When Jago saw Laurie Spink’s fourth column, he was furious. This had gone on long enough. Not one reference to monstrous boobs had yet appeared in Spink’s submissions; not even a mention of monstrous dicks, which he’d assured Spink would be a satisfactory second-choice subject, if sensitively handled. Although he worked for a mid-market newspaper, Jago had been promoted especially on his talents as a tabloid thinker, as a man with a direct psychic link to the least-educated person on the Clapham omnibus. He had kept the Viagra story going for twenty-eight months. The picture desk adored him.
‘Damn it, Spink,’ he bellowed now down the phone. ‘If I’d wanted a piece about free will and predestination in the scientific age, I’d have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact, hang on a minute.’ He tapped his keyboard and studied his screen. ‘I did ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ He tapped some more. ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you any idea the money that man gets? I could get God for less. Listen, Spink. I want this again in thirty-five minutes or I rewrite it myself.’
‘I’ve got a tutorial,’ Spink objected.
‘You’ve always got a tutorial.’
Jago slammed down the phone, and dialled Dermot, the Archbishop’s literary representative. He loved playing tough-talking newspaperman like this. Sometimes he opened his desk drawer to gaze for a few seconds at a little picture of Edward G. Robinson, to fire him up sufficiently.
‘Dermot, it’s Jago. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
A lengthy pause at the other end, while Dermot fought panic. It had to happen one day that Jago would discover the affair. Sweat formed on his brow.
‘Dermot?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m talking to you. This so-called Primate of All England of yours. Who exactly does this guy think he is?’
Stefan ate his third nut cookie of the morning and put down his Teach Yourself English Slang. He had felt better about himself since his late-night confession to Linda. He wished sometimes he could drop the Swedish act, but he was right about Belinda’s attraction to him as a Swede. Belinda could never love a man called George; she’d admitted as much. When they saw a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the early days of their relationship, he tested her afterwards.
‘You don’t mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Stefan?’
‘But your name is Stefan.’
‘Personally, darling, to speak quite candidly’ – he did his Wildean dialogue pretty well – ‘I don’t much care about the name of Stefan. I think there are lots of other much nicer names. George is a charming name.’
But true to Oscar Wilde, Belinda said that George had no music and didn’t thrill, and that she pitied anybody married to a person called George, and that she could never love a George, and so on. They were laughing, of course. It wasn’t serious. But Stefan already loved Belinda so much that he couldn’t take the risk. What always amazed him was that she didn’t penetrate his phoney Swede act anyway. True, he’d lived in Stockholm for twenty years, but when his wife asked him (for example) who was the Swedish Alfred Hitchcock, or the Swedish Jack the Ripper, or the Swedish Kenneth Williams, it was surely obvious he was making up the answers.
‘Bo Söderberg,’ he told her recently, with great authority, when she asked who the Swedish Enid Blyton was.
‘Didn’t you say Bo Söderberg was the Swedish John Travolta? I’m sure you did.’
‘No, that was his brother Nils,’ Stefan had replied, thinking quickly. ‘Nils Söderberg. Brother of Bo. Marvellous clan, the Söderbergs. All blond and extremely clever. Kerstin Söderberg is the Swedish Barbara Woodhouse, while Jonas Söderberg won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1958.’
Luckily, his wife trusted him. She did not ask for an invitation to Stockholm, to meet the Magnificent Söderbergs. And luckily he also loved researching idiom. Throwing back his head now in the Habitat café, all the better to concentrate and memorize, he resolved to work into casual conversation today codswallop, cold feet and colour of your money. A load of cock, he discovered, was ‘less polite than cobblers’. How interesting to consider either of these terms by their degree of politeness. And which of these two excellent turns of phrase would Stefan authentically choose? Or would he (as it were) cock a snook at both?
‘No bald-headed boy, these days,’ he remarked to the girl selling coffee. It was true. A month had passed since Tanner had appeared. Stefan felt free to breathe again.
She smiled, uncertainly. ‘The one who kept watching you and making notes?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Gone to Sweden,’ she said.
‘He rang just now from a place called Marmite, and asked me to let him know if you’d done anything remotely interesting in the last four weeks. Those were his exact words. I wrote it down, look. I said no, by the way. What a nerve.’
‘Marmite?’
‘Sorry.’ She consulted her notes. ‘Malmö. He mentioned two dots.’ She looked at him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No.’ Stefan had swung his scarf around his neck. ‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘Tanner.’
‘Right. Tanner.’
‘Of the Effort.’
Stefan stopped in his tracks. ‘The newspaper?’
‘I suppose so.’
The boy was from Jago’s paper!
‘Oh God in heaven,’ he said.
Dermot put down the phone from Jago and took a deep, steadying breath. Life was certainly teaching him a lesson – not to have sex with your clients’ wives. Not because it was morally scummy, or anything, but when the husband rang you in a flying rage about something else entirely you needed to lie on the floor to recover.
Dermot felt very uneasy about Jago. He could handle feelings of disloyalty, of course; and he was actually deeply fond of lying. What he hated most about the present situation was having to keep from his best newspaper contact Viv’s phenomenal secret. A potentially lethal criminal fraud had been perpetrated by Jago’s wife, and he couldn’t tell anybody. Viv had exonerated her conspiracy with Linda, if memory served, by invoking the beauty of the resulting soft furnishings. He wondered whether even the Calvinists in their heyday had ever considered such a belief system. Justification by Tie-back, they would have had to call it. Expiation by Kapok.
Right now, he was supposed to be calling the Archbishop with the Effort’s demands, so he got up off the floor, put his feet up and started to count to 500 instead. This was his usual practice. He would just wait a few minutes and then phone Jago back, saying the Archbishop was a tough nut with titanic financial commitments who refused to bend over for the Effort, not now, not ever. He knew Jago would capitulate when met by superior rhetorical force: Jago liked to impersonate Edward G. Robinson, but it was all an act. Come back at him as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he rolled over like a puppy.
‘Archbish says no dice,’ he snarled realistically, after making and drinking a nice cup of peppermint tea. ‘You made one primate very, very angry, my friend. He said he’d personally excommunicate you.’
‘Shit,’ said Jago. ‘Really?’
‘Just back off. OK?’
‘OK.’
Dermot took a deep breath. He had to say something about what he’d learnt of Linda.
‘Listen, I hear your friend Belinda’s on Late Review, these days. She’s a big hit.’
‘So?’
‘So I hear she’s looking like Kylie Minogue. You should snap her up for the Effort.’
‘Kylie Minogue? Belinda?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Belinda looks like George Orwell.’
This was unkind, but not entirely untrue.
‘Well, I’m just tipping you a wink.’
‘You’re doing what?’
‘Tipping a wink.’
‘Oh.’ Jago wrinkled his nose. He had no idea what to make of this. He couldn’t relate to anything cryptic. That Linda was impersonating Belinda he already knew, because at home Viv spoke of nothing else.
‘OK. See you. Oh, name some flowers, I’m in a spot.’
‘Aster, rose, daisy, clematis, camellia.’
Jago made tapping noises at the other end, and put the phone down.
Dermot looked at the dead receiver and shrugged. By his own meagre ethical standards, he had certainly done his best.
Four bad weeks had passed for Maggie since she threw Leon out of her house. Her therapy had intensified to such a degree that now it had more of a life than she did herself. She was therapy’s tool, nothing more. As she sat at home with the cats in the evenings, she was a mere husk, stroking the fluffy racing car, watching mindless television and snivelling.
The trouble was, the well-intentioned Julia had a no-nonsense hard-hat approach to therapy. Demolish the person, inspect the foundations, and then rebuild to a new and better spec, using a selection of the original materials. No matter that a shower unit and a bit of cosmetic crack-papering might actually suffice. Instead, methodical and painstaking, she dismantled Maggie’s personality brick by brick, examining the mortar, preserving bits of cornice, and making careful notes of the archaeological layers in the wallpaper. The only problem was that, while the process was ongoing, Maggie felt exactly like an abandoned human building site, with wind rustling her tarpaulins. No roof; no walls; no floors; fireplace and toilet exposed for all to see. It was no wonder, really, in these conditions, that a squatter quickly got in.
Because although Noel had been banned from Julia’s programme of therapy – lookalike role-playing was absolutely ruled out after the first experiment – Maggie slept with him anyway. She didn’t mean to. It just happened. He kept phoning to tell her he cared about her, and that she was lovely and talented, and that she didn’t deserve to be exploited by married men who stayed only an hour. And then, one day, he brought a thoughtful cat-toy for Miranda, which broke down Maggie’s weakened defences. Noel now came to see her twice a week, each time for fifty-five minutes. And it was awful. Not knowing how much it upset her, he brought her extremely cheap presents, such as a copy of the Big Issue, or a paper bag with two oranges in it. Presumably he hoped to repeat the effect of the cat-toy, but instead she felt demeaned. ‘He thinks I’ll do it for a bag of Bombay mix,’ she said miserably to herself, as she put her hand down his trousers. ‘And if I’m doing this, I suppose he’s right.’ These days, when Maggie looked in a mirror she was reminded of a line in a Restoration comedy she did at college: ‘I’m like an old peeled wall.’
As she prepared to meet Linda for coffee at the Adelphi, she wondered how much of this to tell her. None of it was very flattering, after all.
‘Obviously, if I’m sleeping with you, I must leave Julia,’ she said to Noel, after his second visit. He was putting his coat on and consulting his watch. Having washed his hands twice, he was still sniffing his fingers with a quizzical expression, as if he couldn’t identify the smell.
‘You can’t do that,’ he exclaimed, with panic behind his eyes. He took her by the shoulders, his hands heavy against her neck. ‘I mean, she’ll want to know why, and you can’t tell her. I hope you’re not that selfish, Maggie? To hurt Julia? After all she’s done for you?’
‘No, no. But—’
‘Besides, you must never curtail therapy unnaturally. It’s incredibly dangerous, psychologically.’
The problems of leaving therapists had plagued Maggie for the past ten years; she was an expert on its double-binds. ‘This isn’t working,’ you say. To which they reply, ‘We must discuss this urgently. Is Tuesday afternoon still good?’ ‘You’re not very bright,’ you object. And they look at you pityingly and say, ‘But it’s exactly this kind of judgementalism that is blighting your life, don’t you see that?’
‘Sometimes I think Julia will never let me go.’
Noel laughed. ‘Join the club.’
‘But I’m not married to her!’
He assumed his solemn expression again, and she knew she was in for a lecture. As a member of the therapists’ union, Noel had sworn on a stack of Freuds never to let such heresy pass unchecked. ‘What you could have with Julia is better than marriage, Margaret. If you would only accept it, only open yourself up! You refuse to experience transference! But if you did, you’d see that Julia is completely on your side.’
‘Is she?’ Maggie sniffed.
‘Of course. Shame you’re shagging her husband, really.’
As she remembered this scene, Maggie felt tears of shame roll down her face. And what had she said to him next?
‘What I need, Noel, is to have a man completely on my side.’
‘Pay me thirty quid an hour and you might get one.’
‘I wish we could talk.’
Noel kissed her forehead lightly. ‘Talk to Julia,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’
There was a time when Belinda had never really heard of Malmö. A Söderberg might be a crispbread. But now her beloved Stefan was going back on a sudden visit, and she had to bite her lip and be brave while he packed for his journey.
‘Is it Ingrid?’ she whispered. ‘Is she – worse?’
Stefan took her hands and held them warmly in his own. ‘Not possible,’ he said, gravely.
‘Oh, Stefan. I can’t help feeling guilty about her. We’re so happy and she’s so—’
‘I know. Don’t say it.’
He threw some warm clothes in a suitcase, and checked his watch. He was catching a flight to Copenhagen in two hours from Heathrow.
‘Oh, Miss Patch, I love you. You do know that? I must come clean. You give me collywobbles.’
She grinned bravely. Of course she knew that. She really appreciated it, too, when he remembered to call her Miss Patch. Even if Audrey Hepburn never weighed thirteen stone, smelt a bit, and got dizzy standing up.
‘I wish I could come,’ she lied.
‘No, no. Listen, Belinda. You have fears that you will cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain. This is what you tell me. I respect this. It is not codswallop, I think?’
‘I hope not.’
‘So don’t get cold feet. I know what you think, Belinda. But your book will not be common or garden. Or cobblers.’
‘OK.’
He stood in the doorway, gazing at her. He really didn’t want to leave. Not only did he have genuine affection for his strangely ballooning wife, but he had found no way of incorporating ‘a load of cock’ into the conversation.
Jago couldn’t believe it. He was having a very bad phone day. Tanner had been in Malmö just two hours, and already Stefan had discovered what was going on.
‘Who is Tanner of the Effort, please, Yago?’ Stefan demanded, without preamble. In the background to the phone call were giveaway airport noises. ‘And why is he in Malmö?’
‘Oooh,’ stalled Jago, whose mediocre skill at lying was rightly famous. ‘Tanner? Tanner. No, I can’t think. How’s that lovely wife of yours, incidentally? I hear she’s quite foxy these days.’
‘He has a bald head, like a footballer.’
‘Bald head, bald head, bald head. Oh, I know! Fashion! That’s right. Couldn’t think who you meant. Yes, Tanner’s our great young style guru. Must be in Malmö for – er, Scandinavian Fashion Week. Snoods are back, apparently. Is there a problem?’
‘Well, yes, Yago. This bald-headed Tanner fellow has been following me. And I don’t think it’s because he studies my outfits.’
‘He follows you? What for?’
‘He spooks me, Yago. In fact, between you, me and the doorpost, I think this Scandinavian Fashion Week story may be a load of old cock.’
‘No!’
‘Can you call him off, please?’
‘I’ll try. But why?’
‘I must go, Yago. But please, help me! I helped you many times. Please. I don’t know if I am coming or going!’
‘Which way are you going, by the way?’ Jago tried to make it sound like a pleasantry.
‘What?’
‘Are you coming or going, Stefan? Are you in Malmö?’
The line went dead, and Jago buzzed his secretary. ‘Get me a flight to Malmö, quick! And name me some flowers while you’re about it!’
‘You’ve got to get out of this Noel–Julia situation, Maggie,’ said Linda, firmly. She poured milk into her coffee, and took another cake from the plate. What a shame Belinda never came out these days. She’d have liked the Adelphi. Linda sometimes felt she knew Belinda’s preferences better than Belinda knew them herself.
‘It’s the first rule of survival,’ she added, brushing icing sugar from her fingers. ‘Never have anything to do with people who drain the life out of you.’
‘But they each have my best interests at heart.’
‘Is that what they told you?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you feel really great, do you?’
‘No, I feel terrible.’
Maggie felt rather awkward talking to a stranger in this way. But it was odd. This woman was far more supportive than Belinda was. She had the knack of applying herself to somebody else’s situation. She seemed to think loyalty the principal virtue of mankind. She said Maggie had enormous potential as an actress. Already, in fact, Maggie was ready to call her the best friend she’d ever had.
‘Can I ask your advice, too, perhaps?’ asked Linda. ‘I would love to know what you think about something.’
‘Who, me?’
Maggie brightened for the first time that day. Her advice was never sought by Belinda. Even when freely offered, Maggie’s bitter, sour-grapes opinions were consistently ignored by all her friends.
‘It’s just that you’ve known Belinda for years. Do you think she secretly wants children?’
Maggie barked with laughter at the thought of it. ‘No.’
‘Because she’s incredibly selfish.’
‘But Stefan would make such a lovely father. Strange that a geneticist would waste such genes.’
‘Oh Lord, you’re right there. When I was Olivia in Twelfth Night, do you know the part I couldn’t cope with? It was when Viola said to me, “Oh, lady, you are the cruellest she alive, if you will lead these graces to the grave, and leave the world no copy.”’ Maggie swallowed. ‘It used to make me cry.’
‘That must have been very effective on stage.’
‘Oh, yes. Except that it’s more of a comical moment, really.’
‘Oh.’
Maggie pulled herself together. ‘But that’s what you mean about Stefan? He’s bound by sheer good taste to reproduce?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’re absolutely right.’
Jago phoned Tanner on his mobile, and heard strange sports-hall echoes in the background, like a ball bouncing and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, an organ playing, and lots of cheers.
‘Tanner? Whatever time your appointment is with the madwoman,’ he barked, ‘you’ve got to bring it forward!’
‘Sorry?’ yelled Leon. The noise of the basketball warm-up event behind him made chatting difficult. Tanner had gone to buy a coffee and left his mobile on the desk. Leon had helpfully answered it. ‘This isn’t Tanner—’ he began.
‘What’s that noise? Tanner, where are you?’
‘What?’
‘This is Jago Ripley, for fuck’s sake! You’ve got to go and see the loony as soon as possible!’
Leon had heard this clearly enough, however. ‘What?’ he yelled. He was quite enjoying this. He had never liked Jago much.
Jericho Jones performed a graceful sky-walk slam-dunk, and the place went wild.
‘Stefan’s on his way!’ screamed Jago, amid the approving roar of the Swedes.
‘Sorry, you’re breaking up,’ Leon said, then switched off the mobile and dropped it back on Tanner’s desk.
‘Who was that?’ asked Tanner, returning with hot drinks on a paper tray.
‘No idea,’ shrugged Leon, and looked at his watch. Things were going rather well with his Maggie mission. He just had to get to the hospital before Stefan Johansson.
Meanwhile, back in London, Jago chewed the edge of his desk with excitement. It would be accurate to say that his interest in this story had been revived. Stefan had a secret, all right! He was acting like a guilty clone! And, with any luck, the whole story would unfold within the extremely short range of Jago Ripley’s twenty-four-hour attention span.
When Mother popped in to see Belinda, she found her methodically cleaning her keyboard with finger and spittle.
‘Damn. I mean, hello,’ said Belinda, guiltily. Lucky her mother had not entered earlier and found her counting her Mars bar wrappers. Writing had not been very good today. In fact, according to her word-count software, she’d added fourteen words in total to her manuscript, and two of those were ‘Chapter Three’. But on the bright side, she had enough Mars bar wrappers for a free scratch card, and the function keys and space bar had never looked so shiny.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Belinda defensively. ‘Very busy. Quite a lot of my time is spent just thinking, you know. It’s not all tap-tap-tap. That’s typing, not writing.’
‘Yes, of course. That’s why all your work takes so long, I expect.’
‘Mm.’
Mother cleared a number of books from Belinda’s couch and sat down. She chose this spot because it was the furthest from the radiator. Gently, she stroked her own cheeks upwards towards her ears, like a cat washing itself.
‘Something up?’ asked Belinda, automatically.
Mother ignored her. ‘Belinda, it isn’t easy to say this, but I feel I must.’
‘What?’
‘I feel you have let yourself go. There. I’ve said it.’
‘Let myself go?’ Belinda laughed.
‘Yes.’
‘Nobody says that any more, Mother. It comes from the days when people wore corsets and plucked their eyebrows, and lived in L-shaped rooms.’
Mother harumphed. ‘You’re not even offended! Oh, Belinda, you’re beyond hope.’
‘What do you expect? I haven’t “let myself go”. Actually, it’s an interesting phrase, when you think about it. It can be a very good thing to let yourself go. Go on, Mother. Let yourself go!’
‘But it’s what you’ve done,’ she protested. ‘You’ve let yourself go. You used to be quite slim and sexy, and now Stefan can hardly bear to look at you. And I don’t blame him. It pains me to say it when you’re my own daughter, but in that cardigan you look absolutely disgusting. I can’t think where you get it from. Have you ever seen me wear a cardigan? Even Auntie Vanessa never wears cardigans and she’s got the worst dress sense of anyone in this family.’
Belinda swallowed hard. The metallic taste of the keyboard dirt made the action all the more unpleasant.
‘Look at your nails! When was the last time you went to the hairdresser? I can’t stand by and watch it any more. This room smells. When I think of how beautifully Linda dresses.’
‘What’s Linda got to do with it?’
‘My own daughter, a human barrage balloon. In a V-neck cardie with pockets. I bought you that beautiful nylon Prada coat last autumn and I found it under the stairs today. It had spiders in it. It was streaked with what I can only describe as snot. I’m having it cleaned, and then I’m giving it to Linda.’
‘Stefan says I’m lovely.’
‘Can’t you see he’s just saying that?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
‘Well. You don’t see the way he looks at Linda when you’re not there. But I can tell you, he can’t take his eyes off her.’
Belinda gasped. This was too much. ‘Well, now I know you’re just being spiteful,’ she cried, and – hardly knowing why she did it – she secretly switched on the two-way baby-listener, so that Linda would hear downstairs in the kitchen, where she was known to be rustling up a delightful dish of squid stewed in tomatoes and lemon before popping off to Broadcasting House to review a new film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for Radio 4.
‘Repeat what you just said to me!’ she told her mother, in a loud voice. ‘What are you implying about Stefan and Linda?’
‘I’m merely saying that if you continue to bloat in the dark in extra large T-shirts with Wallace and Gromit on the front, your husband won’t be able to help himself. Linda is a very attractive young woman, who also happens to be a lot nicer than you are, as well as more talented, and with excellent connections in the worlds of both the media and fishmongery. And, being only human, she fancies Stefan as much as we all do.’
Mother stood up and left the room, leaving Belinda to stare down at her extra large T-shirt in a state of confusion. Her mother had all the wrong values, surely? Stefan had told her just an hour ago how much he loved her. He was extremely supportive about the book, too. Besides, who would be interested sexually in a deputy when he could have the real thing? No, Mother was a silly, interfering woman with artificially arched eyebrows who would find any excuse to disparage her own daughter because she was jealous of her intellect. In fact, Belinda was just about to whisper into the intercom, ‘Linda, did you hear all that? What a ridiculous person my mother is!’ when she overheard Mother entering the kitchen.
‘Linda! Darling!’ she said, as if she’d just come home from a terrible day. ‘Can I help with anything?’
Belinda knew she ought to switch off the device, but somehow she couldn’t. Instead, she placed the speaker on her desk, to hear it better. It was crackly, a bit muffled. But good enough to picture the scene. A scrape of a chair told her that her mother was sitting down. A kettle was filled and switched on. Chopping commenced on a wooden board.
‘You’re looking lovely, Linda,’ Mother said. ‘I was just telling Belinda how lucky she is to have you doing everything for her.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Linda, clattering some pans. She sounded strangely brisk. What was up? Surely she’d been flattered by everything Mother had said. It was true that not many people bridge so gracefully those two distinct worlds of the television studio and the fish shop. Belinda notably had contacts in neither.
‘May I say something?’ Linda said, at last. Sizzling and stirring could be heard.
‘Of course.’
‘I think you’re a wicked person,’ said Linda, in a level tone. ‘I couldn’t see it before, I thought we were all on the same side. But I heard what you said to Belinda just now, and I have to tell you I think you’re a cow.’
Belinda was glad she couldn’t see Mother’s inadequate expression of mild surprise, but was torn nevertheless. Should she rush downstairs to make the peace? Or make sure she didn’t miss anything by staying put? She found she had very mixed feelings at hearing Linda call Mother a cow. She wanted to boo and cheer at the same time.
‘I think you should leave the house and go back to your flat,’ Linda continued. ‘You’ve been very good to me, which makes this hard to say. But I see now you are hurting Belinda, and if you hurt Belinda, you hurt her work. We all know it’s very important for Belinda’s work that she’s not upset.’
‘But Belinda’s work isn’t worth twopence!’ exclaimed Mother, brightly. ‘Face it Linda, you’re twice the person she is. You’re the person everybody likes. Stefan thinks you’re gorgeous.’
‘Take that back,’ warned Linda. She sounded angry.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Mother.
‘Take that back.’
‘No.’
Belinda couldn’t believe it. Were they both mad?
‘Put down that frozen salmon, Linda!’ said Mother, her voice rising.
‘Make me,’ said Linda.
At which point, unbelievably, there were sounds of a scuffle.
‘Oh God,’ whispered Belinda. ‘They’re fighting!’
She stood stock-still, staring at the speaker on her desk. She heard a chair knocked over. Bits of crockery fell off the table and smashed. And throughout there were gasps and squeals. There was violence in the kitchen!
‘Linda!’ she yelled into the intercom. ‘Mother! Stop it!’
But the scuffle continued, with the sound effects of oven doors and broken plates until a loud ‘Aieee!’ from Mother announced that something very serious had happened.
‘My face!’ Mother yelled. ‘Linda, you bitch! My face!’
Belinda realized it was time to leave the sidelines. Sometimes it’s all right for an author to abandon her desk – for example, when her loyal cleaning lady is downstairs mutilating her mother. So she loped to the landing, puffed and clung to the banister when she saw stars, then struggled downstairs, reaching the kitchen just in time to see Linda wield a side of frozen salmon round her head, like a claymore.
‘Linda?’ Belinda said. ‘Put down the fish.’
Linda’s arms went limp. It had gone very quiet suddenly. Between them on the kitchen floor Mother already lay unmoving, her face upturned and strangely beautiful. She was dead.
Why did she look so strangely beautiful? As Belinda later learnt, a sudden exposure to the heat of the boiled kettle during the scuffle had made Mother’s features drop perfectly into place for the first time since the lift-job. In death, therefore, she looked natural and not a bit surprised, and the irony was profound. Nobody would ever say, ‘Something up?’ to Mother again. In the turmoil she had slipped on a piece of raw squid, banged her head on the corner of the kitchen table and died instantly. By the time Belinda arrived at the kitchen door, the celestial Fenwick’s had already claimed her mother, its cash tills ringing in praise.
Linda’s eyes were round holes in her face. Belinda thought afterwards it was the first and last time she ever saw Linda frightened.
‘Put the fish down, Linda.’
Linda looked at the salmon as if she had no idea where it came from. ‘I didn’t—’
‘I know.’
‘It was her that was angry. It wasn’t me. I told her to go, that’s all.’
‘I heard.’
‘She wasn’t good enough to be your mother, Belinda. She said I was twice the woman you are! What sort of mother says that?’ Linda’s dismay choked her. Tears rolled down her face. ‘Look,’ she still managed to say, ‘I did this for you, Belinda, and if you’re not happy about it, I’ll go.’
Belinda felt her head swim. She had to be happy about this? It was a bit of a stretch from being happy about a daily diet of eels and haddock to being happy about seeing your mother lifeless on the kitchen floor. Linda really didn’t know where to draw the line, did she? The problem with this situation was that neither of them had the faintest idea where to draw the line.
‘Belinda? Don’t say you’re not happy about this. Please. I don’t want to go. How could I live with myself?’
‘Oh God,’ said Belinda. ‘Come here.’
And as she hugged her insanely loyal cleaning lady, who sobbed in her arms, she noticed with a kind of glum horror that Linda was still cradling a slab of frozen fish.