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ insisted Maggie. ‘And it wasn’t anything to do with projecting. It’s just that you look
exactly
like the man I slept with last night. It was a case of mistaken identity, that’s all.’

‘I know,’ said Noel.

‘I know,’ echoed Julia, and automatically offered Maggie a packet of tissues from her bag. Likewise automatically, Maggie took one. She shoved it up the sleeve of her jumper.

‘You do,’ she insisted, and waggled her hands.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Noel, thoughtfully. ‘I’ll tell you what, Margaret. Can I call you Margaret?’

‘You already have.’

‘Well, Margaret.’ Noel rested his chin in his hands. ‘I’m struck by an idea here. It’s pretty revolutionary, I warn you. But why don’t we all work together on this? I happen to be an expert on therapeutic role-playing. For therapeutic purposes, and under the strictest ethical controls, I could take the role of this man, this – Leon?’

‘Yes, Leon.’

‘And – well, I’m just feeling my way here, of course – but I could be Leon and, um, well, recognize you. Why not take
advantage of the fact that you see a resemblance? I could recognize you and respond to you, and make you feel better. Sometimes I wouldn’t recognize you, and you could hit me. Although only under the strictest ethical doo-dahs and whatsits, et cetera. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. To be honest, I was thinking of leaving therapy altogether.’

Noel and Julia both gasped.

‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘I spend so much time talking about my life, I feel I’m not actually living it.’

The therapists swapped glances.

‘All the more reason to continue with therapy, but step it up, add another dimension,’ Julia advised, quickly.

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes.’

They watched her as she wavered. Noel coughed. ‘I’ll come clean with you, Margaret. I think you have a very serious problem.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Ignoring this problem is simply not a choice you have. No, you can either solve this problem through years of analysing it, or you can confront it and blow it out of the water. Tease it out slowly, or blitz it. Well, I think I know you well enough to know which course you’d prefer.’

‘You don’t know me at all,’ Maggie pointed out, reasonably.

‘Margaret, your hostility and defensiveness are all part of your problem.’

‘That’s true,’ said Julia. ‘You resist intimacy, even with me.’

Maggie wanted to hit her. She wanted to hit him, too. The café would be closing at half past two, and she still hadn’t had her bacon sandwich.

‘Look. I’m sorry. But the point is, you’re the lady I pay to help me sort out a problem, and you’re a man who just happens to
look exactly like the man I slept with last night. I didn’t like him, and to be honest, I’m not warming much to you, either.’

Julia shook her head and sighed.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Noel told her. ‘I can work with that. Let’s say I’m the man you slept with last night, Margaret. See? I’m Leon.
Nyow-nyow,
and here comes Michael Schumacher in the Renault. First things first. Was I any good in bed?’

‘You were terrible.’

‘OK,’ he said again, with slightly less enthusiasm. ‘I can work with that, too.’

‘No,’ she relented. ‘You were nice. I’m a bitch. I mean,
he
was nice. What am I saying?’

A man came to collect their cups. ‘Michael Schumacher drives a Ferrari,’ he observed. ‘As a point of fact.’

‘I didn’t say this was going to be easy,’ snapped Noel. ‘I just said it was the best way to stop this lovely young woman spiralling into madness.’

At which the man pronounced the Gemini closed.

Sitting here in the dark now, Maggie realized Miranda and Ariel were practising that special cat alarmed expression, which says, ‘Who the hell are you? Am I in the wrong house? My God, I’m getting out of here.’ It didn’t help. She got up and brushed them off her lap.

This is all bloody Leon’s fault, she thought. Bloody, bloody Leon.

When Jago returned from the office at nine that evening, he said nothing about Stefan being a clone. He just brought home with him five books by Laurie Spink, four by Steve Jones and two by Richard Dawkins. It was clear that his efforts to absorb and enjoy these books had defeated him. He looked tired and miserable, as though he’d been wrestling feebly with
a muscular opponent who’d not only held him by the wrists but had laughed at him. The minute he was indoors he made a tall pile of the books in the hall and kicked them against a door. Viv heard the noise and rushed in. ‘Special supplement on genetics,’ he explained, waving a hand at the scattered, broken-backed volumes. He wore a wounded expression. ‘Do you think Melvyn Bragg really understands any of this?’ he cried. ‘Because I’m fucked if I do.’