Madame Doubtfire Read online

  Madame Doubtfire puckered her glossy brown eyebrows into a warning frown.

  ‘Oooh!’

  Lydia seemed to be close to exploding. Nervously, Madame Doubtfire reached for her crocodile handbag and gathered her bulky outdoor garment around her, as if once more compelled to think of leaving. But just at that moment all Lydia’s inexplicably pent-up excitement burst through the floodgate of her self-control, decanting forcefully on to her brother.

  ‘Christopher, you’re so stupid!’

  She seized the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him towards her. ‘Stop being so awkward, for heaven’s sake!’ She tugged at him desperately. ‘Come on! Upstairs! Now! We’ve tons of homework and we must get started!’ Pushing and heaving with all her strength, she propelled her recalcitrant brother across the room, and shovelled him vigorously through the doorway.

  ‘So nice to meet you,’ she called back to Madame Doubtfire over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure we’ll get on beautifully. I do hope you agree to take the job. Christopher will be fine, too, I promise, as soon as he gets used to the idea. I’ll speak to him about it. I know he’ll be pleased.’

  And, kicking her brother firmly in the shins to shift him the last few inches out of the kitchen, she swiftly drew the door closed behind them.

  Sinking back on her chair, Miranda sighed with open relief. Madame Doubtfire’s relief was even greater, if slightly less overt. Surreptitiously, she wiped beads of sweat from her forehead, and seemed a little taken aback to see yellowy smears appear on her fingers.

  But Miranda didn’t notice. She was too busy stretching herself luxuriously in triumph.

  ‘Well, Madame Doubtfire,’ she said, delighted. ‘You passed the final test with flying colours.’

  Madame Doubtfire reached up and patted her turban primly.

  ‘I’m very pleased, dear. Very pleased indeed.’ She paused momentarily. ‘They’re a spirited pair.’ Then she added a little warily: ‘It’s none of my business, of course, and stop me at once if I offend you. But if you don’t mind my saying so, that son of yours looks to me to be sorely in need of a firm hand.’

  Miranda smiled.

  ‘I quite agree,’ she told Madame Doubtfire. ‘And the job’s yours.’

  Chapter Five

  Finding a rôle in life

  A couple of weeks later, Madame Doubtfire was leaning on the banister of the upstairs landing, scratching a hairy leg and smoking a cheroot, when Lydia came out of her bedroom with her arms full of tattered comics.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ Lydia scolded, dumping the untidy pile on the floor outside Christopher’s bedroom. ‘You’ll get black lungs.’

  Madame Doubtfire narrowed her eyes, and blew a stream of cheroot smoke sideways into the landing curtains. She peeled the blackened stub from between her lips, and spat out a wayward flake of tobacco.

  ‘Listen, my sugar-plum,’ she said. ‘When I was young, back in the good old days before I married your mother, I drank my whisky in peace, and smoked my fags without disturbance. That happy time is far, far in the past. But if occasionally in my exhausting middle years I’m driven to down the odd half pint of beer, or drag on the occasional cigar, I’ll thank you to keep off my back.’

  She took another deep drag from the cheroot.

  ‘Just press on with the tidying, honey-bunch. If these bedrooms aren’t super tidy by the time your mum gets home, your humble servant here might get the sack.’

  Lydia pressed on with the tidying. Christopher carried his overflowing waste-paper basket out in the hall, and sighed to see yet another heap of his possessions deposited there by his sister.

  ‘I don’t see why it’s always us who has to clear up,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s you who gets paid.’

  ‘It all goes on your bloody child support.’

  Madame Doubtfire stuck the cheroot stub back in her mouth, and lifted her arms to settle the turban more securely on her head.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not good at keeping a house looking nice, you know that. It’s one of the reasons your mother divorced me.’

  She hitched her skirt up higher, revealing an expanse of beefy thigh, and settled herself on the broad ledge of the window sill, between the pots of spring-flowering azaleas.

  ‘Gardens, now, they’re another matter…’

  She stared out. The carefully plucked and burnished eyebrows crumpled with concern as she looked down at the miserable ranked rows of Miranda’s purple sprouting broccoli and winter drumheads.

  ‘By now I really should have limed that vegetable patch…’

  While Lydia and Christopher continued to scuttle in and out of their respective bedrooms, returning each other’s library books and pens, emptying water glasses down the bathroom sink, dropping crumpled garments into the two matching wicker laundry baskets outside the airing cupboard, Madame Doubtfire leaned back against the window and stared morosely across into next door’s garden.

  ‘That Mrs Hooper’s left the door of her shed wide open again. The rain will get in and rot her tools.’ She turned in sudden outrage. ‘Do you know what that wretched woman did while you two were at school today?’

  ‘No,’ Christopher said, passing with Lydia’s radio in his arms. ‘What did that wretched woman do while we were at school?’

  Madame Doubtfire clutched at her turban.

  ‘She only ripped out a perfectly splendid japonica – tore it away from the wall in a frenzy of horticultural vandalism. That’s all she did!’

  ‘Perhaps she wanted the space for something else,’ suggested Lydia. ‘Would you pull your knees back so I can get past with this vacuum cleaner?’

  Obligingly, Madame Doubtfire lifted her skirts and drew back two enormous hairy knees.

  ‘Very likely,’ she said. Her lip curled up so far in scorn that the cheroot scorched it. ‘Room for some flashy supermarket rose, I have no doubt.’ She sighed, exhaling clouds of blue smoke. ‘How that woman has the gall to show her face each week at art class, I shall never know. As far as I can make out from all her scrubby renderings of my fine physique, she has no more aesthetic sense than a lavatory brush, no more sensitivity than a flagstone. Eight times she’s done me now! Eight times! That’s sitting and lying and standing in all sorts of positions. She’s done me draped in muslin, and with coloured lights flashing all over my body. She’s done me in chalk and charcoal and pencil and oils, in watercolours and crayons and pastels and, last week, God help us, even clay. That’s eight different ways I’ve turned out so far: pin-headed, hunch-backed, bandy-legged, wall-eyed, wry-necked, ape-armed, barrel-chested and, as a final blow to my self-esteem when a small lump of her clay fell off last week, apparently unmanned.’ Madame Doubtfire scowled horribly. ‘I’m wasted on the woman, truly I am. She is impervious to natural beauty.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Christopher mused in passing. ‘She seems to like me…’

  ‘You fail to qualify on either count,’ Madame Doubt-fire observed tartly. Inspecting the clogged end of her cheroot, she pushed the window open behind her and flipped ash towards Mrs Hooper’s laburnum.

  ‘My God!’ she cried, almost falling out of the window in anguish. ‘The woman’s planting out her dahlias now!’

  ‘It is her garden,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘Why shouldn’t she plant out her dahlias?’

  ‘In March? Are you mad?’

  Gripping the turban tightly with one hand, and holding the smouldering cheroot safely below the level of the window with the other, Madame Doubtfire leaned out.

  ‘Dearie,’ she warbled over the lawn. ‘Must warn! Plant them out now, and your sweet dahlias will be slain by the frost!’

  She drew in her turbanned head, and slammed the window shut again.

  ‘Absurd! Needs telling every single year. I must have warned her half a dozen times when I was your father.’ She heaved a massive sigh. ‘I’ll tell you the trouble with that Hooper woman: she simply cannot take advice. I suppose that I’ll have to go down there and stop her. I need to talk to her anyway, about
her bad leaf curl.’

  Christopher broke off struggling with the downie he was trying to strip of its cover. He hated it when, as he tended to think of it to himself, ‘his father took Madame Doubtfire into the garden’. He feared the possibility of discovery, with all the terrible consequences when the knowledge was passed, as it would be, to his mother.

  ‘Don’t go down in the garden. You’ll be ages. We’re starving. What about our supper?’

  Madame Doubtfire pushed open the bathroom door, and dropped her cheroot stub into the lavatory bowl.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I count you in after school. I check your simultaneous equations. I wash your knickers. You can’t expect me to do all the shopping and cooking, too.’

  Christopher was outraged.

  ‘Haven’t you even shopped?’

  Madame Doubtfire drowned her absence of positive response to this question by flushing the lavatory.

  ‘Isn’t there anything to eat?’ Christopher persisted.

  The cheroot stub spun merry circles in the lavatory bowl, which drained and refilled. The stub stayed on the surface, circling gently.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  Madame Doubtfire shrugged.

  ‘I suppose there’s always quail…’

  ‘Quail?’ Christopher was horrified. ‘Do you mean Hetty?’

  Madame Doubtfire inspected her fingertips.

  ‘Hetty is quail…’ she said. ‘Quails are nourishing…’

  Lydia appeared in her doorway, quite as appalled as her brother.

  ‘Are you two talking about cooking Hetty?’

  ‘Why not?’ Madame Doubtfire picked delicately at the orchid-pink lacquer embellishing her fingernails. ‘I noticed a rather nice-looking recipe only a couple of days ago. Quail and artichoke salad.’ The glossy eyebrows furrowed. ‘It might be a little difficult, though. One of the ingredients was juniper berries. I don’t suppose either of you two is prepared to climb over the fence and nick one or two off Mrs Hooper’s dwarf juniper?’

  ‘No!’ Christopher shouted.

  ‘No!’ Lydia echoed.

  Madame Doubtfire leaned over the banister.

  ‘Natalie!’ she trilled. ‘Up here, dear. Quickly. Madame Doubtfire needs your help.’

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ said Christopher. ‘Lydia could just make us all a tuna fish salad.’

  ‘You could just make it yourself,’ Lydia retorted with some irritation.

  ‘I wish I could remember exactly how this recipe went,’ Madame Doubtfire brooded. ‘What was it now? Reserve the legs and carcass for the sauce. Sauté the quail trimmings in hot fat in a pan… Which bits do you suppose the trimmings are, dears? The little feet…?’

  ‘I’ll make the tuna fish salad,’ Christopher hastily capitulated.

  ‘I’ll sort out a pudding,’ Lydia compromised.

  Entirely content with these arrangements, Madame Doubtfire threw open the window once again, and throbbed down to Mrs Hooper:

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s coming up very nicely indeed this year, dear –’

  Christopher shovelled the last of the mess out of sight under his bed, while Lydia slammed the vacuum cleaner away in the landing cupboard. Her observations on the current condition of Mrs Hooper’s brussels concluded to her satisfaction, Madame Doubtfire closed the window, giving no more than a gracious Queen Motherly wave through the glass in response to Mrs Hooper’s abruptly muted anxieties about galloping club root.

  ‘I can’t think why she’s worrying about club root,’ she confided to Lydia and Christopher, just as Natalie appeared at the top of the stairs in response to the recent call for her assistance. ‘Club root is the least of Mrs Hooper’s problems. To look at her vegetable plot, you’d think the woman only had three gardening tools: the chainsaw, the pick-axe and the flame-thrower.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Natalie told her. ‘That’s what my daddy always used to say.’

  Daniel stared at his younger daughter. He shook his head, baffled. Each of his children had, he knew, developed a different way of coping with the bizarre situation with which he had, without warning, presented them. Lydia’s attitude towards his two, sometimes merging, identities was one of detached and laconic amusement. Christopher’s was keenly protective: he was ever prepared and preparing against the dread moment of discovery. And both of these ways of coping made sense to Daniel. But Natalie’s method of handling her father’s double personality was very odd, very odd indeed.

  All through the first few days, Daniel recalled, she had been worried – terribly, terribly worried. As he sailed confidently round the house masquerading as Madame Doubtfire, Natalie had stood in anguish, consumed with anxiety, watching him with the deepest unease, and jumping out of her skin each time the front door opened, or the telephone rang. The mere mention of Miranda’s name put her into a tizzy. Clearly the whole arrangement disturbed her so much that Daniel began to wonder if it might not have been a disastrous mistake, more likely to upset Natty with his presence than comfort her for his absences.

  Then, as it now seemed looking back on it, everything changed.

  To Natty, he seemed to become two entirely separate people. Gradually, as the days went by, it was as if Madame Doubtfire became more and more real, and Daniel was being pushed out of her entirely. This seemed to make Natalie more comfortable. Where she had been almost a nervous wreck, once again she became her placid, equable self. She stopped busying herself with crayons and tiny plastic animals anywhere in the house but where he happened to be, avoiding him as much as possible, and took instead to trailing happily around in his wake, chattering with ease, telling him all about her day at school, her quarrels and games in the playground, and her mother’s occasional men friends.

  ‘She’s going out with Sam tonight,’ she’d say, adding wistfully: ‘I wish she wasn’t.’

  ‘Why, dear?’

  ‘I just wish she was going out with Mr Lennox.’

  ‘Why?’ Daniel persisted, suddenly worried beyond measure lest this Sam were cruel, or insensitive, or even just cold to his precious Natty.

  ‘Because Sam always brings boring old flowers. Mr Lennox brings chocolates, special big boxes with no horrible strawberry creams.’

  ‘I quite like strawberry creams myself, dear.’

  ‘So does my daddy.’

  It seemed best to say nothing. But it was, Daniel found, thoroughly disquieting to be leaning over the sink, idly rinsing a dish or two under the tap, and find he was listening to his own daughter telling how, in her father’s kitchen, the soap bar was encrusted with nasty bits of grit which scratched the palms of her hands when she washed them, and his washing-up brush was so bald it couldn’t clean dishes. He learned the hard way that it was better not to rear up as Daniel on these occasions, defending his honour on such small matters. It made her nervous. Indeed, after a while her clear division of these two protectors in her life became so unyielding that whenever Daniel made the mistake of letting the mask slip, if only for a moment – used his own voice to call her from one room to another, swept her up on to his shoulders, swore at the vacuum cleaner in a Danielish fashion – then Natalie fell silent and lowered her eyes, grew most uncomfortable and drew away, wandered off into another room and stayed there. But so long as Daniel remained four square in the heavy brogue shoes he had bought Madame Doubt-fire – along with a new pinless turban and several nice blouses – then Natalie stayed happy and at ease in his presence, more than willing to help him with all sorts of little household tasks, eager to confide her secrets, easy to cuddle.

  So Daniel tailored Madame Doubtfire’s days to avoid any manifestations of Daniel. He learned to drink his lunchtime beer from a porcelain teacup. He formed the habit of smoking his occasional cheroot upstairs on the landing, where he could blow the smoke out of the window, and flush the tell-tale stub away the moment he heard little Natalie approaching. And, towards teatime each day, when he shaved closely for the second time, he made a point of shutting the bathroom door b
etween himself and his small daughter.

  It was all strange, very strange. But nothing stays strange for too long, and soon he found he had become accustomed to hearing old conversations with himself faithfully reported back, as Natalie companionably followed Madame Doubtfire around the house in the afternoons.

  ‘Hand me that coat hanger, would you, dear? I’ll just hang this slip of your mother’s away in her wardrobe.’

  Natalie obediently leaned over the edge of the bed she was rolling on, and picked the hanger off the floor.

  ‘It’s chewed,’ she said critically. ‘Chewed at the edges. Daddy says you should never, ever chew plastic.’

  ‘He’s quite right there, dear. You never know what you’re chewing with plastic.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Daddy says. He says it’s all right to suck it, if you must, but biting and chewing are out, right out, and he means it.’

  ‘Well, he says no more than the truth, dear. And, if I were you, I should pay very close attention to anything your father tells you.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘And I’m going to knit him a tie for his birthday.’

  ‘Are you, dear? That will be nice. I expect he’ll like that.’

  ‘It’s going to be pink.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll love it.’

  ‘It’s a surprise.’

  ‘Indeed, yes. Pass me that bra, dear, would you? That lacy thing lying over the chair back.’

  Natalie passed it over, and Madame Doubtfire inspected it critically before dropping it on to the pile for the laundry.

  Natalie giggled.

  ‘Undies worn twice

  Are not very nice,’ she sang merrily.

  ‘That’s all very well for those who can afford a washing machine,’ said Madame Doubtfire, somewhat cryptically.

  ‘Daddy can’t,’ mourned Natalie, and then, reminded: ‘He’ll have to try to keep my pink tie clean when he wears it.’ She sighed. ‘If he wears it…’