I Want Him Dead

by Anthony Masters

  The painful memories suffused her, refusing to be banished. She could hear his voice now, shouting against the sound of the sea.

  “Come on, Anne. We can do it. We can do it together.”

  But the waves demolished the wall, despite all their efforts, and the long, lashing fingers of the sea soon turned their sturdy sand defences to wet hummocks and they laughed together in happy exhaustion as the final section fell.

  “When are you two going to grow up?” Mum had asked them.

  “Never,” she and Dad had answered in exultant chorus.

  How happy they had been on golden holiday after holiday, always at the same hotel in Studland. Anne could smell the pine trees now, the heady resin in the shadowed chines that led down to the sand.

  Her father had been a restless man, never really content, and his life was lived in sequences. Some she shared, most she didn’t, but Studland was special. He was there for a fortnight, a golden time when he naturally gravitated to his younger daughter while her older sisters and mother looked on, strangers to them both.

  Had the rest of the family resented their closeness? If they had, they had never betrayed jealousy, or any emotion at all. Her mother lived for her “rests” and “reading”, only sharing a mysterious life with her husband after Anne’s bed-time. Her sisters lived for the secret conspiracy that was growing up, linked by interminable whispering and excluding laughter. They wouldn’t play cricket. They wouldn’t play anything. Her sisters were in a distant land concerned with adolesence. She and her father only lived for the day.

  They built more sea walls and sandcastles, dug holes that filled with water, swam in the cold jade-green sea.

  Anne tried to clutch at the memories as if she was clutching at the muddy banks of a river that was running out into an estuary, whose strong tide defeated her puny efforts to stay still, not to be dragged into the tumult of her father’s departures.

  Now, she managed to stem the relentless flow by remembering the day at Corfe Castle when they had run up the steep hill with its sheep-shorn grass until they reached the gaunt ruins that were softened by cool, summer rain.

  When the shower was over they had played hide-and-seek. No one else had ventured up to the old stones and she had concealed herself amongst the broken walls, waiting for her father’s welcome shadow to steal towards her, feigning sudden recognition. Even at her age, the childish game was exhilarating but ironic to recall. He had run to the ruined tower to count to a hundred, and Anne had frantically sought increasingly obscure hiding-places, safe and sure in the certain knowledge that he would come looking for her. Unfailingly he always hunted her down, pouncing with the familiar roar of love, love that she had thought as a child he would always feel for her.

  But the certainty was a false one. In six months’ time her father was finally to depart, never to return, to live with a woman with no children, who didn’t like children, and who certainly didn’t want Anne.

  “We’ll have great times,” he had told her. “It’ll be just the same. Just you and me.”

  But it hadn’t been. When they were alone, he was awkward and self-conscious, always wanting to get away. When they were with Monica, she could feel the woman’s alarm, sense the resistance, masked by the bland acceptance.

  Her mother and older sisters were at one in their grief, rejecting Anne because she had been so close to her father, unable to bear her near them, suspecting she might find favour with “that woman”.

  As Anne rolled on to her face, the whisky tears came as she wondered if she had exaggerated her family’s apparent rejection. Could she have subconsciously engineered it herself, wanting her mother and sisters to leave her out, creating their rejection so that her father would be forced to look after her, forced to defy Monica? But the strategy — if it had been a strategy — had not worked; as she continuously isolated herself from her mother and sisters, her father seemed to spend less time with her. “Got to get back now,” “Can’t be too late,” “I’ll make it up to you next week,” were all phrases that seemed to ring continuously in her ears, a dreadful litany that turned her love for him to hatred.

  The long years of Studland, the old rambling hotel, the beach and the sea and Corfe Castle all merged into a tiny nugget of remembered happiness — too short, too fleeting to be fair or just. Her father’s new relationship with Monica cast a giant shadow over her life. They were granite figures riding a storm which swept over and beyond her, with destinies of their own which didn’t include her.

  So she wished him dead and, quite soon, he was.

  Anne remembered how her mother had opened the door of her room without knocking.

  “Daddy’s dead,” she had said woodenly, her fingers plucking at the loose skin under her chin. “Daddy’s dead.”

  Anne’s wall had collapsed and, yes, it had been sand all the time. Easily washed away. “Come on, Anne,” he had said. “We can do it. We can do it together.” But they hadn’t. He had gone and left her after she had wished him dead.

  For many years she had laboured under the guilt, never talking about it to anyone. Then Paul came and, like her father, brought her such great happiness, but in the end he had also gone away. Horrified by the renewed isolation, Anne had wished Paul dead, too, but this time she knew she couldn’t rely on fate.

  Paul Lucas spread taramasalata on rye.

  “I think Anne’s a little better.”

  Rachel didn’t answer, unsure whether Paul had reached a decision about the divorce or not. Every time they talked about Anne nowadays she felt deeply oppressed, and the office became so claustrophobic that she wanted to walk miles over the common.

  Except that she couldn’t because the common wasn’t miles long and was covered in liberal piles of dog shit.

  She glanced at Paul’s heavy frame, receding hairline and discerning eyes. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with the shock of being forced out of Wyatt. Recently, however, he seemed to have exorcised some of the bitterness and rancour, his renewed drive supplying the necessary catharsis. Founding Cafferty Steele was a step into this rejuvenation and their new relationship was hopefully the same, but Rachel was wary, knowing that Anne and Peter were still close to him, and that although Paul seemed to be moving forward — to be putting the past behind him — with all his bullishness he was still emotionally shackled. The warrior leaps to loose his chains, she thought, but these particular chains still held him fast.

  Her own marriage to Josh Lancaster, retained as a director of Wyatt, had been over for a long time because of mutual infidelity, but they were still vaguely fond of each other, at least still compatible as parents to their son. They had a good “working relationship”, and when decisions had to be made they made them.

  Rachel had no doubt that Paul loved her. With Josh she had grown used to brightly and blindly jogging a dull and unrewarding path, trying to reassure herself that there was no such thing as sexual excitement or even romantic attachment, but when she and Paul went to the Ardèche she slowly began to realize that he loved her in a way she had never believed could happen. For once in a very long time she had felt valued.

  Lately, however, she had been forced to admit that despite Paul’s genuine, consistent love, his wife, Anne, from whom he was only recently legally separated, was still reaching out to him, still had her pincers in his heart. Years in publishing, surrounded by egos, vulnerability and internecine warfare, had made Rachel a pragmatist.

  “So you’re going to ask Anne now, are you?” She was acerbic. Rachel knew how bitter Anne was, how hard she would fight to retain Paul. But maybe an acrimonious struggle was the only way he could handle the break, she thought philosophically. Perhaps he needed to draw on his natural aggression. At Cafferty Steele, where she and Paul were commissioning editors — the only commissioning editors — Rachel was always anxious to bring out the best of whatever creative potential her authors had, but Paul simply bullied them into submission if they didn’t co-operate.

  She st
ood up, staring at him speculatively. His love had become so important to her both physically and mentally; Paul knew intuitively how to generate the sexual excitement that had evaporated in Rachel’s relationship with Josh, and had even put himself out to establish a good relationship with her son Ben. Of course she knew the real reason for their compatibility, she thought cynically. They were both arrogant, both so sure they were right. Pushy bastards. Loving bastards, though.

  “Stop getting so neurotic,” said Paul unreasonably, his voice breaking into her thoughts. He was sitting behind his desk now, with its neat piles of manuscripts. On a shelf behind him were the books on Cafferty Steele’s first publishing list. The walls were hung with water colours, some bought recently with his mother’s legacy.

  “I’m sorry.” Rachel wanted to avoid an argument and Paul, anxious to do the same, smiled placatingly as she removed her glasses and began to polish the lenses as she often did when she wanted to think. “You just have to accept that there is no right time,” she told him.

  Paul went to the coffee percolator. “At least Anne’s off the booze and back at work. I just want her to get a bit stronger —” He passed her a cup with some coffee slopped into the saucer and Rachel frowned. He shrugged, knowing she would be annoyed, knowing that “mess” was something alien and irritating to her, but his shrug also meant that Paul thought she was being unfair, burdening him with premature decisions, so he had slopped the coffee.

  There was a long silence, a silence in which Rachel deliberately listened to the sounds of the office around her, trying not to lose her temper. Her blonde hair was tied back in a pony-tail and she tugged at the end impatiently. Lucy was on the word processor in the front office and Eric was tapping away on another in the production department — a cramped little space that made up the suite. Four rooms — four people. That, for the moment, was Cafferty Steele.

  Depressingly, Rachel knew that the moment for decision-making had once again come and gone.

  Anne and Peter lived half a mile away from Paul and Rachel’s flat.

  At first they had both considered the arrangement suitable; now it was painful. Anne was extremely hostile whenever Paul visited, and as a result he often ducked out of going. Would he abandon his own son, wondered Rachel.

  “We must do something about Peter,” she said uneasily.

  “You know I’d like to see more of him.” He was guilty again. “But Anne makes it impossible, and so does he.”

  “Can’t we both try?” she asked, realizing how ingenuous she must sound, aware that they had had this conversation dozens of times before and it had become ritualized. “Take Peter out together?”

  “You know it wouldn’t work.”

  The problem was that she did, but Rachel felt her temper rising again at the impasse that Paul seemed to accept so readily, so acquiescently. Anne couldn’t be faced with divorce proceedings. Peter wouldn’t co-operate because he hated his father for leaving. Paul couldn’t or wouldn’t visit his son. The statements were like a chain-saw in her head.

  “Let’s try and be more positive,” said Paul patronizingly. “Count our blessings. We’ve got a first-class list — and Mummy’s left me a fortune.” He paused, smiling ruefully, while Rachel prayed for a patience she would never find. Counting her blessings was a pastime she would always find irritating. “Don’t forget it all goes to Anne if anything happens to me so I want to keep nice and healthy.” Paul grimaced at her in that familiar way and she knew he was once again inwardly cursing his mother. In her chapel eyes the first wife was the only wife; she had made the point in her will all too clearly. He shrugged. “I want to give you everything.”

  But I won’t get it, Rachel thought. Not at the present rate of progress.

  “I’ve got to see Peter more frequently,” Paul continued. “I’m just finding it a little difficult to brave Anne — that’s all.” He paused again, but Rachel made no comment; she knew she was simply listening to him postponing the future. “I pity her. What kind of basis is that for a relationship, for Christ’s sake?” He was sitting on the edge of his desk now, suddenly looking bone-weary.

  Rachel had not seen Paul in this analytical mood for some time, and she shivered. Her chief fear was that he might reason her out of his life and return to Anne and Peter, regarding their relationship as an aberration. However hard he struggled to abandon Anne he never succeeded. Then he got up and came over to her, taking her hands gently in his own — another gambit of his that deeply irritated Rachel. “I’m not going back to her,” he said, every inch the plucky little lover.

  “Sometimes I just wonder if Anne and Peter are too strong for us both,” she muttered, hoping to manipulate him into a more positive attitude, frighten him, even, but actually sounding banal.

  “No,” said Paul. “I love you.”

  He was almost convincing, but Rachel knew that he would never be able to reassure her. Since she and Josh had finally split up, since she had moved in with Paul, she had become increasingly pessimistic. Paul was still trying to make a difficult decision and pretending he had made it. She had no way back, but Rachel was afraid that he might find one. He was certainly weak enough to do so.

  Mist and rain closed in as Paul Lucas drove the Peugeot back from Clapham to Wimbledon. Rachel had already left for the flat in her own car, but he was unable to break his habit of working late — of never being able to put the office behind him. He had started jogging again, but only on Friday evenings, with The Lord of the Manor his goal. Paul acknowledged this was a pitiful attempt at fitness, but he always looked forward to the gin. On the whole he liked the safety of routine — even in a new life. He found that being a workaholic was comforting.

  Visibility decreased and the traffic edged forward slowly, creating the familiar chaos he hardly noticed. In one sense Paul Lucas did still love Anne, but the original poignancy, the certainty of it all, was dimmed by the memory of months of watching her shuffling around in a dressing-gown. She had spent the rest of her time in bed, the counterpane strewn with magazines that she never read, cups of coffee on the side table that she never drank, alcohol on her breath, bottles deliberately badly hidden. The realization that Anne had relied on the unconditional love they had once had for each other as her driving force had staggered him, but the evidence was irrefutable. When he had withdrawn that love so abruptly, she had completely collapsed. His guilt was overwhelming, despite a recent capacity to evade her suffering, blot out what he knew he had done to her.

  They had met at the University of Kent some twenty-five years before, reading English, both eventually hoping to go into journalism. They worked on the university newspaper, founded a radical magazine called Rant, joined the CND, became seventies people, nostalgic for the sixties, already ageing hippies with their floppy clothes and beads and marijuana. In their second year they lived with two other students in a clapboard house in the nearby small fishing town of Whitstable, and then for their final year Paul and Anne moved to a barge in Faversham, a quiet, slightly run-down town on a muddy creek.

  They preferred to be alone together now, not wanting others to share their mutually dependent relationship, able to buy the Spindrift with a sizeable handout from Paul’s wealthy mother.

  Anne had told him then about her father’s desertion and how it had almost destroyed her. Now, he realized, he had done much the same. But that was life, Paul reasoned. There were unfortunate coincidences. He surely couldn’t just stay with Anne because her father hadn’t.

  Slowly and with some outside help they had converted the barge into a houseboat that floated on the creek at high tide, settling on the mud at low. Their world had enormous skies and dyked marshland, with the sea on the horizon, an attractively bleak contrast to the cosy, lamp-lit seclusion of the barge as they read for their finals with water lapping at the bow and the sea birds calling plaintively. They had never been so ecstatically happy in their self-contained little world.

  Later Anne had told him that was exactly what she and
her father had had. The admission had shaken him in a way he could never quite quantify.

  In fact, Paul and Anne had complemented each other. She was decisive and saw the future clearly. He was less decisive but had a visionary quality that went beyond planning, a kind of natural foresight, a series of hunches that often came off. Their family backgrounds were similar, but although Anne’s father ran a profitable furniture store he never had the flair that Paul’s mother had with her own business — the visionary flair that her son had inherited. Anne had always been conscious of this, and although at first it had not made any difference, lately she had begun to resent the cushioning Paul had always unquestioningly accepted from his mother.

  When they both graduated, Paul with a first and Anne with a hard won upper second, they found they loved the barge too much to leave immediately. Anne worked on a local newspaper and Paul, once again with his mother’s money, slowly and lovingly began to refurbish the barge all over again. After a year they both moved to London, returning to Faversham over the weekends, always nostalgic for the Spindrift — their original floating home.

  Paul joined Wyatt, the old-established family publisher, and slowly rose to power while Anne went freelance, contributing to The Guardian’s women’s page on consumer research and later on social science. Sensibly she remained freelance and was able to continue working during her pregnancy and after Peter was born.

  The shock of his career failure was traumatic, and Paul felt bitter at Anne’s apparent lack of support. Instead of trying to reach him she seemed absorbed in her own career. To witness her increasing assurance, see her consolidating her reputation as a respected and innovative journalist, apparently oblivious to his own problems, had been more than he could bear.

  At first Paul imagined that he had lost his vision, his ability to pluck the golden fruit, but as Anne’s success continued to escalate he began to have the uncanny feeling that she had stolen it. The more Paul thought about this the more absurd he realized his feelings were, but he couldn’t entirely banish them. As a result he began to look for consolation elsewhere.