I make an effort to calm myself and act as though her trip with Bert is no surprise. I’ll have it out with Bert, not her.
There’s an unapologetic edge to her voice. She doesn’t take the flowers from me, offers coffee instead as though she is some kind of hostess. I look at her pudgy face, her watery blue eyes, her dark-painted lips; I take in the strange velvet dress she is wearing, which drags around her ankles. It’s hideous, a tabby-cat mottled hodgepodge of a dress. She looks like a mad bag lady. I see my enemy. Could this woman, this messy creature with lines on her face and iron-gray hair, also be my rival? And, if she is, do I care? Would I even bother to fight for Bert?
Knowing him as I do, the thought of the two of them making a pair seems ridiculous, but then the truth so often is. I may not be sure that I want Bert, but I’ve had enough of people taking what’s mine.
When Bert comes back, he is on edge, not at ease with me. It is the surprise of me just turning up without warning, I suppose. He is wearing his salmon and cucumber bow tie, so I guess he lunched at the Garrick. He bustles around showing me the new pieces, which include, I can’t imagine why, a canvas covered in hundreds of pieces of what look like Post-it notes but are in fact little squares cut from the assorted flags of Europe.
“More a designer piece,” he says, shooting an anxious look at Helen. “But sort of engaging, don’t you think?”
“It either is or it isn’t engaging, Bert. We don’t go in for ‘sort of,’ do we?”
He’s forgotten how I dislike those wishy-washy words, “sort of,” and “kind of,” and, especially, “if you like.” It either is or it isn’t. You either like or you don’t, there’s no “if” about it. Why water everything down?
“Where is the Hopper?” I ask.
“Sadly, that didn’t come off,” he sighs. “They didn’t want it leaving America. In any case, we couldn’t have come up with the money. You wouldn’t believe the asking price. They had found a homegrown buyer before we even got there.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“You look well,” he says, baldly changing the subject, blushing a little.
It isn’t the truth. I know I don’t look good. I’m thinner than ever, I have the start of a cold sore, and I’m having a bad hair day. Not to mention that it’s a “flag day,” as Gloria likes to call the monthly bleed.
“Tea at Fortnum’s?” he offers.
In the store, heading toward its splendid Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon, we push our way through the crowds, who are gawping at the groceries, as though they are looking at things magical, as though they have never before seen melons, strawberries, or confectionary. There’s a display of chocolate teddy bears guarding a mountain of sugary truffles, one of huge seashells awash with silvered almonds. There are gold-themed tables, boxes of candied peaches, gilded dragées, and glistening jars of honey that catch the light. You have to hand it to whoever arranges the tables. Each one looks like a still from the film Babette’s Feast.
Bert stops in front of a stand where every kind of shortbread is displayed. He fingers a tartan tin. “We need to fatten you up,” he says, taking it to the till.
The sight of all this food quite sickens me. I am put in mind of the seven deadly sins. All this excess, this licking of lips, eyes alight with . . . what? Is it lust or gluttony? I need a drink.
“I hate shortbread,” I say to Bert.
“Oh, never mind, then, we’ll eat them at work.”
The tea is good, hot and sweet. I can’t face the sandwiches, but I nibble at a cheese straw, the best I’ve ever tasted. When Bert goes to the men’s room, I pour a shot of gin from my flask into my tea and outstare the uptight woman sitting at a table nearby who looks across at me with disgust on her face. Silly bitch.
When Bert returns to the table, I pour him a cup of tea and get to the Helen thing.
“So you took Helen to New York, Bert?”
“Well, I . . . you know.” He colors up.
“I know what?” I say.
“You didn’t want to come, and I didn’t fancy doing it on my own. It was a last-minute thing. Spur of the moment, you know.”
“Spur of the moment?”
“Yes. She wanted to see friends there, and she paid for herself.”
“Good,” I say. It’s hardly up to us to pay for her to see her friends, is it?
Back at the apartment, Bert takes to his bed for a sleep before dinner. He has booked the Wolseley, where he is a favorite. He can have his special table. No need for him to obey the two-hour time slot they’ve allotted to other diners, either. I have never cared to stand in the light of my husband’s popularity; it would be demeaning to do so, like hanging on to the coattails of a celebrity in order to feel important oneself. I wonder, though, how it must feel to be so celebrated.
His bedroom door is ajar. I watch him through the open gap for a minute or two. Crumpled into the duvet, his soft body appears like some life-size rag doll. His mouth is open, and every so often he gives a little whistling snore. He has taken his shoes off, left his turquoise-and-yellow-striped socks on. Colorful socks are Bert’s idea of what a gallery owner should wear, those and the bow ties he collects. He may not be an artist, but he doesn’t want to appear like a conventional businessman, either.
He looks vulnerable lying there with his slack mouth gaping. He looks sad and old, older in sleep than when I picture him in my head. Being married to this old man has made me feel old myself. I am repulsed, and it’s in this moment that I withdraw from him totally, know for certain that I don’t want to pin my colors to his mast anymore. I want to be free, to do what I want without having to answer to anyone. Bert has become a burden.
I am done with marriage, but that doesn’t mean I will give Helen a free run. I will choose when to unshackle myself from it. And, when I am ready, we will talk, talk things out, agree on how to share our spoils. But not now. Not on this fading day when all I can think of is getting back to Pipits.
I go to my room, pick up my case, and call a taxi from the phone in the hall to take me to the station. We were meant to have a lovely evening together, I was meant to stay, but I can’t.
I leave him a note on the hall console.
Sorry, my dear. I’m not feeling too well at the moment, and I didn’t want to bore you with having to look after me. Speak soon. Lizzie.
7
WE ARE ALL WAITING: Bert to hear when I plan to return, Gloria and Henry for the baby, and Alice, poor Alice, to die. I’m waiting, too, attempting to find a way to get Gloria and Henry out of the picture. I need a plan, some wonderful plan to rid me of the Bygones once and for all. Pipits hangs in there with me, cheering me on, breathing evenly while it waits.
With Christmas less than a month away, I suspect Alice may just make it. She has fixated on celebrating the yuletide, and it appears to be keeping her going. I have heard before that it’s not unknown to keep death at the door while you complete the one last thing you have set your mind on doing. In Alice’s case, it is Christmas Day.
She is a puny clone of her former self, yellow tinged, her voice fading along with her body. It is shocking how quickly things have gone downhill. She is quiet in her illness, bearing up without complaint. Sometimes I enter a room and it can be minutes before I know that she is in it. She will be sleeping in a chair, or pushed into a corner of the sofa, nodding over a book with her legs curled under her, so that she appears, in her bright knits, like another of Gloria’s scatter cushions. She takes little rests throughout the day, and I wonder how soon it will be before she has to take to her bed full-time.
I heard a strange conversation between her and Henry yesterday afternoon as I passed the sitting room.
“It is too generous of you, Alice,” Henry said. “Is there no one else who deserves it more?”
“Not really. Only you and Gloria, and it’s for the two of you I’m doing it, really.”
“She won’t be grateful, you know. She’s never grateful.”
?
??Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Henry. In any case, I shan’t be around to care about grateful, will I?”
“Oh, Alice,” Henry said, before they fell silent.
It was obvious they were talking about me. I can’t think of anyone else Henry would be so mean about. But then again, although Alice may look benign, she is not above meddling in other people’s business. She involves herself so much in village affairs that it could have been anyone. I’ll find out eventually, though. Henry will tell Gloria, and Gloria will spill to me.
Now that Alice is not so active, I find that I don’t mind her presence in the house as much as I thought I would. I dare say it is something to do with her air of acceptance, and the fact that Gloria has cut down her client list so that she can spend more time with her. So, fewer sorry-for-themselves housewives trailing through the hall, fewer telephone calls from people requiring Gloria’s urgent help.
It’s Alice’s visitors who come to Pipits now, not as annoying as Gloria’s patients and not on the hour, of course, but still there they are, muddy feet and dripping umbrellas, haw-haw voices. With their roles reversed, they bring books to the librarian now and keep her current with the gossip. Who knew that milky Alice had so many friends? The house is full of their gifts: books and potted plants, endless jars of crab-apple jelly. Honestly, how many potted plants are we expected to water, and what is the point of crab-apple jelly? It is neither sweet nor sour, merely bland, somewhat like Alice.
The paraphernalia of Alice’s illness litters the house: extra blankets on the sitting room sofa to keep her from the cold, foils of pills left lying around, half-empty glasses of water placed about here and there. Her bedside table hosts a forest of drugs, a thermometer, a blood-pressure machine, medicated wipes, and balls of cotton wool; and in the middle of this muddle a black-and-white photograph of her parents looking quizzically at the camera. Alice’s father, stooped forward, mild-looking except for the rebellious jutting of his jaw, her mother mousy pretty, everything small, eyes, nose, mouth, tiny white teeth. Alice takes after her father, a gangly man, all angles.
I console myself with the fact that these trappings are transient things. Alice has set up a temporary camp, that is all. It occurs to me that Pipits hosted my father and grandfather on their way out; Mother, too. They left a stronger impression in its heart than Alice will, I’m sure.
Her oncologist, against his will but at her insistence, has given her a guesstimate of how long she has left.
“Weeks,” he ventures. “But it is not an exact science. People are always surprising me.”
How strange. Alice will be here and then not. I remember her in our young friendship, how she admired me, how easily led she was. We were not a good match as friends, I was too adventurous for her, she too timid for me. That doesn’t excuse her jumping ship, though.
I take to walking the garden with her. She is slower than I would have imagined possible, taking pleasure in every living thing.
“I never noticed before how exquisite bare branches are,” she says with wonder. “How the laurel looks so perfectly polished.”
“Oh, I have always noticed such things,” I say. “Ever since childhood, beauty has affected me.”
Gloria, huge now with her baby due in January, can’t do enough for Alice. Henry is worried about how often she climbs the stairs to minister to her.
“It will wear you out, my darling,” he says. “Just when you should be resting.”
He often looks at me when he says it, as though it is my fault Gloria is putting herself to the effort. I suppose he thinks that I should be the one doing the nursing. It wouldn’t help Alice if I did. I don’t have the right attitude to cheer the dying. For one thing, I am disgusted by the stench that emanates from Alice’s sickbed, a suspicion of ammonia, and the faint trace of bile; and, for another, I’m not good at the touching thing. Gloria is. I often catch her sitting hand in hand with Alice. She brushes Alice’s hair, bathes her, helps her in the lavatory. I can’t help thinking that this is what I signed up for with Bert. What was I thinking?
Things between Bert and me have changed. We hardly speak now, and although he says that he will come at Christmas, he has stopped visiting at weekends. His telephone calls have dried up, and his texts are so brief as to be abrupt. He prefers to keep in touch by email, and never asks when I will be coming home anymore. A stranger reading those emails would never guess that we are husband and wife. They inform me of what is going on in the gallery; they offer details of who bought what and describe the latest pieces we have on show. He tells me not to rush my convalescence; for all her free and easy attitude, Helen has turned out to be brilliant at the bookkeeping side of the job, so no need for me to worry that my absence is hurting business. Hmm!
And now, Fiona, the mural painter—I can’t bring myself to call her an artist—is back. She is mapping out her dreadful picture for Mother’s wall, which has been skimmed with new plaster to make it smooth for her efforts.
“Not quite ready yet,” she says. “A day or so more drying time should do it. It must be bone-dry, or my paints will flake.”
So, for the time being she spends the waiting hours sketching outlines on a big pad while sitting on Mother’s floor, sipping sweet tea from the cup of her thermos-flask. I often catch her just staring at the wall as though in a trance.
“I won’t offer you any,” she says, indicating the flask. “It’s too sweet for most people. I’m hooked on sugar. Can’t seem to do without it.”
I wonder what else she might be hooked on. She offers me a piece of nougat from a pink candy-striped paper bag. She pronounces it “nugget,” as though it is a chunk of gold. I can tell the nougat is the cheap kind from the covered market. I refuse politely.
“I have the addict’s nature,” she laughs. “Gave up cigarettes and took up sugar. Ah, well.”
I notice the sugar has camped out on her thighs, which are somewhat lumpy. She actually wears dungarees and a patterned scarf around her hair, which makes her look like a 1980s member of the sisterhood. She is remarkably unaffected by the curse of her minor talent. One can only feel pity.
Two days now since the plaster dried out, but our little cartoonist has retired for the moment, suffering, she thinks, from a stomach bug. Not so. Not a bug, but the laxative I put in her flask of tea while she chatted to Alice as they shared a bag of marshmallows in the kitchen: syrup of figs with a hefty dose of sugar. Sweet enough for the aftertaste of the emetic to go unnoticed, I hoped. And that seems to have been the case.
Because of the risk to Alice, Gloria has asked her to stay away until she is completely back to normal. I hear my little sister speaking to her on the phone. “Better safe than sorry,” she says in her best Mother Teresa voice.
I must admit to getting a thrill from the success of my experiment. It’s exciting somehow to be the cause of the effect. It perked me up to no end, and gave me the idea to lace Henry’s morning coffee with four of the Temazepam I get on prescription since the Beachy Head incident.
After breaking a couple of his pots, Henry took to his bed and slept for ten hours. Gloria thought he must have caught Fiona’s bug, which set her to panicking about our ill houseguest.
“We must protect Alice,” she said. “At the slightest sign of anything, Betty, don’t go near her. We can’t risk it.”
It is fun, this taking a hand in things, but it’s not enough. Slowing down their changes does not stop them. No matter what it takes, be it tears, or blood, or the crushing of bones, I must do it. My inevitable takeover of Pipits will happen. I lie in my bed at night and think of how to accomplish my ends. The house is listening, I know, waiting to hear how I plan to save us from its intolerable owners.
Yesterday, dreading the crowds, I went to Bath to do a bit of Christmas shopping. I needed to get away from my sister, away from Alice’s fading, from Henry fussing about having enough stock of his pottery for the May Park fair. House whooshed me out of the front door as though it knew I needed the break.
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I broke my own rule about not drinking before six and had a double gin at the pub opposite the open marketplace. I needed it to keep going. I ate a packet of peanuts and felt a bit better. I can never stomach breakfast, and I couldn’t remember when I had eaten last.
I bought Gloria some of her fig fragrance in a glass decanter, a so-called limited edition for Christmas. I balk at the thought of giving her a gift at all, but gifts are expected, so if I must, I want to outshine hers to me. Fig is her scent, and it occurred to me that even without the perfume, she would still smell sweet. I sometimes think her body is only part animal, there seems to be plant, too, musk and blossom. Another gift of the gods to their beloved. Hate for her prickles under my skin.
I used to love figs. And I would wait impatiently for the little black variety that grows in Pipits’ garden to ripen. Now their fragrance brings Gloria to mind, and I cannot stomach them anymore. I will rip out the bushes in the spring, when I intend to take over the garden. I will say an infestation of root nematodes has split their roots, or that they caught fig rust.
For Henry I chose one of those chunky knitted snoods from a men’s clothing shop. It looks a bit girly to me. Still I suspect it is his sort of thing. I couldn’t help wondering if it was worth getting Alice a present. Despite her determination to see out Christmas, the way things are going, she may not. I decided to wait and see if willpower triumphs over mortality.
I must have had a premonition because later when I pulled into Pipits’ drive, an ambulance was there loading up Alice.
“She’s had a terrible day,” Gloria said as our GP came bustling out of the house, bag in hand. “Ferocious nausea.”
“Don’t worry, they will get your pain relief sorted, Alice,” he said, squeezing her hand. “It shouldn’t take long. I’ll inform your specialist. He will want to get you home for Christmas, I’m sure.”
“I’ll get back when I can,” Gloria said, stepping into the ambulance to accompany Alice to the hospital.