Robbie's Wife

by Russell Hill

  She reached out to where I lay on the bed and touched my face. “Will you get dressed and come out to see me off?”

  I dressed while she waited at the door and we went out to the Land Rover. It was black and the noise of the river was continuous, a sliding rush that filled the air. I could imagine Robbie trying to swim the river, caught in the current, his head bobbing under, disappearing in the darkness, swept away.

  “I told Robbie I was going shopping at Tesco in Bland-ford.” Maggie pointed to some grocery bags in the front seat. “I shopped before I came here.”

  I put my arms around her, pulled her close.

  “Goodbye, Jack Stone.”

  We kissed and she got into the car and I told her to take care of herself, that I would write to her, and she said, yes, tell me when you become rich and famous, and she started the Land Rover and went over the bridge and up the track, the headlights illuminating the row of trees and then Maggie was gone.

  32.

  The cottage was no longer warm and inviting. It was empty and I felt drained. I packed my things into my duffel bag and drove across the bridge in the darkness, headed for London. I would wait a week, come back to Dorset, somehow see Maggie again. The M3 was filled with traffic, despite the late hour, headlights coming at me from the wrong side, and I felt disoriented and angry. I blamed myself for asking the question about Robbie, as if that were what had caused Maggie to pull away from me.

  It was midnight when I got to London, and I wandered around, lost among one-way streets, finally finding Russell Square, parking on a street not far from my little hotel. The same desk clerk was on duty, and I could smell whisky. Yes, he said, it was a bit late, and yes, he could find me a room and would I be wanting a help up with the bag, sir?

  I tipped him, took my bag and the key and found the room on the top floor, a climb of four flights of stairs since the elevator wasn’t working. It felt like the first night I had come to the hotel from the plane and I slept until nearly ten o’clock the next morning.

  I took the car back to the rental agency, explained the cracked window as vandalism and filled out a form, listing the Glastonbury police as the source for a report. I came back in on the Northern Line. A smiling young woman was at the front desk and I asked her if there were a weekly rate for my room. Two hundred and eighty pounds, she said. I did the mental arithmetic and realized that I would be paying nearly sixty dollars a night. It was cheap by London standards and I paid it but I knew that if I kept spending at this rate I’d be out of money within a month.

  I spent the next few days alternating between working on the screenplay and walking the streets of London. Somehow, what had happened at Sheepheaven Farm seemed like some other world, a parallel universe where characters made love and walked in the countryside and dogs scrambled over the backs of sheep while I watched from my safe vantage point in London, unconnected to those events.

  Always, though, I imagined Maggie, rising from the tub, lowering herself on top of me, I remembered kissing her nipples, her passion infusing me as I walked in Hyde Park, seeing couples walking hand in hand and imagining Maggie there with me, swinging her hand in mine.

  Several times I found myself in a phone box wanting to call Maggie but I didn’t, I went back to the room, wrote out descriptions of her, began to write alternate scenes in my screenplay in which Maggie and Jack were in that little flat on the edge of the Mediterranean where I remembered the sea, or Maggie and Jack met again in the stone cottage in Dorset, or Maggie suddenly knocking on the door of my hotel room and Jack opening the door and there she was in her old blue jumper, smiling at him.

  I went once to see Nigel, told him I was working on a screenplay and he seemed interested in the premise.

  “You ought to send a treatment to Richard in L.A.,” he said. He asked how the coast-watcher story was coming and I said it was on hold but I had this marvelous character, a woman who was a Dorset housewife, the one in the new screenplay, and I would let him see some parts of it.

  “I have no idea where this story is going,” I said. “But she’s the most compelling character I’ve ever written.”

  Nigel said the next time he talked with Richard he’d tell him I was on to something. I don’t know why I went to see Nigel. He was someone to talk to, someone I knew, however casually, and I wanted to tell him about Maggie and me, that it wasn’t fiction at all, that there was this woman in a country farmhouse who was in love with me and I was in love with her only we were separated by something neither of us understood.

  I went back to my hotel and I buried myself in my writing, imagining Jack and Maggie together, writing furiously, the words tumbling out.

  33.

  Always, though, I returned to the scene where Maggie drove off and the phrase ‘What if there were no Robbie?’ echoed. I imagined Robbie coming out of the pub, half-drunk, climbing into his Land Rover and driving down the road and then, when he came to the roundabout, he didn’t look to the right, just as I hadn’t looked that first morning I had rented a car and had nearly been broad-sided by a lorry, but there was no roundabout between the pub and Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie wasn’t smashed by a lorry.

  And I imagined Maggie showing up at my room, escaping once again from Dorset; this time she hadn’t gone to the ballet, she had come to me, but the hallway was empty and I walked once again on Upper Woburn Place, down Euston Road to Regent’s Park, making a giant circle that would end in my room and the laptop and Maggie.

  I was passing St. Pancras church when I saw the notice “Memorial Service” and heard the faint sounds of an organ. It had begun to rain again and I stepped inside. St. Pancras isn’t one of those restored churches — it’s a bit seedy on the outside, dark inside, well-worn, a church that’s still in constant use and I had wandered in there before. I stood at the back, watching the small knot of people dressed in black, sitting silently along both sides of the nave.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  The voice came from a young man in a black cassock who had materialized at my elbow.

  “I’m afraid I’m intruding,” I said.

  “Did you know the young man?”

  “Who?”

  “The memorial service. The young man it’s for.”

  “I’m afraid not. I heard the organ. I came in out of the rain. I should go.”

  “It’s quite all right. If you want to stand back here, no one will notice.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A stonemason. He was doing some work on St. George’s Church, not far from here, and the scaffolding collapsed. Tragic. A young man with a family. Here.” He handed me a sheet of paper. At the top was St. Pancras and an elaborate cross and underneath was written:

  Kevin Overend

  Beloved husband of Brenda Overend,

  father of...

  and there was the usual list of names, children, father, mother, brothers, sister.

  “You might say he died doing the Lord’s work,” I said. “Working on a church.”

  “Hardly.” The voice had lost its softness. “He died doing work for a contractor, replacing stones in a buttress.”

  I didn’t look at him. I knew what was going through his mind. Was I an idle tourist, or was I one of those creeps who go around attending funerals? Or was I some sort of Jesus freak who might hang about and interrupt the sanctity of his memorial service?

  “Thank you,” I said, and I stepped out into the rain. The street was filled with traffic, black taxis and red buses and the wet noise of tires and all I could think of was the fact that Kevin Overend had been alive last week while I was at Sheepheaven Farm and now he was dead. One minute he was hoisting a stone into place and the next minute Kevin Overend was going end over end toward the pavement. You’re here and then you aren’t. Simple as that. Fall off a scaffolding, Robbie. Would Brenda be off dancing in the pub next week? Out with her girlfriends while her mother watched the children. “Be good for you dear to get out,” mum would say. And what was Brenda thinking th
ere in the nave in her black dress? Good riddance? Sorry you’re gone, Kevin, but I owe a pint to the chap who forgot to tighten those bolts on the scaffolding?

  But Robbie didn’t climb on scaffolds with heavy stones and there was no chance he would suddenly disappear. A woman came toward me, and she looked, for a moment, like Maggie, and I started toward her, called out, but she continued walking and I realized it wasn’t Maggie. She walked with a clumsy gait. I turned away and imagined Robbie across the street, hailing me, waving his hand, and darting out into the street and a bus crushing him, thumping over his body while the street came to a standstill, pedestrians froze, cars stopped, a freeze-frame in a script I was writing in my head, and I turned down Euston Road, searching for a pub where I could have a drink.

  Coming back from the pub I suddenly began to speak out loud, head down in the rain, a movie pitch, something I had done dozens of times, two hundred words, tell the important part of the story, capture their imaginations. I could picture those familiar Hollywood faces around the table and I leaned forward, intent, stopping at a bus shelter, sitting next to a man, telling him how Robbie might disappear. And then I rose and went back to my room and took off my wet clothes and sat naked at the laptop, wrapped in a blanket while I wrote repeated pieces of the pitch, and I thought of myself in third person, wondering what Jack would do and how Jack could make Robbie disappear. At first I thought in terms of Robbie getting sick or having an accident. But Jack couldn’t count on Robbie getting sick or having a road accident. Somehow there had to be something that could happen to Robbie on the farm that would be fatal. Like Kevin Overend’s fall. Something that would be a natural act on the farm. There would, of course, be a police inspector in this script, and I thought of who would play the part, perhaps Alan Bates and then I thought, no, Clive Owen, he plays that smart detective who always gets his man only this time Jack would foil Clive Owen, plan this thing so perfectly that Owen would come to the farm and get out of his black police car and he would tell Maggie, who was waiting for him in the kitchen, that he had examined every aspect and he was sorry, but it was an unavoidable accident, just one of those freak things, I know that doesn’t make it any better, Mrs. Barlow, but there’s nothing more I can say.

  Now the trick was to plot this thing so carefully that it would become just that.

  INT. FARM SHED, DUSK

  Robbie is shearing the sheep, and we watch him, standing in a puddle of water, peeling off the wool and suddenly he throws the shears into the air.

  ROBBIE:

  Fucking piece of shit!

  (He picks up the shears and examines the frayed wires, then jiggles them until the shears come to life again.)

  English current is 220 volts. That’s why I needed this little transformer for my laptop. There was a pool of water that seemed to permanently be in front of the stalls. If Robbie were to be standing in the pool of water, and the shears dropped into them, then he’d suffer an electrocuting shock. How many films had I seen where the woman was in the tub and knocked her hair dryer into the water? Or someone plugged a curling iron in and dropped it into the tub, and the blonde shuddered and died and it was a terrible accident? The only thing was to make sure he was in that water. Jack would have to come up behind him, hit him with something, stun him, and then make sure the wires on the shears were exposed.

  INT. SHED

  Robbie falls into the water. The shears lie next to him.

  Closeup of the shears. Suddenly there’s a blinding light.

  Yes, I thought, Jack is home free. Clive Owen will come and he’ll see where Robbie hit his head against the front of the stall and he’ll find the shears with the frayed cord and he’ll come to the only possible conclusion.

  34. EXT. CAR HIRE AGENCY, MORNING

  JACK AND THE YOUNG MAN walk around the car while he inspects it, noting a scratch on the plastic bumper, a chip in the windshield.

  YOUNG MAN:

  No point in you paying for somebody else’s misfortune.

  He checks them off on the sheet, now soggy from the misting rain, and hands Jack a copy, turns and ducks back into the garage. Jack slides behind the wheel and drives out of the industrial park, onto the A16 and, in a few miles, onto the M3, heading west.

  EXT. MOTORWAY

  It seems like he drove this same route months or years ago, but it’s really only four weeks since he went off to Dorset in search of White Church Farm, resolved to write something that would put him back on the map in Richard’s office. Richard and Los Angeles are a dim memory now, as is Mr. Orchard and the wretched hut JACK rented on the coast.

  JACK’S POV: The windshield begins to fill again with rain.

  FLASH BACK TO: The clerk in the hotel commenting that this is the rainiest, coldest Spring that England has ever recorded.

  JACK’S POV: He turns the wipers up another notch and they work steadily back and forth. Car after car passes, sending up sheets of water. Apparently the English have no fear of driving at high speeds in the rain. But he isn’t in a hurry. He will take the same road he took a month ago, turning off at Dorchester, arriving in the lane outside Mappowder just at dark.

  It’s early enough that Jack knows he will have to kill time someplace and he thinks of detouring through Gillingham, north of Mappowder. It’s enough out of the way that Maggie or Robbie are unlikely to be there on some errand, and he can find a pub where he can stay dry and wait for evening.

  EXT. GILLINGHAM – NARROW STREET

  Gillingham is gray and wet and it’s late enough so that the streets are empty when he comes through the roundabout near the train station. He finds a pub and parks the car.

  INT. PUB – LOW CEILING, DARK

  Jack goes in to find it nearly empty, only a few lonely drinkers and a barmaid absently polishing glasses. He orders a pint and takes it to a table by the window where he sits.

  CUT TO: WINDOW, LOOKING OUT

  He watches the rain sheet down, going over his schedule again, hoping that Robbie will take advantage of the terrible weather to go out into the shed to shear more sheep. Perhaps he has sheared all of them already and will be in the warm kitchen.

  CUT TO: KITCHEN – SHEEPHEAVEN FARM

  Terry is working on a drawing and Jack the dog is lying near the cooker and Maggie, rising on the balls of her feet, is floating about. It will all be luck, he knows, that Robbie will be in the shed when he arrives. He will have to time it right.

  CUT TO: SHED; ROBBIE WITH A SHEEP CAUGHT BETWEEN HIS LEGS

  Robbie is shearing a sheep, having started before dark, and Maggie will wait tea a bit longer. If Jack has calculated right, Robbie will remain in the shed and Jack will arrive just after the light goes. Jack has watched him twice before and knows he will have to arrive at the precise moment he has planned.

  INT. PUB – JACK’S POV

  It’s three o’clock and already darkening because of the steady downpour. A half hour from Gillingham to the road outside Mappowder, five minutes to park the car off the lane, another ten minutes to walk across the field to the shed. It will be dark enough at six so he will have to leave Gillingham by five, but he doesn’t want to sit for two hours nursing a beer. There’s too much chance that he will be remembered. He will have to leave soon, drive for an hour or find another place to kill some time.

  He finishes his pint and goes back out to the car, drives south from Gillingham for a half hour until he’s nearly parallel with Mappowder, then east, away from the village, toward Blandford.

  EXT. CAR COMES UP A NARROW LANE BETWEEN HEDGEROWS

  He circles around and comes at the village from the south, finds the lane at dusk and parks. He knows the spot, a break in the hedgerow where he has several times walked.

  The rain has slackened by the time he’s on the lane. He easily finds the gap in the hedgerow and stops the car along the verge.

  CUT TO: JACK GETTING OUT OF THE CAR

  He walks inside the gap to make sure the ground isn’t too soft. The last thing he wants is to hav
e the car stuck when he comes back, but the ground is hard enough, the rough flint and stone of Dorset unplowed along the edge and the car fits neatly against the hedge, well hidden from the road. Jack zips his Mac, pulls the hood over his head and starts across the field. He can see the lights of the farmhouse and light spilling from the shed when he gets closer. Mud clings to his shoes, making his feet feel heavy. He stops about twenty yards from the shed, wondering if Jack the dog will sense him coming and warn Robbie. With any luck the dog is inside the house with Terry. Jack hears some bleating and then, listening carefully, he hears the high-pitched whine of the electric shears and he feels a surge of excitement.

  At the back of the shed is the pile of old timber and he bends in the near blackness, feeling for a piece that’s long enough that he can easily grip. He finds a piece about the size of a baseball bat, wet and heavy, and swings it a few times and then goes to the corner of the shed where the whine of the shears is louder. He hears a bark and then Robbie’s voice.

  ROBBIE:

  Jack! Mind the sheep!

  JACK’S POV:

  He steps into the open doorway and there is Robbie, bent over, a struggling sheep between his legs, the wool peeling off in a long strip and Jack the dog turns and looks at him and then turns back to the opening in the pen, making a quick dart at a sheep that has moved into it. The sheep lunges back, tumbling against the others. Jack steps forward, raises the piece of timber over his head and taking another step, swings it at the back of Robbie’s head.

  In that instant, Robbie raised his head, and looked straight at me and there was a terrible moment of recognition. He threw up one arm to ward off the blow, but it was too late, the wooden weapon caught him in the temple and there was a sound like a splitting watermelon and I remembered when I was a boy finding Halloween pumpkins with friends and hurling them out into the street, watching them smash. Robbie went down in a heap and the sheep struggled loose from his collapsed body, coming toward me, and Jack darted past, turned the sheep back in and the half-naked animal was driven into the pen. The dog was so intent on the huddled sheep that he paid no attention to Robbie’s body, darting forward again to nip at a sheep that tried to bolt.