Eliza was a mystery. Nobody knew where she came from, although she claimed it was Hampstead. She said
Hempstid
the way royalty might. She indicated, although not in a way you could pin down for certain, that there was blue blood, if not money, somewhere. ‘The ruddy silver spoon’s still in her mouth,’ Madge said to Vinny when they first met Eliza. Her accent
was
odd, very out of place in Arden with its nicely buffed-up northern vowels. Eliza sounded stranded somewhere between a very expensive boarding-school and a brothel (or to put it another way, upper-class).
The first time that any of Gordon’s family met the not-so-blushing bride was at the wedding. The Widow had been hoping for a nice quiet wife for her baby boy – drab with brown hair and an ability to budget. A girl who hadn’t been too educated and with ambitions that stretched no further than a local public school for the clutch of Fairfax grandchildren that she would produce. Whereas Eliza was a – ‘Vamp?’ Madge supplied eagerly.
For her wedding, Eliza – as slender as a willow, as straight as a Douglas fir (
pseudotsuga menziesii
) – wore a navy-blue suit with a tiny pinched-in waist, with a white gardenia in her buttonhole and a little black hat made of feathers, like a ballerina’s headband. The bad black swan. No bouquet, just crimson fingernails. The Widow gave a not-so-discreet little shudder of horror.
With her long steel-wool hair wired back in a bun, she looked like a Sicilian Widow rather than an English one. Her feelings about the wedding might be deduced from the fact that she had chosen to dress in black from top to toe. She watched intently as Gordon (‘my baby!’) slipped the wedding ring on to the finger of this peculiar creature. You would almost think she was trying to will Eliza’s finger to drop off.
There was something odd about Eliza, they were all agreed, even Gordon, although what it was no-one could quite say. Standing behind her in the register office, Madge experienced a convulsion of envy as she noticed how thin Eliza’s ankles were beneath her unpatriotically long skirt. Like bird-bones. Vinny wanted to snap them. And her neck like a stalk. Snap.
The Widow had insisted on paying for the reception at the Regency Hotel in case anyone thought that the Fairfaxes couldn’t afford a proper wedding. It was clear that no-one on Eliza’s side was going to turn up, let alone pay. Eliza, apparently, had nobody.
They’re all dead, darling,
she murmured, her dark eyes tragic with unshed tears. The same tragedy seemed to have infected her voice, throaty with notes of whisky, nicotine, velvet. She was Gordon’s treasure, found accidentally, Gordon plucking her from the wreckage of a bombed building in London when he was there on leave, even going back to retrieve her missing shoe (
they were
so
expensive, darling
).
My hero,
she smiled as he placed her gently on the pavement.
My hero,
she said and Gordon was lost, drowning in her whisky eyes.
The age of chivalry,
bomb-dusted Eliza murmured,
is alive and well. And is called?
‘Gordon, Gordon Fairfax.’
Wonderful.
‘Bit of a rush do, eh?’ Madge’s bank clerk husband winked, at no-one in particular, and Eliza swooped on him from nowhere and said,
Darling, are we really family now?
So
hard to believe,
and he retreated under a cascade of
Hempstid
vowels. ‘Hoity-toity, that one,’ Vinny said to Madge.
Eliza had dark, dark hair. Glossy and curly. Black as a crow, a rook, a raven. ‘A bit of the tarbrush?’ Vinny mouthed across the wedding cake to Madge. Madge semaphored amazement with her sherry glass and mouthed back, ‘Wop?’ Eliza, who could lip-read at a hundred paces, thought her new sisters-in-law looked like fish. Cod and Halibut. ‘Plummy,’ said Vinny dismissively to Madge over the sherry-toast to bride and bridegroom. ‘Fruity,’ said Madge’s husband, raising a lecherous eyebrow.
Really,
Eliza said to the bridegroom,
anyone would think I was a piece of wedding cake,
and Gordon thought that he’d like to eat her up. Every last crumb, so that no-one else could ever have her. What wedding cake? grumbled the Widow, for this was a wartime cake made with prewar dates found at the back of the licensed grocery’s store-room. A hasty affair, ‘an expensive do,’ the Widow said to her fish daughters, ‘for a cheap you-know-what.’ Why have they married so quickly? ‘Something fishy,’ said Vinny-the-Halibut. ‘Suspicious,’ said the Widow. ‘Highly,’ said Madge-the-Cod.
Do they
know
Queen Victoria’s dead?
Eliza asked her new husband. ‘Probably not,’ he laughed, but nervously. The Widow and Vinny lived in the Dark Ages. And they liked it there. Eliza said she couldn’t decide which would be worse, to be Vinny in Willow Road or to be Madge-in-Mirfield. She laughed loudly when she said this and everyone turned to stare at her.
Charles was born on a train, an event due to the capriciousness of Eliza who decided she needed an outing to the Bradford Alhambra when any normal woman in her condition would be sitting at home with her feet up, resting her piles and her varicose veins.
‘Premature,’ the Widow said, warily cradling tiny Charles in her arms. ‘But healthy, thank goodness.’ Softened, momentarily, by grandmotherhood, she attempted a smile in the direction of Eliza. Vinny inspected Bradford from the ward window. She’d never been this far from home.
‘And
big
,’ the Widow added, admiring and sarcastic and moved – all at the same uncomfortable time. ‘Just think,’ she said to Eliza, her eyes narrowing as the sarcastic won the battle, ‘what he would have been like if he’d gone the full nine months.’
Oh please – don’t!
Eliza said, shivering theatrically and lighting up a cigarette.
‘A honeymoon baby,’ the Widow said speculatively, as she stroked the baby’s cheek. (‘Whose honeymoon though? Eh?’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield.) ‘I wonder who he looks like?’ Vinny wrote to Gordon. ‘He certainly doesn’t look like
you,
Gordon!’ No-one had more artificial exclamation marks than Vinny! (No-one had written so many letters since the decline of the epistolary novel.)
He’s an absolute cherub,
Eliza said and,
Oh God, I’d give anything for a gin, darling.
Charles’ arrival even made the papers –
GLEBELANDS BABY BORN ON TRAIN
the
Glebelands Evening Gazette
wrote possessively. That was how the Widow found out about her grandson, Eliza having neglected to send a message from the hospital where she was taken when the train finally pulled into the station. ‘Trust her to make the headlines,’ snapdragon Vinny sniffed.
Born on a train. People falling over themselves to help, the guard upgrading her to First so she had more room to grunt and groan (which she did in a very ladylike way, everyone agreed), the guard thinking that the way she said
Darling, you’re an angel
showed she was a First Class type anyway. It was difficult to know what to put on Charles’ birth certificate. He was a philosophical conundrum, like Zeno’s arrow, a paradox on the space-time continuum. ‘Where would you say he was born?’ Gordon asked, when he was next home on leave.
Why, First Class, darling,
Eliza replied.
Charles, sadly, was rather ugly. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ declared the Widow, the mistress of the baffling cliché.
Eliza, however (naturally, being his mother), declared that he was the most beautiful baby that ever existed.
Charlie is ma darlin,
she sang softly to a nursing Charles, who stopped the suck-and-tug at her breast long enough to smile a gummy smile up at her. ‘What a smiley baby,’ the Widow said, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Eliza bounced Charles on her lap and kissed the back of his neck. Vinny unclamped her lips long enough to say, ‘He’ll be spoilt.’
How wonderful for him,
Eliza said.
Gordon came home on leave at last and met his son, by now freckled like a giraffe and with a carrot-coloured tuft of hair sprouting from the middle of his large, bald head. ‘Red hair!’ Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. ‘I wonder where he got that from?’
‘He’s a sturdy little chap, isn’t he?’ Gordon said, ignoring his sister. He had already fallen in love with his red-haired son. ‘He doesn’t look a bit like you,’ Vinny persisted, as Gordon carried Charles around the house on his shoulders. ‘He doesn’t look like Eliza either,’ Gordon said and that much, certainly, was true.
Then Gordon had to go and fly through the greyer skies of Europe. ‘You would think’, Vinny sneered, ‘that he was fighting the
Luftwaffe
single-handed.’ ‘Nerves of steel,’ the Widow said. A man of iron.
Heart of gold,
said Eliza and laughed her bubbling, rather frightening laugh. Before the end of his leave Gordon had managed to get another baby started (
an accident, darling!
).
‘You’ll keep an eye on Eliza, won’t you?’ Gordon said to his mother before he left. ‘How can I not?’ she said, her syntax as stiff as her back. ‘She’s under the same roof, after all.’ In the bathroom, damp and steamy, the Widow had to brush through a forest of Eliza’s stockings hanging everywhere and wondered how this could be part of her duty. And another thing, the Widow thought, how did she get these stockings? Eliza was never short of anything – stockings, perfume, chocolate – what was she doing to get them? That’s what the Widow would like to know.
‘At least this child won’t be born on the move,’ the Widow said to Eliza. The Widow was worried that Eliza might be thinking about the Turkish Baths in Harrogate or a day-trip to Leeds. Eliza smiled enigmatically. ‘Bloody Mona Lisa,’ Vinny said out loud to herself as she smoked cigarettes for her lunch at the back of the licensed grocery.
Eliza drifted into the shop, as pregnant as a full-blown sail. She sat on the bentwood chair reserved for weary customers next to the huge red, gold and black tea-caddies with their faded paintings of Japanese ladies, big enough to hide a small child in. Eliza pulled Charles on her knee and sucked his fingers, one by one. Vinny twitched with disgust.
He makes me laugh,
she said, and as if to prove it she laughed her ridiculous laugh. A lot of things made Eliza laugh and not many of them seemed very funny to the Widow and Vinny.
The Widow ran her dust-seeking fingers over the black bottles of amontillado, checked the moulded butter-pats (thistles and crowns), the bacon-slicer, the cheese-wires. She rang sales into the huge brass till, as big as a small pipe organ, with such ferocity that it flinched on the solid mahogany counter. Straight as an ironing-board and almost as thin. Her skin as pale as pale can be, like white paper that had been creased and pleated a hundred times.
The old hag.
The old hag with her wormwood tongue and her hag-hedge hair the colour of gunmetal and ashes. Eliza sang to cover her thoughts because no-one was going to hear what went on inside Eliza’s head, not even Gordon. Especially not Gordon.
Eliza’s belly was like a drum. She placed Charles down on the floor. The drum was beating from the inside. Vinny could see something pushing against the drum-skin – a hand or a foot – and tried not to look, but her eyes kept being drawn back to this invisible baby.
It’s trying to escape,
Eliza said and, from the handbag at her feet, she took out her powder-compact, the expensive one that Gordon had bought for her – blue enamel with mother-of-pearl palm trees – and put on more lipstick. She rubbed her red lips together, as red as fresh blood and poppies, and smacked them open again for Vinny and the Widow’s disapproval. She was wearing a funny hat, all sharp angles like a Cubist painting.
I’m going out,
she said, standing up so quickly, so awkwardly, that the bentwood chair crashed onto the wooden floor of the shop. ‘Where?’ the Widow asked, counting money, making little piles of coins on the counter.
Just out,
Eliza said, lighting up a cigarette and dragging hard on it. To Charles, she said,
Darling, will you stay here with Auntie Vinny and Granny Fairfax?,
and ‘Auntie Vinny’ and ‘Granny Fairfax’ glared at this interloper in their lives and wished that the war would finish and Gordon come home and take Eliza away and set up house with her somewhere far, far away. Like the moon.
The baby arrived three weeks early and Eliza claimed to be as much surprised as anybody. The Widow, determined not to be caught unawares a second time, was already on a war-footing.
The fire had been laid in the hearth ready (these were drizzling spring days) and the Widow had the bed made up with sheets both boiled and bleached. A rubber sheet and a chamber pot were stowed discreetly under the bed and an army of washbasins and ewers had been marshalled for the natal conflict.
Widow’s intuition made her come in from the conservatory where she was worshipping her cacti and she found Eliza on the stairs, clutching an acorn finial, doubled up in pain. Eliza was wearing her hat and coat and carrying her handbag and insisted that she was going out for a walk. ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said the Widow, who could recognize a madwoman when she saw one, not to mention a madwoman in an advanced state of labour, and she escorted Eliza firmly up the stairs to the second-best bedroom, Eliza struggling all the way. ‘Hellcat,’ the Widow hissed under her breath. She left Eliza sitting on the bed while she went off to boil important kettles. When she returned she found the bedroom door locked and no matter how much she rattled and shook, shouted and cajoled, the entrance to the delivery room remained barred. Vinny was summoned, as was the lumpen maid Vera and the man who helped the Widow with the garden. He eventually managed to kick the door in, but only after many encouraging shrieks from the Widow.
They found a tranquil scene in front of them. Eliza was lying on the bed, still with her outdoor clothes on, and was cradling something small and new and slightly bloody, wrapped in a pillowcase from the bed. She smiled triumphantly at the Widow and Vinny,
Your new granddaughter.
When the Widow finally managed to get her hands on the baby she found that the cord was already severed. A thrill of horror, like invisible electricity, jolted the Widow’s flat body.
‘Gnawed,’
she whispered to Vinny and Vinny had to run to the bathroom, hand clutched over her mouth.