Every Woman For Herself: This hilarious romantic comedy from the Sunday Times Bestseller is the perfect spring read

Every Woman For Herself: This hilarious romantic comedy from the Sunday Times Bestseller is the perfect spring read Trisha Ashley First comes marriage. Then comes divorce. Then it’s every woman for herself …When Charlie’s husband Matt tells her that he wants a divorce she has to start from scratch. Suddenly single, broke and approaching 40 she is forced to return to her childhood home in the Yorkshire moors.Living with her father and eccentric siblings could be considered a challenge but soon Charlie finds her new life somewhat refreshing. Now that she’s single she’s got no need to dye her roots nor to be the perfect wife and she can return to her first love- painting.But just as she begins to feel settled, handsome, bad-tempered actor Mace North moves in down the road and starts mixing things up for Charlie in more ways than one …Every Woman for Herself is a hilarious account of divorce and dating from Sunday Times besteller Trisha Ashley. Perfect for fans of Katie Fforde and Carole Matthews,the country setting and rom-com storyline make this the perfect summer read.Praise for Trisha Ashley:‘One of the best writers around!’ Katie Fforde‘Full of down-to-earth humour.’ Sophie Kinsella‘A warm-hearted and comforting read. Trisha at her best’ Carole Matthews‘An absolute delight. Every Woman for Herself is a laugh-out-loud read that leaves you feeling pleased with the world’ Take a Break TRISHA ASHLEY Every Woman For Herself Dedication (#ulink_ecdba73f-d51f-57bf-ba49-b2d8da347521) For my father, Alfred Wilson Long, with love. Table of Contents Cover (#u08bce5b4-d720-51f3-ad32-b151992c8dea) Title Page (#u39455b7e-c1c8-5a4d-ab56-3f07119042dc) Dedication (#u624ddb4f-fab7-598c-b315-31d871c27fd7) Foreword (#uca70f686-15c5-57cb-9038-98bbf78003bc) Chapter 1: Alien Husbandry: 2001 (#uf1c16a52-f782-5b85-8945-f6b1265423c8) Chapter 2: Wrong in the Attic (#ub73c59dd-dd77-59c7-a077-a563aa17e6c2) Chapter 3: All Panned Out (#u5cc358ad-d9b3-5212-9cce-87405551cc75) Chapter 4: Sheared Off (#u63ef18a6-52b3-5d54-a394-82cd561b2c59) Chapter 5: The Prodigal Daughter (#u282d2133-d543-53d2-9dd0-ced0696efcb8) Chapter 6: Pesto in the Kitchen (#uabf01b79-e5e6-53c8-ba64-de6827cf825d) Chapter 7: Enlightenment (#ubca35d85-f126-5704-9498-eb7c611ede5f) Chapter 8: Dangerous to Melons (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: Nature in the Raw (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: Small Change (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11: Parting (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12: Jumbled (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13: Jam Tomorrow (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14: In Combat (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15: Taken Out (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16: Going Hairless (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17: Surprised (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18: Absolution (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19: Nuts (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20: Returns (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21: Home Comforts (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22: First Cuckoo (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23: To the Bone (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 24: Strange New Powers (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 25: Much Travelled (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 26: Dazed and Confused (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 27: Present Magic (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 28: Snapdragon (#litres_trial_promo) Recipes (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Foreword (#ulink_0db6ad95-e4c3-5aa0-b415-a8a89b9e5359) I’m delighted that Avon are reprinting Every Woman for Herself, because I have to admit it’s still my favourite literary child – and it’s obviously a favourite with readers, too, since not long ago they voted it one of the top three best romantic novels of the last fifty years, a great honour. I haven’t rewritten it, merely tweaked a couple of errors into shape, brushed its hair and made sure it had a clean handkerchief, so since it was first published by Piatkus in 2002, it’s obviously very much of its time. But then, think how relaxing it will be to visit a remote Yorkshire valley with no phone signal for miles and only a dodgy dial-up internet connection. The Bront? family managed quite well without them and I hope you will too. Happy reading, everyone! Trisha Ashley Chapter 1: Alien Husbandry: 2001 (#ulink_c66275da-c585-5993-bf16-06a131a7dd8d) Got up at the crack of dawn to kill the Fatted Breakfast before driving Matt to the airport, only to discover that aliens had stolen my husband during the night and substituted something incomprehensibly vile in his place. I expect their replicator was having a bad day. I distinctly remembered marrying a gentle, long-haired, poetry-spouting Jason King lookalike with a social conscience, but what was facing me over the breakfast table was a truculent middle-aged businessman, paunchy, greying, and flaunting a Frank Zappa moustache seemingly edged with egg yolk: but I knew better. The alien snot was the clincher. It was not a pretty sight, but fascinating for all that. I went to peer into the kitchen mirror to see if I’d changed as well: but no, I still looked like a miniature Morticia Addams. ‘Charlie,’ the Matt creature said impatiently, ‘did you hear what I said? About wanting a divorce?’ I certainly had; what did he think had ripped the veils of delusion from my eyes? But I was temporarily deprived of speech as almost a quarter of a century of married life flashed before my eyes in Hogarthian vignettes: Flake’s Progress. The inner film came to a jerky halt. ‘Yes,’ I said finally, nodding. I understood. Unfortunately my memory was not of the selective kind, a cheery sundial remembering only the happy hours, so my recollections were freely punctuated with loss. Lost mother, lost virginity, lost babies, lost husband, Lost in Space. Charlie Rhymer, this was your life. For some reason, Matt seemed disconcerted by my reaction. ‘We’ve grown apart since I’ve been taking these foreign contracts, and I’ve come to realise that this will be best for both of us. In fact, we can divorce right away, since we’ve been separated for more than two years.’ ‘How can we be separated when you’re here?’ I asked, trying to get my head around this concept. ‘But I’m not really here, am I?’ he said impatiently. ‘I’m in Saudi.’ ‘But you’re back for quite long holidays between contracts – and you said it would be better if I stayed here.’ ‘You would have hated it – you know you don’t even like leaving the house, let alone the country.’ ‘But that’s just York – it’s got the wrong sort of outside. I’m fine at home.’ ‘This is your home.’ ‘I meant Upvale, and Blackdog Moors.’ ‘You seemed eager enough to run away from it with me.’ ‘That was love, and unplanned pregnancy, and Father.’ Matt said earnestly, ‘Charlie, it isn’t that I’m not still fond of you …’ ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘In fact, thank you for having me.’ He ignored that; I’m not sure he even heard it, like most of the things I say. ‘It’s just that I’m not getting anything out of this marriage,’ he continued. ‘You make me sound like a bank. What were you expecting to get out? More than you put in?’ ‘At least there are no children to complicate things,’ he said, which was a very low blow. He was starting to make me feel quite sick. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Charlie, but we really can’t go on. I’ve been offered a long contract in Japan, and I can’t afford to continue maintaining two households.’ ‘But the house … the mortgage?’ I said, my brain starting to limp onwards a bit, now the first shockwave had broken over my head. ‘What will happen?’ ‘The divorce will go through quickly if we’re both in agreement – my solicitor will send you things to sign. Then I’ll pay you maintenance every month, so you won’t have anything to worry about. The solicitor will get in touch with you and explain everything.’ ‘Will he? Is that what you’ve been doing this week, organising our divorce? Why didn’t you talk to me about it, instead of suddenly handing me a fait accompli on your last morning home? After all, I haven’t done anything, have I?’ ‘No, you haven’t done anything,’ he agreed curtly. ‘Perhaps that’s just it. I’ve moved on, and you haven’t. Other women have families and careers and interests. Perhaps now you’ve turned forty, it’s time you got out there in the real world.’ I’d been cocooned for the twenty-three years of my married life, and now suddenly I was to be ripped from my chrysalis and told to make like a butterfly? He rose from the table. ‘I’ll ring you from Saudi, once you’ve had time to think it over.’ Questions were already beginning to bubble scummily to the surface, like: when did he see this solicitor? How long had he been planning this? What does he mean, he’ll give me maintenance? Was there some other woman behind this? Who on earth would want him? ‘Hurry up and get the car out,’ snapped Alien Nation in a reasonable impersonation of my husband, ‘while I get my bags.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’ve got a plane to catch. It’s time to go.’ It certainly was. I went into the conservatory, locking the door carefully behind me. Although it was so tiny, once I was in the middle where my easel and table were, you couldn’t see me for jungle plants. Palms, bamboo and bananas, and a fig tree in a big pot … Dense foliage and warm, slightly steamy, air. Matt banged on the glass a few times like a deranged moth, shouting, but I disconnected, picking up a brush and carrying on painting the tiny, naked, cowering figure at the heart of the rampant forest. It looked like Steve, the handsome young gardener at the park, and something threatening was definitely lurking in the undergrowth. Probably me: I often had lustful thoughts about him when I went there to sketch in the greenhouse, but in reality there was not enough cover to drag him behind, even were he willing – and it was one of those ironic facts that as you age you lust after fewer and fewer men, and those are the very ones who wouldn’t look twice at you. When my last birthday date-stamped me forty, I knew the writing was on the wall. I really should have sown my wild oats before I got married, because I feared it was now too late. Sometimes, too, I wondered if my body wouldn’t have rejected my pregnancies if they hadn’t been fathered by Matt. Now I knew he was an alien, perhaps, I thought, our genes were incompatible. Too late for that, as well. Much later I resurfaced to the sound of a familiar loud thud and yelp as Flossie, my spaniel, attempted to walk through the glass door again. But at least if she’d come out of hiding it meant Matt had finally gone. Flossie was not big on brains, but she had grasped that Matt hated her, and it was safest to keep out of his way. Of course she forgot sometimes, especially when overcome by greed, like the previous morning, when she was drooling over his feet at breakfast, and he kicked her when he thought I wasn’t looking. Afterwards I went up to the bathroom and gave all my big silver rings a vigorous cleaning with his toothbrush and a bit of powdered floor cleaner. The rings came up a treat and I expected his teeth would, too. Flossie now sat in the dining room outside the conservatory door, looking dazed, though this is not unusual. She wagged her tail happily when she saw me coming. The breakfast debris still littered the table, and Alien Nation had left a note pinned down by the teapot that said he’d had to call a taxi, and if he missed the connection it was my fault. There was also the name and address of the solicitor who would explain everything to me. I wished someone would. Why did I never seem to grasp anything until a couple of years after it had happened? I never knew where I was going, only where I’d been. As Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I only knew what I had to start with. Or did I only know what I thought I had to start with? Or did I have what I thought I had, but had somehow swapped it for an alien? Could living with me for so long have turned him into an alien? He was right about one thing – he’d changed, but I didn’t think I had very much. Clearly, that was my mistake. I took stock of my innermost feelings and discovered there weren’t any: I was a blown egg, all shell and void. You might have heard the sea if you’d put your ear to me, but that was about it. Chapter 2: Wrong in the Attic (#ulink_7eb1d0e3-6c4e-5037-b6e1-adba030897c7) Lay awake all night with my mind doing hamster-in-wheel impersonations, then came groggily down the following morning to find a letter from Matt’s solicitor. Wasn’t this indecently fast? The letter said that since Matt and I were in agreement (were we?) and there were no children of the marriage, I didn’t need to have my own solicitor: just sign on the dotted line when asked to, and don’t make a fuss. The only good thing Matt’s sudden bombshell did was to make me realise that he had turned into an alien, and an elderly one at that. Otherwise, who knew how long it would have taken for me to realise that I was beginning the slow trek through that long, rocky hinterland before fifty, hand in hand with a grumpy old man? (And as Sherpas go, he’d have been no Tensing.) A day or two later Matt phoned, his usual bossy self, and basically instructed me just to do as I was told, and he would see me right financially. That would be a novelty. And there was definitely an underlying threat there … I’d finished the painting: miniatures of looming menace, my speciality. When I lived on the moors among all those vast spaces I painted long, narrow landscapes where tiny figures were set like random jewels. But once transposed to the claustrophobia of a city (even one as beautiful as York), I began painting ever-smaller canvases in which the minute figures cowered under threatening jungle foliage. They sold quite well through Waugh-Paint, a local gallery. Vaddie Waugh, the owner, said it was because they were so small that they were easily portable. Or maybe people just liked having something small, dark and threatening hanging on their walls? I hadn’t told anyone about the divorce yet because it didn’t seem real. And anyway, there was only really the family to tell, and frankly I didn’t want to phone home and confess that not only had I failed in the motherhood stakes, I’d also failed as a wife. The solicitor had explained everything to me, but it all slid away from my grasp immediately. All I understood was that financially we are up Shit Creek without a paddle, so there was no point in my fighting for half the house or a huge chunk of maintenance. The maintenance Matt did propose giving me was a pittance, though combined with my painting earnings I thought I would survive: Remittance Woman. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the house, but the only thing I’d regret leaving was my conservatory. I’d have to return home to the Parsonage at Upvale – but where could I put my jungle? I couldn’t paint without it any more. I’d have to find some kind of job, and a house of my own if I could afford it, because much though I loved going home, it would be difficult to do it permanently after having my own place for so many years. I could live on my painting, but it would not pay a mortgage. Having looked around the house, I found it totally amazing what Matt had removed without my noticing before! Still, I didn’t wish to keep ninety-nine per cent of the household contents anyway, since they were never my choice, and in fact were as alien to me as Matt now was. Perhaps it could all go to one of those auction houses that take anything, though I supposed I’d better ask Alien Nation if he wanted to keep any of it first – that is, if he ever phoned again. He’d gone from checking up on me every other night (although after all these years he must have known I was either here or in Upvale), to one solitary, admonitory phone call. A couple of weeks after the discovery that Matt was an alien, I opened the door to a most unwelcome visitor: Angie, raddled bride of Matt’s best friend and colleague, the revolting Groping Greg. ‘Angie! What are you doing here? I thought Greg’s contract didn’t end for another three weeks?’ Of course, had I known she was home, I wouldn’t have opened the door without checking who it was first, from the upstairs window. She pushed a bundle of magazines and a box of chocolates into my arms. ‘These are for you,’ she said in the hushed tones of one visiting the sick. Then she trailed past me into the house, exuding a toxic effluvium of sultry perfume and nicotine. If you dipped Angie into a reservoir it would turn yellow and poison many cities. I followed her into the living room, where she draped herself into one of Matt’s minimalist white leather and birch chairs. She looked surprisingly comfortable, but then, she’s all sinew and leather herself. ‘I had to leave Greg out there and come home early, because the cleaning service said we had weird noises in the attic. But anyway, after Matt told us about the divorce, I just knew you’d fall apart! And since you’ve got no friends except us, I said to Greg, “I’d better get back and help poor Charlie.”’ Angie was not, and never had been, my friend. Her presence was about as welcome to me as a tooth abscess. ‘I’m not falling apart,’ I assured her, which I wasn’t, because nothing lately had seemed at all real. I wasn’t sure if I’d been living in a dream world for years and just woken to reality, or vice versa. Sleeping Beauty in her jungle. ‘Actually, I feel more as if I’m imploding – hurtling inwards on myself. There’ll be a popping noise one day, and I’ll have vanished, like a bubble.’ ‘You poor thing! There, I knew I was right to come back. But look on the bright side, darling – you and Matt are having a friendly divorce, so it will go through really fast. Then he’s going to pay you maintenance, although I don’t suppose you’ll need much because you’ll just go back to that insane-sounding family of yours. Did you see your sister Anne on the news last night? There were bullets flying around her head, and she just kept on talking.’ ‘Emily – my older sister – has second sight, so she knows Anne’s invincible to bullets. And I don’t know why you say my family’s insane. Matt was keen enough to marry me once he found out who Father was, even if he can’t wait to get rid of me now.’ ‘Anne, Emily – and your brother’s called Branwell, isn’t he? What were your parents trying to do, breed their own Bront?s?’ ‘Yes – well, Father was, anyway. He thought if he recreated the hothouse environment and we didn’t become literary geniuses, or Branwell became the literary giant, it would prove his point. You know – like in his book: Branwell: Source of Genius?’ From her puzzled expression, clearly she didn’t know. ‘And Charlie’s short for Charlotte, of course. When the experiment palled on Father he sent us all to the local school, and although Em didn’t mind being known as Effing Emily, I got very tired of being Scarlet Charlotte the Harlot. My family always called me Charlie, anyway.’ ‘Weird!’ she muttered again. ‘I suppose you will go back there?’ ‘I’ll have to, but I can’t just return as if the last twenty-three years never existed.’ Though, when I did visit home it felt as if I’d never left. Everything was the same: Em running the place and striding the moors composing her lucrative greeting-card verses, Gloria and Walter Mundi haphazardly doing the housework and gardening, Father writing his infamous biographies and installing his latest mistress in the Summer Cottage, Bran and Anne turning up on visits. And the moors. Nothing ever changed on Blackdog Moor except the seasons, that was what made me feel so safe there and so very unsafe here in York. ‘You can get a little job, can’t you?’ suggested Angie. ‘You’re not too old.’ ‘What as? Besides, I might make enough from my paintings if I exhibited more.’ ‘A London gallery, that’s what you need.’ I shuddered. ‘Oh, I couldn’t go to London! I’m a country girl at heart and hate big cities.’ ‘Don’t be such a wet lettuce,’ Angie said impatiently. ‘It’s time to stop being a shy, mimsy little wimp once you’re past forty.’ I gave her a look. I may be reserved, stubborn and quiet, but I plough my own furrow, as she should have known by then. I’m an introverted exhibitionist. Why should I like crowds? I’m simply not a herd animal. No one could accuse Angie of being mimsy or shy. She’s at least ten years older than I am, but her hair was dyed a relentless auburn, she wore eyelashes like tarantula legs, and her face had had every cosmetic art known to science applied to it at one time or another. Her body was lean, brown, and taut, except for the crepe-paper skin. Flossie wandered in from her basket in the kitchen, wrinkling her nose at Angie and sneezing violently, before climbing onto my lap and regarding my unwelcome visitor with the blank expression only Cavalier Queen Charlotte Spaniels can assume. I’m convinced they are the result of an early failed cloning experiment. ‘At least there are no children to dispute custody of,’ Angie said, staring at Flossie. I’d learned not to look upset when people said this sort of thing to me, as if I hadn’t desperately wanted children. ‘No, there is that, and Matt has always hated Flossie, so we won’t be disputing over her.’ ‘So everything’s all right? Matt says the first part of the divorce will go through in a couple of weeks, and six weeks after that, it’s finalised. Isn’t it quick?’ ‘That’s because I didn’t contest anything – I haven’t even got my own solicitor – and we can’t go for mediation because we’re in different countries.’ ‘Matt says you don’t need a solicitor, because the house is in his name, and remortgaged to the hilt anyway, and there are lots of debts, so there isn’t much to share. But I’m sure he will be generous with maintenance. You’ll be fine.’ ‘Yes, though I do suspect any mildly generous impulses he has now will dwindle away, like in Sense and Sensibility.’ She looked blank. ‘You know, Angie, where the widow and her daughters were going to be looked after by the son who inherited everything, only the allowance sort of dwindled away to the present of the odd duck?’ Angie isn’t much of a reader. She carried on staring at me with her mouth open for a full minute. ‘The odd duck?’ ‘Not literally, in Matt’s case. How could he send me a duck from Saudi? Or Japan, which he’s supposed to be going to next. What an awful lot of students want to learn English.’ ‘Just as well – and Greg’s been offered a Japanese contract too. I quite fancy it.’ She looked around her vaguely. ‘What are you doing with everything? You can’t take it all back with you to Upvale, can you?’ ‘No, but I wouldn’t want to anyway – I’ve never thought of most of the furnishings as mine. They’re all Matt’s choice, and most of them were already here when we married. There’s very little we chose together. Unless Matt wants any of it, I expect I’ll sell it. There are places that come and pack it all up and take it to an auction for you.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t think you get much for it. Doesn’t Matt want it stored?’ ‘Apparently not. He must have been plotting this long before he came home for his last holiday, because he’d already removed all his personal stuff into storage without me noticing.’ ‘You’re not the most observant of women, are you? Head in the clouds. Or the plants.’ ‘I might want a few bits and pieces, because I don’t think I could live at home again for very long, not after living in my own house for years. And I need somewhere to put my plants.’ ‘I don’t think Upvale sounds very exciting. Matt said it was just one steep cobbled road like a Hovis advert, with three streetlights, half a dozen houses, your Parsonage, and a lot of dirt tracks leading to farms.’ ‘There are a lot more houses than that in Upvale, but they’re spread out. And the only cobbled bit is about a hundred yards in front of the pub.’ ‘I didn’t know there was a pub. Civilisation!’ ‘Yes, the Black Dog, after the local legend. There’s Blackdog Moor, too, haunted by this huge, hideous fanged creature, with blood-red eyes and jaws dripping with—’ Angie shuddered. ‘No more, please. What with noises in the attic and demon dogs I won’t sleep a wink tonight all on my lonesome.’ ‘Oh, yes – the noises in the attic. Are you haunted, Angie?’ She should have been, by the ghosts of all the creatures who died in animal experiments on cosmetics. ‘No, it’s squirrels.’ ‘Squirrels? You’ve got squirrels in your attic? What colour? Those nice little reddish Squirrel Nutkin ones, or the big grey ones?’ ‘What does it matter? They’re all vermin, and they’ve chewed to bits the furniture I’ve stored up there! Squirrels! They’ve eaten all the wooden parts of the chairs, and the grandfather clock, and a nice tallboy. I suppose I’m lucky it isn’t rats, which is what I thought when I got back on Wednesday and heard all those funny thumping noises. Isn’t that what you’d have thought, Charlie?’ ‘What?’ I said, dragging my mind back from my own problems with some effort. ‘I’m the madwoman in the attic, I think, or will be. Perhaps I should join your squirrels.’ ‘Who mentioned madwomen?’ she demanded crossly. ‘Do concentrate, Charlie. The little tree rats have eaten all the lovely furniture Mother left me. I mean, what am I going to say to the insurance company? “Squirrels ate my furniture”?’ ‘“Weasels Ripped My Flesh”!’ I exclaimed, perking up. ‘I’d forgotten all about that song, but my eldest sister Em used to play it a lot years ago.. Wasn’t it Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention? Or no – maybe it was Jethro Tull. Those were her two favourite bands so it must have been one of them.’ Angie sighed. ‘Not weasels, squirrels,’ she said in cold, clipped accents. What a matron she would have made if she hadn’t got off with Greg and left the nursing profession! Or a wardress. ‘Sorry, it just reminded me of that song and … but do go on. Squirrels ate your furniture?’ ‘Yes. Grey ones.’ ‘How did they get in? There must have been a hole somewhere.’ ‘A tiny one, but they found it. Still, I expect the insurance will pay up in the end.’ ‘Unless squirrels are an act of God, Angie.’ ‘Don’t be silly. How can squirrels be an act of God?’ ‘You never know. When our garden wall fell down that time, they said it had been undermined by moles, and that was an act of God, so—’ ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ she asked warily. I smiled encouragingly. ‘I expect they’ll pay up – and what a shame about that furniture. I really liked some of it, especially that knobbly triangular chair. Although bottoms aren’t that shape, are they? And with all those bits sticking out it wouldn’t have been very comfortable, and although it would fit right into a corner of a room, you don’t usually want to sit right in the corner, do you? So I expect you can replace it with something more practical when you get the money.’ ‘You do go off at a tangent.’ ‘I’ll have to go off altogether, Angie – I’ve got my hairdresser’s appointment.’ Which I absolutely loathe; but my roots were showing. ‘That dead-black Goth look with the dark eye make-up and purplish lipstick is very out of fashion,’ she said, scrutinising me severely. ‘I know, but Matt insists, and—’ Suddenly I realised that it didn’t matter any more what Matt liked or didn’t like. He wouldn’t be here to throw a major wobbler if I stopped dyeing my roots, wearing heavy black eye make-up and vampire-style black clothes … It was a look that seemed less and less me as I got older. I mean, it was what I was into at seventeen, when I ran off with him, but I didn’t think I’d be stuck in a timewarp forever afterwards. But now I could do what I liked. ‘I can do what I like,’ I told Angie, brightly. ‘You always did,’ she said sourly. ‘Wasn’t that part of the problem?’ ‘Only in the major things, the ones that mattered, like the painting. In little things Matt had it entirely his own way. And I hadn’t realised we had a problem.’ I was about to add that until the morning Matt asked for a divorce I hadn’t realised how old he was either, but just managed to stop myself in time: like Angie and Greg, Matt was a good ten years older than I. Greg was an awful, red-faced old rou? who tried to jump on women the moment he was alone with them. He was Father’s type, I suppose, but without the leonine good looks – and Father did go in for his mistresses one at a time, as a rule. ‘Greg will be home in a couple of weeks, if you want any help,’ Angie offered. ‘Oh, no thanks, Angie,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m sure I can manage.’ Her eyes fell on the stack of magazines she’d brought, and she pounced on the top one. ‘Now, what’s that doing there? I didn’t mean to bring that old copy of Surprise!. I only kept it because it had photos of that gorgeous Mace North in it.’ ‘Who?’ She exhibited the magazine, and I scanned the man on the cover with no recognition whatsoever, although his was a very distinctive face. His slightly oblique, hooded dark eyes seemed to be staring back at me assessingly (and probably finding me wanting). ‘You must know him! He’s a well-known actor, and he’s got this deliciously plummy voice, a bit like Jeremy Irons.’ ‘You know I don’t watch much TV. But it sounds an unlikely combination with that face,’ I commented. ‘He looks a bit – barbaric.’ ‘It’s the Tartar blood.’ ‘Oh? I thought tartar was something you found on your teeth,’ I said disagreeably. ‘Not that sort of tartar – it’s a place in Russia. Mongolia? The High Steppes, or Chaparral, or something? His great-grandmother was a Tartar and that’s where those fabulous cheekbones come from, and the come-to-bed eyes …’ She gazed at the magazine and sighed. ‘He’s sort of like a young Bryan Ferry crossed with Rudolf Nureyev.’ ‘Rudolf Nureyev’s dead.’ ‘You must have seen photos.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t find men in tights very appealing. I’d never have made Marian.’ After a minute she smiled weakly: Sunrise over Yellowstone Canyon. ‘You will have your little joke,’ she said, hoisting herself to her feet and tucking the copy of Surprise! firmly under her arm. ‘I’d better go and sort out the roof rats. I’ll soon have the little buggers out of there.’ Her car was parked opposite, outside Miss Grinch’s, who would not be pleased, because she liked the front of her house kept clear so she had a better view of what her neighbours were doing. Had Angie been a man visiting me while my husband was away she would have been straight across with a milk jug or sugar bowl to try to catch me out in some imagined misdemeanour. I don’t think I’d ever done anything to surprise her – I must have been such a disappointment. You’d think she’d have lost interest. Apart from Angie and Greg, Matt’s friends didn’t bother me when Matt was away, and if Greg came to the door when I was on my own I’d pretend I was out. I always checked from the landing window first, after one nasty experience soon after I married Matt, when Greg found me on my own and was horribly overfriendly in a near-rape kind of way. He was even like that in front of Angie at parties, but she didn’t seem to mind particularly. Maybe she thought he was all mouth and no action. Maybe he was all mouth and no action when it came to the crunch – I didn’t intend finding out. When she’d gone I finally phoned Em, the Ruler of Upvale Parsonage, told her about the impending divorce, and asked if I could come and live at home for a while. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Will you tell everyone? Father?’ ‘He’s always thought Matt was a waste of space. Anyway, he won’t be very interested – he’s got a new mistress.’ I groaned. ‘Is she in the Summer Cottage yet?’ ‘Not yet. She’s renting a house down in the valley. But she’s always round here, and they’re all over each other. It’s revolting. And she’s got twin little girls who sit about giggling. She leaves them here when she goes out with Father.’ I supposed it was better than leaving them in an empty house, but not much – Em didn’t like children, so she wouldn’t see their presence in the house as being anything to do with her. ‘He’s never had one with children before, has he?’ ‘No, unless you count Bran’s mother, and that was unintentional. He’ll probably get tired of her, if she won’t move into the cottage. You know how he likes everything convenient.’ ‘Flossie says hello,’ I told her. Em’s voice immediately softened to a medium baritone that was positively sugary. ‘Give her a big kiss on her shiny black nose from me, and tell her Frost can’t wait for her to come and live here.’ Flossie was petrified of Frost, a giant grey lurcher with questionable habits (a bit like Father, really), but I appreciated the sentiment. ‘I will – and thanks, Em.’ ‘I haven’t done anything.’ ‘You’re just – there.’ ‘Where else would I be?’ she asked, sounding puzzled. Chapter 3: All Panned Out (#ulink_35d75ed7-25fa-5841-a7c2-107658bdd3ac) I didn’t turn up for my hairdresser’s appointment in the end, which made me feel like I was bunking off school. I realised I need never sit in one of those foul-smelling torture chambers again. Things were moving so quickly now that I’d decided to start packing my belongings. I’d put the stuff I didn’t want in the small spare room: it was half-decorated as a nursery, a place of abandoned hopes, so entirely suitable. Anything going with me would be stacked at one end of the living room. I’d been looking at the heap of magazines left by Angie, and I was feeling extremely irritated: none of them seemed to have any connection with reality as I knew it. They might as well all be called Rich Young Brain-Dead Anorexic London-Based Fashion Victim Magazine, and have done with it. Where were the magazines aimed at women like me? Skint Old Northern Woman, perhaps? I’ll have to write my own: Skint Old Northern Woman: Issue 1 Our motto is: Every Woman For Herself! Welcome to our new magazine for the older, more frazzled reader. While written primarily for the Northern woman, it may also prove invaluable for those Southerners harnessing their huskies ready to brave the Frozen North, containing as it does many cultural hints. To any peripheral Skint Old Southern Women, why not write your own issue, addressing the topics you find important? We welcome readers’ letters, except those sycophantic ones saying how wonderful our magazine is: we already know that, so for God’s sake write about something. If you have an embarrassing personal problem write in to Sister Charlie’s ‘In Confidence’ page: she will only share it with the entire readership … I thought I’d discovered a fascinating new hobby. The house was now on the market, and Matt, via his solicitor, had said he’d give me half of any profit, though I could see that it would all be eaten up by these mysterious debts and the overdraft. It had never felt like my house anyway, so I didn’t care. He’d also said he’d stored everything that he wanted from the house, and he didn’t mind what I did with the rest. What a busy boy he must have been during that week at home – and how unobservant of me not to notice. He was going to carry on paying the mortgage and utilities until the house was sold, but for some reason he hadn’t transferred any extra money across that month for food, etc. Was this a mistake, or had I already dwindled to the present of the odd duck? Seeing that I would have to start selling the furniture now (however odd an appearance that would give to prospective house purchasers) I went out to the supermarket and removed as many cardboard boxes as I could fit into my ancient 2CV. I also laid in a large supply of long-life consumables, like baked beans, jars of olives, red wine and dog food, before the money ran out altogether. Em phoned: the mistress and her children had got into the house, and were laying waste like Angie’s squirrels. None of the others had managed to sidestep the Summer Cottage like this, and Em had begun an offensive against the invader. Em did offensive very well. She hoped to have them out before I moved back, but in the meantime the mistress was domiciled in my room! I was highly indignant, even though Em had removed all my personal belongings from it and stored them in one attic, and the two little girls in another. She would have much preferred squirrels, and so would I. Why did it have to be my room? Why not Bran or Anne’s? Having foreign bodies in my only remaining sanctum was the last straw. Think the aliens were now taking over Yorkshire. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get them out,’ Em said grimly. ‘Father won’t be able to stand them around all the time once the sexual novelty’s worn off – you know what he’s like. Then I’ll put your room back as it was.’ ‘But it will never be the same again,’ I said sadly, for now I really did feel like a dispossessed person. I was blowin’ in the wind. I told Em about Skint Old Northern Woman, and she said it was a wonderful idea, and she would write some inspiring verse for it, or maybe cookery hints, like: ‘In Yorkshire We Eat Faggots’. Em has a knack for writing doggerel verse, which is very saleable: practically every greeting card seems to contain one of hers. Now she reminded me that we all had old portable typewriters. Father bought them when it became clear that we weren’t going to write Gondal-type stories in the minute notebooks he kept giving us. Perhaps he thought we needed a bit of twentieth-century apparatus? When I found mine, the ribbon had dried to paper tape, and trying to buy a new one proved to be a vain quest, for the computer age had long overtaken me. When I eventually did track one down it was the wrong sort and I had to hand-wind it onto the old spools. I feared I may have red and blue hands for the rest of my life. Still, it worked. Skint Old Northern Woman In this issue: Tart up that skirt Normal women bulge Superfluous hair Bulimia for beginners: what to do if your body doesn’t want to part with the food My roots were turning slowly silver as the divorce proceedings trundled tumbrel-like towards the final division. I’d always had long hair, but I didn’t think all that dye would come out. It looked quite interesting, though – more badgerish than Cruella. My clothes I couldn’t do much about, since they were all black; mostly culled from charity shops and jumble sales. There were one or two floaty Ghost things, purchased at who-knows-what-price or with what credit card by Matt in London, but they were black, too. Since I was not the same person who’d eloped with Matt, it didn’t seem right that I should look the same, especially if I was moving back to Upvale. I was going full circle on my life, but surely it should be a different me that returned? New To You. It was melancholy packing up the house, and my dreams with it. And there was that moment when the auction van removed the marital bed … Very symbolic. Not that I ever liked it. Angie had been ringing continually, offering to help, but that was just nosiness. And Greg was back, but he hadn’t got in, even though he phoned first to make sure I was here. That should have got the message through. Soon he’d be flying off again – they both would – and I need never see them or any of Matt’s other friends ever again, so there was at least one good side of divorce. Skint Old Fashion Victim, No. 1 Criteria for buying second-hand clothes: 1. It fits you 2. It has no noticeable holes or stains 3. You can (just) afford it 4. It doesn’t say ‘Dry clean only’ on the label 5. The colour doesn’t make you look like a dead Martian 6. It conceals/reveals all bulging bits in a socially acceptable manner. Phoned Anne’s London flat, and for once found her home. Her normal manner of answering the phone was so indistinguishable from the answerphone that I’d started to leave a message when she broke in. ‘Anne, this is Charlie—’ ‘And you think I can’t recognise your voice after all these years?’ ‘Oh, you’re there! Good. Is Red there, too?’ ‘No. Bosnia.’ ‘I didn’t think anything much was happening there at the moment.’ ‘It isn’t; he’s coming back.’ ‘Has Em told you I’m getting divorced?’ ‘Yes. Bloody good idea.’ ‘It wasn’t mine, but I’m getting quite used to it. I’ve discovered that although I’m deeply shocked and upset, I’m not heartbroken. Mostly I’m annoyed that I stayed faithful all these years when I needn’t have bothered.’ ‘Em says you’re selling the house and going home.’ ‘Yes – I won’t have much money, so I’ll have to live at home for a bit, until I can rent a place of my own. But to do that I’ll need to either sell more paintings or get a job of some kind.’ ‘Father’s mistress has got in the house.’ ‘She’s not only in the house, she’s in my room. If Em doesn’t get rid of her soon I’ll have to stay in the Summer Cottage.’ ‘You might like it. Home but sort of independent. Eat in, live out.’ ‘Yes … Oh, I saw you on the news a few days ago. Nice waistcoat – khaki suits you.’ ‘Just as well; never wear anything else. Like you, with your black.’ ‘I might have a change.’ ‘Em’s thinking of having a change, too: turning to the Black Arts, or maybe greyish. The darker side of Wicca, anyway,’ Anne said noncommittally. ‘Yes, but is it a good idea?’ ‘Who knows? No one can stop Em doing anything she’s made her mind up to do.’ ‘That’s true. I expect she’s got the measure of the mistress by now, too. Do you think you might be visiting Upvale soon?’ ‘Might do, in a few weeks. Depends.’ She rang off after a few bracing words about getting a solicitor and a better settlement, but I didn’t think Matt had got very much to settle, so it would be pointless and tiring. Came back from the supermarket with a whole lot more boxes, and had to kick the front door closed behind me. Flossie was still snoring in the kitchen, lying just as she had been when I went out: on her back in her furry igloo, with her head hanging out of the opening and her ears on the floor. She didn’t wake up even when I started clattering unwanted cooking-ware in the boxes. It was as I was standing on tiptoe on the very top of the high kitchen steps, unhooking the cast-iron frying pan from the ceiling rack (so convenient for Matt, who never cooked, so inconvenient for me, who did), that I was seized extremely familiarly from behind. ‘All alone at last?’ gloated a horribly familiar voice. ‘You can’t know how long I’ve wanted to get my hands on these!’ And he squeezed painfully, like an over-enthusiastic fruit tester. These were, I fear, the last words ever spoken by Angie’s husband, Greg. Had he known, perhaps he’d have thought of something a little less trite: but then, everything he uttered was straight out of a Victorian melodrama, so perhaps not. Startled and off-balance, I couldn’t stop the weight and momentum of the pan I’d just grasped from swinging down and connecting with his head. What an odd, strangely meaty, but hollow noise it made against his skull! A sort of watermelon-hit-by-a-cricket-bat sound that I don’t think I’ll ever forget as long as I live. It was only the smaller frying pan, but unluckily he must have had a very thin skull. Mind you, even with a two-handed swing I would probably have dropped rather than swung the bigger pan. Bad luck all round. As I stepped carefully down, Greg twitched like a dying insect at my feet, then lay still. Not dead yet? Not dead? Someone let out their breath in a long exhalation, and when I looked up, Miss Grinch was standing in the doorway, her choppy fingers to her skinny lips, as Shakespeare has it. An empty milk jug hung from the lax fingers of her other hand. ‘I mustn’t have locked the door,’ I said inconsequentially. ‘I’m always careful, especially when I know Greg’s home – but it was awkward with all those boxes.’ Naturally Miss Grinch would have been so consumed with curiosity she’d followed Greg in. Probably tiptoed up the hall right behind him. ‘Is he dead?’ she enquired, stepping into the room just as I dropped the pan from nerveless fingers. (It landed on Greg’s foot with a crunch, but he was beyond caring by then.) ‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?’ I quavered. ‘Not that he doesn’t deserve it, behaving in such a disgusting way to a defenceless woman,’ she said severely. ‘Find a mirror and hold it to his lips.’ I began to giggle helplessly: ‘A mirror? Why would he want to see himself at a time like this?’ ‘Pull yourself together, girl,’ she snapped. ‘A mirror will mist up if he’s breathing. Here, I’ll do it.’ She unhooked the small pine square from the wall under the clock. ‘You phone 999.’ I managed that, even though my fingers felt even deader than Greg looked. ‘Ambulance – accident – emergency!’ I babbled. ‘There’s no mist on the mirror!’ ‘Where are you speaking from, please?’ ‘This is Miss Grinch,’ that lady said, taking the receiver from my hand. ‘I don’t think there’s any rush. He’s dead.’ She gave my name and address to the operator, then added, ‘We just need the ambulance, no police. This is such a nice neighbourhood, and none of the Grinches have ever been mixed up with police.’ ‘Except the one who stole Christmas,’ I said helpfully. Of course, we did get the police, much to Miss Grinch’s indignation, but never did I think I would be so glad to have a nosy neighbour! Were it not for Miss Grinch I was sure I’d have been facing a murder charge, but she described how she’d followed Greg right into the house and had seen the whole unfortunate accident. If Greg hadn’t suddenly assaulted me just as I was reaching down the pan, with no idea that I wasn’t alone, it would not have occurred. The frying pan was impounded, but I wasn’t, although I felt so guilty at having taken a life I’d have gone without a struggle. Flossie finally awoke at one point during the noisy and exhaustive d?b?cle, took a look out of her igloo and retired back in, until everyone was gone except Miss Grinch and me. Flossie was easily confused by loud voices and big feet. Later, Miss Grinch gave me a small glass of colourless fluid and insisted that I drink it. I was positive she said it was gin and laudanum, but surely that couldn’t be right? Whatever it was, it put me out like a light. Chapter 4: Sheared Off (#ulink_d99c194e-70fd-52d9-bba0-895f12644993) Late that night Angie came to the door and beat on it, screaming hysterically, ‘Bitch! Whore! Murderess!’ The last was the only one I felt truly applied. Fortunately I was sitting in the upstairs bay window, sleep being something I’d lost the hang of, and my legs had gone too numb to go down, otherwise sheer guilt would probably have made me go and let her in. After a while lights went on in several neighbouring houses, including Miss Grinch’s, and shortly after that a police car coasted quietly up and removed Angie. There was a faint, receding cry of, ‘Pigs! Pigs! Arrest the murderess!’ and then the street slowly sunk back into dark silence. I’d been wondering how I could break the news of the accident to Matt, but in the end I didn’t have to, because Angie did it for me. He phoned to inform me tersely that henceforth all communication would be through the solicitor, and then put the phone down. I suppose murdering his best friend was a pretty irreconcilable marital difference. Miss Grinch continued to be my comfort and guide throughout this nightmare. I didn’t know what I’d have done without her, which was a far cry from the way I felt about her before she became the star witness for the defence. She was now my bestest friend. Not so much a mother figure, as an acidulated spinster figure – everyone should have one, but they are a dying breed. Em would have come to stay for a few days, but Father’s latest mistress was still infesting the house. The housekeeping was, and always had been, Em’s preserve, and she wouldn’t stand interference, let alone a takeover bid. Outright war had been declared. Normally this would all have interested me extremely, especially since one of the combatants was occupying the hallowed ground of my bedroom, but now I moved through the days like an automaton. I signed everything the solicitor sent me; Matt, true to his word, having ceased personal contact. I’d be lucky if I even got the duck now. Miss Grinch, like Anne, urged me to get my own solicitor and a better deal, but so far as I could see there wasn’t anything but debts and an absent husband, and I didn’t want half of either of those. Anyway, I didn’t feel I deserved anything any more. All I could think of was that ghastly thud as the pan connected with Greg’s head, and I was tortured with wondering whether I could have prevented it: I mean, when I hit him, I wanted to hit him – so was it really an accident? Was there a moment when I could have diverted the fatal downward swing? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure. And I felt like a murderess – I had killed someone. Miss Grinch didn’t understand that. She said God would look into my heart and judge me, but I was afraid He already had. He just hadn’t told me the outcome. We had had several people round to view the house, though I didn’t know how many were simply motivated by the thrill of blood. Miss Grinch had been conducting the sightseeing tours with a brisk efficiency reminiscent of Anne and Em. Perhaps that was why I liked her so much. She had also helped me pack up most of the house contents, and soon everything except a few necessities had gone to auction. I didn’t keep a lot – I felt a certain revulsion at the things that reminded me of Matt (and through him, Greg), which most things did. Anything unsaleable had gone to the nearest charity shop, or in the bin. I sent a small van of things to Em to store for me: the driver was cheap, but he certainly wasn’t willing, especially when it came to my plants. He said he had hay fever and wouldn’t take any of them, so I would just have to fit as many of them as I could into my 2CV when I moved, with the roof open, even though it was pretty cold to be transporting tropical foliage. I gave a lot of the smaller ones to Miss Grinch, who was delighted, so at least they’d gone to a good home. Eventually there was just me, Flossie, and a few vital odds and ends left. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, we were marooned until after the inquest. Angie had made banshee late-night appearances twice more on my doorstep, but been removed much faster than the first time. I had been buying head-sized melons. Skint Old Gardening Tips, No. 1 Always keep margarine tubs of compost on your windowsills, and whenever you eat fruit, push the pips or stones in. Water daily, and eventually something will come up. The novelty of this method is that you won’t have the faintest idea what it is. Even in my numb state – which by then seemed part of me, like permafrost – I found the inquest appalling, although but for Miss Grinch it might have been a murder trial, which would have been very much worse. The kindly coroner treated me like a frail little flower, and Miss Grinch with respect, but was firm about having Angie removed from the room when she became hysterical and demanded the death penalty. She was still screaming, ‘Murderess! Murderess!’ as she was escorted out. I knew in my heart of hearts she was right, even though the coroner assured me it wasn’t my fault at all, and urged me to put it behind me. The verdict was brought in as accidental death. The coroner added a little speech to the effect that people who succumbed to the current craze for heavy cast-iron pans would do better not to hang them from the ceiling, and I’d have to second that one. By the time I got out of the hearing the reporters from the local paper were encouraging Angie to stage the scene of her life. She spotted me. ‘Murderess!’ she screamed with a certain monotony, tossing her black veil over her shoulders and then lunging at me with blood-red talons like a deranged harpy. ‘Murdering harlot!’ Well, that was different – but why harlot? Surely it was because I’d resisted her leching husband that he was dead? And she knew what he was like. Fortunately, one or two people were holding her back, since I was transfixed by all the avid stares. ‘I’ll never let this rest until my poor Greg has justice!’ Angie howled. ‘Wherever you go I’ll find you, and make sure people know the sort of woman you are!’ I wished I knew what sort of woman I was. ‘You’ll never be able to forget it.’ Well, that was certainly true. ‘Wherever you go, I’ll follow you,’ she added, sounding suddenly exhausted, and dangling limply from the hands that a moment before had been restraining her. ‘You’ll never escape.’ Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide … ‘Why, Angie?’ I asked. ‘You must realise by now I didn’t mean to kill him. Don’t you think I feel badly enough about it already?’ ‘No, but I’ll make sure you know what it’s like to suffer – to be friendless and alone … like me.’ She drew a dramatic hand across her eyes and gave a broken sob. ‘But, Angie, Greg walked into my house uninvited and indecently assaulted me! And you must have known he was serially unfaithful?’ ‘Yes, but none of them ever killed him!’ Well, there was that. And the more I protested, the guiltier I felt. Could I really not have diverted that fatal downward swing? ‘Besides, whatever his faults, he loved me,’ declaimed Angie, looking tragic. ‘Maybe he did, but he slept with anyone he could get,’ I pointed out. ‘They weren’t important.’ The voices of the listeners now rose in a babble of questions, but Miss Grinch popped up suddenly at my side, seized her chance, and hurried me through a gap to the waiting taxi. ‘How tall was Greg?’ I whispered as we climbed in. ‘Did you find out?’ ‘Five feet, ten inches exactly, dear,’ she replied. Looking back, I could see Angie still holding forth on the steps like Lady Macbeth. ‘I wish I was dead,’ I said dully. ‘There doesn’t seem any point to living any more.’ ‘Clearly God still has a use for you,’ Miss Grinch said placidly. ‘Compost?’ I suggested. ‘We are all God’s compost, if you like,’ she said. ‘Interesting – I’ve never thought of it like that before. However, I am sure he has something in mind for you before that. He moves in mysterious ways.’ ‘Like the frying pan,’ I agreed, and we were silent until we reached the house. Miss Grinch bought the local papers, and thankfully I hadn’t merited the front page. Even with Angie’s theatrics I suppose they can only get so much story from a domestic accident without insinuating something libellous. I was described throughout as Mrs Charlotte Fry (although I’ve always called myself by my maiden name), and there were several photographs of me looking very small and weird, like a glaze-eyed rabbit cowering under the menacing overhang of Angie’s bust. My hair was now a clear white for about an inch at the roots. ‘I always wondered about that very dense blue-black shade,’ Miss Grinch said, scrutinising a particularly hideous photo. ‘It was my natural colour.’ ‘Believe me, it is a mistake, once a woman reaches forty, to dye her hair a dark colour. Your skin has lost the fresh bloom of youth and the contrast is too severe.’ ‘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. Chapter 5: The Prodigal Daughter (#ulink_d8a09151-9fe7-512e-8265-651bf3f10f7f) 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 d?cor. 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 Bront?an. 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.’ ‘That poseur! Certainly not. No, I’m thinking more of joining the local coven and fully embracing the Ancient Arts – and perhaps a suitable man. Lilith’s running one.’ ‘What, a suitable man?’ ‘No, a coven.’ ‘And just what do you mean by a suitable man?’ ‘Big, strong, silent and malleable.’ She could add ‘courageous’ to that list of qualifications. I’ve seen strong men turn and run when they see Em coming. ‘That actor’s quite dishy, up at the cottage,’ she mused. ‘And Gloria said his reputation with women stinks, so he’d be terribly suitable.’ ‘Em! You wouldn’t really.’ ‘What time are you arriving tomorrow?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘Early afternoon, I hope, but snow’s forecast, which will make negotiating Ramshaw Heights and Blackdog Moor tricky. I don’t know why, but that’s the only way I can come back.’ ‘It’s because you left that way the first time with Matt, and so you must describe the full Circle of Return,’ Em said. ‘It’ll be dicey if it snows heavily.’ ‘You’ll make it – the 2CV will glide over the top. Wrap Flossie up well, though. These little spaniels are inbred; she catches cold too easily.’ ‘Yes, and the plants, too. They’re all a bit tropical for a winter spin on the moors with the roof down.’ ‘You’ll arrive safely. I’d at least know if that were otherwise,’ Em said deeply, then added more prosaically, ‘See you then. Drive straight down to the cottage. The key is in the frog, and Walter will unpack your stuff for you while we catch up with things.’ When I came over Ramshaw Heights I could see Blackdog Moor – transformed into Whitedog Moor – glittering like quartz below me. I felt inwardly cleansed by the bright light bouncing off the vast whiteness. I was a bit of a dog at that moment: a complete mongrel. Cropped white head and black clothes hanging long and loose … more Uncle Fester than Morticia. And speaking of dogs, bubbling snores were coming from the depths of Flossie’s fake-fur-lined igloo, which was on the floor at the front passenger side. The passenger seat itself, and all the rest of the car, was jammed with all my favourite huge plants – figs and lemons, palms and bananas – wrapped in newspaper and layers of bubble wrap, and sticking up out of the open top of the car like so many extras from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My driving visibility was almost nil. We’d received some strange looks when we set out on our journey, but the closer to home we got the less notice anyone took. West Yorkshire folk can absorb every last detail without looking directly at you. Externally I was freezing, my hands stuck to the wheel. Inside, too, was still the feeling that all my organs had turned to ice, which I’d had since the moment Greg died, only now there was just the faintest tinge of warm hope. ‘You’re nearly home, Charlie: everything will be all right now,’ I encouraged myself as we slid down Edge Bank. But the Snow Queen whispered in Angie’s voice: ‘Nothing will ever be right again.’ ‘Maybe it won’t, Angie,’ I said aloud. ‘But at least it will be all wrong in the right place.’ Chapter 6: Pesto in the Kitchen (#ulink_196c3381-7695-53ad-9389-17a781b53756) Skint Old Crafts: Stick It, Stitch It, and Stuff It Hint One: for those of you living south of Luton, I suggest you shred this magazine and reassemble it in a different order with Sellotape, since it will give you hours of fun and make just as much sense afterwards. I turned down the snowy track behind the Parsonage and slid to a halt, more by luck than judgement, next to the wall of the unseasonably named Summer Cottage. It’s more of a Hobbit hole in the hillside than anything, with the heavy bulk of the Parsonage threateningly poised above, ready to toboggan down the hill sweeping all before it. The front of the cottage now sported a ramshackle, half-glazed appendage, painted a vivid shade of Mediterranean blue. The door was in need of a second coat, for the word ‘Ladies’ could still faintly be seen, although I thought the heart-shaped cut-out very tasteful. Walter had excelled himself. I was just sniffling a few sentimental tears away when a voice as mellow and melodious as a cello suddenly addressed me from behind, making me jump and whirl around like a Dervish. ‘Are you responsible for that excrescence on the beautiful face of Upvale?’ Icy fingers of Arctic wind undulated my numerous layers of loose black drapery, and I had to claw a web-fine woollen scarf out of my eyes before I could see the man who’d spoken. He was very tall, even taller than Em, and his dark, heavy-lidded eyes regarded me with a sort of weary wariness, as though I was a surprise gift he didn’t want. He was also carrying a giant teddy bear. ‘I don’t think a man who walks about wearing a red duvet and a jester’s hat has any right to criticise my cottage,’ I informed him coldly, although his strange garments didn’t actually look quite as ludicrous on him as they might sound, while my veranda, as Walter would call it, certainly did. I didn’t mention the teddy bear in case he was sensitive about it. Bran always takes his soft toy, Mr Froggy, everywhere in his pocket with him, but at least it’s small. ‘It’s ski-wear,’ he said, looking down his remarkably straight nose at me. ‘Not in Upvale it isn’t. You might as well have “Oft-Comed Un” stamped across your back; but I suppose you’re the actor – Em said we’d got one in the cottage down the track,’ I said, making him sound like a disease. ‘I don’t think she mentioned your name.’ And the bit of him I could see, between upturned collar and pulled-down hat – high sculptured cheekbones and slightly slanting, droopy-lidded eyes – did look vaguely familiar, even to someone who rarely watched TV or films. ‘I’m incognito.’ ‘It’s all right with me. I don’t expect the urge will come upon me to boast about meeting you. Or your teddy bear,’ I added, throwing caution to the winds. ‘My teddy bear?’ he echoed, looking at me strangely, but that might have been because my knitted coat was flying up behind me like black bat wings. ‘Am I not supposed to mention the teddy bear? It’s moving,’ I added, fascinated. Indeed, it was now not only moving, but muttering. The head turned and I saw a little face screwed up in sleep, framed by honey-brown fur and round ears. Then it snuggled back into the red duvet. What with that and the Mediterranean veranda I was starting to feel quite freaked. Upvale had always previously stayed the same, my one fixed constant in a threatening world. It was a relief when the actor edged past me without another word (unless you count what sounded like a muttered ‘Crackers!’) and strode off up the lane with his little furry friend. I prised my little furry friend out of her warm nest in the car, and she looked around her with a sort of vague surprise: the world had moved while she slept, again. The door key was in the mouth of the stone frog as usual, together with some small wooden tablets inscribed with what looked like runes, and a bunch of dried herbs. I left those where they were. We went through Walter’s Folly, and I opened the door of the cottage to be met and embraced by a warm miasma of lavender, furniture polish and bleach. There was no leftover redolence of mistress here, for Gloria Mundi had clearly excised every last iota of their existence. It simply smelled like home. Flossie pattered across the flagged floor behind me as I climbed the stairs up to the Parsonage kitchen and opened the strangely silent door. There was a delicious aroma, easily identified as steak and kidney pie with suet crust, and Em was sitting coring baking apples at the kitchen table, and plopping them into a big earthenware bowl of water. ‘You’ve come, then,’ she stated, without looking up from her task. ‘Put the kettle on – you must be frozen. Where’s Flossie?’ With a wheeze like a small pair of bellows Flossie hauled herself up the last step, looking vaguely around, then made straight for the wood-burning stove in the corner like a shaggily upholstered heat-seeking missile. ‘She must be cold,’ said Em fondly. ‘I’ll warm her some milk.’ ‘She isn’t cold – she’s been fast asleep in her igloo all the way here. I’m the one who’s absolutely brass-monkeyed, because I had to have the roof open for the plants. Where’s Walter?’ As if on cue the door swung open and in hobbled a gnarled and cheery little goblin. The bridge of his over-large glasses had been bound with a great wodge of Sellotape, and his baggy corduroy trousers were held up by Father’s old school tie. ‘Hello, Walter,’ I said, giving him a kiss. ‘I’ve got no eyebrows.’ ‘I know. How are you?’ ‘No eyebrows. No bodily hair whatsoever!’ he proclaimed happily. ‘I’ve made you a veranda, and now I’m going to put your plants in it and make a jungle.’ ‘It’s a wonderful veranda, Walter – it’s the best one I’ve ever seen. Thank you!’ Beaming like a lighthouse he hobbled off towards the cottage stairs, muttering, ‘No eyebrows … no bodily hair whatso …’ Em plopped the last apple into the bowl and got up. ‘There we are, now we’ll have a hot drink. Don’t worry about your stuff,’ she added, as ominous Burke-and-Hare dragging noises wafted up from the cottage. ‘Walter will bring it all in, and you can arrange it as you like later. I’ve put a couple of greenhouse heaters in the veranda to take the chill off, because there’s no electric in it yet, of course, and the floor’s just the old paving stones. Do you like the colour?’ ‘Yes. It’s very bright.’ ‘Walter’s choice. Gloria wanted dark green, but I thought that was a bit municipal. You can do your own thing with the inside of the cottage.’ Gloria is Walter’s sister, and they don’t so much work at the Parsonage as inhabit the space at odd hours between dawn and dusk, as the fancy takes them. ‘Where is Gloria? Where is everyone?’ ‘Gloria is turning out Bran’s room, in case. Father’s in his study composing another epic.’ ‘Oh God – who is it this time?’ ‘Browning. Apparently, he didn’t produce much good work while he was married to Elizabeth Barrett Browning because he was actually busy writing all her poetry for her.’ ‘The same line as usual then?’ ‘He doesn’t change. But at least it’s lucrative; everyone loves to disagree with him. Otherwise, the mistress has gone out shopping, and then she’ll probably be picking up the two sprogs from school. Do you know, she wanted them to have Anne’s room because she didn’t like them sleeping in the attic? I told her that Anne locked her room between visits and even Gloria only cleaned when she was there, and that shut her up.’ ‘Any word from Anne?’ ‘No, but her answering machine’s changed: it just says, “This is Anne Rhymer, leave a message,” and doesn’t mention Red at all.’ ‘Perhaps they’ve parted? Not that they ever seemed to be in the same country simultaneously anyway.’ ‘Something’s happening – I can feel it.’ ‘She will tell us if she wants to.’ ‘Yes, or simply turn up. I’m starting to get the idea she might be coming home soon,’ said Emily, her eyes getting that strange, faraway expression. Then it was gone and she was saying briskly, ‘Funnily enough, I’ve had much more interesting foretellings than ever before since I made up my mind to embrace the Dark Arts, but I think I’m going to go ahead anyway. I’ve got three friends coming round soon to tell me about their coven. You know one of them – Xanthe Skye.’ ‘I don’t remember anyone called Xanthe Skye.’ ‘She was Doreen Higginbottom until The Change.’ ‘Oh, yes? That will be nice,’ I said dubiously. ‘Didn’t she have a brief fling with Fa—’ I stopped dead, for the man himself, possibly attracted by the smell of freshly brewing coffee, had wandered in: big and broad-shouldered, in corduroys and a shirt rolled up to show muscular arms. He still had a full head of light, waving hair like Anne and Em’s, and though his face was looking a bit pummelled by time, the general effect was large, virile and handsome. ‘Hello, Father.’ ‘Oh God! Keep the pans locked up, Em,’ he said resignedly. Silently she poured out a mug of coffee and handed it to him, and he took two Jaffa Cakes out of the Rupert Bear tin and went back out without another word. The study door closed behind him with a snap. While I unburdened my soul to Em she baked a batch of sultana scones and made the biggest treacle tart you could fit in the oven, intricately latticed over the top. She didn’t say much, but it was comforting all the same, as were the two hot, buttered scones she insisted I eat. It was quite a while later before the front door slammed and a woman’s voice shrilled, ‘Hello everybody!’ Silence answered her. Even the zooming noise of Gloria Mundi’s Hoover stilled momentarily. ‘That’s her – Jessica. Can’t hear the sprogs; perhaps they’re out for tea or something.’ A woman staggered in and dumped a couple of bulging carrier bags on the table with a sigh of relief. ‘There you are!’ She was fortyish, with a firmly repressed dark downiness and an aura of elegant sexuality – a sort of hungry look about the shadowed eyes. Her body was diet-victim skinny, and the rather bird-billed face perched on top made her look like a duck on a stick. ‘Hello. You must be Charlie?’ she said, smiling. ‘Charlie, Father’s tart – Father’s tart, Charlie,’ introduced Em. ‘Fianc?e,’ Jessica said, her smile going a bit fixed. ‘Is that your sweet little dog? Is she all right? She isn’t moving, is she?’ ‘She isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. She’s a Cavalier Queen Charlotte. They go into suspended animation at regular intervals.’ ‘King Charles?’ ‘Not unless he was a bitch.’ ‘Take this stuff off my table, Jessie,’ Em ordered. ‘I’m trying to get dinner ready.’ ‘I thought we could have something a bit different tonight,’ Jessica said, with a sort of determined jolliness. ‘The girls don’t really like all this meat and stodge, and I’m sure it’s not healthy for a man of Ranulf’s age. And there are vegetables other than mushy peas, you know! So I’ve got some pasta, and sun-dried tomatoes and pesto—’ With one sweep of her muscular arm Em cleared the table, and Flossie found herself under a sudden rain of Cellophane packages. She sat up, looking vaguely surprised. ‘Sod off out of my kitchen,’ Em said. I was relieved she was taking it so well. Jessica laughed and began to retrieve her goodies. ‘Now, Emily, I know your bark is worse than your bite, so—’ ‘No it isn’t,’ I assured her earnestly. One of Em’s bites from a childhood disagreement we had still aches in cold weather, and I certainly don’t come between her and anything she wants, any more than I’d come between a hungry dog and a big, juicy bone. ‘Perhaps we could have pasta tomorrow?’ persisted Jessica. ‘I’ll just put everything in the cupboard, shall I?’ ‘You can put it anywhere you like, as long as it isn’t in my kitchen,’ Em said. ‘I – I think I’ll go and see Ran,’ Jessica said, backing towards the door. ‘Do that,’ Em said, and added, ‘Frost’s behind you.’ The great grey lurcher had indeed silently approached up the hall, and was now looming with his sad yellow eyes fixed on her. Jessica gave a squeak of terror and shot off into the study, slamming the door. They didn’t emerge until dinner was ready, when Father looked excited and exhausted in equal measure, which I don’t think was caused by writing the book. The giggly little twins, Chloe and Phoebe, were decanted by someone’s mother at seven. They looked about nine, and were attenuated versions of their mother, with legs like liquorice laces. The presence of Father and Em seemed to subdue them, but once they were sent off to bed they could be heard giggling for ages. Gloria Mundi (whose only comment on seeing my shorn, silver locks had been: ‘Well, I’ll go to the foot of ower stairs!’) stayed for dinner, but Walter had eaten a coddled egg and several scones in the kitchen and gone off to the pub. Gloria would generally have gone too, by now, but had stayed in order to make sure I ate enough for ten people, and went to bed early. But then, I always was her favourite – probably because I was the runt of the litter. She sat opposite, smiling at me, her pale bright eyes glowing in her crumpled face like stars in a net. She was about as close to a mother figure as we’d ever got, and it was comforting that night to have someone trying to mollycoddle me, even if, as predicted, she did make me drink a herbal brew that tasted as if it had been strained through an old sock. Miss Grinch had been an absolute tower of strength, but Gloria was glorious. Skint Old Cook, No. 1 How to Tell Your Mushy Peas from Your Pease Pudding These two northern delicacies are easily distinguishable from each other. Mushy peas are simply, as the name suggests, dried marrowfat peas soaked overnight and then cooked until they go mushy and give off liquid. Much runnier than pease pudding, they are often served with chips or pies. The canned variety can be an interesting shade of green – try them with potatoes and gravy for an enticing mixture of colour combinations. Your dinner guests will never forget it! Pease pudding is a solid, grey-greenish stodge, sometimes sold in little tubs. Made from split yellow peas boiled to a thick paste, it’s cheap, filling and full of fibre. For the desperately hungry and/or hard up, use it as a sandwich filling. It tastes better than it looks, as so many regional delicacies do: after all, weren’t jellied eels once memorably described as looking like a bad cold in a bucket? Chapter 7: Enlightenment (#ulink_e5524452-f08f-539d-a434-b5bd3ec49a88) Chivvied by Em, I walked reluctantly down to Hoo House to meet Inga early next morning before all the children arrived at the nursery. I was worried that she wouldn’t take me on, and worried that she would, but I needn’t have bothered; I suppose if I had two heads or something she wouldn’t employ me, but after seeing some of the other members of the commune with their feet in the trough at breakfast, I wouldn’t bank on it. They couldn’t know I was a murderess yet – but they might well have regarded it as a sort of minor peccadillo when they did find out. The nursery was called Rainbow of Enlightenment, which is as close as they can get to the Japanese original. I’ve never heard of it, so it obviously didn’t take off like Steiner or Montessori. Inga, a squat, damp, limp Scandinavian (no, they’re not all tall, blonde ice maidens) gloomily took me around the two big, square front rooms of the house that formed the nursery, pointing out the arrangement of the equipment: apparently the children have to complete a series of tasks in their right order. ‘Building the Rainbow of Endeavour to the Further Shores of Enlightenment …’ or something. Susie, the other helper, was setting out paint pots and brushes. ‘We have sixteen childwen,’ lisped Inga, ‘including my own – Gunilla – who is in the gawden, being at one with Natuwe.’ ‘Natuwe?’ ‘Ja, Gunilla loves Mama Natuwe.’ ‘Oh, right. Does she also love the Rainbow of Enlightenment?’ ‘Gunilla is being bwought up by obsewving the behaviouw of The Gwoup. But it is also impowtant that she mixes with other childwen. She often chooses to join in with her fwiends as they complete thewe tasks.’ ‘I see,’ I said, and so I did; no wonder staff didn’t stay long, if Gunilla was doing her own thing while the other children were put through their very structured hoops. I mean, I knew nothing much about nursery education, but it sounded a recipe for disaster. Still, maybe Gunilla was a sweet little thing, and it would all work beautifully. Yes, and I’m Pollyanna and everything comes up roses. I left just as the first children were arriving in a series of mammoth people carriers driven by Mummy or the nanny. The Rainbow must be trendy. Inga greeted the children by name in the same gloomy tones: China, Poppy, Zo? and Josh were just a sample. I expected I’d get them all hopelessly mixed up. ‘Ah, Caitlin,’ Inga said to one little girl, her voice warming up to blood heat. ‘You awe eawly. Is Daddy hewe? I wanted to speak with him.’ ‘Gone,’ Caitlin said succinctly. She was wearing a teddy-bear suit, the head, which I now saw was a hood with ears, pushed back. On her feet she wore flowered wellingtons, like a frivolous Paddington. ‘Daddy wants to be left alone, because he’s writing a play. And resting. And looking after me, while Mummy’s in a film. Then she’s going to marry Rod, and I’ve got a bridesmaid’s dress. Daddy says it makes me look like a meringue.’ She eyed me curiously, especially the limp black drapery and lace-up boots, then informed me: ‘My daddy’s a famous actor – he’s Mace North.’ ‘Face North?’ I echoed, puzzled. ‘Mace North.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to sound impressed, which isn’t easy if you don’t watch films very often, although the name was ringing bells faintly somewhere. ‘Then I think I met him behind my cottage yesterday. I’m Charlie Rhymer, and I live at the Parsonage.’ ‘I know Em. And Frost. Em gave me a gingerbread dragon with chocolate drop scales.’ ‘Em’s my sister.’ And she wasn’t usually prone to like children. What was she up to? Caitlin gave me a look of disbelief, for which I didn’t blame her. I can hardly believe I’m related to three such enormous entities myself. ‘Daddy’s frightened of Em, but I’m not.’ ‘I’m suwe youw daddy isn’t fwightened of anyone!’ Inga said. ‘Wun along in; we awe neawly weady to begin.’ I took the hint and left as yet more expensive dinosaurs trundled up the drive to decant their small passengers, and as I walked home through the mushy, melting snow I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Mace North in anything (other than a red duvet). I didn’t go to the cinema and although Matt was wont to hire DVDs, they were of the violence, sex and nastiness kind, which were not images I wanted stored in my subconscious for ever. However, that made me think of the actor’s barbarian cheekbones, so at odds with his rather posh, mellow voice, and then I remembered where I’d seen him before: the cover of Surprise! magazine, the one Angie’d whipped away again. Tartar blood, that was it. When I got back to the Summer Cottage Flossie was just waking up, so I took her for the hundred-yard stroll she considered a strenuous trek, which got us as far up the track as the actor’s cottage (no sign of life) but not quite as far as the farm, although Madge waved from the doorway. Then I set to work to try to turn the cottage into a home. It was just two rooms, really, built into the hillside, and partitioned off to provide a bed-sitting room and the usual facilities. The d?cor was a bit flowery – the last mistress’s taste, presumably – and if I was going to be here for any length of time I would have to paint it. I set up my easel in the veranda, a gesture of hope, and arranged my plants around me, though there now weren’t enough of them to give me quite that being-towered-over-threateningly feeling. I’d brought the tall ones, it was just the thick jungle effect that was missing. I would have to take a big chunk of the auction money, go to the nearest garden centre – and hope they’d deliver. It wasn’t very warm, either. The two paraffin heaters were only there to stop the plants freezing, and they gave out a pleasant but strange smell all of their own (a bit like Walter). I could do with some coconut matting over the stone flags, and electricity so that I could have lighting, and some heating … Which sort of presupposed I was ever going to spend some time in there painting; but Em and Walter had done their best to encourage me. I went up the stairs to the kitchen to see if Em fancied a trip out plant-hunting, and Flossie trailed wearily after me, wheezing. I felt sure all the exercise would do her good. The kitchen was deserted except for Frost, who lifted his head and gave Flossie a leer. Walter was in the small front room, watching TV and carving a walking stick. He grinned, but didn’t say anything. His wig, never worn, occupied its usual place of honour on the mantelpiece, draped carefully over a polystyrene head. Father’s study door was shut with his ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on it, though if anyone was already disturbed it was Father. There was no sign of the Treacle Tart, and the children must be at school, but the sound of hoovering was still audible from above, where Gloria Mundi was singing Gilbert and Sullivan in a falsetto. She was the very model of a modern major-general. I found Em eventually in the sitting room, the curtains half drawn, which is why I was well into the room before I saw that she had company. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know you were entertaining, Em. I was just going to tell you I was off to the garden centre.’ ‘That’s OK – you know Xanthe, don’t you?’ Xanthe nodded graciously at me; she did look vaguely familiar from her days as Father’s Flavour of the Month. ‘And this is Lilith Tupman and Freya Frogget.’ Lilith looked like she’d been blanched under a pot. Freya was large and clad in billowing white, like over-exuberant ectoplasm. ‘I’ll leave you to it, but let me open the curtains first,’ I offered, taking hold of the heavy velvet drapes. There was a gasp from Lilith, who held her hands to her temples and exclaimed hysterically, ‘No! No! The light must not touch my face!’ I hastily unloosed the curtains. ‘Sorry.’ Maybe she was a vampire? But then, how had she got here? ‘Would you like me to make you some coffee or something before I go?’ I offered in atonement. ‘Thanks, Charlie,’ Em said. ‘There’s a tray ready in the kitchen – just fill the pot with boiling water and bring it in, will you?’ ‘You could join us,’ said Lilith, recovering. ‘If you wished?’ ‘No, no, her aura is blue!’ Xanthe cried. ‘I cannot have blue near me … it drains my psychic energy.’ If Father hadn’t managed to drain her powers, I couldn’t see how my blue aura would. ‘Ice, I must have ice!’ gasped Freya, in a parched voice. ‘A bowl of ice from the freezer, too, please,’ said Em. ‘Do you want a hand?’ What, the Hand of Death? The Hand Of Glory? The Hand of the Baskerv— ‘No, that’s OK,’ I assured her, backing out, and starting to puzzle over the ice. Still, Em’s friends all appeared to be women of a certain age: Freya might be having a hot flush of mega proportions. I brought the tray, which contained all sorts of home-baked goodies, plus a pot of some disgusting-smelling herbal brew reminiscent of Gloria’s best, then left them to it. Flossie was now snuggled up to Frost, the hussy, and showed no interest in accompanying me, to the garden centre or anywhere else. Tips for Southern Visitors, No. 1 It is possible to have any variety of Northern accent in conjunction with an intellect. At dinner it emerged that Father had also inadvertently crashed Em’s tea party, barely escaping without being ravished by Freya, Lilith and Xanthe (well, that was his version, anyway). ‘Congratulations, Em,’ he said through a mouthful of home-made chicken pie. ‘Not one of your friends is normal.’ ‘Speaking of normal,’ Em said coolly, ‘your son is coming home tomorrow for a rest.’ Jessica helped herself to a lettuce leaf, looked at it doubtfully, and put half back again in the bowl. ‘I haven’t met Branwell yet,’ she said. ‘Is he as dishy as you, darling?’ The two little girls, who were doing full justice to the despised stodge, giggled. ‘He’s nothing like me,’ Father said tersely. ‘Charlie’s nothing like me, either.’ ‘I’m like Mother, though, and I expect Bran takes after his.’ ‘Your mother’s very famous, isn’t she?’ Jessica asked. ‘Big in America. But I do think all this writing books and talking about feminism does more harm than good, don’t you?’ ‘Someone’s got to speak out, especially when men are trying to claim great works of women’s fiction as their own,’ Em commented pointedly, but Father refused to rise to the bait. ‘Yes, wasn’t Elizabeth Barrett Browning lucky, having such a clever husband to write her work for her?’ I said innocently. ‘I wonder how on earth she managed before he came along? Perhaps one of her brothers?’ ‘You mustn’t tease,’ Jessica said earnestly. ‘Ran researches very thoroughly. He works very hard.’ ‘He has to research thoroughly to find scraps of evidence that can be twisted into proving what he wants,’ Em said. ‘And you, of course, are a great writer and know all about it?’ he said sarcastically. ‘My dear Em, I don’t think writing doggerel for greeting-card manufacturers quite qualifies you as a literary critic.’ ‘No, but I don’t just write for greeting cards – I’m also Serafina Shane.’ While this was a bit of a damp squib as far as Father and myself were concerned, Jessica laid down her fork and stared. ‘What, Serafina Shane out of Women Live! magazine? Womanly Wicca Words of Spiritual Comfort? I’ve ordered the book!’ ‘Advance orders have been very brisk,’ Em said complacently, and bestowed a slightly warmer gaze on Jessica than I had ever seen before. She might just live, after all. ‘Well done, Em,’ I said. ‘If I’d known I’d have read them, but I never buy women’s mags – they’re all New Woman, and Never Admit You’re Forty Woman, and Rich Bored Bitchy Woman, when all I ever wanted was something like Skint Old Northern Woman.’ ‘You’re right,’ Em said. ‘Weren’t you going to start one?’ ‘Yes, in fact my hobby during the last few weeks has been writing articles for the sort of magazine I’d really like to find. I’ve got quite a lot.’ ‘Do I understand, Emily,’ Father broke in, ‘that you’ve been writing your ghastly doggerel for a women’s magazine, and it’s now coming out as a book?’ ‘Yes – inspirational verse and prose. I’m very popular.’ ‘Serafina what?’ I asked. ‘Shane.’ ‘At least it isn’t Rhymer!’ Father said. ‘Well done, Em!’ I enthused. ‘So what were you plotting with your abnormal friends when I came in this morning?’ enquired Father. ‘We were trying various means to discover where Anne is. There’s something the matter with her, and I can’t get any reply from her flat. Xanthe tried the crystal pendulum.’ ‘And Xanthe knows everything?’ He frowned. ‘And why does she look so familiar?’ Em ignored this. ‘The crystal showed us where she was – somewhere near her flat. Then Freya did a reading, and discovered that Anne’s had an operation, but she’ll be here soon to recuperate.’ ‘I suppose you know this because Anne’s phoned,’ he said sceptically. ‘No. You know Anne, she’ll phone when she’s nearly here. Gloria Mundi’s turning out her room, now she’s finished Bran’s.’ ‘What makes you think the Three Witches got it right?’ ‘They always get it right. That’s why I’m joining their coven. I’ve been pussyfooting round the mealy-mouthed edges for long enough, and now I’m going to wholeheartedly embrace the Ancient Arts.’ ‘Prostitution?’ suggested Ran. ‘I hear it’s very well paid.’ Em gave him a look. ‘The Ancient Black Arts,’ she said. Jessica gasped, her eyes widening in alarm. ‘You mean – black magic? Oh, my God! The children!’ But the little girls, bored with the conversation, had crept away unnoticed. One of the dishes of meringues from the sideboard had gone too. ‘Oh, Emily – promise you won’t say anything about it in front of the girls! Don’t they sacrifice little children, and sell their souls to the Devil?’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/trisha-ashley/every-woman-for-herself-this-hilarious-romantic-comedy-from/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.