The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  He didn’t come up with the idea of murdering his wife straight away. He started off in a ‘what if’ kind of way. What if she had a heart attack and dropped dead. What if she was hit by a car and died instantly. The instantness was important, he didn’t want her to suffer. What if she slipped in the bath and hit her head on the tap at a specially vulnerable place on her skull so that she wasn’t just knocked out or concussed. But it wasn’t a very hopeful process, this what if. It could be a long time, or never, before it happened. It could happen to his lover, or himself, first. He started to wonder how you might nudge what if along through maybe and past happenstance to fact.

  The newspapers were full of reports of a court case, the trial of a policeman who’d killed his wife by injecting her with heroin. He hadn’t done it himself, he’d paid some men to do it for him, they’d tied her up and done it and stood in her kitchen drinking beers out of the fridge while they waited for it to work. It took a long time, the men got drunk on the beers while the woman in the next room watched her death coming and lived through its agony. Carl thought that would be the worst thing, knowing your death coming and having no power to stop it. The policeman’s girlfriend was on trial too, as an accomplice.

  To Carl this seemed the apotheosis of how not to kill your wife. It was messy, crude, cruel, and the bloke had got caught. It seemed particularly ironical that the man was a policeman; you’d think such a person would have some sharper sense of what would work and what wouldn’t.

  And certainly such a method wouldn’t do for him because his wife had never used heroin, knew nothing about it, and neither did he. He wondered why the policeman hadn’t done it himself, why he’d had to hire people to do it; that was probably where the messiness came in. And the unreliability. He certainly wouldn’t get somebody else, apart from the expensiveness of it, the waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere, that was where you would lose control, that was where danger would especially lie. The policeman seemed to have been estranged from his wife, he wondered why it couldn’t just be left at that, him off with the girlfriend, the wife deserted. There was some problem with custody of a small child. This wasn’t a problem for Carl, his children were grown up; provided he decently mourned his wife and that wouldn’t be difficult, he would really be sorry, they would be happy to see him settled again, he was quite certain of that. His lover was younger; his children could even be relieved that she would be the one to look after him when he got old, the job wouldn’t fall to them.

  Carl started reading a lot of books of true crime stories. Fiction wasn’t any good to him, a fiction writer could start at the end and work back, keeping utter control of events in a way that wasn’t possible to a person living them. The thing to be learned from the true crime stories was that it was usually minor and entirely unforeseen things that gave the game away. In the case of really clever murders, that is. Anybody as stupid and clumsy as the policeman trying to buy his wife’s death was bound to get caught, and deserved to. But really clever people who had taken every possibility into account got caught by the unexpected, a door sticking, a light bulb failing, the cat bringing in a mouse. The person who never went to the casino being there that night, the cleaning woman coming late because she had to take her dog to the vet, the neighbour choosing that day to have his trees lopped out of the way of the electricity wires.

  The real problem was the alibi. He was beginning to appreciate how difficult it is to have a perfect alibi, unless you have an accomplice, and that is even more dangerous. That was what trapped the policeman, thinking that paying someone else would allow him to construct an invincible alibi for the time of the crime. Since his wife was already someone who did drugs, an overdose was a clever idea, it just hadn’t worked. Or it had worked, but not secretly. And the hired help were no good. You could see how anybody prepared to commit a crime for money wasn’t likely to be a very trustworthy person, and not a very nice person. Quite different from somebody preparing to commit a crime out of love, and a desire not to hurt.

  Carl thought if he just kept thinking, and reading around the subject, a good idea would come. In the meantime he was more and more in love with his lover. He pretended to have enrolled in a course at TAFE two nights a week in order to have time to spend together. He’d quite fancied doing French in case they ever got to Paris one day but then thought he might get caught out not having learned any, so he chose photography instead, since anybody can take photos, he already knew how to do that. To make it look real he bought an expensive new camera and spent quite a lot of time pointing it at things, and even took some pictures, using black and white film and photographing objects of no interest to anyone and calling them compositions. He made a point of doing homework. He posed his wife, she was called Dianne, against backdrops of bunched-up curtains with light coming sharply from strange angles. She didn’t look very good in these portraits, which was partly his lack of skill, but when he looked closely at her in the flesh she wasn’t looking too hot there, either. Her skin had lost its rosy colour, even in her fifties Dianne had pretty skin, but then age has to strike sometime. And maybe he was comparing her with his love, who was that good bit younger. She was wearing a lot of make-up, which had never been a habit of hers, and it didn’t suit her.

  That’s rather a dark lipstick you’re wearing, darling.

  Oh, I like a bit of colour, she said, with quite a coquettish smile.

  He was wondering about electrocution. They’d once had an electric espresso coffee machine which had stopped working and when he’d taken it in the repairman said it was a wonder nobody had been killed because it was wrongly wired up so that any time it was turned on it was alive, touching the metal could have been lethal. How can that be, Carl had asked, I’ve been using it for years. It’s been wrongly wired for years, said the repairman. You’ve been very very lucky.

  He could wrongly wire up some appliance and when his wife used it she would get a shock and it would kill her. Instantly. But he might be implicated. What if he made it go bung and took it to be mended and then he redid it, wrongly. But that would implicate the tradesman, who would point the finger at him. And what appliance? They didn’t have anything like that simple old ethnic coffee maker any more. Mostly these days appliances are sealed units, you can’t interfere. Too dangerous, otherwise.

  A car accident. Him driving, but not hurt much. But he didn’t know how to control that. He might be killed, or badly injured, she might be badly injured but not killed. And you only had to look at wrecked cars; some were mangled beyond recognition and the occupants had walked away, others barely dinged and people killed. Falling over a cliff when they were out for a walk? But she would see him do it, know for that however many seconds of her fall to death that he had done it, and he did not want her to think that of him, even for a few seconds. And anyway she might survive. Or pull him over with her.

  Poison then. But he didn’t know anything about poisons. Maybe if they had rats, and he put baits down. But how would he get them into her, and just how did they work? He didn’t want any long-drawn agony. Thrashing, and foaming, and drumming heels. That would be hideous.

  Dianne wasn’t interested in sex any more. He’d been doing his duty, and of course he enjoyed it, she was his wife and he loved her, even if she didn’t make him deliriously happy the way his lover did, oh the agonies of parting from her afterwards. But now she turned away with a regretful little kiss on his cheek. She didn’t actually say, Not tonight dear, but that was what she meant.

  She was losing a bit of weight too. It looked good. She’d got rather dumpy. Shapeless, a bit bulgy. Of course she was a grandmother. Now she was much neater, more her old shapely self, and was wearing smarter clothes, more fitting.

  Thinner. More make-up. Smarter clothes. Coming home late from work and no explanation. Off sex—with him. Ha ha. The penny dropped. How could he have been so slow, so stupid. She had a lover. That was the explanation.

  He suddenly felt a sickening acid wash of jealous
y fill his gut. His wife and a lover. He’d murder the beast. He squeezed his fists together round the brute’s imaginary neck. The tension of his squeezing made the veins in his own neck stand out in cords. But then he began to think rationally again. His gut was still full of acid, but his mind was functioning. Seeing, as it had been trained to do, a window of opportunity.

  An amicable parting, then. That would be a lot more expensive, of course. With her death he’d keep her half of the house, and some of her superannuation, and there was a decent insurance policy. They’d made their wills, and left everything to one another, each trusting the other to leave it to the children in the end. But he could adjust his thinking to a lot less money; he’d made some nice plans depending on it, the Paris thing, and so on, but it was his lover he wanted, her body, her presence, he didn’t need a lot of money as well. And he hadn’t come up with a decent murder scenario; it could be the best solution.

  But his wife, and a lover . . . He still felt sick, the betrayal of it, he wouldn’t have thought she could ever do such a thing. She deserved to die, being unfaithful like that.

  When Dianne came home from work late he confronted her. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, he said.

  She smiled a wan smile. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too. But she stopped, waited, so he had to go on.

  You’re looking very smart these days.

  Again she smiled, an odd smile, he thought it was maybe a secret sly sexy smile, which disturbed him, but that didn’t seem quite right. It was sly, and knowing, but with more fear than sex in it.

  It’s my old clothes. Haven’t you noticed, now I’ve lost a bit of weight, I can fit into my old smart clothes.

  Oh, he said. He hadn’t noticed, he’d thought they were new.

  You’ve got a lover, he said.

  She looked at him, and gasped.

  It’s all right, he said. I won’t stand in your way. You must follow your heart.

  Her gasp turned into a laugh, into long and not very pretty laughter, into hiccups, and a sob.

  A lover, she said. A doctor. A lot of doctors. I’ve been having tests. After work. I didn’t want to tell you, in case it was all right, and then you needn’t have worried. But it isn’t. All right.

  She leaned against him, and he put his arms around her, hugging her tight. Her voice was muffled against the shoulder of his tweed sportscoat.

  It’s cancer, she said. It started in the cervix. But I didn’t, didn’t get it found out in time. Now it’s mest . . . mets . . .

  Metastasising, he said.

  Yes. Spreading in all sorts of places.

  We can get chemotherapy. Radiography.

  They might give me a bit more time. But they won’t cure me. And it won’t be very much more time.

  Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have come with you. You shouldn’t have had to go through this all on your own. There were tears in his eyes as he stared over her head.

  Well, I thought it seemed the best way. And you didn’t seem, seem very interested.

  He hugged her closer. Oh darling, he said.

  She stretched her head back out of the hug. Carl, she said, I want you to promise me . . .

  Yes?

  I’ve got some pills, some morphine, the pain’s quite bad already. And some syrup, I can take little sips of that on top. Oh, but Carl, I’m afraid of the pain. Promise me, Carl, if it gets too bad, you’ll help.

  Help?

  Help me, put an end . . . Oh, to die. I don’t want to go on living if the pain’s unbearable.

  Oh my darling. He squeezed her harder, and she winced. I couldn’t bear to see you suffer.

  This is Carl’s ending. But it’s not how it was.

  Go back to where Dianne says she has cancer. This sad loving scenario spools through his mind as she begins to speak. But she says something different.

  It’s cancer, she says. In the cervix. But not too bad. They think they’ll get it in time. Surgery, then chemo to make sure it all goes. It won’t be fun, but with a bit of luck it won’t be fatal.

  She looks at him with a small smile, brimming with tears. He puts his arms round her so he won’t have to look into that brave frightened face.

  Oh darling. We’ll beat it. You know us, never conquered. I’m not going to let a silly thing like cancer take you away from me.

  She hugs him back. Oh sweetheart, she says. My own sweetheart.

  referential friends

  WHEN SHE SPOKE AT GEOFFREY’S funeral Clare said, He was my Latin dictionary, my English grammar, my entrée to the French language, my Thesaurus, my mentor, my critic. She had got into a wonderfully lazy comfortable habit over the years of asking him instead of looking things up herself, knowing he would be perfectly precise and right. Or else he’d say he didn’t know, but that didn’t often happen. Sometimes, since, Oliver has filled those roles; she has emailed him and asked for help, especially when she was in Adelaide for a month and missing her reference books. What sort of kidney did Leopold Bloom eat? She was sure it was pork, but a Joyce scholar had said it was ox. Of course it was pork. Oliver fixed her up with the Greek word for garden, the reason for using a certain tense, the real meaning of celibate. She argued about that; if people use it to denote not having sex, that’s what it means now, even if originally it meant not being married. Especially since there isn’t another word.

  Often Geoffrey could be a dictionary of quotations, but it had always been Miriam who was best at that. If Clare’s mind was a rag bag, Miriam’s was a card index, neatly arranged and unerringly consultable. Sometimes she rang her up and ran garbled bits of verse past her, and Miriam nearly always knew, could fit the muddled words into their proper pattern of metre and rhyme. And she was good at specialised vocabularies. One day Clare couldn’t remember the verb for the Virgin Mary going up into heaven, so she telephoned Miriam. It would come to her eventually, but she was writing a review of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and wanted it now. Assumed, said Miriam; she couldn’t do it by her own means, she needed help, so it’s assumed. Jesus, now, could do it on his own, his own power; he ascended.

  If you’ve got the right words in the right places, then you can feel you’ve got your life in order, too. For a while.

  a measure of kindness

  EVEN WHEN YOU ARE MAKING up stories you have no intention of publishing there are certain things you can’t write about. Your children’s operations, for instance. Clare did once do this, not very long ago, but it had taken her twenty years to be able to manage it, and she made the parents a woman who worked in a credit union, and an upholsterer, simple good people, the voice, though it was in the third person, the woman’s, an anxious hard-working woman trying to understand. Not her own clever ironic self-reflexive voice, the voice of the Clare whose head is full of the orts and bits and greasy relics of other people’s words, the voice of the woman—she stayed nameless—was humbler, shyer, more innocent. It takes a long time to achieve that innocence, decades have to pass.

  This time all she can write down is the words of the doctor to her daughter, on the day they let her out of intensive care. He gave her quite a tender look and said, Well, you nearly went away and left us, but at the last minute you changed your mind and came back.

  You have to wonder: is this cosy doctor-speak, or profound truth? She remembers herself inquiring, all that time ago, (never forgetting the answer, twenty years later giving the words to the woman working in the credit union) about the success of the operation on a beautiful four-year-old child, Clare’s daughter and the little girl had become friends, and she used to talk to the mother, who was knitting a jumper for the child, pale green it was, with flowers on it, and the nurse saying, Josephine’s parents don’t have her any more, and the overwhelming simple sadness of this statement. The grief, so intimately recognised. And also . . . hard to admit, this, an awful irredeemable feeling, a kind of hideous inadmissible relief: if this child has died, the odds may be that mine will live. As she did, that time, and now has again
.

  At the last minute you changed your mind and came back. That doctor’s words imply a choice, a decision. They see the element of will, of spirit, involved. When Geoffrey was dying, he knew that it was Clare’s will as well as his own that kept him alive a year longer than expected. And they offer a picture, it is of the valley of the shadow of death, which somehow appears in Clare’s mind’s eye as a green place, and pleasant, maybe its point is that it’s seductive and so the effort of will has to be even stronger, to turn round and come back. She suspects that her daughter was drawn, was pulled, quite a long way through it. And she knows that it would have been the girl’s spirit that resisted, that baulked, and brought her back. The textbook heart should have failed at birth. It’s not supposed to be able to function. Which makes communication with certain doctors difficult—they go by the textbook heart and not the overriding spirit.

  And now mother and daughter smile gleefully at one another. She has come back. She is safe. Death hasn’t won this time.

  Of course we always knew you’d be okay. Didn’t we. Of course.

  There is a line in A Streetcar Named Desire which is as sad as anything could be. It is when Blanche says to the white-coated men who have come to take her away, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers. It’s a line that floats around in Clare’s head, along with a whole lot of other small wriggling pondwater creatures, and surfaces when she needs it, doesn’t have to be trawled for, dredged up, sieved out. The kindness of strangers. It’s poignant. And as well there’s Blanche’s bravery. Being able to say it, after all that’s happened to her. And in the context of our knowing that these strangers are not likely to be very kind. As she must, too, but still faces them with this pathetic courage.