Made in Heaven

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Authors: Adale Geras
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from the truth. Edie was stubborn, intelligent, kind and rather cynical. She trusted no one except her children, Charlotte, and Val. Even Nadia with whom they played cards and took tea, she regarded as slightly unreliable (because she was foreign by birth), even though she conceded she was ‘a good egg’. Charlotte had met her when she fell ill shortly after arriving in prison. Edie had been one of the youngest nurses in the sickbay, and did what she could to make the time her patients spent there both calm and pleasant. She thought of her charges not as criminals but as women who needed her help. Most of them were much older than she was, but even in those days she had a natural authority. She was, Charlotte thought, like Mary Kingsley, who in the nineteenth century had explored Africa and apparently used to subdue fierce animals with nothing more than a glance. She was also, in the modern phrase,
non-judgemental
. It wasn’t so much that she believed every single woman’s assertion that she was innocent. Many, she knew, were as guilty as hell but in Edie’s eyes that didn’t affect their humanity or their needs. She would have been happier if there were a category called something like,
‘Guilty but Justified
,’ which described many of the women she had to deal with in prison. She’d done everything in her life with the minimum of fuss, marrying, having two sons and losing her husband in a slow, organized progress through the years. Nowadays, she spent much of hertime fundraising for a local battered women’s refuge and it was she who made sure that jumble sales and whist drives were put on regularly to benefit it. She’d helped to found it in the early seventies and still took an active part in running the place, sitting on the steering committee and frequently ringing up the newspapers to give them opinions on many issues relating to violence in the family, whether they’d asked for them or not. She even appeared on the radio from time to time, and when she did, she always spoke clearly and with a precision that came as a surprise to those who had written her off as a sweet old thing.
    â€˜Did you even get a chance to discuss things like the venue?’ Val Handley asked. ‘You have to start thinking about that months ahead, booking the church and so forth.’
    She was sitting across the table from Edie and Charlotte, looking exactly like what she was: a middle-aged tomboy. At sixty-five, and because she was younger than her companions, Val refused to be categorized as ‘old’. She wore corduroy trousers in what Charlotte privately considered an unfortunate shade of beige, a brown and orange hand-knitted Fair Isle cardigan, and her dark hair (‘only about sixty per cent grey’ she maintained) was tied back in a girlish ponytail.
    On Sundays, Edie went to church, Val spent the morning in the garden and Charlotte cooked lunch. Today there was enough food left over from the engagement party to feed all three women. Val was a romantic and almost as excited at the prospect of a wedding as Isis, in spite of her own experience of matrimony. She’d been married at a ridiculously early age to a domestic monster and only Charlotte and Edie knew how little she regretted his death, for which she’d served six years in prison. He’d been an optician in a small market town and had taken in everyone with his façade of respectability. Behind closed doors, though, he’d madeVal’s life a constant torment. Everyone agreed on that, and she was very young, but the law was the law and this was in the days when desperately hitting out at an animal who repeatedly brutalized and beat you was not quite as sympathetically regarded. We’ve come a long way, Charlotte thought, looking at Val. She’d never have served a sentence like that nowadays. Mitigating circumstances. Today, someone like Val had people like Edie to help her and places like

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