by Jill Dawson
‘Have you ever been so low you thought of suicide? You remember I told you that two of my girlfriends took it up, and one was rather successful.’
Ronnie says nothing, but he follows my eyes to the portrait of me that Allela did and says: ‘Your friend who painted you back in the forties? She had – prescience. You look about the age you are now. And you certainly look cross with her.’
I stare back at us from the wall, fierce in my red jacket, a frown line between my eyes. Yes, I will live a long life, and I will always be angry with you, Allela, for abandoning yours. Abandoning me.
‘Twenty years. The irony . . . In the end, after downing the acid, Allela recovered in hospital and was sorry! Her girlfriend told me that. I never went to see her. She’d slipped into a coma and died by the time I heard.’ And it wasn’t my fault, everyone kept saying. Our relationship was long over by then. But I re-read her letters to me, and she came back to me with such vividness. Sweet little Allela, with her bug eyes in her glasses, like some kind of insect. I should have tried harder; I should have understood.
‘I read your novel,’ I tell Ronnie. ‘I love the way you talk of the boys in the school, that line about being neither shy nor respectful of death, only disgusted.’
‘Well, if you did read my manuscript,’ Ronnie sounds rather pleased, ‘you’ll remember the line where the old girl says these days she wishes we still traded in nuances rather than amateur psychology.’
Ah. I smile, opening my mouth a little against the warm skin of his stomach. Touché. So clever, Ronnie. So enclosed. So private.
‘Did you ever steal anything? Ever really want to hurt somebody?’ I persist.
‘Of course I’ve wanted to,’ Ronnie says. ‘It’s not a bit the same as doing it, is it?’
I sit up, feeling danger swell close beside me, hover at my face. ‘I went into the garden today to try to – kill some snails. I wanted to see if I could do it. See what it felt like to snuff out the life of something, a living thing . . .’
Tears hammer at my eyes as I feel it again, the horrible crunching, the jelly-life oozing out and the strange sadness, the inevitability of how I felt about myself as I looked at the little crushed shell in my hand. I’m just as Mother always said. Sick. And evil.
I lift my face to his and our eyes meet. It seems to me that Ronnie sees all, sniffs out my soul, my darkest little-girl past, but – what? What does he do with the information, the knowledge? He draws in his antennae and retreats.
‘I worked on my book today,’ he says. ‘I was at the church, talking to Tender.’
I picture the church, perhaps the same one he took me to, with the huge blowy churchyard, the lichen on the church tower, and on the drowned sailors’ tombs. ‘Of course, Tender’s not his name. The gravedigger. He inherited it from his father, but it’s not his real name.’
I press myself against Ronnie, crush my breasts against his chest. He’s unmoved. He smiles – he laughs at me, actually, with a kind of sunny beauty, but he’s unmoved. I shift slightly away. And now he’s laughed at me, should I give up? Because Ronnie either has no ugliness inside him (I think this is true) or he has no access to it. Both states bore me.
‘Tender’s been digging graves since he was twelve years old. Before his voice broke! The work never upset him, he took it in his stride. Graves are my vocation, he says.’
Now Ronnie laughs again, a gusty, genuine chuckle, and switches off the light. He shuffles himself further down in the bed, and I rest my head on his chest and continue to stroke him, compulsively, my hand straying deep into the rougher hair beneath his stomach, but not quite that far.
‘He says that he’s buried one woman three times. She keeps cheating death and giving them all a shock. His point is: using a mirror is no good. You should put a piece of cotton where the lips part and if there’s the least bit of wind it will flutter. And he says he can always tell from the eyes. When seeing has ended.’
When seeing has ended. I think of my snails again. And a terrapin that Mother once cooked in a pot of boiling water for a stew. Watching the agonised creature frantically scrabbling to escape – Mother humming happily, reaching for a spoon, the same way she would have twinked out my life, given half a chance: washing me away, drowning me in turpentine.
And now Ronnie is talking softly, and consolingly, of death. I listen to his heart beating and the vibrations in his ribcage.
‘Dust to dust, they say. More like mud to mud. Half the graves round here are waterlogged. Foxton is a terrible wet place.’
I keep my hand compulsively moving on Ronnie’s warm skin. I plunge, daringly, with my naughty, wilful, transgressive hand. But there’s no desire for me there: just softness, Ronnie’s sweet kindness, his tender pity for me. I think of the phone booth suddenly, with its brambles and bushes, the heated conversations trapped inside the closed glass door. Ronnie sleepily comments that the gravedigger didn’t read, didn’t like to think too hard, had seen death so often, every day of his life, that his own wish was simply to be cremated – ashes thrown straight into the air. Then Ronnie’s breathing grows deeper, with a nasal vibration at the end, and I know he is asleep. Dear, sweet Ronnie. The war has washed over him, over all of them in this little place, left its residue. He believes in art, as I do. And now he wants only to sleep.
Sam rings at 10 a.m. as arranged; she sounds cold; wary. The booth smells of wet grass, cats and blackberry leaves. The glass panes are faintly furred with green; a beer bottle knocks against the toe of my shoe. I can barely hear her words, between gulps and sniffing and great long inhalations of breath.
‘Is Minty there?’ I ask. A sound that seems to be ‘no’. Have the police been? Yes. In person? Yes, two of them. A man and a woman. Young. Horrible. What did they say?
‘They found the – the clothes, you know. And the car. Early this morning. And they wanted to know if he was – if I thought he was – depressed.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said no. I said I don’t know!’ she wails.
I guess this crying is good. The hysterics will make it all look authentic; if her husband had just gone missing, she would certainly be upset. I try some soothing words, but my mind is elsewhere, on the problem of the stained rug, which Ronnie has now seen rolled up and leaning against the stairs, and which I need to get out of the house by some means, just in case. In case of any visit.
‘Did they ask you anything else? Where you’d been for the weekend? Did you mention me?’
‘I said I left Saturday lunchtime and he was fine then. That he drove me to the station to get the train to Ipswich and his golf clubs were in the car and I’d thought he was going – golfing. They didn’t ask me your address; they didn’t seem concerned about that. That when I got back Sunday and he wasn’t there I reported him missing.’
‘Maybe you should have hinted. Not so fine. A girl at work. The argument you had, you know . . .’
‘What?’
‘Told them about the fight between you. So that – they have a reason.’
She simply sobs. She tells me she has to go, she has to ring the school and let them know, and then she cries: ‘What to tell Minty, oh, what do I say to Minty?’
‘Well, at this stage he’s only missing, it’s only the clothes they’ve found, so keep it from her for now. Yes, keep it from her,’ I say. ‘At this stage Gerald might turn up.’
‘What?’
‘I mean, for all we know he might. That’s what we would be thinking if . . .’
Through the broken pane of the telephone booth I glance over at Bridge Cottage. A cobweb strokes my face; a pheasant is calling somewhere, repeatedly; a bus appears at the top of the road, on its cosy, normal way to Framlingham. Tra-la. How life in a village goes on! Then I see Mrs Ingham appear at the front door of Bridge House, which, being higher up than mine, situated on a small raised incline, can be seen easily from the booth. She puts two empty milk bottles on her step, bending stiffly to place them in a wire crate with No Mi
lk Today Thank you and Silver Top Please all pre-written on little cards that simply need turning. She picks up a package the mailman has left for her. She’s fully dressed and she returns in a moment wearing a navy coat, clutching a red purse, a pillbox hat pinned to her head, and her little dog, Reggie, yapping away and tugging on the lead beside her. Promising. Maybe I can put the rolled rug in the car while she’s out.
‘I have to go. I’ll call tomorrow. Same time. Honey, try to . . . It’ll be OK.’
Sam is still crying when I replace the black telephone in its cradle. I should have been kinder, but I’m distracted, heart pumping a little. This may be my only chance. I nip back into the house and carry the rolled-up rug out to the car, pressing my face against its ghastly roughness and smell. Opening the trunk, I flop it down and shove it across the back, but there is a prominent spare wheel in there and very little room: the trunk won’t close. I have to find the mechanism that allows me to push down one of the back seats and dump the rug across it. I glance up and down the street: only the mailman still making his rounds, up ahead, his back to me. Bits of carpet underlay, like black moths, flutter all over the road and cling to my clothes as I’m manoeuvring it. I see the departing figure of Mrs Ingham and her dumb little dog trotting up the street; she doesn’t look back.
Next problem, where the hell to take it? What do the English do with their old carpets and rugs? I certainly know where I can buy a rug – Abbott’s, the large, barn-like second-hand furniture place in Debenham, if I want to replace it – but getting rid of it is much trickier. I jump in the car, aware that the rug is visible to anyone glancing in through the window. Well, that’s fine, isn’t it, at this stage? I’m just a householder getting rid of an unwanted rug.
Virginia Smythson-Balby is suddenly tapping on the window at the driver’s side. Holy crap! What’s the idea of turning up like that every five minutes?
‘Hello! Miss Highsmith! Going out for the day? I wonder if you have time for a word? It’s about the interview – Miss Highsmith. I’ve spoken to Frances. Would this Friday be a possibility? I’m sorry it’s such awfully short notice.’
‘Friday’s fine.’ I jump in the car, making it clear I’m in a hurry. This seems to make her smile. Or something in my behaviour does.
‘At two p.m. I’ll drive you down there, if you like, as she’s a friend of mine,’ she says. ‘That is, unless—’
‘Huh? Oh, sure. See you Friday.’
I begin winding the window up. She gives me a startled expression through the spotted glass and then another big smile. Her perfume gusts in through the window. I turn the key in the ignition and pull away from her. In the side mirror I see that she is waving happily, a coat with some sort of silver fox fur collar up to her neck, as if she just secured a coup of some sort. I’m right about her being hipped on me. Damn her: what did I just agree to?
The fields round here, deserted though they are, seem somehow filled with patrolling farmers. I have an idea to drive to the dockland area in Ipswich. For some cock-eyed reason the docks appeal to me. The old gasworks and the Cobbold Brewery, this area glimpsed only once, the time when I was lost with Sam after picking her up from the train station, has the dirtiness and industry that I need: people moving things around, shifting things, dumping things. I seem to remember seeing giant vats and skips for garbage. I’ll just plonk the rug in one of those. Easier to look innocent in an industrial setting than a deserted rural one.
The sumptuous colours of the trees and fields start to lift my mood as I drive. There is a whiff of rot in the air: leaves, apples. I sing a Doris Day number . . . and picture Gerald for a moment, the great lunk whistling as he put his golf clubs into the car, fooling around and reckoning on a jolly weekend with his buddies. This thought produces a pang of something but I can’t tell what. Then I think: He wasn’t in golf slacks when he arrived at Bridge Cottage. Does that matter? Does it have any bearing? Would he have been? Should I have thought of that? Also, why didn’t the police ask Sam for the address she was visiting at the weekend? Wouldn’t they at some point ask her about that? Then again, no reason to get nettled, the story is this: Gerald didn’t care a hang about golf, he’s been having trouble with a mistress, or several (or work, something dodgy there, wasn’t there a hint of some bad dealings, some investigation, who knows what?) and, worse, he has long suspected his wife is in love with some arty-farty guy, so he drives to the coast in a half cracked state and does away with himself – why Aldeburgh? Is it near the golf course, perhaps, and a last-minute change of plan? I pass the green-painted water pump. Crows squawk overhead like village busybodies. I drive towards the sky of graded blue as if into a screen of dip-dyed cloth. It reminds me of a scarf Sam has. And now I’m thinking: Some day soon I’d like to wrap her in that scarf, in nothing but that vivid, violet-blue gauzy material, blazing the colour of a Texan bluebonnet in spring and then slowly unwind her, twirl her until she is fully undone.
They found the body. It was in the Ipswich Star. Man, missing for over a week, found washed up near Martello tower. His car was found at Aldeburgh; his clothes and belongings recovered on the beach. Believed to be Gerald Gosforth, senior partner at a London bank . . .
Sam doesn’t think I should come to the funeral and we have a fight on the telephone, which I win.
‘You hardly knew him. It will look odd,’ she says.
I know she’s right but my motives are complicated. I feel tightly wound, like a ball of cotton. I can’t risk not being there. I have to keep some kind of vigil over Sam. Maybe she’ll betray us with a look, some comment, a gesture. I have to be there. A voice inside me screams, I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing this if there were any other way . . .
A rooster crows somewhere as I leave the phone booth. I’m nervy, strung out, and I’m going to be this way for a good twenty-four hours. I find a black leather vest – what do the French call it? A gilet – to wear with a skirt and white shirt and plain flat shoes, and I know that I look . . . well, not exactly the toast of the fleet. Lumpen, more like a ranch-hand in drag, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
Ronnie needs a ride and I’m glad of the company. He knew Gerald a little, and he knows Sam. He will notice my sweating hands on the wheel, my lip permanently folded under my tooth (Ronnie notices everything) but, being him, he will assume it’s just my shyness, my dread of social occasions, my fear of my love affair with Sam being detected, and put no further spin on it. I am Sam’s friend, after all (well, Ronnie knows it’s more than that but that’s OK), the friend she was staying with during the weekend when her husband went missing.
A surprising number of people are here. A couple of other writers. People from the bank. Parents of Minty’s friends. The Dixons. The Polk-Faradays. Neighbours, friends from the bridge club. Golf buddies. Gerald’s much-envied younger brother, Hugh, the one who worked in the publishing world: a skinnier, more ridiculous version of him in a shiny suit and glasses that perch on the edge of his nose, giving him the look of a parson. We’re at Sam’s place, back from the crematorium. Damned good luck that cremation was what Gerald plumped for in his will. Once he is ashes no one can examine the head; no further clues can ever be uncovered. And because of the shame, the whisper of suicide, the coroner’s questions have been hasty and respectful, Sam said. His opinion was that the law should be as Christian as allowed, under the circumstances, Ronnie repeated to me. No post-mortem was suggested by the coroner: there has been a certain haste.
My heart is drumming its tattoo and I pull the leather gilet around it, as if others in the room might see. I’m watching Sam, while trying to look as if I’m not. My hands tremble around a tiny glass of sherry, which threatens to slip from them. And Sam? Where is she? She’s wearing a simple black silk number, elegant as ever, and lizard-skin high heels. I’m conscious of her even when not watching, as if she’s the only lit thing in the room, and always in my peripheral sight. Is she acting naturally? Is she saying the right things? The answer is no, she’s acting like a
n automaton, like a zombie; she’s stiff and slightly crazed, her nose too powdered, her blonde hair too rigidly pinned in its bun. But that’s fine, that’s fine, no one will expect otherwise. Who is she talking to now? What is she saying? Did that woman just glance over at me? Was my name mentioned?
The smoke from my cigarette drifts upwards, slow and unbroken. Sam goes to talk to another little group – an older couple, perhaps relatives. My heart jumps. Who are they? What is she saying now?
No one will be surprised either that I’m sitting here alone, sipping at this tiny tot of sherry, blowing out smoke. That is what’s known about me. Reclusive. Unfriendly. What does it matter how they describe it to themselves, if they think of me at all, which I’ve learned to persuade myself is unlikely. ‘Nobody is thinking about you,’ Mother used to say, when I used shyness as an alibi.
Minty is passing round little plates of cakes with disgusting coconut shreds on top. She shook everyone’s hand as we arrived, including mine, and said solemnly: ‘Thank you for coming.’ She didn’t meet my eye and I was glad, because the hand she held was slippery with sweat, and my eyes, I felt, were frightened. At any rate, she has the same handshake as her father: snatching only your fingers and letting go as soon as she picks up your hand, as if it’s hot to the touch.
At the crematorium I relaxed for a moment. I thought: That ridiculous curtain, the music blaring, the rigmarole. What are people protecting themselves from seeing? And I thought of Ronnie’s gravedigger, Tender, who buries nearly two hundred people a year. Brother Death. Does he have some secret knowledge the rest of us don’t? A more precious take on life because he’s closer to death every day and sees how it is? You could say the same about writers who write about death. Trying to face it down, but failing every time. Words aren’t death – typing them doesn’t move you closer. If anything, it makes it more fanciful, takes the teeth and claws out because you’ve captured it and survived, pinned it to the page. That late-night tremor, the quake you feel when you get a real glimpse. That just edged further away.
