Every Woman For Herself. Trisha Ashley

God still has a use for you,’ Miss Grinch said placidly.

      ‘Compost?’ I suggested.

      ‘We are all God’s compost, if you like,’ she said. ‘Interesting – I’ve never thought of it like that before. However, I am sure he has something in mind for you before that. He moves in mysterious ways.’

      ‘Like the frying pan,’ I agreed, and we were silent until we reached the house.

      Miss Grinch bought the local papers, and thankfully I hadn’t merited the front page. Even with Angie’s theatrics I suppose they can only get so much story from a domestic accident without insinuating something libellous.

      I was described throughout as Mrs Charlotte Fry (although I’ve always called myself by my maiden name), and there were several photographs of me looking very small and weird, like a glaze-eyed rabbit cowering under the menacing overhang of Angie’s bust.

      My hair was now a clear white for about an inch at the roots.

      ‘I always wondered about that very dense blue-black shade,’ Miss Grinch said, scrutinising a particularly hideous photo.

      ‘It was my natural colour.’

      ‘Believe me, it is a mistake, once a woman reaches forty, to dye her hair a dark colour. Your skin has lost the fresh bloom of youth and the contrast is too severe.’

      ‘I know, but Matt wanted me to keep it black. He liked this sort of Goth look with the long hair and the dark eye make-up, because he thought it made me look young. He was so much older, so I was a sort of a Trophy Wife, you know?’

      ‘Yes, but you can do what you like now, dear.’

      ‘I don’t think I care.’

      ‘I’ll have my hairdresser come round and do something with it – have it made as God intended.’

      ‘God intended my hair to turn silver at thirty, like my mother’s, but my eyebrows and eyelashes to stay dark.’

      Mother is Lally Tooke and when I see her on the jacket of one of her radical feminist books, or on TV, she looks a bit like she’s wearing a powdered wig, but she also looks good. We have the same big dark eyes, the purplish colour of black grapes.

      Matt was always impressed by Father’s fame (or notoriety), dragging his name into conversations like a dog with some malodorous and grisly find. ‘My father-in-law, Ranulf Rhymer …’

      He never felt the same way about my far-flying mother, but then, neither do I: that hand did not so much rock the cradle as break off shards and wage a bloody battle with them before leaving the field for ever.

      ‘You could start wearing prettier colours than black,’ suggested Miss Grinch, who had been pursuing thoughts of her own.

      ‘I don’t have anything else. Most of my clothes come from charity shops and jumble sales anyway.’

      ‘Time for a change.’

      ‘I can’t afford a change.’

      ‘My hairdresser’s very cheap,’ she assured me, and looking at her frizzed ginger-grey curls I could believe it.

      She was right: her hairdresser was cheap. In a moment of madness induced by receiving the decree nisi in the post, I summoned her and had all my hair chopped off: very cathartic.

      It was now clipped short and close to my head like a convict’s, but at least it was all silver. I left off the heavy eye make-up, which made me look like a marmoset in combination with the cropped head, but the loose black clothes (I’d lost weight) and big boots now looked ridiculous.

      I’d forgotten how to eat as well as sleep, which was why my clothes hung on me, but there was no more money so the escaped fugitive look would have to remain for the time being.

      A rare phone call from Mother in America.

      The last time she’d called me was after I married Matt, when she’d said that I was a pathetic, downtrodden negation of everything the women’s movement had ever fought for.

      Perhaps I was. And perhaps I might have turned out differently had she taken us children with her on her flight from Father; but then again, maybe not.

      This time it was a congratulatory phone call, she having heard about Dead Greg.

      ‘Well done!’ she said. ‘A blow struck right at the heart of male oppression.’

      ‘More the head, Mother. And I’m not proud of it. I’m finding it very hard to live with the idea that I’ve killed someone.’

      ‘The guilt was his: it was his own fault.’

      ‘True, but somehow that doesn’t seem to make it feel any better. Mother, did you know Matt and I are divorcing? We’re waiting for the final bit to come through.’

      There was a pause. ‘I’d have loved to have had you to stay with me,’ she said eventually, as though I’d asked. ‘But I’m afraid I’m about to go on a lecture tour for my next book, and – wait, though! – you could come with me, and tell everyone about—’

      ‘No, thanks,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m going home to Upvale.’

      ‘You can open the cage door, but you can’t force the animals out,’ she said cryptically, sighing.

       Chapter 5: The Prodigal Daughter

      It was strange to be going home for good and yet not to be going back to my square, high-ceilinged bedroom, with the teenage-timewarp décor.

      Of course, I’d escaped back from time to time over the years, usually alone. Among so many big, self-assured people Matt always felt very much the small Fry in the pond, I think. (Which he was.)

      Father, Em and Anne petrified him, but I don’t think he found Branwell threatening, just loopy. When I asked Bran soon after I was married if he liked Matt, he just replied vaguely, ‘Who?’

      Matt was always jealous of the stretched but uncut umbilical cord that connected me – and all of us Rhymers – to Upvale, though strangely enough I hadn’t even realised it existed until I tested its limits by running away with Matt.

      Even Anne, globetrotting TV correspondent that she was, returned from time to time to recharge her batteries on Blackdog Moor, before going back to foreign battlefields. Wherever in the world there was trouble, there also was Anne in her khaki fatigues and multi-pocketed waistcoat. Wars didn’t seem to last long once she’d arrived – I think they took one look and united against a greater peril.

      Since the Ding of Death I’d tried to phone Anne a couple of times at her London flat (stark, minimalist, shared with her stark, minimalist, foreign-correspondent lover, Red), but there had been no reply other than the answering machine. Em said she’d managed to get hold of the lover once, but he’d just said Anne was away and put the phone down.

      Anne, Em and Father are all big, handsome, strong-boned, grimly purposeful types, with masses of wavy light hair: leonine. Maybe that’s why they made Matt nervous – he thought he may be the unlucky zebra at the waterhole.

      I’m small and dark – now small and silver-haired – like Mother, but I’m not the fragile little flower I look. Bran is slight too, but wiry, with dark auburn hair like a newly peeled chestnut, and strangely light brown eyes. We think he must take after his Polish mother’s side of the family, but we barely remembered her brief tenure as au pair, mistress, and oh-so-reluctant mother; even Em, who is the eldest.

      Em had run the house as far back as I could remember, with the help of Gloria Mundi and her brother, Walter. Funnily enough, housewifery didn’t sort of seep into me by osmosis – I had to go out and buy a book. But you can’t say I didn’t try; it’s just that nature intended me