Bridesmaids Revisited (8 page)

I could see why my mother had kept her father’s memory under wraps. Mrs. Malloy, who could never quite remember if she had been married four times or five and was partial to a glass of gin, would not have enthused. Certainly not to the point of bursting the seams of her black taffeta frock to accompany me in laying a bunch of flowers on my grandfather’s grave. Come to think of it, where was he buried? Was there a churchyard within a stone’s throw of the Old Rectory? Had my mother, like the Brontes, grown up looking out upon a time-stricken cluster of tombstones? If so, small wonder that she had never seemed entirely connected to the everyday world of shopping lists and comedy programs on the television.

I looked down the lane, suddenly eager and at the same time afraid of all that I would find out from the bridesmaids. Strangely enough, I had forgotten that it was my grandmother who was my reason for being here. All I could see was my mother’s shadowed face as she sat on a horsehair sofa in a room where there was a parrot in a cage by the fireplace, a dark red cloth with a balled fringe on the table, and a jug of lemon barley water on the sideboard.

Something furtive and furry moved out of a clump of shrubs to the right of cottage number four. Given the fact that I was half in the past and half in the present, which would have been disorientating even had I been comfortably settled in an armchair, I vaulted several feet in the air. My old gym teacher would have been astounded by this feat, considering that I had never been able to manage more than a bunny hop to make it over the wooden horse. Happily, Frank corralled me with the hooked end of his walking stick and Susan steadied me with an iron grip.

“I had forgotten all about your dog,” I said to the woman with black and orange hair and impossibly green eyes.

“Been round back rummaging in the dustbins from the looks of him.” Tom eyed the longhaired gray beast without much enthusiasm.

“He always looks as though he’s in need of a brush and set.” His owner patted her leg and made cooing noises to which he responded by turning tail and peeing up a tree. After which activity he sat down and stared mournfully off into the distance.

“Had him long?” asked Irene.

“He’s not really mine.” The green eyes went from the dog to me. “I’m looking after him for my mother, who’s in hospital with back problems.”

“Arthritis?” Frank inquired with the extreme interest that only the elderly seem to show in other people’s ailments. “My wife was stricken with it something cruel for years before Thora Dobson came up with one of her herb remedies.”

“No ... a growth on her spine.”

“Sorry to hear it, but I didn’t mean your mother. I was talking about the dog.”

“Sorry.” The woman laughed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Shadow.”

“And you with your psychic powers?” Susan gave a foghorn grunt of laughter.

Frank wagged his stick in the animal’s direction. “From the way he’s sitting he looks stiff in the joints to me. But of course I’m no vet. Would have liked to be one, mind you. But didn’t have the education. Started work at fourteen, like most of us that went to the village school. Of course there’s always some,” he mused, “that you just know is going to make it in this world without none of its advantages. There was this lad—some years older than me, he was, and thought by most hereabouts to be a thorough bad lot, but I always had the feeling he’d end up king of the heap one way or t’other. Not that the girls would have cared if he’d gone around emptying dustbins. Had the looks and the damn-you-all-to-hell attitude that had them all over him. Even my Jessie admitted to me after we’d been married some thirty years that she’d thought she was in love with him until she found out she was just one of a string wrapped around his little finger.”

“Don’t go looking at me!” Susan’s stertorous denial carried conviction but she was fussing with her floral pinny. “My parents would have knocked me into the middle of next week if they caught me within inches of a gypsy foundling without a proper name to call his own. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ is what they said when Hawthorn Lane took himself out of Knells, right about the time”—she looked at me thoughtfully—“that your grandmother Sophia was married off all in a hurry to William Fitzsimons.”

What was she implying?

“Poor lass! Didn’t get the white wedding that was planned,” said Frank.

“Meaning?” Irene radiated a blue-eyed interest.

“On account of her father dying so sudden.”

“Couldn’t have been any other reason.” Tom gave me a smile that bordered on the benign. “Not with her being a vicar’s daughter. Bound to have been too busy doing the altar flowers and helping her mum entertain the ladies of the Women’s Institute to get up to tricks. Besides, she was your very own grandmother, wasn’t she, love?” he added as if this put the seal on it.

“It’s very interesting getting a sense of Knells’s past and present,” I said, “but I really should be doing something about getting my car out of that ditch.”

“Allow me.” Tom sounded like Sir Walter Raleigh preparing to spread his cloak at my feet, where there happened to be a puddle remaining in one of several potholes in the lane. The sky showed patches of blue. There were only a few clouds to be seen and even they were drifting away over the fields like threadbare underwear blown off a clothesline. I wondered what the weather was like in Norfolk, and if Ben and the children had managed to get out on one of the nature walks so prominently featured in the Memory Lanes brochure. When I refocused, it was to see that Irene, Susan, and Frank had gathered alongside the ditch, heads nodding, arms waving, as they issued a stream of instructions to Tom on how to back up without running one of them over.

Shadow, the dog, pawed at my raincoat, and being the rangy mutt he was, he managed to leave muddy prints from hem to collar. I was tempted to turn around and let him do the back as well. That way, the bridesmaids might think I was wearing a smart, up-to-date leopard print, which I could later give to Mrs. Malloy, who was partial to the safari look. But the woman with black and orange hair was at my elbow, talking to me.

“This must be a real trip down memory lane for you, Mrs. Haskell.”

I felt a chill, which had nothing to do with the breeze blowing strands of hair across my cheeks. “Susan said something about...” I watched the cottagers scatter as the car jerked out of the ditch. My voice was doing the same thing—coming out a lurch at a time. “Do you really have them ... psychic powers, I mean?”

“Why?” She was looking at me intently and there was something about her perfume, softly floral—like violets on a windowsill—that set me further off balance.

“It was only that I was thinking just seconds ago about my husband and children.” Shadow sat at my feet, one ear cocked as if eager not to miss a single word of what he clearly expected to be a fascinating disclosure. “They’re staying at a holiday camp place called Memory Lanes. You’ve probably heard about them. They’ve been springing up all over England over the last few years. The way Butlins’ did years ago. My parents thought they were awful. All that raucous ‘let’s have fun’ and the beauty pageants, the worst thing since sliced bread. Or were they around before that?”

Now I was talking too fast, one word toppling over the other. “Of course it was the logical thing for you to say, about my taking a trip down memory lane, I mean. After all, you do know I’m here to visit people I haven’t seen in years, who live in the house where my grandmother and mother grew up. But, well ... are you psychic?”

“Do you believe people can be?”

“I’m not sure.”

She smiled and it was as though she drew me inside herself, back to a place I knew and loved. This stranger with the weird, wild hair. And the eyes that had me feeling as though I were looking into a kaleidoscope of fractured memories. Part of me wanted to climb into the car that Tom now had back on the road. The rest of me needed to stay right where I was, rooted not only to the past and present but also to the future that was about to claim me.

“The ladies at the Old Rectory believe that I see things hidden to most.”

I sensed she was about to say more. But the cottagers suddenly surrounded us and for a moment I panicked, remembering their earlier mob mentality. They were instead almost falling over themselves to convey that it wouldn’t take my moving in and living amongst them for thirty years to gain their acceptance and goodwill. Frank took my arm and tottered me over to the car, Tom nipped smartly ahead of him to open the driver-side door, and the moment I was seated Irene reached in and buckled the safety belt for me. When that was done, Susan bundled in the trailing end of my raincoat. After which one or all of them shut the door and I rolled down the window to catch what they were mouthing at me through the glass.

“Drive carefully.” Irene beamed and waved her hand. “The Old Rectory is just around the second bend, you can’t miss it. It’s the very last house on the left where the lane turns onto Church Road. Beyond that it’s just more fields. There’s a sign on the gate.”

“Ted could be working in the garden,” supplied Tom, “him that’s Edna Wilks’s husband, in case you’ve forgot. Unpleasant old codger. Might snarl at you for so much as telling him ‘good afternoon,’ but don’t mind him.”

“Always been that way since he was a lad. Can’t think why Edna married him. A pretty girl she was once upon a time. Took her out a time or two myself till I met my Jessie.” Frank’s craggy features softened into something between happiness and sorrow.

“Now don’t go keeping the girl twiddling her steering wheel.” Susan gave him a poke with a giant finger. “You’ll just have to come round to my house one morning and we’ll all have a good natter over coffee and one of my Dundee cakes.”

“I’d love that,” I said, and with a resolute wave put the car in gear and drove off down the middle of the road, where I hoped the ditch couldn’t get me. Through the rearview mirror I could see the solitary figure of the woman with the black and orange hair framed by an overhanging branch from one of the cottages. A second glance showed Shadow, the dog, chasing after me—paws barely skimming the ground and ears streaming out behind him. This was all I needed. The next thing I’d know he would have circled in front of me. Either he would end up under the wheels or I’d end up having a serious accident this time.

Slowing to a crawl I breathed a little easier. He was now jogging, happily from the looks of him, alongside me, almost as if I had him on a lead and we were practicing for an upcoming appearance at Crufts. Although what breed he would have shown under I hadn’t the foggiest. I was now at the second bend in the lane and could see what had to be the Old Rectory. Yes, there was the gate in the garden wall and I could read the lettering on the tarnished brass plate. I couldn’t see a garage, although there might be one around the back. I parked at the curb and stepped gingerly out so as not to step on Shadow’s tail, which was thumping happily, as though he had accomplished something wonderful in getting me safely to my destination. His owner’s voice floated our way urging his return and with a last thump and a final soulful gaze he crept back up the lane.

“That’s right, get off with you, nasty old mutt!” A small, wizened man wielding a pair of pruning shears several sizes too big for him crossed the sloping lawn as I was getting my case out of the car.

“He wasn’t doing any harm,” I felt compelled to say.

“Fouling pavements, that’s all any dog’s good for. Don’t know why Miss Maywood let that witch woman bring him along when she came here spinning her yarns.” He was now gumming his words with a vengeance. The absence of teeth and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and chin might have been endearing in a kindly old geezer. But I decided I had rarely seen anyone more repulsive. “And there was Edna telling me to keep an eye on him out here in case he jumped the wall while they was inside talking, like I got nothing better to do.”

“You let him out, that’s why he was running loose.”

“And I say that’s for me to know and you to prove.” He was pointing the shears at me. Perhaps in his worked-up state he had forgotten he was holding them but I took a couple steps backwards, glad that I was still behind the gate. “Want to go running to the old girls, do you, letting them know Ted’s not been respectful?”

He stood cackling away to himself. Then a sly watchfulness slid into his lizard eyes and I stared back at him, telling myself that he was a poor mad soul. Perhaps if I stood very still and thought nice kind thoughts he would realize that I wasn’t holding a hypodermic in one hand and a straitjacket in the other.

“I know who you are.” Saliva foamed around his lips like the tide coming up on the beach.

Here we go again!

“You’re Mina’s daughter.” Ted grudgingly opened the gate for me. “Even if the old ladies hadn’t said you was coming, I’d have known you anywheres.” His leer would have cracked a china cup.

“I don’t look like my mother.”

“No. A reed of a girl she was, with yards of red-gold hair. Never liked me, she didn’t. Not from when she was a tiny child. Didn’t give Edna any trouble.” He released one of his foam-spattered chuckles. “That’s my wife, or the old bat, as I calls her. She’ll make a fuss of you, but don’t you go being taken in. Her and her wicked deceiving ways! Led me a proper dance, she has, from before we was wed. Never good enough for her, I wasn’t. Always dreaming of Mr. Wonderful.”

I couldn’t bring myself to thank him for confiding in me.

“The cemetery’s just around the corner, not halfway up Church Road, next to St. John’s. Could be you’ll fancy a walk up there after you’ve had your tea and crumpets with Miss Maywood and the other two. Always nice to visit relatives, is what I’m getting at.”

“Meaning?”

“That’s where your grandfather and great-grandparents are buried. Say hello from me to the miserable lot of them. Religious nuts! Who needs them?”

Why ever would the bridesmaids employ such a man? Mercifully, he exited my life for the time being, disappearing through an ivy-covered archway set in the tall privet that separated the front garden from the back. Taking a deep breath, I studied the house, trying to merge the reality with my childhood memory of a place steeped in gloom. What I now saw was a gray stone dwelling with narrow sashed windows and a prim roof on which perched a row of chimney pots that looked as though they had been set there by a child’s hand and dared to fall off. Not the grim-looking place I remembered. I had been an imaginative child and easily spooked, I reminded myself as I pried open the gate and headed up the cobbled drive. For years I had believed that a firm of goblins had set up their headquarters under my bed. The noises I heard at night were the whirl and grind of their machinery churning out bottles of spell bombs guaranteed to turn a child’s homework into gobbledygook by morning, when it would be too late to do it all over.