A Timely Death

by Janet Neel

  He took her to a tiny restaurant in the back streets of Ealing, leaving the car parked directly outside where he could see it.

  ‘Wouldn’t be necessary in Christchurch, but …’ he said, darkly.

  ‘None of the sheep can drive, of course,’ Francesca said, rallying.

  ‘We haven’t yet reached the same level of civilisation as the mother country, so we leave our cars out and our simple huts unlocked. Hello. We need two bloody enormous steaks, chips on the side, tomatoes and mushrooms with. And a beer.’ He raised an eyebrow at her but she shook her head. ‘Water for the lady then.’ He introduced her meticulously to the cook, a small middle-aged dark woman who emerged to greet him with joy. He bent to her and said something quietly, intent and concentrated, and the woman shook her head vigorously, beaming at him. ‘Good.’ He straightened up and steered Francesca to a table, taking her elbow and pulling out her chair for her while chatting with the waiter, six inches taller than the cook but recognisably her son.

  ‘Clients?’ Francesca asked quietly when they were left to themselves, with a pile of bread and black olives.

  ‘Mum is. Was. Seems to be OK now. Her old man had been at her for twenty years, so it took a bit of doing.’ He considered her across the table. ‘As you would not know, women whose men beat them start to think it’s their fault.’

  ‘I can’t imagine putting up with a man who beat me up.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you can’t.’ He looked suddenly impatient, and she tried to make amends.

  ‘Sorry, Matt, I do know that’s too easy. My mum is in the business after all.’ She found herself very much wanting this man not to think her an arrogant, middle-class matron, but was equally not prepared to compromise. ‘And I do see that in the days when the neighbours, the police and everyone else just treated domestic violence as part of Life’s Rich Tapestry to be expected in marriage, and something in which outsiders would not get involved, then it was pretty difficult for the women. But then came the Domestic Violence Act. Male violence is, well, officially condemned, and the police do intervene and the courts do exclude battering men from their houses. So why aren’t all the women doing something about their men?’ She looked at his shuttered face and tried again. ‘They’ve got my mum, and you, after all. And I do know from Mum that quite a lot of these men do stop battering when they are told forcibly they mustn’t. And manage to live with their wives.’

  Matthew took a long swallow of his beer, and she understood, disconcerted, that he was delaying in order to keep his temper.

  ‘Where to start, that’s the problem,’ he observed, to the air, and she gritted her teeth.

  ‘No need to patronise, Matthew. You are younger than the most junior of my siblings.’

  They glared at each other.

  ‘I’ll start with the easy bit,’ Matt said, uncompromisingly. ‘Some of these men are mad, in the sense that they will not be deterred by anything society can threaten, and the women know that. If they ever have the courage to get to a Refuge, their names have to be changed and they have to live in another town, even when we manage to get the man put away.’

  She sat, remembering cases she had read, or heard about from her mother. That’s a small percentage,’ she said, defensively.

  ‘The victims don’t quite see it that way. Ah, I see our steaks.’ He gave her a look of admonition and warning and she bit her lip in irritation, then exclaimed in genuine admiration of the beautifully laid out plate. She cut into her steak, seeing Matthew wait for her to start.

  ‘Crumbs,’ she said, when she could speak again. ‘What wonderful meat.’

  ‘Argentinian. Maria was born there and knows what meat should taste like. Like us and lamb.’

  ‘Indeed.’ She decided not to risk further comment about New Zealand lamb as experienced by the UK consumer, frozen and shipped 13,000 miles, and worked through her steak, feeling better by the minute.

  ‘Then there’s the next group of men.’ Matthew’s steak had disappeared so fast he might as well have inhaled it and he was spearing chips to dip in the gravy. They come from societies where wife-battering is acceptable behaviour. Anywhere in the Mediterranean, much of the Far East, Africa, and Ireland.’

  ‘New Zealand?’

  ‘These get indignant when they’re told they mustn’t do it, but they do stop. By and large, and if they don’t live in closed communities. I have colleagues who aren’t having a lot of luck with Punjabis in Bradford, for instance.’

  ‘Are we only changing behaviour rather than hearts and minds?’

  He gave her a long, hostile look, a chip arrested in mid-air between his plate and his mouth. ‘There speaks the middle-class liberal. Would it be better to let these blokes go on beating up their women – with belts, and hammers, and anything else they can find – until you can persuade them to change their views?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said, furiously, wrong-footed and scarlet. ‘What I meant was, didn’t they go back to their preferred method of interaction the second the policeman went home?’

  ‘Not if they’re in the nick or injuncted from going near the house, no. Works very well mostly.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, between her teeth, all too conscious that she had been attempting to defend the utterly indefensible. ‘So we are back to my first question. Given that the exercise of society’s sanctions works in the majority of cases, why do not all battered women at least try invoking those sanctions?’ She considered the sentence, decided the logic was right, and sat back, picking up a chip.

  ‘At last a slightly better question,’ he said, balefully, ‘if one which shows you don’t understand a lot about the upbringing of most women. Even if I didn’t know your mother I would only have to look at you to know you had been loved and encouraged and pushed on to achieve from the day you appeared in the world. So if you entangled yourself with a man who beat you, you’d get out again. OK, it might take you a month or so because you’d waste time, thinking that this couldn’t be happening to you.’ He peered at her and she relaxed her jaw and drew breath.

  ‘What happens to all the others, then?’

  ‘We speak here’, he said, stacking her plate and causing them to be removed with a jerk of his head, waiting impatiently while she told the cook how good it had been, ‘of women who weren’t brought up to think a lot of themselves, who were taught one way or the other that they were on this earth to marry and look after a man.’

  ‘That was held up as an objective even to me,’ she objected.

  ‘As a part of your life, if possible, but well second to personal fulfilment.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Not just little Chinese girls who are of no account at all and made to feel it, but young English women in families where they assume the girls will marry.’

  ‘Oh, Matt. There aren’t any these days.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. Did you know Annabelle has one brother, not nearly as clever as her, but her doctor father dotes on him, and wouldn’t even top up her grant to go to university?’

  ‘What you’re saying is that women who lack self-esteem get into these battering relationships and can’t get out,’ she said, determined to evolve a clear hypothesis. ‘My mum says that you often find a battering father in these cases.’

  ‘Doesn’t do a lot for your opinion of yourself having a father who beats you and calls you stupid or dirty, to justify what he’s doing, no. To little boys or little girls. And before you ask, Wonderwoman, I too am the eldest child of devoted parents.’

  ‘That sees itself.’

  ‘But I’ve got more imagination than you.’

  It hit her like a blow and she felt herself turning scarlet. ‘When I was your age I’d no time for imagination,’ she said furiously. ‘I’d been unhappily married for three years and was trying to face the fact I’d have to stop.’ She realised her voice had gone up and looked round for an escape. Seeing none that did not involve working her way past three tables of interested faces, she reached
for her glass of water.

  ‘He beat you? I got it all wrong?’

  She coughed on the water, managed to put it down and calmed herself by blowing her nose, and looked across at the intent, clever face. ‘He wasn’t supportive or nice to me, he had had a rotten upbringing, but he didn’t beat me. I could have left easily if he had.’

  ‘So how did you leave?’

  ‘He left me.’

  ‘Did you mind much?’

  ‘I did, but it was the failure, the loss of the whole idea that made me so unhappy, not the loss of the man. We had been so happy.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve been there. It was so good, why can’t we get it back?’

  ‘You must have been about sixteen,’ she said, feeling the need to assert seniority.

  ‘Twenty-one. It pushed me into leaving our humble shieling and coming to make my fortune where the streets are paved with gold.’

  ‘To a Refuge in the back of nowhere, excuse me?’

  ‘I got sidetracked. Which reminds me, I have things to do this afternoon, even if I am lunching with the leisured classes.’ He shepherded her impatiently from the restaurant, a large hand in the small of her back, and in ten minutes had driven her back home. He saw her to the door, refusing all thanks for lunch, and shook her hand punctiliously. He ran down the steps, several jackets flapping, and stopped to pat the car affectionately before making off down the street.

  5

  Monday, 11 April

  Two miles to the west of Kensington Church Street the sun was illuminating the faded yellow wall and chipped tiling of a tiny kitchen. The place had been advertised as a furnished studio flat, and it met the specification inasmuch as there was a cramped shower and lavatory and a minute kitchen. It was not therefore necessary to cook in the room which held a small double bed, a desk, a wardrobe, one armchair and not much else. The principal point in its favour – and the one that had been of overwhelming importance to Annabelle when she had found it five days ago – was that it was only a two-month let, giving her somewhere to be while she reorganised her life. She stood on her toes to look out of the high, narrow window which lit and ventilated, inadequately, the tiny kitchen.

  ‘Darling, I’ll make tea. You get back in and keep warm.’

  She smiled to herself as she heard Antony fight his way out of the bedclothes. The heating in the place left much to be desired and they had ended up under her duvet, his car rug and both their overcoats. She felt his arms go round her and leant back against him, resting her cheek on his neck, luxuriating in his smell. It was a miracle, like turning the clock back five years to when they had first been in love. He steered her gently back to bed and crossed the floor again to the kitchen and she sat, the rug round her shoulders where he had put it, duvet up to her chest, and watched as he put tea-bags into the pot and reboiled the kettle. He looked round at her and grinned. He was dressed solely in his own good navy overcoat, black hair flopping over his forehead, his skin looking brown and healthy in the small ray of sunlight.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ he announced, handing her her cup, undoing his coat and sliding carefully under the duvet beside her, companionably twining his legs round hers. ‘We’re going to find you somewhere better to live. I want you back with me, but not just because where you are is too awful. Not that I’m ungrateful to this dreadful bed,’ he added hastily. ‘Excellent place it seemed at the time.’

  She laughed, charmed by him as always. It had been a good night for her too, and she was still moved by the memory.

  The process which had ended in the small lumpy bed last night had started two days before on the Friday night when she had agreed to meet Antony for dinner. She had acknowledged to herself before she started that dinner was the top of a slippery slope, but that she was not going to abandon a relationship she had been in since she was twenty-one without at least saying the words that were boiling in her head. She had enjoyed the sense of power; it had been a guilty but delightful pleasure to watch Antony working so hard that he was sweating in his efforts to persuade her that he would be a changed man.

  She had met him on the Friday evening at a restaurant where they had often been before so that initial awkwardness had been dissolved in the professionally welcoming reception. He had wanted to pick her up at her flat, but she had serenely refused to give him the address. She had listened for his reaction, intending to opt out of dinner if he showed any signs of the wicked temper, coming out of nowhere, with which he had terrorised her, but he had accepted her refusal humbly.

  They had sat opposite each other and he had tried to take her hand, but she pulled it back on to her lap.

  ‘Sorry. I’m just glad you’re here.’

  She had been able to think of no response to that but he had gone on, doggedly. ‘Look, I want to try and explain. I know I’ve been awful to live with.’

  ‘You mean you’ve been beating me up.’ She had meant to sit, coldly, in judgement, but rage threatened to choke her.

  He opened his mouth to tell her not to speak so loudly but stopped himself just in time. ‘Yes.’ He stared at the table, and she watched the muscles at the back of his jaw move, a warning sign of trouble. ‘I want to explain,’ he said, without looking at her, hands clenched on the table.

  ‘Please do try.’ She was in a crowded restaurant, she reminded herself; there was nothing he could do.

  ‘It isn’t just because I was being hassled by Francis,’ he said, finally managing to look at her. She forced herself not to help him in any way. ‘Though I’ve always found him a … well … a heavy load. I feel responsible even though I know he’s hopeless.’

  ‘He’s an addict.’ She had not meant to speak but Antony’s attitude to his younger brother, combining resentment and absolute refusal to face the key fact, had always infuriated her.

  ‘I do know that. Now at any rate. I understood it finally when I found I was willing to steal from you to pay his debts. I saw that he was an addict and I’d got involved with his habit.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was a very fair summary, startlingly so. She tried not to add anything in alleviation, or exculpation, but simple interest overcame her. ‘Why do you … did you … feel so responsible for him?’

  ‘Ah.’ He leant across the table and she understood she had supplied a feed. ‘Because of my father – or mother. Both our parents.’

  ‘Bill and your real mother?’

  Antony’s mother had died fifteen years ago when he was fifteen and Francis twelve. He had never talked much about her.

  ‘He used to beat her up. And us. Francis and me, Francis worse than me. Christ!’ He jerked back in his chair, thumping the back legs down so that the people at the tables near them turned to stare. ‘Sorry.’ He rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I can hardly manage to say it even now. I saw a psychiatrist about it when I was younger. Jonty Morris.’ He found a handkerchief and blew his nose and she saw that there were tears in his eyes.

  Annabelle, fascinated as she was, found herself thinking that of course it wouldn’t be any old psychiatrist, like the weary underpaid young man who came in to see the women at the Refuge. It would have been the great Jonty Morris, author and star, now retired.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That I needed help.’ He caught her eye. ‘Treatment, I should say.’ He sniffed and blew his nose again, as she watched, amazed at seeing the confident, dominant Antony so reduced. ‘I managed to tell Jonty … and myself … that I was ashamed of the whole grubby miserable bloody thing. I mean, other people’s fathers didn’t beat them, make them feel fucking useless. But I was very busy, so was he, and I sort of stopped going.’ He was crying openly now and the waiter hesitated with two plates of avocado held above their heads.

  Annabelle nodded to him to put them down and reached over to take Antony’s hands, the skin roughened by continual washing in surgical soap.

  He looked at her over their clasped hands and sighed so deeply she thought he was going to faint. ‘Sorry.’ />
  ‘Do you want to … to go for a walk?’

  ‘Actually, I’m starving. I didn’t have lunch, or breakfast. I had a longish list because Peter’s a bit off colour and was letting me do most of it.’

  They had eaten two courses in virtual silence. He pushed his plate away and reached for the last slice of bread.

  ‘I wanted to find you and persuade you to come back now, tonight.’ He was watching her face carefully, but she could not control an alarmed jerk of her shoulders. ‘Annabelle, darling, don’t worry, please. I know that would be all wrong, I need to give both of us space. So I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just asking you not to cut me off, to go on seeing me.’

  She had sat and looked at him, olive skin yellowish, eyes still swollen, and the straight nose reddened. He still looked wonderful, as the covert glances from the two girls at the next table confirmed, and she clenched her hands in her lap. ‘I wouldn’t dare move back with you at the moment.’

  ‘You’re frightened of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh Christ. Like my mother. He killed her, you know. I don’t mean literally, but she just faded away. I hate him.’ He put his butter knife down, shaking.

  ‘You’ll need to get through that,’ she said, slowly.

  ‘I don’t see how.’ They stared at each other. ‘Until the bastard dies.’

  She fidgeted uncomfortably at the taste of this memory, sitting warmly inside Antony’s rug, listening to him struggling with the tiny awkward shower. She had not let him take her home after the scene in the restaurant. But she had agreed to dine with him again two days later, and this time she had brought him back to bed with her. And it had been wonderful; Antony had been gentle, persistent and imaginative, and they had both wept and he had licked the tears from her cheeks.