Started Early, Took My Dog (6 page)

Tilly herself was beginning to feel a lack of commitment to longevity. Some days the old ticker felt like a hard little knot in her chest, other days it was like a soft, fluttering bird trying to escape from its ribbed cage. She suspected that her alter ego, poor old Marjorie Collier, was going to meet a sticky end rather than expire gracefully in her bed. And then! Just as she was coming out of Rayners’ she encountered Death, exactly as she’d feared. Thought she was going to drop dead on the spot but it was just some silly boy in a skull mask. Sneering at her, jumping up and down like a skeleton on strings. Shouldn’t be allowed.

Bluebell Cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood and up at dawn with the beasts in the field. She’d done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it.

We’ve got you a lovely cottage
, they said,
usually rented out to holiday-makers
. They had cast and crew stashed everywhere – B and Bs, cheap hotels in Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, rental houses, even caravans. They would have been better off just building a Travelodge on set. Tilly would have liked a nice hotel, three-star would have done her. What they didn’t tell her was that she would be sharing the cottage with Saskia. Didn’t tell Saskia either by the look on her face. Not that she had anything against Saskia per se. All skin and bone, far too thin, lived on fresh air and fags – the Dame Phoebe March diet. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said to Tilly the first time she produced a packet of Silk Cut. ‘I mean I’ll only smoke in my own room, or outside.’

‘Oh, go ahead, dear,’ Tilly said, ‘I’ve been around smokers all my life.’ (It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.) She wouldn’t want to fall out with her. Tilly hated falling out with people. It was funny because Saskia was such a clean girl (obsessively so, obviously had a problem, conducting germ warfare single-handedly) and smoking was such a filthy habit. Ballet dancers were the worst, of course, lighting up like chimneys the second they came out of class. Lungs like lampblack. Tilly used to live with a ballet dancer. That was after Phoebe left the Soho flat (1960 – turned out to be quite a decade for both of them), moving on and up to live with a director in Kensington. Douglas. He had belonged to Tilly first but Phoebe couldn’t abide Tilly having something that she didn’t. Very handsome man. Batted for the other side as well, of course. Nowt so queer as folk, as they said in the north. Phoebe used him up and left him behind after a year or so. Tilly and Douglas had remained fond of each other to the end. His end anyway.

Saskia played Vince Collier’s sidekick, DS Charlotte (‘Charlie’) Lambert. Keep it under your hat but she wasn’t the world’s greatest actress. She only seemed to have two expressions. One was ‘worried’ (with the variation ‘very worried’) and the other was ‘grumpy’. Very limited range, poor girl, although, like a lot of them, she looked good on the telly. Tilly had seen her in a play at the National. She was awful, just awful, but no one seemed to notice. Emperor’s new clothes. (Shades of Dame Phoebe again.)

Now that she had her new specs and could actually
see
, it was terrifying. Wednesday used to be half-day closing. Her father pulled the shutters down on the shop in the Land of Green Ginger and went off to live his mysterious other life with his fellow Rotarians. He spent a lot of time on the allotment as well, although there were never many vegetables to show for it. No more half-day closing, everything open all the time now, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. And where had all the money gone? You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?

She had to get out of this God-forsaken place, make her way to the car park.
Should you still be driving?
an AD had asked her after she’d failed several times to reverse into her allotted parking space in the car park on set and he’d had to take over from her. Ruddy cheek! And anyway
parking
wasn’t the same as
driving
. She was still in her seventies, plenty of life left in the old bird yet.

Up above the world so high!
She was a coward. How could anyone be so horrible to a child? A little scrap of a thing. Poor little mite. It broke Tilly’s wheezy old heart. If Tilly had had a child she would have wrapped it in lamb’s wool and treated it like an egg, fragile and perfect. She’d lost a baby, back in the Soho days. A miscarriage but she never told anyone. Well, Phoebe. Phoebe who had tried to persuade her to get rid of it, said she knew a man in Harley Street. It would be like going to the dentist, she said. Tilly wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. The baby had lived for nearly five months inside her, a dormouse nesting, before she lost it. It was a proper baby. Nowadays they might have been able to save it. ‘It was for the best,’ Phoebe said.

It never happened again and Tilly supposed that she had avoided it. Perhaps if she had married or found the right man, if she hadn’t been so concerned with her career. She might have a family around her skirts now, a strapping son or a friendly daughter, grandchildren. She would have a
life
, instead of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. Although Tilly was from the north (such a long time ago) the place scared her now, both town and country.
From the north
, like a wind, like a winter queen.

Tilly could understand why the first people had trekked out of Africa but why they continued on, north of the Home Counties, was beyond her. She was an idiot, she should have gone to Harrogate instead. A little tootle around the dress shops and lunch in Betty’s. Should have known better. No sign now of the tattooed woman and the poor child. You didn’t like to think what kind of home life she had. She should have done something, she really should. Weep, weep, Tilly.

In a newsagent she bought a
Telegraph
, a packet of Halls Mentho-Lyptus throat tablets (to keep the old pipes going) and a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut for a treat. Days off meant no set catering. Tilly loved set catering – big fried breakfasts, proper puddings with custard. She was a terrible cook herself, lived off cheese on toast at home.

She didn’t have enough coins so she gave the girl behind the counter a twenty-pound note but the girl gave her the change on ten.

‘Excuse me,’ Tilly said hesitantly, because she hated this kind of thing, ‘but I gave you a twenty.’ The girl looked at her indifferently and said, ‘It was a ten.’

‘No, no, I’m sorry, it wasn’t,’ Tilly said. Confrontation tied her up in knots inside. That came from Dad, all those years ago.
He
was never wrong. A big, blustery man, slapping cod fillets down on his marble counter as if he was teaching them a lesson. Tilly had had to learn a few lessons from him. Ran away in the end, never went back to the Land of Green Ginger, reinvented herself in Soho, like many a girl before her. ‘It
was
a twenty,’ Tilly persisted gently. She could feel herself getting upset. Calm, calm, she said to herself.
Breathe, Matilda!

The girl behind the counter held up a ten-pound note that she’d taken from the till as if it was incontrovertible proof. But it could have been any ten-pound note! Tilly’s heart was thudding uncomfortably in her chest. ‘It was a twenty,’Tilly said again. She could hear herself sounding less certain. She’d been to the cashline and it had given her twenties. She’d had nothing else in her purse, that was why she had given the girl the twenty in the first place. She could hear a mutter of discontent behind her in the queue, heard a gruff voice say, ‘Get a move on.’ You would think that after all these years in the profession she would be able to slip into a role, she was, after all, most comfortable in someone else’s skin. An imperious, commanding character, Lady Bracknell, Lady Macbeth, would know how to deal with the girl but when Tilly searched inside all she could find was herself.

The girl was staring at her as if she was nobody, nothing. Invisible.

‘You’re a thief,’ Tilly heard herself suddenly say, too shrilly. ‘A common thief.’

‘Get lost, you stupid cow,’ the girl said, ‘or I’ll call security.’

She would need money to pay her way out of the multi-storey. Where did she put her purse? Tilly looked through her bag. No purse. She looked again. Still no purse. Plenty of other things that didn’t belong there. Recently she’d noticed all these objects suddenly appearing in her bag – key rings, pencil sharpeners, knives and forks, coasters. She had no idea how they got there. Yesterday she had found a cup
and
a saucer! The emphasis on cutlery and cups suggested she was trying to put together a complete place-setting. ‘Turning into a bit of a klepto, Tilly?’ Vince Collier had laughed at her the other day in the canteen. ‘What do you mean, dear?’ she said. Vince wasn’t his real name. His real name was . . . hm.

Mother kept a long-handled brass toasting fork hung with the fire-irons on the hearth. Always polishing the fire-irons. Always polishing everything. Father liked things clean, would have got on well with Saskia. The toasting fork had three wise monkeys on the top of the handle.
See no evil
. Plenty of evil to see in that house. Tilly used to sit by the fire and toast teacakes, Mother would butter them. The teacakes used to get stuck on the prongs of the fork. Father threw the toasting fork at Mother once. Like a spear. Got stuck in her leg. Mother howled like an animal. A poor bare forked animal.

She emptied the contents of her handbag on to the passenger seat. A mysterious tablespoon and a packet of crisps – cheese and onion. She hadn’t bought those, she didn’t like crisps, how had they got there? Definitely no purse. Fear squeezed her heart. Where was it? She’d had it in the newsagent. Had that horrible girl taken it, but how? What was she going to do now? She was trapped in the car park. Trapped! Could she phone someone? Who? No point in phoning anyone in London, not much they could do. The nice production assistant who had made her appointment at the optician’s, what was her name? Tilly drew a blank. Something Indian and therefore more difficult to remember. She went through the alphabet – A-B-D-C-E – a method that often helped to prompt her memory. She went through the whole alphabet and came up with nothing.
Silly Tilly
.

Perhaps she was just being highly strung. That’s what they said about her when she was a child. Family doctor prescribed an iron tonic – thick green stuff like mucus that made her gag although not as bad as castor oil or syrup of figs, gawd, the things they used to give the poor suffering child. Highly strung indeed. Artistic temperament, that’s how Tilly preferred to think of it. As if an iron tonic could cure that.

Think about something else and then it’ll come. Hopefully. She checked herself in the rear-view mirror, adjusted her wig. Who would have thought it would come to this? At least it was a very good wig, made by one of the best, cost a fortune. No one could tell. Made her look younger (well, one lived in hope), not like the awful rug she had to wear to be Vince Collier’s mother. Looked like a Brillo pad. She wasn’t completely bald, not like Mother had been at this age (like a billiard ball), just rather thin on top. Nothing more laughable than a bald woman.

Padma! That was the girl’s name. Of course. Tilly fumbled for her phone, she wasn’t very good with mobiles, the buttons were so small. She put on her new spectacles and peered at the phone. Wrong ones, she needed her reading specs but when she found them she realized that she couldn’t remember how to use the phone, not the foggiest. She took her specs off and looked through the car windscreen, gazed out at the other parked cars. Everything a blur. She didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.

She put the phone down on the passenger seat.
Breathe, Matilda
. She looked at her hands in her lap. Now what was she going to do?

When you were lost you needed a map. Ariadne and her thread, Tilly the
Leeds A–Z
that she found in a newsagent. Somehow or other she had wound her way back from the car park to the shopping centre. It was very brightly lit, brighter than the sun. Tilly could have sworn that she felt the hum of electricity passing through her bones. She had been disconcerted by hearing her mother’s voice on the tannoy system, echoing down the years from her childhood, saying, ‘If you get lost, go up to a policeman.’ Tilly knew she must be mad because the last time her mother said that to her was well over sixty years ago, not to mention the fact that her mother had been dead for three decades and even if she had been alive it seemed unlikely that she would be making public announcements in a shopping centre in Leeds.

Anyway there wasn’t a policeman to be seen anywhere.

The newsagent was familiar, she had definitely been here before. She put her spectacles on and opened up the
A–Z
. Why? What was she looking for? A way out of the ninth circle of hell. That was where traitors went, wasn’t it? Where Phoebe belonged, not Tilly. As she walked out of the shop, face buried in the
A–Z
, a mean-faced, gum-chewing girl behind the counter shouted, ‘Oi!’ at her. Tilly thought it best to ignore her, you never knew what girls like that wanted.

She reached the foot of an escalator. The
A–Z
flapped uselessly in her hand. It was very hot in here, it must be the heat that was affecting her brain. She fanned herself with the
A–Z
. A youth, face raw with acne, like the inside of a pomegranate, loomed in front of her.

‘Have you paid for that, madam?’ he asked, pointing at the
A–Z
. Tilly’s heart began to pound, a steam hammer threatening the end. Her mouth was dry, there was a buzzing in her ears as if an insect was trying to escape from her brain. A curtain descended before her eyes, waving and undulating, how she imagined the aurora borealis would be, although she’d never seen it. She would like to, she had always wanted to go to the North Pole – such a romantic destination. The Northern Lights. She was so hot, feverish.
Be not afeard
. Think of something cold. Tilly remembered shivering on the dockside with her father in the winter, watching the trawlers sailing into harbour after fishing the Arctic waters. Mysterious places – Iceland, Greenland, Murmansk. Ice still slick on the decks of the boats. Her father buying fish in the market, great trays of cod, bedded on crushed ice. Big fish, pure muscle. Poor things, Tilly used to think, swimming in the deep, cold waters of the north and then ending up on her father’s slab.
From the north
. Like the wind, like winter monarchs. King Cod.