Venetia puts a cup of milk in a large pan and boils it very rapidly, cutting the flame under it as it swells suddenly to twice its volume. She whisks two heaped teaspoons of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and a tablespoon of brandy into the frothy milk, moves the pan, re-lights the flame and holds a marshmallow over the flame on the end of a fork until it forms a blistered skin on the point of bursting and sputtering its liquefied centre. She stirs the marshmallow into the hot chocolate, pours it into his favourite cup, sprinkles some finely chopped almonds on the top and walks next door to where her husband still sits. The brandy has curdled the milk, slightly.
He looks so gloomy that she can’t think of any words that will make him feel better. She takes his hand, so he will take comfort from her presence. At times like these a very small part of Venetia is sorry she disapproves of his career in the City so strongly because it makes it so difficult to discuss things with him. She has a horror of mentioning his unhappiness in case he starts talking about business issues and bores her.
‘Stephen, I’ve brought you a cup of hot chocolate.’ Venetia hopes the drink will cheer him up. She’s really very fond of him. She has something she needs to ask him.
‘Stephen, how would I go about getting a private detective’s licence revoked?’
‘A licence? I don’t know how it works. If it’s anything like a trading licence in the City then exposing the detective for something like embezzlement or drug dealing would do it. Can you try to turn up any kind of irregularity in his behaviour or in his business accounts? That would probably get a suspension, at least. Shall I tell you how it works in the City?’
‘No. That’s quite enough. You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’
Chapter Eleven ~ Colors
Roy watches Sylvia harvesting winter firewood from yesterday’s pruning in the garden. Wearing gloves, she rubs one hand up and down the soft shoots on the branches to remove the leaves. She takes the very ends of the slimmest branches in her two hands and bends them until they break, the muscles tensing in her upper arms and her back under her tight pink T-shirt. Other, thicker branches are trimmed and cut to length with secateurs. Sylvia parcels them up using garden twine and places them lengthwise in a shoe-box shaped woven basket with a handle to take them to the wood store, which is actually a garden shed. The leaves and twigs that she can’t use for firewood in the kitchen and the living room are sorted into piles, the leaves going on to a compost heap and the twigs carried to a brazier in the back of the garden to be burned with the household rubbish.
There is something different about the orchard at the bottom of Sylvia’s garden this morning. Roy looks very carefully at it through the foliage of the rose bushes that frame the kitchen window. Something has changed. Spring is coming but it’s not that. He studies the view from the window. Soft shoots and hard buds are appearing on the flowers and trees, red and green among the gray. Clematis has wound itself through the rose branches, teardrop flower buds poking out at the top like little green vipers standing on their tails above a nest of prickles.
Roy looks through the sunlit space among the roses to where the sunlight reaches the apple trees. He watches two of the trees pick themselves up and move away, slowly. He looks again and sees they are Sorrel the elephant’s legs moving, not the apple trees. Roy loses sight of her among the trees, then catches the movement again as she walks down to the beach. He feels lonely, watching her unobserved.
Ella Fitzgerald is potting up the geranium cuttings that have over-wintered on the window ledge in her spare bedroom. The leaves are variegated; soft green with thin maroon lines traced in them. She touches the leaves and the contact intensifies the distinctive, spicy smell in the air. The flowers, when they come, will be shocking salmon pink and red pepper red.
Ella thinks about her husband, long since dead, who suffered from color blindness. Men are more prone to the condition than women. Four per cent of men suffer from color blindness, compared to one per cent of women. She pauses for a moment in sympathy for those who will never enjoy the garish clash of geranium colors when the flowers start to appear on the plants. How can such vibrant, different colors be indistinguishable? Her husband never liked to discuss it. He couldn’t explain whether he perceived the colors as a muddy mixture or whether he saw both red and green as some exotic extra color that she didn’t have access to through normal vision. He only said that he couldn’t see the difference between them.
There is a very rare color blindness in which everything appears as a shade of gray, like a black and white photograph, or a television advertisement for an expensive perfume. Also very rare is blue blindness, in which sufferers are unable to detect the color blue. More common is green blindness, in which bright green is confused with dark red, and red blindness, in which dark green is confused with light red. Mrs Fitzgerald’s husband, whose disability would have disbarred him from taking a job as a signalman on the railways or a pilot on an aircraft, had chosen a career in the law and made a great success of it. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs a very tiny sigh, thinking about her lost husband.
She turns to the pots. She’s using a compost that doesn’t deplete the natural peat resources, emulating Geoff Hamilton, who until his death a few years ago was a stalwart in her life with his sensible advice on Gardener’s World on Friday evening television. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs again. She sometimes feels she goes on and on through life, carrying its burdens, as men fall away. The earthy smell of the compost connects her to deep thoughts. She brushes away the dirt that clings on her fingers up to the first joints where she has plunged them into the pots and she walks away from the plants.
In the kitchen, her hands scrubbed and smelling of rose soap, Mrs Fitzgerald takes up one of the biographies she has been reading lately. She is conducting private research into the behaviour of people whose start in life is outwardly normal, but who later descend into madness. She reads about troubled comedians, shamed politicians, drink and drug addicted soccer players, power crazy businessmen. What is it that connects them? Are there any external contributory factors? She deduces the link in one of those flashes when the staringly obvious hits for the first time. Every single one of the people in the books she has been reading has been damaged by notoriety. To ensure she learns from their mistakes, Mrs Fitzgerald vows to avoid notoriety at all costs. She pours a cup of very strong black coffee and opens a packet of langue de chat biscuits to celebrate her decision.
‘There’s so much color in my life,’ Alison tells Taron as the second shot of Tequila goes down. ‘Do you remember the first time you came here and everything in the house was white? The walls, the bed linen, the furniture? Now there are primary colors in every corner; toy trucks and post boxes and ABC books.’
‘Hey, keep up. That uptight white stuff was so early-nineties-single-woman. Things have moved on. You only had color in your garden when I met you. It was symptomatic of your empty life. Now you’re enriched and fulfilled and there’s color everywhere. I think we should celebrate that.’
They lick the backs of their hands, sprinkle some salt, lick it, pour the tequila, pour the champagne, swirl, swirl, cover the glass, bang, bang, bang, drink the liquid, suck the lime.
‘Aren’t Tequila Slammers a bit of an eighties drink?’
‘Alison, some things are evergreen. What’s it really like, then, bringing up the baby?
‘Say you buy a Volkswagen Golf,’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t expect to come home and find it’s extruded into a Volvo and you can’t park it anywhere.’
‘That would take a bit of getting used to.’
‘Exactly.’
Alison composes a poem to send to Jeff.
Colors
Colors are wrapping me up in my living room
Coming in from the garden
Climbing the walls of the nursery
Red trucks in the corners
Yellow plastic crockery in the sink
Green elephants in my bed
Taron s
ays it’s a sign of my coming of age
But I’ve never believed
A single thing
She’s said
‘You’ll be sent to Poet Hell on judgement day to suffer eternal punishment,’ Taron tells her, and signals the end of the night by lighting up the last cigarette in the packet.
Chapter Twelve ~ Cherry Lip gloss
The psychic postman brings a small package in a brown Jiffy bag for Alison the next morning. It contains a present of cherry lip gloss from Jeff.
‘My sister-in-law had a baby last year. She stopped going out or taking an interest in herself. A visit to the hairdresser, a bit of lipstick, you’d be surprised how much better she felt when she made a bit of an effort with her appearance.’
A hand-written poem falls from the package as Alison opens it.
Cherry Lip gloss
Cloudy color
Sticky flavour
Slicks your lips
Temporary
It slips away
With the first lick
Alison goes into the kitchen to make some lunch. A Sunday Times color supplement feature on economical natural beauty techniques comes to mind. Standing at the hob, stir-frying things to a pulp in a wok, she slicks her fingers with olive oil and runs them through her hair and traces them over her dry lips. She mashes an avocado, spoons half the quantity into Phoebe’s mouth and smears the rest on her face. The postman is probably right. She needs to get out more.
Chapter Thirteen ~ Truly, Madly, Deeply
Sheila Travers had no idea how much she depended on Roy until she lost him. She was always the strong one, the one who spoke for both of them and made all the trivial decisions about their daily lives. He didn’t seem to care about anything much except her, which was one of the reasons she liked him. He fixed his brown eyes on her and watched her wherever she went in the house, like a faithful hound. Now that he has gone, her world is crumbling and she spends hours scouring the press and the TV and radio for clues to his disappearance.
The police haven’t found his body. The only explanation for his continued absence that Sheila can come up with is that Roy is alive but he isn’t free. Friends seem to feel that another explanation is much more likely.
‘A woman? Why would a woman want to keep Roy from coming home?’ Sheila asks them, puzzled. It’s considered old-fashioned to differentiate between the genders but surely people still concede that men are more likely than women to commit crimes against the person?
‘Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air?’ counter her friends, despairing.
Sheila, queuing in the newsagents to buy a newspaper, fire-lighters, bin liners and a packet of Twiglets, looks at the range of magazines with their incredible stories to tell. She has some understanding of the way that journalists work, having watched a docu-soap on the subject last year. Each one of the stories will have been carefully verified by the editor before going to print.
‘My mother stole my boyfriend.’ ‘I spent the night in a space ship.’ Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air? The mist clears. Sheila, wearing her favourite earrings, receives another message. Roy has been taken away. He hasn’t come home because he can’t get back. He is being studied or held to ransom by aliens.
When Sheila telephones the police, they are willing to consider a wider spectrum of possible explanations. ‘An affair?’ They suggest. ‘Another woman? Another man? A mid-life crisis, a joke, a hoax, a fraud of some kind?’
Looking out at the sea from where he stands on the high wire platform next to Sylvia’s house, Roy wonders what would happen if he jumped from here, instead of trying to walk on the wire. Would it hurt? He cannot die, if he is dead already. If you die in Heaven, do you go to Hell? Do you drop to some other circle of Heaven that is less comfortable? Roy would rather stay here. He thinks about Sheila, as he often does, unreachable because he is dead and she is alive. If only there were some way of letting her know that he is all right. If only he could go back, like Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply. Roy remembers walking Sheila home from the cinema after she’d been to see it with her sister, holding her as she sobbed. She said it was heartening the way someone with a big nose can get a starring role in a film and the woman was very convincing when she cried. It made her proud to be British. What was the name of the actress? Sylvia refuses to talk about her previous life but sometimes Roy slips in a reference to some cultural event to estimate how long ago she left Earth.
‘Who was in Truly, Madly, Deeply?’ Roy asks Sylvia, going to find her where she is kneeling in the vegetable garden, pulling up weeds. ‘Julie something. Julie Walters? Julie Christie?’
‘Juliet Stephenson,’ she says, not looking round. So she was there somewhere, ten years ago or so, when he was walking home with Sheila. Would she have looked at him, if she’d walked past? He’d have looked at her with her bright hair and her pretty face. It is difficult to tell how she would feel about him under different circumstances because here he is one of a choice of one.
Maybe she was never alive. He likes to say to himself that Sylvia is an angel, although he doesn’t feel that he is an angel. Has she undergone some sort of transformation that he has not yet completed, or do angels begin as angels? Was she in a holding place somewhere in the clouds, in some other Heaven where there is a giant video screen where she and all the other waiting angels could watch the latest releases? She hasn’t been here forever because she has told Roy that the land was overgrown and ugly when she first arrived.
‘How old is that dog?’
Sylvia’s elderly sheepdog totters by. It is black with a white patch on its face and white paws. One green eye, one blue. ‘She’s sixteen.’
‘That’s old.’
‘Yes. She was nearly fourteen when she came here.’
The dog has continued to grow older even after it has died. This information is a bombshell for Roy. Horrible, horrible information. Will he continue to age while he’s here? He thought he’d done well to stick at 42 but he will grow older and older with no prospect of release, as there is on earth.
Chapter Fourteen ~ The Dinner Party
Miss Lester, zipping across town on a very small moped, is vibrating with excited nervous energy. She has never, ever been so happy. The cause of this happiness is Ella Fitzgerald, who has accepted Miss Lester’s business proposal to set up a dinner party dating agency, using her own offices as its headquarters.
Miss Lester had been feeling rather low since the failure of an affair. This coincided with her departure from a management position in the genetics industry, under circumstances which left her reluctant to seek alternative employment with anyone who might wish to take up references. However the rehabilitating effects of Mrs Fitzgerald’s trust and kindness have been remarkable. Miss Lester has thrown herself into the task of setting up the dating agency, compiling business plans, charts and projected returns on investment. She has equipped herself with an infra-red pointer pen, of the kind that have been banned in schools and provincial night-clubs, and she has made lengthy presentations to Mrs Fitzgerald and all her associates.
For the very first round of dinners, Miss Lester has pulled in some favours, filling some of the spare places with people who are not genuine love-seekers, just to get the evening going with a swing.
Speeding through Soho’s stationary traffic astride her moped that evening, like a winged emissary from the gods bringing happiness to London’s single professionals, Miss Lester is struck by a pale face staring at her from the shadows as she draws to a stop at a set of traffic lights. A man in a dress steps out in front of her, as if daring her to drive through him when the lights change, his eyes holding hers for a few seconds through the visor of her crash helmet. The malevolence in the gaze unsettles Miss Lester even after the man crosses to the other side of the road, continuing his journey without looking back.
As she arrives at the restaurant, Miss Lester sees that things have already gone slightly awry, with people movi
ng the place cards and spoiling the boy-girl, boy-girl symmetry of the seating arrangements.
Mrs Fitzgerald’s associate Alison is sitting there with a scowl on her face. Alison’s best friend Taron is sitting on her left. Her friend and neighbour, Harvey, is sitting opposite. To Alison’s right is Hugo Fragrance, a stunningly handsome man who works in the City and can talk of nothing else.
Miss Lester, unaccustomed to wearing makeup, has selected a too-sticky lipstick that has already travelled over the edges of her mouth. She has the appearance of being made up of a series of interlocking triangles. Her face is an inverted isosceles triangle framed within the equilateral triangle of her hair. Her nose is a triangle. Even her clothes are triangular because she wears knee-length A-line skirts.
Miss Lester
Miss Lester - side view
Miss Lester has chosen to set up a dating agency because her research has shown it will deliver a high return on her investment capital. Miss Lester is perfectly competent when it comes to pointing at a flip chart with an infra-red pen and saying ‘our vision is to be the best dating agency in Britain,’ but she hasn’t got much grasp of how to organize a successful dinner party. Nevertheless, she has already obtained, from one of her guests, the phone number for renowned director Philippe Noir, with the aim of interesting him in filming a docu-soap about her company for Channel Four. One of the best things about being on TV is that she would hope to be able to repay Mrs Fitzgerald in some small way by ensuring the director gives her benefactor plenty of prime time exposure.
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 69
