Death of a Salesperson

by Robert Barnard

  Your signature, you weedy oaf. Your necessary signature on documents authorizing the transfer of funds. Your signature on cheques. Your signature as Head of Accounts (Foreign). Marcia smiled down at him.

  ‘I’ve always liked the mature type,’ she said. ‘Dependable. Someone I can rely on.’

  ‘Little girl!’ said Herbert fondly. ‘Well, from now on, you just lean on me. You’ve done too much up to now.’

  ‘You did your bit,’ said Marcia generously. ‘That time when they rang from Brussels about the transfer . . .’

  ‘Oh, I knew they’d do that. So unusual a transaction. I had the story ready.’ Herbert was inclined to boast. ‘There was nothing to it, nothing at all. Feel like stopping to eat? Nice restaurant along the way? Good French déjeuner, eh?’

  ‘No, we want to get on,’ said Marcia. ‘We don’t want to leave any sort of trail.’

  ‘You’re marvellous!’ said Herbert, and put his hand tenderly on her knee. Her handbag nearly fell to the floor, and she grabbed it like a flash.

  ‘Throw it in the back,’ advised Herbert. ‘You don’t want to keep clutching it.’

  ‘I like to keep it with me,’ said Marcia. ‘It’s got all my little things.’

  Like a gun, for example. Not that she intended to fire from this gun. Still, a gun may always come in handy, in an emergency, if things don’t go quite according to plan. And Marcia could use it too, accurately. She had trained. Marcia, the good secretary, prepared for all Eventualities.

  Now they had left the low, flat countryside and were approaching the cliffs of the coast Marcia loved. Wild, dangerous country. She looked around her, remembering landmarks.

  ‘Quite remote, isn’t it?’ remarked Herbert.

  ‘That’s what I want,’ said Marcia. ‘No trail. We’ll zigzag back across France—through out-of-the-way places.’

  ‘Still, I don’t quite see the point,’ said Herbert. ‘They’ll know we’ve been to Brussels, and when.’

  ‘You’re not the planner,’ said Marcia. ‘Darling.’

  She kept her eyes on the surrounding landscape. This was her country. This was where the idea had first seized hold of her. They had had to come here. It was the only place, the place she had chosen. At last, not long before sunset, she said: ‘There!’

  ‘What, my little darling?’

  ‘I’m hungry. It’s all that throwing up. I’ll have to have something. You’ve got that hamper.’

  ‘You deserve something better than Mabel’s bleeding sandwiches,’ said Herbert fondly.

  ‘We’re miles from anywhere. Sandwiches will be fine. Pull in here and we’ll have a picnic.’

  They pulled off the road, and Marcia, still clutching her handbag, got out of the car and stretched.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely? Cliffs and sea and sky. We’ll just sit down and have a bite, then move on.’

  She walked to the edge and looked over. The cliff hung over the sea: nothing to be seen below but rolling waves, blue-grey tipped with white—inviting, dangerous. Marcia had an uncontrollable, almost erotic, feeling of power. She had no fear of heights, no fear of emptiness, no fear of anything.

  ‘Don’t go too near the edge, my lovely,’ called Herbert Greenaway. He sat down fussily on the coarse grass, hoping it wasn’t damp. Then he opened the little picnic basket his wife had insisted he bring. He inspected the contents.

  ‘Well, there’s plenty. Not like Mabel to make enough for two . . . All crab. Still, crab’s always nice, isn’t it? And there’s a bit of cake for afters . . . I can’t say much good about Mabel, but I will say this: she makes a lovely fruit cake.’ He popped half a sandwich in his mouth, and then another. ‘Come on, Marcia. You said you were hungry. You can’t live off scenery, you know. Got to keep body and soul together!’

  But Marcia had taken the heavy revolver out of her handbag, and—filled with the exaltation produced by sea and sunset and the prospect of great wealth—had come up quietly behind Herbert as he swallowed the crust of his sandwich and hit him quickly and hard on the back of the head. Herbert keeled over on to the picnic hamper. Obedient, eager-to-please Herbert! Putting the revolver neatly back into her handbag, Marcia bent over Herbert’s senseless body, removed his wallet and checked its contents, then took the body in her arms, walked a few steps to the edge of the cliff, and threw it over.

  Herbert did not die instantly. A strong breeze from the sea wafted his body in towards the cliffface, and a lone, obstinate tree, growing in chalky soil, broke his fall somewhat at the bottom. But the incoming tide was already lapping at the roots of the tree, and one way or another it wouldn’t be long.

  Marcia Lemon did not even look down to see. She was possessed with a feeling of limitless opportunity. She stood alone on the cliff edge like a Greek goddess, amoral, unchallengeable. The strain of the day—the demeaning, emptying sea-sickness, the Customs inspection, Herbert’s company and fatuous conversation during the long car ride—all that had reached the logical, planned-for conclusion. The perfect secretary had planned the perfect crime. In Brussels there awaited her wealth; and after that a new identity, travel, fun, smart friends. The beauty of her future and the perfection of her planning coalesced in her mind and drove her to new heights of exaltation. She was no longer a busty office girl, standard figure of fun, butt of lip-licking jokes. She was the perfect criminal: she was superb; she was supreme; she was unbeatable.

  Suddenly, incongruously, her stomach rumbled. She looked towards the hamper.

  She was also hungry.

  DEATH OF A SALESPERSON

  It was the last thing you would have expected, Lottie used to say to her friends, and to anyone who would listen. Because Westbury was one of those ‘nice’ suburbs of London (or dreary, inward-looking and conformist, depending on your point of view), where you simply wouldn’t expect to find anything unusual. And yet somehow there had collected together at the leafy end of Crompton Road a group of people who (in Lottie’s words) were unconventional, experimental in their lifestyles, and capable of cocking a snook at the platitudes of bourgeois living with which they were surrounded.

  ‘When you think,’ Lottie would say, ‘how the whole area is jam-packed with people in boring, traditional two-parent situations, it’s practically a miracle—except of course that I don’t believe—that there are a few people here who really believe in attempting alternative lifestyles. I tell you, I wake up every day and feel I’m at the dawn of something new and exciting!’

  The people to whom Lottie said this smiled politely. Those more aware of social change said to themselves: ‘Survivals from the ’sixties,’ while others just murmured, ‘Kooks.’ When they spotted her thereafter they tended to give her a wide berth. It was possible to be free-flying, adventurous and experimental, and still be something of a bore.

  Lottie’s little circle at the leafy end of Crompton Road (where it turns into Acacia Drive and becomes pure stockbroker’s Tudor) was close but not large. Its centre was probably Mike, who with his three teenage children occupied the whole of No. 74. His wife had decamped with an Australian, and sent the kids the occasional postcard of Bondi Beach. Probably being married to a television technician with irregular hours had not been much fun. At any rate, Mike kept open house, had the occasional woman-friend in, and the children came and went as they liked—luckily they were old enough for that. Mike was big and bear-like, and on a Saturday night if he was home tended to get genially tiddly on cheap red wine.

  Pam and Judith had the first-floor flat at No. 72. They had what Lottie described as a stable and caring relationship, as did Nicholas and Jonathan, who had the ground-floor flat of No. 75. Though whether Nicholas and Jonathan’s relationship would have been quite so stable and caring if the Aids scare had not put the fear of mortality into them Lottie was not quite sure: she knew that both of them had flitted around a bit in the past, and she had caught Nicholas quite often looking wistfully at desirable young men. ‘But, goodness, it’s not a crime to fancy someone, is it?’ Lottie
said.

  Cybella, in a room at the top of No. 77, was black. Sometimes Lottie was sceptical about Cybella—not because she was black, heavens above no, she thought that was super!—but because she felt she was not really ‘one of us’. She suspected that what Cybella really wanted was a nice house and a husband and kids—the whole middle-class set-up. She had once heard her describe her friends (who had been awfully kind to her) as ‘a queer lot’. You’d think minorities would stick together, wouldn’t you? Lottie thought. But she rather suspected that Cybella went around with them so much because she enjoyed mothering Mike’s kids.

  And then there was Lottie. Whether Lottie had slid into non-conformity, or been catapulted into it by the breakdown of her marriage, no one was quite sure. She had gone to a course in Milton Keynes and had come back, in her own words, ‘a terrific feminist’, but that was probably a symptom rather than a cause of marital disharmony. She told her friends she simply couldn’t live any longer in that stifling atmosphere of male competiveness and male aggression, and quite soon she had got her husband out and had the whole of No. 73 to herself—she and her two little girls. She had got herself an excellent alimony arrangement, due to a lawyer friend, and now she also had a part-time job as typist at an advertising agency.

  ‘Is that compromising with the system?’ she would agonize from time to time. But then she would excuse herself, saying: ‘What is a single parent to do, with all the odds stacked against her when it comes to getting an interesting and fulfilling job?’

  So now she was trying to bring up her children in a warm, responsive and non-violent atmosphere. She was not lonely at all, she told people, because there was Mike and all her other friends. And quite often her brother Gabriel came to spend the weekend with her. Gabriel was with a Vedta-orientated commune in North Wales, but he came and stayed with Lottie whenever he had tickets for Covent Garden.

  So that was the group: the Westbury Originals, as they sometimes called themselves. The story of how the group’s loyalty and supportiveness was tested began at Mike’s on a Friday—‘black Friday’, as Lottie called it ever afterwards.

  They were all of them there, including Gabriel, who was up for Così Fan Tutte the next night. Cybella was helping Mike’s youngest, Annetta, with her homework. Cybella rather overdid the mothering of Mike’s children, Lottie sometimes thought, because Mike was a wonderful mother as well as father. All the rest had got involved in a wide-ranging discussion on the decline of CND. There was a big rally, or at least a medium-sized one, planned for the next weekend with the theme ‘Whither the Peace Movement?’ and they were getting in early. Thrashing the subject about made them quite heated. Judith in particular (she worked in a casting agency, a job with a good deal of power) could get very bossy when the subject was close to her heart. ‘Where has the passion gone?’ she kept demanding, looking round at them accusingly as if they were each personally responsible for the declining passion for peace. The children soon got bored, and drifted off upstairs to play with their computers. Some of the group disapproved of computers, thinking them anti-social and anti-worker, but they had to admit they kept the children quiet.

  They were just getting on to the thorny topic of relations with Eastern bloc peace movements when the doorbell rang.

  Mike raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

  ‘Can’t be anyone,’ he said. ‘We’re all here.’

  He was gone for a few minutes, and in his absence the argument began again. Judith was just beginning to get really aggressive, wagging her finger at Jonathan, who didn’t take these matters of principle as seriously as he should, when Mike came back with a small, fair-haired little thing who he said had come to the door asking if he had a fifty-pence piece for the gas.

  That was their first sight of Davina Stubbs.

  Whether it was true (as she later said) that Lottie had a shiver of premonition as Davina came into the room it is impossible to say. Certainly Lottie looked at her critically. Davina was an awfully pretty girl, but she was pretty in a Womans-Owny kind of way which was definitely not the way of the Westbury Originals. There was a coolness about her—not just her clothes (straw-coloured frock, gauzy little scarf tucked in at the neck), but her whole manner, as if she thought she would find them all interesting, but wasn’t yet sure whether she wished to be one of them. She was certainly over-made-up by their standards, and perhaps by most standards, but this was explained by her job: she worked in the cosmetics section of the David Lewis chain store. She was a salesperson.

  Davina came from Hackney. When she had got the job in Westbury she had actually regarded it as a step up the social ladder (several of the Originals laughed behind their hands at that!) She had also, in Hackney, never come across people quite like Mike and his friends, though her manner was designed to hide this fact.

  ‘Come on in,’ called Judith, genially hectoring. ‘We’re discussing Cruise missiles.’

  ‘Solving the world’s problems,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘No, really,’ said Davina, rather attractively shy, some of them thought, ‘I don’t think I have very much to say about Cruise missiles. I just wanted a 50p. Mike doesn’t seem to have one.’

  Several eyes flickered at that. Mike already!

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Mike, gesturing to the floor with his big, pullovered arm. ‘Say your say or hold your peace, but join the mob. We’re going to have chilli or something eventually.’

  ‘Oh, are we?’ said Cybella, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘What I don’t like about the peace campaign,’ said Gabriel, starting up the discussion again, ‘is the way it isolates just that one aspect, at the expense of a holistic approach. Basically, getting rid of nuclear weapons is only part of the larger struggle to recreate a sane environment and a sane living-style.’

  So Davina got a fair taste, that evening, of the Originals’ concerns. She noted how Pam took Judith’s hand to try to stop her losing her cool. She saw Jonathan imitating Judith behind her back, and her growing, angry consciousness of it. She noted Lottie’s flailing style of debate, and Nicholas’s quiet fastidiousness. And she saw that Mike—big, genial, tolerant Mike—was the hub or lynch-pin of the group.

  After a time the discussion petered out. Mike’s two elder boys arrived back from the swimming pool, Cybella brought in the chilli, everyone fetched themselves wine from the winebox on the sideboard, and then everyone began to tuck in and to become more human. Cybella had to go to work (she was a receptionist at the local Trust House hotel, and she was on the night shift), and soon Lottie announced she’d better take her ‘littlies’ home. Davina took the hint and left then. Lottie muttered to Mike that she was a common little thing, and Pam said she hadn’t got an idea in her head about Cruise missiles.

  None of them expected to see her again, except to pass the time of day in the street.

  So Lottie was a bit surprised, over the next few weeks, to find Davina so often in and out of Mike’s house. Lottie would drop in to borrow rice, or brown sugar, or wholemeal flour, and there Davina would be. Eventually she said to Pam: ‘At last the penny’s dropped. She saw Mike—you know how he comes and goes at all hours—found him attractive, and invented the 50p as an excuse. Why come next door, after all? There are at least five bedsitters and flats in her own house. And she went off quite happily without one. She’s soft on Mike!’

  Eventually Lottie conceived another suspicion. She thought that Davina watched her comings and goings from her window, and made sure she arrived at Mike’s five or ten minutes later. ‘As if Mike and I aren’t the oldest of friends!’ said Lottie: ‘I’ve been in his bed in my time, and it’s a bit ridiculous to start getting jealous of me now!’ She added: ‘She’s practically a member of Mike’s household, you know.’

  And so she was. She cooked quite often for the family, displacing Cybella—though Cybella was such a busy girl that she seemed quite glad of the rest, and certainly showed no resentment. Davina took Annetta’s clothes in hand, bought new so
cks for the boys, and on one occasion—a spectacular triumph, but bitter for the rest—actually got Mike into a suit to take her out to dinner.

  They had been so accustomed to living in and out of each other’s houses that this affected them all. They felt they could no longer call Mike’s house their own. Naturally they discussed the new order, in as charitable a manner as each could muster. One day Nicholas and Jonathan were round at Lottie’s, trying some clothes on Beth, her youngest (Nicholas designed clothes, in a small way) when he happened to mention that he was using Davina to model some things in a fashion parade he was putting on for the Westbury Toc H and their wives.

  ‘She does it quite well,’ he said. ‘Moves well. Has a certain . . . air. Remote, somehow.’

  ‘Oh, she’s more than just a pretty face,’ said Jonathan. ‘Mind you, not much more . . .’

  ‘As to her mind, the least said the better,’ said Lottie. ‘She’s given no evidence of having a brain in her head.’

  ‘Such a relief,’ said Jonathan, ‘after all the rest of you. It’s nice at last to have someone around with whom one has something in common.’

  Jonathan affected, on occasion, the pose of being The Man in the Street. It was a pose that didn’t become him, Lottie thought, especially as most real Men in the Street would have died rather than acknowledge any affinity. What really marked Jonathan off from the rest (Lottie told anyone who would listen) was that he was not really a thinker. Where they cared passionately about this planet and its future, Jonathan was essentially frivolous, a mocker, a free agent.

  Opinions on Davina were divided in Pam and Judith’s household too. Lottie was round there one Saturday, having an impromptu lunch of Cornish Pasty and a glass of lager, and she became aware (as she later told the Superintendent) of tension—something she had never felt between them before. For some time she could not pin it down to anything specific, but the root of it became obvious when Davina’s name came up.