When I Was Otherwise (18 page)

She remembered that a younger cousin, not nearly her equal in looks nor with nearly so sweet a singing voice, had become quite well-known as an actress and a film star. She had lived for many years in Hollywood where, allegedly, she had attended many a glamorous and star-studded party. Whereas Marsha herself…well, what had
she
ever done? What famous person had
she
ever been introduced to, at any party at all, whether in Lausanne or Throgmorton Street or at John and Evelyn's house in Pinner?

Oh God. She turned onto her other side and peered at the luminous hands of her bedside travelling clock. One-thirty-five.

So all right, she told herself, and with sudden fierce determination, forget RADA; forget Hollywood. If she had stayed with Andrew—or, rather, if Andrew had stayed with her—she would never have met Joan. She would never have met Beryl.

It was necessary to be reminded.

24

“It's amazing,” said Joan. “The days when you're working and don't appear to have a single spare minute, you can reorganize your own life and everybody else's without turning a hair; the days when you're free, it becomes a major expedition to go out and buy a birthday card. I bought a birthday card this evening. It was just before the shops closed. I swear, I'd been working up to it all day. I'd better not tell you what I had
intended
doing with my time.”

“Oh, go on, though, do tell us!” cried Marsha.

“I'd
intended
to give the flat its weekly clean, get up-to-date with the ironing, and turn out the kitchen drawers. And that was just to start with.”

“But you've certainly baked a scrumptious cake,” said Beryl.

“And I'm sure that just being able to relax for once in a while must have done you the world of good,” said Marsha.

“Who's been relaxing? I've used up every scrap of energy I had in thinking what a dreadful waste of time it's all been. A whole day preparing to go out and buy a birthday card! And if I'd been just a couple of minutes later I'd have missed even that.”

“I hope it's for somebody special,” said Marsha.

“My sister. And you both know, of course, how she and I get on, even at the best of times! But I'd never have heard the last of it if she'd thought that I'd forgotten.”

“Well anyway, thank God,
I
didn't have the day off,” said Beryl. “At least I managed to rush over and see Uncle after I'd finished work.”

“The brooch?” smiled Marsha.

“What else?” asked Beryl.

“So is it
there
or is it
here
at the moment?” enquired Joan. “Forgive me, but I lose track.”

“Who doesn't?
I
lose track. Uncle loses track. ‘Oh, is it with me this month?' he says. ‘Well, I hope so,' I tell him, ‘otherwise it's damned well lost.' And Raymond's coming home on Sunday.”

“Oh, for how long?”

“Only two days.”

“But is it the first thing that he always says? ‘Darling, where's the brooch?'”

“No, of course not. Yet I just couldn't look him in the eye if it wasn't there. I'd go all shifty and stammer. He'd think there was another man. The family heirloom! His great-great-grandmother's diamond brooch! The pride of the Rochdales! With Uncle in Praed Street.”

“Oh,” said Joan, “I bet he's got some pretty shrewd idea.”

“No, none at all. I swear not. The shock would kill him. We'd be in the divorce courts before lunch.”

“Come and join the party!”

“But if
you
have the brooch,” said Marsha, “how on earth are you going to give him that lunch?”

“Yes, Uncle asked the same question. I think he was going to offer to lend me something!”

“Well, you know, my love, you've only got to ask…”

“Thank you—I do know. Yet simply as a last resort. I made myself that vow.”

“Oh, now that's silly. What are friends for?”

Marsha undid the clasp of her handbag; Beryl jumped up, stepped across and fastened it.

“But if you won't let me lend you something how can I tell you I finally bought that dress today? The one in the window at

Mary Morton's, the one I've had my eye on for the whole of the past week.”

“You didn't!”

“I did! At last I took the plunge.”

“Well, go and put it on, then!”

“Shall I?”

“Yes!”

“At once!”

She went out, but with the lounge door left ajar and her bedroom one as well, she could still hear most of the conversation.

“Malcolm, some more cake?” asked Joan.

“Yes, please!”

Beryl peered across at the small pile of books on the coffee table beside him. “What's the homework?”

“
Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibus opstat / Res augusta domi
.”

“Pardon?”

“It means—I've got a crib—difficult indeed is it for those to emerge from obscurity whose noble qualities are cramped by narrow means at home.”

“Who said that? Your mother?”

“Well, yes. She usually mentions it at breakfast. But Juvenal got there first.
He
said, in addition…,” and this time Malcolm was reading from a textbook, not from his foolscap pad, “that your prayer must be to have a sound mind in a sound body. Pray for a bold spirit, free from all dread of death, which reckons the closing scene of life among Nature's kindly boons.”

“This man was obviously a laugh a minute,” declared Joan. “Every bit as jolly as
The Sleeping Tiger
.” Which was the name of the film she was working on at present.
Not
a comedy. It was being directed by Joseph Losey.

“Death alone discloses how very small are the puny bodies of men.”

“Please! The poor man's Bob Hope. Well, personally I think it disgusting the taxpayer's money should be spent on such frivolities.”

When Marsha came back there were ten minutes of admiration, of feeling the material, exclaiming at the lining, trying out the effect of various scarves.

Then she said, “I think that my little boy, with his grubby knees and all that hair which needs cutting, had better pack up now and go and have his bath. The water's good and hot.” She added, after he had said his goodnights and was about to pull the door shut behind him, “And, darling, don't forget your fingernails.”

“Oh, Mummy! Must you?”

“I'll come in later on and turn your light out.”

“'Oh, Mummy!'” Joan and Beryl chorused quietly, as they heard him walking off down the corridor.

“Grubby knees,” observed Beryl, “and prayers for a bold spirit, free from all dread of death!”

“The headmaster thinks he's doing extremely well,” announced Marsha, proudly. She told them again of several of the encouraging comments he had made at a recent interview. “And nearly every night, what's more, he does the washing up.”

“The headmaster?”

“No, you big stiff. Malcolm.”

“But isn't he a pet!” said Joan. “I could eat every inch of him.” She and Malcolm sometimes went to the pictures together. “On Saturday let's all go and see
The Robe
. It's at Swiss Cottage. How about it, you two? My treat, of course. And, Beryl, would Helen like to come as well?”

In fact, it was just an average sort of evening, no different in essentials to a thousand others—indeed, it could possibly have been an amalgam. But for some reason this was the evening which Marsha remembered that Sunday night in Hendon, twenty-seven years later, as she lay sleepless in the dark; sleepless and wet-eyed.

She remembered it as the evening when after Joan and Beryl had gone and she was tucking up Malcolm, much later than she should have, he had said to her: “They're very pretty, aren't they?”

“Yes, darling. Very.”

Joan, the most glamorous and sophisticated of the three, who took an hour each morning to apply her makeup and to do her hair and who left a trail of scent behind her on the dismal stairs.

Beryl, often scruffy and slightly tomboyish, yet with a much more delicate type of beauty, stunning when she wore a particular black dress and took more than usual pains with her appearance. Beryl with her white skin and her sparkling eyes and her chignon.

“I shouldn't think there are many ordinary homes where you get
three
such pretty women who spend so much time together!”

“Oh,
darling
. I shall tell them what you say.”

“No—don't.”

But naturally she did.

Yet where were they now?

Beryl, still living in Wimbledon, with Raymond and their daughter? (No, Helen of course would be a woman of forty by this time. How absurd!) She had completely lost touch.

And Joan—dead half a dozen years ago; of cancer.

“I bought a birthday card this evening. It was a real expedition. It took me all day to work up to it!”

25

Dan was out. Marsha wanted a bath. A large spider sat beneath the taps. She gave a little scream and ran to fetch Daisy, who was in her bedroom, with her coat on, packing the day's needs into her shopping basket.

“And I can't flush him down the plughole,” cried Marsha, with a shudder. “He's so big. It would seem like murder.”

“And he might come back to haunt you?”

“Don't!”

“But you're quite right, dear. What's he ever done to you that you should do that to him?”

“It's not what he
has
done. It's more what he
might
do!”

“Exactly, dear.” Daisy took from her basket yesterday's copy of the
Financial Times
, purloined from the bank. She made a roll of it and waved it over her head. “Excalibur! Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Daisy the Fearless Spider-Catcher!”

“Will it be best if I just wait for you here?”

“No, it will not! You great scaredy-cat. You can't push me right into the front line and then turn down a place in the rear!”

They proceeded to the bathroom, Daisy fierily twirling her sword and chanting the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

“Oh, what a beauty! What a monster! I believe he's staring right back and thinking much the same about me! He says he doesn't admire my hat a great deal. Oh, my word, but isn't he
leggy
! And fat! And almost blacker than a bus conductor!”

Daisy gazed at him with all the deference one experienced duellist might feel towards another. And then prodded him with Excalibur.

He scurried over the enamel.

“Oh, Daisy, I do appreciate this. I'll make you a special supper as a reward.”

“That will be nice. Not that I've quite earned it yet! And not that your suppers, dear, aren't always very special.”

Daisy unrolled the newspaper and flattened it against her coat.

“Now the trick of it will be to try to get him onto this—Master Solomon Spindleshanks, otherwise known as Mr Diamondlegs Eleven—and then lift him up and carry him over to the window. He'll think he's on a flying carpet. He'll dream of Turkish delight. As long as he doesn't fall off in his excitement! Will you open the window, dear?”

Marsha did so. She opened it as wide as it would possibly go.

The paper was now spread carefully across the bottom of the bath. “She stoops to conquer!” said Daisy. “Pass me that backbrush, will you, dear? I'm going to tickle his behind again.” The spider was induced to go in the right direction. “Gen up on your investments,” Daisy advised him.

“You're very brave!” said Marsha.

“Now stand back, Pearl White!”

“I shall! I am!”

With the spider at the centre of the double spread Daisy picked the paper up at either end.

“Got it!” she said.

But her balance wasn't good. The paper buckled. The spider dropped to the floor and scuttled back to Marsha.

Marsha screamed.

“It's all right, dear. He won't hurt you. He's heading for the skirting board.”

“If he disappears I'll never
dare
to come in here again!” Marsha was pressed up against the wall, ready at any moment to dash through the open door.

But it wasn't easy keeping track of him: the lino was made up of large black and white squares.

“Now you see him—now you don't!”

“There he is, Daisy!”

“Ah, yes. That's a good chap. You're having a well-earned rest.” Daisy went down on her knees, holding onto the washbasin with one hand and onto the side of the bath with the other. She retrieved the toothmug she had previously set on the floor. “Now you appreciate your forty winks, dear, while kind Aunt Daisy is coming to take you out. There, there. Nobody's going to harm you. Even the hairs of
your
head must be numbered somewhere—yes, how could it be otherwise? Sing him a lullaby or something.”

“I can't!”

“Oh, well, never mind. Now gently does it, old thing. Oh! There he goes again! But he's coming this way. Stout fellow. Over here, dear, and park yourself inside our nice yellow garage. Good Lord, Marsha, what a creature of intelligence and charm! An officer and a gentleman. Even if he
does
like to tickle.” Daisy had clapped the flat of her hand across the top of the toothmug. “Ugh! No, I'm really not enjoying that. Stop it, please!”

“Hold on, though, Daisy. Hold on for dear life!”

“You'll have to help me up.”

“Don't drop it!”

“It's a bomb! If I drop it we're done for!”

Marsha managed to haul her to her feet. She hadn't known she'd have such strength. She had the will of a desperado.

The bomb remained intact, its lid still shakily in place.

“Careful now, Daisy. Don't stumble.”

“Rock-a-bye-baby on the tree top…
Somebody's
got to sing to it, poor frightened mite. His wee little heart must be thudding fit to burst!”