Dead Gorgeous

by Peter Lovesey

  Vic returned with the drinks. ‘Actually I’ve got good news. Well, good news for me in a way.’

  ‘Let’s hear it, then.’

  ‘I’ve been offered a two-year temporary lectureship at Princeton.’

  Antonia put down her glass. ‘Princetown? Someone’s led you up the garden path, darling. That’s not a university. It’s a prison in the middle of Dartmoor.’

  ‘Princeton, New Jersey.’

  She felt a prickling sensation in her scalp. ‘America?’

  He nodded.

  ‘For two years?’

  ‘It’s not until next summer.’

  She looked into his brown eyes. Mentally he was already over there in New Jersey. She was livid. She couldn’t survive a day without him. He was it. She’d never known a man who excited her more. ‘You bastard! You didn’t tell me you applied for this.’

  ‘I didn’t think I stood an earthly. Look, Antonia, it’s not the end of the world.’

  How little he knew! ‘Judas! Two-faced, scurvy, bloodsucking louse. I’m coming with you.’

  He was back in London like a rocket. ‘You can’t do that. You know you can’t.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘You’re married.’

  ‘I’ll leave him.’

  Those eyes of his opened so wide she could see white all round them. ‘It’s an Ivy League university. I couldn’t turn up there with a married woman in tow.’

  As promised, Antonia was by the bandstand at half past two, conspicuous in a lilac-coloured coat with bishop sleeves and a matching Breton sailor hat tilted back rakishly. She was getting some long looks from the nannies walking their prams.

  ‘Let’s go that way, towards the Mall.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  Green Park no longer looked like a war zone. The bulldozers had flattened the barbed wire fences and the searchlight station and filled in the artificial lake in time for the Victory celebrations. Squads of Italian POWs had laid fresh turf. Today Londoners in scores were out enjoying the autumn sun.

  Rose gossiped happily about old times, and Antonia chipped in with bits of news she had picked up since. They covered just about everyone of the Kettlesham Heath crowd. Almost an hour passed before Antonia switched back to the present.

  ‘Where do you and Barry live, then?’

  Rose considered what answer she would give. She chose to keep it vague. ‘Out Pimlico way.’

  ‘A house? One of those sweet little terraced boxes covered in stucco?’ Antonia should have been in intelligence in the war.

  ‘It was all we could get and now we’ve got to stay until the war damage is put right.’

  ‘So you were bombed.’

  ‘The house across the street. A doodlebug. No one was hurt, thank God, but we lost our front door and all the windows and there are cracks you can see daylight through.’

  ‘Bloody doodlebugs.’

  ‘It could have been much worse. You have to look on the bright side. We can see right across the river now.’ And I, Rose instantly thought, am incapable of keeping any secrets at all. I didn’t want to tell her all this. She tried clumsily to cover up. ‘But no one can ever find us because we haven’t got a number on the new door.’

  ‘No number?’

  ‘No number.’ Rose raised a smile. ‘We don’t do much entertaining.’

  ‘You might get a visit from me one of these days.’

  ‘Don’t! I’d die of shame if you turned up.’

  ‘Did you tell Barry you met me?’

  ‘No. I didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Don’t you two have much to say to each other?’

  ‘The only thing he wants to talk about is that revolting murder in the papers.’

  ‘Neville Heath. How dull.’

  ‘Dull? I call it horrible.’

  ‘He’s a psychopath, of course.’

  ‘Heath?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t referring to Barry, darling.’

  There was a moment before Rose spoke again.

  ‘What’s a psychopath?’

  Antonia responded as if to a child. ‘He has a diseased mind, my dear.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So what can be more dull than that? He was incapable of committing an intelligent murder. Darling, are those rain clouds, would you say?’

  They took the straightest route back to Piccadilly, where Antonia insisted on tea in the Palm Court at the Ritz. In the pink and gold setting her outfit looked so exquisite that she must have known all the time she would come here. Rose, seated in front of a gilded water nymph on a rock, felt like a refugee in her green tweed coat and woollen headscarf. People at other tables glanced at her and looked away.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come in.’

  ‘My dear, nobody’s taking any notice.’

  ‘I do have better things at home.’

  ‘Imagine how I felt in the Black and White Milk Bar.’

  ‘If only I’d known we were coming here.’

  ‘Relax. We deserve this.’

  ‘I’m not sure why.’

  ‘For putting up with our ghastly husbands.’ Rose forgot what she was wearing for a moment. ‘Is yours a problem too?’

  ‘Hector?’ Antonia tensed suddenly and lowered her voice. ‘Don’t look now, but I think a fellow over there is giving one of us the eye.’

  ‘Oh, no. Where?’

  ‘To your left against the window, sitting alone. Grey pinstripe. Clark Gable moustache.’

  Rose stole a glance.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Antonia! He’s sixty if he’s a day.’

  ‘I swear to God that’s an American tie. Where would he get a tie like that in England? It is Clark Gable. And he’s looking at you.’

  ‘Dressed like this?’

  ‘Americans go wild over tweeds. This is your chance, darling. Show him some stocking and let’s see if he comes over.’

  Any uncertainty in Rose’s mind was removed. This was a well-tried game of Antonia’s, picking out the most unlikely men and casting them as heart-throbs for her friends. Amusing to everyone but the victim. She was always catching people.

  ‘Cool down, Ack-Ack, this isn’t the sergeants’ mess.’

  ‘He’s panting for you.’

  ‘Panting! He’s hardly breathing. He’s practically asleep. His eyes are closing. Look, he’s closed his eyes.’

  ‘Imagining things.’

  Antonia’s face was so suggestive, and the whole thing so ridiculous that Rose was forced to smile and it started Antonia off. She made sounds like a traction engine picking up steam. Rose snatched a hankie to her mouth.

  ‘He is definitely asleep.’

  ‘He’s just pretending.’

  ‘He’s sliding down his chair. Any minute now he’s going to slip under the table.’

  ‘Don’t let that fool you. He’s trying to see up your skirt.’

  Rose reddened and tugged the hem over her knees.

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  Before they left, a waiter handed a small white cake-box to Antonia. She thanked him and put a coin in his hand. Then she turned to Rose.

  ‘Isn’t it a bore trying to think of things to feed the cat with? I find cream quite impossible to get in the shops.’

  The umbrellas were up when they came out. There wasn’t a taxi in sight, so they stood under the arcade and waited for the shower to stop. Rose didn’t mind. She didn’t want the afternoon to end. It was like old times, only better. Antonia wasn’t performing for an entire hutful of WAAFs. The entertainment was for private delectation. She couldn’t tell what to believe, and she was captivated.

  Antonia hadn’t finished, either.

  ‘You and I will definitely have to do something about our husbands.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Get shot of them.’

  The only way to cope with Antonia in this mood was to keep a straight face and treat everything she said with total seriousness – until you collapsed laughing.

  ‘How do
you mean – get shot of them?’

  Antonia flicked her hand as if she were shaking off the rain.

  Rose aped the action. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Difficult, I should think.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I told you I’m not getting a divorce.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about divorce.’

  ‘All right, cleversticks, what other way is there to get shot of a husband?’

  ‘I can think of at least a dozen.’

  ‘Name one, then.’

  ‘A fatal accident.’

  ‘Small chance of that!’

  ‘Chance needn’t come into it, darling. Quick, that taxi’s pulling up.’

  The Ritz commissionaire beckoned to them with his white glove. He seemed to know Antonia. He waved away some other people and held a huge brown umbrella over them as they climbed in.

  At home she tuned in to the Light Programme, got Merry-Go-Round and started the ironing. Barry’s shirts had to be ready for another week. She couldn’t imagine Antonia at the ironing board these days, though she’d seen her often enough in the billet at Kettlesham Heath pressing her uniform for kit inspections and her civvies for dates with the officers. Things had moved on since then.

  Antonia has, at any rate, Rose reflected. As for me, I’ve slipped. Those really were better times. We bleated about the food and the uniforms, but we had some point to our lives. Women had a part to play in fighting the war. We were needed. And they paid us.

  I was happy. Even the first years of marriage to Barry weren’t too impossible. I still had some self-respect and so did he. And the joke of it is that we all looked forward to something called Victory Day.

  Victory!

  It was Friday and Barry wouldn’t be in before ten. He always picked up a woman after work on Fridays. Rose spat on the flat-iron to see if it was hot enough. A far cry from afternoon tea at the Ritz. She picked a shirt from the heap and spread it out, dipped her fingers in a basin of water and flicked her hand over the shirt.

  ‘Just like that.’

  She watched the droplets darken and spread.

  3

  Hector was holding forth about the Britain Can Make It Exhibition as a shop window for his products, which Antonia thought was rich considering he was a Czech. She smiled at a couple at another table and said something about the weather and Hector didn’t even pause for breath. She reached across the table and pulled his plate away.

  It got a reaction. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

  ‘Haven’t you finished? I have.’

  ‘That’s my dinner you took away.’

  ‘It’ll walk away by itself if you carry on much longer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never mind.’ She handed back the plate.

  ‘I forget what I said now.’

  ‘Good. Will you give me a divorce?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want a divorce, Hec. I want to marry Vic and go to America. He’s been offered a job at Princeton University.’

  Hector chuckled and brought the dimples to his cheeks, which always infuriated Antonia because it made her feel like a cradle-snatcher. In reality he was twelve years her senior, yet such a shrimp that people thought of him as not much over twenty. His springy red hair was the sort that looked no different after it was combed.

  ‘Vic is leaving? Your fancy man is leaving?’

  ‘I’m going with him. I’m getting a divorce from you and going with him.’

  ‘Not possible.’

  A harsher note came through in her voice. ‘You’re going to say it’s against your religion, aren’t you? Listen. You don’t go to Mass. You don’t make confessions. You’re not exactly one of the flock, sweetie.’

  ‘Christmas I go to Mass.’

  ‘Face it, Hector, you’ve lapsed.’

  ‘Do I treat you bad?’

  ‘We’re bored with each other. Admit it. We made a mistake.’

  ‘This is possible. Divorce is not. We will stay married till death. Understand?’

  She took a gulp of wine and leaned forward in her chair. ‘Have you thought of this, Hec? If you gave me grounds, I could divorce you. It’s not against my religion.’

  ‘Grounds? What are you talking about? I don’t understand what you need grounds for if you want to leave the country.’

  ‘Grounds – a reason, sweetie, not a piece of land. Misconduct, as they put it in the papers. You’d simply pay some woman to spend the night in a hotel with you.’

  He laughed again. ‘You make it sound like money for jam. How much do such women charge? Five pounds? Ten? You think I’m a complete chump? It isn’t just a divorce you’re planning. You want costs. And maintenance. For ever and ever. You want to carry on eating in restaurants and buying expensive clothes. I may not be a great husband, Antonia, but I’m a pretty good businessman, and that’s bad business, terrible business. No deal. No divorce. Forget it.’

  She said, ‘Bastard. I’ll just leave you.’ But the words didn’t carry conviction.

  Already he was talking about the bloody exhibition again. The people on an adjacent stand had told him that Prestcold were planning to have domestic refrigerators back on the market within a year – far more disturbing to Hector than the prospect of his wife abandoning him.

  All around them in the glitter and red plush of Reggiori’s, couples were gazing dewy-eyed at each other over the wine.

  ‘ . . . I could speed up production easy, but I depend on suppliers, you see. I give you this example. Take aluminium alloy.’

  ‘Hector.’

  ‘Essential in manufacture.’

  ‘Hector, I’ve got a question for you. A technical question.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘How many volts of electricity do they use in the underground?’

  ‘Over six hundred. Nominally six hundred and thirty DC. Why do you ask this?’

  ‘Enough to kill someone?’

  ‘Easy.’ He grinned. ‘But I never use the tube, so you’d better think of some other thing.’

  Antonia smiled back serenely. ‘Ah, but I might be thinking of suicide, mightn’t I, little man?’

  ‘You?’ This amused him greatly. ‘You’ve got to know which rails to jump on.’

  ‘The live rail.’

  He handed his plate to a passing waiter and removed the cruet from the centre of the table, welcoming the rare chance to impress his wife with some electrical knowhow. ‘Pass me those knives.’ He arranged four knives in parallel between them. ‘Now, two long knives – this and this – represent running rails, understand?’

  ‘The wheels of the train move along them.’

  ‘Good. Small knives are conductor rails.’

  ‘Two live rails?’

  ‘Positive and negative. Positive goes between the running rails, negative outside them. In a station’ – he moved his place mat alongside the knives – ‘the negative conductor rail is right over there, along the opposite wall. Now, you want to electrocute yourself. For best results, you should be in contact with both conductor rails at the same time.’

  Antonia frowned. ‘I’d need to be an athlete or a contortionist.’

  ‘Difficult, yes.’

  ‘What would happen if you just hit the nearest conductor rail?’

  ‘In theory you could still earth six hundred and thirty volts.’

  ‘And in practice?’

  Hector smiled and pressed the tablecloth with both hands to make a furrow between the knives. ‘Here, below the rails in each station they have a pit. The suicide pit. Chances are that you will fall between the rails.’

  ‘Without getting a shock? This isn’t very helpful, Hec. People do get killed sometimes, so how does it happen?’

  ‘Simple. They jump in front of the train, so it’s not electrocution that kills them.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Messy.’

  He laughed. ‘You want to look pretty in your coffin? You’d bette
r take phenobarbitone.’

  Rose had been in bed an hour when the key turned in the front door. Barry took each stair as if it were put there to trap him, then loosed a huge belch as he passed the bedroom door on his way to the bathroom. This, she reflected, is the Battle of Britain hero, the dashing fighter pilot I promised to love and cherish.

  So how will I deal with him? I’ll pretend I’m asleep. I don’t want a scene. Probably I won’t even mention it tomorrow. The plain truth is that I’m resigned to this every Friday night. I’m resigned to being ignored when he’s home every other night of the week, so why should I object when he stays out and comes home drunk?

  I’m trapped in this nightmare. I haven’t just slipped in my standard of living since the war. I’ve slipped mentally. I’ve practically given up.

  He thrust open the door and switched on the light.

  Rose closed her eyes.

  She heard him lurch to the bed, then felt his hand on her shoulder. He turned her over. She opened her eyes. He stood swaying there in his braces, no collar attached to his shirt.

  ‘Bloody trains.’

  ‘Where are your waistcoat and jacket?’ ‘Bathroom.’

  She got out of bed to retrieve them. If she could possibly help it, there wouldn’t be a scene. Fixing her mind on the things she regarded as the duties of a wife helped to control her anger. It was a woman’s job to keep her husband decently kitted for work. He owned this blue pinstripe and his demob suit and one pre-war flannel monstrosity that he refused to part with.

  The waistcoat and jacket lay in a heap beside the lavatory. Mechanically she picked several long fair hairs off the sleeves and dropped them into the bowl. She shook the jacket and something rattled in a side pocket. She took out a hotel key and glanced at the disc, replaced it and took the clothes to a hanger in the wardrobe.

  He was face down on the bed, still in his day things.

  ‘Are you proposing to sleep in your trousers?’

  He made a show of clawing the braces off his shoulders.

  ‘Roll over.’

  She unbuttoned him at the front and peeled off the trousers.

  He tugged the bedding aside and crawled underneath.

  ‘Had a few after work.’