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Lady Jean

Peter Owen LTD

She had discovered Henry lying dead on the stairs, just after dawn. His body was stiff and quite cold. She had never loved Henry as much as she'd loved the rest of the family. He had not been an affectionate cat.

Jean sat slumped in the oldest armchair of the morning-room. It was a Wednesday morning, just past eight o'clock. She was listening with headphones to a collection of her blues standards, just reissued under a new label. The french windows were wide open. Through them, along with the unseasonable warmth of an early spring day, came a view of Mrs Meiklejohn. Somewhere beyond sixty and as tough as a major in some territorial army, Mrs Meiklejohn was staring through a gap in the garden wall at a half-empty bottle of Tanqueray standing upright on Jean's lawn. Her concentration was so intense that it appeared she might be attempting to read the label, or perhaps using her mind to levitate the bottle out of sight.

Gleaning and sharing as little information as possible from and with the neighbours without appearing to be rude or churlish, several generations of the Barries had lived in the house on Acacia Road. In decades long gone George Eliot had held her Sunday receptions close by, at least within walking distance. Elizabeth Anne Howard, eventually to be made the Comtesse Beauregard, had lived on Circus Road. The local church on the high street was originally built on a plague pit. In 1823 a murderer going by the name of Morland was buried outside at the crossroads, a stake driven through his stomach.

Jean Barrie had never held Sunday receptions nor been found guilty of any crime, except perhaps for her attempts to eradicate the functions of her liver by drinking too much. It used to be claimed, probably by a good Christian, that gin was a mother's ruin.

Mrs Meiklejohn, taking one long embittered glare towards the open french windows, withdrew. Minutes later Jean heard the slam of Mrs Meiklejohn's kitchen door. She continued to sip at her coffee until the mug, decorated with a William Morris design and chipped, was empty. She reached across to set the mug down on the table beside the chair and picked up her appointment book. Twelve thirty, lunch with Freida. Must telephone Aunt Dizzy. Anthony Hibbert calling at seven. Dinner? In a careful hand, with the attached pen, she added, Bury the cat.

The house that Jean owns, had been born in and brought up in stands only a couple of hundred yards from the tube station in St John's Wood. Jean had once known but long forgotten when the house had been built and the vaguely distinguished names who previously owned it or visited. It is an ancient house that has survived by careful change of ownership yet only occasional renovation. The hallways and the stairs, like many of the rooms, are permanently in shadow from the dark-stained oak panels and ceiling beams and general neglect. It is not a distinguished house in itself. It is now far less occupied by people than in any time in its long history. Fronted by a low privet hedge that is as neglected as the rooms indoors, there are two concrete tubs on either side of the cracked entrance steps in which red geraniums struggle to impress.

There are two reception rooms leading off the main down stairs hall of the house. The one to the left is used to store box after box of long-playing records, vinyl treasures, now defunct, that Jean has never had the inclination to sell. Billie Holiday, Sophie Tucker, Annette Hanshaw, Helen Morgan, Elsie Carlyle. The boxes sit one on top of the other like a mausoleum to lost vocal fame. The other reception room is an escape for visitors, as it once was for family, to seek solitude in or solace or simple sloth. Overburdened with books and videos on shelves and a small television with in-built video player, the room is dominated by dust and not unpleasant odours from at least the past fifty years and a huge horse-hair sofa sagging with cushions and rugs. Christopher, Jean's erstwhile young man of gardening and culinary and lack of communication skills, is never allowed into the room to clean.

The downstairs hallway, walls festooned with oil paintings and faded pastels and the occasional framed poster, leads directly to the morning-room, the kitchen door also there to the right. The main staircase, which had been cleverly hidden when built, designed by someone wholly undistinguished and forgotten, is in a corner of the morning-room, hidden also from sight with a set of free-standing panels that reach from the bottom stair to the hall door. Upstairs, the drawing-room, vast, formal and unrenovated for decades, was named by a now dead, theatrical relative as the Green Room. It quietly possesses almost the entire first floor. From there stretches a short, dark hallway with doors leading into bedrooms and two en suite bathrooms with separate spartan toilets. Another staircase ascends to a self-contained studio flat, where once sat cupboards for the servants and where now lives the long-term lodger known as the Fallen Nun. And on top of the house sits the roof, tiled, angled, where pigeons and starlings and sparrows deposit their bodily waste. When rain falls heavily the roof leaks pigeon- and starling- and sparrow-tainted water down the walls of the uppermost rooms, causing the Fallen Nun to complain with notes that Jean successfully manages to ignore.

'Is that you, Aunt Dizzy? It's your niece. It's Jean.'

Jean explained and enunciated slowly whenever she telephoned her aunt. Elizabeth Barrie was suspicious of being telephoned, having once been traumatized by a series of obscene calls back in the 1970s when an illegal telephone sex-line was created and the number widely misprinted as Aunt Dizzy's own. Jean did not often enjoy the dutiful, twice-weekly calls. Aunt Dizzy still believed that one should shout into the receiver, which, she claimed, helped the electronic voice to speed down the line.

'Is that you, Jean? How lovely of you to call. So unexpected. Just a minute. I've something on the boil.'

Something on the boil was a ruse to help Aunt Dizzy catch her breath. The telephone's shrill bell, never adjusted, caused her, she said, to have heart palpitations which were not healthy for a fragile lady of eighty-one.

'There,' she continued, seconds later, shouting, 'all set. How are you, Jean? Did you hear yourself on Radio Two yesterday? Around four thirty. Or was it the day before? You never sound any different, ducks, even if the programme was five years old. You are an absolute ruddy fool, don't you know? It's time you took yourself in hand. All this retirement business. It isn't healthy. Despite all you went through.'

Jean did not respond. She silently counted to ten.

'Now don't you hang up on me, ducky,' Aunt Dizzy muttered. 'I know you.'

'Would you like to come and stay for a few nights, Auntie?' Jean asked. 'It's been a while. I've bought some of those lamb chops you love, from the food hall.'

'What?'

'Lamb chops! From the food hall in Self ridges. You remember, you couldn't stop exclaiming over them last time you were here.'

'Couldn't I?'

There was silence for a moment. Jean heard Aunt Dizzy swearing, her hand over the receiver ineffectually stifling the curse.

'I'm so sorry, ducky, I've these awful medicinal stockings. They're cutting off my circulation and making me irritable. I don't even need them. Bloody doctors. Yes, I would love to come over. How is Freida?'

'Fine. She's fine. Auntie, Henry died last night. Didn't even wake me up.'

'Freida? Freida has died?'

'No, Auntie, Henry. Henry died. I found him on the stairs this morning.'

'Did you? Well, I am so sorry, ducks. I expect they all die eventually. Cats are only animals, after all. So Freida hasn't died?'

Jean sighed.

'No, Auntie. I'm having lunch with her today. I'll pass on your love.'

'A liquid lunch I expect,' Aunt Dizzy muttered as if to herself. 'When do you want me on board? Shall I order a taxi? I can if you're giving a few days' notice.'

'How about the weekend? Now don't worry, I'll come and collect you in the motor as usual. Just pack a few necessities. Nothing else to bring. You need the change of air. It always does you good.'

'Does it?'

Aunt Dizzy Barrie – Elizabeth – also named Doo Lally Barrie by Freida, was Jean's late father's only sister. She had had a checkered life. Threatened with a pre-frontal leucotomy on several occasions throughout her youth for outrageous behaviour with older men and younger women, she had created scandal and unrest within the family. She had never married. She had a son living in California who made action films for television and was reputedly addicted to cocaine. Elizabeth Barrie was so rich she was forever being plagued by charities, whose frequent, money-seeking receptions she attended with religious zeal. Accompanied by 'a young man' of seventy, she referred to him as the One Who Got Away, her only paramour, despite the generally known fact that he was homosexual. Jean had her to stay at irregular intervals, usually over a weekend, when friends occasionally called in without prior arrangement. Aunt Dizzy entertained them with the zest of unbridled youth. Everyone who knew her admired her. She had given up alcohol and aerobics on her seventy-ninth birthday but still occasionally smoked miniature cigars that were handmade for her by an old firm of tobacconists in Manchester. She lived in Mayfair, in a suite of rooms at the top of a hotel and was waited on diligently by the staff. The arrangement suited her, after selling her Hamp-stead home once a serious fall threatened problems that never ensued and a flat refusal to be placed in a nursing home caused a family crisis.

Jean had spent the previous evening sitting on a blanket on the lawn, clad in only a dressing-gown and thick socks, loud music – not her own – blaring from the morning-room as she sipped straight gin from a fluted champagne glass. She had lain back at one stage, opening the dressing-gown to expose her skin to the night sky, remembering her mother as a young woman dancing naked under the moon, forgetting that Mrs Meiklejohn would be able to see her from her upstairs windows and would more than likely be spying. She had moved indoors eventually, leaving the Tanqueray bottle and going straight to bed, lying there in her vast room listening to the Fallen Nun reciting poetry somewhere up above. The voice had been faint and strangely comforting. It had lulled her into sleep without any warning. If Henry had indeed called to her as he lay dying on the stairs, Jean had not heard.

Now, having attended to the dutiful call to Aunt Dizzy, who would forget about the invitation to come to stay by lunchtime, Jean picked up the box in the hall in which she had placed Henry's body wrapped up to the neck in an old silk scarf. She carried the box through into the kitchen, lowering it down gently on to the side-table by the door. For a few minutes she gazed at the silk-wrapped corpse and cried a little. Henry had been thirteen years old. He had come from a long line of demanding feline companions going back to before her childhood. When Jean was born there had been a fifteen-year-old Henry living at Acacia Road. There had always been a Henry at Acacia Road. Sometimes several at once.

She telephoned Christopher from the hall and asked him to come over, explaining why.

'I have to go out,' she added. 'Lunch. I've left Henry in the kitchen, in a box. Make certain you mark the grave.'

She had never exactly warmed to Christopher. At seventeen he still lived with his parents at Eamont Court, a large square block of unfashionable private flats near the park. Studying law and economics, which he hated, he walked local dogs, tended gardens and generally accepted any task that helped pay his way. He never refused her a visit and came officially on Fridays to clean, attend to the garden and occasionally prepare meals which he left in foil for her to freeze. She usually forgot. Lately his behaviour had begun to change. She sent him a fortnightly cheque or left it on the hall table. Christopher was exceedingly tall with lank black hair and rubbery lips similar to those of a chimpanzee. They were the largest, most peculiar lips Jean had ever seen on a male face. They were always bright pink and compared badly to his sallow, unhealthy skin. Acne scars, a weak chin, combined with a body odour that never ceased to disturb her, made his close proximity uncomfortable. They communicated by note, the telephone and messages taken by his mother, a devout fundamentalist Christian who sent e-mails of complaint and disapproval to the Pope and spoke to Jean over the telephone as if she had filled her mouth with carpet tacks. According to Christopher, his mother had suffered for years from mouth problems over which three GPs and a Harley Street specialist were stumped.

Jean met Freida at a small, familiar and reliable Indian restaurant just off Kentish Town Road, to where they both travelled by minicab, therefore allowing them to drink excessively.

'You're late, Lady,' Frieda complained as soon as Jean appeared but had not even sat down.

'Shut up, trollop, and order me a double.' Jean leant over and kissed Freida on the cheek. Freida had once claimed that this represented the latent lesbian tendencies Jean had never come to terms with.

Freida Weinreb's origins were the result of a casual coupling between a New York press agent and a minor British film starlet. The latter lived alone, ageing badly, somewhere in Yorkshire, breeding Siamese cats and denying Freida's existence. Freida's parents had been married only long enough to have had enough sex to beget her, Frieda was fond of explaining to total strangers, while weeping with intense enjoyment. Unlike herself, who stayed married only long enough to realize the true horrors of a man's sexual organs. She had never been forced to enter a career and join a publisher or a PR company. Money from her daddy, who did recognize her existence, arrived into her bank account from America with a regular smooth flow, and she spent it as easily. Though she had once written a play about female angst that premiered at the Hampstead before it sank gracefully into the pit.

'How's Doo Lally?' she asked, once Jean was settled and the drinks had arrived. Jean smiled. The two never failed to ask about each other.

'I spoke to her this morning. Invited her over for the weekend. Now you must promise to pop in. Come for Sunday lunch. You know she never truly enjoys her visits if you fail to make an appearance.'

And?'

'What?' Jean was staring at a silver-haired man in a blue flannel suit. He had a cleft chin.

'Did you get a report?'

Jean, having hated herself at the time, had arranged for someone to monitor Aunt Dizzy's behaviour at the hotel closely, as there had been veiled complaint. In the guise of a hotel employee, the man was some behavioural assessor who had been recommended to her. He charged a ridiculous fee. Jean nodded. The second round of drinks arrived. The waiter was new. He was wearing pale lipstick. One of his eyelids had been pierced with a minuscule silver disc. Freida glanced up and winced.

'She's been hanging her rinsed undies out the windows of her rooms pegged to a length of rope,' Jean responded once the waiter had moved away. She thought he had winked at her then realized the young man was in certain discomfort with his eyes. It was the age of piercing. Frieda had a small solid silver chain attached across her stomach. According to her, most of her female lovers apparently enjoyed holding it in their teeth during sex.

'So that's not so awful. A little tacky for Mayfair. Or perhaps not.'

'She'd dyed them bright red. The dye dripped down on to some woman's hair and suit as she stood chatting to her husband on the steps below. The woman's threatened to sue. American, of course.'

'Anything else?'

'Someone found her wandering through the foyer at four thirty in the morning, half naked. She claimed she was looking for her maid to get her dressed. She was carrying her handbag and wore little else except those hideous six-inch heels you so stupidly gave her. When one of the female staff took her arm to lead her back upstairs she created a terrible scene.'

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Excerpted from Lady Jean by Noel Virtue. Copyright © 2001 Noel Virtue. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen LTD.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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