2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (26 page)

“
Tutto e possibile
,” Norma said, nodding sagely.

“Your Luigi always used to say that but I never thought to ask him what it meant,” Ella said.

“In English it is ‘Everything is possible.’”

C
atrin was too startled to speak and her heart was threatening to burst out through her T-shirt as she stared up into the face of Meredith Evans, who stared unflinchingly back at her.

He opened his mouth to speak then closed it again.

“You fool! I could have had a heart attack!” she said angrily.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Well, you did. What were you doing in there, anyway? The hotel is private property.”

“I was just checking the place was okay, and it seemed such a shame that no one plays the piano any more, so I had a go. It used to be so lovely up here.”

“How did you get in?” she asked frostily.

“There’s a door at the back near the servants’ staircase that’s never locked. I always go in that way.”

Catrin glared at him.

“You mean you go in there without Aunt Ella knowing?”

He smiled sheepishly.

“Was it you hiding in the wardrobe the other day?”

“No.”

She didn’t believe him.

He rummaged in his trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled, yellowing leaflet which he handed to her. On the front cover was a picture of Shrimp’s Hotel as it had once looked. Catrin looked in amazement at the mown lawns and the neat flowerbeds bursting with blooms. There were tables set out and a smiling maid in a black and white uniform was carrying a tray laden with cakes.

She opened the leaflet and saw a photograph of two women, Alice and Ella Grieve. She drew in her breath with a whistle.

Ella looked utterly different; her hair was cut in a curly bob and she was dressed in a pair of trousers and a fisherman’s sweater, and was smiling widely as she held up an enormous fish.

Beside her Alice was dressed in a flowery frock, her shoulder-length hair held in place with two clips. She was smiling sweetly but her eyes had a vacant, dreamy look as though she were somewhere far away. Norma was right about Alice and Ella; they might be twins but they were like chalk and cheese.

“She was so pretty,” Meredith said, looking over Catrin’s shoulder. “Anyway, I’m sorry I frightened you.”

She regarded him warily.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention to Ella that I’ve been inside Shrimp’s. It’s for her own good, you know. I’ve kept an eye on her for years now on the quiet. In an isolated old place like this, anything could happen.”

Once again she didn’t believe him.

Meredith ran his long fingers through his lank hair, then turned on his heel and lumbered away towards Kilvenny. Catrin decided she wouldn’t say anything to Ella, but she’d keep her eye on Meredith Evans. When she was sure he had gone, she let herself into Shrimp’s and wandered through the gloomy rooms, every creak of the floorboards and rattle of the windows making her nervous. She trailed her fingers across the piano keys, listening to the echo of the notes hanging on the air.

She found the visitors’ book in the kitchen and took it up to Alice’s room, where she made herself comfortable in a chair, lighting a candle for the day had grown darker.

She was looking for signs of Arthur Campbell and his sister staying here. There was definitely something fishy about him wanting to marry Alice and something mysterious about what had gone on the summer of Alice’s wedding. And it had something to do with her mother. Kizzy had done something terrible to Aunt Alice and Ella had never forgiven her and she’d never come back. Sure as eggs is eggs, Aunt Ella wasn’t going to tell Catrin what had happened, but she was determined to find out.

Maybe her mother was a thief. Or a murderer. Catrin shivered.

She turned back to the book and came across an entry in July 1944 for a Dr Arthur Campbell and a Miss Deirdre Campbell. The address given was the house where he still lived, where Catrin went to visit him in the holidays. Alongside the entry, in Arthur Campbell’s familiar handwriting, were the words:
Food rather rich. Rooms overheated. Water in the swimming pool too cold
.

That was typical of him; he was so fussy that nothing was ever good enough for him.

She turned the pages until she came across another entry for the Campbells. It was strange that he’d come to a place like this because he hardly ever went on holiday – he said holidays were a waste of time and took him away from his important work.

Next to this entry he had written,
Disappointed not to have our usual rooms, particularly as the rain was incessant throughout our stay
.

If he had disliked the place so much, why did he keep coming back? And why mention the rain? Surely there must have been a roof on the room, unless there was a hole in it? On one of these visits he had met Alice and fallen in love with her. Catrin shook her head in exasperation; that couldn’t be right.

She put the book down, opened the bureau and looked inside. There wasn’t anything much of interest, a pad of headed notepaper, some blotting paper, a bundle of pens and pencils held together with string. There were a few old postcards with faded writing and a pile of yellowing bills on a spike all stamped PAID IN FULL.

It was hard to make any sense of the things she’d found out since she’d been here. Alice Grieve had been going to marry Arthur Campbell, but something made her change her mind at the last minute and she’d left him standing at the altar and run away. Aunt Ella and Norma couldn’t have known what Alice was planning, because they were waiting for her in the chapel, expecting the wedding to go ahead.

Absentmindedly Catrin picked up an old calendar and flicked through the leaves. It was dated 1946, the year before she was born. There was something nagging at her brain, something that didn’t add up. She dropped the calendar back into the bureau and stood lost in thought. Her mother had been at Alice’s wedding in the summer of 1946. Catrin was born in 1947, so in the summer of 1946 her mother would have already been – she swallowed hard and tried to batten down her unwelcome thoughts – would have already been pregnant. If she was pregnant she must have been married, and her husband would probably have been here for the wedding. It was a warming thought: her father sitting in the chapel next to her mother, waiting for Alice to arrive in her beautiful ivory dress. But of course she hadn’t arrived, and that had something to do with her mother.

All this thinking was driving her mad, making her temples throb painfully.

She rummaged about in the drawer of the bureau and found an old letter from a florist’s shop in Swansea agreeing to deliver the flowers for the forthcoming wedding of Miss Alice Grieve on Saturday, 15 July 1946. Another letter, from a school in Kent, told Miss Ella Grieve that Katherine Grieve would be escorted to Paddington station by a Miss Penhaligon and would be arriving at Kilvenny on the midday train on 8 July 1946.

She slammed the drawer shut and stood absolutely still, anger welling up inside her. Then she made her way up to the attics.

She stood in the gathering dusk, an orange-red glow creeping into the room, pooling in a palette of merging colours all around her. She picked up the discarded red dress and held it up in front of her. The material was faded, riddled with moth holes, and in the dying light it was almost see-through. She ran the scalloped hem through her fingers and she knew without a doubt that this was the poppy-red dress that Kizzy was wearing in the photograph downstairs, the dress Norma had described her wearing at the wedding.

Catrin looked at the label in the frock; it was from a dress shop in Knightsbridge where her mother still bought clothes for special occasions. Kizzy would never have left behind an expensive dress like this unless she’d been in a terrific hurry. Had she rushed back here from the chapel, changed as quickly as she could, packed her things and left, never to return? It looked like it: there were rotting stockings hanging over a chair back, a spilt bottle of her mother’s favourite perfume.

The dress slipped through her fingers to the floor and as if in a trance she crossed the room to the rickety wardrobe and yanked the door open. Old clothes steeped in dust hung on rattling hangers, reeking of mildew. She lifted out a washed-out school blazer, the silver buttons tarnished with rust; a withered nametag on the collar read
Katherine Grieve
. How strange to think of her mother as a schoolgirl. She put the blazer back and lifted out a blue gingham dress with an ink stain across the bodice. She couldn’t imagine her mother wearing these drab clothes; she was always so glamorous and particular about her appearance. Her mind went back to speech day last year, when Sister Lucy had thought Kizzy was Catrin’s sister because she looked so young. Catrin had a vision of her in the refectory clutching a cup of tea, standing out like an exotic bird, incongruous and awkward in the midst of the other mothers with their perms, muted twin-sets and sensible skirts. Kizzy had been nearly nineteen when she had Catrin, eighteen when she left school in the summer of 1946.

She put her hand to her mouth to stop herself crying out.

Kizzy must have been pregnant while she was still at school, but if she was pregnant she must have been married. She couldn’t have been the sort of woman who would have a baby without having a ring on her finger. That was unthinkable. There were words for women like that: trollop and tart, slut and slag.

But when could Kizzy have got married? She couldn’t have married while she was still a schoolgirl, and the letter downstairs said she would be arriving back from school on 8 July, only a week before Aunt Alice’s wedding.

That was stupid. She was muddling herself up with all the dates, looking for problems where there weren’t any. There must be some sort of explanation.

There wasn’t.

If her mother hadn’t been married, that meant Catrin was illegitimate.

Or, as Mary Donahue would say, a bastard.

One of the Palfrey twins had asked her once why she had her mother’s surname and not her father’s. Catrin had explained patiently, just as Kizzy had to her, that she had taken her mother’s surname because her father was foreign and he’d thought she might get teased having a name that was hard to pronounce.

The girl had given her a strange, knowing look and whispered to her twin, and then they’d run away together, snorting and sniggering.

Why had she been so stupid and accepted Kizzy’s explanations without questioning them? The more she thought about it, the more she realised how blind she’d been, how she’d ignored all the clues that had been staring her in the face. Her cheeks reddened as she recalled Sister Lucy, on her first day at school, taking her birth certificate off her mother and the long, cold look she’d given Kizzy as she’d handed it back.

Everyone had known and they must have been laughing at her behind her back.

She slammed the bedroom door and hurtled down the stairs, through the kitchen and out into the fresh air. She bent double, began retching into the long grass, then, gasping for breath and blinded by tears, ran headlong back towards Kilvenny. The sky was darkening and the gulls wheeled above her head in a screaming frenzy.

I
smelda lay back in the bathtub and looked up at the ceiling, where a lizard was patiently waiting for a fly to settle. How wonderful it would be to be able to walk upside down like a lizard. How she would love to be able to walk across the ceiling, climb over the high walls that surrounded the Villa Rosso, maybe even to the top of the church tower, and look down on the village. She sighed; she would never be let out, just be kept cooped up here, bored and lonely
.

She rubbed the coarse bar of lemon-scented soap between her hands until she had a good lather going. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and blew gently into the film of soap as Maria had taught her to do. A bubble grew slowly, wobbling dangerously, growing bigger and bigger until she could see her distorted reflection in its quivering brilliance
.

It was magic. There she was inside the bubble. A girl with a big head and a small body, a little like the lovely Bindo
.

Papa said that Bindo was a freak of nature, a monstrosity. Papa could be so silly. Bindo was just a boy put together differently. He was warm and funny and kind and, unlike some people, he told the truth. You didn’t have to search for the truth with Bindo; it rolled off his tongue like warm honey off a spoon
.

She blew another bubble and watched it float up on the warm currents of air. She giggled. Two Ismeldas. One here in the bath and one up there in the bubble. She blew a third bubble and watched as it broke loose and wafted upwards. It hovered for a moment, then touched the wall and popped
.

She blew more bubbles and watched with envy as one drifted between the bars of the high window and out into the garden. The other Ismelda had escaped and soon she would be blowing over the high villa walls, away across the piazza, over the heads of the stone cherubs that the artist had made. Higher and higher she would fly, away down the valley, past the Convent of Santa Lucia where the mad people were sent…drifting far away, even as far as the sea
.

What would Papa say if he knew that she could conjure herself up many times? Didn’t he always say that one of her was enough for anyone? Poor Papa. He was such an old misery
.

She heard someone passing under the window, humming as he went. It was Father Rimaldi
.

She didn’t like Father Rimaldi. He smelt horrible and he told lies with his eyes without his lips knowing
.

“
It’s good to see you, Ismelda,” his lips said when he saw her at early mass. His eyes said it wasn’t good to see her at all. Once she had seen him kick a donkey in the piazza when no one was looking
.

She washed herself more quickly, not forgetting the back of her neck or inside her ears, for Maria was sure to check. After her bath, if she behaved herself and didn’t start her antics, she might be allowed out to play in the garden on her own. She must keep quiet, though, because Papa would be taking his after-breakfast nap on the upstairs balcony
.