Free Bridesmaids Revisited by Dorothy Cannell Page A

within a stone’s throw of the Old Rectory? Had my mother, like the Brontes, grown up looking out upon a time-stricken cluster of tombstones? If so, small wonder that she had never seemed entirely connected to the everyday world of shopping lists and comedy programs on the television.
    I looked down the lane, suddenly eager and at the same time afraid of all that I would find out from the bridesmaids. Strangely enough, I had forgotten that it was my grandmother who was my reason for being here. All I could see was my mother’s shadowed face as she sat on a horsehair sofa in a room where there was a parrot in a cage by the fireplace, a dark red cloth with a balled fringe on the table, and a jug of lemon barley water on the sideboard.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Something furtive and furry moved out of a clump of shrubs to the right of cottage number four. Given the fact that I was half in the past and half in the present, which would have been disorientating even had I been comfortably settled in an armchair, I vaulted several feet in the air. My old gym teacher would have been astounded by this feat, considering that I had never been able to manage more than a bunny hop to make it over the wooden horse. Happily, Frank corralled me with the hooked end of his walking stick and Susan steadied me with an iron grip.
    “I had forgotten all about your dog,” I said to the woman with black and orange hair and impossibly green eyes.
    “Been round back rummaging in the dustbins from the looks of him.” Tom eyed the longhaired gray beast without much enthusiasm.
    “He always looks as though he’s in need of a brush and set.” His owner patted her leg and made cooing noises to which he responded by turning tail and peeing up a tree. After which activity he sat down and stared mournfully off into the distance.
    “Had him long?” asked Irene.
    “He’s not really mine.” The green eyes went from the dog to me. “I’m looking after him for my mother, who’s in hospital with back problems.”
    “Arthritis?” Frank inquired with the extreme interest that only the elderly seem to show in other people’s ailments. “My wife was stricken with it something cruel for years before Thora Dobson came up with one of her herb remedies.”
    “No ... a growth on her spine.”
    “Sorry to hear it, but I didn’t mean your mother. I was talking about the dog.”
    “Sorry.” The woman laughed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Shadow.”
    “And you with your psychic powers?” Susan gave a foghorn grunt of laughter.
    Frank wagged his stick in the animal’s direction. “From the way he’s sitting he looks stiff in the joints to me. But of course I’m no vet. Would have liked to be one, mind you. But didn’t have the education. Started work at fourteen, like most of us that went to the village school. Of course there’s always some,” he mused, “that you just know is going to make it in this world without none of its advantages. There was this lad—some years older than me, he was, and thought by most hereabouts to be a thorough bad lot, but I always had the feeling he’d end up king of the heap one way or t’other. Not that the girls would have cared if he’d gone around emptying dustbins. Had the looks and the damn-you-all-to-hell attitude that had them all over him. Even my Jessie admitted to me after we’d been married some thirty years that she’d thought she was in love with him until she found out she was just one of a string wrapped around his little finger.”
    “Don’t go looking at me!” Susan’s stertorous denial carried conviction but she was fussing with her floral pinny. “My parents would have knocked me into the middle of next week if they caught me within inches of a gypsy foundling without a proper name to call his own. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ is what they said when Hawthorn Lane took himself out of Knells, right about the time”—she looked at me thoughtfully—“that your