Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  “So I was accused but the charges were dropped.”

  “Technically that would be the position. In the second case, of course, the decision would have the force of an acquittal. In both cases, your record would be wiped clean. You would no longer be on parole or subject to parole conditions. You will be, in effect, a free man without a blot on his record.”

  Jude shook his head. “No. Not without a blot. People will always doubt, always wonder.”

  “Jude. It’s not very likely that the police will proceed with the case even if you get a directed verdict of acquittal. It’s old news, it’s not hot. If you want the whole world to know you are absolutely innocent, you would have to find the guilty party yourself.”

  “Yes,” said Jude. “I know. I intend to.”

  Nicholas Harvey raised his eyebrows as he took it in. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?” he asked rhetorically. “Bill Bridges?”

  “Bill Bridges.”

  Nicholas Harvey nodded. “Well, good luck. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

  “I want the name of a very good, a top private investigator. Someone with brains, Nick.”

  The detective examined the tiny photo-booth photograph. “How old is this?”

  “Just about a year,” Hope supplied. She had pulled it from the Thompson Daniels employment files. “It makes him look a bit swarthy, but otherwise, I remember, it was a pretty good likeness.”

  “And he absconded when?”

  “Within the past couple of weeks.”

  He nodded and wrote. He was an ex-policeman, a fact that was only apparent when he made a note. Otherwise he looked like someone who might work on an oil rig.

  “Right. Well, he could be anywhere, but you don’t need me to tell you that. I can maybe get a lead from the old phone number and address, and I can check the airlines in Toronto, but if he drove to Montreal airport or down to the States...” He shook his head. “And even if we got a line on where he went, there’s no guarantee he stayed there. You understand that?”

  “I understand,” said Jude.

  “The place to start would be his last employers,” the detective said. “That’s the first place I’d normally go. But if the employer is his partner in the crime, it’ll be very difficult to ask any questions at all without arousing his suspicions, and then who knows where he’ll go? Or his partner might even kill the man to protect himself.”

  Hope shivered.

  “My instinct,” Roger Beatty went on, “is to try other avenues and see whether there’s any lead, and judge our approach to Bridges accordingly. If we could get a tap on his phone, then it would be worth spooking him, see if he calls the guy. That kind of thing.”

  Jude nodded.

  “All right.” He got to his feet. “I’ll give a shot at a couple things and report back.” He addressed Hope. “You say you thought Gig Young used his wife’s illness as an excuse for leaving.”

  “I’m not certain. It’s a very vague memory.”

  “That’s all right. He’s an amateur. If he did use his wife, he probably has one. And if he’s got kids, too, it won’t be so easy for him to disappear. Man can do a runner on his wife, but he misses the kids. I’ll check for a phone listing in his wife’s name.”

  “How will you find out her name?”

  Roger winked. “That’s how I train my staff in detail work. I send them to the public records office. If he got married in Ontario we’ll find the record. If not, I’ve got reciprocal arrangements with agencies in nine provinces and two territories.”

  “We never sleep,” Hope joked.

  “Believe it.” He put out his hand to shake first Jude’s and then Hope’s hand. “Be talking to you,” he said.

  Daniel Johnson turned away from the last painting and Hope, Jude and the art dealer all returned to their seats in the sitting room. “Your father originally bought a number of these works from my gallery,” he said. “He had a good eye. I don’t think he ever made a bad choice.”

  “But?” said Jude.

  “But they haven’t had time to appreciate. They are all the work of artists still painting. If I put them into an auction for you, you’ll be disappointed with what they bring in.”

  “We may have to do it anyway,” said Jude.

  “If you give me more time, there is an alternative way to dispose of them. It entails my calling various clients and offering them individual works that I feel might interest them. I’m sure you can appreciate that this will not produce results overnight. But you will realize more from the sales. Something much closer to the real current value of the works.”

  Jude drank his whisky. “Either way, it’s clear this is not the immediate way to raise money.”

  Daniel Johnson picked up his glass and looked at Hope over the rim for a moment. “I imagine Hope has told you about her show next year, Jude.”

  Hope jerked upright. “Oh! Well, no, not yet!” she said guiltily, as Jude repeated, “Show?”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled a surprise,” he said, but Hope shook her head. “Hope’s work is going to be shown at my smaller gallery in about sixteen months’ time. She should be working hard towards it now, as a matter of fact.”

  Jude glanced at her. “This is very good news.” His voice was wooden. She found it impossible to read him.

  Daniel smiled and set down his glass. “As it happens. Hope, I was on the point of calling you when you called me. I’d like to put a proposition to you.”

  Hope nodded, her eyes fixed on him. Daniel had been a friend of her father for almost twenty years, and her father had trusted him.

  Now, he said, “I’ve just learned that an artist I have booked for a show next month isn’t in a shape to show. That leaves me with two weeks to fill at the Village Gallery. I expect you know that Hope’s got a large number of finished canvases done over the past year, Jude. But because many of them are nude and other portraits of you, she was reluctant to show them.” He turned to Hope. “I’d like you to fill that slot next month, Hope. If you were to change your mind about the portraits, we would have enough for a very respectable show.”

  There was a long silence while Jude and Hope looked at each other and remembered.

  “Do you want to show them, Hope?” Jude asked at last.

  The artist in her did, of course; the woman did not. Hidden deep inside Hope was a woman who wanted to keep the precious memory of the discovery of love as her still centre in the driving storm that life had become. The thought of those portraits hanging on anyone’s wall but her own seemed irreligious to her.

  And yet this might be a way to ease the immediate financial pressure.

  “It won’t raise very much money, will it?” She turned desperately to Daniel. “We might sell only two or three.”

  He looked at her bemusedly. “New artists at the Village tend to do better than that,” he said gently. “And I expect you to be very well received.” The Village Gallery was a very prestigious gallery, and Johnson had a wide clientele. It was said to be the best launch a new artist could have, because Johnson had a reputation for discovering the best new talent. “In addition, you two have got a high curiosity value at the moment, if this is not the wrong thing to say. There’s a buzz around you. That will add interest even for those who are capable of appreciating the merit of your work.”

  “Where are your paintings, Hope?” Jude asked.

  Her breathing quickened with nerves. “In—upstairs.”

  “Shall we look at them?”

  “You want to see them?” she repeated stupidly. Her skin was twitching with nervousness: she did not want to look at those paintings with Jude.

  “Why don’t we do that?” Daniel said comfortably, getting to his feet. “I’d like to see them again myself.”

  So Hope mutely led the way to the attic room which she had converted to a studio. Once it had been her bedroom, but it was the logical room to convert into a studio.

  She had taken up the carpet and laid
down plain grey linoleum. A wooden trestle table carried jars of brushes and tubes of paint and rags; her paintings were stacked against the walls. Her easel stood under the north skylight.

  On the easel was a painting she had just varnished, neither fully realistic nor truly abstract. The shape of a bed was suggested within bursts and blotches of blood red, black and grey. One side pristine, the other a tangle of sheets, this was a bed in which one person slept alone, and did not sleep well. The view from what might be the window was of ruin. It was a painting of the bleakest loneliness. She knew that Jude understood when she heard the intake of his breath.

  Daniel Johnson stood silently in front of it. Then he nodded and said, “Mmm,” flicking a glance at Hope. “I like this, Hope. I like the focus you’re getting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Does it have a title?”

  She did not look at Jude. “Empty Bed,” she said.

  Daniel nodded again, then moved over to where a stack of three or four paintings leaned against a wall. “May I?”

  She nodded.

  It was like a dream she had dreamed before, but couldn’t remember the ending of. Jude with his burning dark eyes, and her pictures of him...a bad dream from which there was no escape. Daniel Johnson lifted the first painting and set it against the leg of the table. Then he began putting the others out in a semi-circle around him.

  One by one the hot, sultry days of August and their passionate obsession returned as Jude and Hope gazed at the paintings she had made. Jude sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up, his arms folded across them, staring out of the canvas with a look in his eyes she would never see again. Jude prone on the tangled bed with the newspaper. Jude lying on his back in complete sexual fatigue, and in his eyes the information that he still wanted her, that he was exhausted physically but not sated mentally.

  Jude the Lion. Transfiguration.

  When that canvas appeared, the first she had done of him, she could not resist the compulsion to glance at Jude. He was looking at her, and a thousand memories danced on the air between them. Don’t touch me, Hope! he had said then, and later, I knew it would be like this!

  He looked away.

  More reminders of those long, hot days and nights when the world was confined to each other’s body. Another empty bed, this time with tangled sheets that held the promise of return. A window open on a world that was bland, uninteresting, because all the life was within the room...

  Then Jude’s face from memory, Jude as the ghost that haunted her bed, painted after his arrest, paintings full of desperate yearning...

  Then, as the art dealer moved around her studio, gathering and spreading the paintings, he came to those she had painted after Jude’s conviction, after his rejection of her. Jude’s face scritched and scratched by black lines reminiscent of barbed wire, and blank walls, pain, and bleak, angry sterility.

  When they were all displayed, Daniel Johnson stood looking at each painting in turn, mostly in silence. Sometimes he paused and looked back to a previous painting. “Did you do that one before this?” he asked once, and Hope nodded.

  “And that set there—before or after these?”

  “Before,” she said.

  “There’s actually quite a pronounced chronological cycle,” Daniel observed.

  Hope agreed.

  Jude said nothing. His face was a mask. Leaning against one wall, his arms crossed over his chest, he looked at every painting, turned away from none, lingered on none. She could not tell whether this was a form of penance or simple lack of real response.

  After a while a shift occurred, without any verbal acknowledgement—it was now understood that Hope would have the show, and that Daniel Johnson would take his free choice of her work to hang on his gallery walls.

  “I think we won’t hang these of the harbour,” he said. “We’ll concentrate on the cycle.”

  Hope nodded, and Daniel removed several early paintings of boats and stacked them against the wall.

  “Are you thinking of rounding out the cycle now?” he asked, returning to look again at the group.

  “Oh!” Hope stammered. “Oh, well—I haven’t thought much about it.”

  “Give it some thought. If I may make the suggestion, I’d say it needs one or two more to bring it full circle.”

  “I do see what you mean,” Hope said reluctantly. There was only one sort of picture that would round out the cycle, and that was another portrait of Jude, which was impossible. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good!” he said, as if they had come to the agreement that she would produce another painting in time for the show. “Now, how many have we got here? Twenty-eight,” he said, counting. “Excellent. I’ll take these now, we’ll want to frame them, and time’s short.”

  She glanced at Jude, but he made no move, gave no sign. Without his clear rejection of the idea, Hope lacked the strength to stop the momentum Daniel Johnson had built up. “All right,” she said.

  When they had ferried the canvases down to his station wagon, and slipped them inside the insulated bags in the rack especially designed for holding canvases, Daniel climbed into the driver’s seat, then spoke out the window. “Another portrait of Jude?” He sat looking up at her a moment. “Is that the direction you’re thinking of?”

  “Uh—” Hope coughed to clear her throat. “Yes, maybe, I’m not sure.”

  “Get her nose down to the grindstone,” he advised Jude with a friendly grin, nodded and leaned forward to start the car. Then with a wave he was gone.

  Jude did not like the churning mix of emotions that he felt. For the past year he had held down all feeling. He had believed that he had closed the door on emotion and locked it, and that it would not be unlocked unless he chose.

  In prison things were brutally simple: talk tough, walk tough, be tough. He had quickly learned never to show weakness, never to relax his guard. The only emotion called for had been anger, and that had been easy enough. He had plenty of that.

  He had spent the months since his conviction secure in the belief that all feeling for Hope had been killed in him. That she would never have power over him again. He had feared nothing, marrying her, except the tediousness of day-to-day living with someone for whom he felt no more than coldness and a lingering anger.

  His mother had been betrayed, too, by those close to her. Her husband, deep in the throes of his loss, bitterly angry at the system and at the friend who had sold out to it, had made sure his son knew it. He had taught Jude that his mother’s death was a warning to him to be wary of trusting.

  He had forgotten the lesson. He had trusted Hope because she had stripped him raw, down to his essential self. She had made him naked. There had been no alternative to trust except death. But he had been so sure of her. He would have trusted her with his life, with whatever meant most to him. It was she herself who had meant most to him; he had known it almost from their first meeting, and had proved it later. Nothing in life had ever meant as much to him as Hope had.

  His father had been right; he ought to have been more careful. She would still have betrayed him, nothing would have changed that, but if he had trusted her less it would have hurt less. If he had trusted her less, he would not have died in that courtroom and risen from his own ashes transformed into a man without a heart.

  For his father the issues had been clear-cut. His wife was gone, and her betrayer, the one who had named her name to the secret police, had done it. For Jude, it was more complex, confusing, because Hope was gone, but she herself was the one to blame. He hated her because she had created the situation in which she was lost to him.

  The first clue that he had had that he was not as emotionally dead as he wished and believed was the day when he had torn at her in prison. He was so sure that he had nothing to say to her, that there was no feeling left, that even blame was irrelevant. But when she was near his anger seemed to be born all over again, anger and hurt and other unnameable feelings assailing him when he most wanted to be
in control.

  He wanted nothing to do with her. If they could live like strangers in the house he could be comfortable inside his self-imposed emotional prison, and the bars would hold. He was not tempted by her physically—or at least, not as Hope. Of course the year of sexual deprivation meant that the smell of woman sometimes caught at him, or the sight of her soft flesh stirred him. That was only to be expected. It did not trouble him because he could control it. And he knew that as soon as he found a woman and the edge was taken off his appetite the desire he sometimes felt in Hope’s presence would stop. It was not Hope he wanted, but Woman.

  What was more difficult was the storm of emotion that raged in him at unpredictable moments. When she demanded that he allow her to help him in his mission to clear his name, common sense had forced him to submit. But cooperation with her, no matter how he fought his feelings, made him so sharply aware of what he had lost that he had to exert the extremes of control not to stand shouting at her.

  He was not a violent man. What he had seen in prison had revolted him, appalled him, even though he understood the reasons for it. He had never been tempted to raise his hand to a woman in his life, and rarely to a man.

  Yet there were times when it seemed the desire to hit Hope assailed him like an incoming tide. He wanted to lay hands on her, shake her, shout at her, till he was weak. Prison had changed him in some fundamental way, he thought, he had been transformed into an animal. And he hated her all the more because of what he had become.

  His father would have despised him for it. He had taught Jude to respect women, almost to worship them. He had never raised even his voice to Jude’s mother Jude had childhood memories of his mother sometimes being angry, but not his father. His father had always weathered the storm.

  “Women are just like nature, Jude,” his father had told him, when the child, troubled by his mother’s rage, had asked for an explanation. “When a storm comes, we don’t go out and shout at the wind and the rain and the lightning, do we? We hide indoors. And when the sun is shining again, and you go out, what do you find? The wind has blown the dead leaves out of the trees, and the rain has watered the plants, and the world is clean again. If there were not storms, the world would never be washed. It’s the same with your mother. When she storms, she washes her soul and mine.”