Читать книгу Every Woman For Herself - Trisha Ashley - Страница 9

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 débâcle, 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.