Perhaps I will do it tonight.
What happens to me when I have killed my husband does not matter, for I am dead already.
Fair and Square
Mrs Ford stepped aboard the SS Sphinx, treading carefully along the ridged gangplank, her stick before her. It would be unfortunate if she were to stumble and injure herself before her holiday had properly begun.
Her holiday.
Mrs Ford had developed the custom of avoiding some bleak winter weeks by going abroad. While ostensibly seeking the sun, she sought to give her family some relief from having to be concerned for her. She tried hard not to be a burden to her middle-aged sons and daughters and their spouses.
She had been cruising before. She had also stayed in large impersonal hotels in the Algarve and Majorca, where it was possible to spend long winter weeks at low cost, enduring a sense of isolation among uncongenial fellow weather refugees. On her cruise, Mrs Ford knew she could expect near insolence from certain stewards because she was a woman travelling alone. With luck, this would be counterbalanced by extra thoughtfulness from others because of her age.
Her cabin steward would be an important person in her life, and she had learned to tip in advance as a guarantee of service and her morning tea on time. There would be patient tolerance from couples who were her children’s contemporaries; they would wait while she negotiated stairways and would help her in and out of buses on sightseeing excursions ashore. Older passengers in pairs would be too near her in age and too fragile themselves to spare her time or energy, and the wives would see her as an alarming portent of their own future.
There would be plenty of older spinster ladies in cheerful groups or intimately paired. Eleanor Ford would not want to join any such coterie.
The best times would be if the sun shone while the ship was at sea. Then, in a sheltered corner, she would read or do her tapestry while others played bridge or bingo or went to keep-fit classes. She would have her hair done once a week or so, which would help to pass the time. She hoped she had brought enough minor medications to last the voyage. The ship’s shop would certainly sell travel souvenirs and duty-free scents and watches but might be short on tissues, indigestion remedies, and such.
Each night Mrs Ford would wash her underthings and stockings and hang them near the air-conditioning to dry by morning. For bigger garments she would be obliged to use the laundry service. She would go on most of the shore excursions, though they tired her and she had been to all the ports before, because to stay on board would mean she had abandoned all initiative. She would send postcards to her smaller grandchildren and write letters to her sons and daughters.
She would long for home and her warm flat with all her possessions round her and her dull routine – yet this morning she had been pleased, leaving it in driving sleet, at the prospect of escaping to the sun. Most people would envy her, she told herself, wondering which of her fellow-passengers, who had looked so drab waiting at the airport, would, by the whim of the head steward, be her table companions throughout the cruise. She had requested the second sitting and been assured by the shipping office that this wish would be granted – otherwise what did you do in the evening after an early meal? As it was, Mrs Ford would be able to go to bed almost at once when dinner was over with a book from the ship’s library, which was likely to be one of the best features of the vessel.
Her cabin was amidships, the steadiest place in bad weather, and not below the dance-floor, where she might hear the band, nor the swimming-pool, where the water might splosh to and fro noisily if the ship rolled. She had been able to control these points when booking. What she could do nothing about was her neighbours. They might be rowdy, reeling in at all hours from the discotheque, or waking early and chattering audibly about their operations or their love lives – Mrs Ford had overheard some amazing stories on other voyages.
As she unpacked, she thought briefly about Roger, her husband, who had died six years ago. He had been gentle and kind, and she had been lucky in her long life with him. He had left her well provided for, so that even now, with inflation what it was, she could live in modest comfort and put aside enough funds for such an annual trip. She had so nearly not married Roger, for it was Michael whom she had really loved, so long ago. Setting Roger’s photograph on her dressing-table, she tried to picture Michael, but it was difficult. She seldom thought of him after all this time.
That night, climbing into her high narrow bunk, she had a little weep. It was like the first night away at school, she thought, when you didn’t yet know the other pupils or your way around. It would all be better in a day or two.
In the morning she had breakfast in her cabin. The ship had sailed at midnight, and beyond the window the sun shone on a gently rolling sea. Mrs Ford had taken a sleeping pill the night before, and so she felt rather heavy-headed, but her spirits lifted. She would find a place on deck in the sun.
On the way, she stopped at the library and selected several thrillers and a life of Lord Wavell, which should be interesting. She found a vacant chair on a wide part of the promenade deck and settled down, wrapped in her warm coat. After a while, in the sunlight, she slept.
The voice woke her.
‘You’re not playing properly,’ it charged. ‘Those aren’t the right rules.’
Mrs Ford’s heart thumped and she sat upright in her chair, carried back by the sound to when she was twelve years old. She was playing hopscotch with Mary Hopkins, and Phyllis Burton had come to loom over them threateningly – large, confident, and two years older, disturbing their game.
‘This is how we play,’ came the present-day response, in a male voice, from the deck-quoit player now being challenged on the wide deck near Mrs Ford’s chair.
‘They’re not the right rules,’ the voice that was so like Phyllis’s insisted. ‘Look, this is how you should throw.’
Long years ago Mrs Ford’s tennis racket had been seized from her grasp and a scorching service delivered by Phyllis Burton. ‘You played a foot-fault,’ she had accused – and later, umpiring a junior match, she had given several foot-faults against Eleanor Luton, as Mrs Ford was then, in a manner that seemed unjust at the time and did so still. All through Mrs Ford’s schooldays, Phyllis Burton’s large presence had loomed and intervened, interfered and patronised, mocked and derided.
She was good at everything, but though she was older she was in the same form as Mrs Ford. She wasn’t a dunce, however – it was Eleanor who was a swot, younger than everyone else in her form. In the library she was unmolested; her head in a book, she could escape the pressures of community life she found hard to endure. Eleanor was no joiner, and neither was she a leader – it was Phyllis who became, in time, head girl.
There came the sound of a quoit, thudding.
Mrs Ford opened her eyes and saw large buttocks before her, shrouded in navy linen, as their owner stooped to throw.
‘We enjoy how we play,’ said a female voice, but uncertainly.
‘Things should always be done the right way,’ said the owner of the navy-blue buttocks, straightening up.
In memory, young Eleanor in her new VAD uniform stooped over a hospital bed to pull at a wrinkled sheet and make her patient feel easier. Phyllis, with two years’ experience, told her to strip the bed and make it up over again, although this meant moving the wounded man and causing him pain.
‘But the patient—’
‘He’ll be much more comfortable in the end, it’s for his own good,’ Phyllis had said. And stood there while it was done, not helping, although two could make a bed much more easily than one.
Phyllis had contrived that Eleanor was kept busy with bedpans and scrubbing floors after that, until more junior nurses arrived and she had to be permitted to undertake other tasks.
Michael had been a patient in the hospital. He’d had a flesh wound in the thigh and was young and shocked by what he had seen and suffered in the trenches. He and Eleanor had gone for walks together as he grew stronger. When he cast away his crutc
hes, he took her arm for support – and still held it when he could walk alone. They strolled in the nearby woods, and had tea in the local town. Phyllis saw them once and told Eleanor so, and soon after that Eleanor was switched to night duty so that she scarcely saw Michael again before he went back to the front. She didn’t receive a single letter from him, and after months of waiting, although she never saw his name on the casualty lists, she decided he had been killed.
Later she met Roger, who was large and kind and protected her from the harshest aspects of life for so many years, leaving her all the more ill-prepared to battle alone, as now she must.
‘Games are no fun unless you play fair and square,’ said the sturdy woman with Phyllis’s voice.
Mrs Ford looked away from her and saw a thin girl in white pants and a red sweater and a young man in an Aran pullover and clean new jeans – the deck-quoit players. The older woman was leaving, walking away, but the damage was done.
‘Come on, Iris, your turn,’ said the man.
‘No, I don’t want to play anymore,’ the girl said.
That had happened long ago, too. Eleanor had not wanted to play games after Phyllis Burton’s derisive interventions.
There was some murmuring between the two. The man put his arm round Iris’s shoulders but she flung it off and, head down, mooched away along the deck, disappearing eventually round the corner. The man watched her go, then moved to the rail and leaned over it, gazing at the water.
Mrs Ford was trembling. The woman was so like Phyllis, whom she hadn’t heard of since ‘their’ war, so long ago. Strange that someone else should waken her memory. Phyllis, if she were still alive, must be well over eighty now – eighty-four, in fact – and this woman was what? Getting on for sixty? It was hard to tell these days.
Mrs Ford found it difficult to settle down after that, and spent a restless day.
Proper table allocations, not prepared the night before when seating had been informal as passengers arrived, had now been made, and Mrs Ford was pleasantly surprised to find that she was at the doctor’s table, with two couples past retirement age and a younger pair. The doctor was also young, reminding Mrs Ford of her eldest grandson, who was thirty-five. She didn’t know that her elder son, that grandson’s father, now chairman of a group of companies, had personally visited the shipping office to request special attention for his mother, particularly a congenial place for meals. He and his wife had been on a cruise the year before – their first – and had seen for themselves what Mrs Ford’s fate could be. Her children all loved their timid mother and respected her desire to maintain her independence – and, far from relaxing about her when she went away, they worried. On a ship, however, there was constant attention at hand, a doctor immediately available, and swift communication in an emergency.
Mrs Ford felt happy sitting next to the doctor, waiting for her soup. She would eat three courses merely, waiting while others ate their way through the menu like schoolboys on a binge. The doctor told her he was having a year at sea before moving, in a few months’ time, into general practice. It was a chance to see the world, he said.
He was a tall blond young man with an easy manner, and he liked old ladies, who were often valiant, building walls of reserve around themselves as a defence against pity. Mrs Ford, he saw, was one like that. There were others who thought great age allowed them licence to be rude, and took it, and the doctor liked them too for he admired their spirit. He ordered wine for the whole table and Mrs Ford saw the other three men nod in agreement; they would all take their turn to buy it and so must she. This had happened to her before and it was always difficult to insist, as she must if she intended to accept their hospitality. She liked a glass of wine.
Phyllis Burton, if she were a widow, would have no difficulty in dealing with such a problem, She would, early on, establish ascendancy over the whole table.
After all these years, here was Phyllis Burton in her mind, and just because of the dogmatic woman on the deck this morning.
Conversation flowed. The doctor asked about Mrs Ford’s family and listened with apparent interest to her account of her grandchildren’s prowess in various activities. It was acceptable to brag of their accomplishments, but not of one’s children’s successes, Mrs Ford had learned. Everyone disclosed where they lived and if they had cruised before – or, failing that, what other countries they had visited. Both retired couples had been to the Far East, the younger pair to Florida. The doctor revealed that he was unmarried, but his face briefly clouded; then he went on to describe the ship making black smoke off Mykonos (such a white island) due to some engine maintenance requirement. He laughed. It had looked bad from the boats taking the passengers ashore.
Mrs Ford had enjoyed her meal. The passenger list was in her cabin when she returned after dinner but she didn’t look at it. She read about Lord Wavell, falling asleep over him and waking later with her spectacles still on. Then, with the light out and herself neatly tucked under the bedclothes, she dreamed about Michael. They were walking in the woods near the hospital, holding hands, and he kissed her sweetly, as he had so long ago, her first kiss from an adult male, right-seeming, making it easy when afterwards Roger came along.
She woke in the morning a little disturbed by the dream, but rested.
The next night the Captain held his welcoming party, and at it Mrs Ford, hovering on the animated fringe of guests, saw the doctor talking to a pretty girl in a flame-coloured dress. She saw them together again in Athens, setting off to climb the Acropolis.
Mrs Ford decided not to attempt the ascent – she had been up there with Roger on a night of the full moon and preferred to hold that memory rather than one of a heated scramble that would exhaust her. She waited in a tourist pavilion by the bus park, drinking coffee, till the groups from the ship returned. This time the doctor was alone. With her far-sighted eyes, Mrs Ford peered about for the girl but did not see her.
Then she heard the voice again.
‘What a clumsy girl you are. I don’t know why you can’t look where you’re going,’ it said, in Phyllis’s tones. ‘Look at your trousers – they’re ruined. Scrambling about like a child up there!’
‘I’m sorry, Mummy.’ Mrs Ford heard the tight high-pitched reply of someone in a state of tension. ‘I slipped. It will wash out.’
Mrs Ford, on her way to coach number four, glanced round. The tourists wouldn’t pause for coffee – meals were paid for on the tour and they were returning to the ship for lunch before taking other excursions before the Sphinx sailed that night. Behind her she saw a tall, well-built woman with carefully coiffed iron-grey hair, in a tweed skirt, sensible shoes, and an expensive pigskin jacket. Beside her was the girl Mrs Ford had witnessed talking to the doctor, her blonde hair caught back in a slide at the nape of her neck. On her pale trousers there was a long, dirty smear.
It was to the mother, however, that Mrs Ford’s eyes were drawn. Just so might Phyllis Burton have looked in middle age.
That evening Mrs Ford consulted the passenger list with a pencil, reading it with care to winnow out the mothers and daughters travelling together. The father might be present too, unobserved so far by Mrs Ford. She marked several family groups with a question mark. There were no Burtons. Of course not. But the resemblance was so uncanny, she would have to find out who the woman was.
In the end it was easy.
The next day the sun shone brightly and the sea was calm. Mrs Ford decided to climb higher in the ship than she had been hitherto, and explore the sports deck in search of a quiet corner where she could sit in the sun. Stick hooked over her arm, a hand on the rail, she slowly ascended the companion-way and walked along the deck to a spot where it widened out and some chairs were placed. In one sat the blonde girl. Beside her was an empty chair.
‘Is this anyone’s place?’ Mrs Ford enquired, and the girl, who had been gazing out to sea, turned with a slight start. A smile of great sweetness spread over her face and, confused, Mrs Ford was again in a woo
d, long ago, with Michael.
‘No—oh, please, let me help you,’ the girl said, and, springing up, she put a hand under Mrs Ford’s elbow to help her into the low chair. ‘They’re difficult, aren’t they? These chairs, I mean. Such a long way down.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Mrs Ford, gasping slightly. ‘But getting up is harder.’
‘I know. We found it with my grandfather,’ the girl said. ‘But now he’s got his own chair for the garden – it’s higher, and he can manage.’
‘Your grandfather?’ Mrs Ford wanted the girl to talk while she caught her breath.
‘He’s lived with us since my grandmother died – before I was born,’ said the girl. ‘He’s still quite spry, but a bit forgetful. He’s a lamb.’
‘And are you like him?’ She was, Mrs Ford knew.
The girl laughed.
‘Forgetful, you mean?’ she said. ‘Maybe I am – Mummy always says I’m so clumsy and careless. But then, she’s so terribly well organised herself. Granny was the same, Grandpa says. She always knew what to do and made instant decisions.’
Roger had always known what to do and made quick, if not instant, decisions, Mrs Ford reflected. ‘I dither a bit myself,’ she declared. ‘I miss my husband a great deal. He cared for me so.’
‘That must have been wonderful,’ said the girl, seeming quite unembarrassed by this confidence.
They sat there in the sunshine, gently chatting. The girl’s mother was having her hair done, she said. They were cruising together – her mother had had severe bronchitis during the winter and it had seemed a good idea to seek the sun. Her father couldn’t get away and so she had come instead. What girl would refuse a chance like this? Her mother had a great desire to see the Pyramids and that would be the high point of the trip for them.
‘But you’ve travelled before?’ Mrs Ford asked. Her elder grandchildren, this child’s generation, were always whizzing about the globe.
Pieces of Justice Page 8
