Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  It was an awful situation, all the same. ‘I don’t know,’ she said to Smith as the car moved on again. ‘Ought one to tell?’

  They came once more opposite the black marble nursing home with its golden curlicues. ‘You’ve forgotten, Madam,’ said Smith. ‘There’s still the rough looking man.’

  ‘Oh, yes, so there is,’ said Mrs. Jones, thankfully. She gave no thought at all to the divine boots in the shop across the road. ‘We’d stopped just about here. The man was sitting…’ She broke off. A car was drawn up at the door of the nursing home, a patient being assisted to alight. Only the driving seat was now occupied. ‘What an odd coincidence!’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘Their chauffeur has just the same uniform as you have.’

  Smith turned his head to look and in the same movement the chauffeur turned and looked straight back at him. ‘Yes, he has, Madam, hasn’t he?’ said Smith. ‘And what’s more—just the same face.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Jones in a very small voice. ‘Yes. So he has!’ She thought it all over in her own cool little way. ‘That day,’ she said. ‘It was raining. I had my umbrella up and my head down—I suppose I never looked at my taxi driver at all. Not to recognise him if I saw him—well, in some different situation.’

  ‘In a mirror, for example,’ said Smith. ‘That black marble, you know—when it’s wet, it does get a shine on it. You could see your face in it, really you could.’

  ‘Or somebody else’s. I saw my own taxi driver, didn’t I?’ said Mrs. Jones, humbly. ‘He’d be sitting a bit ahead of me like you are now. And, through the window of the car drawn up beside me, I’d see him in the mirror of black marble and he’d look as though he were sitting in that car!’

  ‘That’s the way I’d worked it out,’ said Smith. ‘Last time I drove past here on a rainy day. I daresay when the police were here, it happened always to be fine.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I suppose one ought to whizz off this minute and confess to them?’ She didn’t seem too much delighted at the prospect.

  ‘Perhaps one should. On the other hand,’ said Smith, ‘you never saw those girls like I did, Madam, when His Excellency had done with them. Crying all the way home in the car, poor little devils. And that chap, the commissionaire—his girl, she’s dead. Died in hospital, he said.’

  ‘So if everyone just goes on believing in the rough looking man….I really do think on the whole that I ought to keep quiet about it. Don’t you, Smith?’ said Mrs. Dorinda Jones, hopefully. She added: ‘Upon reflection.’

  From the Balcony…

  FROM THE BALCONY UP there, they could see right down into her house. And she knew that they talked about her. The old woman sat out on every fine day in her wheel-chair, peering down through the railings with nothing else to do, but watch.

  ‘I knew it,’ said the old woman. ‘There she goes again! Dipping a great hunk of bread into the curry sauce.’

  ‘ “Tasting it,” ’ said her daughter, with a sneer.

  ‘Gobbling it,’ said the old woman. ‘Then she’ll sit down to her supper and eat a great dob of it on a mound of rice. No wonder she’s fat.’ She herself, long ailing, was very thin.

  ‘Fat!’ said the daughter. ‘She’s disgusting.’ She was not thin but slim. She ate sensibly, carefully, keeping herself slim. Her husband loved and admired her for her beautiful figure. ‘What can the husband think, married to such a mountain of flesh?’

  Mrs. Jennings was not a mountain of flesh but she was over-weight and it was true that her husband found her unlovely in consequence. ‘Aren’t you having any curry?’

  ‘No, I picked when I was cooking. I must pay for it.’

  ‘Well, that makes a change,’ he said, finishing up her share.

  ‘I thought you’d rather admire me,’ she said, trying a little joke. ‘It’s a long time since I did that,’ he said.

  They were out there again, next day, the old woman in her chair, the rest popping in and out, waiting on her—the old grandfather, the daughter and her husband, a couple of teen-age kids. The Family, Mrs. Jennings called them to herself, with a capital F. They could see everything. They could see into the kitchen, all the front rooms, upstairs and down; even part of the garden at the back of the house. Mrs. Jennings’ garden had a tiny swimming pool. ‘Don’t tell me she’s going in!’ said the boy, coming out with a glass of nice cold milk for Gran’ma. ‘What’ll the displacement be?’

  ‘Flood the garden,’ said his sister, sniggering.

  ‘That I would like to see,’ said the old woman. ‘Her in one of them bikinis.’

  Mrs. Jennings in fact did not venture into the pool. ‘Those people would have been watching me,’ she said, excusing herself to her husband when he came home. ‘Saying things about me.’

  ‘Some old trout in a wheel-chair,’ he said. ‘What the hell does she matter?’ The Family were a frequent source of disagreement; sometimes, she thought, the original cause of it all. Was it not her complaints about them that had first drawn his attention to her increase in over-weight, so gradual a process that he had hitherto been blind to it?

  ‘So you didn’t go for a wallow?’ he said. ‘Pity. It might tone up that flab of yours.’

  ‘Yes, I know. So I came in and did some hard housework instead.’

  ‘Well, she’s given that up. Now we’ll begin on some housework,’ said the old woman to her granddaughter, looking down into the drawing room. ‘You wait!—twenty minutes and she’ll be on the sofa, gorging biscuits.’

  It was true that, carrying so much overweight, Mrs. Jennings got easily tired, doing housework. ‘But I’m not going to eat anything,’ she said to herself. ‘I know that old hag up there watches everything I touch.’ She could not resist a cup of coffee, however, and an hour later was still stretched out on the sofa, doing the crossword. ‘A bit more exercise would do her good,’ said the old grandfather. ‘All that money—better for her to be a bit hard up, have to go out to work. And on foot,’ he added, almost savagely.

  ‘And how did you bestir yourself today?’ asked Mr. Jennings, sitting down to a well-filled dinner plate. He was not such a beauty himself, reflected Mrs. Jennings; not as svelte as all that. ‘I did a big household shop,’ she said. Only at the last minute had she succumbed and taken a taxi home. ‘All by bus,’ she said, fibbing. ‘Parcels and the lot.’

  ‘I bet,’ said Mr. Jennings on an unlovely, jeering note.

  ‘Well, nearly all. Oh, and I took your suit to the cleaners. There was a letter in the pocket. I put it on your desk.’

  He went a shade pale. ‘Having had a good look at it first?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t read other people’s letters.’

  ‘All women read other people’s letters,’ he said. ‘Especially their husbands’.’

  ‘Well, I don’t and I didn’t. Why should I?’

  ‘I simply took the girl out to lunch,’ he said, defensive.

  ‘The girl? What girl?’

  ‘The girl in the letter. A thin girl,’ he said.

  ‘Got a girl friend now,’ the old woman was saying, cosy now indoors in the sitting room. Friends had come in for coffee and the Family were regaling them with the continuing story of That Woman Opposite. ‘Brought her home the night old Fatso was away—whatever took her away, but she was gone for the night. And in they come, like a couple of rabbits to the burrow, him and this floosey with him. You could follow the lights—hall, sitting room—lights on in the sitting room—lights out in the sitting room, lights on up the stairs—lights on in the bedroom, lights off in the bedroom…’

  ‘What’s she like?’ said the grandchildren.

  ‘Thin,’ said the old woman.

  So now she really went to work, dieting hard. It was a weary business all the same, depriving yourself, starving yourself, losing weight, yes, but so gradually that nobody noticed it—never really anything to show. ‘Well, you’re not all that fat,’ said her doctor. ‘Lose a couple more and you’ll be a sylph.’ A couple more stone he meant.
/>
  ‘I’m eating literally nothing.’

  ‘What’s nothing?’ he said.

  ‘No meals,’ she said. ‘But I pick when I’m cooking. I lick the spoon. Well, I can’t help it. I’ve got to cook rich things for my husband and I have to taste while I’m going along, haven’t I?’

  ‘Why must you cook rich things for him?’ he said. ‘Couldn’t he manage on something less destructive to you?’

  ‘Oh, no, he loves those things, he wants everything cooked in cream. And I’ve got to give him what he wants.’

  ‘I expect it’s really because you like licking the spoons,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Licking the spoons,’ said the old woman’s daughter, leaning over the balcony rail to look down into the lighted kitchen. ‘See her? Half a pint of double cream, that looks like to me; and there she’ll be, dipping the spoon in every other minute, licking away… And chocolate sauce, that’ll be for the ice-cream; hot chocolate sauce, that’s her favourite. Some stuff she puts into it, fetches the bottle from the dining room, and then great spoonfuls to see she’s got it just right…’

  ‘What’s this muck?’ said Mr. Jennings that night. ‘It’s got far too much kirsch in it. You haven’t got it right.’

  ‘I’m trying to keep off tasting all the time.’

  ‘Yes, well while you’re on that lark, I’ll have my dinners elsewhere,’ he said.

  So there was no more tasting. Sick with knowledge of her own lack of appeal, Mrs. Jennings accepted his absences, increasingly frequent and prolonged, and since she made no objection, he shrugged and went his way. ‘He’s left her,’ said the Family, adding pity to contempt. ‘Well, almost. Keeps up the outward pretence. But it won’t be long now.’

  Mr. Jennings kept up the pretence because it suited him to do so; the thin lady was keeping up pretences of her own. But at home, he troubled not at all. ‘If you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘look in the mirror. Just ask yourself, whose fault is it? You’re disgusting.’

  ‘It’s her own fault,’ said the people opposite.

  She began to diet in real earnest. Now that the tasting was over, it wasn’t any great hardship. She had spoken the truth when she said that she by no means grossly over-ate or indeed over-ate at all—not by standards other than her own. It was simply that with her particular metabolism, she more easily put on fat. And with so little cooking to be done for her husband, the weight loss became, if gradual, at least very steady. ‘I live almost entirely on salads now,’ she said to her doctor.

  ‘If she eats any more of them greens,’ said the old woman on the balcony, watching her stagger home, laden with lettuces, ‘she’ll turn into a rabbit.’

  ‘Lashings of salad cream,’ said the daughter, who never touched anything, herself, but a dab of malt vinegar, ‘what’ll you bet?’

  ‘Mind, she’s losing!’

  ‘Skinny,’ said the old woman. ‘Much more of it and she’ll be skinny.’

  ‘Doesn’t suit her,’ said the husband. ‘She was better fat.’

  ‘She was never all that fat. What’s she messing herself about for?’

  ‘Never get him back that way,’ said the Family, comfortably.

  ‘You were a lot too fat,’ said Mrs. Jennings’ husband, on one of his now rare visits home, ‘and now you’re a lot too thin.’

  ‘Don’t you like me thin?’

  ‘I don’t like you at all,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, shocked. She ventured: ‘You used to like me once. When I was slim.’

  ‘You’re not slim now,’ he said. ‘You’re gaunt.’

  ‘She’ll take to the drink,’ said the old grandmother. ‘You watch!’

  She had given up even the six o’clock half-glass of sherry. Now, sad and lonely, faced with an evening meal of yet more lettuce, she took to the habit again. Had a half glass—a whole glass—a couple of glasses: before the evening salad—before the lunchtime salad—at eleven o’clock. ‘I see they’re delivering from the wine shop regular,’ said the grandfather. ‘And the hard stuff. Not sherry any more and that derbonny.’

  ‘You’re not drinking too much?’ said her doctor.

  ‘Only what they call “socially”.’

  ‘I’m not too sure that it isn’t a drop more than that?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to the people opposite,’ she said.

  ‘The people opposite?’

  ‘In the flats. They watch me from the balcony there.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know them, do I?’ said the doctor. ‘How could I talk to them?’

  ‘They watch me all the time. Criticise me among themselves.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m sure. What else would they watch me for? There’s an old lady, an invalid, she sits in her chair and watches me through the railings of the balcony, she’s got nothing else to do. And the Family come in and out and they talk about me.’

  ‘How do you know they talk about you? You can’t hear them.’

  ‘What else would they talk about?—hanging over the balcony up there, looking down, watching me. What else has the old woman got to interest her?—she talks about me to them, and then they all talk about me together. There’s nothing I do that they don’t know about. They’ve watched me get fat and stay fat, and get thinner; and get fat again and now get too thin and stay too thin. I’m so fixated on salad stuffs now, I seem never to eat anything else. I expect they know that too. Everything I do, they see, they comment on.’

  ‘Maybe they talk kindly?’

  ‘No, they don’t. Why should they? They’ve seen me drive my husband away, making myself so unattractive, they’ve seen him with his mistress, he brought her to the house once, I smelt her scent on my pillow…’

  ‘Perhaps they criticise him?’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ she said. She said again, ‘Why should they? You can’t blame him.’ But in her heart, she blamed him. She had tried very hard and he had been cruel. She thought to herself with fear that by now she was beginning to hate him.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the doctor. There seemed nothing else to say. But he did advise: ‘Go easy on the booze, my dear.’

  ‘Alcoholics Anonymous any day now,’ said the old woman, from her wheel-chair.

  In the doctor’s waiting room Mrs. Jennings had leafed through the magazines. ‘Go out and get a new hair-do,’ they all advised, as a way to reclaim lost love. ‘Have a facial, dress yourself up a bit glam.’ She went out and got a new hair-do, had a facial, bought some bright-ish new clothes. ‘What in God’s name are you doing to yourself now?’ said Mr. Jennings, on the next of the rare visits. They were becoming almost non-existent.

  She had had a little drinkie and now she embarked upon another of her humble jokes. ‘I read in a magazine that the way to get back my husband’s love was to make myself look glamorous.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made yourself look a freak,’ he said.

  More than one little drinkie, actually; several little drinkies. She tottered up to her feet, took the decanter by its stout glass neck and lifted it above her head. He gave her one look of stunned amazement and, as the bottle hit him, stepped back and fell, grazing his temple on the hard edge of the marble mantelpiece. She put back the decanter slowly on its tray and knelt down beside him. After a little while she realised that he was dead.

  Wonderful how it sobered you up. One minute, you were half tight, reeling, stupefied, boiling up within you the pain and indignation of the ultimate insult; and all of a sudden cool again, cold again, aware and very much afraid. But thinking, quickly. I hardly touched him. Well, yes, I hit him. But he scraped his head on the mantelpiece as he fell, it could have been that. I could just have been—talking to him. He’d had a few drinks before he came, he slipped and fell backwards, he banged his poor head. I didn’t hit him, I didn’t touch him, it’s nothing to do with me. And she picked up the decanter and wiped from its neck any grip marks that might be there, and handled it as though it had been used merely for p
ouring out whiskies, and put it back on its tray. And knelt down again—and touched with her fingers the blood oozing from his head wound, and tweaked out a grey hair, and stood up and smeared her finger against the edge of the mantelpiece, and held the hair against it so that it stuck there….It was horrid, doing it, but she knew, as she had known at the doctor’s with a flash of insight, that in fact she no longer loved him, wouldn’t really have wanted him back: to touch him did not terribly upset her. It will be nicer without him, she thought. I can move away, where I won’t be looked down on, be talked about, by those horrible people up there, out on the balcony.

  Out on the balcony! On this sunshine-y evening, they would be out on the balcony—leaning over, peering into her window: seeing it all!

  ‘He’s fell over,’ said the old woman. ‘He’s lying there. She’s—what’s she doing now?’

  ‘Leaning over him,’ said the daughter. ‘He’s dead, she can see he’s dead. She’s killed him.’

  ‘Hit him with that there glass bottle,’ said the daughter’s husband. ‘What’s she up to now?’

  ‘Wiping the neck of it,’ said the granddaughter.

  ‘Covering up her traces,’ said the grandson, eagerly.

  ‘Kneeling down again. She’s… Will I never!’ said the daughter. ‘What’s all this for?’

  ‘Blood on the mantelpiece. She’s going to pretend he hit his head there. Going to pretend he was drinking and fell over. Just slipped and fell, she never hit him, it’s nothing to do with her. I’ll tell you what,’ said the old grandfather, slowly, ‘I think we should inform the police….’

  Mrs. Jennings stood listening—listening….She could almost hear them now, she knew so well what they would be saying. After a little while, she went to the telephone. ‘Police? Would you come round.’ She gave her address. ‘I think I’ve just killed my husband. He’s lying here dead.’ She replaced the receiver and went and stood in the window, looking up at them. ‘I don’t know why I said “I think”,’ she said. ‘You’ll tell them anyway.’

  ‘Police?’ the daughter’s husband was saying. ‘You’d better come round. We’ve just seen a murder committed.’