by Weldon, Fay
‘So why did you feel obliged to vacuum my house?’ enquired Alexandra.
‘Because at home whenever I am in a crisis, I clean,’ said Vilna, ‘like many women, and because it needed it, and because I am your friend, and you were coming home to more than enough.’
‘Yes, I was,’ said Alexandra. ‘I did. Thank you.’
The two women smiled at one another. Alexandra drank her cocktail with a straw bent in the middle, designed to bypass chunks of pineapple, little flags and maraschino cherries. It was absurd.
‘Where did Abbie find my lace nightie?’ asked Alexandra.
‘Darling, you are so suspicious. You must not let yourself become paranoic. I have no idea. Your cupboard, your drawer?’
‘Under my pillow, I expect. Why did she have to do that? It moves Lucy Lint far too close to Ned. It makes me feel ill.’
‘It was just something loose Abbie could throw over Lucy. Like a cloth you throw over a birdcage to keep its occupant quiet.’
‘I came to thank you both for helping me out. I’m not quite myself at the moment.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Vilna.
‘When you saw the body in the morgue,’ said Alexandra, ‘what did Ned look like? I’ve never seen a dead body either. Is it frightening?’
‘He didn’t look very dead to me. He looked astonished. Death tautens the jaw, like a facelift. It is very flattering. I was sorry, seeing him lying there, I hadn’t said yes. It’s a criminal waste of opportunity, don’t you think, saying no? We’re on this earth for such a little time; we’re cold and dark for so long.’
‘Say no to what? I don’t understand you.’
‘He said he kept the door unlocked when you were away so beautiful women could visit him at night. It was an invitation.’
‘Vilna, it was a joke. Ned talks like that.’
‘He was not my type anyway. And he was married to you. And you are my friend. And the dog would have jumped up. You English and your dogs.’
‘It saves security gates,’ said Alexandra, ‘in the middle of the countryside.’
‘Your husband looks very peaceful in death and younger than in life. Lucy Lint looked at his corpse and screamed.’
‘Lucy Lint saw the body? How do you know?’
‘As Abbie and I left the morgue, Lucy Lint was coming in. We nearly crashed into her. Abbie’s a bad, bad driver. We had to stop. The other car went on. While Abbie was inspecting the damage I heard Lucy Lint scream.’
‘Everyone’s been to see the body except for me? Even LucyLint?’
‘Alexandra,’ said Vilna, ‘you didn’t want to come with us. That was seen as strange.’
‘I was exhausted,’ said Alexandra. ‘I was in suspension. You should have waited until I’d been. I can’t see any point in seeing the corpse, it’s been so picked over. I’d rather remember him alive.’
‘Ned said you would often be very tired. Career women so often are. It is the penalty men pay in return for their wives’ salaries. I have never worked in all my life. I wouldn’t dream of it.’
She clicked her fingers and her mother appeared from nowhere with more drinks. She was wearing pink rubber sandals with very thick stockings. She went away again. Vilna did not speak to her.
‘How does Lucy Lint get to The Cottage? Does she drive or does she walk?’ asked Alexandra, choosing to ignore this last. ’Or perhaps she comes on a broomstick.’
‘She didn’t have her car on Sunday. After I’d hit her and she’d stopped running round and screaming, I had to drive her back. She wouldn’t have been fit to drive anyway. She clung to the door handle; she kept saying it was her house by rights, I had to drag her away. She complained no one was being nice to her. I said you were on your way, in all decency she had to stay away, and I offered her £200 to make sure she did. I thought that was about the right sum. Not too little, not too much. A tip.’
‘You what?’
‘Money’s nothing,’ said Vilna. ‘I felt for you. Women like LucyLint can be dangerous. At home where people are sensible they are found dead in a ditch; knifed. Here you do not use knives, you use money. My mother and I follow the customs of the country. It is advisable. Do you want to see my new crown?’ she asked. She opened her mouth and Alexandra looked inside.
‘Very nice,’ she said, and went to visit Lucy Lint.
7
Lucy Lint’s house was in the old part of town: a row of cottages facing a wide but secluded street, on the other side of it being the high brick wall of Eddon Gurney prison, built 1718, and now Grade One Listed as a building of prime architectural and heritage interest. The prison had been recently taken out of service: the level of absenteeism and suicide amongst its staff had finally impinged upon the authorities; no amount of reorganisation or counselling, it seemed, could ameliorate the terror and fear that oozed out of the old stone walls. But the city council had begun the work of converting the building into a Penitentiary Theme Park, the first of its kind in the land.
Number 42 sat snugly among its similar neighbours: two-storey cottages with thick walls, built to house the prison warders. A plaster front, a porched front door, a large square window to the right, a kitchen out the back, two bedrooms, and a bathroom extension above the kitchen. Out the back door was a little square garden. Once such a dwelling would have housed a man, a wife, an aunt or so and some children. Now it served very well as a love nest for one. Cosy.
There was a parking space outside, but Alexandra left her car a little way down the road. She looked through Lucy Lint’s window but saw no one inside. A rather handsome orange cat sat on the inside sill, next to a well-cared-for pot plant, and stared bleakly at her. Alexandra could see beyond cat and plant into a room which was vaguely arty: orange throws over ethnic wicker chairs, a large table on which were the bits and pieces of work in progress – bits of card, pieces of fabric – an easel; a rug on a polished floor; theatre posters on the walls; photographs everywhere. She could not make out the detail. A zodiac lamp; a deep sofa on which a couple could copulate, just about.
Alexandra rang the front doorbell. No one came. She looked up and down the road. No one. Children were at school, adults at work. These were aspiring little houses; not for those on welfare. Alexandra slipped a credit card between lock and hasp and pushed. It was how she opened the door of her London flat, after the show, after the late-night supper, if she had forgotten her key. Lucy Lint’s door opened. Such a method of entry would never have worked at Vilna’s house. Alexandra went inside. The house smelt of lavender toilet water and scented soap, of paint and glue. There was a sense of desperation in the air, of serenity suddenly shattered: a coat which should have been on a peg fallen on the floor and not picked up; in the small kitchen a bag of shopping left on the floor and still unpacked. Frozen food losing its hardness, going soggy: the opposite of a dead body, which started soggy and went hard. The silence felt temporary, as if recently rent by tears and wails which would at any moment start again.
Alexandra went to the front window, pulled the curtains; switched on the lamp. On the table, open, was a diary. There were few entries: crosses here and there, and question marks. Today’s entry: ‘Bristol, 12–1, Leah.’ Bristol was twenty miles away. It was now five past twelve. Lucy Lint had dropped everything to get to her therapist. She had not taken her address book with her. That was open by the telephone. Alexandra’s address book was crammed and messy. Lucy’s was neat, but there were few entries. Ned’s name wasn’t there, not under L, not under N. Alexandra herself was there, in the A’s. Her London address and telephone number. How had Lucy Lint come by that?
Alexandra looked at the photographs pinned up on the wall. Ned everywhere. Ned at parties at The Cottage, Ned with Diamond in the garden, Ned in the garden putting up the beanstalk pyramids. He did that every year. Who had taken these? Lucy? Lurked behind the hedge and snapped away? Had she stolen them, acquired them from Ned himself? Or entered The Cottage when they were both away and pried into the family photograp
hs? It was horrible to think of that. They locked the house only if it was empty, but anyone who knew the house could break in easily enough. And Lucy Lint seemed to know the house so well. She couldn’t talk to Ned about it She would never be able to ask Ned anything again. The photographs had a curious flatness, as photographs do when they represent the dead, not the living. ‘The dead’ was a strange notion: you could define it only by a negative: someone, something, once alive, now not. A rock wasn’t ‘dead’ – it was just inanimate. Alexandra found she was standing in the centre of Lucy Lint’s living room, in suspension once again, thoughts looping. Whatever her business was here, and she was not yet quite sure what it was, she could not afford to waste time. She did not want to be discovered by Lucy Lint. The orange cat stared at her; slowly got to its four feet, arched its back idly, and walked from the room to sit by the front door. She worried for a moment in case it could talk, but that was absurd. A thought transposed from her thoughts about Diamond. If he could talk, what would he say? It seemed wilful of him not to, as if he wasn’t on her side. But this wasn’t a matter of ‘sides’. Why did she feel under attack? Well, obviously – mad LucyLint. Enough to unsettle anyone, make them worry in case cats talked.
Ned’s books on the shelves; a letter in Ned’s handwriting on the board above the table. Dated two years ago. ‘Dear Lucy – thanks for the Rosmersholm pics. Brilliant as usual. Talk to you soon. In haste, Ned.’ And two crosses for kisses beneath the familiar signature. Well, what was wrong with that? Ned always put two crosses for kisses, for friends. Or was it one? She herself got three. Jesus, was she in competition here?
On the table was a cheque for £200 signed ‘Vilna Mansell’. It lay there as if no attention had been paid to it at all. It was dated last Sunday. Well, someone sometimes told the truth. Vilna too was barking mad, but at least had the excuse of war back home, and saw herself as Alexandra’s friend, to the value of a couple of hundred pounds. She was troubled.
Alexandra stared at the photographs some more. She thought she herself had taken the one of Ned putting up the bean poles. That had been in May. Three months ago. She’d taken the roll to Boots the chemist to be developed. Most people did the same. If Lucy had an arrangement with someone at Boots she could siphon off any number of photos of Ned. Just ask her to look out for them; have another copy made. Alexandra observed that Lucy had burned away her half of a snapshot of the two of them, herself and Ned down at Kimmeridge Bay, where the fossils lurked in the flaky slate cliffs. Abbie had taken that. They’d all gone down in the car. Three years ago. Had they met Lucy Lint and her husband there, accidentally? Shared the contents of the Lints’ thermos of coffee? She seemed to have some such memory. Dave Lint, that was his name. Had Sascha been in that snapshot too? Alexandra thought so. The burn marks ran up the sick of Ned’s sleeve.
All I have here, thought Alexandra, is evidence of a woman obsessed by my husband. A plain, mad, unhappy woman. I should feel sorry for her.
Alexandra went upstairs to Lucy Lint’s tiny bedroom. A white coverlet on the unmade bed; lots of cushions and pillows tossed everywhere, black lace knickers on the floor, trimmed with crimson. Black and crimson – well, she’d worn that too in her time. Vulgar and fun. Just odd for Lucy Lint. But perhaps she lived in hope. Women did. A fossilised ammonite on the wooden mantelpiece. You could find them in the ground round here. They were excavating part of the prison to build their Penitentiary Theme Park. All kinds of things turned up in the disturbed soil. Roman pottery. Stone Age axe heads. Fossils. Presumably once sea had covered the land here; presumably Lucy Lint kept her eyes open. Finding fossils was the kind of thing that Ned approved of.
Still the quiver in the air as if the wails had just stopped. A painting of Ned on the wall: no, not a painting. A kind of montage of scraps of fabric which amounted to a portrait; very much Lucy’s style. A model of a set on the dressing table: on closer inspection a model of Ned and Alexandra’s bedroom. That was shocking. The oak table made in matches; the brass bed contrived in orange sticks and minute slivers of twisted gold paper. A doll’s house mirror where her, Alexandra’s, mirror was. How did Lucy know what her bedroom looked like? Because she’d been to a party at The Cottage in the past? Might even have come to an event or so when Alexandra had been in town? Ned sometimes asked people round? If the spare room was occupied, guests would leave their coats in the master bedroom. Or because when Ned and Alexandra were both away Lucy Lint came in and loitered, and breathed up her beloved’s breath? A fan, a true fan, a devotee, a groupie, a stupid, plain, fat middle-aged woman well beyond her sell-by date, a stalker into sympathetic magic.
Alexandra went into the bathroom and found Ned’s toothbrush in the tooth mug. That is to say it was yellow and had a blue line running through the tufts. When the blue line was no longer visible it was time to buy a new toothbrush. It was barely visible. Perhaps Abbie had thrown it out on the Sunday morning? Perhaps Lucy had then stolen it? Perhaps she welcomed this dreadful intimacy – that she should put in her own mouth what had been in Ned’s?
Alexandra took the toothbrush. She took all the photographs of Ned off the wall. She took the address book and the diary. She let the orange cat out, who stalked away calmly up the road. And she drove home to the unbearable emptiness of The Cottage. She would not have to put up with it for long. Hamish would be arriving mid-afternoon.
There were eight messages on the answerphone. One from the Mail on Sunday, another from The Times asking for help with Ned’s obituary, another from Dr Moebius asking her to return his latest call, one weeping woman too incoherent to identify, one from the florist asking her where exactly The Cottage was, and another one, which Ned had picked up: Ned saying, ‘Is that you, Leah? Hang on a minute, I’ll switch off the bloody answerphone.’ At least she thought he said that. She replayed it. It was an old call. The tape was on its second time around. Trying to find it again, she erased the message by accident. But she thought he’d said that Perhaps he’d said ‘dear’? Soon she would be as mad as Lucy Lint.
Alexandra felt completely excluded, cut out, burned away. Ned’s image was owned by others, as was his voice: it spoke to others, not to her. Even his body, his skull, had been snatched by others. Were they sawing through it at this moment? Did bones leave sawdust behind? Did brains spill out as they did in horror stories? Diamond snuffled round her ankles. She made a fire in the grate. She burned the photographs because Ned’s image had been besmirched by Lucy’s regard. She burned the toothbrush because it might have been in Lucy’s mouth and had become disgusting. She lay it on a firelighter, applied a match, and watched it splutter and flare. She watched Ned disappearing in green and purple and black. But he still didn’t feel gone. If she turned round he’d be smiling at her. Like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, remaining long after the body had gone.
If Lucy had been less sludge-like, had been a prettier, younger, cleverer person, Alexandra would not feel so shop-soiled, so picked over. Lucy was like a garment in a jumble sale: infinitely dreary. Grief should be pure and noble.
There were noises from upstairs. This time it truly was Diamond, on the brass bed again. She went up; heaved him off. Had there been a dog curled up and mutinous in the model in Lucy’s bedroom? She had a feeling there had been, but no longer trusted either her memory or her senses. Everything was virtual. Diamond wasn’t allowed on the bed anyway. She thought perhaps she should tell the police about Lucy Lint’s obsession. Everyone knew these things could be dangerous. But now she, Alexandra, had stolen things from Lucy’s house. Not the photographs, not the toothbrush – they were hers, if anyone’s – but diary and address book. Why had she taken them anyway? She was being dragged into a situation it would be better to ignore. She was exhausted again. She lay down on the brass bed and slept. She was woken by the phone.
8
‘Mummy,’ said Sascha, in his piercing urgent voice, ‘the cat’s got kittens. I have to go.’ He went. Irene took the phone.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘
I hope you’re not too upset. Men will be men; that is to say, babies.’
‘Why should I be upset?’ asked Alexandra. ‘In particular? Apart from being widowed; all that?’
‘You have heard of the Doctrine of Parsimony?’ asked Irene.
‘No,’ said Alexandra. ‘Couldn’t we talk about the cat having kittens? How many?’
‘Eight,’ said Irene. ‘But where did I go wrong in your education?’
‘You sent me to stage school,’ said Alexandra.
‘The Doctrine of Parsimony is a version of Occam’s razor,’ said Irene, who had been to Cheltenham Ladies’ College in its severe prime and then to Oxford. ‘Both suggest that the simplest solution is likely to be the true one; or the most useful. If, as you say, there is a mad woman roaming the edges of Ned’s life –’
‘His death –’ said Alexandra.
‘– it is likely that Ned gave her some encouragement. Think of Fatal Attraction.’
‘But she’s so fat and horrid,’ said Alexandra.
‘You mean why should Ned be interested in her while he had you?’
‘Exactly,’ said Alexandra. ‘Besides, we loved each other. He wouldn’t do anything like that. He had a great integrity. He didn’t cheapen himself, ever.’
‘That’s as may be, but you’ve been away an awful lot,’ said Irene. ‘Men don’t like it. If the wife leaves an empty bed a husband’s first impulse is to fill it.’
‘I’ve been working,’ said Alexandra. ‘What was I supposed to do? It’s not my fault if I’ve had to earn. Ned got me the part in the first place. Do you think I’ve liked being away from home? We couldn’t even have Sascha’s fourth birthday on the proper day because I had a matinee. And the poor little boy hated coming up to London at weekends. He missed all his friends’ parties, but what could we do? And then Ned died on the dining-room floor, just fell down and died, and I wasn’t even there.’ She cried.
‘Stop blubbing,’ said Irene, who’d always wanted to go on the stage but had been thwarted, or so she said, by an early marriage and Alexandra’s birth. ‘You owe it to your public not to blubber. You’ll spoil your looks. And it upsets me. I feel so helpless. I don’t like leaving you alone. Likewise, I don’t want to bring Sascha back to The Cottage, into such an unhappy house as it must be at the moment.’
