Mrs Mulvaney Read online

  Hilary Bailey

  Mrs Mulvaney

  To Mary Ballard

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  A Note on the Author

  Part 1

  The picture which comes back to me now, when I remember that time before anything changed, is of the garden, two acres of trees and grass. It is a small London park, private, enclosed, overlooked by the back windows of the tall houses around it, and always filled with the noise of the traffic roaring, day and night, beyond them on all four sides.

  It was in the garden that, each afternoon, when the cold amber sunshine filtered through the browns and yellows of the trees, I, Joseph Coverdale – Joe – used to walk my dog along quiet gravel paths and over the chilling October grass scattered with fallen leaves. In some places the eternal rattling and belching of the traffic muted to a low roar, like that of an approaching wind. Walking under the trees, over grass, you might think you were in the country.

  I remember the near-silence, half-solitude of those autumn afternoons. The freshness and clear light.

  All around, the back gardens of the houses led on to the square. Here is one with white trellises, a pool and marble statues. I see a tabby cat slide across the paving round the pool and head for the cover of the trellis against the wall, where a few roses still hang among the drying leaves and petal-dropping blooms. In another garden the axle of an old motor-bike grows out of weeds and long damp grass studded with thrusting baby sycamores. Next door, a red-eyed white rabbit sits up, a carrot in its paws, on a billiard-table lawn. And, as I pass a high, yellow-brick wall, two Alsatians leap up barking. Their heads and paws appear over the top. They yelp. They thud down again. They are comic and frightening, with their red lolling tongues and yellow fangs, like cartoon wolves. My spaniel, Philip, toffee and white and curly, stands and growls at them, runs away down the path, comes back and growls, runs beside me as I pace on, staring up with rolling brown eyes, in search of my strength. A little, cool wind begins to blow.

  Imagining that time, the time of my slow, numbed walks in the autumn garden, dazed even by the circling, racing, leaf-chasing dog, always aching the dull ache of an old wound, the healed bone, I see, suddenly, the picture of Mrs Mulvaney’s long garden with its trees, the rusting seesaw, the spade abandoned in the patchy grass, and of Mrs Mulvaney, framed in the window of her upstairs sitting-room, on her knees, very still in prayer, quite visible through the long windows.

  There she kneeled, in profile from above the waist, and staring blindly towards the right-hand wall. To the left of her I could see part of the old sofa. On it was a pair of wellingtons and one of the mistreated but beautiful, rich, needlepoint cushions – Aphrodite rising from the sea was one I remembered, and Salome, presenting the head of John the Baptist – all done in rich reds, blues and greens, the loving creation of some old aunt or spinster cousin. Behind Mrs Mulvaney was the shape of the small battered grand piano, with its green velvet piano stool. Behind that, the open hatch looked, I knew, into her cluttered kitchen where the wall-cabinet doors usually stood ajar and the counters were laden with many unsorted domestic objects – a seaside bucket full of shells, an odd sock, an unused bowl of flour, a book.

  The sun was beginning to get lower as that small cool wind began to blow. Mrs Mulvaney knelt there without moving. She wore a navy-blue jersey. Her blue arms hung by her sides. Her head, topped with its bouncy, frizzy, light brown hair which always gave her face the soft look of a young Edwardian postcard beauty, leaned slightly back as if the object she looked at were a little above her.

  I knew the statue to, or at, which she prayed. It stood alone on a high white-painted bookshelf against the wall. Above it was a green-spined set of Balzac. Below was a shelf of lopsided pieces of pottery, made at school by the older Mulvaney children. There was a large jug, a bowl, a couple of mugs and a rabbit painted black and red with pencil-point jabs for eyes. The statuette, alone on its shelf, was about a foot high, ivory-coloured, showing the Virgin Mary, eyes closed, head bowed, and hands, below long trailing sleeves, placed together in prayer. It was, in short, that statue which is in the windows, along with the holy pictures, cards of medallions, crucifixes and prayerbooks, in any Catholic repository, from London to Lourdes.

  At first I felt concern. What, I asked myself, could be so badly the matter that someone, a neighbour, a friend, should be praying, out of church, on a weekday in the middle of the afternoon? Was the child, Ajax, who was said to have measles, in fact gravely ill? Was Mrs Mulvaney’s mother, who now lived alone in the large crumbling house in Dublin, and still terrorized her seven children by the fact of her existence and her uncannily-timed long-distance phone calls, suddenly dying? Had Julian Mulvaney actually left, instead of staying on with his wife and children and ostentatiously pining after his former personal assistant, the dull-faced Glenda MacFarlane, now transferred to the dust and infernal heat of the Department of Trade and Industry?

  Ah, not so, I thought. Katie Mulvaney was not the sort to turn to God in a crisis – or to his mother either. No, she would not ply her God, or Goddess, with requests on her own behalf and would be sparing in her requests for others. It would be for more love, more faith, more compassion, that she appealed. That banal little statuette on the shelf was just a focus for her outpouring of faith, love and energy, a way of connecting with a more abstract object, the font and source of goodness, warmth and light.

  Such love, I thought, standing in my parched, self-regarding state on the rocky bed of a dried-up river. Such love. Such strength. If, I thought morosely, as a dried leaf drifted gently down and settled on the shoulder of my jacket, if I had a God in whom I believed, I should ask for what I really wanted. Continually. Dieu me donnera, c’est son métier. But Katie, humble, proud, perverted, blasphemous, absolutist Katie, would not.

  It had grown much colder. The light was fading fast. The numbness, the distancing of my surroundings which were now a permanent condition with me, came down like fog. As I was, without thinking, beginning to move back across the grass to the house, in the corner where I lived, I saw the boy, Ajax himself, wearing a green-and-white-striped jersey and jeans, pounding across the carpet towards his mother, evidently shouting something. She looked round and held out her arms. With his round face, brown, small, beady eyes, his jet-black hair cut in a fringe and his ruddy cheeks, Ajax, in repose, always looked to me like a large Chinese doll. Undressed, he looked like a little, tiny man. He had shoulders like a chicken-hut door, miniature biceps on his arms, a deep chest and wee, heavily muscled legs. He was deeply frightened of King Kong. As I watched he ran full on into his mother’s extended arms. She jolted, hugged him, rose slowly to her feet, said something to him and started to walk into the kitchen. She pushed a hand through her wavy hair. She wore green trousers. Ajax, tugging on a khaki forage cap, swaggered after her with the air of a child who may begin to feel the menace of boredom at any time. Soon, I knew, he would be rocking to and fro on top of the kitchen cabinet.

  Sighing for my friend I started off, back across the grass. Did Julian, I wondered, know that his wife prayed in the afternoons? With any luck he would never come home unexpectedly and catch her at it. Kate Mulvaney’s religion was one of the things Julian seemed most to dislike about his wife. In the old days I had spent more than one bad half-hour at their dinner-table, as he attacked her for religiosity, superstition, subservience and, rejecting the sabre for the sharp kitchen knife, for loving God instead of focusing her attention and concern on the people around her. Naturally I could not say whether this was true or not. Probably his attacks on her faith were just shorthand for whatever else it was he objected to. Sexual frigidity perhaps, or disorderly children, or the peculiar blind stare which wou
ld come down from time to time, seemingly arbitrarily, over her eyes like a fog. Or was it her housekeeping, or her flea-prone mongrel bitch, Lady, or her righteousness, or just the fact that she was his wife?

  Philip, who had been running ahead of me back to the house, stopping short from time to time, feathery ears flapping, to make sure I was still behind, reached the path, pulled up short and gave a barking howl. My mind dulled, drifted away into numbness. I turned back. In a flash Jessica Lombard’s two Cairn terriers were up to him, yelping.

  ‘Would you kindly call your dog off?’ cried Mrs Lombard, appearing through the misty dusk, pulling a wheeled shopper. What a voice to call the cows home, stop a horde of fuzzy-wuzzies dead in their tracks, bring the hound of the Baskervilles creeping on his belly. Already poor cowardly Philip was trying to leap into my arms. Seeming to ignore this demonstration of canine love, Mrs Lombard, in the gloomy forest, allowed the phrase, Like master like man, to escape from her head like a comic strip bubble.

  She called, ‘Rufus! Danny! Here!’

  The basket contained, I noticed, a bag of courgettes and a packet of Sainsbury’s meringues. Mrs Lombard, a thrifty housekeeper, must be entertaining tonight.

  ‘Turning cold,’ I remarked, offensively drawing myself to her attention.

  ‘I must get on,’ she announced.

  ‘There’s always summat to do,’ I said, broadening my accent.

  She was away. Her fast feet and the wheels of the shopper rattled on the gravel. The cairns ran yelping round as she and her basket disappeared down the path in the gathering mist.

  How right she looked, I mused, burning holes in her straight, departing back, as she crunched along the path with her barking dogs. In the past she had been the light-stepping prefect running on the chill playing-fields of a country boarding-school. Move her into the future and there was an old lady wrapping a parcel for a grandson at Oxford, carrying it through autumnal lanes to the post office. For she would return to where she came from – that big semi-rural house near the golf course, with its lawns, hydrangeas, tennis court. I had been to the Lombard’s cottage, too, a place of low ceilings, scant food and damp, too near the estuary, and borne the whole burden of the myth of the town-dwelling middle classes, always believing in their secret and wholesome link with a douce, unchallenging countryside where they were, of course, landlords rather than tenants.

  How she drove about, I thought, dazed at the idea; how Jessica drove about so resolutely, ferrying her children with the air of a social worker taking them somewhere for their own good – one to a child-guidance clinic, another to the magistrates’ court, and the remaining two to a GLC home where they would be properly looked after. I had once opened a bedroom door by accident at the Lombard’s. There was Jessica, bare-shouldered in front of the mirror, wearing a clinging sage-green evening dress, determinedly applying scent to wrist, neck and shoulders like someone putting Dettol on some nasty spots. The contrast between that slender sapling body in green, the white of her shoulders, the column of her neck and the pile of ruddy blossom that was her hair, and the nurse-like application of Arpège, arrested me.

  ‘Bathroom’s next door, Joe,’ she had said, without turning round.

  All this was, of course, in the old days.

  Now she hated me, did Jessica Lombard. Oh, how she hated me. Well, it was a hard life, in spite of the au pair, Monique, the daily, Mrs Waddell, and the automatic washing-machine. For where the wife of a building worker might spend an hour with mop, bucket, screaming toddlers and a heavy period, washing all the floors in the flat, and then straighten up groaning for a cup of tea and a moan with another woman, Jessica, in solitude, would spend the same time driving the children to school and fetching them back, delivering them en route to the maths coach, the art class, the recorder lesson and tea in Kensington with a cousin. Then would come the reassembling of the children, hand-over to Monique, quick change, dart-round with the peanuts and olives before the arrival of Hugo Lombard with some business friends, chat, cheer, flatter, an anxious eye on the cassoulet in the oven, mental note to Monique to keep the noise of the Western down upstairs and never, never for an instant let anyone, least of all herself, know for a moment that she was not one of the civilized, one of the wonderful women of the world, or how she, Jessica Lombard, was giving herself cell by cell, corpuscle by corpuscle, to the lives of others.

  No wonder she hated me. I had to allow that, as a moral being, Jessica had a perfect right to legitimate moral objections about my behaviour. But in my position I had become used to being at the other end of plenty of legitimate moral objections, and I knew what the real ones felt like. Katie Mulvaney, for example, really disapproved of me, but she regretted, rather than condemned, grieved, rather than reproached. She wanted to help me. I suspected that more than one candle, every drop of wax an anxious wish, had, lit by Mrs Mulvaney, gone up in incense-laden darkness on my behalf.

  No, it was not moral objections, I reflected, but hatred I aroused in Jessica. That – and her green-eyed half-sister, envy. Six million, countless millions, including poor turned-off parlourmaid Fanny, bearing her baby in a ditch, had died because people felt about them the way Mrs Lombard felt about me. She feared me in case my weaknesses were contagious, in case I contaminated her with my desuetude, lust, sloth, and accidie. Or in case I infected society likewise, was part of a secret movement which might make all her efforts worthless, even in her own eyes, reducing her to nothing but an Horatio, suddenly realizing she stood on a bridge no one wanted any more, the Tuscans having ferried themselves across the river higher up some hours previously. And she envied me – why? Well, because I was wrecked, ruined, done in, washed up, finished by my own vices, my uncontrollable appetites, my total failure to think ahead. And, having enjoyed the splendours and miseries of my evil acts, here I was – free. Free for bugger-all as it happened, but there is nothing to equal the aching green of the grass when you see it from behind bars.

  Now it was dark. The birds were nearly silent.

  I opened my iron-barred gate, walked through my tangled garden, where weeds dropped among the sprawling roses and seeding plants. A rotting child’s ball, with water in the hollow where it had deflated, floated on my choked pond. The grass, uncut for a year, straggled damply over bald patches on the lawn. From where the apples lay bruised and rotting under the tree I heard a child’s voice call ‘Daddy!’

  And so into the still house. Over the rough concrete of the children’s playroom, full of planks, half-built shelves and cupboards. A wooden rocking horse, covered in builder’s dust, had been hopefully placed there for the day when the room would be ready. On into the kitchen, where the dim light of evening filtered through gaily patterned blinds, not raised that morning, where the new oven with its spaceship controls lay disused yet filmed with London grease, where the formica counters lay, raw, chilly and bare. A Marks and Spencer’s bag, a pound of apples, a broken alarm clock, an empty can of dog-food. A wooden salad bowl containing small bags of peanuts and three bananas.

  I put on my slippers, which were standing side by side in the middle of the floor. I put my shoes under the round pine table. On it, in the half-light, lay the Guardian and an empty coffee-cup.

  Up the stairs, hand trailing up the dusty banisters, hearing my slippers flop on the stairs like an old man’s. Into the sitting-room. The Sunday papers, a sock, a fallen brocade curtain on the floor under the window. Beer cans in the grate among the nine-month-old ashes of the last log fire. I sit down, so tired, in the armchair by the fireplace and play high, clear music out into the brown and yellow leaves on the trees. The room is dark-panelled. There is a tapestry sofa against the wall, an old picture, heavily varnished, and half a dozen prints. What am I doing in an old man’s study in the dark, hearing old music and the wind shuffling the dry leaves on the trees? The dog sits beside me, thumping his tail hopefully on the floor, waiting, as usual, for the flames to leap, lick up and make us light and warm.

  I can hear the chil
dren’s voices, echoing from wall to wall of the dusty room.

  Still hearing them, I pick up the phone.

  ‘Joe? It’s me – Elmira,’ screamed Elmira in her great Antipodean parrot’s screech. ‘Why don’t you come over for a drink? It’s not good for you – sitting on your own there, brooding. Anyway,’ she added threateningly, ‘I’m lonely.’

  ‘We’re all lonely, Elmira,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, let’s all be lonely together,’ she cried encouragingly.

  ‘Who’s that behind you, singing The Wild Colonial Boy when you’re so lonely, then?’

  ‘Just some cousins of mine from Perth. Joe – you’ve got to come and help me get rid of them.’

  ‘No. No, Elmira.’

  ‘I need you, Joe.’

  ‘No, Elmira.’

  After that, for a while her healthy voice overbore the voices of the children. Then they came back.

  On the next day light streamed through the windows of the church, shining on the cream of the walls and all the glitter. Beside me in the pew Katie Mulvaney sat quietly, her eyes fixed on the golden figure of Jesus, hanging on the golden cross of the altar. On either side of the altar were baskets and boxes decorated with coloured crêpe-paper and satin bows, containing apples, bunches of greens, packets of tea and cornflakes and bunches of bananas. Below the steps leading up to the altar was a decorated table on which was set a giant loaf a foot wide, made of plaited bread, more baskets, a pile of apples, a melon and two cauliflowers. The beautifully white centres of the cauliflowers, full of a hundred curled flowers, were like twin eyes. Beside them, stood vases of mighty, ragged, orange and white chrysanthemums.

  Mothers and fathers shuffled in, edged into their pews, dropped down and said their perfunctory prayers.

  Above, Jesus hung on his cross.

  I looked sidelong at Katie, whose lips now moved in prayer, whose breathing, I heard, came steadier, slower and shallower at every breath. She sat a little higher in her seat, her attention caught. Following her eyes, I saw nothing. There was the altar, covered with its gilded embroidered cloth and the golden, hanging Christ. Below there was the harvest-laden table. Mrs Mulvaney was staring into the space behind the altar rails, the red-carpeted chancel – that platform, so to speak, without an actor, lying in front of the altar and behind the heaped food of the harvest.