[Brenda & Effie 01] - Never the Bride Read online

  Never the Bride

  PAUL MAGRS

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  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2006 Paul Magrs

  The right of Paul Magrs to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7654 4

  978 0 7553 3288 5

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  A division of Hachette Livre UK Ltd

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: - The Deadly Boutique

  Chapter Two: - The Green Family

  Chapter Three: - Manifest Yourself!

  Chapter Four: - Murder at the Christmas Hotel

  Chapter Five: - A Fancy Man for Effie

  Paul Magrs was born in the North East of England. After seven years at the University of East Anglia teaching English Literature and Creative Writing, he now lives in Manchester and lectures part-time at the Manchester Metropolitan University. The rest of his time he devotes to writing. He has published fiction for both adults and children. His novels include Strange Boy, All the Rage and To the Devil: A Diva!

  Praise for Never the Bride:

  ‘I love Paul Magrs, he’s a great novelist, clever and ironic’

  Russell T. Davies

  ‘Never the Bride is a brilliant extravaganza, gripping, ingeniously plotted, and tragically funny, with unforgettable characters. Paul Magrs is an original talent with a wonderful and sympathetic ear and eye for the hidden craziness of contemporary life. This book deserves to be widely read, enjoyed and garlanded with praise’

  Shena Mackay

  ‘The plot line is fantastical, but unexpectedly touching’

  Independent

  ‘I wasn’t at all sure I’d read it as I didn’t think it would be my thing. I imagined I’d skim through the first pages, have my doubts confirmed and put it to one side. But . . . I was wrong! Instead, I have spent the weekend ignoring my family and absolutely racing through the book. It is wonderful, I love it and really hope there will be sequels starring Brenda, whom I love to bits. Many congratulations on having written such a fab book, it deserves to be a huge success’

  Jill Mansell

  ‘This is a quirky, whimsical, episodic novel that combines perversity, situation comedy and quietly lush moments of poetry’

  Time Out

  ‘A cornucopia of playfully sinister delights. Funny, poignant, clever and hugely original. I loved it’

  Daren King

  ‘Utterly believable, immediately enthralling and spiced with a deliciously dark humour. Never the Bride has to be one of the most original and entertaining books of the year’

  Attitude

  ‘Highly entertaining. Magrs’ novel is compulsive reading with a darkly comic edge’

  Big Issue

  for Sherry Ashworth

  Chapter One:

  The Deadly Boutique

  I love it here. It’s the only place I could have settled down. I’ve never found a town like it, never in my long, long life.

  My name is Brenda. Hello!

  Since the beginning of summer I have lived here, deliciously inconspicuous: just one more bed-and-breakfast lady in a resort that teems with them. Here, the streets are narrow and intricate, the rooftops are ramshackle and the wind is biting. The seagulls are as big as Yorkshire terriers and, for a good nine months of the year, the town is steeped in a thick sea mist . . . and that’s probably a good thing.

  There are things here that you don’t necessarily want to see.

  Keep your head down, Brenda. That’s what I tell myself. Fry those sausages, eggs and bacon. Make those beds. Be welcoming. Be at home.

  Now it is autumn. I have settled into the gloomy, doom-laden, chintzy Gothic atmosphere of the place.

  And I love it.

  I am a woman of a certain age who is ready to settle down. In the past I have had to pick myself up, time and again, and reinvent my life from scratch.

  Now I want a quiet one.

  I have known adversity, disaster and dodgy relationships. I have moved around from place to place, all over these islands. Sometimes I have even had to go on the run.

  Now I want a quiet life. A respectable life.

  I have no family. No ties.

  I want to look after others.

  I want to keep everything immaculate and just so, making sure that the breakfasts and teas are on time and that the rooms are exact, with the correct number of towels, flannels and little bars of soap. My guests are quite particular. My establishment attracts a certain class of person, I would say, though I’m not a snob.

  My friend Effie, who owns the junk shop next door, is a bit la-di-da and she says I’m obsessed with getting things right for my guests. She used the word ‘mania’. She says no one else running a B-and-B in this town goes to the same trouble. For all her airs and graces, Effie is a bit slapdash about her own place. She’s the arty type, very literary. The only books I have are the Bible, Milton and Shelley, of course. I make sure there are copies in each of my three rooms, in the drawer of the bedside cabinets, and two fresh bath towels laid out, two flannels for every basin. The curtains are always opened exactly a foot wide, to let enough sunshine in but not so much as to make the room look bleak. Effie says I fuss, but it’s like someone once said, ‘God is in the details.’

  But don’t get me on to the subject of God. Effie tried once and I had to stop her. She understands now that my God and her God are not quite the same. That was as far as the conversation went. Effie is a good friend to me but, like everyone else in Whitby, she knows nothing about my past.

  No one living knows about my past.

  I always wanted pretty things. I wanted sofas and chairs, and nicely patterned curtains in light fabrics. I wanted colourful, dainty crockery. And I wanted to please people, to serve them tasty, wholesome, well-cooked food. I’ve got a craze for cleaning. I wait until the guests go out in the mornings, and leave their rooms all a-tumble, strewn with seaside-holiday bric-à-brac. And then I creep in, clutching cloths, yellow dusters and a tin of baking soda. I crouch in bathtubs, sprinkle on the powder and scour to my heart’s content. Everything has to shine.

  My livelihood depends on the excellence of my establishment.

  Despite everything, I am, in the end, more or less, a self-made woman.

  Mondays, I take my afternoon off. Effie and I stroll along the prom, up the hill, to the Christmas Hotel for afternoon tea. It isn’t the swishest of places, as Effie says. But I like it. I like its deep, cavernous interior and its ancient, unchanging clientele. I love to sit in the conservatory at our usual table, overlooking the craggy, inhospitable bay. I like to sip too-hot tea, crumble biscuits and stare at the jet-black cliffs, the ruined abbey and the fathomless sky.

  Effie grumbles and moans, of course. As I say, she puts on airs and wishes she was somewhere altogether nicer. Yet she has been coming here since she was
a child. She has lived in the town all her life, inherited the house and her belongings from her family, which has always been rooted here. I envy her that much. She could no more think about leaving this town and her usual days than she could sprout a second head.

  She’s neat and slim, Effie, in a pale grey woollen suit, little ruffles round the neck of her lilac blouse. She takes a twist of lemon in her tea and her mouth is pursed much of the time. Appraising. Watchful.

  That Monday afternoon her eyes were narrowed as she gazed round the conservatory at the Christmas Hotel. Neither of us bothered to comment on the party hats the decrepit hotel guests wore, the crackers they struggled feebly to pull or the dusty swags of vulgar tinsel strewn everywhere. This hotel is frozen for ever on the cusp of Christmas Eve. That is its selling point, its gimmick, and it is the way its eccentric proprietress likes it to be.

  So it wasn’t the festive lavishness that was attracting Effie’s frown of intrigue. She was staring at our waitress, Jessie, who invariably served us our afternoon tea on Mondays. She was approaching with the trolley and its usual freight of gleaming, tinkling china, squashy cakes, mounds of golden cream and precise geometrical arrangements of egg and cress sandwiches.

  ‘What on earth has Jessie gone and done to herself ?’

  I peered over my glasses. ‘She looks all right to me. In fact, she looks rather well.’

  Effie’s mouth squinched up even tighter. ‘Exactly. She looks better than she has any right to.’

  Jessie was breezing along between the tables. Her usual tread was listless and heavy. She had worked here eighteen years and she despised her job. She had told us so on many occasions. We had speculated repeatedly on what kept her tethered to a job she hated. Maybe it was a blackmail thing, and the proprietress of the Christmas Hotel had something on Jessie. Or maybe Jessie was a timid person who feared leaving a situation she loathed because the thought of the outside world was even more terrible. Who knew? We were too polite to ask her. As it was, we were used to Jessie’s quietly corrosive despair. Today, though, she was positively jaunty.

  ‘She looks twenty years younger!’ Effie cried.

  Surely she was exaggerating, I thought. But it wasn’t like Effie to resort to hyperbole. I waited until Jessie and our afternoon tea arrived and then I could properly stare at her.

  And it was true! Where were her deeply etched wrinkles? Where was her scraggy old chicken neck?

  ‘Ladies!’ She grinned. ‘How lovely to see you.’

  Where was her surliness, her migrainey frown?

  ‘What on earth has happened to you?’ Effie demanded crisply.

  Jessie shook out her golden (golden!) perm and treated us to a dazzling (dazzling!) grin. ‘Ladies . . .’ she announced. ‘I have had a make-over.’

  Her complexion was marvellous. She had a kind of glow. We basked in it, incredulous, as she wielded her tongs, popping cakes on to plates, then slid teacups before us.

  Effie could restrain herself no longer. ‘But it’s impossible! ’ she burst out. ‘No beauty parlour is that good.’

  I winced. Usually it’s me who’s tactless like that. Jessie gave a carefree laugh. This in itself was alarming. We had never heard her sound carefree before. She let out a volley of shrill guffaws that rang out and bounced off the glass of the conservatory. Pensioners at the other tables glanced up from their tea, sherry and Christmas pudding. Jessie? Chortling? In a carefree fashion?

  ‘It’s all right.’ She smiled down at Effie and me. ‘I don’t mind. You can say it - it’s impossible that I should look so much better. No one could have made the old, careworn Jessie look like this. What a feat! It’s amazing, I know. Last time you saw me I was like a wrung-out old dishrag, all disappointment and bitterness. I know that better than anyone.’

  She gave the teapot an energetic swirl and poured our tea. We leaned in closer to hear her secret.

  ‘Even I don’t quite believe this miraculous transformation, ’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I woke up on Saturday morning and dashed to my mirror. I did the same on Sunday, and again this morning. Just to check that it was true. I can’t believe my luck. I’ve dropped twenty-five years as if they never even happened to me. I’ve dropped the worst twenty-five years of my life.’

  ‘But,’ gasped Effie, ‘how?’

  ‘It happened on Friday,’ said Jessie. ‘It cost a whole two months’ wages. I went to that new place, up Frances’s Passage. You must have noticed the adverts in the Gazette ?’

  ‘Adverts?’ Effie hadn’t seen the local paper. But I had.

  ‘The Deadly Boutique,’ Jessie said, giving us that glorious smile again, ‘has just opened for business. I was one of the first.’

  ‘“Deadly”?’ sniffed Effie. ‘Why’s it called “Deadly”?’

  I must say, the adjective had rung alarm bells with me when I clapped eyes on the advertisement.

  ‘I don’t know!’ cried Jessie. ‘Who cares? Look at me! I’m fantastic!’

  That was as much as we heard about it, for now. Effie was keen to pump Jessie for more details, and I wouldn’t have minded hearing more, but suddenly Jessie turned shifty. ‘I’m sorry, ladies. I can’t stand here gossiping all day.’ She gulped. ‘I keep getting into trouble for chatting with guests. Madam doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Madam’ was how all the staff at the Christmas Hotel referred to the proprietress. To me, there was something old-fashioned and even sinister about this nomenclature. Jessie was perturbed. ‘I can’t go upsetting her. I’ve drawn a lot of attention already, due to my make-over, and she isn’t very happy at all.’

  ‘Hmm,’ mused Effie, looking troubled. Then she smiled at Jessie. ‘You run along then, my dear. We’ll see you later.’

  ‘Are you coming to the pie-and-peas supper on Wednesday evening?’ Jessie asked. ‘Shall I put your names down?’

  Effie frowned. ‘Is this a new thing?’

  I could tell she thought it sounded rather common. ‘It’s bingo as well, isn’t it?’ I asked Jessie. ‘What a delightful combination! Sign us up, Jessie. We’ll be there!’

  We received another dazzling smile, and then Jessie was off, shoving that tea trolley along the thick carpeting with a lot more vigour than she used to.

  Effie sighed. ‘Pie and peas and bingo.’ She tutted. ‘Honestly, Brenda.’

  ‘At least we’ll get a chance to quiz Jessie further,’ I said, tapping my nose.

  It was from that point onwards that I think you could say Effie and I were officially intrigued.

  We both knew - in our water - that something strange was going on. No amount of primping, pampering and preening in some beautician’s parlour could change a woman so much. Jessie hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she’d shed twenty-five years. She’d slung off those years as Gypsy Rose Lee would fling off her long satin gloves.

  Effie and I ambled along the breezy front, down the hill, walking off our tea, thinking about Jessie’s transformation.

  ‘She said it was like being mesmerised,’ I shouted, above the crash and boom of the surf.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘She let that much out,’ I said. ‘Being done up - being titivated at the Deadly Boutique was like being mesmerised. That was how she put it. She said she was in a lovely trance the whole time.’

  ‘Yes,’ purred Effie. ‘I heard her. It was all most interesting, wasn’t it?’

  I could feel that we were at the beginning of a crazy adventure, at the still point before the storm.

  One of the things that Effie and I had discovered about each other - early on in our friendship - was that there was nothing that either of us liked better than a bloody good mystery. It kept our minds active, kept us limbered up mentally, so to speak. No matter how trivial or earth-shattering, we liked something mysterious and - dare I say it? - spooky to keep us occupied in our spinstery decrepitude.

  Right now, treading on the gold and crimson leaf mulch, tasting the stiff salt breeze off the North Sea, we knew we were on the brink of s
omething grand.

  I returned to my home, my glorious B-and-B, to get on with my work. Effie marched off to hers next door having issued a curt goodbye. There’s nothing sentimental about Effie. She’s not what you’d call a clingy friend, which suits me fine. She went in through her ground-floor junk shop, then to her echoing rooms upstairs.

  It must be gloomy for her. Lonely, up there.

  I think she prizes her solitude, as do I.

  That Monday I had no paying guests. The season had wound down to a standstill and I had only a few bookings lined up over the next couple of months. However, that was no reason to let things slide. I anticipated a headily enjoyable evening scrubbing out the four bathrooms. Getting the old baking soda going. Sloshing around with the mop.

  And maybe I’d have a lovely deep bath and pamper myself a bit.

  As you can see, I was thinking about make-overs.

  But there was no way I would visit the Deadly Boutique. I wouldn’t let any beautician lay their hands on me, no matter how skilled or magical they were. I simply couldn’t let them touch me.

  I can’t let anyone get that close.

  In the eyes of the world I have to look like an unobtrusive woman. I have to draw scant attention.

  How old am I?

  In the eyes of the world, and the eyes of this town, I am coming up to pension age. Effie keeps asking when I’ll be due for my bus pass. She’s guessed it must be soon. She already has hers and she isn’t too proud to get on the buses for nothing. Effie says that when I have mine, we’ll go on trips together, up the wild north coast, and count the pennies we’re saving. I haven’t the heart to tell her my pension will never come. I can’t bring myself to say that I’m not on the official records. Really, I don’t exist. It’s hard to explain that to your best friend.