‘But why, Edmund?’ I kept asking him. ‘Why?’
On Sunday evening, when they’d got home from the holiday, she’d been tired and wanted her supper in bed. He’d brought it, she’d eaten it, and he’d come to take the tray away.
‘Something came over me,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember properly what happened. I think I felt that if I was a little bolder, she’d give in. Women often say no at first, don’t they, when really they mean yes. All they want is a little persuading.’
He’d tried to make love to her, and when she resisted he caught her by the throat, held her till she ceased to struggle, and then realised she had beaten him forever.
‘You didn’t mean to kill her, Edmund,’ I whispered.
‘No,’ he said, and then, ‘I suppose I didn’t.’
Suddenly, oddly, I remembered the butterflies he had kept imprisoned in his jars when he was a child.
‘Oh, Edmund dear,’ I said.
I visit him in prison, regularly. He’s working in the library and studying in his leisure time. His moustache has gone and he looks much younger. With remission for good conduct he’ll be out soon.
At the trial it emerged that Louisa was pregnant. She’d had several lovers, the police discovered, two before ever she had met Edmund. The prosecution asserted that Edmund had found out and that jealousy was the motive for the murder.
He never told the police, nor his lawyers, what he had told me.
A Time for Indulgence
Looking in the mirror, I see a white, fat face – pale eyes, sparse brows, which now I pencil over darkly. My lips are a bright bow of painted pink. My hand shakes as I apply mascara to my scanty lashes. I add rouge over my cheekbones and powder the whole. My mask is on for the day.
In the bathroom adjoining our hotel room, my husband is taking his morning bath. The water slurps and splashes. He will be some time yet; the ritual toilet lasts for over an hour as first he shaves his jowly chin, then soaps his scrawny body with its grizzled hair.
Last night, in the four-poster bed in this hotel bedroom, my husband used me. He plunged and groaned, trying to make of me a mustang to meet his bucking. Above us, the canopy stretched, silent witness of intimate encounter. Later, in sleep, he pushed me away, taking for himself the centre of the dipping bed, snoring heavily. When I tried to win for myself enough space to find some rest, he lashed out at me with a flailing arm. At last I took my pillow to the armchair and dozed a little. This morning my feet and ankles are sadly swollen.
Why not twin beds, you ask.
My husband frequently, even now, demands his rights, and insists they remain within reach. A holiday, he has said, is a time for indulgence.
I am wearing my white linen sundress, which exposes my flabby white arms and much of my heavy shoulders, though wide straps conceal my underwear. My husband has always liked me to be dressed in white, so to please him I seldom wear colours. I will go down to the terrace and sit there in the sunshine, waiting until he comes downstairs, for I must not go into breakfast without him. You would expect me to have no appetite after such a night, but I am constantly hungry. At the thought of coffee, hot toast, bacon and egg, saliva runs in my mouth.
While I wait, others enter the hotel dining-room: the slender, pale girl with the fine dark hair that falls to her shoulders, and her tall young husband with the full soft lower lip. His hand guides her ahead of him, possessively touching her back, and she turns to smile intimately at him.
I think of a day in Venice: of a pale slender girl in a full-skirted muslin dress sprigged with small flowers and with a wide-brimmed hat on her dark hair, her husband’s hand firm on her elbow as they cross the Piazza San Marco: myself.
He always took thought for me. In those first years before the war, a daily maid helped with the heavier work in our small house in Wimbledon. I saw that all ran smoothly to please my husband, as was my duty. The silver shone with polishing; the furniture gleamed with beeswax; tasty, nourishing meals were punctually served. For a time I went to a cookery school, to learn basic methods, and embellished these by advice from books whose complicated recipes I followed with increasing success. We gave little dinners for some of my husband’s friends. He would give me a bouquet of flowers on the day of such a dinner; the guests, when he brought it to their notice, thought it a charming thing to do.
Our intimate moments were troubling to me. I had none of the knowledge girls seem to acquire so easily these days, and I was too timid to ask advice from other young women; such matters could not be mentioned to a mere acquaintance and I had no close female friend, nor a sister; my mother was dead. A husband to provide for her was what every girl hoped for then; a job was a stop-gap until marriage was safely arranged, and to remain unmarried was to be labelled a social failure. Careers were for the few, who were thought eccentric and unwomanly. How different things are today! I envy modern girls their independence. Now no woman need pay for her keep in a manner that degrades her.
For years I imagined that all women felt as I did about these things. Then came the war.
My husband, who worked in a bank (I had met him there, paying in money for the draper in whose shop I was employed as cashier), had earlier joined the Territorial Army; he enjoyed their manoeuvres and meetings, and looked well in his uniform. I was pleased that he had this interest and never minded that it took him away from home for hours, sometimes for days; for me, these intervals brought blessed rest. He was called up even before war was declared, and was soon in France, a commissioned officer. I felt proud.
In the collapse of 1940 he was taken prisoner, and he spent the rest of the war in various camps in Germany.
Left alone, childless, I let the house for the duration of the war and joined the ATS. At first I worked as a cook, for this was my only skill, but when I found that army food, cooked in bulk, could never resemble the tempting dishes I had been used to concocting for my husband’s pleasure, I applied to become a driver and was accepted for training. I reasoned that this work, carried on outdoors and often alone in a car or lorry, would offer relief from the pressures of noise and constant company which I found trying. I was not good at mixing, and was older than many of the other girls.
I was a conscientious pupil and was soon proficient at the wheel, taught by a brisk middle-aged sergeant with a red face and a surprising amount of patience. I learned some mechanics, and took pride in maintaining my vehicle in efficient order. For the next five years I drove lorries round Britain to gun sites and supply depots.
I wrote regularly to my husband and arranged for parcels to be sent to him. He replied at intervals, terse notes with requests for things he wanted, but I knew his letters would be read and censored and expected nothing more. He studied for a law degree while he was in the camp, but he failed his examinations. He did not try to escape. Escapers, he said when at last he came home, were a nuisance to those who had settled down to a course of study in an effort to profit from their captivity. He blamed his examination failure on the fact that he was obliged to give background help to would-be escapers, acting as look-out and so on, which disturbed his studies.
Because I was married, I did not go out on ‘dates’ like the other girls. In my spare time I knitted warm garments for my husband and for other servicemen. I became a good knitter and found it peaceful employment, though I don’t knit now. I went to the cinema often; there were plenty of good films to see then. Sometimes I went to concerts; I still listen to them on the radio if my husband is not in the house; he does not like music.
I was content. It was as though my life in Wimbledon with my husband had never been. I did not look ahead.
I was given a stripe, and then a second; as a responsible married woman I was an obvious candidate for an eventual sergeant’s stripe, even a commission, but I never rose higher. I was not flighty, likely to get into trouble, like so many girls. Their conversation, as they talked about their amorous adventures, often shocked me; it surprised me, too, describing pleasure they obt
ained from experiences that would have been only distasteful to me.
Then, one fine warm night, walking back to the billets with one of the men who helped maintain our vehicles, everything changed. He suddenly slid his arm round me in the darkness, turned me to face him, and kissed my lips. Holding me close to him, he remarked that I was a fine girl, always cheerful, though my husband had been so long in the prison camp and wasn’t I missing him?
I was so astonished by his action that I did not push him away at once. Nor did I connect what had happened with the encounters I had had with my husband. The soldier’s lips were soft and warm. He kissed me again, his battledress rough against my hands which, to my amazement, were holding him. He led me away to a far corner of a field and undid my jacket, then my shirt. What followed was unimaginable bliss. I no more thought of protesting than I would have of refusing to take my vehicle out when ordered. We spent a long time together in that field, but it never happened between us again; he was posted away soon afterwards and I did not hear from him at all. But I remembered.
I did not become pregnant, but now I understood the other girls better and was kinder to them.
The war ended and my husband came home. We returned to Wimbledon. I hoped that things would be different between us, more as they had been with the soldier, but nothing was altered: if anything, matters were worse than before, for now I knew the difference. One night I wept, and in the end, when he berated me, told him the reason.
He beat me with his army belt, then used me again, violently and viciously.
‘I will never forgive you,’ he said. ‘Behaving loosely, while I was behind the wire suffering for my country and half starved.’
‘I know, I know,’ I wept. ‘I’m sorry.’
His thoughtfulness for me increased after that. Every day he telephoned me at half-past ten, using the office phone. He had not returned to the bank, but was now, after all those years of study, a solicitor’s clerk. If I went out shopping, I had to hurry home to receive his call. He rang at odd times during the day, too, and if by chance I was out I had to account for where I was when he came home. Every evening he wanted to know exactly how my day had been spent.
I worked harder than before to ensure that the house was perfectly kept and the meals as good as ever, to afford no further cause for complaint.
I was always tired. The nights were dreadful and I slept little, but each afternoon I dozed off with a comforting box of chocolates beside me. My husband did not know about the chocolates, and I told him I had spent the time reading. He selected books he considered appropriate for me, improving volumes of biography or history, never fiction, bringing them home from the library, but I read few of them for I could not concentrate on their sober contents. I bought magazines, secretly, and paperback romances, which I read with my feet up on the sofa. I had no close friends. I seldom went out to coffee mornings for my husband’s morning call made it difficult unless the hostess lived close by. Soon I gave up trying and my few acquaintances dropped away.
Our dinner parties resumed, with my husband’s business connections as guests, and again he brought me flowers on the evenings of those days.
‘What a good husband,’ the guests would purr.
When we were invited back, he no longer took me with him but would telephone to say I had a migraine, and must be excused. He would lock up all my shoes in a cupboard then, leaving me only my slippers.
‘I’m not letting you go out to behave like a trollop,’ he would say.
He would return very late on such nights, elated, and his elation might last for several days. I would lie motionless in bed, feigning sleep, expectant and afraid, but I would be unmolested. It frightens me now to think of the possible reason for his exalted mood. I shall never know if I am right.
Food was my solace, and soon I grew fat, eating cream cakes at four-thirty with my cup of tea.
Why did I stay?
At times I thought of leaving him, but where could I go and what could I do? I had no money of my own, and no training apart from my ability to cook and to drive most sorts of vehicle. I could not divorce my husband, obliging him to pay me alimony, for it was not he, but I who had committed a matrimonial offence, as he pointed out to me when once I went so far as to pack a small bag and rush to the front door in the middle of the night. He would hunt me down, he said, wherever I went, disgrace me publicly but never let me go. I believed him.
‘You are my wife,’ he told me sternly. ‘You are mine.’
Gradually the desire to escape withered away; I grew resigned, like one in gaol, to my endless sentence. Sometimes I would think of that long-ago interlude with the young soldier, whose face had faded by now from my memory; I would murmur his name under my breath, and try to remember the tenderness he had shown me.
Then my husband retired, and the few hours’ respite I had had each day were gone. He took up growing orchids, making a success of them, in a large greenhouse which he built in our garden. Each July a neighbour tended it while we went on our annual holiday, always to a different cliff-top hotel at some seaside resort. In the mornings we would walk over the headland, often along hilly, difficult paths, and in the afternoons my husband would swim in the hotel pool while I, in my white sundress, would sit watching him pant splashingly up and down, and rise to hold his towel for him when he emerged.
My husband is old now, but he is still vigorous. I do not enjoy our holidays as I trail after him on our long walks, or pour his tea in hotel lounges. Sometimes I play clock golf with him, or croquet, though I do not care for games.
Last year there was a tragic accident at the place where we were staying. A young girl fell to her death from the cliff top near the hotel. A path led there from the hotel garden, and the girl, a guest in the hotel, had walked that way with her husband after dinner. Her husband – they were on their honeymoon – had returned to the hotel to fetch a coat for her as the night was getting chilly. He left her, he said later, sitting on a rock watching a ship, brilliantly lit, passing on the horizon. They intended to stroll further before going to bed, perhaps down to the shore to seek for shells in the light of the moon. Steps cut from the cliff descended near to where he left his slender, pale wife in her white dress. When he returned, she had vanished. He thought she might have gone down to the beach, and searched there for her, but could find no trace of her.
The girl was dead, dying before the stars went from her eyes.
Were there stars in my eyes after that brief wartime interlude? No one remarked on them at the time.
My husband had kindled nothing in me. His touch was death.
Last year, as that young couple went out into the moonlit night together, my husband set forth on the walk he took after dinner each evening. He no longer insisted that I accompany him, tittupping over the grass in the high heels he decreed I must wear. I stayed in the hotel lounge, glancing at a magazine. He was not gone long, but said it was time for bed when he returned. His walk had done him good; he was alert, elated, as on his return from dinner-party visits without me; and as on those nights, he did not trouble me. We missed the commotion when the distraught young husband returned to the hotel and the search for his missing wife began.
When I washed my husband’s shirt the next day, I found a long dark hair clinging to it. I looked at his jacket and saw another there. I brushed the jacket well, not comprehending at the time.
It was only much later that I remembered other accidents at places we had visited. Four years ago a young girl who lived in the neighbouring town – not a guest in the cliff-top hotel – was killed in a fall, and there was another similar case the next year at the place where we stayed. The verdict on those two deaths was misadventure, for too little of the bodies was left, after some weeks’ immersion in the sea, to prove anything else. Crabs, I have read, devour human flesh in the ocean. I have never cared for the strong flavour of crab.
I know what he did to each girl before she fell. Perhaps he prevented her screaming by strangl
ing her first. It must always have been so quick.
It is going to happen again.
He has noticed this slender young girl in white with the fine dark hair. I have seen him watching her. It is myself as I was when young, and in his mind he kills me each time he does it, after the violation.
Last year he miscalculated, for the tide did not come up in time to prevent the girl’s body being found. The moonlight helped too, and the searchers saw her white dress caught on a rock.
Her young husband was suspected of her murder, but on some detail of evidence not made clear in the papers it was later decided that he was not her attacker. That was when I remembered the hairs on my husband’s clothes. We had long since returned to Wimbledon.
That girl last year was the daughter of my lost young soldier lover of a single night. He came to the hotel the next day, a sad man, well into middle age now, a widower, we learned. He was bewildered by what had happened. I would not have recognised him after all those years if I had not heard his name.
I saw him sitting sadly in the garden, and went up to him to express my sorrow over the accident. The girl and her husband had looked so happy, I told him, and he seemed pleased, but, understandably, his manner was abstracted. I asked him if he had been in Lincolnshire during the war, and he looked surprised but said he had. A friend of mine was stationed there, in the ATS, I said, and named myself.
He did not remember.
I will follow my husband tonight when he goes for his evening stroll. I will follow him every night until my chance comes. This year I have a bright, sharp knife in my bag. I brought it with me from my kitchen at home, for my plan was made long ago. I will plunge it into him. But now I must do it before he can attack his next victim, seizing my opportunity to save not only her life but also her young body from his abuse. Somehow I must find enough strength in my poor weak legs to creep up behind him undiscovered, and in my hand for the deed.
Pieces of Justice Page 7
