Free Bridesmaids Revisited by Dorothy Cannell

brother, but his visits to the flat in St. John’s Wood had been few and far between.
    “Anyhow”—Frank had the look of a man talking into the distant past—“that was our Sunday-afternoon entertainment back then. Reggie and John and me, we’d flatten our noses against the windowpane hoping to catch the Reverend doing something he oughtn’t, picking his nose or the like, that we could have laughed about with the other boys in Sunday school. But all we ever caught him doing was sucking on those cherry cough drops of his. Except for that time we saw him emptying his teacup into the aspidistra pot.”
    Susan responded with a gloomy laugh. “Gladys Bradley, Edna Wilks’s mother, as was the daily help in those days, couldn’t make a decent cup of tea to save her life. Gnat’s pee is what my mother called it. Too weak to come out of the pot. But then tea wasn’t Gladys’s drink. My father wouldn’t allow her in the house. Been a Methodist, he had, before coming over to the Church of England on marrying my mother. Same as your dad, Frank. Thought old McNair didn’t talk enough about the evils of the bottle in his sermons.”
    Frank was back to reminiscing about his boyhood pranks. “Could have frightened the old geezer to death if he’d caught the lads and me. Or ourselves if we’d been at the window the afternoon he was found dead at his desk. Heart attack it was. Sixty-five years old. Same as I am now.”
    “Just days before his poor little daughter’s wedding.” Susan completed the sorry picture. “Sophia was her name. Only seventeen. And a nice girl. Far too young to be married off to anyone, let alone a dry old stick like William Fitzsimons. The whole village was heartsick when they heard what had happened to her. Dying out there in the wilds of Borneo.”
    “I thought it was the Belgian Congo,” inserted Tom.
    “All much of a muchness.” Susan waved a hand the size of a ham. “All jungles and swamps from the sound of them. And hot enough to fry you like a pan of chips. No wonder Sophia didn’t last a year.”
    “She was my grandmother,” I said.
    “Is that right?” Irene got back into the conversation.
    “So you’re Mina’s daughter,” Frank said. “Not more than two or three she wasn’t when her father brought her back to the Old Rectory.”
    “A sad-eyed little sprite was Mina, you couldn’t call hers a happy childhood, not with that old sour face for a father.” Susan was now looking at me, her features somewhat softened. “Those that thought Reverend McNair didn’t do enough thundering from the pulpit on the evils of drink got enough of it when William Fitzsimons took over. Foam at the mouth, he would. It was his favorite topic next to the evils of wanton women.”
    “Some men shouldn’t have children.” Tom’s hair bristled.
    How strange, I thought, to be learning more about my mother from strangers standing in a street than I had ever gleaned from her while I was growing up. I could feel the woman with the black and orange hair studying me intently from several feet away, but she didn’t move and I couldn’t.
    “No one was surprised when Mina ran off to London and never came back after marrying that third or fourth cousin of hers,” Susan went on. “Good riddance to Knells, is what she must have thought. It wasn’t like she even had friends of her own age here. Kept shut away like one of those Victorian children, she was. Schooled her at home himself did her father. The only times she got to go out was to her ballet classes over in Rilling.”
    I could see why my mother had kept her father’s memory under wraps. Mrs. Malloy, who could never quite remember if she had been married four times or five and was partial to a glass of gin, would not have enthused. Certainly not to the point of bursting the seams of her black taffeta frock to accompany me in laying a bunch of flowers on my grandfather’s grave. Come to think of it, where was he buried? Was there a churchyard