Flying Under Bridges

by Sandi Toksvig

  Flying Under Bridges

  SANDI TOKSVIG

  To Alice

  Books are not solitary enterprises. My thanks to the following for their invaluable advice and assistance — Ursula Mackenzie, my editor, friend and mentor, without whom I wouldn’t write a word; Pat Kavanagh, my splendid agent; Viv Redman, for immense patience with fine-tuning the text; Juliet van Oss for fantastic error-spotting; Patsy Silburn and Glen Wolford for work on the early material; everyone at Little, Brown; Germaine Greer for her splendid writing over the years; and, as ever, my wonderful children.

  One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —One need not be a House —The Brain has Corridors — surpassing

  Material Place —Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting

  External; Ghost

  Than its interior Confronting —That Cooler Host.

  Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,

  The Stones a’chase —Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter —In lonesome Place —Ourself behind ourself, concealed —Should startle most —Assassin hid in our Apartment

  Be Horror’s least.

  The body — borrows a Revolver —He bolts the Door —O’erlooking a superior spectre —Or More —

  ‘Ghosts’, Emily Dickinson

  Preface

  Two women, one story. An everyday tale of morals, marriage and murder. Both women from the same town, the same school, the same generation. For a long while their lives went in completely different directions. Fame, acclaim and the fast lane for one; husband, kids and the suburbs for the other. Nothing in common but their past until the summer they met again. Soon one became a killer and the other was not surprised. It could have happened to anybody but it didn’t. It happened to them and by the time the snow fell they were both trying to understand.

  Chapter One

  1 January

  Holloway Prison for Women

  London

  My dear Inge,

  In the Beginning

  In the beginning was the word…

  (JOHN 1.1)

  Do you think there is a Bible quote for everything? That’s my one for today — about the beginning. It seems appropriate. Happy New Year and all that. It’s a funny bit of the Bible really because it doesn’t come at the beginning of the Book at all. It was written after lots and lots of things had happened and that’s what I feel like. As though I’ve got to go back to the beginning even though I am so far into the story. I do want to find the ‘once upon a time’ bit of what happened but it’s not easy. I just think if I could explain it to you then you could explain it to Shirley. Is she all right? Give her my love, won’t you? So long as it doesn’t upset her. I mean, don’t if it will. You decide. I miss her, but I don’t know what’s right any more. I’m so glad you’re looking after her. Everyone wants to know ‘the facts’ but even I find it hard to get it all straight in my head.

  I know Shirley still wants to think it was an accident but maybe she should know the truth. I have nothing else to give her. I still can’t believe I’m here. I’m in prison. It’s unbelievable. I’m in prison for killing somebody. Everyone keeps talking at me and I am trying. I am trying to find the words. In the beginning was the word.

  In some ways I think it’s quite simple. I mean, guests ruin weddings all the time, although I will admit it is probably less usual for them to do it by killing the groom. I do want to be honest about what happened. I didn’t entirely mean to kill him. Well, I may have meant to but I didn’t plan it. I was, after all, the mother of the bride, which I think anyone would say carries a certain responsibility. I’ve had a letter from the women’s group I used to meet with. I think they were trying to be supportive but their basic message seemed to be that the whole thing has done nothing for me socially. As if I care.

  I’m tired. I just want to sit. I just want to be left alone, but there are questions, endless questions. The barrister seems a sweet girl. Too young to have to wear black every day. Nice hair and given to a good suit but she hasn’t got a clue. She’s a bit older than Shirley but I think of her when we meet. I think of Shirley. I think of Shirley all the time. How did I end up here? She would have been married now … if I hadn’t killed her fiancé. My daughter, married.

  ‘Do you mind… Mrs Marshall?’ The barrister blushes at me. She obviously minds terribly. ‘Would you say you were a woman of a certain age?’ She nods at me and I half think she is going to wink as well. I’m not at all sure what we are blushing and winking about. I’m forty-five. I tell her I’m forty-five. I don’t know if that’s a certain age or not. I don’t seem to have been a useful age since I was eight and finally old enough to have my own bicycle. After that it seems to have been pretty much downhill. Quite a lot of years of being too young and then decades of being far too old. I don’t ever seem to have been just right. Now I am getting hairs on my chin. I am growing into an old woman with a beard. A woman small children won’t want to kiss. There’s another sign of age. I think about being kissed by small children, not Richard Gere or Errol Flynn. The barrister stumbles forward into my inner life.

  ‘I was wondering about the… menopause.’ She almost whispers the word. It is too ghastly and yet we must consider it. Something that is too far away for her to contemplate looms over my every move. I look at her young body choking with ovarian health. Little eggs bursting all over her inner bits while my crop withers and shrivels on the vine.

  ‘It might be… helpful,’ she manages as we plod on. You can see her point, especially at these prices. The menopause would be helpful. What a relief if we could blame the whole thing on some hormonal imbalance. That I was imbalanced at the time. It’s so much tidier. I might even get off. My sister Martha would say it is what men want to believe if we women step out of line. We poor females at the ‘mercy of our defective carcasses’. I suppose the good thing about being a woman (from a legal point of view) is that there is always something to blame. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, the menopause — it all adds up to ‘hormonal imbalance’. We do droop and drip endlessly. Germaine Greer says (I know, you’re shaking your head and saying, ‘Oh Eve, not Germaine again,’), but Germaine says that men believe that every one of a woman’s working parts comes with a ‘built predisposition to malfunction’. We are God’s faulty design. Nothing so proud and substantial as a male organ but a vacuum that is useless unless filled. Listen to me. Who would have thought?

  ‘There have been numerous cases where women …’ The young black-suited woman flicks through fat books and dust settles in the air. I could clean that. I am good at dust. She finds comfort in her legal tomes because she does not understand me. I have done something women don’t do. I have been violent and now we must sit quietly, women together, and find that it was all due to ‘the adverse effect of my biology’. Maybe it was. I don’t know. Maybe it is the menopause. Maybe it is postnatal depression. Latent, of course. I had my last baby twenty years ago but I’m sure there is some precedent in her fat books. The solicitors have got a woman to represent me on purpose. I think it is supposed to soften my image but she looks at her books rather than me. I suspect I frighten her, although I don’t mean to. Am I the witch waiting in every woman? Is there a shadow of me in this bright university mind and dull suit?

  The barrister is just one of many who have probed and prodded since I was arrested. No one can ‘understand’ and it is very important to everyone that they do. I am in the middle of ‘having reports done’, which hasn’t happened since school. Do you remember?

  Eve is a keen member of the form. She has good

  application but with little obvious result.

  Keen. I’ve always been keen but this is the first time I’ve ever actually done anything.

  The psychiatrist is ano
ther prober. I see him after the barrister has departed in legal despair. A flurry of pink ribbon waves around the departing legal shoulders. The lawyer wants to tie me up while the shrink wants to unravel me. He is a very earnest old man with a rather pleasing middle-European accent. I listen to his constipated vowel sounds and I find them rather comforting. I mean, if you were in a film with a psychiatrist then he ought to be a bit German, don’t you think? It is the only textbook thing about the untextbook thing that I have done. His heavy accent suggests power. Questions which will be answered and properly. The Dutch or the Belgians never conquered the world because the accent was all wrong. In the beginning may have been the word but I don’t think it was a Flemish one. The fact is if someone told you in Flemish that they planned to rule the world, you’d tell them not to be so silly. I wonder what it is about Austria and Germany that makes its people want to go into mental health? Of course the Von Trapps didn’t. They were Austrian but they escaped over the mountains and ran summer music camps in Vermont. I should have liked that but I had no mountains…

  I’ve just come back to my letter from exercise period. What the hell was I writing about? The Von Trapps? Maybe I am going mad. Maybe I was mad. I have been so busy using my brain to run other lives and now I find I have this huge empty space under my skull and a To Let sign on my forehead.

  The shrink, the mental inquisitor, holds my hand rather too long when he shakes it and insists on staring me in the eye when we talk.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asks, ‘what do you see when you look at me?’

  Mainly I see that he has a big nose but I keep it to myself. The nose has a huge wart on it. A vast growth, like an alternative nose with a large hair growing out of it, but I don’t mention that either. Opinions have been getting me into enough trouble. It’s funny him having a long hair growing on his face like a fairy whip. He can’t mind or he’d pluck it out. I suppose he’s a man so it’s all right to have hair like that. I’m not allowed any on my chin. We women must pluck and tidy ourselves away while men are quite happy to let bits of themselves swing around for all the world to see.

  We talk about everything very slowly. Perhaps I could do some embroidery during our sessions so I’ve got something else to look at besides the two noses.

  ‘What do you see when you look at me?’

  ‘A man,’ I say, because it is polite and straightforward and I can’t think any more.

  He nods. ‘You cannot ignore that I am a man.’

  I don’t know whether it is a piece of analysis or a statement of fact.

  ‘Let me just be sure that I have the facts straight, Mrs…’ He looks at his notes. I am so forgettable but I am polite. He can’t see without his glasses so I help him.

  ‘Marshall. Mrs Adam Marshall.’

  ‘Mrs Adam Marshall.’ He writes everything down in pencil as if I might be tempted endlessly to change my mind about what I’ve said. We could always go back and rub things out. I’d like that. I’d like to rub my whole name out.

  ‘The body of the deceased was found… and I believe the word you used was “crucified”, against a holly bush in your front garden.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, that’s not right.’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘You did not use the word “crucified”?’

  ‘It was wisteria not a holly bush.’ The pencil pauses for a moment and I am tempted to help him with the spelling of wisteria which may, for all I know, be unknown in middle-European garden centres.

  ‘Wisteria sinensis,’ I say, as he pauses. ‘It’s originally from Central China.’ He stares at me. ‘Member of the pea family. A deciduous climber with divided leaves and trusses of lilac-blue flowers. Beautiful for house walls.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ he enquires.

  ‘I read things and I remember. I don’t do anything with them. I just remember.’

  He writes something down. I suspect it is not a gardening note. Then he looks up and stares me in the eye again.

  ‘I see. So, tell me about yourself.’

  I think, this won’t take long. And then I stop for a minute.

  ‘It’s difficult to know where to begin,’ I say.

  ‘Aaah,’ he intones and nods. His large nose beats time above his lip. The hair from the wart dangles like a fine fishing line. He should have a moustache or a beard. There is a big space between his nose and his lip. Not a handsome man. About sixty. He’s probably heard it all. All the loonies. I don’t really want to tell him anything. I take some sewing out of my bag. I like cross-stitch. You have a pattern and you just follow it. You just follow it exactly and at the end you have something beautiful. It isn’t complicated. Old Freud is staring at me. I realise I haven’t been paying any attention.

  ‘Sorry, what was the question?’

  He writes something down and then stares again.

  ‘Tell me who you are.

  Who are you? Such a simple question and yet it gives me a bit of a jolt. I can’t remember ever being asked. Well, not since I joined the Brownies. We had to write an essay about ourselves while Brown Owl went outside for a cigarette, but that’s going back a bit. Who are you? Such a tricky question to answer. Mrs Adam Marshall — Mrs Adam Marshall — that’s how the AA addressed me on my new card, which arrived the week you did. I am Mrs Adam Marshall. The really strange thing is that it’s taken me twenty-odd years to notice that I’m not really me any more. I mentioned it to Adam.

  ‘Do you realise my whole name has disappeared?’ I said to my husband, my lover, my partner in life. ‘That I don’t have a single name I started with?’

  Adam sucked on his teeth, which is a new habit. It’s not attractive. ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about these things,’ he said. ‘People are past all that women’s lib nonsense. Good job too.’

  Which is all very well for him. I mean, he’s not Mr Eve Marshall, is he? I thought Shirley would think it odd too, but she didn’t.

  ‘It’s a new millennium, Mum.’ She shook her head at me and crunched a Hobnob. ‘It’s time to move on. There are other issues. You know you really ought to be a “post-feminist” by now.’

  That was what my grown-up daughter thought. Post-feminist. It’s a funny expression. I think it suggests that I’ve already passed through a feminist phase, and yet I don’t remember it. You had yours, didn’t you, Inge? I envy you that. Perhaps my feminism is in the post and hasn’t arrived yet.

  The psychiatrist is waiting patiently. I suppose I had better say something.

  ‘When the post comes, it’s addressed to Mrs Adam Marshall. That’s me, I suppose and.., well, there’s not much to say. Bit of a nothing, really. I can’t even seem to manage to stay on the church flower—arranging rota.’

  I laugh, but apparently it is not funny. He does not laugh. Perhaps he is very religious. It’s everywhere these days. Still, for all I know he may never laugh. I am embarrassed. I was quite a laugh at school, wasn’t I, or have I forgotten that too?

  ‘Of course the flower rota wasn’t entirely my fault. Mrs Milton got so funny about the whole shop business and…’ I drift off. None of it seems important now. Do you remember Mrs Hart at school? Geography and PE. Odd combination really. It’s not like you need ordnance survey to find the sports field. Anyway, whenever someone had some little problem or other, she would look down her nose and say, ‘I see. And where do you suppose this fits in the great scheme of things?’

  The answer was always nowhere. The trouble is I can’t seem to see the great scheme of things at all.

  The psychiatrist prompts me back into my inner recesses.

  ‘Mrs Adam Marshall?’ he says quietly.

  ‘Mmhmm,’ I reply. ‘Yes. It was only when Inge moved back to Edenford that I noticed my whole name had disappeared.’

  Big nose scribbles away. His pencil bounces across the pad. I have no idea what I’ve said to cause such a literary surge. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned you. Perhaps he is a fan.

  ‘Adam does a lot of correspondence,’ I say whil
e I wait for him to catch up. ‘Mainly to the Eden ford Gazette. He had the first cuckoo last year.’

  I use the word ‘cuckoo’ deliberately. I think it would be rather a good one for a shrink. He could give me that searching glare and say, ‘Zo you zay “cuckoo”, and are you ze cuckoo person?’

  But he doesn’t. He is resolute in pursuit of my reason for being. I like cuckoos. They just sort themselves out and don’t give a damn. And why? Because their parents didn’t give a damn. Just lay the egg in some other bird’s nest and let someone else raise their kid. Then the cuckoo hatches and shoves all the other eggs out of the nest. No guilt, no retribution, no Hail Marys, just…

  The psychiatrist gives me a long Germanic look and says quietly, ‘And do you mind? About your name?’

  I suddenly feel nervous. ‘I shouldn’t, should I? I mean, it’s silly. It’s just a name. I didn’t think about it. Not for years. I know there are women who don’t bother any more. You know, keep all of their name always, but I’m sure it mattered to Adam.’ I stop and think.

  I should have known straight away. We had only had one date when Adam mentioned it.

  ‘I hope you’re not one of those … women’s libbers,’ he said. I remember because I was holding the screws while he worked on the security bars for Mother’s pantry window. Adam always dabbled in security even before it became a living. I think he spent his childhood making sure other people’s rabbits didn’t escape. Mother always worried about the pantry —what with her prize-winning jams and pickled eggs. When she found Mrs Bartlett’s boy from next door, who’d never really been right, looking through the pantry window, she had burglar bars fitted.

  Adam’s first job was in plaster-relief mouldings. That’s how I met him. Mother wanted a new ceiling rose after that trouble in the lounge when the bath upstairs ran over while Aunt Luce had her seizure on the toilet. Odd to think I got my husband from the Yellow Pages. Mother never liked him. She always said she rued ‘the day she patched her parlour and took up Adam’s offer to protect her preserves. Then, of course, he went into insurance and never looked back.