Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Read online

  But the woman’s face was melting, was no longer Miss Ball’s. Cicely strained her eyes to recognise this new woman on the chair floating comfortably in the ether, her eyes like twin stars, burning into Cicely’s. Urgently, her lips were forming the same syllables over and over, but Cicely was too far away …

  With an electric shock, she recognised that it was Miss Marple whispering to her, in a voice too soft to decipher, a voice like the wind in the pines.

  In the morning, Cicely woke, still damp from sweat but oddly comforted.

  Her bandages let in no light, but she heard movement in the room. Martha was already there, with tea, ready to help with what she called ‘the unveiling’. Nervously, Cicely removed first one eye pad, then the other. Red light, but no sight.

  Panic …

  ‘Your eyes are just clogged up love,’ said Martha, passing her a warm, damp face washer. The first thing that came into focus was her picture of Milan in the red crocheted heart frame. She could see it, if a little blurrily, even without glasses. He was as handsome as ever.

  Cicely cautiously deciphered the furniture in the room. A blue vase on the cream window sill, where a white curtain billowed. Though her eyes were still swollen, she felt a growing joy, a confidence that her vision had returned. She closed one eye then the other, delighting at being able to make out her dressing gown hanging on a hook, her photo of Agatha on the wall.

  But when Martha pulled the curtains back, the glare was overwhelming.

  And although she meticulously followed her routine of eye drops and painkillers for several days, the light through the window remained so unbearable that she still had to wear her sunglasses inside.

  She could not imagine ever being released from the cosy cocoon of the dim house.

  Special

  However, helped by Martha, Cicely managed to keep her follow-up appointment. The receptionist whispered that there would be no charge.

  ‘You are on his special list,’ she confided, beaming, proud to be the messenger. ‘He calls you the-lady-with-the-hat.’

  Cicely set her Miss Marple hat at a more jaunty angle.

  Able to see Dr Singh more clearly now, Cicely was reassured to find that her initial impression of his saucer eyes had been wrong. Nothing unusual about him at all as, after conducting a preliminary shining of lights into her eyes, he declared the operation a success. He seemed relaxed, and even hummed as he worked on her.

  ‘Healing up nicely.’

  ‘Yes, but still a little blurred for reading …’

  He explained in his clipped voice that he would prescribe a new, much weaker pair of glasses, for, as she had already discovered, she was now far-sighted, rather than short-sighted as she had been before the cataracts.

  ‘I thought that with the artificial lenses I would see perfectly.’

  Dr Singh pursed his lips, stopped humming.

  ‘Cicely, we said your myopia would be gone.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Which it is, Cicely.’

  She should be grateful, she told herself, feeling suitably admonished. At least his hand hadn’t slipped during the operation. She had only glanced at the detailed list of possible complications, stopping when she had seen blindness as being one of them. She remembered his filmy, all-powerful, alien figure moving over her, and surrendered once more. It hardly mattered that she was now to be far-sighted.

  He made an appointment for her to come back in six months.

  ‘Just to see how you are getting along. And by the way, you won’t see any more spiders.’

  ‘How did …?’

  ‘People say things under the anaesthetic that they don’t remember. And you were wondering about the song I was humming?

  ‘We are star-dust …’

  She had hoped that he would want to stroke her hat again in that exploratory way – she had worn it specially. She had caught him glancing at the artfully bobbling flowers once or twice, but he had not mentioned it this time.

  Knowing that she was now far-sighted still did not explain why, even with her new reading glasses, her mind would wander off any printed page. It was not as if the print was too blurry for her to read. When she consciously made an effort to look at the words, they were definitely in focus. She tried reading in different light, adjusting her lamp, but the printed page seemed to have lost its spell over her. She was sure he could have explained what was happening to her. She would mention it at the next check-up, but that would not be for another few months.

  Dr Singh (she supposed he was actually Mr Singh, but that specialist title had always seemed such a downgrade to her) had been right about the spiders.

  With the return of her sight, she had tested her peripheral vision cautiously, anxious in case the hallucinatory spiders might pounce. But it was as if they had been just a trick of her vision. In fact, the operation seemed to have left her with only two fears.

  The first one, forcibly rotating in the background was a constant, mental whisper. The recurrent cry for help of Odette in peril.

  The other fear, as she lay in bed at night, was that the excruciating eye pain might return, and wake her with its torturous grip. The painkillers soothed away these anxieties, so she continued taking them, even after the first two packets were empty.

  They were proving hard to abandon, inviting her as they did into a cosy, though not dreamless, sleep, followed by a luxurious, worry-free waking.

  She dreamt of Miss Marple again, but she always wore the masks of the actresses who had played her in movies. None of them had that dream face, with its eyes like stars. None of them mouthed those words she longed to comprehend.

  And then one night, without warning, the face became that of Cicely’s mother.

  Cicely’s mother, late in life, had risen from her sickbed, announcing that she was now, inexplicably, to be addressed solely as Mrs Bovary. The various medical appointments that followed had been made in that name.

  She had taken to dressing formally in tweed suits, with bright coral lipstick and extraordinarily loud hats – green parrot feathers, orange velvet and black fascinators with diamantes. Always a shock for her daughter to see her like that, no longer in her nightdress all day, as at home.

  Instead, at visiting hours, she would sit stiffly in the lobby of the Little Sisters of the Poor rest home where she had gone to live after an ‘accident’ with the pills. And during young Cicely’s visits, her mother would run her eyes disapprovingly over her clothes, making her sharply aware of her unsatisfactory hair, her scuffed shoes.

  ‘Still hiding your eyes with those dreadful glasses? Couldn’t you just try to see without them?’

  The nursing nun stayed nearby while the seventeen-year-old girl chatted with increasing awkwardness to her newly elegant mother, who was looking at her watch, anxious for the visit to be over. Eventually, her mother would start to repeat the same phrases over and over, twisting her handkerchief in her hands.

  ‘You don’t have to come so often dear. After all, I hardly know you.’

  And the nursing nun would bring the conversation around to the daffodils in the vase, the cakes and tea that would soon be served, and would usher Cicely out into the hallway.

  ‘She has her own life here, you know, with all her new clothes and dressmaking class. She runs it you know. She could have been … sometimes they don’t like to be reminded of the past.’

  The nun had then told her, in answer to her perplexed questioning, that her mother was ‘drugged up’.

  ‘It’s hereditary, you know.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Drugging yourself up. You better watch out, especially where you’re going.’

  For it was the end of her final school year, and she was going away to university in another town.

  Had her mother neatly planned her sudden need to be rushed to the rest home, timing it for the exact month that Cicely would, at last, be ‘off her hands’?

  No one would be able to say she hadn’t done her duty as a mother.<
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  Ménage again

  These days, Cicely was blessedly uninterrupted by any thumps on the wall, any calls for meals.

  Martha’s rich and spicy food, with ‘lumps’ Cicely would not have dared present, had a way of soothing Uncle Bill’s nocturnal wakings, and Cicely could now lie cosily in bed.

  Every morning, she would hear Martha in the house, clattering productively about the kitchen. Could she be looking for a husband? Afraid to end up old and alone?

  Odette had said that she was afraid to end up alone like Cicely. Looking back on those months of peace, before the nightmare had erupted, she realised that she had never been happier than in the old ménage à trois. She had had the pleasure of a man’s arms at night, though it had always felt stolen, for she had felt no responsibility for any of his daytime needs. There had always been Odette to care about what he wanted. Cicely had to admit that it had suited her to zigzag in and out of intimacy. She sighed.

  But did such freedom go with love? Her mother’s generation may as well have lived in the nineteenth century, like poor Emma Bovary. Stuck with her husband in the sticks, no money of her own, dreaming of travel and romance.

  Once, once only, Cicely had felt an overwhelming love for Zac, while watching him sleep. With her, but not with her.

  And only because he had been at a safe distance.

  Cicely had suddenly got the cleaning bug.

  She loved the detail that she could now make out in her flat, and she set about cleaning up smears and dust that she had never noticed before. She and Martha now took it in turns to see to Uncle Bill’s world, to set things right for him. Martha cooked and Cicely scrubbed.

  The sounds of a woman’s domestic work always put Uncle Bill in a cheery mood, and he would smile when he came across Cicely on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the sink or wiping windows. He would even sit down near her to enjoy the entertainment.

  ‘Newspaper and water for the windows, that’s what we used to use.’

  ‘You can’t do that now because it’s different ink …’

  ‘Bah, you always know best of course,’ he would sigh. But the ‘bah’ was softer now, even to her.

  It struck her that she had ended up sharing a man with another woman again. How did men have such luck?

  But as she scrubbed and wiped, she thought of old ladies’ houses, how they were often dusty and dirty, and she was grateful that she had been saved, at least for now, from that premature destiny.

  Having lost the habit of reading, Cicely would reach out to the bedside for the tablets, then take up her new crazy crochet work that she was making up as she went along, round and round, in and out, so that it resembled the senseless bumps and frills of a coral reef. Waiting.

  Waiting for what Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had called ‘the click’, when the alcohol (in his case) kicked in, and she would at last enter the bubble of calm, where nothing could harm her.

  As she sorted out her coloured wools – so soft, so subtly infinite in shade and texture now that the veil over her sight was lifted – her mind was at the same time sorting through all the tangled threads of Odette’s disappearance, à la Agatha Christie.

  The story tapes she had listened to over the last months made it all seem so logical. There were always five suspects, and the least likely person was the one who ‘dunnit’. The trouble with proceeding along these lines, however, was that Cicely had either only one suspect, Zac.

  Or else too many, if she was to include all those mysterious internet lovers.

  Not to mention that times had changed. These days, there was always the third possibility of a random act of violence … what would Christie have made of that? Crime unmotivated by either of her two favourites – inheritance and jealousy? How would she then have managed that scene in the Great Hall, where all the suspects were called together, and motive revealed?

  Such an exquisite shade of blue … Cicely had an urge to crochet something that she had never tried before, so, throwing down the creative mess, she picked up the deep blue mohair, and started again.

  She knew she would soon fall asleep over her work. The painkiller instructions warned about possible grogginess, but that was a negative way of describing the mental numbness on waking that Cicely looked forward to.

  Cicely would sit on the bed in the afternoon sun, with her threads a coloured web around her. The new crocheted ‘blue thing’ was growing as if it had a mind of its own, while Cicely’s mind lumbered obsessively between two magnetic points.

  Daggers hurtling towards Odette, as she did a handstand against an execution wall. Each knife sinking into the corkboard wall, soft as flesh, blood released and trickling to the floor.

  And, more and more, the film script. The deadline for the competition was approaching but she just couldn’t write. Was it because someone – usually two people – was always in the house?

  She could hear Martha banging about in the kitchen. Martha the domestic angel whose arrival with casseroles and curries and iced cup-cakes which didn’t crumble had turned Uncle Bill away from supermarket food. She even put Uncle Bill to bed at night, tucking him in before returning – or did she? – to her own flat next door.

  Involved in a particularly devious stitch that was leading her to create a three-dimensional effect, Cicely looked up, startled by a reluctant, choking, coughing sound.

  It was, incredibly, Uncle Bill laughing with Martha. If even Uncle Bill and Martha were developing some kind of love relationship, maybe it was time for Cicely to … she must finish that orange jumper and give it to Dr Singh. But she recalled that it had only ever existed in a dream.

  Was she losing touch with reality?

  Cicely strained to hear what the joke was, in the other room. But she couldn’t make it out. She sighed, stood up, gazed out the window at the lawn. So many weeds, which she hadn’t noticed before. She could start weeding, that would keep her mind from wandering. Occupational therapy. Or …

  She made a decision.

  She would go back every day to Golden Tower. It would become her refuge from domesticity. Her office. The script would take shape there. Nothing would distract her from her solitary project at Golden Tower.

  And going there each day would be a way to feel close to Odette.

  So many carrots

  Cicely sat, straight-backed and dutiful, at the computer.

  She had resisted the temptation to poke around in Odette’s files, but only because she was holding this out to herself as a reward, her carrot, for the day when she would finally send in the script to Thatsawrap.

  As she opened the file and gazed at the first scene, she suddenly had the impression that she had never seen this script before. And yet, at the same time, she had an overview of the whole in a way that was new to her. It was as if she were now looking at the world through Dr Singh’s ‘eyes like saucers’, so changed was her perspective.

  She had a vision of the script as an abstract pattern, a series of rhythmic entries and exits, words and silences. The idea was not to feel it, but to analyse it. This was the reverse of the way she had written the novel.

  And so in a week-long fury, she was able to rework Last Chance entirely, seeing it as if looking down from the stars, rather than caught up inside it.

  If not finished, it was at last abandoned, addressed to Thatsawrap, stamped, insured and dropped in the express postbox.

  Now for the carrot.

  She pulled out her antique make-up mirror, and reapplied her favourite cinnamon lipstick, gratified to be able to do this neatly once more. She checked the result, pouting in the mirror, before taking another steadying sip of white tea from her Thermos.

  Hungrily, Cicely logged in as honeylicks. The asterisk password volunteered, and Cicely plunged in.

  Miss Marple would have been proud of her, for she was soon swimming in a sea of suspects. More than a hundred suitors were splashing around honeylicks, promising the world, seeking her favours.

  Sensing their testost
erone, and in a state of mild arousal, Cicely felt that the men were in the room with her. It reminded her of writing the erotic sections of Last Chance, with a pile of travel brochures and XXX Couples Annual Photography to inspire the juicier chapters.

  But this was different. These were real men, not the products of her febrile imagination. She was in a roomful of men, all in want of a woman … Perhaps it was not Zac but one of these men who had disappeared with Odette?

  As an experiment, she sent a blank email to one of them.

  It bounced back. A message box repeated that the toweroflove site no longer existed. All emails to honeylicks had been routed through that site. Only these emails already received were accessible. Look, don’t touch.

  The Tower had indeed crashed.

  Raining men.

  Chimeras offering to be her one-woman man. All wanting her touch. Now. Mobile phone numbers offered as readily as Hotmail addresses. Had Odette escaped Zac’s clutches for one of these men? Or had Zac been provoked by jealousy into the violent temper which he had revealed during those last days in the share house? His personality change had been so extreme that Cicely had grown to think of him as two different people.

  The one that she had been fond of before his trip to the publisher’s.

  And the one who had, after that trip, set about poisoning Odette’s mind against her.

  His Flaubert thing had been not only accepted, but lauded, according to Zac, so why the rage towards her? Why the accusations that she had ‘sucked him dry’?

  Click.

  Click.

  How had Odette avoided the fate of the donkey who starved between two bales of hay? For Cicely was soon imagining Odette – or was it herself? – cosying up with Sebastian, the professor who was writing his first book, who liked a good red and decent conversation. He quoted Zen haiku. Odette had renamed him her King of Cups, and he had accepted the sobriquet easily, saying that Sebastian wasn’t his real name anyway.