Andrew was beginning to learn that pain can come from the most unexpected places. It could even come from a nice woman trying to be kind.
Remembering every sentence of the letter, he said, “In fact, there’d been trouble between you, hadn’t there? When she left you to go to New York, it was because you’d more or less thrown her out.”
Mrs. Thatcher’s eyes were startled. “Is that how she put it?”
“That’s what she implied.”
“But it wasn’t that at all, not really. There was no rejection. It was just that it seemed to me best for her that she should go.”
She stopped, looking even more embarrassed. Best for her. What would make a woman like Mrs. Thatcher feel it was “best” for Maureen to leave home at nineteen unless there had been some complications of sex?
He took the gamble. He said, “It was because of that man, wasn’t it?”
The flush heightening in Mrs. Thatcher’s cheeks completely gave her away. “So she told you?”
“She told me some of it. Don’t be afraid of hurting me, Mrs. Thatcher. I know what Maureen was. The truth can’t possibly change how I feel about her.”
Mrs. Thatcher looked down at her glass and then up again. “I suppose to her I was the villain of the piece.”
“Not really.”
“But I was, of course I was, because I was the one who—well, caught them. Didn’t she tell you that?”
“That’s more or less what I gathered.”
“Then you do see what a dreadfully difficult decision it was to make.”
As Andrew had expected, now that he had induced her to talk she was eager to present her point of view. “I don’t know whether she told you his name. I hope not. I’ve always hoped that nobody need know, not so much for his sake as for his wife’s. She’s a wonderful woman and one of my best friends and she never had the faintest idea of what was going on. Oh, I blame him, of course I do, but I don’t think he realized the intensity, the passion for life in Maureen. He’d got into it far, far deeper than he’d intended. And as for Maureen, she’d completely lost her head. A man old enough to be her father, a happily married man! It was only glamour, of course. After all those years of poverty and tension with her own father, a man like that, a charmer, a wealthy, prominent citizen, he must have seemed dazzling to her. But she was only nineteen. She thought it was love. I’m sure of that. That’s what made the decision so heartbreaking.”
She put the sherry glass down on the table beside her. Then her large, unguarded eyes returned to his face.
“I don’t think I was hysterical or partisan about it. I honestly don’t. I mean, I knew he’d never had any serious intention of leaving his wife; I knew Maureen’s position was intolerable. That’s why the only conceivable solution seemed to be to send her away. I gave her money; I tried to make her see it was for her own good. I didn’t seem to get through to her at all, and she was very bitter. After she’d gone, I didn’t think she would ever forgive me and I was prepared to accept it. But I’d misjudged her. One does so frequently underestimate people. When we moved to New York ourselves, she came to see me on the very first day after our arrival and she was wonderful, truly wonderful. She’d come, she said, not only to apologize but to thank me. She sat there, actually right there where you’re sitting now and she said, ‘To think I hated you for making me come to New York when I realize now it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it’s here I found Andrew—and love.’ ”
Andrew put down his sherry glass too. He was afraid his fingers might snap the stem. Some man in Pasadena—some emotionally immature tycoon he’d never heard of and who, in any case, had no interest now. But Maureen had gone to Mrs. Thatcher in gratitude, telling her she’d found love with him. She’d done that six months ago, over a year after she’d written the letter to Rosemary.
Now he had heard what Mrs. Thatcher had to say, everything was being blurred again by a wild upsurge of hope. Wasn’t it possible that the spiteful bitchery of Maureen’s letter had been a mere product of temporary vindictiveness over the break-up of what had seemed to her her great love affair? Even if he accepted the fact that she had married him cynically, wasn’t it possible that this wounded, embittered attitude in her had gradually been cured—by his love? He thought of his wife turning to him in the taxi on the way to Bill Stanton’s. “I love you.” Once again she seemed to be in his arms—had it been only two nights ago?—clinging to him, accepting and returning a love which at the time had seemed utterly convincing? Did the fact of a letter written almost two years ago, have to invalidate what he had felt two days ago?
Had his rejection of his wife been a betrayal not only of her but of himself?
He looked at Mrs. Thatcher’s shrewd, kind face agonizedly as if somehow the secret could be wrested from it.
“She told you she was happy and that she loved me?”
“Of course she did, Andrew.”
“And you believed she was telling the truth?”
“I know she was. There was nothing really bad about Maureen, I’m sure. It had been difficult for her. There’d been a bad start, she was confused, uncertain, and, yes, for a while envious. It was probably the worst thing that could have happened to her to have been plunged so suddenly into our world of wealth and security. As I said, I think she hated us for a while. I know she did. But that was only a phase. She was a good girl, a girl with a lot of love to give when she found the right man to give it to.”
She got up again and moved to him, putting her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Andrew. I should have had more sense than to have let this come up. But since I’ve been foolish enough, I might as well go on. You may not realize now in the terrible shock of what’s happened, but there’ll come a time when you’ll find it will help to know from somebody outside, somebody quite unprejudiced, that you were a good husband and that Maureen loved you with all her heart.”
She had loved him with all her heart …
In his mind Andrew could see his wife’s wedding ring glinting as it dropped from his hand down through the grating of the drain.
NINE
“Andrew.”
“Yes, Mrs. Thatcher.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
The phone rang. Mrs. Thatcher answered it and chattered about bridge arrangements. The banalities, drifting through to Andrew, seemed to belong on another planet. Forget everything she’d said, he thought. Why torment himself with a hope that could only bring pain? What was Mrs. Thatcher but a conventional society woman trying to be kind? What had she really known about Maureen? Ned had known Maureen. The letter had revealed Maureen. “Scheming little bitch.” Cling to that.
Mrs. Thatcher had stopped talking. She came over to him, holding out a sheet from the telephone memorandum pad.
“Andrew, I mean it. Do call any time. Maureen had the number but it’s unlisted so I’ve written it down for you. I do wish you didn’t look so tired. If only you could rest …”
He took the piece of paper and put it in his breast pocket, wondering dimly how things would have been if his own mother had been like this.
As he did so, the door opened and Rosemary came in with her stepfather. Mrs. Thatcher turned.
“Hello,” she said. “Andrew’s here, Rosemary. He wants to talk to you.”
Mr. Thatcher, grave, handsome, looking unhappy, said, “Andrew, my boy, I want you to know …”
“No, dear,” broke in Mrs. Thatcher. “Not now. You can tell Andrew how sorry you are some other time.”
She put her hand on her husband’s elbow and guided him out of the room. The moment they had gone, Rosemary hurried to Andrew. He watched her coming across the room, hardly remembering what she looked like, surprised all over again that Ned’s girl could be so small, so unspectacular, so like a rather belligerent mouse.
“Andrew, how can you ever forgive me for being so beastly about Maureen yesterday? It’s my temper. I’ve g
ot a terrible temper, and when she refused to understand and insisted on telling Mummy and Dad …” Her mouth tightened into a thin, self-condemnatory line. “I’ll never forgive myself, fighting with her, saying all those things about her to you and then—those monstrous hoodlums.”
Suddenly Andrew was all right again because he’d managed to stop thinking about Maureen. She-loves-me-she-loves-me-not was a far too dangerous game. Forget it. Stick to the facts. Rosemary was a fact. Rosemary could have gone to the apartment and killed Maureen. Why not?
He said, “There weren’t any hoodlums. The burglary was a fake.” He added, brutally, “Ned faked it. He went there. He found her dead. He was trying to throw the police off the scent.”
Rosemary reached out with her hand and caught on to the back of a chair. “Neddy was there?”
“Does that surprise you? Didn’t it occur to you after you’d called him that he’d go there and try to talk Maureen out of it?”
“But … but … Maybe I thought … I don’t know …”
“You didn’t go there yourself, did you?”
“Me?” Her voice cracked in astonishment. “Me go to Maureen? Of course I didn’t.”
“What did you do after you left my office?”
“I called Neddy. You know that. But I didn’t tell him to go to Maureen. I swear it. Then—then I went to a newsreel. I couldn’t face Mummy and Daddy until I’d decided how I was going to handle them if Maureen … But that isn’t what matters. It’s Neddy. Do the police know he was there?”
“No. But they know the burglary’s a fake.”
“But why did he do it? I don’t understand.”
“He did it because of the letter.”
“Letter.” There was no interrogation in her voice. It was merely an uncomprehending echo.
“He found it lying beside her on the bed.”
Andrew took the letter out of his pocket. Handing it to Rosemary, he felt as if he were stripping himself naked. She held it close to her face, then closer, then she tried it further away. With a little cry of exasperation, she went to her pocketbook, brought out another, even larger pair of glasses and switched to them. Andrew hadn’t realized she was as blind as that. It made her become human to him, Ned’s girl, Ned’s little blind—murdering?—fiancée.
He watched while she read, feeling strangely dizzy. Lack of food?
“How did Maureen get it?” he said. “Did you give it to her at lunch?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She went on reading. Eventually she looked up, pulling off the reading glasses. It was the first time he’d seen her face without them. All the proportions were different. It was a pretty-shaped face and the eyes, unarmed, had a dazed, swimming look. They undermined him because what they were expressing at that moment was utter astonishment.
“But, Andrew, it’s disgusting. I can’t believe she could have written it.”
That was the last thing he had expected her to say. “You mean you haven’t seen it before?”
“Never.”
“But it was written to you.”
“I realize that. But I never got it. You must believe me. Why! If I’d got it, if I’d had it yesterday at lunch, do you think I’d have been scared of Maureen? I’d have said, ‘All right, you go to Mummy and Dad and I’ll show this letter to your husband.’ That’s what I’d have said. You don’t know me. I’d have done it in a minute. So believe me, please. There isn’t any point in lying. I’ve never seen that letter before.”
A clock on the mantel—a bizarre skeletal clock which exhibited its innards under a glass bell—gave a thin, musical chime.
“Andrew, you do believe me, don’t you?”
“I believe that when letters are written to people, people usually receive them.”
“Don’t be idiotic. I know that.” She put the glasses back on. “Wait a minute.” She studied the letter again. “Yes, here at the end it says I hope this reaches you. She wasn’t sure of the address in Lausanne. Maybe she got it wrong and it was returned to her. Or, perhaps, after she’d written it, she was ashamed and never sent it at all.”
“And kept it all this time?”
“Why not?”
“And it just happened to turn up again yesterday?”
“I don’t know about that any more than you do.” She dropped the reading glasses and put on her regular ones. “I only know that I never saw that letter and I can’t believe she wrote it.”
It was the second time she’d said that. Andrew sat down. He said, “Why do you keep saying you don’t believe she wrote it when you were telling me yesterday how much she hated and envied you?”
“Oh, it isn’t because of what it says about me; it’s what it says about you.”
“You don’t think she felt that way about me?”
“Oh, Andrew, Andrew dear, I know she didn’t.”
She dropped down on the floor beside his chair and, reaching up, took his hand in hers. If she hadn’t been so young, the maneuver would have seemed both clumsy and phony.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I haven’t any idea. But I do know one thing. Yesterday at lunch, before she mentioned Neddy, she did nothing but talk about you. I can’t tell you! How wonderful you were, how good, how kind, how much she loved you. That’s how she brought up Neddy by pointing out the contrast. You were the saint. He was the bum. Don’t you see? There wasn’t any gloating about marrying a rich woman’s son. She talked about you the way any girl would talk about the husband she loved. Why should she have lied to me?”
Still holding his hand, she looked up at him through the glasses. She had kicked her shoes off onto the Aubusson carpet. There was a hole in the toe of her right stocking.
“Andrew, I can see how awful it is for you, having read that letter, feeling humiliated, all shriveled up inside, hating Maureen and yourself. It’s as awful as if—as if suddenly I discovered that Neddy didn’t really love me. That’s why I’ve got to make you understand. If Maureen really did write that letter, and I suppose she did, then she must have changed completely after she’d married you. I’m sure of it. If you’d seen her face yesterday, you’d have been sure too. It was radiant. Andrew, people can change. And now I come to think of it, I think she’d changed about us too. I know I said she was spiteful and envious yesterday but I think I was just remembering the past and assuming she still felt the same way she felt in Pasadena. But she was never nasty. She was quite firm but sweet and gentle, and I think she may honestly have decided it was best for us all, me, Neddy, Mummy and Dad, all of us, not to be sneaky but to bring the truth out into the open. So, Andrew, I know it’s not going to help much. Maybe, now she’s dead, it makes it worse. But I’m absolutely sure she loved you. You’d be mad to doubt it for a moment.”
Now that she was sitting at his feet, he could see only the top of her head, the neat, clean, otherwise uninteresting hair and a little bit of her glasses frame. He looked down at these random parts of her, almost hating her. Here was Mrs. Thatcher all over again. Couldn’t women ever leave things alone? She loved you. You’d be mad to doubt it for a moment. To protect himself, he repeated the phrases jeeringly in his mind; he thought of the letter, of Ned, of all the doubts and suspicions of his married life. If he had been a dumb, gullible fool in the past, the ultimate humiliation was to let himself continue in the folly now. But with a shattering flash of self-knowledge, he realized that to give up hope was beyond his power. Whatever he chose to pretend, his love for his wife was as obsessive now as it had ever been and, against the whole body of the evidence, against far more evidence than had yet come his way, the only thing in the world he wanted was to be able to believe what Rosemary had just said.
She loved you. You’d be mad to doubt it for a moment.
He got up from the chair. Rosemary twisted her neck to look up at him. He went across the room and took a cigarette out of a jade box which stood on a coffee table. As he lit the cigarette, his eyes just happened to remain on the jade box, and a
n idea sprang fully born into his mind.
He swung around to Rosemary. “Maybe you’re right.”
She was getting up from the floor, rearranging her skirt. “Right about what?”
“About Maureen and the letter. Maybe she did misdirect it and it was returned to her or maybe she never even mailed it. Maybe, for some reason, she did keep it, and if she did, the logical place for it was her jewel box which she always kept locked. The jewel box is missing. Ned didn’t take it. He told me so.”
He could feel excitement bubbling up in him, a kind of madman’s elation. Rosemary was wriggling her feet into her shoes. She stopped dead with one heel still sticking out.
“You mean someone could have wanted the jewel box, killed her for it, found the letter and left it beside her to incriminate you?”
“Couldn’t it have been that way?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Rosemary’s face was alive with interest. “Then all you’ve got to do is to convince the police they must concentrate on the jewel box, isn’t it? There’s no need to say anything about Neddy at all.”
“No.”
“Nor—nor about me and Neddy and Maureen wanting to interfere. Oh, Andrew, I know it’s awful and selfish of me, but you’re not like Maureen, are you? You don’t feel you’ve got to tell Mummy and Dad and everyone about Neddy’s stupid little escapades. They have nothing to do with Maureen, and when Mummy and Dad meet him, they’re going to be mad about him. I know they are. It’s so meaningless to spoil it all, to make them unhappy for nothing.”
She ran to him, reaching up and putting her arms around his neck, being coaxing, almost coquettish, quite out of character.
“Oh, Andrew, I don’t want to run off and be married by some dreadful justice of the peace. I want a real wedding, a real wonderful wedding with bridesmaids and flower girls and Mummy and Dad being happy and proud and … Oh, Andrew, I’m a monster, aren’t I, thinking about the wedding when everything’s so awful for you.”
A discreet cough sounded behind them. Slowly and quite unself-consciously, Rosemary disengaged herself from him. Both of them looked toward the door, where the butler was hovering discreetly.
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 8
