Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 29 Read online

  Thus, later on the morning of the wedding, she and her husband met each other in their living room. There was the familiar couch, stained from their years of living on it, and there the end table. There the bookshelves and the entertainment center and the many many family pictures, both posed and candid, and the vase she had filled earlier that week with yellow tulips which had now bloomed past their breaking point, some sides drooping to expose the waxy stamens standing dark against their yellow screen. If she looked through the French doors and down the hallway she could even see herself and her husband reflected in the hall mirror, standing together in complimentary grays next to the couch, her husband fiddling with his tie stud, the gaily wrapped giftbox which contained the clock sitting on the end table next to the lamp. Oh, but who were they? She felt so tired now, and it was only the beginning of what was historically supposed to be a very long day. There would be so many different kinds of emotions to go through. She tried to conjure them up in her head: Pride and Guilt, Strength and Providence, Envy, Greed. Through the French doors and down the long hallway her very small face in the mirror flickered through the emotions. Pride and Greed, Guilt and Providence. She thought she looked strange in her steely gray dress which made her hair take on a sympathetic sheen, her shoulders seem mottled, her mouth like a dent in her face.

  “What are you thinking about?” her husband asked. It had been a long time since he’d asked her this, but it had used to be a kind of code between them. At night he would say it, reaching under the sheets to rest his hand on her stomach, and she would say it back. “I don’t know, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about what you are thinking about. What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eventually, they would just echo each other, their voices so alike, and then they would come together, have sex carefully so the bed would not proclaim itself too loudly, and be surrounded in the house by the sound of their sons sleeping, their seven sons packed into all the corners of the house breathing in tandem through the night.

  Now, however, the context seemed different and when she said “I don’t know,” her husband used her shoulder to steady himself as he wiped a fine film of sawdust off the tip of his polished shoe. He said, “Where are the directions? Are they in your purse?” and together they walked out the door of their house and their figures in the mirror behind them also dwindled, smaller and smaller, then gone.

  The night before it had snowed and the world was unmistakably altered as they drove through the town and out of the town, through the countryside and up into the mountains where their son had reserved a mountain lodge for the ceremony. In the town, the snow made her neighbor’s houses look like cheerful idiot children. Some of the houses even had hesitant little ribbons of smoke drifting up from their chimneys which made their doors and their windows looked rosy the way an idiot child’s cheeks would look rosy if he had stayed out too long in the cold. She wanted to scrub the house’s cheeks, but of course this made no sense and she shifted in the seat so that her dress, uncomfortable beneath her, wouldn’t crease.

  In the countryside, the snow fell over the fields and hedges with soothing formlessness, but was already starting to be marked, tracked all over with the markings of animals cutting across the wide, white fields. In the mountains, where the trees grew thicker and thicker and closer to the road, the snow took on a blue tinge. It seemed to be hiding from them, moving through the forest alongside their car so that when she looked she would see snow—gullies of it, blue pockets studded with rocks—but when she turned her head to watch the tightening, climbing road, it would be something else: a pacing, a dark movement between the trees. The snow was in the road as well, fresh and deep. Her husband had to drive slowly, tense with concentration, while she turned the dial on the suddenly squealing radio looking for the latest weather news and as a result they were late getting to the top of the mountain, late pulling into the gravel parking lot of the lodge which was already crowded with other guest’s cars—parked at desperate, hasty angles as if they had arrived together, all at once, from every imaginable direction—and late climbing the lodge’s wide stone steps, the shoulders of her husband’s overcoat frosted with a thin layer of snow which was again beginning to fall.

  When she and her husband entered the lodge, they found themselves in the foyer, a narrow room planed in rough pine planks and constricted with the cold that seeped in around the door, through the window panes, up through the cracks in the uneven floor. It was empty save for a coat tree hung about with scarves and hats, mittens stuck to its various knobs, and beside it a chair draped with heavy overcoats. Her husband handed her the box containing the clock and added his overcoat to the pile. It was by far the largest and overwhelmed the other coats, its soft grey wool spangled with melting snow like asphodel spangling a secret, luxuriant, ashen meadow. None of the rest of the coats is so beautiful, she thought. In fact, many of them were ugly and strange. Some of them were also very small—diminutive, doll-like coats with too many armholes and buttons fashioned from the carapaces of iridescent beetles. She lifted the hems of the many coats layer by layer. Some seemed to be stitched of leaves and rustled under her fingers and she realized the whole room was filled with rustling, as if a large crowd were talking very softly, each member of the crowd talking on and on, not necessarily to each other, not necessarily intending to be understood. “Hurry up,” her husband said. “We’re late.”

  So she and her husband, dressed in beautiful outfits of complimentary gray, one of them, herself, carrying a gay gift box inside of which was a clock that had just that moment begun to tick, opened the wide double-doors at the far end of the foyer and stepped together into a great, vaulted hall. The hall had been set up like a chapel: rows of whitewashed pews down either side of an aisle carpeted with lichens, garlands of feathers in reds and blacks and grays festooning the rafters, a smell in the air like thick, dark incense, like peat moss, like cold soil piled by the side of a hole. It was altogether a startling effect made worse by the fact that the other guests were already seated, all facing the dais at the end of the aisle on which stood six of her sons dressed in gray, the groomsmen, and one son in black who was today taking a bride. The bride herself was also there on the dais—oh, they were late indeed—and she seemed to have chosen an unusual dress. It was hard to see exactly what shape the dress was, it was so unusual. Hard to see, exactly, what shape the bride was even as she turned, rustling, her face covered by the billowing veil, a hoary veil, crackling, vertiginous, to face her and her husband as they stood together in the doorway. The rustling sound increased and the guests swiveled around in their seats to look.

  “What are you thinking?” she said to her husband. But it was altogether too late. The chapel was filled with variable shadows, the brilliant cold light dampened by flurries that clumped as they fell past the vaulted windows. Her husband’s face wavered in and out of the shadows; drawn, bluing, extraordinary, she realized, but yet the same as all the other faces he had ever had in their lives together. She pictured her husband in his familiar settings, the easy muscle of his younger arm stretched up to grip the doorframe and the way he held his knife to press a bit of meat onto the prongs of his fork. Yes, even in her memories it was still this face—twitching, unsure what to do with its mouth—superimposed over each of the other possible faces as if someone had clipped it out and pasted it messily over the still scenes of their past.

  “I don’t know,” she said, filling in the gap, but her husband paid her no mind. He stared around him: at the chapel, at the guests, stared at the bride, now advancing down the dais to welcome them, and at the groomsmen, his sons, the smallest and shyest raising one sleek paw to wave. He stared at their immaculate suits, their sharp immaculate heads, long brows, fine whiskers, the dear points of their ears and their bright eyes. He stared at their russet fur gleaming in the snow-light that poured through windows, the little puffs of breath that rose from their black muzzles, their sharp yellow
teeth as they smiled, all of them, dear sons, smiled at their parents, happy to see them arriving at last, standing together in the aisle, happy to see them looking upon them, the seven sons, the brothers, the singular bride.

  “This is a shock to me too, you know,” she said. She felt a little peevish now, a little uncertain with the gift clock ticking, the bride advancing and holding out one indistinct, welcoming arm. Her husband beside her suddenly seemed too small for his suit, continuing to shrink, dwindling in the aisle. But a number of years had passed for them, too many for their situation to change much now, and she said it in the way she would have said almost anything. What was there left to do but step forward, graciously, into her daughter-in-law’s embrace?

  Re-load

  Kara Singletary

  I knew he was right.

  That kid,

  who kept reloading

  until he could save

  each and every one

  of the CGI schoolgirls

  from anonymous,

  mouth-less soldiers,

  who took all the

  extra quests needed

  to rid the map of its evil

  without losing karma points

  in the unfortunate

  course of battle,

  he died a martyr

  never named,

  erased from history.

  I scoured the rectangle map

  for ways to out-do his goodness,

  looked to the very corners,

  I tried to save myself

  to momentary living

  before anything important, but

  the hurt look of my

  well-programmed companions

  stayed with me

  no matter how many times

  my fingers somehow

  hit the buttons to make me

  delete their memories.

  Fairy Skulls

  Nina Allan

  “They’re fairy skulls, Vinnie,” Jude said. “Don’t you believe me?”

  Vinnie didn’t, of course, or at least as she grew older she believed her aunt less. She knew the skulls were probably made of Bakelite or ivory. But Jude liked to pretend they were fairy skulls, and pretending to believe her made things more fun.

  The skulls were off-white in colour, the size of small marbles. One had its lower jaw missing but apart from that they were perfect in every detail. Vinnie had seen a human skull in a museum, together with the skulls of other primates and replicas of the skulls of early man. The fairy skulls were more elongated than the human skull, and what they reminded Vinnie of more than anything was Australopithecine Man, a species that had first appeared in the Pliocene era, two million years before the birth of Homo sapiens. Each skull hung from a chain, fixed into the bone with screws so tiny you needed a magnifying glass to see them. The chains were attached at equal intervals around a gold charm bracelet. When you slipped the bracelet over your wrist and waved your hand from side to side the skulls banged together like clackers.

  Jude said that the bracelet was made of 24 carat gold, the best, and there was no doubt in Vinnie’s mind that it was valuable. About where it had come from she was less certain because Jude had always been evasive on that subject. She supposed it was the product of one of Judith Staunton’s many ‘encounters.’

  “I shouldn’t have accepted it really,” Jude told her. When Vinnie pressed her for details, hoping for a story about spies or contraband, all she got was more vague talk about the skulls being out of bounds.

  “It’s like the Elgin Marbles, or those African carvings in the British Museum. They weren’t really ours to take. Their people want them back now and I don’t blame them.”

  What she was trying to say, Vinnie guessed, was that the skulls on the bracelet were still the property of the fairy people. Sometimes when she stayed over at Jude’s flat she dreamed that the fairies were clambering over the windowsill into Jude’s bedroom, desperate to reclaim what was theirs. They dropped one by one on to the carpet, tangling together in a forest of tiny limbs.

  Like maggots in a jar, Vinnie thought, without knowing why. She said nothing to Jude about this nightmare.

  ‘Thick as thieves,’ was what Vinnie’s mother called them, and was always citing Jude as a bad influence, although Vinnie thought she secretly enjoyed the idea of having a black sheep in the family. Jude had run away to work on a cruise liner two weeks after her sixteenth birthday and without even taking her O levels. She worked first as a chambermaid, then as a waitress, then as a croupier in the ship’s onboard casino. She was clever with money, and whether it was gambling that topped up her salary or some other less salubrious activity, her pied-a-terre in North Kensington was sure proof of her financial acumen. The flat was stuffed with things, the outlandish and often valuable curios she had been given by grateful clients for services rendered.

  Exactly what these services were Vinnie did not know. Her mother would sometimes drop dark hints about that, hints Vinnie did not understand until her early teens, when she was first shocked and then vaguely curious. Vinnie found the whole boy-girl thing peculiar and frustrating. There were boys that seemed to like her, but when she finally allowed one to kiss her the only thing she felt was disappointment, the same kind of sick disenchantment she experienced if she picked a sweet from a box of chocolates without looking at the little card inside, and ended up with the centre she most disliked.

  That was before she met Margo. Kissing Margo was something else entirely. Everything was clearer after that.

  “Good for you,” Jude said when Vinnie told her. “How did Pauline take it?”

  Vinnie raised her eyebrows and sniffed the air, tossing her head back as if taking the sniff by force, the way her mother always did when confronted with something she disapproved of. Jude burst out laughing, the laugh quickly disintegrating into the cough that, unknown to both of them, was the first symptom of the cancer that killed her two years later.

  When her mother called to tell her Jude had died she was helping Margo compose an application letter to the grant-awarding department of South East Arts. It was her third consecutive application, and Margo was showing all the signs of working up to one of her tantrums.

  “Who was that on the phone?” she said. The top notes of her voice were brittle with nerves.

  “No one,” Vinnie said. “Just telesales.” Jude and Margo had never got on. Jude thought Margo was a selfish attention-seeker, Margo thought Jude was a mercenary philistine. Vinnie guessed they were simply jealous of one another. Not that it mattered now. She did her best to soothe Margo’s panic about what she was going to do if her grant application was turned down again, and that night she dreamed she saw a procession of undertakers removing Jude’s belongings from the mansion flat on Waverley Road and carrying them in single file to a pick-up truck parked on the corner.

  Jude would have laughed at that but now she was dead. Vinnie wondered how long it would take to become used to the idea. She presumed that Jude’s flat and everything in it would be left to her mother, so when she received a solicitor’s letter informing her that she was her aunt’s main beneficiary, Jude’s money was something else she had to get used to. She told herself that if it were a choice between the money and Jude it would be no contest. But there was no escaping the fact that the money was about to change her life.

  She would have liked to have kept the flat, but Margo was all for selling it and buying somewhere out of London. Displaying an efficiency and enthusiasm Vinnie would never have expected from her, she contacted a long list of estate agents in Sussex and Kent. Suddenly they were deluged in colour leaflets advertising property in inaccessible rural hamlets Vinnie had barely heard of.

  She finally settled on a place just outside Chilham. Sharps Cottage was more expensive than a lot of the others, mainly because it had a mangy patch of farmland attached to it.

  “It has its own stream!” Margo enthused. When Vinnie tentatively pointed out the paragraph in the property details that mentioned consi
derable renovation and updating, Margo said it was no big deal.

  “Most of it’s just cosmetic,” she said. “We can do it ourselves. It’ll be exciting, having a place of our own to do up from scratch.”

  That wasn’t quite how it turned out. A fortnight before they were due to give up the tenancy on their flat in Stoke Newington, and two days after contracts had been exchanged on Sharps Cottage, Margo suddenly announced that she was leaving.

  “It’s all getting way too heavy,” she said. “Houses and stuff. I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment.” It turned out that she was planning to spend six months travelling round India with a blond-haired German book illustrator called Sigren. “I’ll see you when I get back, we can talk then,” she said. “I hope the move goes OK.”

  Vinnie had only been to the cottage twice, and on both days it had been raining. The day of the move was no exception. The path to the door was slippery with moss, and the removal men kept sliding and cursing. When they asked Vinnie which things went where she told them to pile everything in the front living room, mainly because it was the room that seemed least damp. The other five rooms stood empty, except for the bedroom at the back, which contained a monstrous brass bedstead, mysteriously left behind by the former owners.

  “It’s fabulous,” Margo had insisted. “It needs a spot of Brasso, that’s all.”

  They had bought a new mattress for it, but Vinnie was almost too embarrassed to let the removal men bring it upstairs. She did not want them to see the bedstead, standing alone at the centre of the room like some bizarre prop left over from a Hammer movie. She did not want them to see the patch of mould on the bathroom ceiling, the chipped and grubby enamel of the bathtub. The bath was as vast as the bed, vast enough to wash a cow in. She wondered if that was what the bath was for, after all, and felt a bubble of hysterical laughter well up inside her. The bubble pressed painfully against the sides of her windpipe then burst, bringing tears to her eyes. She thought about Margo, then realised it was not Margo she longed to talk to, it was Jude. If Jude had been here it might all have been funny. As things stood, she didn’t know what it was.