Purveyor of Enchantment Page 3

  ‘Such a shame you never had those children,’ Clementine’s mother, Lydia, had muttered when she arrived from her home in Cape Town to pick over the pieces of her daughter’s life.

  ‘Those children,’ Clementine had muttered, as if they had somehow been there the whole time, standing off-stage in their neat school uniforms, waiting.

  But Lydia had not been listening. When Clementine’s father walked out on her all those years ago, Lydia had said she’d rather he had died, but now, happy on her own, she seemed to get a certain grim satisfaction from Clementine’s newly single state.

  ‘Men are a bore,’ she stated as they went through the house, packing up what belonged to Clementine. ‘Now what do you think I should wear when your ghastly mother-in-law comes? I want to give the right message, you know, I’m glad that my daughter is rid of you all, yet I appreciate the seriousness of what has happened.’ She had skipped upstairs, at seventy-one she was surprisingly light on her feet, and returned wearing a simple but beautifully cut navy-blue silk jersey dress. It was, as Clementine often pointed out, not that her mother was selfish, it was simply that while most people suspected that they were the centre of the universe, Lydia knew she was.

  ‘You are in love with William aren’t you?’ Clementine asked Ophelia as they prepared to go to bed. ‘I mean really in love,’ she nagged.

  ‘To quote our own dear future King, “What does in love mean?” But yes, of course I am.’

  ‘Grace must be so excited about the wedding,’ Clementine felt her stepmother’s name on her tongue as if it was a slice of lemon.

  ‘Yeah!’ Ophelia nodded. She accepted the adoration that had surrounded her since birth with the ease of someone who was both parents’ child. To Clementine and her sister and brothers, that was Ophelia’s mark of distinction. It was to her home the half-brothers and sisters went when seeing their father. It was her mother, not theirs, who sat at the head of the table. Ophelia was the whole child, and the others envied and revered her status.

  ‘Actually, she’s driving me insane,’the whole child complained now. ‘The wedding is five months away and yesterday she rang me up to say I absolutely had to come up to London this week to discuss the flowers, or it would all be a disaster.’

  Clementine was not really listening. It was a bad habit, she knew that: drifting off into your own thoughts when someone was addressing you. Truly wonderful people, ‘people persons’ concentrated their whole being on their companion, fixing him or her with an unwavering gaze, responding to every word that was spoken; that is how they got loved. Clementine occasionally had the ambition to be a wonderful people person, but she knew as she looked out at the dark rain-washed street, that she was a lost cause. A solitary car drove by, the street light reflected in the spray of water thrown up by the wheel. The darkness of night was infectious, she thought. You had to ward it off with light and sound and bustle, lest it seeped inside you, filling you with melancholy. Biscuits, she thought, biscuits and a mug of warm milk with honey, that should do it, and an old-fashioned detective story to read. One of those where everyone disliked the victim, so that real emotion never got in the way of a jolly good puzzle.

  She carried the small tray upstairs to her bedroom. It was only two days since she had arrived at the house from the cottage in Sweden where she had lived since the divorce. Ophelia had moved in at the same time, and they had agreed that Clementine should have Aunt Elvira’s old bedroom with the en suite bathroom and that Ophelia should have what used to be the spare room. Maybe, Clementine thought now, it had been a mistake. It was no good going on about how unlike Aunt Elvira she was, only to slip into her life as comfortably as she slipped into her old dressing-gown. She stood in the bedroom, hating herself for feeling so at home amongst the William Morris wallpaper, the moss-green curtains and the solid walnut furniture. With a little shudder she placed the tray on the foot of the bed; Aunt Elvira’s bed, narrow with a padded headboard to match the curtains, and hurried back along the landing and into the tiny boxroom where she had put her new tool-box. She had been out shopping that morning and she paused briefly to admire the fire-engine-red metal box with its compartments containing hooks and eyes and nails and screws, a hammer, two screwdrivers and a serious tape-measure in a heavy metal casing with a red button which you pressed to snap it all back up inside again. She picked up the tool-box together with the large green and white carrier bag standing next to it.

  Ophelia was sitting up in bed reading Proust. She had almost finished the third part of Remembrance of Things Past, and that alone, Clementine thought, was enough to annoy anyone. At least she was not reading it in the original French. Clementine smiled at her sister.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to swap rooms would you? I just feel this room is more me, if you see what I mean. And you would have your own bathroom. You’ll probably come home late a lot of the time and the last thing I’d want is for you to have to go all the way across the landing to wash and things when you’re tired.’

  Ophelia glanced up from the book. ‘No thanks, I’m fine here.’ She continued with her reading.

  Clementine looked at her thoughtfully. How amazing Ophelia was. ‘No,’ she had said. ‘No, I’m fine here thanks.’ No dithering, no excuses.

  ‘I’ll put your ladder up then,’ Clementine said, fetching the carrier bag and the tool-box from the landing.

  ‘What ladder?’ Ophelia called after her.

  ‘Your rope-ladder,’ Clementine said holding the bag up, then she went straight to work, drilling holes in the window-sill for the two large brass hooks. ‘I’ve got one for each of our rooms.’ She pulled a tangle of rope from the bag and fixed the eyes to the hooks. She turned round with a pleased smile to find Ophelia staring at her, the open book resting on her knees.

  ‘In case of fire or burglary or other emergencies,’ Clementine explained brightly. Ophelia continued to stare at her. ‘We won’t be trapped,’ Clementine went on.

  Ophelia snapped the book shut. ‘You’re serious?’

  Clementine nodded, determined to maintain that bright, just-rinsed look. Ophelia patted a spot next to her on the bed. Her bed was wider than Clementine’s. ‘Sit down.’

  Clementine sidled up to the bed and sat down on the edge. ‘You know, Clementine, I reckon you believe that by fretting away like this, you’ll somehow render yourself immune to all the scary things out there. Is that not right?’

  Clementine knew she was being patronized, and by her little sister too, but it was kindly meant; it was a form of concern, and Clementine was a sucker for kindness and concern.

  ‘Well I don’t exactly choose to worry,’ she said, moving further onto the bed, making herself a bit more comfortable. ‘I mean it’s not as if I enjoy it.’ But she knew what Ophelia was saying. There was that time she had been asked to give a concert in Uppsala. She spent weeks beforehand imagining disaster; far more time than she had spent practising. She had foreseen her fingers going dull right at the point when she hit the first note. She had imagined a hall empty but for Gustaf and his mother sitting alone in the centre front row; next, an auditorium packed with a fidgeting, coughing audience whose clapping at the end was so lacklustre that it barely saw her out through the stage door. On and on the conveyor belt of disasters had rolled past her mind’s eye. Yet, if any of it had actually happened, no-one would have been more unpleasantly surprised than Clementine.

  ‘You see, I believe that the opposite is true,’ Ophelia said. ‘I think that the very act of constantly worrying draws all this negative energy towards you until, in the end, your greatest fear does come true.’

  Clementine flinched, feeling like the baby at the christening, gurgling happily in its crib, only to find the wicked fairy smirking down at her. ‘How can you?’ she gasped, moving so far out on the bed that she almost fell off. ‘How can you be so . . . so unhelpful?’

  ‘What do you mean unhelpful?’ Ophelia had opened her book again.

  ‘Because it is! You say, “Do stop worryin
g because worrying will bring calamity.” Well, thanks. That’s all right then. Now I never need worry again.’

  ‘C’mon, take it easy,’ Ophelia put her hand on Clementine’s arm.

  Clementine shrugged it off. ‘What you’re saying is that fleeing through the night from a passing psychopath, I will crash my car and burn to death, my body racked with cancer, previously undiagnosed through some NHS mix-up, a slip of paper confirming a positive HIV test clutched in my charcoaled hand, after which, what’s left of me is taken and scattered to the winds, everyone congratulating themselves on having saved on a cremation.’

  ‘Now calm down. All I said was stop worrying so much.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. And this little chat has been really helpful. You try not to think about something. Take pink. Say to yourself, Whatever happens, I will not think of pink. Instantly, I tell you instantly, your mind will flood with it: pink Cadillacs, pink elephants, Barbara Cartland . . .’

  ‘Christ, Clementine, chill.’

  ‘And don’t blaspheme. That kind of casual taking of names in vain is just the kind of thing to provoke God on a bad day.’ Then again, she thought, closing her eyes, when was there ever a good day for provoking deities? In the Fifties maybe? In the white-gloved and hatted days of the Fifties, God must have been in a good mood.

  She opened her eyes again. ‘Say fuck, or shit, or something, if you feel you must, but don’t blaspheme.’

  ‘Well fuckadoodle doo, Clementine, chill.’

  ‘That’s better.’ Getting up from the bed, Clementine gave her a pale smile. As she walked from the room, Ophelia called her back. ‘Clementine! Is there anything you’re not afraid of?’

  Clementine turned in the doorway. ‘Of course there is, silly.’

  ‘What?’

  Clementine opened her mouth to answer, then shut it again. She thought. Finally, she answered. ‘Doris Day. I’m not scared of Doris Day.’

  ‘Christ Almighty, Clementine.’

  Clementine winced, but this time, she did not protest.

  She ran a bath, hoping the warm water would calm her down. Rummaging through the bathroom cupboard, she found a half-finished bottle of bubble bath in a cupboard: gardenia. It was too much. She and Aunt Elvira even had the same taste in bubble bath. ‘No!’ she yelled. ‘No, no, no. No way!’ And she poured the contents of the bottle down the lavatory.

  It was a mistake to flush. By the time she had finished mopping the soapy water from the linoleum floor her bath had gone cold. She washed quickly and wrapped herself in her white towelling dressing-gown before hurrying back into the warmth of the bedroom. Seated at her own art deco dressing-table, brought from Sweden, she brushed her hair and put cream on her face and neck. ‘Never forget the neck,’ her stepmother, Grace, had told her once, showing a rare interest. And Clementine never forgot. This particular cream boasted an ability to neutralize free radicals, making it sound as if it was working undercover for some Fascist junta. She screwed the lid back on the jar before turning to her sponge bag and searching for the condom. She found it, and once in bed, placed it carefully under her pillow before putting the light out on a long day.

  Three

  ‘I know I worry a lot,’ Clementine whispered to Mr Scott. ‘And right now, it all seems to have been the most cruel waste of time, but then again, how can people not worry? I know that sleeping with a condom under my pillow might be thought of as going a little too far.’

  Mr Scott stirred in his chair. ‘Would that be some modern version of The Princess and the Pea?’ he asked.

  Clementine shook her head. ‘Rape,’ she hissed. ‘The thought is bad enough as it is, but if you add the risk of contracting Aids.’

  ‘I think it might be a little optimistic to expect an intruder with rape in mind to agree to protect you against sexually transmitted diseases?’ Mr Scott suggested.

  It was a new experience for Clementine: being accused of over-optimism. ‘Well I thought it might be worth a shot,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Clementine my dear, you cannot walk through life wearing both braces and a belt. You can’t live life to the full without freedom, and with freedom comes risks.’

  ‘I would like nothing better than living life to the full,’ Clementine said quietly, ‘but I don’t know the first thing about how to go about it and now it could well be too late.’

  Aunt Elvira had not been much of a gardener, it had to be said, preferring instead to stay indoors in melancholy half-gloom, reading and writing. No wonder her eyes got so bad near the end. Clementine looked around the tiny garden. It was a good shape, like a mushroom, narrow at the top and growing into a semi-circle at the bottom by the high brick wall. Trie lawn too was promising; it was there and it was green. Two climbing roses grew up the back wall of the cottage: one pink; Albertine, Clementine guessed, and one wine red. She did not know the name of that one, but it smelt delicious, like . . . Clementine buried her face in the dew-drenched blooms, searching her mind for just the right word to describe the sweet scent . . . roses, that was exactly what it smelt like. She straightened up, moving into the early morning sun. Some years before she had tried her hand at writing poetry. This kind of thing was precisely why she had not persevered; all the good metaphors were already taken. No matter, she would create poetry in her garden; an exclamation mark of lupin here, a dawn of pink and yellow there, a blood-red drop of fuchsias right by the sundial at the bottom. She skipped inside before remembering what a mistake it was for a large woman of thirty-six to try to behave like Christopher Robin. Come to that, she thought, as she landed on the doormat just inside the French windows, it had been a mistake by Christopher Robin to behave like Christopher Robin.

  ‘I’m about to hang the new curtains,’ she told Ophelia, who had come into the room at just the wrong time. She had draped the curtains over the back of the sofa the night before, and now she looked at them fondly. She was not a good seamstress, but who would notice when the material was so pretty; golden background sprinkled with roses and cornflowers.

  ‘You know all that banging and shouting from next door the other night,’ Ophelia said. ‘It was the old boy’s son. Veronica at the college knows him. He’s a news photographer and apparently he has a major drink problem so he’s staying with his father to dry out.’

  ‘Mr Scott is a sweetie,’ Clementine said from the top of the ladder. ‘We always nod to each other when we meet outside the house.’

  ‘How exciting for you,’ Ophelia said. She was still in her nightclothes (one of Clementine’s T-shirts) and her short blond hair was standing up in a little quiff at the front.

  Clementine finished the first window in silence before moving on to the French windows at the opposite side of the room. They had been in the cottage for almost two weeks now and their colonization of Aunt Elvira’s home was almost complete. A fair number of the original inhabitants had been driven out: an old armchair with fleas nesting in the seat; a teaset, cracked and stained; two embroidered cushions, moth-eaten and smelling of cat’s pee (it was odd that they did, because as far as Clementine knew, Aunt Elvira had not kept cats) and five antimacassars. Gone too, were the old sitting-room curtains and a chair with a brown vinyl seat. They had stamped out disease, dry rot, damp on the back wall in the kitchen and woodworm, and only the other night they had amused themselves by poking fun at the indigenous culture, mainly in the form of a stack of romances they had found in the cupboard under the stairs.

  Having finished hanging curtains Clementine stepped down from the ladder and looked around her with a little sigh of contentment.

  ‘It’s amazing to see’, she tried again, ‘how different this place is to when Elvira lived here.’

  Ophelia too looked around the room. ‘It looks much the same to me,’ she said. ‘Different stuff, of course, but essentially it’s the same feel to the place.’

  Clementine’s smile faded. Her shoulders a little hunched, she put away the steps. Still, she could not help arguing.

  ‘But look at how d
ifferent it all is.’ She gesticulated at the black lacquered grand piano which took up a good quarter of the room. ‘Elvira was tone-deaf for heaven’s sake. And my embroidery,’ she grabbed a Berlin stitch canvas which she was working on and held it out for Ophelia to look at. ‘Hers were all floral. Look at this. It’s a pug. Aunt Elvira wouldn’t have liked it at all. She hated animals.’

  From next door came the sound of a guitar and Clementine fell silent and listened. After a few minutes, the melody broke into some crazy-sounding chords and then, abruptly, it stopped.

  She wandered across to the piano and, still standing, picked out the notes of the ballad. ‘Pretty,’ she said.

  ‘Do you realize we haven’t had breakfast yet?’ Ophelia replied.

  Clementine felt happier once she was sitting in the freshly painted blue and white kitchen. It would not have been to Aunt Elvira’s taste at all. Actually, it was not really to Clementine’s taste either.

  She had explained exactly how she wanted the room done to the decorator, Mr Cook. ‘If we paint the walls creamy white and then I thought it would be rather fun to do the windows, skirting and the cupboard doors in a soft grey-blue . . .’

  ‘Say no more,’ Mr Cook had interrupted her, putting a paint-smudged finger to his nose. ‘I’ve got this knack for knowing what my clients like. Pete’s sixth sense, my wife calls it. For you it has to be exactly the right blue, I can see that. You know, Mrs Hope, the problem with today’s tradesmen is that they take no pride, no real interest. To them it’s just a job of work. Me, see, I’m old school. To see the pleasure on the face of a lady like yourself when I’m done, now that’s what gives me my satisfaction.’

  That’s how Clementine had ended up with kitchen cupboards in the bright baby blue of acrylic knitting yarn.

  She handed Ophelia the plate of hot cinnamon bagels and picked up the local paper. Ophelia was reading the Independent. For a while they read on in silence, then Clementine sighed, a loud deep sigh meant to be heard.