The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  He was squeezing. But not Maisie. This time he was squeezing the bedhead. And his daughter, her big head lolling across his chest, was fast asleep.

  Down below, the front door opened and then closed quietly. Henry loosened his fingers from his daughter’s shoulder, tucked her under her duvet and, walking lightly on the balls of his feet, moved with a new precision on to the darkened landing. He smiled to himself at the head of the stairs. Not long now. Not long.

  14

  ‘Donald is desperately ill!’ was the first thing she said, as he met her in the hall. As soon as she had announced this fact, she pushed past him roughly, on her way to the kitchen. This wasn’t as bad, Henry thought, as post-therapy hostility. It was more like plain, straightforward dislike. He felt able to deal with this. One just had to be manly about it.

  It was a shame. Strangling really needed a more co-operative partner than Elinor. One of those kittenish creatures he remembered from the films of his childhood in the fifties, clad in waist-high, baby-doll nightdresses, women who seemed to enjoy nothing more than lying back among the yellow nylon sheets and allowing themselves to be strangled.

  It was feminism that was to blame. Nowadays women carried everything short of CS gas; all of them – at least, all of the women Elinor knew – were fairly well up on the martial arts. He followed her through to the kitchen where, as far as he could see, she was still in operatic mode.

  ‘Desperately, desperately ill!’ she said, over her shoulder, then swooped down to the dishwasher, picked up a handful of plates, and marched off towards a cupboard. As she marched she threw remarks over her shoulder, as if in some climactic race with a large orchestra. ‘He is in a very critical state, Henry. He is in the throes of this awful thing, can’t you see?’ Then – ‘Chest pains! Dry skin! Pulse slow! Headache!’ and finally, ‘Poor, poor Donald!’

  Well, it was his own fault, thought Henry. If he would go around pinching other people’s food! If only he had managed to force down a little more dynercaprol and potassium chloride! Elinor turned to him.

  ‘We’ve called in Roger From the Practice!’

  Roger From the Practice, eh? thought Henry. Well, that should finish him off in no time.

  ‘Poor old Donald!’ he said, limply.

  ‘I don’t think you care about Donald!’ she said, pushing off from the cupboard, like someone striking out in a swimming bath.

  Henry felt this was unfair. He liked Donald a great deal; and the prospect of the man’s imminent death did nothing to dispel this feeling, since he was the person directly responsible for this state of affairs. Well, perhaps not directly responsible. This business of being responsible for people had to stop somewhere, didn’t it? All Henry had done was poison a chicken which the berk had then insisted on eating. There was no way this made Henry ‘directly responsible’ was there? We had, thought Henry, gone beyond such primitive notions of morality.

  ‘You don’t care about anyone! You don’t care about anyone but yourself and your narrow little world.’

  ‘Well, what do you care for?’ said Henry.

  Elinor thrust her square jaw at him. ‘Art!’ she said, ‘Feelings! People! The world around me!’

  She didn’t, of course, thought Henry, mean the world around her. The world around her was largely made up of Wimbledon. She meant quite a different world. A world of giving women and strong but equally giving men, a world of Bengali dancing, passionately held ideas and seventeen different kinds of psychoanalysis. A world that existed only in her head.

  Henry thrust his hands deep into his pockets, glumly. He wondered which row to select from the library of disputes available to him. It was going to be an important row. He could see it now, tucked up in a cassette case. Last Row Before Strangulation. Was it going to be the You Are Cold and Unfeeling Row, the Why Are You So Feeble Row, the Fat Row, the Racist Row, the Right-Wing Row, the Left-Wing Row, the Merits of Jane Austen Row, the Driving Row, the Looking After Maisie Row or the Why Are You so Bitter and Twisted Row. After some moments’ thought, Henry selected the Sex Row. The Sex Row was always the best. It was so beautifully, predictably ugly. It followed the track it had followed for so many years, awakened the parties to rage, apathy and contempt in precisely the usual places and ended, as it always did, in a drawn game. Henry stuck his lower lip out and in an uncouth voice, said: ‘How about a bit of sex?’

  Elinor looked at him, blankly.

  ‘A bit of sex,’ said Henry, ‘you know. We take our clothes off and I stick my penis into you and pull it in and out for a few minutes and white stuff comes out and you say “Is that it?” And I say “There isn’t any more where that came from.” And you say “Why can’t you be more tender?” And I say “Search me, squire.” You know. A fuck. You must remember. We had a fuck, didn’t we once? A few years back.’

  Elinor’s mouth had dropped open. She looked now like some domestic cleaning device, mouth open for household filth. Henry gave her some more.

  ‘Or buggery,’ he said, yawning, ‘that buggery sounds good. I read about it in Knave magazine. And that magazine Hot Bitch. You have to go to Holland to get it but it’s well worth the trip. It’s very informative. Or oral. You could suck my cock if you liked. We could turn on the artificial gas fire!’

  Here he leered in a conspiratorial fashion. By way of answer Elinor’s mouth dropped another few notches.

  ‘Or spanking!’ went on Henry brightly. ‘I fancy spanking.’

  Elinor gave a choking sound. For a moment he thought she was going to hit him, and then her face turned crimson, her mouth started to bang to and fro like a door in a gale force wind and a sound came down her nose that suggested she had just swallowed a quart of White’s Cream Soda. Elinor was laughing. It was primarily a Display Laugh, something to indicate that she could rise above Henry, but (this disturbed him somewhat) at the back of her he caught a glimpse of something that could only be genuine amusement.

  ‘Oh, Henry,’ said Elinor, now blocking her mouth with the palm of her hand and moaning elaborately, ‘you’re trying to be funny! Aren’t you? Is that the idea?’

  Her laughter dropped away suddenly. It was obviously a ploy. She said then, very quickly, like a trick question to someone in the Yes/No interlude on the Michael Miles quiz show: ‘Marriage Guidance didn’t do much for your need to dump, did it?’

  Henry was beginning to enjoy this. ‘Marriage Guidance,’ he said, ‘didn’t understand my need for brutally climaxing into tight white bottoms.’

  Marriage Guidance had been a bloke called Kevin who, in Henry’s view, had had designs on Elinor. She, skilled in the ways of therapy, had after the first few sessions begun dissecting his own motives for him and Kevin, like an obedient dog, ended up nodding slowly as she told him clearly, fully, frankly what he meant when he said what he thought about what she or Henry felt, and how what he thought he thought about what they felt, or said they felt, probably wasn’t what he really felt any more than what they said they felt was really deep down what they really felt. Except of course, in her case. Because what she thought she felt was what she actually did feel and she said it, loud and clear and everyone else could go and fuck themselves. This was called ‘being in touch with your feelings’.

  ‘At Marriage Guidance,’ went on Henry, ‘I didn’t feel able to discuss my need to tie you to the bed and whip you with my pyjama cord. But that wasn’t on the agenda, was it? On the agenda was something called Tenderness with a capital T. Well—’ Henry thrust his face towards her, allowing a small fragment of saliva to trickle down his chin. ‘Tenderness is just another aspect of female control. Tenderness is just something that women like because it gives them the upper hand. Tenderness is that hideous, cooing voice you hear mothers using to their children as they get them to do this, go there, stay here. I am so pissed off with being told how men own and control the world. I tell you they don’t. They all start out doing what some woman wants them to do. And you know the weapon she uses? She uses Tenderness with a capital T!’ />
  Elinor folded her arms and, shaking her head in the way Henry sometimes did at the motorists who cut him up, she began to pace up and down the red-tiled kitchen. She did quite a lot of snorting, quite a lot of brittle laughter and a very great deal of what Henry took to be assumed inarticulacy.

  ‘Basically . . .’ she said, ‘basically . . . I think . . . I don’t know, but I think . . . I suspect . . . I feel . . .’

  Here she raised her square white face up to his and sought his eyes. Then she said, according a miraculously even level of stress to each word in the sentence: ‘We’re-at-the-end-of-the-road.’

  At this point the telephone rang. Henry answered it. It was Donald’s wife. Henry could never, would never be able to remember her name.

  ‘It’s Donald . . .’ she said.

  ‘Yes!’ said Henry. He sounded curt, businesslike. Perhaps a little too businesslike, he thought. He sounded like a man whose next line would be ‘I’m in a meeting’.

  ‘He’s . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Her voice suddenly swooped into hysterics. For a moment, Henry thought she was going to laugh, and then came a sudden explosion of sobbing.

  ‘He’s . . . dead!’

  At this moment Tibbles came into the room.

  ‘Roger From the Practice is here!’

  Well, I’m not surprised he’s dead. I’m surprised you’re not all dead!

  ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!’

  Henry wished Mrs Donald (what was her name?) would stop behaving like an extra in Oedipus Rex. So he was dead. Plenty of other people were going to be dead before the night was out. Tibbles for one. She was looking a bit like she had the morning of her hysterectomy. She prowled and paused and placed her feet carefully, all as if she were a normal feline, but there was something woefully uncatlike about her performance. She looked as if she was not entirely sure she was a cat, as if, thought Henry, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of her nine lives were oozing out of her like blood from a wound.

  Henry looked up at Elinor smartly. He said: ‘Donald’s dead!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Elinor. ‘Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh my God!’

  Christ, thought Henry, he’s only your doctor!

  At the other end of the phone Mrs Donald (what was her name?) was grieving with similar bravura.

  ‘Respiratory failure at 11.30 p.m.,’ she said (why did women have to be so scrupulously exact as to detail?) ‘and before that he couldn’t swallow. He said that he had a violent head pain. And then he had hallucinations. He thought there was a pig in the room.’

  ‘What kind of pig?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just a pig. Oh my God! Oh my God! He was so sweet. I loved him so much.’

  ‘I . . . Christ . . . I liked him. He was a nice bloke. A damned nice bloke actually.’

  ‘And oh my God my God just like that! Like that. He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead. He’ll never come back. He’s dead.’

  A pause.

  ‘Roger From the Practice is here!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He was so good and loyal and honest and brave and sweet and kind. And . . . he was such a good doctor.’

  Henry thought this was depressingly typical of the way in which people talked about the recently deceased. Inaccurate would be a charitable way of describing Mrs Donald’s description of her husband. He held the receiver a yard away from his ear. Tiny strangled sobs floated out of it and across the room. Elinor swung towards him. For a moment Henry thought she was going to hit him, and then, instead, she seized the receiver from him and, sweeping it down to the floor with her she poured love, support, tenderness and quietness down the line.

  ‘Billykins,’ she said (surely this could not be the woman’s name?), ‘Billykins, this is so awful.’

  Henry wandered to the other end of the room. Elinor sat on the floor, allowing her long black hair to fall around her and started saying ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes, I know . . .’ and ‘Of course . . .’ a lot. She listened, thought Henry, the way some people figure skated. Presumably Billykins was telling her about Donald the Gourmet Cook, Donald the Great Fighter for Social Change, Donald the Novelist. He can’t only have been Donald the Great Doctor.

  If Roger From the Practice was doing the post-mortem, thought Henry, he should be OK. Roger From the Practice couldn’t tell emphysema from the common cold.

  ‘. . . Yes yes, my darling . . .’ (Uh?) ‘. . . my darling, yes . . . we’re with you . . . we’re with you . . .’

  Elinor put down the phone. She stared bleakly across at Henry.

  ‘My God,’ she said, sounding a bit like a vicar who has just discovered the Third World, ‘this makes one’s own problems seem pretty small, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ said Henry.

  He sucked on his lips. She put her head on one side.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you have instincts and feelings that are not really human at all. I don’t think you are human, actually. I think you’re like some disgusting little animal, some creature from another planet. I’m sorry for you, Henry. One day you’ll wake up and realize how utterly ghastly you are, and I don’t think you’ll find that very easy to live with. I’m going to bed.’

  Flexing his fingers, Henry followed her up the stairs. Behind him, pathetically, Tibbles mewed in the hall. Henry hoped she wasn’t going to make a fuss about dying. Ahead of him Elinor was pulling her dress over her head. She was wearing, as usual, a sack-like dress, one that hinted coyly at pregnancy. Underneath it was, as usual, Elinor’s body. It wasn’t, actually, if you could forget who it belonged to, a bad body. The thought occurred once again to Henry that someone who wasn’t him might have a sexual interest in his wife. If not Donald, then perhaps one of the women from the therapy group. Was he, could he, be married to a lesbian? Such things had happened to more eminent lawyers than he. He heard the sound of the tap running, and then the sound of bristles against gum, ivory and lip. Arms out in front of him, Henry ran up the stairs, thinking, as he ran – She has three minutes to live.

  15

  She turned out to have rather longer than that.

  For a start, when Henry rounded the bathroom door it seemed, to use a phrase of Elinor’s, ‘inappropriate behaviour’ to run at her. He found himself walking at a steady pace towards those meaty shoulders. Her head, which was rotating at a different speed and a contrary motion to her brushing arm, reminded him of a duck in a shooting gallery. It had a difficult-to-hit quality about it, an almost larky imperviousness to attempts to interfere with it.

  Still flexing his fingers, he started to dig them into the base of her neck, or rather, in the area where her neck might be assumed to begin. He found his hands full of dry, papery skin which, as he worked his way closer to her windpipe, came up and away like a curtain of strudel dough. Tossing this first layer of skin aside, he attempted to burrow deeper, only to discover yet more skin, though whether this was the outer skin that had slithered back through his advancing fingers, or a whole new layer was not apparent, but it was pretty clear that finding her windpipe, let alone getting hands round it and squeezing it, was a two-person job.

  ‘What are you doing, Henry?’ she squawked. ‘Do you want sex again?’

  ‘What do you mean, “again”?’ said Henry.

  ‘You only ever touch me when you want sex,’ said Elinor. And started to brush her teeth again.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Henry. ‘I sometimes put my arms around you because I need to feel your closeness. I need to touch you tenderly and feel the warmth of your body.’

  As he said this, Henry pulled at his nose and raised his upper lip to expose his gums. He looked, he thought, like a nasty species of rodent.

  ‘Shut up, Henry!’ said Elinor. ‘You just grope my fanny and expect me to respond. Sex isn’t just about an animal urge. It isn’t like going to the lavatory.’

  Henry started to slide down the wall. It looked as if strangling her was n
ot going to be possible. Tonight anyway. Maybe he should go for a contract killing.

  ‘It’s a bit like going to the lavatory!’ said Henry. ‘Anyway, what’s so wrong with going to the lavatory? I like going to the lavatory.’

  ‘We had noticed!’ said Elinor archly and, shaking out her black hair behind her, she placed the toothbrush, emphatically, in the plastic cup and marched out of the bathroom. On the landing a new thought occurred to her and she re-entered, her long arms swinging, her face screwed up with anger.

  ‘How can you, though?’ she said. ‘How can you? Your best friend lies dead. Dead. And all you think about is . . . that!’

  Here she pointed dramatically at Henry’s flies. Henry found he was grinning foolishly. Any sort of attention to his genitals, even if it was the sort of gesture usually used by particularly aggressive barristers, was welcome.

  ‘And stop smirking!’ she barked. ‘Christ! Anyone’d think from the way men carry on that their . . . things . . . are somehow clever and funny.’

  She was down to its level now, her finger jabbing at the zip of his trousers.

  Sex between Henry and Elinor had come to a halt some four or five years ago and, from what Henry could remember about it, it was something that was better discontinued. Elinor had spent most of their congress complaining. There were pains in her back, her right arm had gone to sleep, she was stiff, he wasn’t stiff. It was lasting too long. It was over too quickly. He was too tentative, too assertive, too submissive, too dominant.

  Following her into the bedroom, he decided to continue on the plainly offensive tack.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, sitting on her side of the bed as she reached for a woman’s magazine, ‘maybe I’m gay!’

  She looked at him oddly. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry!’ she said, in a slightly querulous tone. Then she started reading a recipe.