“Tabby was me maiden name.”
“Oh!”
Mrs. Malloy sighed deeply. “I think it’s one of the reasons I got married so many times, trying to put the sound of it as far behind me as possible. You’ve no idea, Mrs. H, what it’s like to have a name that makes you the butt of spiteful jokes.”
She was wrong about that. Being named Giselle is not conducive to happiness when you are a plump child completely lacking in grace and athletic ability. There had been no malice aforethought on my parents’ parts. It was understandable that my mother had hoped I would follow in her satin shoes and become a ballerina and that my father had naively assumed I would inherit her ethereal beauty rather than his portly build. Having soon realized their mistake, they had done their fond best to put matters right by adjusting to an Ellie who was not born to pirouette. Even so, there had been no getting away from my full name completely. It is impossible to keep dark secrets from your schoolmates, especially the ones whose mission in life is to make you wish your parents kept you prisoner on a diet of bread and water.
“I can’t count the times the other kiddies teased me, calling out, ‘Here, puss, puss! Come and have some Kittycat, puss!’ ” Mrs. Malloy sat staring into space. “But I’ve got to remember as how it’s been worse for me sister, not getting married even once and so being stuck with the name Tabby for life.”
Now I was the one to stare. Mrs. Malloy had never previously said peep to me about having a sister. “I thought you were an only child.”
“We don’t speak. Haven’t done for years.”
“A quarrel?” I was always good at suggesting the obvious.
“Me and Melody never did get on.”
“Melody?” I found this harder to grasp than the concept of Mrs. Malloy being a tightrope walker… or even a cat. There is that little matter of age appropriateness when it comes to names. Mrs. Malloy, although she would have denied it to the death, was in her early sixties. Presumably, her sister was of a similar age and should by rights have been a Barbara or a Joan or maybe a Margaret. A Melody is never supposed to be older than fifteen, either in books or in real life. It isn’t possible to believe there will ever be nursing homes peopled with residents named Tiffany, Megan, or Stacie.
“She’s older than me by a couple of years. But never no maturity. Our relationship went from bad to worse when we was teenagers. She accused me of stealing her boyfriend.”
“Did you?”
“’Course not!” Much affronted, Mrs. Malloy sat up straighter in her chair. “I borrowed him, is all. And only for an afternoon, at that. But you’d have thought when I gave him back it was with tea stains all over him. Such a carry-on I got. Miss Melody Dramatic, I called her.”
“If she was in love with him-”
“Nothing of the sort. I don’t think he’d ever washed his neck. He was just someone to get Melody’s mind off the other one.”
“Unsuitable?”
“A doomed relationship from the word go.”
“Oh, dear! A married man?”
“Mr. Rochester.”
“As in…?” I’d stuck my elbow in my saucer and toppled the cup, much to the chagrin of Tobias, who was sitting on my lap.
“That’s him. Edward Fairfax Rochester.”
The man against whom all other gothic heroes must be judged and the majority of them found wanting! The storm had picked up again. Thunder rolled and rumbled in the distance. Lightning flashed. Rain rattled against the kitchen windowpanes. When it ended, would we be left with a blighted oak on the grounds?
“Melody couldn’t think how to get Mr. R to leave Jane Eyre for her. She said no one else would ever come close.”
Some might think this a little odd, but having felt much the same way before meeting Ben, my heart went out to the unhappy Melody. I found myself wondering if it might not be possible for her to begin life again, even at this late date, as a primly garbed governess-after establishing, of course, that there was no mad wife in the attic.
“You shared a love of great romantic fiction. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked Mrs. Malloy.
“After sobbing herself to sleep for five years, it seems Melody turned in her library card and vowed never again to darken the threshold of a bookshop. All her cooped-up passion went into learning to type. She’s worked for the last forty years as secretary to an accountant in Yorkshire, some small town not all that far from Haworth.”
“Home of Charlotte Bronte and the rest of her famous family! But why would your sister torture herself that way? Why not get as far away as possible from painful associations with the man of her dreams?”
“Never happy unless she’s miserable herself and depressing everyone around her. The boyfriend moved home and never again let go of his mother’s apron strings. I’ve not met her boss, but my guess is she’s done a number on him too.”
“That sounds unkind, Mrs. Malloy.” Tobias wandered off my lap onto hers.
“I suppose it does.” She had the grace to look shamefaced. “Truth be told, it bothers me the way I never could stand her. My chums in the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association get on me all the time. ‘Your own sister,’ they say, ‘and the only contact you have with her is exchanging Christmas cards. Go and see her. Make up your differences!’”
“They’re right.”
“You would say that, Mrs. H! But there’s no explaining it even to meself. Just looking at Melody’s photo gets me hopping mad. That daft expression on her face! Like she’s afraid if she don’t smile just right the camera will zoom in and suck off her nose. I’m not saying as I’m proud of it, but I remember looking at her when she was two years old and thinking, You’re a miserable little cow, Melody Tabby, and always will be.”
I was doing some laborious arithmetic. “Wouldn’t you have been a newborn at the time? You said she was a couple of years older than you.”
“Did I?” The rouged cheeks turned a deeper brick-red. “Maybe it’s the other way round. Melody always seemed elderly. By the age of nine you’d have thought she’d started collecting her pension and going on coach rides to Margate with a bunch of gray-haired old biddies. Still, I knew girls at school like that and they didn’t drive me up the wall quite the same way. But then again, none of them was me own sister. I can see what you’re thinking, Mrs. H, but it wasn’t a case of having me nose put out of whack when she came along. This was something different, almost like…”
“Go on!” I urged.
“Well, almost like… I’d known her before.”
“Before what?”
Mrs. Malloy heaved a pained sigh that inflated her bosom and conveyed clearly that I was being even dimmer than usual. “Before we was born. Into this current lifetime is what I’m getting at. But maybe I was wrong.”
“No sign of Melody floating around the periphery of your trance?”
“Not a hint. Madam LaGrange didn’t mention her.”
Even Tobias looked sorry. And I wondered if I should invite her to spend the night. I pictured myself sitting up with her through the small hours, holding her hand to make sure she didn’t have the vapors or go into a decline. Doing so was something I wouldn’t begrudge, even though with the children gone I’d made other plans for an evening alone with Ben. These had included my sea-foam green nightgown, music from Phantom of the Opera playing in the background, and an atmospheric arrangement of chamomile-scented candles on my dressing table.
I reminded Mrs. Malloy that it was something to discover that she had been a person as exciting as a tightrope walker in a previous life. And a cat too, if one discounted the possibility of Madam LaGrange’s having made that part up. Come to notice it, in close proximity Mrs. Malloy and Tobias did bear a certain rememblance to each other, around the eyes and the twitch of their mouths.