The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  After Anya had put her son to bed, she said to Jaysmith, ‘You’ll have to be careful not to let him always win.’

  ‘Oh it won’t be always,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Eventually we’ll play off level, and then when I’m old and decrepit it’ll be his turn to let me win.’

  She didn’t look at him but said as she poked the fire, ‘You seem to be assuming a long future for your games.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Jaysmith, affecting surprise. ‘We’re going to be practically neighbours, aren’t we? And you did say you’d bring Jimmy to visit me in Rigg Cottage every Sunday, didn’t you?’

  Bryant, who had been apparently dozing over his paper, snorted derisively and said, ‘I rather fancy a nightcap. Who’ll join me?’

  ‘I will,’ said Anya promptly. ‘Especially as I see the Islay’s been opened. You two must have been in a very jolly way with yourselves this afternoon.’

  ‘Just a celebration of youth and hope,’ said Bryant.

  They sat at their ease before the crackling log fire and drank their golden whisky and talked in a pleasant, undemanding, desultory manner for another hour. The room was lit only by a single standard lamp and the fire’s shifting glow. The whisky and the warmth made them all drowsy, but beneath his drowsiness Jaysmith felt the stretching, waking shape of strong desire whenever his eyes dwelt on Anya’s relaxed and outstretched body. At one moment their gazes met and she looked away abruptly enough to make him hope that she too was troubled by this restless visitor.

  Bryant at last announced that he was for his bed. Jaysmith rose to help him and was told that he was now feeling able to negotiate the stairs unaided.

  ‘A man of ingenuity can overcome mere physical disadvantages, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked.

  ‘True, but you’ve had a tiring and demanding day,’ said Jaysmith. ‘At least let me bring up the rear to catch you if you fall.’

  This compromise agreed, Jaysmith and Bryant slowly processed up the stairs.

  When he came down again, Jaysmith found Anya kneeling before the fire with her arms outstretched as though embracing the heat.

  ‘You’ll ruin your skin,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps. But you wouldn’t like a cold-hearted woman, would you?’

  He knelt beside her, feeling awkward.

  ‘Is that an invitation?’ he asked, putting his arm around her waist.

  ‘Is this an offer?’ she replied.

  He turned her body towards him and kissed her. It was not an easy or elegant manoeuvre from this position and after a few seconds she disengaged and pushed him away. For one chillingly detumescing moment he thought she was going to resume her seat and their previous domestically comfortable but definitely non-passionate relationship. Instead she pulled a couple of cushions off the sofa, dropped them on the rug in front of the fire and lay back on them. She looked more like a gymnast about to engage in some trimming exercise – with her body perfectly straight, legs close together, arms by her side, features relaxed, eyes closed, breathing steady – than a woman hot with desire. But when he crouched over her and kissed her again and ran his hands over the small firm breasts beneath the fine woollen sweater, he felt a convulsion run like a tidal bore the whole length of her body, and then her thin arms were round his neck, drawing him down with a strength which surprised him. She kissed him, she ran her tongue over his face into his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils, she wrapped her limbs around him as if intent on fusing their bodies together beyond all hope of separation, she had clearly loosed her hold entirely on the intellectual and conventional universe and was conscious of nothing but the burning agonizing demands of her raw and exposed nerve endings.

  Jaysmith’s response was almost as absolute, except that while his passion took him far beyond considerations of place or person or morality, he was unable by his mortal and masculine nature to transcend the constraints of time. Their hands were inside each other’s clothes, but the very violence of their embrace was an obstacle even to the minimum degree of nakedness necessary for its consummation, and Jaysmith felt himself within a caress, a touch, a warm breath of explosion. Forcing his mind away from the lithe, pulsating body beneath him to memories of the coldest and most physically agonizing experiences of his life – a dawn in Sweden when his target came late and a blizzard came early; a night in the Vosges when a landslip cut him off from his car – he prorogued his orgasm while he dragged the clinging jeans down over her narrow buttocks. Even his steely will could not hold out much longer and once the impeding garment had passed over her knees, he delayed no more. He thrust straight into the liquid heat of her vulva and did not need to thrust again. As he convulsed, he felt her enfolding, squeezing, rubbing with desperate need against his soon-to-vanish hardness. Then she cried out and pressed her wide gaping mouth against his neck to stifle her cry as she came also.

  Afterwards she lay quietly in his arms for perhaps fifteen minutes, then she began to cry. He listened to her sobs and pressed her closer still and felt them racking her body long after she had controlled their noise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked gently. ‘I mean, why did you cry?’

  ‘Shame, I think. Something like that.’

  ‘Shame? Because of us?’

  ‘No! Because it wasn’t us, perhaps. It was it, not us. There was no room for identity in there, was there?’

  ‘Perhaps not. But there’s identity now.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I mean. You, me. Before, it was just it. That’s how it was with Edward in the beginning. Shit! I swore that if ever you and I came to this, I wasn’t going to talk about Edward. Not now, not so soon. And now listen to me!’

  ‘So you foresaw it might come to this?’ said Jaysmith, glad of a chance to lighten the exchange.

  ‘The first time you looked at me, I saw it could come to this,’ she said seriously. ‘If you think you’ve a poker face, disillusion yourself.’

  ‘Love isn’t poker,’ said Jaysmith. ‘You work by admission, confession even, not bluff. You were confessing about Edward. Don’t back off. If we continue, we’ll get back here some time. Best to carry on now.’

  ‘Are you right? Perhaps you are,’ she said softly. ‘I’m not sure, but I’ll pretend you are. Edward. In the beginning there was a girl; just out of school, on the brink of university, with all the ignorant self-assurance of a bright and pretty creature who knows she’s pretty and knows she’s bright and never doubts that the whole world loves her. Then I met Edward and one night he touched me and something like this happened and suddenly it didn’t matter if the whole world hated me as long as I had Edward. It was me and Edward, you see. No others; we alone. And now I’ve experienced it again. With you. You’re the only other man, ever. And now it occurs to me that perhaps it is independent, just waiting to be summoned up by any man. An intermittent nymphomania; a mere physical syndrome masquerading as an emotional need!’

  ‘And that was why you wept?’

  ‘I wept at the thought that if this were so, perhaps it conned me into conning Edward into marrying me.’

  They lay quietly for a while, deep in their separate yet parallel thoughts.

  ‘You want to feel guilty about him, don’t you?’ said Jaysmith. ‘Well, perhaps you ought to. Tell me about the things you made him do.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘If you are guilty, then presumably you accept responsibility for his oddities of behaviour, isn’t that the point of all this? So, tell me what it was you made him do.’

  She rose on one elbow. He’d never succeeded in getting her sweater off and it was rolled up over her tiny breasts which hung like pale apples beneath the bough of rolled-up wool. Seeing his gaze, she pulled the garment down in a movement more automatic than censorious.

  ‘It was after he found out about his diabetes that he changed,’ she said slowly. ‘After he found out that he wasn’t going to be eligible for any more expeditions.’

  ‘Hardly your fault,’ said Ja
ysmith.

  ‘I was all he had afterwards,’ she said fiercely. ‘I should have been able to offer … something.’

  ‘You were all he had because he chose that you should be, surely?’ said Jaysmith. ‘Didn’t he establish you in some out-of-the-way farmhouse before he found out about his illness? He obviously foresaw another twenty years of shooting off to the Himalayas or wherever, but it never crossed his mind that his wife might like to be living somewhere a little less isolated while he was away.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot for a man who knows nothing,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Have you been pumping pappy?’

  ‘Only in a general way,’ said Jaysmith. ‘He told me nothing you ever told him, believe me. But I persuaded him I was entitled to know something.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘On these grounds,’ said Jaysmith, patting the hearth-rug. ‘I rest my case.’

  She responded to his smile, albeit wanly.

  ‘I didn’t mind the farmhouse,’ she resumed. ‘I helped choose it, after all. I’ve never minded isolation. And I had a car. The Lake District’s not a large area. And to be alone with your husband never seems such a terrible prospect to a newly wedded wife, does it? But things did change, in all kinds of ways. I had Jimmy, and right from the start, I found Edward’s attitude … disturbing. He was very proud of Jimmy, I could tell that, but very resentful of anyone else having much to do with him. At the same time, right from the start almost, he was talking about sending him away to school, just like it happened to him. Almost as soon as he could walk, Edward was wanting to take him out on the fells. I put my foot down. Besides it being absurd for someone so young to be walking very far at all, I was already getting worried about the kind of expeditions Edward was making by himself. He used to tell me about some of them at first, but when I protested about the danger he was putting himself in, almost wilfully it seemed, he stopped telling me. Another failure, you see.’

  ‘You’re a real sin-eater, aren’t you?’ observed Jaysmith. ‘And what was his reaction when you got between him and Jimmy?’

  She didn’t reply, but folded her legs up to her chin and rested her forehead on her knees. Her jeans were still round her ankles but she didn’t seem to be aware.

  ‘So he hit you,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Often?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything about him hitting me!’ she protested. ‘I didn’t even imply it.’

  ‘No? Of course, what you implied was that you made him hit you! Did you force him to violence often?’

  She did not react to his sarcasm but said, ‘He wasn’t really a violent man. I just think that something had happened in his mind. He needed sharp contact with physical reality to convince him of his own existence. I’d sometimes come across him outside the house, just clinging onto a tree, or pressing his head hard against a drystone wall, as if he was desperate for lines of delimitation.’

  ‘I believe Wordsworth in his youth had something of the same trouble,’ said Jaysmith. ‘But he stopped short of beating up women.’

  ‘He didn’t beat me up!’ she said fiercely. ‘He struck me, on occasion. Not many occasions, and never more than one blow.’

  ‘Moderation in all things! But you got to the point of wanting to leave him, despite his moderate behaviour?’

  ‘Did pappy tell you that?’

  ‘He told me you were staying here when your husband had his fatal fall.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Anya. ‘But I doubt if I would have left him. It never became absolutely unbearable, though perhaps all that that shows is how much human beings can bear. I suggested a separation once; that at least had the effect of making him break the customary silence. He told me simply and categorically that as far as he was concerned, there’d be neither separation nor divorce, and assured me that if I ever acted unilaterally, he would ensure by legal or, if necessary, by illegal means that Jimmy stayed with him. That was when I confided in pappy. He was furious. He tried talking to Edward but got nowhere. He even tried talking to Edward’s father but that wasn’t very productive either. Pappy was all for my leaving Edward forthwith, but I wouldn’t. I went back home; things blew over I suppose. Not that I noticed. I was just surviving with as little pain as possible. What had to be, had to be.’

  ‘I can’t imagine your father falling back on philosophy,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘He seemed, if not reconciled, at least quiescent. I regretted having said anything to him, so I did my best to undo the damage by pretending things had improved. I suppose that helped. In the middle of last December, pappy announced he was giving a party the Saturday before Christmas and asked me to help with the preparation and to be hostess. He invited Edward to the party, of course; but Edward of course refused. But he said I could go and help, or at least he didn’t say I couldn’t. Pappy came to pick us up on the Friday, just to be sure, I suppose. I took Jimmy with me. Edward didn’t care for that, but I told him straight that I wasn’t leaving the boy in the farmhouse.’

  ‘I suppose he suspected you might be going to bolt?’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘He asked me that. I told him I wasn’t. He trusted me.’

  ‘All the same, it might have been a good opportunity. What did your father say?’

  ‘He asked the same question as soon as we got back here. I just told him nothing had changed, I wasn’t running and I wasn’t risking losing Jimmy. He didn’t persist. I think he just hoped that my pleasure in being at Naddle Foot again and meeting old friends might be so great that I’d refuse to give it up. It almost worked too. I loved the feeling of being busy preparing for the party, and it was all a tremendous success. But come Sunday, after I’d cleared up and we had lunch, I said it was time I was going back. Thank God I did. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d made up my mind to leave Edward and then found out later what had happened!’

  ‘You seem to have accepted pretty full responsibility as it is,’ remarked Jaysmith. ‘But come on, don’t stop now. All or nothing.’

  ‘It was mid-afternoon when we reached the farm, but the weather was so foul it was dark already. There were no lights on, no fires. It was clear to me at a glance that the place had been empty for twenty-four hours at least. I looked for Edward’s climbing gear. When I saw it was gone, we called out the mountain rescue. They set out that evening but with the weather like it was, there wasn’t much hope of finding him then, and it was Monday morning before they spotted him. He was deep in coma by then and he died within hours of getting to hospital. His back was broken too, so it was probably for the best. A day in a wheelchair would have driven him insane, let alone a lifetime. They were kind at the inquest. They called it misadventure. But I knew better.’

  ‘Why? What did you know?’

  She stared at him, her rich brown eyes filled once more with that intense feeling he had first mistaken for grief but now knew as guilt.

  ‘He’d been looking for death every time he went out on those solo climbs,’ she stated flatly. ‘Looking for it, challenging it. But so far, despite all the dangers, his skill had always won. This time he stacked the odds against him to the point of impossibility. He didn’t go into a coma because he was lying out there among the rocks without insulin. He fell among the rocks because he went into a coma. I know. I checked the ampoules later. I always kept a close eye on them because I knew he tended to be slap-happy in his use of them. He hated that sense of dependency, you see. He deliberately didn’t inject himself before he went out on the Saturday.’

  ‘But you can’t be certain it was deliberate,’ protested Jaysmith. ‘You say he was slap-happy about taking the stuff? Perhaps he just forgot.’

  ‘That would be bad enough,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure it was deliberate.’

  ‘Why? Because that makes you feel more guilty?’ said Jaysmith angrily. ‘I don’t see that you have a damn thing to feel guilty about, even if it was deliberate.’

  As if explaining something to a slow child, she said very clearly, ‘All the time I was feeling sorry
for myself and moaning on to pappy that I was getting near the end of my tether, Edward, quietly and without much fuss, reached the end of his. There was only one person close enough to notice and that was me.’

  A hundred refuting arguments rose in Jay’s mind, but he voiced none of them. Anya’s feelings were not to be dissipated by logic. The mere act of articulating them had probably done much to help, but the process could not be advanced by mere persuasion.

  ‘I’m glad the bastard’s dead!’ he said with a vehemence which surprised himself as much as Anya.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If he wasn’t dead, I’d have to kill him,’ he stated with simple force. ‘I want you, Anya.’

  ‘It was my firm impression you’d just had me,’ she said.

  ‘I want more than that,’ he said. ‘I want everything about you and I want it on a permanent basis. Believe me, a mere husband would have been no obstacle!’

  He spoke with an intensity that clearly impressed her, even though she could hardly begin to guess at the real and dark truth behind his retrospective threat.

  ‘Look, Jay,’ she said, attempting lightness. ‘There’s no need for all this, you know. All this talk of futures and permanency, I mean. OK. It was very good. If you want to slip off now and remember me from time to time as the best fuck in Cumbria, that’ll be all right, believe me.’

  He must have looked shocked at her unexpected coarseness, for she laughed out loud.

  ‘You see,’ she said. ‘You’re going off me already.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Good try, but it won’t work. Nothing will work, you’ll find that out eventually.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, rising. ‘I’ll make us a pot of coffee, I think.’

  She stooped to grasp her jeans and pull them up. He stared up at the long slim legs and the curve of the boyish buttocks and he reached out and grasped her wrist.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘It took me too much hard effort to get those things where they are,’ he said. ‘I’m not letting you pull them up until it’s absolutely necessary.’