‘I’m afraid so, Sir,’ the policeman answered.
‘Handcuffed?’ Charles asked hopefully.
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Inspector Bromley said.
Alice knew that Charles was disappointed. He would have preferred her to have been carried out of the house with a ball and chain on each wrist and ankle and flung on a tumbril amid a jeering mob of sansculottes and dragged off to the guillotine without delay.
‘We’ll also charge the young man,’ the Inspector said heavily, gesturing to Michael.
‘As an accessory, merely, I assume,’ Michael’s father said fiercely.
Inspector Bromley nodded judicially. ‘It depends, Sir, on whether he is prepared to give evidence against his former partner, Hartley. He has been very helpful with our inquiries. He will only be charged as an accessory for the more serious offences of fraud, kidnap and murder.’
‘He’ll help. Won’t you, darling?’ his mother said, resting her hand on Michael’s sleeve. ‘After all, a stitch in time saves nine.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ he said miserably.
He met Alice’s dark tear-filled gaze for only one moment and then his pale glance fell to the ground.
‘I’d like to say I’m very sorry, Sir,’ he said. ‘I see now that it has all been a mistake.’
(The weedy Judas.)
‘Fine,’ Inspector Bromley said brightly, and turned to Professor Hartley. ‘After you, Sir,’ he said.
They went out through the door together, almost arm in arm, and paused on the steps surveying the mayhem which had once been the wooded front garden. Sniffer dogs were scurrying around digging frantically at the site of old forgotten bones. Policemen were resting on their shovels, digging long scientific slit trenches through the undergrowth and over and around strong tree roots. The newly weeded herbaceous border was uprooted and dying on the drive. The newly mown lawn was trodden and muddy with the track of boots.
Alice paused in the doorway with a policeman from the drug squad at her right hand and one from the vice squad at her left. She heard Inspector Bromley ask her estranged husband if he personally would go to the witness box to testify that she was clinically insane.
‘It’d be probably best to get one of your friends to do it for you,’ the policeman advised. ‘Not very nice to stand up in the box and tell a jury that your wife is barking. It’d put a bit of a strain on your marriage when she does get out.’
‘If she ever gets out,’ Charles replied cheerfully. ‘I would have thought that the best thing for her would be to have her detained until she can demonstrate that she is completely cured.’
‘Can take some time that,’ Inspector Bromley said cautiously.
Charles smiled. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘with a bit of ECT and some heavy medication, some aversion therapy, and dogmatic Freudian analysis, she should be fit to rejoin society in something between ten and twenty years. It’s the sort of thing I have an interest in. I might undertake her case myself, actually. She won’t be the same woman of course. That sort of treatment knocks the life out of them I always find. But it’s the best thing for society. And it’ll be the best thing for her in the long run.
‘She’ll thank me in the end,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve tried to live with her hysteria for years, you know. She’s been in counselling for most of our marriage. God knows, no man has ever tried harder to manage a woman who was simply beyond control.’
The Inspector nodded. He found he was warming to Charles. While he had no specific complaint to issue against Mrs Bromley (who led a blameless if deathly existence in Ditchling), he rather liked the grand forensic manner in which Charles anatomized his wife’s failings.
‘One expects women to be unreasonable,’ Charles said largely. ‘It is their chemical and biological make-up. They are not creators – there are no women artists, composers, sculptors. They lack logical thought processes – there are no women mathematicians or philosophers. What really are they good for?’
Inspector Bromley shrugged. Faced with the direct question he was damned if it were not unanswerable. What, after all, was Mrs Bromley good for? She ran the house, shopped and prepared all his food, cared for his two children, and supported and serviced his needs. But what did she do all day?
‘I’ll tell you what they are good for!’ Charles proclaimed. ‘They are the support team to the thinkers. They are the second-in-commands. They are the back-stop. Their job is to organize one’s life in such a way that a man can give his best to society. A man like me, for instance, whose life is so full of challenges and creative struggle that his home life must be …’ Charles paused for effect, ‘flawless,’ he pronounced.
Inspector Bromley nodded. His life, too, demanded a flawless home. ‘But women won’t do it,’ he mourned.
Charles smiled smugly. Miranda Bloomfeather was taking her finals this year and knew of only one way to scrape an honours pass. Miranda Bloomfeather would give Charles a flawless home. Miranda Bloomfeather would have done anything on God’s earth to please Charles. (But only until after finals.)
‘Some will,’ Charles said. ‘Properly adjusted ones will.’
Alice felt rage slowly building inside her, heating up like a bonfire, but it scorched only herself. She knew there was nothing she could do. One large policeman stood one side of her, another stood the other. They were not actually holding her, but they were looming, confident in the size of their boots and the blueness of their uniforms. Alice dawdled unwillingly between the two of them, helpless, helpless, hopeless just like all of her married life.
Charles and Inspector Bromley went out through the front door and preceded Alice down the steps and across the drive to the waiting police car. Only one half of the double front door was open, the policemen fell back to let Alice go first.
Half-way across the drive her husband and Inspector Bromley had paused to discuss bail and how Professor Hartley could legitimately avoid ever having his wife home again. Alice, in a scene reminiscent of Paul Scofield going to the scaffold as Sir Thomas More, looked up at the poignantly blue sky, breathed her last gasp of freedom and prepared herself to abandon hope.
There was an almighty squeal of tyres and a shriek of brakes as Professor Hartley’s concourse-condition silvery-grey Jaguar whirled like an unleashed fiend around the corner from the stable block.
The car bore down upon the Professor as if it wanted revenge for all those hours and hours of boredom, blinded under the blue plastic sheet. Professor Hartley leaped vertically upward and wind-milled his arms to get clear. It clipped him as it roared past, throwing him against Inspector Bromley and backwards into the rose bushes.
The policemen guarding Alice were stunned into immobility at the broad daylight vision of Inspector Bromley collapsing among the rose bushes in the arms of the husband of their prisoner.
But Alice was already running; running blindly, instinctively, without a thought in her head, only guided by the hunted animal’s instinct for escape, running down the drive after the car.
It screamed to a standstill, the passenger door swung open, the motor roared.
‘GET IN!’ screeched Aunty Sarah, loud as a banshee, like a hag on a speeding broomstick. Her rats’ tails hair streamed loose over her white pin-tucked nightie. Her purple toque hat with the nodding egret feathers was madly askew. A bottle of elderflower champagne fizzed and cascaded beside the gear lever. ‘GET IN, my darling! Let’s show ’em who’s boss!’
And Alice Hartley: mad, bad Alice Hartley, her face once again alight with joy, leaped for the passenger door, slammed it on the policeman’s scrabbling hand, and fell into the bucket seat as the powerful car sprayed gravel and roared, triumphantly, away.
About the Author
Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool. The Other Bo
leyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.
Also by the Author
The Tudor Court Series
THE CONSTANT PRINCESS
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE
THE QUEEN’S FOOL
THE VIRGIN’S LOVER
THE OTHER QUEEN
The Wideacre Trilogy
WIDEACRE
THE FAVOURED CHILD
MERIDON
Earthly Joys
EARTHLY JOYS
VIRGIN EARTH
The Cousins’ War
THE LADY OF THE RIVERS
THE WHITE QUEEN
THE RED QUEEN
THE KINGMAKER’S DAUGHTER
THE WHITE PRINCESS
Standalones
PERFECTLY CORRECT
ALICE HARTLEY’S HAPPINESS
A RESPECTABLE TRADE
THE WISE WOMAN
FALLEN SKIES
THE LITTLE HOUSE
ZELDA’S CUT
Short Stories
BREAD AND CHOCOLATE
Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books 1992 under the title Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre
Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1992
Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780006514657
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007380169
Version: 2013–09–02
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