A Suitable Strip Club and Pandora’s Box #3
Something I’d always sensed was made solid: my dad, the way he felt about my aunt and cousins and even my gran, hushed conversations between him and Mum, my own observations of the different ways things were done at our place and at Rita’s.
Mum and Dad were snobs and I felt embarrassed for them and embarrassed for me, and then, confusingly, angry with Rita for saying it and ashamed of myself for encouraging her to do so.
My vision blurred as I pretended to focus on the white bag I was threading.
Auntie Rita, conversely, was lightened. Relief spilled across her face and seemed to radiate beyond.
The untold truth was a wound that had waited decades for someone to lance.
“Book learning,” Rita spat, crushing her cigarette butt, “that’s all she wanted to talk about once she got back.
Walked into our house, turned her nose up at the small rooms and our dad’s laboring songs, and took up residence at the lending library.
Hid in corners with one book or another when she should’ve been helping out.
Talked a lot of bosh about writing for the newspapers, too.
Sent things off and all! Can you imagine? ”
My mouth actually fell open. Meredith Burchill did not write; she certainly did not send things off to the newspapers. I’d have assumed Rita was embellishing, only the news was so perfectly confounding it simply had to be true. “Were they published?”
“Of course not! And that’s just what I’m saying: that’s the sort of mumbo jumbo they put in her head. Gave her ideas above her station, they did, and there’s only one place those ideas take you.”
“What were they like, the things she wrote? What were they about?”
“I wouldn’t know. She never showed them to me. Probably thought I wouldn’t understand. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had the time: I’d met Bill by then, and I’d started here. There was a war on, you know.” Rita laughed, but sourness deepened the lines around her mouth; I’d never noticed them before.
“Did any of the Blythes come to visit Mum in London?”
Rita shrugged. “Merry was awful secretive once she got back, ducking off on errands without saying where she was going. She could’ve been meeting anyone.”
Was it something in the way she said it, the shadow of insinuation clinging to her words? Or was it the way she glanced away from me as she spoke? I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I knew immediately that there was more to her comment than met the eye. “Like who?”
Rita squinted at the box of lace bags, inclining her head as if there’d never been anything as interesting as the way they sat together in little white and silver rows.
“Auntie Ri-ta?” I dragged it out. “Who else would she have been meeting?”
“Oh, all right.” She folded her arms so that her boobs perked together, then looked directly at me.
“He was a teacher, or he had been before the war, back at Elephant and Castle.” She made a show of fanning her peachy cleavage.
“Ooh-la-la. Very good-looking, he was—he and his brother both: like film stars, those strong, silent types.
His family lived a few streets over from us and even your gran used to find a reason to come out on the step when he was passing by.
All the young girls had crushes on him, including your mum.
“Anyway,” Rita continued with another shrug, “one day I saw them together.”
You know that expression “her eyes goggled”? Mine did. “What?” I said. “Where? How?”
“I followed her.” Justification trounced any embarrassment or guilt she might have felt. “She was my little sister, she wasn’t behaving normally, it was a dangerous time. I was just making sure she was all right.”
I couldn’t have cared less why she followed Mum; I wanted to know what she’d seen. “But where were they? What were they doing?”
“I only saw from a distance but it was enough. They were sitting together on the grass in the park, side by side, tight as you please. He was talking and she was listening—real intent, you know—then she handed him something and he …” Rita rattled her empty packet of cigarettes.
“Bloody things. I swear they smoke themselves.”
“Auntie Ri-ta!”
A brisk sigh. “They kissed. She and Mr. Cavill, right there in the park for all the world to see.”
Worlds collided, fireworks exploded, little stars shot up the black corners of my mind. “Mr. Cavill?”
“Keep up, Edie, luvvie: your mum’s teacher, Tommy Cavill.”
Words were beyond me, words that made any sense.
I must’ve made some sort of noise because Rita held a hand to her ear and said, “What’s that?
” but I couldn’t manage it a second time.
My mother, my teenage mother, had sneaked away from home for secret meetings with her teacher, Juniper Blythe’s fiancé, a man she’d had a crush on, meetings that involved the handing over of items and, more to the point, kissing.
And all this had happened in the months leading up to his desertion of Juniper.
“You look peaky, love. Would you like another lemonade?”
I nodded; she fetched; I gulped.
“You know, if you’re so interested you should read your mum’s letters from the castle yourself.”
“Which letters?”
“The ones she wrote back to London.”
“She’d never let me.”
Rita inspected a dye-stain on her wrist. “She wouldn’t need to know.”
My look, I’m sure, said, Huh?
“They were among Mum’s things,” Rita explained, “came to me after she passed away. Kept them all those years, the sentimental old girl, never matter that they hurt her so. Superstitious, she was, didn’t believe in throwing letters away. I’ll dig ’em out, eh?”
“Oh … I don’t know, I’m not sure that I should—”
“They’re letters,” said Rita, with a dip of her chin that made me feel daft in a Pollyanna sort of way. “They were written to be read, weren’t they?”
I nodded. Tentatively.
“Might help you to understand what it was your mum was thinking up there in her fancy castle.”
The thought of reading Mum’s letters without her knowledge plucked at my guilt strings, but I silenced them.
Rita was right: the letters might have been written by Mum, but they’d been addressed to her family back in London.
Rita had every right to pass them on to me, and I had every right to read them.
“Yes,” I said, only it sounded more like a squeak. “Yes, please.”