On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  “Gossip,” said Ponsonby to himself as he returned to his lab, “is like garlic. A good servant, a bad master.”

  Finch wasn’t the only one who used Schiller as his butt for frustrations. Sonia Liebman ostentatiously withdrew from his vicinity whenever she encountered him; Hilda Silverman suddenly mislaid his journals and articles; Marvin, Betty and Hank lost his samples and inked swastikas on the rats whose brains would go to pathology.

  Finally Schiller went to the Prof to tender his resignation, only to have it refused.

  “I can’t possibly accept it, Kurt,” said Smith, whose hair seemed to grow whiter every day. “We’re under police observation, we can’t change staff. Besides, if you left now, it would be in a cloud of suspicion. Grit your teeth and get through this, just like the rest of us.”

  “But I’ve had it up to here with gritting my teeth,” he said to Tamara after the devastated Schiller had gone. “Oh, Tamara, why did it have to happen to us?”

  “If I knew that, Bob, I’d try to fix it,” she said, settled him in his chair more comfortably and gave him a draft of Dr. Nur Chandra’s paper to read, the one that coolly and clinically went into the details of Eustace’s incredible seizure.

  When she returned to her own office she found Desdemona Dupre there, but not waiting where anyone else would have. That English bitch was unashamedly scanning the contents of Tamara’s cluttered desk!

  “Have you seen my wages sheet, Vilich?”

  The corner of a highly confidential handwritten communication was poking out from under a sheaf of rough-draft dictation she had transcribed from the Prof; Tamara leaped to shove Desdemona away.

  “Don’t you dare look through my papers, Dupre!”

  “I was simply fascinated by the chaos you work in,” Desdemona drawled. “No wonder you couldn’t administer this place. You couldn’t organize a booze-up in a brewery.”

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself? One thing for sure, you’re too ugly to get a man to fuck you!”

  Up went Desdemona’s rather invisible brows. “There are worse fates than to die wondering,” she said, smiling, “but luckily some men like scaling Mount Everest.” Her eyes followed Tamara’s red-varnished nails as their hands shuffled the papers, tucked the vital sheet out of sight. “A love letter?” she asked.

  “Fuck off! Your wages aren’t here!”

  Desdemona departed, still smiling; through the open door she could hear the distant ringing of her phone.

  “Miss Dupre,” she said, sitting down.

  “Oh, good, glad to know you’re in to work,” said the voice of her other bête noire.

  “I am always in to work, Lieutenant Delmonico,” she said very curtly. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  “How about having dinner with me one evening?”

  The request came as a shock, but Desdemona didn’t make the mistake of thinking that he was paying her a compliment. So the Lord High Executioner was desperate, was he?

  “That depends,” she said warily.

  “On what?”

  “How many strings are attached, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, while you’re trying to count them, how about you call me Carmine and I call you Desdemona?”

  “First names are for friends, and I regard your invitation more in the light of an inquisition.”

  “Does that mean I can call you Desdemona?”

  “May, not can.”

  “Great! Uh — dinner, Desdemona?”

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, remembering his impressive air of calm authority. “Very well, dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight if you’re free, Carmine.”

  “Great. What kind of food do you like?”

  “Ordinary old Shanghai Chinese.”

  “Fine by me. I’ll pick you up at your house at seven.”

  Of course the bastard knew everybody’s home address! “No, thank you. I prefer to meet you at the venue. Which is?”

  “The Blue Pheasant on Cedar Street. Know it?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll meet you there at seven.”

  He hung up without further ado, leaving Desdemona to deal with a query from Dr. Charles Ponsonby, standing in her doorway; only once she was rid of him could she plot and plan not a seduction but a fencing match. Oh, yes indeed, a little thrust and parry with the verbal rapier would be welcome! How she missed that aspect of life! Here in Holloman she was in exile, banking her lavish salary as fast as she could to get out of this vast and alien country, return to her homeland, pick up the threads of a stimulating social life. Money wasn’t everything, but until you had some, life of any sort was depressing. Desdemona wanted a small flat at Strand-on-the-Green overlooking the Thames, several consultancies at private health clinics, and all of London as her backyard. Admittedly London was as unknown to her as Holloman had been, but Holloman was an exile and London was the hub of the universe. Five years down, five more years to go; then it would be goodbye to the Hug and America. A super reference to get herself those consultancies, a plump bank account. That was all she wanted or needed from America. You can take the English out of England, she thought, but you can’t take England out of the English.

  She always walked to and from work, a form of exercise that suited her hiking soul. Though this activity appalled some of her colleagues, Desdemona didn’t think herself imperiled because her route led right through the Hollow. Her height, her athletic stride, her air of confidence and her lack of a pocketbook rendered her an unlikely victim of any kind. Besides, after five years, she knew every face she encountered, and received none but friendly waves in answer to her own.

  The oak leaves were already falling; by the time Desdemona turned on to Twentieth Street to walk the block to Sycamore, she shuffled through piles of them because the council trucks hadn’t been this way yet. Ah, there he was! The Siamese who always hung out on top of a post to say hello as she passed; she stopped to pay homage. Behind her, footsteps shuffled for a fraction of a second after hers had ceased. It was that made her turn in surprise, a tiny hackle prickling. Oh, surely not after five years! But there was no one in sight unless he lurked behind a nearby oak. She went on, ears tuned, and stopped again twenty feet farther on. The rustle of dead leaves behind her stopped too, half a second too late. A faint sweat broke out on her brow, but she continued as if she had noticed nothing, turned onto Sycamore, and astonished herself by racing the last block to her three-family house.

  Ridiculous, Desdemona Dupre! How silly of you. It was the wind, it was a rat, a bird, some small creature you didn’t see.

  When she climbed the thirty-two stairs to her third-floor apartment she was breathing harder than either the run or the steps warranted. Involuntarily her eyes went to her work basket, but it was undisturbed. Her embroidery lay exactly where it ought to be.

  Eliza Smith had made Bob’s favorite dinner, spare ribs with a side salad and hot bread. His state of mind worried her hugely. Ever since the murder he had gone steadily downhill; touchy in temper, critical of things he usually didn’t even notice, often somewhere so distant that he neither saw nor heard anything. She had always known that he had this side to his nature, but between a brilliant career and his folly in the basement — as well as a good marriage, she hastened to add — she had been positive that it would never dominate his thinking, his world. After all, he had gotten through Nancy — oh, been a bit rocky for a while, yet rallied — and what could be worse than that?

  Though the papers and the TV news programs had ceased to harp on the “Connecticut Monster,” Bobby and Sam hadn’t taken their hint. Every day that they went to the Dormer Day School they basked in the glory of having a dad closely involved in the murders, and failed to see why they ought not to harp on them some more after they came home. I mean, cut in pieces!

  “Which one do you think it is, Dad?” Bobby asked again.

  “Don’t, Bobby,” said his mother.

  “I reckon it’s Schiller,” said Sam, gnawing
at a spare rib. “I bet he was a Nazi. He looks like a Nazi.”

  “Hush up, Sam! Leave the subject alone,” said Eliza.

  “Pay attention to your mother, boys. I’ve had enough,” the Prof said, his plate hardly touched.

  Conversation ceased as the boys ate more spare ribs, crunched through crusty bread, and eyed their father speculatively.

  “Aw, gee, Dad, please, please tell us who you reckon it is,” Bobby cajoled.

  “Schiller’s the killer! Schiller’s the killer!” sang Sam. “Achtung! Sieg heil! Ich habe ein tiger in mein tank!”

  Robert Mordent Smith put both hands on the table and lifted himself to his feet, then pointed to a vacant space in the big room. Bobby gulped, Sam whimpered, but both children got up and went to where their father had pointed, rolling their pants up to their knees. Smith took a long switch with a shredded end from its traditional position on the sideboard, walked across to the boys, and swung the implement at Bobby’s calf. He always hit Bobby first because Sam was so terrified of the switch that having to watch Bobby doubled his own punishment. The first cut raised red welts, but five more followed while Bobby remained still, manfully silent; Sam was bawling already. Six more cuts on Bobby’s other calf and it was Sam’s turn for six on each calf, laid on as hard and viciously as Bobby’s despite the screams. Sam was a coward in his father’s opinion. A girl.

  “Go to bed and think of the pleasures in being alive. Not all of us are that lucky, remember? I’ll have no more of this pestering, hear me?”

  “Sam maybe,” Eliza said when the boys had gone, “he’s just twelve. But you shouldn’t take a switch to a fourteen-year-old, Bob. He’s bigger than you already. One day he’ll turn on you.”

  For answer, Smith went to the basement door, the keys to its police locks in his hand.

  “And there’s no need for this obsessive locking up!” Eliza called from the dining room as he disappeared. “What if something happened and I needed you in a hurry?”

  “Holler!”

  “Oh, sure,” she muttered, starting to carry the remains of dinner to the kitchen. “You wouldn’t hear over the racket. And mark my words, Bob Smith, one day our boys will turn on you.”

  The strains of a Saint-Saëns piano concerto erupted from a pair of gigantic speakers poised in the doorless aperture that led out of the kitchen. While Claire Ponsonby shelled raw shrimp in the ancient stone sink and picked the veins from them, her brother opened the “slow” oven of the Aga combustion stove, hands inside mittens, and withdrew a terra-cotta casserole dish. Its lid was glued on with a dough of flour-and-water to keep in every last drop of precious juice; depositing the dish on the marble end of the three-hundred-year-old worktable, Charles then began the tedious job of chipping the casserole lid free from its sealing of dough.

  “I coined an excellent aphorism today,” he said as he toiled. “Gossip is like garlic — a good servant, but a bad master.”

  “Appropriate considering our menu, but is the gossip at the Hug really that bad, Charles? After all, no one knows.”

  “I agree that no one knows whether the body parts went to the incinerator, but speculation is rife.” He tittered. “The main object of gossip is Kurt Schiller, who blubbered all over me — pah! An ornamental Teuton, a furtive fumbler — I had to bite my tongue.”

  “That smells divine,” Claire said, turning to face him with a smile. “We haven’t had a beef daube in God knows when.”

  “But first, shrimps in garlic butter,” said Charles. “Have you finished?”

  “Last one being deveined now. Perfect music for a perfect meal. Saint-Saëns is so lush. Shall I melt the butter, or will you? The garlic’s crushed and ready to go. That saucer there.”

  “I’ll do it while you set the table,” Charles said, pushing a block of butter into his pan, the shrimps ready for their brief immersion the moment the butter boiled and the garlic was brown. “Lemon! Did you forget the lemon juice?”

  “Honestly, Charles, are you blind? Right beside you.”

  Every time Claire spoke in her husky voice the big dog lying with its chin on its paws in an out-of-the-way corner would lift its head, thump the floor with its tail, its lumpy blond brows rising and falling expressively in its gentle black face like an accompaniment to the music of Claire speaking.

  The shrimps in Charles’s capable hands, the table set, Claire moved to the battered, stained marble counter and picked up a large bowl of canned dog food. “Here, Biddy my love, dinner for you too,” she said, crossing the room to where the dog lay and putting the bowl down just beyond its front paws. On its feet in a trice, Biddy gulped at the food hungrily. “It’s the labrador in you makes you greedy,” said Claire. “A pity the shepherd can’t tone you down. Pleasures,” she went on with a purr in her voice, “are infinitely sweeter when taken slowly.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Charles. “Let’s take an hour at least to get through our meal.”

  The two Ponsonbys sat down one on either side of the wooden slab end of the table to eat, a leisurely process that was only interrupted when the LP record on the turntable needed replacing. Tonight was Saint-Saëns, but tomorrow might be Mozart or Satie, depending on the dinner menu. To choose the right music was as important as the right wine.

  “I presume you’re going to the Bosch exhibition, Charles?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. I can’t wait to see his actual paintings! No matter how good the color prints in a book are, they can’t compare to the originals. So macabre, so full of what I don’t know is conscious or unconscious humor. Somehow I can never get inside Bosch’s mind! Was he schizophrenic? Did he have a source of magic mushrooms? Or was it just the way he’d been brought up to see not only his world, but the next? They thought of life and death, reward and punishment, differently than we do today, of that I’m certain. His demons ooze glee while they subject their hapless human victims to torture.” He chortled. “I mean, no one in Hell is supposed to be happy. Oh, Claire, Bosch is a genuine genius! His work, his work —!”

  “So you keep telling me,” she said rather dryly.

  Biddy the dog bustled over to put its head in Claire’s lap. Her long, thin hands pulled at its ears rhythmically until its eyes closed and it groaned in bliss.

  “We’ll have a Bosch menu to celebrate when you get back,” Claire said with a laugh in her voice. “Guacamole with plenty of chili, tandoori chicken, devil’s food cake…Shostakovitch and Stravinsky, some Moussorgsky thrown in…An old chambertin…”

  “Speaking of music, the record’s stuck in a groove. Fix the daube, will you?” he asked, moving to the never-used dining room.

  Claire walked around the kitchen efficiently while Charles, now in his chair, watched her. First she took the tiny potatoes off the Aga hotplate, strained them in the sink, patted a dab of butter over them in their bowl, then carried the bowl to the table. The daube she divided into two pieces which she placed on two old Spode plates and put one between each set of knife and fork. Last to come was a bowl of blanched green beans. Not one container or plate clinked accidentally against another; Claire Ponsonby laid everything on the table exactly. While the dog, knowing itself unneeded in the kitchen, went back to its square of rug and put its chin on its paws again.

  “What do you intend to do tomorrow?” Charles asked when the daube had been replaced by treacly black demitasse espresso and both of them were savoring the smell-taste of mild cigars.

  “Take Biddy for a long walk in the morning. Then Biddy and I are going to hear that talk on subatomic particles — it’s in the Susskind lecture theater. I’ve booked a taxi there and back.”

  “It should not be necessary to book a taxi!” Charles snapped, watery eyes gone dry with anger. “Those unfeeling cretins who drive taxis ought to know the difference between a guide dog and any other dog! A guide dog, piss in a taxi? Rubbish!”

  She reached out, put her hand on his unerringly; no groping, no slipping. “It’s no trouble to book one,
” she said pacifically.

  The dinner menu at the Forbes house was very different.

  Robin Forbes had tried to make a nut loaf that didn’t crumble ruinously the moment a knife hit it, and drizzled thin cranberry sauce over it to, as she said to Addison,

  “Ginger it up a tad, dear.”

  He tasted the result suspiciously and reared back in horror. “It’s sweet!” he squeaked. “Sweet!”

  “Oh, darling, a tiny bit of sugar won’t cause another heart attack!” she cried, striking her hands together in exasperation. “You’re the doctor, I’m only a humble R.N. of the old-fashioned, non-degreed kind, but even nurses know that sugar is the ultimate fuel! I mean, everything you eat that isn’t built into new tissue is turned into glucose for right now or glycogen for later. You are killing yourself with unkindness, Addison! A twenty-year-old football star doesn’t train as hard.”

  “Thanks for the lecture,” he said bitingly, ostentatiously scraped the cranberry sauce off his nut loaf, then piled his big plate high with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, celery and capsicum. No dressing, even vinaigrette.

  “I had my weekly talk with Roberta and Robina this morning,” she said brightly, terrified that he would notice that her loaf was meat loaf from the deli, and that creamy Italian dressing lurked under her own modest salad.

  “Did Roberta get accepted into neurosurgery?” he asked, only slightly interested.

  Robin’s face fell. “No, dear, they rejected her, she says because she’s a woman.”

  “And rightly so. You need a man’s stamina for neurosurgery.”