He looked at her, her face thin now and showing lines around the mouth and eyes; he felt her tense, wiry body pressed against him. He loved her, yes: of course he did, but not enough, now, to interrupt the even pattern of his life, his peaceful time at home, where Marjorie saw that things ran smoothly and still welcomed him into her body with easy familiarity, though Philippa of course did not know this. She assumed, and he had let her, that Marjorie was bored with that side of life.
Of course Philippa made love with Derek too: it was a fact of life, Hugh knew, and something separate from their infrequent secret meetings which made him feel quite youthful. He could give them up, however. The truth was that he loved both women, but one of them was expendable.
‘Let’s rest it for a while,’ he said. ‘If we aren’t meeting, the letter-writer will give up. Who do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps someone recognised us somewhere.’
‘Or saw you on the train once, followed you out of curiosity – spotted your car that time we went to Oxford when I had that meeting.’
It could have happened anywhere; the surprising thing was that they had not been found out before.
Reluctantly, she consented to an interval with no meetings, at least until after the wedding, and even promised not to ring the office. She did this sometimes, using a code they both understood, pretending that she was speaking from a graphics firm he used.
‘It might be someone in your office,’ she suggested.
‘Wouldn’t they write to Marjorie, not Derek?’ he said. ‘How would they trace you?’
It was logical.
But in spite of their separation, Derek received two more letters, both postmarked London, Philippa told Hugh on the telephone, breaking their agreement. And finally, tired of the pretence, and angry, she had told Derek that the allegations were true, though she had protected his identity.
Derek had left her. There had been a dreadful row. Appalling things were said. Articles were thrown and china broken.
‘I’m not sorry,’ Philippa declared. ‘I’m glad it’s in the open.’
Hugh had told her that Derek would cool down and return, but she did not want this reassurance.
‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘He’s too proud, and I don’t want him back.’
Soon after this Derek had told her he had found someone else whom he wished to marry, and he wanted a divorce.
‘You don’t expect me to be celibate, do you?’ he had demanded in a hostile interview on the terrace at their Surrey house, the swimming-pool translucent blue beyond them.
She was young, his woman: someone he had met through work, she learned later, and Hugh, hearing about it, suspected that the affair was not a new romance. Derek obtained his divorce on the grounds of Philippa’s admitted adultery with an unnamed individual, and remarried. He was compelled to make provision for Philippa but it was the minimum the law decreed. Her settlement included the seaside house, which she thought she would be forced to sell.
‘Letting it could bring you in a useful income,’ Derek had remarked, beneficently.
Meanwhile, in a rented flat in Pimlico, Philippa worked in the gift department of a big store while awaiting Hugh’s summons, but the time passed and it never came. He would not take her telephone calls, and he did not answer the letters which, in desperation, she wrote to him at home, not caring if in their married intimacy Marjorie should read them.
They met eventually. At last she visited his house and Hugh found her there with Marjorie. They were drinking tea, or Marjorie was. She looked calm, while Philippa had been crying.
‘You remember Philippa, don’t you, Hugh?’ said Marjorie. ‘She has had an interesting story to tell me. Would you like some tea?’
Hugh’s stomach did a somersault. ‘Of course I know Philippa,’ he said.
‘She tells me that you and she are lovers,’ Marjorie remarked. She began pouring tea into a spare cup for Hugh.
Hugh looked from one woman to the other.
‘It isn’t true,’ he said. ‘Her husband left her, I believe. Perhaps it’s made her fanciful.’
‘Do I hear a cock crowing?’ Marjorie enquired, head on one side.
‘There are no cocks near here.’ Hugh did not understand.
‘I know you wrote the letters, Marjorie,’ said Philippa, jumping to her feet and glaring down at the other woman who sat, plump and placid, very middle-aged, her waved hair flecked with grey. ‘You found out and wanted to break us up. You thought if Derek knew, it would spoil things – and it did.’ Her voice trailed off into more tears. She was no match for the confident older woman whom she had enjoyed deceiving all this time, mocking her in her mind, deriding her, yet who was the victor now?
‘What letters?’ asked Marjorie.
‘Don’t insult me with such a question,’ stormed Philippa. ‘You knew Hugh was weak, of course. He wouldn’t risk the scandal. I’ve found that out too late. A whole lifetime too late.’
She looked across at Hugh, and as they exchanged glances, Marjorie saw that once there had been love between them. Misery, dismay, and fear showed now, and Hugh was the first to drop his gaze.
‘You’re contemptible,’ Philippa found the courage to tell him, and hurried from the room.
‘Go after her,’ Marjorie urged him.
‘It’s best to let her go,’ he said. ‘It’s over. She’ll calm down.’
‘Don’t you owe her something, after all these years?’
‘What can I say to her? There’s nothing left,’ he said, but he went slowly to the door and was in time to see Philippa start her small car and race off in a flurry of gravel.
She reached the gate safely, but in the road outside the big Edwardian house she took the first corner too fast and could not avoid an oncoming bus. Or that was what the police thought had happened. The driver said she drove straight at him.
She was in hospital for months, her face badly cut and permanently scarred despite many operations. Both legs were broken, and an arm, and several ribs, and she had a fractured skull. When she recovered, as much as she ever did, she lived in the seaside house, almost a recluse, disfigured and with one leg shorter than the other, lame forever and a mental cripple until eventually she had to go into a nursing home.
I made her an allowance. Marjorie insisted, for it was all my fault, and my punishment was to remember that every subsequent day of my life.
‘I knew about it, Hugh,’ Marjorie told me. ‘I’d known all the time. But I didn’t write the letters. I made myself content with what I had in life, which was a great deal, as well as your companionship and most of your loyalty. She was your small excitement, and, in a way, I understood. And I remember Derek. He was a selfish, insensitive man, while you are gentle. She deserved some joy.’
Philippa died today. I used to visit her each fortnight, though towards the end she did not know who I was. She was, in the end, relieved of pain and mental anguish by drugs, and I could not bear to see her reduced to such a pitiful piece of wreckage. I snuffed out her life easily enough, with a pillow over her face. She did not struggle, and I left her, tidiness restored, apparently asleep, but the nurses will discover what I did, for they thought that she would live for years. I came here to try to make sense of it all, face my guilt, decide what must be done, and I’ve concluded that this is not the place for my resolution.
I shall drive inland and stop at a well-known local beauty spot overlooking a spectacular ravine, where a waterfall gushes over rocks forty feet below a viewing point. There has been a lot of rain here in recent weeks, and there will be plenty of water pouring down the mountain. To aid my apparently accidental fall, I may have to break the wooden safety barrier. This may get some official into trouble for neglect, but I do not wish my family to endure the opprobrium of my suicide: as I shall leave no letter, an open verdict of vertigo, even a heart attack, which, if my body is pounded by the rocks, as it will be, obliterating any chance of survival, may not be detectable. An eye for a
n eye and a tooth for a tooth: a life for a life. I destroyed Philippa long before her death.
I have left a clue for Marjorie. Among my papers she will find an envelope containing words cut out from newspapers, trial efforts at the letters I wrote and sent anonymously when I wanted to extricate myself from my entanglement and sought to do it so despicably. She will understand.
Widow’s Might
Mrs Watson watched as the gardener, high on a ladder, lopped the branches of the tall palm in the hotel garden. Heavy trusses of berries fell to the ground, and the trunk of the tree bore smooth white spherical scars where he made his cuts. So death came, chopping down those who had lived too long or who had flirted with danger, or were doomed.
She sat in a comfortable chair in the shade of a pomegranate, a book on her knee. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the red hibiscus and the blue flowers of a plumbago which sprawled on a trellis beside the steps leading to the terrace. Though it was November, the island, warmed by the Gulf Stream, was never cold and seldom uncomfortably hot. Its jagged coastline bore a rash of large hotels, but Mrs Watson’s, one of the oldest, was also the most expensive and the most luxurious. Here, the ratio of staff to clients was almost one to one and, lapped in care, the pampered guests felt worries, aches and pains slip away, forgotten.
Mrs Watson and her husband had first visited the island when on a cruise. Their liner had steamed in at daybreak and they had spent an interesting day, visiting the cathedral and driving into the country in a taxi. They had passed banana plantations, waterfalls, and reached mountain areas where the air was fresh, and they had had tea at this hotel where now she sat alone. Her husband had approved it as a suitable place for them to visit in the future: only there had been no future for Mr Watson for that very night, en route to Gibraltar, he had had a heart attack in their cabin on ‘A’ deck and had died within minutes. Mrs Watson and the coffin had flown home to a well-attended funeral at the local crematorium where representatives of the many organisations with which the deceased had been connected, diluted with members of his staff and several workmen from the current sites he was developing, made up the congregation. There were no children of their union, no son to lead her to her pew, and Mrs Watson proudly walked alone.
Mr Watson had been a property developer, and by the terms of his will, so long as the business prospered, she was well provided for: however, now it was in the hands of his partner. They had amalgamated when both were competing for a particularly desirable site in the centre of a new town: a Dutch auction over it had seemed pointless at the time, and, since then, the two had worked well together. Now the partner was obliged to pay Mrs Watson a large portion annually of his profits. This was satisfactory for several years, until the partner spread himself too far, the banks called in their loans, and the business fell apart.
Mrs Watson was only forty-five years old when she became a widow. She was still trim and shapely, her hair burnished gold, rinsed regularly by Sandra at Bandbox Coiffures, and her complexion smooth. She found life hard alone, for Mr Watson, fifteen years older than she, had cherished her all the twenty-five years of their life together. She had worked in his office as a bookkeeper: she was good at figures, and very pretty, and had soon attracted the attention of the rising Mr Watson, who was looking about for a suitable wife, something he had been too busy to do sooner, for what was the point of amassing a fortune if you had no one to spend it on?
Mrs Watson, then Madge Fraser, had grown up in a semidetached villa in Luton, where her father was a bank clerk and her mother devotedly kept house, running up frocks for Madge on her Singer machine and cooking nourishing meals, in between keeping the house spotless. In those days women were not expected to strive on all fronts as mothers, wives and wage-earners, and couples who found themselves incompatible or bored with one another usually stayed together in conditions of civilised truce until or unless one of them was tempted away by a new love. However, Madge’s parents were fond of each other and of their only child, pinning their ambitions and hopes on her, and when she married her boss, just as happened in the magazines her mother read, their joy and pride were boundless.
Madge went to live in Bletchley, in a new four-bedroomed house with two bathrooms, a study and a utility room as well as a large lounge and dining-room. It stood in nearly an acre of garden, all laid out and planted by a nursery-man. Like her mother, Madge cleaned and baked, and in her spare time did gros point as there was no daughter to sew for or take to dancing-class, nor was there an economical reason to dress-make for herself. She went to flower-arranging classes and art lessons to fill up her time, and gradually she became a gardener, rearranging what the nursery-man had planned and devising new corners and grottoes. She joined a gardening club and went with them on excursions to stately homes where she secretly broke off shoots of plants to propagate through cuttings, building up a remarkable collection of shrubs unique in their neighbourhood. Mr Watson was proud of her green fingers and had no notion as to the true source of her acquisitions.
After Madge’s father died, her mother stayed on in the house in Luton, but she accompanied the Watsons on their holidays, staying in hotels in Spain and villas in Greece, which she found rather hot. Eventually she expired peacefully in her sleep after a bout of flu, giving in death no more trouble than she had given in life and leaving Madge her worldly possessions, the house now free of its mortgage and her few pieces of jewellery.
Madge sold up and used the money to open a florist’s shop which she named Rosa’s, where she installed as assistant a woman she met in her flower-arranging class. Mr Watson was amused at the venture and pleased with its success. ‘Madge’s toy,’ he called it, ‘her baby, seeing as we’ve none of our own.’ The enterprise flourished and she opened a second shop in another district, then a third. Her foraging trips to alien gardens grew fewer as the business absorbed her surplus energy and her administrative skills. By the time of Mr Watson’s demise she was prospering in her own right, so that when his partner went officially bankrupt – though in fact he had siphoned away considerable funds in the name of his wife and daughter, enough to enable him to start up again when his debts were written off – she was able to maintain her customary standard of living. She continued to reside at Greenways, which property alone was now worth a considerable sum, enough to fund a comfortable life for Madge if her florist shops failed. But they did not: they expanded and throve as Madge took on able managers to whom she paid bonuses on turnover.
But she did not enjoy being a widow.
It was not simply that she missed the comfort of Mr Watson’s protection, his big warm body, his interest and his pampering: it was the rest of the condition that irked. She was unpartnered now, half of what had been a whole, an outcast in paired society. When travelling, her single state seemed as if it was a crime. People shunned her. Except in the best hotels, she was given an inferior room and at far higher cost than the rate for one half of a couple. Her table in the dining-room would be near a service door or in a draught, and the wine waiter would ignore her, although she always ordered a half bottle of the best local wine available. Sometimes she would be served rapidly, course following upon course so that she could be removed swiftly from the scene; at other times she would be neglected. Mrs Watson never returned to hotels which treated her in this manner, but here nothing was too much trouble: she was tended ceremoniously.
Here, it was the guests to whom she seemed invisible, and Mrs Watson knew the reason: it was fear. The women were warned of the isolation that would be theirs when they became widows themselves, as statistically was quite probable, and the men were reminded of their own mortality.
When she was younger, Mrs Watson had posed a different threat, though at the time she had been unaware of it because it had never occurred to her to embark on any sort of affair; with hindsight, now, she recognised that she had been still pretty, even desirable, when she began to travel alone. At home she had been pursued, to her naïve surprise, by one of her husband’
s cronies, an untimely widower, but she had soon made her lack of interest plain. She needed no meal ticket for her security, and her energies were directed towards her own business and her garden, where an aged man helped her to keep down the weeds and cut the grass.
She observed the couples who came and went during her visits to various luxurious hotels, and she wondered which would still be together the following year, which parted either by death or by divorce. Because the hotels were expensive, most of the couples she encountered were older guests whose families had grown and flown, but sometimes there were honeymooners, shyly young among their elders and benignly smiled upon, and there were other couples, obviously paired without the formality of a marriage certificate.
Mrs Watson watched an elderly man and his wife cross the lawn and stiffly mount the stairs that led from the garden to the wide verandah where teas were served. The man carried his wife’s knitting in its floral bag: Mrs Watson had observed her turning the heel of a warm olive-green sock; her own mother had knitted socks like that when Mrs Watson was herself a schoolgirl, during the war. Her father, myopic and flat-footed, had been spared the call-up but he was an Air Raid Warden and her mother was a member of a knitting-party. Mrs Watson had not realised that people still wore hand-knitted socks. She wondered what work, if any, the husband had done – he was long past retiring age. With them were their son – unmistakable because so like the mother – and a daughter-in-law, a pale, elegant woman who had about her an air of confident distinction. Breeding, thought Mrs Watson, breaking off a spur of the red hibiscus which, if it took, would replace one she had lost in a recent severe winter; breeding gave you that air of quiet arrogance, but would it be of help if your husband was struck down prematurely and you were left alone? Who, then, would open doors for you, carry hand luggage, park the car after dropping you at the door of wherever you were going, complain if a room was unsuitable or the service bad? She would not be left penniless, that elegant woman; there would be insurance if not family wealth, but that was not the only provision she would require.
Pieces of Justice Page 22
