Because, of course, they would all have assumed that Bert was drunk. Agnes herself assumed it. All those whiskies before dinner, and then those soft-footed waiters padding round the table filling her husband’s glass again and yet again …
Agnes knew his weakness, especially under stress. She had been watching every sip he took, counting every glass, ever since they’d arrived at the house. Even before they filed into the great dining room her nerves were already at snapping point on his account; and when at last the crash came, the ghastly glittering slither of silver and precious glass, she had found herself praying, before she could stop herself, Please, God, let him be dead! Please, God, let him not be merely drunk! To die at an elegant dinner table—that is socially forgivable. Anything less is not.
He wasn’t dead, of course; but nevertheless, everyone behaved beautifully, as of course they would in that kind of household. Without even a flicker of a glance toward her ruined dinner service or her smashed crystal goblets, Lady Olivia had calmed her guests, had had the victim carried solicitously and instantly upstairs to her own bedroom, and herself had telephoned the doctor.
“Suddenly taken ill,” was the phrase she used, in tones of ringing concern, clearly audible through the great dining room door; and neither by word nor by intonation had she given the faintest indication of being aware that the patient had simply passed out.
Such is breeding. Slinking shamefacedly upstairs behind her disgraced and unconscious husband, Agnes could not but be vaguely grateful for it. Though she could scarcely breathe for shame at the thought of what Lady Olivia must really be thinking, it was a relief that she could be counted on not to say it.
Brandy? Dinner sent up for her on a tray? Even a cup of tea? Agnes shook her head to all these, still speechless with shame; and presently Lady Olivia, her duty by the two disgraced guests correctly, even graciously, performed, swept elegantly from the room.
What poise! What savoir faire! Crouched guiltily by her husband’s bedside, Agnes could not help feeling a stab of unwilling admiration. By now the mess would have been unobtrusively cleared up, and the dinner party would be in full swing again, with Lady Olivia effortlessly setting her guests at ease, passing it off as if this sort of thing happened every day.
Well, that’s aristocracy for you, Agnes reflected wryly. Bred into the bones it was, over hundreds of years, this unflappable presence of mind, this imperturbable façade in the teeth of absolutely anything. Poor Bert, with all his passionate social climbing, he would never make it, never. It took a thousand years; and Bert, at forty-three, had been at the job for barely ten.
And anyway, just look at him! Couldn’t even hold his liquor, let alone display these other, more regal forms of self-command!
And it was now, looking down at her husband’s still face in the green-shaded lamplight, that Agnes became conscious of her first qualm of fear.
Because this didn’t look like drunkenness—not the kind of drunkenness she’d grown used to over the years. Where were the hiccups, where was the heavy, stertorous breathing, the throwing-up over someone else’s carpet? The awful insufferable humiliations rose up out of the past—and suddenly they seemed like mere pinpricks in the context of this new and unfamiliar dread. She would have given anything now to see a return of the familiar, disgusting symptoms; how willingly would she have rushed, at this very moment, in all the old familiar panic, for towel and basin to save Lady Olivia’s heirloom bedspread!
But there was no need. Not this time. Already he had gone beyond this sort of thing. In the greenish light she looked again at her husband’s face, and it appeared waxen, and very still. Even the twitching of the eyelids had ceased, and he lay as if dead, only the faint jerky rise and fall of the sheets showing that he was still breathing. Breathing too rapidly, too unevenly, as if his lungs and heart were already faltering in their rhythm.
She wished desperately that the doctor would come. Dare she make a fuss about it—ring the bell at the bedhead—bother someone? Was it done to ring for your hostess’s servants, even if someone was dying?
Turning the lamp away from Bert’s face, she leaned over and tried once again to rouse him.
“Bert!” she said, quite loudly, “Bert, wake up! It’s all right, everything is going to be all right, Lady Olivia isn’t angry, she—”
But it was no good. She shook him, spoke loudly into his ear but there was no drunken, inconsequential mumbling in response, no clumsy groping of half-conscious hands. The hand she held in hers was limp and cool, it reminded her of lilies. White lilies, and the proximity of death.
Death! How could such a thing be possible? Bert dying! Greedy, self-indulgent, go-getting Bert? Impossible! Death just wasn’t his thing.
When would the doctor arrive? An hour now since he’d been summoned—surely he’d have realised it was an emergency? A man of forty-three collapsing suddenly—why, it might be anything.
Heart attack? Stroke? Raking through her sparse medical knowledge, Agnes tried to recall those last minutes before the catastrophe. Had Bert looked odd in any way? Ill? Had he been behaving strangely? Certainly, in the drawing room before dinner, he had looked nervous and agitated.
From her observation point at the far end of the room, Agnes had watched him arguing heatedly with a slim supercilious young man—a television star, as she learned later—and losing the argument. Not that she’d been able to hear from that distance what either of them was saying, but she could tell by the insolent set of Bert’s shoulders, by the arrogant gesture with which he thrust his empty glass at a passing waiter, that he had been worsted.
But not ill, no. Just at a disadvantage, out of his depth in this company, and too proud, as always, to admit it to himself.
And at dinner?—the abortive beginnings of dinner, that is, which were all that either he or she was destined to enjoy. From across the huge mahogany table she had watched him, with wifely anxiety, launching into conversation with Mrs Beltravers, wife of the Conservative M.P.; had watched him boasting, as usual; describing how he’d used his influence to quash the Council’s plans for a Remand Home just next to the Arts Centre—was he sure, Agnes remembered wondering, that this had been a Labour project and not a Conservative one? Not that it mattered, you could see from Mrs Beltravers’ glazed expression that the affairs of her husband’s constituency bored her into the ground.
And at least Bert was eating, Agnes remembered noting. That’ll settle all those whiskies, she had reflected with satisfaction, watching him polishing off a plate piled high with assorted hors d’oeuvres. Duck pâté, jellied oysters, prawn darioles—wasn’t it rather a faux pas, Agnes remembered wondering uneasily, to be eating the lot like this, as if he’d been starving for a week?
But now, sitting at his bedside in a growing turmoil of anxiety, Agnes had few thoughts to spare for the etiquette of the thing; ideas far more sinister were beginning to take possession of her.
Duck pâté! You could get food poisoning from duck pâté. And from shellfish, too. She’d heard of people collapsing like that, suddenly, from food poisoning, though of course it was more usual for the symptoms to appear after an hour or so. On the other hand, if it was food poisoning, you’d expect the other guests to be affected too. The chance that Bert alone …
Chance? It was only now that Agnes became clearly conscious of the direction in which her uneasy thoughts were leading. She felt herself gripped by a violent trembling; sweat broke out on her forehead and on the palms of her hands; her stomach seemed to be tying itself in knots within her.
Murder! Deliberately administered poison! A poisoned helping of pâté—or poisoned oysters? Poisoned anything, in fact, from that lavish table, groaning with exotic and unfamiliar foods. And Bert—poor, gullible Bert, who for all his social pretensions knew no better than she did how these weird things ought to taste—poor Bert (and she could sympathize with this, for she was the same) would have swallowed anything, no matter how bitter or unpalatable, rather than show his unfamiliarity wi
th such delicacies.
And if someone, knowing him well, aware of his hidden social ineptitude, and of his pride, and choosing to take advantage of this knowledge—But who? Who, of all this glittering throng, could be Bert’s enemy?
Most of them—that was the answer. A man like Bert, pushing his way ruthlessly to the top, thrusting aside everything and everyone that stands in his way—such a man is going to make enemies. Somewhere along the way, had he pushed too hard? Trampled too blindly over feelings of whose intensity he was unaware? Stirred up against himself a hornets’ nest of revenge and hate? Was this then, in the end, what Bert had earned for himself by all his struggles, all his social climbing, all his single-minded self-aggrandisement? Murder, death by poisoning?
The sheer horror of the thing seemed to take Agnes’s breath away. Her head swam, her heart pounded in her ears. The effrontery of it, too! The dreadful, cold-blooded simplicity of the method! A little pharmaceutical knowledge, a little insight into Bert’s vainglory and his precarious self-conceit, a few moments alone in the dining room, and the thing was in the bag. A verdict of accidental food poisoning would be a near-certainty.
*
Especially, of course, if two of the guests were known to have come down with it, one being lucky enough to have survived. As Agnes, the blood pounding in her brain, slumped sideways in her chair and slipped unconscious to the floor, Bert slid swiftly from under the blankets and hurried to her side.
The carefully chosen green light already made her features look close to death, just as his had looked; but this time the illusion was fast becoming reality. For some minutes—maybe half an hour—he sat with his finger on her failing pulse, his ears intent on the harsh, uneven rattle of her breath. When both had finally ceased, he got to his feet and hurried quietly along the corridor to the head of the great curving staircase.
Peering, half hidden by shadows, over the oak banisters, he was able to watch Lady Olivia ushering her guests from the dining room into the great hall; and when she managed, unnoticed by anyone, to flash a swift glance up in his direction, he gave her the thumbs-up sign.
It had all gone off like a dream.
THE WOMAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING
THE EFFORT OF opening her eyes was enormous, and no sooner had Maggie achieved it than the light pounced like knives, and she closed them again.
She thought at first that it was the sun, that she was sunbathing, sunbathing for too long, on a scorching Mediterranean beach, on holiday somewhere or other. This must be heat-stroke she’d got, she felt so weak and numbed, almost paralysed. Even her jaw would not move, her teeth were clenched in some sort of tension whose cause she could not at the moment recall; so that when she tried to speak, the words would not come.
“I think I’m getting heat-stroke, darling,” she wanted to say, reproachfully, in a feeble effort to arouse Rodney’s sympathy and concern. “I’ve been lying here too long, why didn’t you wake me ..?”
But it was no good, something seemed to be blocking the sounds, choking them back into her throat; and anyway, Rodney wasn’t listening.
Well of course he wasn’t. He never listened to her, these days. Maybe he wasn’t even there; maybe he’d wandered off by now, bored and restless, eyeing desultorily the other female figures spread-eagled on the sand, and thinking about his work.
He never thought about anything else any more, at home or away; a far cry indeed from those golden holidays in the first years of their marriage, when he’d sit or lie beside her hour after hour, rubbing oil on her brown body, murmuring into her ear nonsense to make her laugh or endearments to make her glow — face down on the hot sand—with secret joy.
Maybe he was still sitting there after all, right beside her? Reading, of course, and making notes. Going over those eternal papers and documents which he lugged with him everywhere, even on holiday; the dry, convoluted paragraphs curling under the Mediterranean heat, the sand seeping into the interstices of his bulging, important briefcase.
To hell with Rodney’s importance, his rocketing success! Success had come suddenly, attacking her marriage like a fast-growing cancer, with metastases spreading into every corner of their relationship.
“Rodney ..?”—she tried to put appeal, reproach and pathos into the syllables; but once again, no sound came from her throat.
And now a memory … a suspicion … an unease lurched inside her, and she forced herself once more to open her eyes, to peer through the dazzle with narrowed, burning lids.
*
No beach. No blazing Mediterranean sun. Only a reading-lamp—and a shaded one at that—casting its mild 60-watts across the littered desk; and straight in front of her, propped carefully at eye-level, just where she had left it, was her suicide-note.
So she was still alive. The thought was a neutral one to Maggie at first—neither surprising nor unsurprising. Nor did she feel either relieved or dismayed at this miscarriage of her plans.
Her plans? What, actually, were her plans? What had the whole thing been about? Letting her lids fall closed again against the baffling light of Reality (Reality?—Oh, not again ..!)—Maggie set herself to fumbling through the cotton-wool that right now was her brain, seeking the relevant connections, trying to recall, through the confusion of her thoughts and the singing in her ears, the sequence of events that had landed her here, in her husband’s own special wing-chair, in his own well-ordered study, with an empty bottle of sleeping-pills at her elbow.
No, not empty. Half the pills were still there—no, more than half—the blur of blueness reached way up the glass sides—two-thirds up at least.
So what had gone wrong? She’d intended to take the lot, of that she was certain. What had prevented her? Had she been overcome by unconsciousness before she’d had time to swallow more than a dozen or so of the things? Or had she, on the very verge of oblivion, somehow lost her nerve ..?
This, of course, would explain why she was still alive, she reflected, with slow, laborious logic; and still she could feel neither pleased nor sorry at the outcome. She could, though, feel a weak stir of anger about it all. It was so unfair! Why was everything, for her, always so difficult? Other people commit suicide in their hundreds of thousands, all over the world, why should she be the one who never managed to bring it off?
Because this wasn’t the first time she had tried—Oh, by no means. In these past two or three years—the years since Rodney’s spectacular promotion at the Foreign Office had changed him from a shy, pleasant, young man into a dynamo of ruthless energy—during these years, Maggie had made two other suicide attempts—three, if you counted that first one of all, which (as she now admitted to herself) hadn’t really been an attempt at all, but merely a ruse for getting attention—forcing attention, indeed, at pistol-point—from her increasingly remote and preoccupied husband.
She’d worked it out so carefully, too. He was to have come home (late, as usual) to find his wife dead in a gas-filled bathroom. He was to have kicked and battered on the bathroom door: “Let me in, darling, let me in!” he was to have yelled, white-lipped at the keyhole, rattling and bashing, shaking the handle loose from its moorings, pushing until the hinges groaned, and the door finally caved in before him. She saw him dragging her limp figure out of the bath, across the landing, long mousey hair dripping like Ophelia’s, and finally laying it on the bed, covering it with kisses …
“Wake up, my darling … Oh, wake up!” he was to have sobbed, distraught with grief and with remorse. “Oh, Maggie, Maggie, come back to me! I love you … I need you ..!”
Too late the kisses. Too late the wild words of love. His tears of remorse would fall upon her dead face in vain.
Or would they? It would be a shame, when you came to think about it, to be missing it all. How about if she stirred and murmured his name at some point in the proceedings, when he had suffered enough, had repented enough of his shortcomings? “Rodney … Rodney ..!” she would whisper with her first faint breath of returning life: and from there to his
promising to give up his demanding job and stay home in the evenings would be but a few delicious, night-long steps …
With a surge of steaming water, Maggie had lurched upwards into a sitting position and turned off the un-lit jets of the water-heater, leaving only the pilot to do its feeble worst. Then she lay back once more into the water, warmed through and through, and blissfully expectant.
*
And after all that, he hadn’t come into the bathroom at all! Hadn’t smelt the gas seeping out under the door—nothing! She’d lain there in the cooling water from midnight until a quarter past one, only to hear him slam the front door and go straight upstairs to the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
For several minutes, Maggie had lain there, incredulous. Surely, when he saw the empty bed, he would come in search of her? She waited; the minutes passed; and presently, chilled and desperate, she dragged herself out of the now nearly-cold water, wrapped a towel round her shivering body, and went to investigate—only to find him snoring peacefully on his own side of the big double bed.
*
“I thought you must have stayed the night at your sister’s, or somewhere,” he’d explained off-handedly the next morning: and on Maggie’s insisting that she “might have died!” he’d merely said “Ridiculous!”—then added: “You’d better phone the gas people and get them to send someone. It’s a waste of gas to have a pilot that keeps blowing out”—and with that he’d gone off to the office as if nothing had happened.
“Ridiculous”, indeed! I’ll show him, she thought; and a couple of months later she did—or nearly. The occasion had been the “official entertaining” of a Scandinavian diplomat—blonde, and not a day over thirty-five—from which duty Rodney had come home at one in the morning to find a policeman at his door and an urgent summons to the local hospital.
She’d intended, of course, that he should find the policeman at his door; also that he should have to rush to the hospital. But she hadn’t intended—well, of course she hadn’t—that as soon as he reached the hospital he should be told there was nothing to worry about: “She’ll be all right; she’s coming round nicely!”
A Lovely Day to Die Page 13
