Death of a Dormouse

by Reginald Hill

  She said thank you and put the phone down.

  She could have told him Trent was rich, had always been rich, was not the kind of man to be anything but rich. Everything she had wanted she had had, except that there was not really anything she wanted, except to be safe …

  Next day a letter came with the firm’s name on its envelope. She let it lie unopened with all the other mail, mainly junk, which had dropped through the letter box. That day the phone rang at regular intervals from morning to night. In the end, she picked it up and let it dangle over the edge of the table without putting it anywhere near her ear.

  That night the dream came as usual. Trent turned, she fled, he followed. She crouched on the bed and watched the door handle slowly turn.

  She awoke, and lay bathed in sweat, waiting for the terror to recede and the dull, deadening silence to rise around her.

  But this time there was a noise, a real noise. Like a door opening below. Still savouring the relief of escape from her dream, her first reaction was to treat it like all the noises of this so-called real world – people talking, cars passing, wind and weather – which to her were an empty buzz.

  But now there was another sound, a sound all too familiar to her straining ears, the sound of the slow tread of feet coming nearer and nearer. She knew in that instant that the ultimate horror had been born and the walking corpse of her husband had at last broken through from her sleeping world to her waking.

  She lay quite still, not unable to move but unable to think of anywhere to move to. There was only the window and what help lay there? Her cries into the night air would only reach the ears of her unknown neighbours like the high wail of some restless night creature. And in any case she knew with a certainty beyond faith that when she opened the window, Trent would be there already, standing on the unkempt lawn, his pale face raised towards her.

  Now the footsteps were at her door. The handle moved fractionally. She put her hands to her ears and closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a silent cry of terror.

  When she opened her eyes, it was broad daylight. She had no recollection of fainting, less of falling asleep, but did anyone ever have such recollections? Anyway, it meant nothing. The crisis had come as she had known it must. Her defences had been breached, the barrier of her indifference lay in ruins. Trent had broken through into her waking life, and the consequences were unthinkable. She was not yet mad, but she could go mad. Grief, terror, guilt, she did not know how to itemize her emotions; all she knew was that she was ready now to give anything for peace. Including life itself.

  She sat in the lounge and like a little girl with her birthday sweets she considered her tablets. So she had sat at her father’s feet with a teatray before her on which she counted and classified dolly-mixtures, jelly-babies and chocolate buttons.

  The supply of sleeping pills she had brought from Vienna was sadly depleted, but there was a good number of Valium and an assortment of other tranquillizers from her old agoraphobia treatments. A mixture of these washed down with whisky, which she had heard intensified the effect, must surely do the trick.

  She started off very slowly, thinking for some reason that she ought to savour the experience. Then a sudden fear struck her that this leisurely approach would give the tablets time to put her to sleep long before she had taken a fatal dose. Panic-stricken she began to take them in twos and threes, gulping them down with mouthfuls of raw whisky. Eventually, with most of the tablets gone, she found she could manage no more. Surely she had done enough. Now there would come that delicious, easy, drifting off into oblivion she longed for.

  Time passed, perhaps a little, perhaps a lot, she couldn’t tell. Where she was, it was timeless. Something was definitely happening, some great change was about to take place. But it was not going to be easy, it was not going to be delicious! Her body felt as if it were being racked apart. She was leaving not in peace and quiet but in turbulence and agony. But she had to go. She could hear somewhere last night’s noises again: the door opening, the footsteps approaching, a voice calling her name. She looked up and saw the door handle turning and she willed herself to die.

  The door opened; a last spasm convulsed her body. In the doorway stood a woman, middle-aged, strikingly good-looking with a full, sensuous figure and shoulder-length black hair framing a heart-shaped face which was wearing an expression of incredulous horror.

  ‘Trudi?’ she said. ‘Trudi! For God’s sake.’

  ‘Janet?’ gasped Trudi. The word brought relief. She double up and vomited over the carpet. Her stomach which had received practically no food for days gladly gave up its mixture of bile and whisky in which lay scattered like daisies on a summer lawn a myriad of little white pills and tablets.

  Part Two

  Thy wee bit housie, too in ruin;

  Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’!

  An’ naething, now, to big a new ane.

  O’ foggage green!

  An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin’,

  Baith snell and keen!

  BURNS: To a Mouse

  1

  Frank Carter was a reasonable man; reasonably tall, reasonably tempered, reasonably good at his work in a Manchester estate agency.

  He tiptoed out of the spare bedroom in which Trudi was lying with her eyes screwed up tight as if to keep out more than just the light. And he asked the reasonable question.

  ‘How long’s she staying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Janet. ‘Frank, I’m sorry. I know we didn’t plan starting married life with a non-paying guest, but she’s nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Hospital; nursing home,’ said Carter, moistening his lips as though at the start of a long list.

  ‘No good. Look, she needs someone she knows, that one. Always has done, though she’s come on a bit since I first met her, I reckon. God, Frank, you should have seen her at school, little Trudi Shoesmith! She never went out at playtime, special medical permission. If it hadn’t been for her funny name, she’d have been completely invisible. It was her name first made me take notice of her. Janet Evans was so ordinary, I thought! I really envied her being called Trudi, especially when I found out it should really have been Trudi Schumacher!’

  ‘Schumacher? That’s German, isn’t it?’

  ‘Austrian. Her father was a Jew, non-practising, but that didn’t matter evidently in 1938. He got out, came to England. I gather her mother died giving birth, so her dad brought her up more or less single-handed. That was half the bother, I reckon. Lots of substitute mums, lots of moving about, and a father who never got over his suspicion that everything in uniform was a storm-trooper and every knock at the door was the Gestapo! It’s no wonder she was such a timorous little thing. Her father changed their name to Shoesmith when he was naturalized, but I reckon he never stopped thinking of himself as a refugee. Anyway, I took little Trudi in hand, didn’t I? Looked out for her at school, got her a job later on, even introduced her to Trent Adamson, though that turned out a mistake!’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Carter, puzzled.

  ‘Well, just that if she’d not met and married Trent, she wouldn’t be here now,’ said Janet, not altogether convincingly.

  Trudi, half hearing but totally unresponding to this conversation drifting through the open door, could have told Frank Carter exactly what Janet meant.

  Most of what her friend said was true. Before the Evanses moved to Surrey from Cardiff, no one had paid any attention to the slight, pale, self-effacing child with the funny name. Janet Evans on the other hand was instantly the centre of interest. Voluble, impassioned, darkly attractive, she was admired or resented but never ignored. There was no shortage of applicants for the position of ‘best friend’ but to the amazement of everyone she plucked Trudi out of obscurity and gave her the job. Trudi was more taken aback than anyone. Nor was she much assured by overhearing a spiteful peer declare, ‘It didn’t surprise me. What else would a cat look to play with but a dormouse?’

  Janet had ex
aggerated when she said she got Trudi her job. School over, Trudi had found employment as a copy typist in a council office at Staines. Janet had sought the lusher pastures of the West End, but after a couple of years, she had returned to Staines to train as an air hostess at nearby Heathrow. And it was now that, hearing of a well-paid secretarial opening in her company’s airport office, she urged Trudi to apply. How much the full beam of Janet’s charm influenced the office manager was hard to say, but Trudi got the job.

  A few weeks later, Janet came into the office just as she was preparing to leave.

  ‘All right, girl,’ she said. ‘Glad rags on, colour in your cheeks, I’ll pick you up at eight. Be ready.’

  ‘What? Jan, no, I mean, what …’

  ‘Don’t play hard to get! I’ve got two lovely men lined up but my other lovely girl’s gone down with flu, silly cow. I need you, lovey, so don’t say no.’

  ‘But I can’t …’ said Trudi, panic-stricken.

  ‘Can’t what? You can drink orange juice, eat a chop, and laugh politely when I kick you under the table, can’t you? Trudi, I don’t ask much, do I? So, please!’

  Trudi had given in. The men had been Trent Adamson and Alan Cummings. Cummings, who worked for Customs and Excise, was the younger and livelier of the two, but it was Trent that Janet had in her sights. An airline captain with the wit and the will to move profitably from air to chair when the time came, he was in Heathrow terms a great catch. It was only to be expected that he would take Jan home.

  ‘But all he wanted to do was talk about you!’ said Janet the next day in mock pique. ‘Perhaps he’s a secret mouse-fancier!’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Trudi, flustered. She had no desire to be fancied by Trent or any man. The previous night Alan Cummings had made a token pass and she had literally run away from him. It had not been her father’s intention that his distrust of authority and uniform should have been communicated so strongly to and extended so comprehensively by his daughter, but bringing her up single-handed had made his influence paramount and given his over-anxious warnings, both political and sexual, the force of divine law.

  A week later Trudi was dumbfounded when Trent came into the office and gravely asked her for a date. She refused. He wasn’t put off. Janet’s pique soon ceased to be mock, but her sense of realism eventually prevailed and she started urging her friend to grab her chance with both hands.

  Trudi was simply bewildered. She did not feel she had anything to offer a man like Trent. More importantly, he had nothing to offer her. She was happy to contemplate a life living at home, looking after her father.

  And then one evening everything changed. Walking home from school in the November fog, her father was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. She sat at his bedside for twenty-four hours and would not believe them when they told her he was dead. She had refused to leave the house after that, even to attend the funeral. There was talk of forcible removal to hospital, but Janet squashed that, moving in with her friend. Then Trent started calling round and it was in his company that Trudi first stepped into the open once more. Few people thought of this as courtship, attributing it to some hitherto unsuspected vein of human kindness in Trent. The question, which only Janet dared put to him direct, was what would happen if and when he withdrew his protective shadow from the little dormouse? Trent’s only reply was a faint smile.

  Two months later, he and Trudi got married.

  And three months after that, to further amazement, Trent gave up his prestigious job and secure future, and went to work for a Swiss-based charter company trading out of Zürich. The Adamsons moved to Switzerland, the first step in a twenty-five-year separation from England which was to see them living in some of the most glamorous cities in Europe. Not that it mattered to Trudi, not in those early years anyway. Home was where Trent said it was. That was all that mattered.

  Janet, meanwhile, lovely, lively Janet for whom the sky always seemed the limit, married Alan Cummings, had a couple of quick kids, and when promotion took her husband up to Manchester’s fast-developing international airport, she settled down stoically to a life of middle-class obscurity in the depths of Cheadle Hume.

  ‘I think it’s time I moved out,’ said Trudi.

  ‘Good Lord. Why?’

  A month had passed. Slowly Trudi had returned to normality. The bad dreams persisted, but she had begun to feel perfectly safe in the day. Then that same morning, lying in bed enjoying the pale gold of the autumn sunlight on her window, she had suddenly recalled in its entirety that overheard conversation of her first day here. Savage resentment of Janet’s condescending interference had rapidly cooled to a general embarrassment that required instant action.

  ‘I’ve been here ages. I can’t impose on you for ever.’

  ‘Impose! We love having you, really.’ She sounded persuasively sincere.

  ‘You’ve both been marvellous,’ said Trudi. ‘But when Frank married you, he didn’t expect to get landed with another fat old widow.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Oh God, Jan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

  But Janet was just laughing with the confidence of one who knows that all a few extra pounds have done to her figure is add a certain sensuous roundness to its always attractive contours.

  ‘Forget old, girl!’ she commanded. ‘We’re in our prime, you’d better believe it. As for fat, well, I can tell what you mean by the size of those clothes of yours. But have you taken a look at yourself lately? You haven’t been eating enough to keep a dormouse healthy! Take that blouse off. It’s like a surplus parachute anyway. Now take a good look in that mirror. Not much fat there, is there?’

  Trudi didn’t reply. She was regarding with fascinated horror what she must surely have seen but somehow not managed to register. Her shoulder bones stood out like a fashion model’s and against her louvred ribs hung tiny breasts like deflated balloons left over from some long-forgotten party. This was how she had looked at nineteen. A quarter of a century of crème patisserie had been stripped off her in a month.

  ‘Oh God, Jan, what a mess I look!’

  ‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say. Right, here’s what we do. You want to leave? OK. As soon as we get you looking like a human being again, you can go. That includes getting you back on a decent diet. We don’t want you putting up two stone overweight again, but we don’t want you anorexic either! Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ said Trudi, still staring at herself. For some unfathomable reason, it occurred to her she was now as slim as Astrid Fischer.

  It took another three weeks. Frank, with an end in view and perhaps some guilt in mind, was kindness itself, and when the time came Trudi hugged him tearfully in farewell.

  ‘It’s high time you were going,’ said Janet grimly as they drove away in her Ford Escort. ‘Another week and you’d have been giving that randy old devil ideas.’

  Trudi looked down with undiminished surprise and pleasure at her new, slim body clad now in tight-fitting cords and sweater.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve been right so far, Jan. I’m not fat, and I’m not old, well, not so very, but …’

  She felt her brief mood of happiness already slipping from her and when Janet prompted her with a ‘but what?’ she burst out, ‘Yes, that’s it. But what? But what am I? I need a new me inside as well as outside. Inside, I’m just lost. Bewildered. I feel useless. Jan, help me to stop feeling useless, then you’ll really have done me some good!’

  Janet slammed on the brakes as she changed her mind about jumping some lights on amber. An old blue pick-up with a long double radio aerial almost ran into her, but the driver with surprising restraint refrained from blowing his horn.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Janet exploded. ‘If you’re useless, then what does that make the rest of us? I mean, what’s the difference between your contribution to the big mad world and mine?’

  Trudi said with a quiet vehemence, ‘You’ve had a real life, I’ve just lived in a k
ind of cocoon. You’ve brought up children, worked for a living, and I bet you didn’t need to look back twenty-five years for a friend when Alan died. You had a real life to put back together, family and friends to give it a framework. Me, I’ve been like a dormouse in an old teapot that Trent made comfortable for me. He’s gone, the teapot’s shattered, and there’s no way I can put it together again. That’s what I mean by useless. Kaput!’

  Janet did not reply for a while, concentrating on her driving. But when the houses began to fall behind them and they were properly out in the country, she said quietly, ‘Trudi, I don’t want to get into any scar-trading competition with you, but just to set the record straight. All right, I had the kids, but where are they now? Eileen’s settled down in Australia, Tim’s in the merchant navy, sailing God knows where. They came back for the funeral. First time I’d seen them in ages. And I’ve not seen them since. Me and Alan before he died, we were just coasting along, just about tolerating each other. This great useful life you talk about all seemed pretty much of a waste of time, I assure you! Then Alan died. I had friends, OK. And they were kind. But what were they? Couples, mainly. Now I was half a couple. Let me tell you something. Six months go by. After that, if you show any sign of still hurting, you’re a misery guts and ought to pull yourself together. But if you go around smiling, then you’re the merry widow and a menace to all good Christian marriages! So don’t talk to me about a real life. It doesn’t matter what you were before. For most of us, I reckon, being widowed means going right back to GO!’

  Trudi considered this.

  ‘But it was different for you,’ she said obstinately. ‘You did know people, you did have friends, you did have a social life to build on. I mean, you were able to get around and meet people, weren’t you? You met Frank! It wasn’t as if you had to advertise for him, was it?’

  Janet glanced assessingly at her friend and then began to laugh.