The Queen's Margarine (19 page)

Having retrieved her bag and jacket, she went straight out again, heading for the travel agent. Best to book well in advance, to allow the widest choice of dates and destinations. Besides, having been stuck indoors with Alison half the afternoon, she hadn't had a chance yet to enjoy the rare spring sunshine. So far, March had been continually wet and blustery; more raging lion than gambolling lamb. Only today had the wind died down and the sun resumed its role of coaxing green from brown. She decided to take the long route, through the park, and see if the horse chestnuts were in leaf.

Not quite. The fat, sticky buds were swollen and distended, but no fluttery green sprays had yet opened like the fingers of a hand. The blackthorn was in flower, though, having changed from last week's mourning into a froth of white confetti. Ironical, she reflected, how even here, in the park, she couldn't escape from procreation. Birds were hatching their young; frogs copulating in the pond; catkins puffing pollen-clouds on every passing breeze; the whole of nature burgeoning and breeding. Still, she was feeling distinctly better, out in this soft, scented air and enjoying
the sense of relaxation engendered by the weather. Now that winter's grip had loosened, people were coming out of hibernation like butterflies or bees, basking beneath benevolent blue skies. Some were walking dogs, others flying kites, several simply lazing on the grass.

She took the path that led past the large lily-pond, on towards the bandstand, through the rockery and rose-garden and eventually out to the High Street, keeping up a brisk, determined pace. She hated being idle, even at weekends; preferred to stick to a timetable; have some goal in mind.

All at once, she stopped, riveted by the sight of two babies in a pushchair – twins –
her
twins; the twins who had died at two years old, yet alive and resurrected. She continued staring in amazement, although uncomfortably aware that their wary mother, a slip of a girl, in a garish purple anorak, was eyeing her suspiciously – as a potential baby-kidnapper, perhaps. Quickly she averted her gaze, but, too shaken to walk on, sank down on the bench beside the girl, so she could watch the twins surreptitiously. The likeness was astounding and all the more extraordinary, considering how rare that particular colouring was: the rich, gleaming, red-gold hair – not carroty, not ginger, but genuinely titian – and the distinctive eyes, a brilliant speedwell-blue. As an insipid-looking child herself, with mousy hair and drab grey-nothing eyes, she had been jealous of those hated babies' sheer glamour and appeal. How horribly unfair it seemed that no one ever stopped to ogle
her
, exclaim about her beauty or joke about the droves of men who'd be queuing up to date her. She was simply overlooked: the plain, boring, elder sister, not worthy of a second glance.

Again, her gaze strayed back to the twins. It was as if she were looking at the photograph which still stood in pride of place on her mother's mantelpiece: the same mop of auburn curls, the same delicate, porcelain skin; even the same listless air, as if the babies were over-tired or ill. She knew from Alison's family that most toddlers were tornadoes – explosive, irrepressible – yet these particular two sat slumped passive in the pushchair.

‘How old are they?' she asked their mother, suddenly.

‘Just coming up to two. But they're small for their age. You see, they haven't been too well….'

Desperately, Jane tried to close her ears; couldn't bear to hear the details: the slow decline, the death, the parents' lifelong mourning, while she, the sister, silently rejoiced.

‘Chantal has a problem with her breathing, and Melanie's not eating as she should.'

Fancy names. Of course. Exceptionally beautiful children must have names to match. Her mother's two had been Rosamund and Bella. Another painful contrast. Plain Jane was considered good enough for her.

‘Do
you
have children?' the girl asked, thawing now a little.

‘No.'

‘Actually, twins are quite a handful.'

Jane gave the curtest nod, aware she must seem rude. ‘Yes,' she repeated, her voice indistinct and shaky. ‘I know.'

‘Why? Do you have twins in the family?'

The silence seemed to stretch for ever. ‘I had twin sisters,' she blurted out, at last. ‘Just like these, in fact. The same hair and eyes and … but I, er, lost touch with them.'

‘You mean, when you grew up?'

‘No, as a child. Very early on.'

‘Gosh! How awful.'

‘It wasn't, actually.' She was appalled by the words escaping from her lips. She must be losing her grip. As a rule, she would no more confide in strangers than run naked down the street.

‘Could I
hold
them?' she asked, barely recognizing the person making so unspeakable a request. The very thought of touching the twins brought her out in a sweat.

The girl bit her lip, clearly on her guard again. ‘I'm sorry, no. I told you – they're not well. In fact, I really ought to get them home.' She stood up, grabbed the pushchair handles, made to walk away.

‘No, wait! Don't go! This is desperately important. You see, I … I never held my own twins.'

The girl swung round, with a frown. ‘But you said you didn't have children.'

‘I was lying,' she whispered, almost to herself. ‘They
were
my twins, but I … lost them.'

‘Look, are you OK? You sound a bit – well …' The sentence petered out.

Jane said nothing. Had she
ever
been OK?

‘Maybe you ought to see a counsellor…. Anyway, must dash!'

Gone. Vanished in a trice. With no warning, no goodbye. Exactly like the first time. Men in black, called undertakers, swarming through the house. Two tiny coffins, shock-white against the black. Stiff wreaths; their blooms distorted; pins stuck through fragile flower-heads; evil scarlet roses bleeding into white. Her father's cold, stern, hurting hand, shackled to her own hand throughout the funeral. Yet, even long years afterwards, she had never got her parents back. Her mother remained chained to the dead twins, shrouded in black-marble grief, and her father buried his loss in overwork, escaping day and night from the dark morgue of the house. While
she
grew up, alone.

Tears streamed down her face. Furiously she brushed them off. She
never
cried, let alone in public. And, even now, she wasn't mourning the babies – that was well beyond her powers. Rather, she was weeping for her childlessness: the childlessness imposed on her by terror and resentment, and meted out as a due punishment for murder – murder in intent, at least. And she was weeping for the fact that, wherever she might go, on whatever ‘adult' holiday or ‘perfect' trip or tour, she could never travel light.

And never had.

Louise blew the dust off the blue-silk padded cover, with the tooled inscription, OUR BABY'S BOOK, and the picture of a stork holding a cradle in its beak. She opened the first page.

All the entries had been filled in by her father, in his distinctive, flowing copperplate. She sat staring at the writing, so familiar from his countless letters, or lists of jobs he left around the house, or instructions laboriously copied out for workmen – although wasted on them, really. Such impressive penmanship should be preserved in a museum, under a glass case.

As the phone rang for the umpteenth time, she dragged herself out of her chair. It had been mostly kindly neighbours, commiserating, offering help, but she had fobbed them off, so far. It seemed imperative to be alone – as she very rarely was these days.

‘Hello …
Who
? … Oh, the dentist … I'm sorry, I'd no idea he had an appointment this morning … No, he isn't ill … Yes, I know he should have cancelled it, but it wasn't actually possible.' A nervous laugh escaped her – a vulgar squawk, wildly inappropriate, which she quickly tried to turn into a cough. ‘He, er, passed away – yesterday.'

‘Passed away' – loathsome phrase. Lily-livered. Euphemistic. Muffling the dark, dread shriek of death.

‘Thank you,' she said to the receptionist, who was giving little
bleats of sympathy, before launching into an involved account of her own father's sudden death.

When she had finally rung off, Louise went straight back to the baby book. Why blue, she wondered, stroking the plush cover? Had they wanted a boy? And, if so, why had they never tried again; produced a second child? Maybe they had tried, though, and failed. So many things she didn't know – would never know, now that he had gone. Gone for ever. She couldn't grasp it yet; kept expecting to hear his key in the door and his cheery cry, ‘Louise, my love! How good of you to come.'

Turning the pages of the album, she peered closely at the tiny photographs – black and white, of course, since they dated from the fifties. The first showed her as an infant, bundled up in her father's arms in this very sitting-room, which had changed little over all that time. Her parents were so frugal and old-fashioned they had seen no reason to replace the existing furniture and furnishings, as long as they were serviceable. Admittedly, most of their stuff had faded and deteriorated but, over the years,
they
had also faded, and perhaps began to feel an instinctive bond with the rickety and obsolete. So different from her own generation, who had insisted on the up-to-date, the fashionably contemporary.

Something fell out of the book on to her lap: a small brown envelope, dated 2 May, 1955. Inside was her first lock of hair, cocooned in tissue paper, with a note added by her father: ‘Louise's hair is turning slightly darker. Originally, it was the colour of clover honey, but now it's more like butterscotch. Although the texture's very fine, there's a definite hint of a curl.'

It amazed her that he had found the time for all this detailed record-keeping but, knowing his perfectionism in matters of calligraphy, he had probably refused to allow her mother to inflict her messy scrawl on the book. And actual photos of her mother were noticeably rare, since she had always shunned the limelight and tended to disappear on some ‘urgent' kitchen mission, if any of their relatives showed up with a camera. It was her father who was pictured, year on year, giving her a bottle, or feeding her as she sat in her high chair, or using his bent, braced knee to help her stand, as a wobbly but determined toddler.

Reluctantly, she closed the book. It was sheer indulgence to be
wallowing in nostalgia when there was such a lot to do. Although all she had managed to achieve so far was to cover the old hearth rug with mementoes of her father, which she had collected from around the house: his shabby, Velcro-fastening shoes, misshapen from his bunioned feet; the
TV Times
, with his favourite programmes highlighted in marker-pen; the ancient, rusting,
long-bladed
, lethal scissors he had owned since God knew when; his stout wooden box of tools, containing not just hammers, pliers, chisels, but a bag of Creamline toffees and – strangely – a child's skipping rope. She had also found a shopping list, impeccably penned, of course, but pathetic in its meagreness: ‘toilet roll, tin of Irish stew'. She couldn't chuck such objects in the bin. They seemed part of her inheritance, to be treasured and conserved.

She got up again as the doorbell rang: Miss Mays from number six: a small, bird-like creature, with fragile skin, parchment-pale, and watery blue eyes. She had lived next door for close on half a century; been part of their life in a vague and distant sort of way; someone they helped out in emergencies, or chatted to over the fence about the weather, or the National Health, or the black-fly on the roses; someone whose smelly, manic spaniel she had played with as a child.

‘How are you, Louise, dear?' she asked, in her thin reed of a voice. ‘I wanted to come and pay my respects. Your father was such a lovely man – a real gentleman, in fact.'

‘Thank you,' Louise murmured. She had been thanking people all day – although rarely with true gratitude: her father's brusque and businesslike GP; the pompous, prune-faced registrar; the ridiculously young undertaker, with his soft fuzz of a moustache.

‘It must have happened very suddenly.' Miss Mays edged a fraction closer on the step, obviously keen to hear the saga.

‘Yes,' said Louise tersely, herself shrinking back a little. ‘Look, it's good of you to call, Miss Mays, but forgive me if I don't ask you in. I'm up to my eyes at the moment.'

‘You always were a busy one. It was go, go, go, with
you
, my dear, even from the age of eight or nine!'

Louise flushed. The trouble with living in the same small street from birth to the age of twenty-one was that people got to know you far too well. So she had always been a restless type, impatient
to get on, but was that any worse than idling away her existence? It had been a relief, as well as a wrench, to move to Inverness, and to a house set on its own, without the musty breath of neighbours exhaling in her face. ‘I could pop round in an hour or so, if that's convenient, and fill you in on the details.'

‘Lovely, dear! I'll put the kettle on. And you must try a slice of my lemon sandwich cake.'

Once she'd closed the door, Louise stood leaning against the table in the hall, trying to gather her strength. The energy she'd possessed aged eight, and, indeed, most of her adult life, seemed to have deserted her entirely – the worker-ant now turned into a sloth. All the things on this morning's long ‘to-do' list, she had carried out in so inert a fashion, it was if she were groping through a dense and choking fog.

‘Full name of the deceased?' the registrar had asked, and she'd actually forgotten her own father's middle name. And when she had come to sign the papers, to obtain the death certificate, her hand had shaken so badly, her signature looked spastic as it tottered across the page. Then, sitting in the small, stuffy room at the funeral directors', she had tried to choose a coffin from the brochure. They all looked so pretentious, and she knew her father would vehemently object to lying on white taffeta, or being buried in a box that went by some highfalutin name such as Herald or Balmarol.

Worst of all was viewing the body: his face frog-cold and waxen; his nails a grisly bluish-mauve; his hands clasped across his chest in a reposeful, pious manner, quite alien to his character. Equally untypical was the dreadful, eerie silence. Never had her father been uncommunicative. Normally he took the lead, if there was something to be organized, gave orders, spoke his mind. So why wasn't he complaining about what he'd call this ‘carry-on', insisting they bury him in the garden in a nice, strong cardboard box, beneath his favourite bush? And, no, he didn't want a wreath – lugubrious things, and a scandalous expense. And, as for a hearse, what was wrong with the old wheelbarrow?

‘Open your eyes,' she had whispered desperately. ‘Take an interest. Tell them who's the boss.'

She had left the place two hours ago, feeling disoriented and
drained, and had been mooching round the house since then, failing to complete a single task, but drifting indecisively from one thing to another. She must choose a job and stick to it – perhaps start in the kitchen and clear out all the cupboards.

Having found a couple of packing cases in a corner of the cellar, she began removing all the crockery and stowing it away, first wrapping it in sheets of her father's unopened
Guardian
. She had better take this china to Oxfam, although the stained and pitted saucepans and rusting baking tins were fit only for the dump. And the mincer and the jelly-moulds were in little better shape, and clearly hadn't been used since her mother died. No way would her father make jellies or mince meat.

She stood holding the rabbit jelly-mould, recalling her childhood birthday parties: the trembly red rabbit, sitting on a bed of chopped-green-jelly grass; its tail a blob of whipped cream; its whiskers strips of angelica, and the grass itself sprigged with whipped-cream daisies. Although the mould was badly dented, she laid it on the hearth rug in the sitting-room, along with all the other things that couldn't be thrown out.

Hardly had she got back to the kitchen, when the phone rang yet again. It still seemed wrong for her to answer it and, every time she picked up the receiver, she looked nervously around, as if expecting her father to come rushing in from the garden to take the call himself.

‘Yes, hello. Mr Chandler's house … Oh, Graham, it's
you
! I told you not to ring.'

She listened with increasing impatience to her husband's halting croak – all he had left in the way of a voice now. He was distressed about the new carer – unfriendly and unkind, he said, and as much use as a blue peapod.

‘A blue peapod,' she repeated, with her usual irritation at his misuse of the language. Once, he had been skilled with words, employing them with rigour and respect.

‘What time will you be back, Louise? I can't manage here without you.'

‘Graham, I've only just
come
! The flight didn't get in till ten … Yes, I know I left at six, but we were held up at the airport … No, I can't fly home tonight – I've told you that already.'

Shameful to be sharp with him and so lacking in compassion, but her normal reserves of sympathy appeared to have dried up overnight. If Graham hadn't had his stroke, she wouldn't have neglected her father for an interminable six months, or failed to realize that he, too, must be ill. And it was Graham who'd put paid to his usual frequent visits, because he hadn't wanted anyone, not even his own father-in-law, to witness his infirmity.

‘Look, I'm sorry you're not feeling good. Why don't I ring Melanie and get her to come over?' Unfair to blame her husband, when it was just as much her fault. She'd been so horrified, so shaken, by Graham's sudden, dire decline from an independent work-horse to a complaining, clingy invalid, she had barely spared a thought for her poor father; simply rung him once a fortnight and accepted it as gospel when he assured her he was fine.

‘Graham, you
must
remember Melanie! She came just last week – tall, with reddish hair.' Strokes were so insidious, blitzed not just language and mobility but memory and mind. The man she had loved for thirty years was now damaged goods, a wreck. Sometimes, passing the bin of marked-down products in the local corner-shop, she imagined Graham lying there amongst broken packets and dented cans – forlorn, unwanted objects, reduced for clearance and finally thrown out.

‘Yes, she's very nice. You liked her. I'll phone her now, and ring you back the minute I get hold of her. OK?'

Melanie was out, of course, but she left a message on the answerphone, then, returning to the kitchen, began sorting through the cutlery drawers, wrestling with self-pity – despicable yet difficult to shift. She had barely come to terms with losing Graham – as husband, helpmate, friend – and now she was faced with her father's death. Even Jake had disappeared, deciding to take a sabbatical in Kenya – presumably his way of saying that he simply couldn't cope with a depressed and drooling father in a wheelchair.

Angrily, she filled the second packing case, only to stop, with half-a-dozen fish-forks in her hand. What on earth was she about, clearing out the crockery and cutlery, when she'd need it for the funeral reception? Her father would want it to be held here, as had happened when her mother died. What she
should
be doing was
drawing up a guest list and getting in touch with everyone, to inform them of the date and time. She simply wasn't thinking straight. Her mind kept sneaking back to that claustrophobic funeral parlour, to plead again with the cold and stiffening corpse: ‘Come back. Sit up. Get out of that vile box!'

She jotted down a few random names on the back of an old envelope – Miss Mays, Aunt Nora, Jim and Janet Slade – then sat staring into space, aware how weak and empty she felt. She had eaten nothing since the news of her father's death, nor wept a single tear. The two appeared to be connected. While her eyes remained perversely dry, it was her stomach that had expressed her grief by going into painful spasm and rumbling audibly.

As she put the kettle on, she heard his usual admonition chiming in her head: ‘Don't forget to warm the pot'. He had been saying it for decades, as if he hadn't quite grasped the fact that she had actually grown up, and now ran a home of her own. Obeying his silent instructions, she went to fetch the
tea-strainer
, which, in deference to her mother's rules, he insisted that they use. And the all-important tea cosy – a weird, multicoloured monstrosity knitted by her thrifty mother from bits and pieces of wool.