I read the letter, of course, before tearing it to pieces and flushing it away forever in the ladies’ lavatory. It told him her address and extended an invitation from her parents – her father was a farmer – to spend a weekend with them in the country. She’d be off work some time, she said.
In the end, she never came back. She had decided that city life was not for her and had found a job with the local vet – imagine! She sent me a note to this effect, but as far as Bernard was concerned, she had broken their date and disappeared without an explanation.
Bernard and I were married the following spring. Without me, he’d have got nowhere, but now he’s the chairman of the company, a semi-retired post because of his poor health, but carrying a substantial salary and with many ‘perks’, as they’re called. We’ve travelled all over the world, sometimes on business – sometimes not.
Unlike Bernard, I’ve worn well. I’m still a size 12; my hair – tinted of course, to a rich, glossy chestnut – is thick and lustrous, and my skin is clear. Bernard, unfortunately, has had a number of illnesses through the years – an ulcer, a minor heart attack, and now he is very deaf as the result of an infection he caught in Brazil. He has an efficient, inconspicuous aid, but is careless about using it and one may speak to him for several minutes before discovering that he has not heard a word.
When we returned from Bermuda in January, Bernard developed bronchitis. The hard winter at home was prolonged, so when he recovered we accepted the offer of Casa Bianca for March. Bernard was anxious to see the spring flowers; they were over when we came here before.
Our routine is established. I see to the house in the morning, and supervise the maid – an unskilled but willing woman from the village. She speaks a little English. To get him out of the way and to occupy him, I send Bernard off to do the shopping.
We have lunch in the villa but go out to dinner in the evening, otherwise it’s no holiday for me. He buys bread and lettuces, tomatoes, whatever we need to drink, at the super-mercado up the road. It serves the holiday complex and stocks most ordinary groceries. Bernard takes the car, as it’s bad for him to carry weights.
After he’s brought the shopping home, and I’ve checked that he’s forgotten nothing, he goes for his walk, looking for flowers among the pines and the mimosa on the headland. He has a siesta after lunch – it’s surprising how hot it can get at midday, when the breeze drops.
I have a rest, too – apart from Bernard of course: the villa is large and cool and we each have our own spacious room. There’s a pool, where Bernard swims in the afternoons. I can’t swim, myself.
Teresa hadn’t entered my thoughts for years. Perhaps the reason I knew her at once was because she looked flushed and hot as she got into the car, just as she used to after playing tennis. I saw her full-face as I walked towards her on my way back after buying some postcards. There was a girl with her, and a small child – a boy, I thought, though it’s not always easy to tell these days, with their unisex clothes. They all drove off in the car.
I was curious enough to walk past their villa later, and saw the girl on the patch of lawn outside playing with the child. A young man was there, too, but I didn’t see Teresa again, and tried to convince myself that I’d made a mistake and it wasn’t her, after all.
But two days later Bernard drove straight past the Casa Bianca when he came back from the shops. I always listen for him – I want to get on with unpacking the shopping he’s bought and making the day’s arrangements – and I saw the car go by. I went out to the patio and looked up the road.
Bernard had stopped outside the villa where I’d seen that woman. He got out of the car and came round to open the passenger door. Teresa – or her double – got out; Bernard leaned into the back of the car for her packages and carried them for her into the villa. Their heads were turned to each other.
I knew fear, but I stilled it: it was all a long, long time ago. What could be said, now, that could threaten me, or my comfortable life which I’d worked so hard to secure?
He did not return for half an hour, and then he was in an over-excited state. I told him to calm himself, on account of his blood pressure.
‘Who do you think I met in the shop?’ he exclaimed, and before I could attempt a guess, he told me. ‘I knew her immediately,’ he said. ‘I suppose she must have changed – everyone does, after all – but to me she looks just the same – a little plumper perhaps, but it suits her.’ He smiled.
I ran my hands over my lean hips in their elegant white linen trousers. Teresa would look ridiculous in trousers; at least she seemed to have enough sense not to wear them.
‘She’s staying just down the road in that complex,’ he babbled on. ‘With her daughter and son-in-law, and their little boy – Simon, he’s called – and a baby. The young family have all gone off for the day in the car and she’s on her own there.
‘She’s got four children, imagine,’ he continued, obsessed with the subject. ‘But only these two grandchildren so far. Perhaps that’s why she still looks so young. She’s not dried up, barren, as we are.’
Dried up? Me? And I chose not to have children.
Before I could argue, he went on, ‘I’ve asked them all round to drinks this evening, when the young ones get back and before the children have to go to bed.’
‘You’ve invited the children?’
‘Why ever not? They’ve no one to leave them with, anyway,’ said Bernard.
‘Her husband?’ I grated. ‘Teresa’s?’
‘He’s dead.’ At this, Bernard looked sad. ‘She went to work for a vet, it seems, and married him. He was quite a bit older than Teresa, and he died a year ago. She seems to have had a happy life.’
‘You found all that out in half an hour?’ I asked.
He stared at me for a moment, then said, ‘How did you know how long I was there?’
‘You’re always back by ten-thirty,’ I said. ‘It’s after eleven, now.’ A quick recovery.
‘All those years ago, when she never turned up for that dance, she’d broken her arm,’ he said. ‘You went with her to the hospital and promised to tell me what happened, but you said nothing.’
‘I didn’t know what had happened to her,’ I lied. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘She said you were on the same bus. You always went back together.’
‘I got off at an earlier stop,’ I said. ‘She was concussed – she must have been hallucinating.’
‘How do you know she was concussed?’ he pounced. ‘You told me you knew nothing at the time.’
‘Some time later the girls in the office heard she’d had an accident and gone home to her parents,’ I invented.
‘You never told me,’ said Bernard.
‘Why should I?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t important.’
‘She wrote,’ he went on. ‘She wrote me a letter. I never received it.’
‘Oh well – posts are unreliable.’
‘Perhaps,’ he replied, and took off his hearing-aid.
They came, in the evening: the young man and the girl, the small boy, the baby, wheeled in a pram and mercifully asleep, and Teresa in an unfortunate pink dress.
The boy kept running about with his arms outstretched pretending to be an aeroplane – they’d flown out, of course, from Gatwick – and then he started to push a toy car up and down the patio, making engine sounds till I wanted to scream.
Luckily, with such weather, we had drinks outside; though it isn’t my house, I couldn’t have endured the child racing around the rooms.
Bernard offered them all the use of our pool. They had said that the one among the villas was often crowded.
‘Come any time,’ he said, without reference to me. ‘But take care – it’s deep. It’s not safe for Simon unless someone goes in with him.’
They had accepted instantly.
‘I love swimming,’ said Teresa.
What a sight she must look, in her costume, flesh obscenely bulging.
She didn’t talk
much, sitting on the patio with a gin and tonic beside her, but she looked at me now and then with an odd expression. If I hadn’t known it was impossible, I’d have thought her glance expressed pity, but if there was any pity about, it had to be mine, for her.
This morning Bernard was back promptly from the shop, alone, and soon he set off for his walk along the cliff. I had a hair appointment. I have to have it attended to regularly, particularly here, where the sun can affect my rinse. When I returned, Bernard was still out. Sometimes he forgets the time, and I go to meet him. I don’t like lunch to be late.
I went to meet him today.
They were sitting together on the flower-studded sandy ground under a pine tree, holding hands. Bernard and Teresa, for all the world to see: a fat, red-faced woman in a blue skirt and cream-coloured shirt, and a thin old man with a sun-tanned, balding head.
An old man: yes, he looked it.
To reach them, I must walk over a narrow path at the side of a quarried hollow in the hillside. I’d been there before, and refused to go along this track which, at one side, fell away sheer to the beach, and on the other bordered a deep pit, scored with ravines, an occasional shrub clinging to patches of loose soil here and there. Bernard had wanted to show me some rare flowers that grew on the further side.
He’d been showing those flowers to Teresa, I supposed. Couldn’t they see me? They weren’t very far away.
I called out sharply.
‘Bernard! It’s lunch-time.’
They did not stir, and she did not release his hand.
I called again.
‘Come over,’ Teresa said then. ‘Come and look at this fig tree. We think we can see its leaves coming out as we watch.’
At the rim of the ravine, near them, I could see a fig tree, boughs outspread, but what nonsense to think they could watch it unfold. I could not let Teresa know, however, that I was afraid of the narrow path with the drop on each side, and I could not let her go on sitting there, holding my husband’s hand.
There was a longer way round, through the pines, and perhaps they had taken that path themselves, but it would take some minutes to find it and I knew the matter, now, was urgent.
I started along the narrow path. I was still wearing the high-heeled sandals I’d had on to go to the hairdresser’s, and my foot slipped. I fell down into the ravine, bumping and bruising my thin body as I tumbled, clutching at the soft, sandy sides as I tried to halt my fall, but my hands could find no hold.
I must have lost consciousness, for it’s almost dark now. Haven’t they gone for help? I’ve called and called, but at this time of year few people come this way; that was its charm, for Bernard. My voice doesn’t sound very loud, even to myself, and my arm’s all twisted behind me. I can’t move. I can never climb out alone.
Above, outlined against the darkening sky, a fig tree stands at the edge of this pit. I seem to remember seeing two people standing beside it, peering at me, and I see one of them, Bernard, removing his hearing-aid.
He’ll have to tell someone I’m missing, won’t he? Someone will come and save me. Won’t they?
A Woman of Taste
There was trout on the menu. Mrs Finch’s mouth watered and she licked her lips, around which the creases of age had filled with runs of vermilion lipstick. She’d begin with the soup, and follow the trout with veal, which was done in a rich wine sauce. She enquired of the steward what else was in the sauce: it was important, at the start of the cruise, to establish herself as a woman of taste.
After forty years of married life, she knew that Harold would choose the soup and the trout, but he might prefer beef to follow the fish. There were several types of vegetables to accompany the main dish, with French fries and creamed potatoes. Mrs Finch would have chocolate gateau to follow, then biscuits and cheese and fruit – a peach, perhaps – at the end. She waited calmly, her mind composed, her taste buds agreeably anticipating the treats in store, while Harold pored over his half-moon spectacles at the menu, one plump, pigmented hand tapping the table.
The Finches were at the First Officer’s table, which conferred on them a certain status; but in any case, by their demeanour, they would have established themselves as persons of consequence. There were several tables for two in the dining-room, but Harold never asked for one of these when they cruised; he needed an audience for his savoir faire. Mrs Finch was always relieved by his wish for company, for thus she was spared from having to make conversation with him and could concentrate on her meal without distraction. They were experienced cruisers now, and Mrs Finch had her new outfits ready: well-tailored slacks to enclose her heavy thighs; pretty silk shirts and waistcoat tops; uncrushable dresses for the afternoons; and her evening attire – four different long ensembles and two short ones. Harold had his white dinner jacket and several frilled shirts, to be worn with a variety of ties. They had brought a lot of luggage.
Some years ago, Harold Finch had retired from the Civil Service, where he held a good position. He had his index-linked pension, the income from shares he had prudently bought, and the rents of two houses he owned. Mr Finch had always had an acute business sense, sharpened by his experience at the Ministry. He sold the house in Orpington where the Finches’ family had grown up, and had bought a flat in Eastbourne. This was easy to close when they went away.
Before Harold retired, and after the children left home, Mrs Finch had enjoyed some pleasant years. She went to coffee mornings and even held some of her own in aid of causes approved by Harold, and she met her friends at cafes in town. She had attended a course of flower-arranging lectures in the afternoons, and another on dressmaking, but that had been a failure since Harold always went with her to buy her clothes and would not pay for things he had not selected. She couldn’t scrimp enough from the housekeeping to buy fabrics or enjoy even a minor splurge, for Harold always inspected her housekeeping accounts and demanded an exact explanation for any expense, with bills for proof of outlay.
‘Harold’s very good,’ she often told her friends, when she met them wearing, for instance, her new sheepskin coat – she hadn’t wanted one, it was so heavy to wear, but he’d insisted. ‘He likes me to have nice things.’ But he’d never allowed her to learn to drive, though he could have afforded a second car with ease.
Now, in Eastbourne, there were no friends; they’d all been left behind in Orpington and the only companion Mrs Finch had was Harold. He went shopping with her these days, and would insist on brands of goods other than those she had found satisfactory for years. He complained in the butcher’s about meat he declared was tough, though Mrs Finch had found it perfectly tender.
‘It must have been in the cooking,’ she anxiously declared on one occasion, to be smartly rebuked by her husband.
‘Nonsense, Amy. You’ve been cooking pork for forty years. You certainly know how to do it now,’ he informed everyone in the shop.
Mrs Finch’s fat, sagging cheeks had flamed as she paid for her liver and shoulder of lamb.
There were no coffee mornings now, and no friendly classes in this hobby or that. Mrs Finch had suggested that Harold might like to follow some such pursuit of his own, but in a hurt voice he had said that he had looked forward to spending time with her, now that he was at leisure, and had expected her to share this sentiment.
‘Oh, of course, dear, I do,’ Mrs Finch had hastily said. ‘I just thought you might find it dull.’
He was under her feet, as it were, all day. When she wanted to vacuum their lounge, with its new, pale carpeting patterned in darker brown, he was reading the paper there, and making notes to do with his investments. When she went to prepare the lunch in the kitchen, he would come to watch how she scraped the potatoes and rubbed fat into flour to make pastry, and though he defended her cooking in front of the queue at the butcher’s, he criticised it at home. His sudden appearance behind her when she was standing at the sink, or perched on a stool at the table, for her legs often ached and she rested them when she could, would always s
tartle her, lost in some dream as she constantly was. He came to the library, too, and would not let her take out books of a type she enjoyed – romances set in days gone by, for instance – but would suggest biographies instead, about long-dead politicians or generals.
She could no longer watch television in the afternoon; Harold thought the programmes showing then entirely frivolous, unless she could assert that they contained genuine expert advice on improving one’s own home management. They walked on the front every day, even in terrible weather, well wrapped up in their sheepskin coats and each with a fur hat on their heads.
But they went away a lot. Mrs Finch, in her mind, lived from holiday to holiday, as soon as the one was ended beginning to long for the next, like a child unhappy at school counting the days to the end of term, or a prisoner awaiting the end of his sentence. On their cruises, they’d ‘done’ the Canaries, Madeira, and most of the Mediterranean. At other times of the year, they’d packaged themselves and flown to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Delhi. Sometimes Harold talked about going to China, but was uncertain about the food: too much rice made one flatulent, he embarrassingly said to their travel agent, the new one in Eastbourne who was getting to know them so well. Bundled in coaches, they’d seen a great deal of the world, led in pedestrian files by foreign guides around Jerusalem, Valetta, Athens and Rome.
At the Captain’s welcoming party on this first night of the cruise, Mrs Finch would wear her new cornflower-blue chiffon; blue had always brought out the colour of her eyes. Garbed in this expensive dress, the Captain of the SS Sphinx would recognise that she was not just one of your run-of-the-mill passengers but a person of some status, Harold had said as they chose it. She’d enter the ladies’ deck-quoits contest, and play bingo. Harold would calculate how far the ship sailed each day and take part in the tote – a small expense, and justified, for he worked it all out in so studied a manner, keeping records from previous trips and using a calculator, that he often won. Mrs Finch would go to paper-flower-making classes and millinery lessons, and even keep-fit sessions, for these were part of cruise life and so Harold approved of her joining in. He played deck-quoits himself and would take part in quizzes, for he prided himself on his well-stocked mind.
Pieces of Justice Page 10
