Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  “The letter was dated August first and stamped August sixth,” Jude said, frowning. “You left July twenty-second.”

  “Yeah, that was the big compromise I got out of Bill,” Young said with self-loathing. “I said if that letter was dated to the period I was there working for you, somebody would guess if anything ever happened. So he postdated it.”

  “Ah,” said Jude.

  “Yeah, and then I misfiled it, see, figuring that it wouldn’t be found till long after August first, and then someone would just file it in the right place without looking at it. That was my idea,” he said, half pleased at his shrewdness, half ashamed of its success. “I put it in the dead files, you know. The girls didn’t go in there much, I noticed. The women, I mean.”

  “You stamped and initialled it.”

  “Yeah, I did that,” he nodded. “I did that. I read all about the problems with that at your trial and I hoped that would get you off. I didn’t know the two stamps were different, and Lena’s desk was easier because she had her own office, I could get in there and get the stamp out of her desk and change the date on it, whereas Hope’s desk was right out there in the main office. I didn’t even think about whose signature, I just picked up the nearest letter and copied it, and it turned out to be Hope’s.”

  “And then your job was done and you could resign.”

  “That’s right. I went and told Hal Thompson some story and he said okay, no harm done, and I got out. And then five-six weeks later, when he’d promised me nothing would ever happen, but if it did it’d be years, five little weeks later the glass in the Rose Library blew.” There was a long pause.

  “Bill said he was sorry,” Gig Young said levelly. “Somebody was dead, somebody else was injured, to save his bacon. And he was sorry. I have never held my head up since. I want you to know that.”

  “Yeah, I notice how troubled you were when I went on trial for manslaughter,” Jude said mercilessly.

  “So help me God, I didn’t think they could possibly convict. Bill didn’t tell me he was gonna testify against you, tell all those lies about talking to you...I swear I didn’t know. And Bill gave me and my wife a surprise cruise in the Caribbean and when we came back, it was all over and you’d been—” He lifted a helpless hand. “I know I was a coward. You don’t have to tell me. A million times I thought about writing the police a letter.”

  Jude ignored that. “What was wrong with the original test results?” Jude said.

  Gig Young shrugged. “I don’t know. We were supposed to send it to an independent lab for testing in the first place, I know that much, but Bill—somebody screwed up on the estimate, that much I do know, because the shit hit the fan when Bill realized. It was gonna cost a bundle to send that stuff out for testing, and it hadn’t been costed in, because some cretin forgot that every single different shape had to be tested. He only costed in for the one shape. You follow me? So you had there—what?—ten, twelve different shapes making up those petals? Bill was gonna have to pay for those tests out of his own pocket.”

  “So he didn’t have the tests done? Were those first results false?”

  “No, they were tested, but he did it a sneaky way. We bought some new equipment so we could do all the tests on site, yeah? It wasn’t independent, but it was thorough, it was rigorous, I could swear to that!”

  “Not rigorous enough. When did he discover that the tests were inadequate?”

  Gig Young looked at Jude. “You know, you must be right. You gotta be right that that’s what happened. And yet, I could swear to you that that isn’t the way it was. I don’t know what happened, Bill never told me, he never told anyone. Just one day, something happened, and the factory was making another one single piece of every shape and we sent them out to DeMarco to be tested independently after all.” He lifted his hands in a you tell me gesture. “He told me that he’d been wrong to do it the other way and he was morally obliged to get the glass tested independently like he promised. And that’s when he got me to go and take that job with you guys.”

  Jude watched the man through narrowed eyes. “It doesn’t fit together,” he said, lifting a hand to count off on his fingers. “First, there was a mistake on the estimate because someone omitted the costs of testing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So contrary to our agreement, Bill did the testing on site and sent me those results.”

  Gig Young nodded.

  “When two-thirds of the glass was shipped, the balloon went up that there was a problem. So then Bill sent all the glass for independent testing at an outside lab.”

  “Yup.”

  “And when the tests were done he put you in our office to destroy one set of tests and plant another.”

  Young nodded. Jude shook his head. “It doesn’t fit. How the hell did he find out the testing he did was inadequate? Was there some fault discovered in one of the pieces of testing equipment?”

  Young shook his head emphatically. “We were still testing glass for other sites on that equipment right the way through. We couldna done that if there was a problem. There was no problem.”

  “All right, is that everything?” asked Jude. He knew there was something that didn’t hang together, but whether the man was lying or not he couldn’t be sure. Something didn’t fit.

  That afternoon a representative of the Rose Library trustees arrived at the office to talk to Jude “unofficially.”

  “Have you been down to the site since you, ah...were released?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ve had a look around.” The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the entire thing shrouded with tarpaulins. “I take it you haven’t been able to decide what to do with it yet.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No, we’ve decided—most of us, it’s not unanimous yet—what we’d like to do, but everyone was pretty much of the opinion that it won’t do to proceed too fast. We wanted to wait for public opinion a bit.”

  Jude looked at him. “I see,” he prompted, but this elicited nothing further. The man sat half-smiling and nodding like an animated Buddha statue. “What exactly do you want to do with it?”

  “Well, we want you to complete it as designed,” the man said, still nodding. “That is, all of us except one are agreed. We don’t need a unanimous decision on this, but when you’re presenting something controversial it’s best not to have a dissenting voice. So we’ve been—wearing her down by attrition.”

  Jude stared at him. “You want me to complete the Rose Library as designed? Are you all nuts?”

  “Oh, good heavens, there have been buildings that have lost glass before, Jude, you must know that, and even caused deaths! It’s not as though this was deliberate on your part, even if you were guilty as convicted. Public opinion has to be looked at, of course, but so many people now agree that your trial was—well, that’s really why I dropped by. The trustees are wondering if you’re still appealing your conviction, Jude, even though you’re now a free man.”

  He thought wonders would never cease. Jude gazed at the apologetic little man in front of him, who looked the type to wimp out at the first breath of opposition.

  “Did—did you hear my question?” he asked shyly now.

  “Yes,” said Jude. “Ah—yes, my appeal is going ahead. We have a date now in about six weeks.”

  “Good, good. Well, we just wanted to ascertain that. It’ll make life easier for us, in the short run, if you’re successful, but we’ll have to consider whether to announce the trustees’ decision before or after your appeal is heard. You understand.”

  “Yes,” said Jude blankly. Clear as mud.

  “If you win, everything’s tickety-boo. But if you were to lose—and I’m sure you feel you have to face that possibility just as we do—might it be better for us to have run the gauntlet in advance? That’s the issue. Otherwise we might be in the position of having to wait out that extra little puff of hostile opinion we’ll get.”

  “I understand,” said Jude, who, just at this mo
ment, didn’t think he would ever understand anything again.

  So Hope had a lot more to digest that night than the meal of grilled chicken breasts and scalloped potatoes. She was delighted, but much less surprised than Jude at the decision of the Rose Fund trustees. The confession of Gig Young, though, naturally got the lion’s share of their attention that night.

  “What exactly doesn’t fit?” she asked, when he had tried to express his doubt about the story Young had told.

  “I can’t put my finger on it.” Jude shook his head. “Look: once the testing is done and Bill Bridges accepts that it’s accurate, there’s no reason for him to go over it again. Now his focus is on manufacturing and shipping the glass. What Gig Young says is that, with two-thirds of the glass shipped—that means we had half of it installed already—Bridges suddenly discovered a problem with his on-site testing that made him send every single shape off for another round of tests.”

  Hope chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Maybe he discovered a problem with one piece right after they got it off the production line—maybe it shattered right there on the factory floor or something—and for some reason he decided to have them all retested.”

  “If that’s the scenario, the piece that proved to be weaker than the others during the DeMarco testing, the same piece that shattered on site—31AA—should have been the one that had the kind of problem you suggest at the time of manufacture. Would you agree?”

  Hope drank and swallowed. “Yes, that has to be the case, doesn’t it?”

  “According to this scenario, the shape that shattered on the factory floor was being shipped at about two-thirds of the way through, yes?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Jude nodded. “The actual problem piece—and the experts and I agreed that the shape that stressed and shattered spontaneously was the same as the one with the different test results—the others broke essentially because they were smashed by pieces of flying glass or because the structure destabilized—all the pieces of shape 31AA were manufactured, shipped and already installed long before Gig Young says the balloon went up at Environmental Glass.”

  Hope took another sip of wine. “Jude, that’s weird.”

  “So what could have happened at the lab after it was already shipped that would tell them there were problems with that shape that hadn’t shown up on the tests, when at that time there wouldn’t have been a piece that shape anywhere on the factory floor?” He speared the last bite of meat on his plate and chewed appreciatively.

  “Do you want some more?” Hope offered.

  Jude nodded and reached for the last piece of grilled garlic chicken, then lifted his plate as she gave him more potato. He still hadn’t got used to how good food tasted in the real world.

  “What we need is the original test papers from the Environmental Glass lab,” she mused. “Do you suppose they discovered they left out one area of testing on that one shape?”

  “Gig Young says he thinks all evidence of that first set of tests, and of the fact that the testing was ever done on site, was destroyed. Everything in the test laboratory goes straight to a computer and he’s pretty sure that whole record was deleted.”

  Hope sat up as a thought slipped into her mind. “But someone had typed up those results on letterhead and sent them to you, right? I wonder if they remembered that in their purge of the records?”

  Jude frowned. “What are you saying?”

  Her eyes opened wide as the picture formed behind them. “I’m sure he remembered to wipe the lab computer. Do you think he remembered to wipe the secretary’s hard disk?” she asked slowly.

  There was a photograph of Hope and her mother, taken when Hope was age five or six, that sat on the drinks chest in the living room. It showed a smiling, pretty woman with long, straight blonde hair, parted in the middle, a necklace of painted beads and small feathers at her throat, pretty feathers hanging from silver earrings. Standing inside the embrace of one arm, her little hands holding her mother’s wrist with the certainty of always being able to do so, stood Hope, the sunlight glinting off her tousled red curls, her mouth open, her eyes curving with laughter.

  Sometimes Jude found himself studying the picture, but what was he looking for? He didn’t know. Beside it was another picture of Hope, taken a decade or so later, a few years after her mother’s death. The difference between the child and the teenager was striking. Gone was that serene knowledge that her world was indestructible, gone even the full sense of herself. The girl who looked out of the portrait at age fifteen had made a compromise with the world that had cost her some part of herself. The sort of compromise, Jude thought, that most people do not make until much later in life. She looked older than her years.

  Sometimes he felt, in a wordless way, that the clue to why Hope had betrayed him was in these two photographs. Sometimes he felt that if he studied them for long enough he would find an answer.

  One night, working on the Whalley and Sutton project in his study, he found himself at a creative standstill, tossed his pencil aside, got up and went downstairs to pour himself a drink.

  Hope was upstairs working in her studio, and the house was silent. Outside twilight was closing in, crickets were singing, and the smell of the dying summer was rich in the air. Jude poured his whisky, and stood looking out the window as he sipped it. After a moment his eyes wandered to the photographs. He picked up the picture of Hope at fifteen and slowly, almost unconsciously, moved to the sofa and sat down.

  She was not physically attractive, the girl in the photograph. Her hair was neither short nor long, her clothes so plain it could not be an accident, and her posture, with one arm bent to clasp the other near the shoulder, hiding the new young breasts, showed none of the blossoming, awkward sexual awareness that made teenage girls so painfully sweet to watch. This girl neither desired to attract nor believed she had the power, although there was a human understanding behind the eyes that was at once attractive and interesting and too old for her years.

  When he had first been invited to this house by Hal Thompson and listened to the older man speak of his much loved daughter, as he did sometimes, Jude had formed a clear picture of the little rich girl who hadn’t had the decency to tell her father that she didn’t care for a career as architect, and was flitting through the capitals of Europe instead of getting down to the serious business of life.

  One day Hal had pointed this picture out to him, and Jude had been astonished that this damaged, grave child was the social butterfly they were discussing. Then he had met her, and had lost sight of this picture in his estimate of her. The contrast between this girl and Hope as she was now was a mystery. Yet a mind like this did not simply disappear, even under the weight of powerful feminine sexuality, rich clothes and well-cut hair.

  Jude stood up and collected the other picture, that of the child and her mother. He held the two pictures, one in either hand, and looked back and forth between them.

  He realized, with the shock of sudden insight which only proves that the truth has been there all the time but that the mind has hidden from it, that Hope at fifteen was the person who had looked at him from the witness stand and doubted him. She was the person who had looked at him the other day when he had accused her and then made love to her.

  He sat still. Even his heart seemed to stop beating as he absorbed it, and tried to see what it meant.

  “Hi. All finished?” said Hope, coming into the room, and he looked up from the photograph and saw this girl there, in the wariness behind her eyes. She looked at him, only him, now, as she had once used to look at the world.

  A smile teased her mouth. “What are you doing with those?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer that. He said, holding up his hands, the framed photos lying one on each, “What changed you from this happy child to the girl here?”

  She shrugged and turned away. “Oh, lots of things.” She bent to open the refrigerator compartment of the drinks chest and drew out a bottle of white wine. />
  “Your mother died,” he offered, behind her.

  “Yes, that was a big part of it.” Hope poured wine and mineral water into her glass and added an ice cube, then turned and came back to him, reaching out a hand for the photo.

  “And you had a limp after the accident, I think,” he pursued.

  “Dad told you a lot, I guess.” She moved to the armchair that cornered the sofa, sat, looked at the photo and smiled as sad memories tugged at her.

  “He did not tell me enough to explain this change. Tell me,” he commanded.

  Hope leaned forward to set the photo down on the coffee table. “Is that all he told you—that I limped?”

  “He said you were having an operation to cure you of a slight limp. But you still have it sometimes. The operation was not a complete success?”

  “The operation was an amazing, a miraculous success.” She smiled again, and looked at him. “I don’t know why my father didn’t tell you the truth. I had a very ugly limp and a hip that kept me in constant pain.” She flicked her eyes to the picture again. “This photo was taken just around the time that I finally realized what it meant: that I could never have a sexual relationship, never get married, would never have children.”

  Jude frowned, his eyes involuntarily dropping to the pictured face again. “My God,” he breathed.

  She nodded wordlessly. Even now, the remembered anguish of that discovery could bring tears to her eyes.

  “When did this change?”

  “After the operations two years ago.”

  “What?”

  She smiled quizzically. “What did you think?”

  “But your father told me how popular you always were, what a good time you were having...”

  “I was popular. All through high school I was one of the guys. Until my operations, however, I had hardly even kissed anyone.”

  “Surely it didn’t hurt to kiss,” he protested. He wasn’t sure why this revelation was so shocking to him. One by one, every preconception he had had about Hope seemed destined to be turned on its head. He had been prepared to hate her, and instead he had loved her. He imagined a woman who had no respect for her father and he had found one who adored and worshipped him. He had thought her a dilettante and she was an artist of power. He imagined that she had always been rich and protected from life, and here was the history of the kind of prolonged and deep suffering from which wealth can never protect.