Pieces of Justice

by Margaret Yorke

  She piled the crockery into the dishwasher. She would turn it on in the morning after breakfast, before the taxi arrived to take her to the airport from which she was due to fly to join her cruise. She made coffee and poured out the last of the champagne to drink while she watched her play.

  In the warm luxurious room, Mrs Frobisher sat in her deep armchair and gazed at the screen while her hero, captured by terrorists planning to kill him, sought to evade what seemed an inevitable fate. The camera cut to his wife (middle-aged and careworn) and his mistress (young and curvaceous). The background was Spanish, the countryside burnt brown, baking in shimmering heat. Shots of a bullfight were briefly, irrelevantly, shown.

  Mrs Frobisher’s hero, bound and gagged, watched water entering his prison cell in the dungeon of an old castle. It lapped about his feet. The terrorists, on the ramparts, watched for the helicopter that would take them to safety.

  The telephone rang in Mrs Frobisher’s hall.

  The sound startled her. She received few calls apart from an occasional message from the porter.

  Could it be the shipping line? They had her number in case, as the booking clerk had explained, there were last-minute changes of plan, alterations to flights due to weather or other conditions.

  She had better answer. She’d be quick, missing only moments of the play’s approaching denouement.

  She brusquely gave her own number, and added, ‘Mrs Frobisher speaking.’

  ‘Mavis – at last! I’ve had such a trouble to find you,’ a female voice said. ‘It’s Beatrice. I’ve only just heard you’d got married. I’m so sorry to hear you’ve lost your husband.’

  ‘Beatrice!’ Mrs Frobisher echoed.

  ‘Yes. I traced you through the nursing agency,’ the voice of her younger sister declared.

  Mrs Frobisher was too shocked to answer. From the living-room came the sound of gunfire and the clattering noise of helicopter blades. Mrs Frobisher replaced the telephone receiver, ignoring the voice that continued to speak, and returned to the living-room. She poured herself out a small brandy and was sipping it when the telephone started to ring again.

  Mrs Frobisher sat watching the screen, letting it ring. The blood pounded in her temples. She had not heard from Beatrice for years. Her sister had married young and had four children – she lived in Wales with her farmer husband. What had happened to make Beatrice seek her out?

  She wanted money, Mrs Frobisher thought. She must have discovered that Matthew had been a rich man.

  Mrs Frobisher gazed at the screen, pouring a second brandy. While she was out of the room, her hero had somehow freed himself from his bonds and was now driving a car across a desert while shots were fired at him from a helicopter overhead.

  The telephone went on ringing.

  Mrs Frobisher rose, went into the hall, and took the receiver off the hook. Her hero, now wounded, was staggering on foot across a small river when she returned to her seat. On the far bank, his mistress was waiting, holding a chestnut horse by the bridle. The camera cut to the helicopter from which guns protruded.

  Beatrice had always been a nuisance. She’d been cleverer than Mavis – and prettier, too, with boys hanging about her since she was fourteen. She’d got herself pregnant and had to get married, but hadn’t seemed to mind the loss of her chances for betterment. Beatrice, who had not wanted one, had been assured of a university place, while Mavis, who sought advancement, had struggled to pass her nursing exams. She’d crossed swords more than once with ward sisters. Private nursing had been a haven, for she’d soon discovered which patients would pay with gifts for extra attention and which would accept good care as merely their right, so that it was not worth taking trouble for them.

  Beatrice, getting in touch with her like this, must want something. It could only be money, for what else had Mavis that Beatrice might envy?

  The hero, on her screen, struggled out of the river towards the outstretched hand of his mistress. Guns in the helicopter fired, and at that moment the screen flickered and went black.

  It was not a power failure. The soft light from the table lamp beside Mrs Frobisher’s chair burnt on. She rose and pressed various buttons on the set. She hit it and swore, but it remained dark.

  The play had ten more minutes to run. Her hero was far from safe. She felt sure that in the end he would escape, but would his mistress survive, too, and how? Were the terrorists caught? The interruption, at such a tense time in the story, enraged Mrs Frobisher. It was Beatrice’s fault – if she hadn’t telephoned, the set would not have gone wrong. All their lives, Beatrice had frustrated her sister and taken what was Mavis’s due – her looks, her ability to do well at school, the attention, before he died, of their father. And now she had spoiled the perfection of Mrs Frobisher’s special evening.

  Mavis stood in front of the television set shaking her fists. Her face went red. The pounding continued inside her head.

  As the picture, after a short break due to a transmitter fault, returned to her set, Mrs Frobisher was unable to see it, for she lay unconscious on the floor.

  She lay there all night.

  In the morning, the taxi that was to take her to the airport arrived. When the hall porter telephoned to tell her and there was no reply, he came up himself to knock at her door. In the end, he opened it with his master key.

  Mrs Frobisher’s blood pressure, never tested, had, unknown to her, long been high. She had eaten and drunk too well in her year as a widow, and rage and frustration had caused it to soar, bringing on a stroke.

  Her eyes opened as she was lifted to a stretcher. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. She tried to sit up, but she could not move.

  Two days later, Beatrice came to the hospital where Mrs Frobisher, unable to ask for private attention, lay in a public ward. Though it was years since they had met, Mrs Frobisher recognised her at once, despite greying hair and a red weatherbeaten complexion. There was that something about her – an aura. Mrs Frobisher knew the word as she stared at the hated face. It was joy. Beatrice was a happy woman.

  ‘Poor Mavis. How terribly sad,’ Beatrice said, taking Mrs Frobisher’s unresponsive hand which lay neatly on top of the sheet, convenient for the nurse who would take her pulse. ‘No wonder you couldn’t answer the telephone after we were cut off. If only I’d realised, you’d have been found much sooner. Fancy the television still on in the morning, making a terrible noise. But don’t worry. I’ll see that you’re taken care of. I was trying to find you to tell you that Hugh—my eldest son—that his wife has had twins. You’re a great-aunt, Mavis. Isn’t that nice?’ She squeezed Mavis’s hand. ‘I’m sure you can understand what I’m saying,’ her voice went on. ‘We’ve been out of touch too long. Families should stick together. You were hard to trace. You’re moved about a lot since you did your training.’

  Mavis’s eyes looked up at the ceiling. She heard and understood every word, but she could not reply.

  ‘Still, you’re not short of money, are you? The doctor thinks you have a good chance of getting much better, but you’ll always need looking after. I’ll take you home with me when you can travel.’ Again, Beatrice patted the motionless hand. ‘I’m your next-of-kin, after all.’

  The Mouse Will Play

  Mrs Bellew surveyed her neighbours through the large picture window of her living-room at Number 17 Windsor Crescent. Across the road, the fair young man with the beard was getting into his Sierra, briefcase already placed in the rear. Two small children and their mother watched him leave, all waving. Up and down the street, other morning rituals were taking place. Some husbands sprang into their cars and drove away without a visible farewell; at several houses both partners – you could not be certain they were married nowadays – left home daily. Soon The Crescent would settle into its weekday mode as the children left for school, the younger ones with their mothers, others alone, a few in groups. Then the toddlers would come out to play – a few, to Mrs Bellew’s horror, in the street. Mrs Bellew
’s own son had never played in the street.

  She was, as far as she could tell, the only senior resident on the estate, and she had been accustomed to a very different life.

  Mrs Bellew’s husband had died a year ago, suddenly, of a heart attack while in Singapore on business. Until then, hers had been a busy, fulfilling existence, acting as his hostess as his own business expanded. Frequently, guests who were in fact his customers were entertained at Springhill Lodge to dinner, or even for an entire weekend, with a round of golf or a swim in the Bellews’ kidney-shaped azure pool. Deals were mooted and concluded around the Bellews’ mahogany dining-table while Mrs Bellew and the visiting wife chatted of this and that in the drawing-room and the hired Cordon Bleu cook cleared up in the kitchen. Mrs Bellew planned the menus but never prepared them.

  Occasionally, in her turn, Mrs Bellew travelled abroad with Sam and was, herself, entertained, but not on that last journey.

  And now it had ended, with Sam heavily in debt.

  After his death their son had decided that his mother must be resettled in a small, easy-to-manage house on a bus route and within walking distance of a general store, for she would not be able to afford a car. Thus it was that she had been uprooted from her large house with its two acres of garden in Surrey and despatched to this commuter village where she knew no one.

  She could catch the train to London easily, her son had pointed out, to visit him and her grandchildren, and it was not far from his own weekend cottage in the Cotswolds.

  Mrs Bellew would have agreed that the distance was not great if she could have been whisked there in Sam’s Rover, or even in her own Polo, but there was no way of getting to Fettingham from Windsor Crescent by public transport without two changes of bus involving a long wait between them, so she stayed away. Giles had said he would often fetch her for a visit, and this had happened once, but Mrs Bellew had not enjoyed the weekend spent in the damp stone cottage which Giles and his wife were renovating. While they spent their time decorating or in the pub, Mrs Bellew was expected to mind the children and to cook the lunch. Chilled and miserable, Mrs Bellew was thankful to return to 17 Windsor Crescent, with its central heating.

  But her days were long and solitary. She kept to a routine of housework, as she had done throughout her life before she had anyone to help her with it, but she could not dust and polish all day long. Meals were dull. She missed not Sam so much as what went with him – the bustle of his life and its purpose, as well as the comforts she had now grown used to, which his money bought; and she felt bitter anger at his failure to leave her properly provided for. Now she was no one, just an elderly woman living in a modern house – one of the smallest on the estate – among other anonymous houses in an area where there was no sense of community. Mrs Bellew did not require the services of meals on wheels or the old people’s day centre. It did not occur to her that she could have usefully lent her aid and experience to either of these organisations.

  When Sam died, the deal that he had been negotiating had been intended to put his business back in profit, but meanwhile his credit was extended, funds borrowed and despatched, like Antonio’s argosies, to earn reward, and like those, some were lost. He had pledged his main insurance on this last project.

  ‘You’ve got to face it, Mother. Father was a speculator and his gamble came unstuck,’ Giles had told her sternly. ‘If he hadn’t died, he’d have been in serious trouble.’ It had taken all Giles’s own considerable ingenuity to rescue what he had from the collapse of his father’s ventures, and he had been unable to spare his mother the discovery that the old man had died as he had lived, dangerously, in bed with a young Chinese woman.

  Now, nothing broke the monotony of Mrs Bellew’s days. No Sam, red-faced and cheerful, returned with tales of successfully concluded deals.

  How many of such stories had been lies? Like his protests that he missed her when he went abroad?

  These thoughts were unendurable. Mrs Bellew would not entertain them and instead she concentrated on her neighbours. Which of them, superficially so self-satisfied and smug, with their rising incomes and, in many cases, their second car and salary, were living lies?

  Wondering about them, Mrs Bellew began to notice things. There was the dark blue Audi which left Number 32 each morning at half-past seven and was sometimes absent for several days at a time. One day she saw the owner, a man in his late thirties, carrying an overnight bag to the car. Like Sam’s, his job obviously involved travel. She watched the house while he was gone and saw a green Porsche parked outside it until very late at night. Mrs Bellew soon identified the driver, a young man with fair curly hair.

  The cat’s away, she thought, and that mouse is playing.

  She noticed other things: an impatient, angry mother cuffing her small son about the head as they walked along the road bound for the nursery school; older children on roller-skates who swung on trees that overhung the pavement, breaking branches and skating off, giggling, before they were discovered. She began to keep a record, writing down the habits of her neighbours in a notebook. She knew no one’s name, but within the compass of her vision from her window she observed which wife was visited by her mother every Tuesday; who was called on by a man in a Triumph Spitfire every Wednesday afternoon; who cleaned and polished – such women were seen in pinafores cleaning windows – and who employed someone to help them. She recognised her neighbours in the supermarket in the local town and saw how they laid out their money: who bought frozen food in bulk; who spent vast sums on pet food; who was frugal. Walking along the street on winter afternoons, she could see through the large lighted windows into rooms where women spent hours eating chocolates and watching television.

  Some of them had secrets, and she began to learn them.

  Mrs Bellew prepared the letters carefully, cutting the words from a magazine and pasting them on to plain sheets of Basildon Bond. She planned every operation with the same meticulousness that had made her dinner parties so successful, choosing each victim when she was confident of her facts, and finding out their names from the voters’ list.

  She wrote to the social security office about the child she saw cuffed in the street, and soon had the satisfaction of seeing an official-looking woman calling at the house. Later the child’s mother went away. The window-cleaner – almost her only contact apart from the postman and the milkman – told her that the father, left alone with the child and a job to do, could not cope and the small boy had been taken into care.

  ‘A shame, I call it,’ said the window-cleaner. ‘Been knocking the kid about, it seems – the mother had. Girls don’t know they’re born, these days. But I don’t know – poor little lad. It makes you think.’

  Mrs Bellew agreed that indeed it did. She was surprised at the outcome of her intervention; still, the boy would be looked after now.

  She did not fear discovery; the recipients of her letters would not broadcast their own guilt. On trips to London, which were cheap because she used her old person’s rail card though she did not like to think that she looked old, Mrs Bellew mailed her serpent missives. Then she would indulge herself in tea at Harrods before catching her train home. She would prepare the next offensive whilst awaiting the outcome of the last.

  One Wednesday, the husband of the woman visited by the Triumph Spitfire driver came home unexpectedly. He caught his wife in flagrante with the young man from the estate agent’s who had sold the house to them, and went straight round to see the young man’s wife who had also been ignorant of what was going on. Eventually, both couples separated. Four school-age children were involved, two in each family.

  Mrs Bellew soon had the interest of watching new neighbours move into Number 25.

  The window-cleaner expressed dismay that there had been so much unhappiness on the estate lately. He’d heard that Mrs Fisher’s mother, who came to see her daughter every Tuesday, had been asked by her son-in-law to restrict her visits because it was time Mary Fisher pulled herself together and stood o
n her own feet after her fourth miscarriage. She ought to get a job, her husband had told her, and stop brooding. She’d told the window-cleaner all about it when he went round and found her weeping bitterly.

  Mrs Bellew was surprised to hear about the miscarriages. Her letter to Mr Fisher had mentioned his wife’s childlike dependency on her mother and suggested she was idle. To the window-cleaner, she opined that sitting about indulging in self-pity was not constructive.

  Mrs Bellew went on a summer visit to her son and his family in their cottage. This began as a better experience than the last; she sat in a deckchair for an hour reading Good Housekeeping, but was expected to cook the Sunday lunch while her son and his wife met their friends, fellow weekenders, in the local pub. The children were delighted as their grandmother had been left a leg of lamb to roast; on other Sundays a precooked pie, bought from the local butcher, was their lot. It was a grandmother’s pleasure to cherish her family, Giles’s wife stated firmly; her own mother liked nothing better than to cook for any number.

  ‘Get her to do it, then,’ said Mrs Bellew, demanding to be taken home early.

  She was in time to see an ambulance drawn up outside the Fishers’ house, but she did not learn what had happened until the next visit of the window-cleaner. He told her without any prompting.

  Mrs Fisher had tried to kill herself. She had swallowed various pills, drunk a lot of sherry, and gone to bed with a plastic bag over her head. Woozy with the sherry and the drugs, she had used a bag already perforated for safety and so she had survived, though she was deeply unconscious when discovered by her next-door neighbour. Mary’s mother had known that Tim Fisher, an enthusiastic golfer, was playing a double round that day. Unable to reach her daughter on the telephone, she called the neighbour. Tim had come back from the golf course grumbling about neurotic women.

  There was a satisfactory amount of coming and going to please Mrs Bellew for several days after this. She knew that Tim Fisher would never show her original letter to a soul, and she did not make the mistake of following it with a second. She had a new target lined up in her sights now.