Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  You’re telling me Maria’s boutique is a hobby, because she’s never ever there!

  Good Lord, what if anyone could see her? And who does she think she is trying to fool, because when Maria gets round to the kitchen window she’ll have to be blind not to see Ellie’s fags and lighter set on the kitchen table beside the open newspaper, and her coffee cup steaming.

  They get the Telegraph delivered now. It takes Ellie quite a while to work through it. Malc can do the crossword but Ellie is lucky if she gets one clue. ‘It’s not that you’re thicker than me,’ says Malc, ‘it’s just that your brain has gone rusty.’

  Maria is at the kitchen window, not feet away from the top of Ellie’s head. This is just bloody daft. Ellie jumps when Maria calls again; she jumps half out of her skin and then starts crawling like an ungainly crab across the kitchen and through to the hall where she can’t be seen. And when she reaches this comparative safety she calls back, ‘Hang on. Hang on a minute,’ because she just can’t go through this performance any longer.

  She straightens her hair by flattening it down with her hands. It hasn’t seen a comb yet this morning and nor has she put on her make-up. Her housecoat, padded and covered in roses and nothing at all like her old dressing-gown, hangs open to reveal a knee-length coral-coloured nylon nightie with ribbons set into the low-cut neckline. She buttons it up as she goes to the back door, sees the fuzzy image of Maria in the rippling glass, and opens it.

  ‘I knew you were in,’ says Maria.

  ‘I was just tidying up the bedroom,’ explains Ellie. And Maria moves the cigarettes, and folds the newspaper, making room for her elbows as she sits down. It looks as if she’s got the start of an eye-infection coming on, or is it just the cold of the morning that has affected her?

  ‘I know you don’t get The Deesider,’ she says, bringing the magazine from the depths of her dufflecoat pocket, ‘so I thought I’d bring it straight round so you could see. You didn’t tell me that Malc was going to the do at the Grosvenor. Were you there, too? Why on earth didn’t you say?’

  Ellie eases herself down on her chair, rubbing the sides of her neck for comfort. ‘I didn’t go. Malc asked me, but he said it was just some civic do, bound to be boring speeches afterwards, so I thought I’d be happier here by the fire with a book.’

  ‘I’d have gone,’ says Maria. ‘You should have got him to ask me! I’d have loved to have gone!’

  ‘I think he looked on it as more of a duty, rather than an event to enjoy,’ says Ellie complacently.

  But Maria’s not listening. She places the magazine flat down on the table and flicks through the pages, licking her thumb now and then like tellers used to do at a bank before they thought of sponges.

  ‘Well for someone who considers he’s doing his duty he seems to be having a wonderful time!’ She twists the magazine until it’s facing Ellie, and pushes it forward, right under her nose.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’ Ellie screams in her soul while the black wings of fear bat about her.

  Ellie smiles, because straight away she recognises bald-headed, tubby, bespectacled Mr Gogh, and in his arms looking surprisingly tiny is Mrs Gogh in a pencil-slim gown with the dazed glaze of too much booze on her face. Her eyes stare at the camera, unfocused, like a statue’s eyes. And there is Murphy, looking cooler and leaner than ever in a dinner jacket with Ramon’s great face like a summer moon rising, trying to force itself into the picture behind him, and the caption underneath that one says, ‘The men who brought Swedish style to Liverpool.’

  ‘That’s them, isn’t it?’ Maria prods with a finger. ‘Wilf says they’re a couple of whizzkids. He’s sure their success is a phenomenon that can’t possibly last. Yuppie types.’

  ‘The city embraces the arts.’ And there is Malc, looking very handsome and formal, dancing with this woman in his arms. And the little box caption beneath it explains that Gabriella de Courtney has been living in Liverpool for a year now, running the new Royal Albert Art Gallery in the old dockland.

  ‘That dress,’ states Maria, ‘that skimpy bit of cloth that woman is wearing cost more than all the creations I’ve got in my shop added up together. And what’s more, you’d travel the world and never see another one like it.’

  ‘It suits her,’ says Ellie shortly, aware that she’s blinking very hard but unable to stop herself.

  ‘Mind you, anything would suit if you looked like that. You could go round in a sack and still look enticing. But isn’t it a good one of Malc? All his charms are emphasized, wouldn’t you say? The photographer has obviously caught him just right. You should have been there, Ellie—turning down an opportunity like that! I’d have gone like a shot if anyone’d asked me.’ And her voice makes quite clear what a fool she thinks her.

  ‘Perhaps I should have,’ says Ellie, staring down at the picture. She is looking at a smiling Robert Beasely who sits at a white, very cleared, after-dinner table, a selection of glasses before him and that must be his wife beside him.

  ‘They’re certainly all there, aren’t they, all the big-wigs, all the wise-guys.’ Maria rubs her hands together. They are stubby little hands, like a child’s and flawless—you could almost imagine she’s got rubber gloves on. ‘Well, I can’t hang around here all day. Got to go and open up… people are coming in now with an eye on Christmas. I’ve brought all my ballgowns out to the front, there’s some lovely ones this year. Very glam, very Cinderella. Women are wanting to look like women again and I think that’s nice, don’t you? Ellie, next time you’re passing you must come in and look.’

  Ellie sighs, lowers her shoulders and stretches a neck that feels painful and sinewy as she promises, ‘I will, Maria. And thank you for showing me these.’

  ‘Keep them till Malc comes home,’ she says. ‘He might not have seen them and I know he’ll enjoy them.’

  ‘I will, yes, thanks.’ And a cold draught gusts through the door as Maria Williams passes brightly out of it and it feels as if it comes from inside Ellie, as though somebody’s walking over her grave.

  She smiles to herself, weakly, as she hobbles back to the table to peruse the pictures again. How silly. How very, very stupid and silly… this sick feeling, this plummeting of the heart, this terror. What else was Malc meant to do all evening? Huddle at the bar with the men like he used to? Of course he’s not going to do that now.

  What time did he get home that night?

  She doesn’t know. She was asleep.

  What did he say about it in the morning?

  She doesn’t know. He was gone before she woke. He left without waking her up.

  The tug of pain that comes with the knowledge that Robert is with them… one of them… part of it all… is twitchy, like the start of a toothache. She dabs it with commonsense on a cotton bud of reason, secretly knowing there is nothing you can do to take toothache away—not when it starts at this level of intensity. Of course Robert would attend such functions. He’d have to attend them because of his job, and it’s natural that Bella would go with him. Ellie studies Bella hard. She is not quite how she’d imagined, not smooth and sophisticated at all but wirily thin with a narrow, intelligent face, small shoulders and two little knobs of breastbone shining in the photograph. And sitting beside them is the jovial, hearty lady mayoress with a chain, instead of a breastbone twinkling and sparking across her chest.

  In the cold, private silence that exists now (even the fridge has stopped its humming and the tap has ceased its dripping), Ellie takes her eyes back to the picture of Malc. Are these the typical fears and reactions of a bored and lonely woman, with nothing better to do but make up situations inside her own head? Oh yes, Ellie knows quite well what’s been happening to her state of mind lately, she’s not daft. You can’t pick up a magazine without reading about it… ‘Dear Sonia, Help me! What shall I do? I suspect that my husband is having an affair and sometimes I fear I am losing my mind…’

  ‘Dear Anguished of Ipswich. Fear not! Do not give your suspicions the time to flouri
sh. If you fear that your bloke is two-timing you, don’t keep it to yourself. The solution is quite simple dear, just ask him!’

  As for the danger signals, everyone knows them; everyone knows what they are supposed to be. Is he more gentle than usual? Sweet? Extra attentive?

  Yes he is, actually.

  More loving than usual, in bed as well as out?

  Mind your own business.

  Deeply disturbed now, Ellie makes the bed; she’s working out in her mind the times he’s rung to say he won’t be back home until later… an unexpected client, or a meeting, a sudden panic at the office… urgent messages to be sent… they’re all working late, not just him. STOP IT, ELLIE, STOP IT. ‘Dear Anguished of Ipswich… ask him.’

  On what grounds? She tears her mind apart.

  Should she rifle through his suit pockets? Should she open his desk and go through that, too? He’s only dancing with a woman, for Christ’s sake, in front of a camera for the whole world to see—hardly the kind of behaviour that could be described as furtive. Why the unease then… why the unease?

  Just a feeling. That’s all.

  She rushes back to the kitchen along the narrow corridor, almost slipping on the carpet tiles, and clutches the magazine. Her eyes burn into the photograph. Where’s his hand where’s his hand where’s his hand? It is resting demurely on Gabriella de Courtney’s waist. He is not even looking into her eyes, he is gazing off over her shoulder.

  But she’s looking at him.

  Freedom is in her stare, in her hair, in her dress and even in her movement which is on paper and therefore quite still. Freedom and daring, those two things are both in her smile. This Gabriella—she is not familiar with Fairy Liquid, or Pledge, or Gumption, she is not on speaking terms with back-breaking, unreachable plugs or the little mats of dust that accumulate on the bottoms of kitchen chair-legs, and the wind has never blown the dust from a carpet back into her face.

  She has a cleaner. Some other woman with strong arms thrusts her duvet baggily into its cover, sweating and swearing and wondering whoever thought they were less trouble than sheets and blankets.

  Somebody else empties her bit bucket, and keeps that cupboard fresh and clean.

  Freda, Ellie’s mum, had once been a cleaner. She cleaned offices in the early morning and private houses in the afternoon, and when she got home from work she rolled up her sleeves, put on her slippers, popped on her button-through overall and started on her own house. When Ellie was in love with Miss Bacon she had felt shame that her mother was a cleaner… never before that, and never since. Freda Thwait—five kids and her man long since disappeared, ‘sailed off on a ship and never came back, the bastard.’ Spick and span. ‘Lift your legs, Ellie.’ ‘Put this bundle in the spinner and then hang it out in the yard, my pet.’ If everything was spick and span then Freda could cope, she was on top of it. Ellie was the oldest so Ellie had to help; she was ten when her father sailed away and the strongest memory she had of him was his mobile tattoos… he could make women dance erotically all the way up and down his arms. That was her memory—and his raw-red, bristly chin.

  Like a Jumbly: ‘If only we live, we too will go to sea in a sieve’. Ellie remembers the envy she’d felt when she heard that her father hadn’t come home, because she had this ridiculous vision of him sitting eating pineapples beneath a brown mountain while a dusky woman in a grass skirt brought him cranberry tarts and Stilton cheese and covered him with garlands. Why she thought of the Jumblies Ellie could not guess, unless the connection was made because of the ‘small tobacco-pipe mast’ and the ‘forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree’… and he might as well have sailed in a sieve for all that he left behind him.

  Apart from the kids.

  And they all left home and scattered, except for Ellie of course, who moved out first just four doors down to the lifelong disgust of poor Freda. She is on Christmas card terms with her two brothers and two sisters now. They always agreed that they wouldn’t send presents.

  Freda died in hospital, having everything taken away. She’d been so thin by then that Ellie was concerned about anything solid being removed from her… surely she needed whatever she had to fill her out, to keep her standing. But the ‘everything’ turned out to be riddled with cancer and by the time they got to it, it was far too late. She was only forty.

  One of the first things Robert Beasely had advised Ellie to do was to make a will. ‘However you feel about your money, it would be unforgivable not to organise your affairs, and there might be some extra bequests you might like to make.’

  An awful realisation hit Ellie. ‘When I’m dead everyone’s going to know.’

  ‘You’ll be dead—you won’t care.’

  ‘But they will always know that I have deceived them.’

  ‘Not for any selfish motive.’

  ‘But it is selfish. I am depriving them all of an easy life, deliberately manipulating the people around me. I don’t want them to know that, Robert, not even after I’m dead.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. They’ll have to know. Now have you any other family with whom you might like to share it?’

  She’d had to think very hard about that. She hadn’t seen her brothers and sisters for years, but she got the impression they were all doing well: Bobby in Canada, Craig down in Kent, Cara, divorced now but still living in Preston, and the youngest, Libby, in Maida Vale.

  If she left them some money she’d feel even more treacherous. No, if she was dead she’d want Malc to have it all, or Mandy and Kev, whatever.

  ‘How about a trust,’ Robert suggested, ‘if you’re worried about how they’ll handle it, and then you can more or less control it.’

  ‘No, that wouldn’t be fair. I don’t believe in control from the grave.’

  So Ellie had to accept the possibility of hurting them all posthumously, or perhaps—and this was a rather lame hope—those enormous bequests would soften their attitude towards her. She wrote a letter of explanation, with Robert’s help, ‘so that they understand how I felt,’ she said. And in that letter she was careful to stress her confidence in Malc. She didn’t quite beg for forgiveness because Robert wouldn’t let her, but she almost did, and she certainly felt the need to do that.

  She has not yet mentioned the fact to Malc that she wants to sell the bungalow and move back into the city. After her return from her desperate visit to Di’s house last week she had felt much better, until this morning and Maria’s visit. But now… now…

  She straightens herself as she sits there in the kitchen chair, and puts a determined expression on her face. A complete overhaul, that’s what she needs, both physically and mentally. She glares at her cigarette packet and the one that spirals so foully, so acridly, from the mess which is the ashtray. She picks it up and drags it angrily through the ash. ‘You can go for a start!’ And Ellie breaks it and kills it and mashes it into threads before getting up and tipping the whole lot into the bit bin. She crumples the packet in a fist that is strengthened by grim resolution, and she throws it away.

  She has brought all this pain on herself.

  Everything is suddenly startlingly simple. The reason she does not accompany Malc on his various social excursions is because she feels unworthy, and she feels unworthy because she lacks confidence… she always has. Being plump and forty and a heavy smoker does nothing to boost the depressing state of her own self-esteem. And what’s more, she says to herself, brightening visibly, all my insecurity and neurotic suspicions stem, not from fact, but from my own manufactured fear and I will not dwell or wallow in any of it.

  ‘Fighting, Fit and Forty-Something’—those were the headlines that had run over an article on Farrah Fawcett last week. Well, Ellie might never compare with Farrah Fawcett with her long golden hair and her hour-glass body and her sexy eyes, but she could do much better than she was doing if she tried… especially with money no object!

  So she forces herself to get up. Never mind the weight in her mind and her body, she
makes herself concentrate hard enough to find the yellow pages beside the phone in the hall, and telephone ‘The Plaza Lifestyle Centre… whirlpool, gymnasium, superb treatment area, beauty salon, fast tan sunbeds and steam baths’.

  Hah!

  And then, trembling slightly with both fear and triumph, Ellie goes to the fridge and takes out a circular box of cheddar triangles.

  This is not a game. She is such a fool.

  20

  OH DEAR, THE POWER of suggestion. Ellie’s attention is entirely concentrated on the mysterious details which jealousy notices with such fatal precision.

  Well—so how else are you supposed to behave when you suspect your husband is having an affair but you’ve no proof whatsoever?

  Do you pay to have him followed? Do you bug his phone? Do you check on his every movement? Or do you look for tiny, everyday clues, like the speed with which he gets through his cornflakes, wondering why he’s in such a hurry and did he used to eat quickly like that, with one eye on the clock?

  Ellie hides the magazine for a start, feeling guilty as if it is proof against herself for her nasty, unwarranted suspicions. The pages are sticky in her fingers. She hides it beneath her side of the mattress so that it’s handy to reach for first thing every morning. She needs to see it. She needs to stare at the pictures and work them out.

  At night she lies alert beside him. She doesn’t go to sleep until Malc does, and if he’s restless she wonders why and if he drops straight off to sleep she muses over what he’s been doing which could lead to such terrible exhaustion.

  It is rumoured that Maria Williams is having an affair which has been going on for years. The reasons Maria showed Ellie those photographs are quite clear in Ellie’s mind: Maria would not have gone to the trouble without a dubious motive… she’s that sort of person. Seeing the glossy pictures of an event she would liked to have attended, noticing how everyone at the Grosvenor was enjoying themselves, old pals together, must have riled Maria beyond endurance. Getting in with what she likes to call ‘the right set’ has always been important to her. So she would not have come round to share them with Ellie out of any sense of kindness, or interest. She came round with one purpose in mind, and one alone, to warn Ellie about Malc’s affair.