Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘All right then, I won’t. I just don’t want her thinking that I don’t know how to behave.’

  ‘Bella wouldn’t dream of thinking that.’

  Ellie turns to face him at the door. ‘One thing,’ she says, ‘and I’d really be grateful if you’d answer this honestly. Did you know that this affair was going on, Robert?’

  He answers her directly and quickly, so she knows very well he is lying. ‘Hand on my heart, I had absolutely no idea.’

  ‘And has Malcolm ever been here to your house?’

  ‘Here? Why would he come here? I don’t know Malcolm that well, Ellie,’ and Ellie knows that this time, he is telling the truth.

  ‘Thank you for that,’ she says.

  And when she looks back as she gets into her car she sees a child’s face staring out through a window of the room she’s just left, and she knows that either James or Victoria hurried in after she’d left to see the freak, the extraordinary creature their mother must have been tutting about while her husband ‘dealt’ with the mess in the front room.

  24

  THE ENEMY IS ADVANCING. It is hurtling towards Ellie and threatening to strip her, threatening, as the surgeon did her mother, to take everything away.

  Ellie drives: if she drives very fast indeed she just might be able to leave some of her own humiliation behind. She drives on and on, trying to work things out, attempting to come to terms with her extraordinary isolation.

  There is nowhere to go and nobody to go to.

  If Ellie had worked in a factory like Margot, or in the organised bustle of a hospital canteen like Di, her situation would most likely be different. Her lonely job in the Arcade working for Mrs Gogh, sometimes helped by a young YTS girl on a Saturday, was hardly conducive to making friends and getting to know people. And Nelson Street had changed so much… everyone in it staunchly withstood being moved into one of those barrack-like flat complexes set on a hill like a fortress strung with white flags of surrender—nappies—and painted blue and yellow. They signed petitions and held protest meetings objecting to the move. Men with forms had been dispatched from the council, they bobbed up with irritating regularity over the years like outbreaks of fleas and vermin; they called themselves inspectors and they tried to declare that Nelson Street was insanitary and unsafe. Rubbish. Once, in spite of the protests, they almost succeeded. The bulldozers ranged against the mutinous residents across the wasteland behind the advertising hoardings, giant, grey and massive like regiments of battle tanks. They squatted there for weeks, gathering litter and old coke cans in their huge destructive claws and the people of Nelson Street put boards across their windows, had posters printed and went by night to unlock the petrol caps and pour water into the great beasts’ engines. Old people’s eyes went bright, they grinned gummily and said it was just like the war. They planned to line themselves up across the road, and some of them said they would rather die than be shifted.

  Then the council ran out of money. The whole thing spluttered out and with that went the staunch sense of pulling together against the odds. The odds of life retreated beyond the narrow frontiers of Nelson Street and became invisible, like the germs; they were no longer something you could see, attack, or range yourself against. The odds turned into silent vigils outside barbed wired gates, blue hands rubbing together over braziers, desperate conversations in front of glass partitions, and after that the loneliness of closing your door against the world and fighting an unseen enemy alone.

  Nobody could win this battle. People started leaving Nelson Street and those who came to replace them were younger and angrier, super-defensive so that catching eyes in the street was like giving your terror away.

  No, Ellie has no friends down Nelson Street.

  Di had asked her once, ‘Come to aerobics with me. You need to get out and about a bit for just a couple of evenings.’

  Ellie had answered, ‘I’m never that keen on leaving Malc on his own.’

  ‘Well, why doesn’t he go somewhere—take up a hobby or something? He’s such a slob, Elle.’

  She always enjoyed defending Malc. There was a kind of safety in doing it. ‘He’s tired out, Di. He has to work very hard and it’s physical work, remember. He’s worn out by the time he gets home.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t mind if you did something.’

  This was a difficult argument to answer because Ellie suspected that if she went out, Malc would probably not even miss her. That might be so, but she didn’t like doing it, she just felt guilty about it, that’s all. And secretly she was afraid that she might be the most unhealthy person there if she went to aerobics and they would all see how short of breath she was, although Di smoked like a train and still managed it somehow.

  Very occasionally, if there was absolutely nothing on telly, she might persuade Malc to take her to see a film, but the last one they’d gone to see was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—so you can tell how long ago that was.

  And then of course there was always the club on a Friday night. Sometimes they went there on Saturdays, too. And Ellie felt satisfied with Di and Margot. She knew she would never find such close, true friends as them, and it did not occur to her that one day she might want to.

  Malc was exactly the same. He didn’t have any friends except Dave and Dick; the people at Watt & Wyatt were only workmates and somehow for him, that made them separate and different.

  Ellie winces as she drives along, remembering the cordon bleu and the poetry. Perhaps she is not the sort of person whom anyone would want as a friend. Perhaps she isn’t interesting enough or doesn’t have sufficient to give—too satisfied, with a closed mind—because even with Malc as he was, there had been something comforting about drawing the curtains in number nine, lighting the fire and settling down for the evening with a book, the telly and the Mirror crossword. She used to start it and Malc always finished it, but he had never demanded a harder one, never suggested that they might tackle a more difficult paper. Perhaps Malc had been satisfied, too, in a moaning, miserable, hopeless sort of way, and maybe Ellie had secretly known that.

  She calls on God as she drives along. Many times. And loudly.

  She is terribly hurt because Robert was so appalled to see her, and worse than that, because she has got that relationship so wrong. Ellie sees herself as pathetic. A kind word, a few lunches, that genuine interest which Robert had shown… oh, what an easy conquest she was, and buoyed up by the belief that somehow her money made her different. At one point, and she can hardly bear to admit this to herself as she drives along the grey, wet link-road, at one point she even believed that in a guarded, subtle kind of way he had fancied her, and oh God she had flirted with him, too, smiling a certain smile, positioning herself in a certain kind of way, making her eyes go wistful, trying to be interesting and seductive. Oh God oh God, at forty and Robert was what—thirty-two, thirty-five, something like that. She can hear him now, going home to Bella, that able, sociable creature with her television relative and her artistic sister. She can hear him accepting a drink and starting, ‘You’re not going to believe this but such an amusing thing happened to me today. There was this peculiar woman… it’s a bit sad, really.’

  Ellie swerves and almost goes into the back of a lorry. The driver behind overtakes, winds down his window and shakes his fist at her. Ellie, on top of all the other pain—it fugs the air, it mists up the windscreen—on top of all this other pain Ellie Freeman has still got room to be hurt by a stranger waving his fist.

  She slumps at the wheel and drives on, automatically turning for home. Well, where else can you turn? She rummages in her bag for a fag and, remembering she’s given them up, accelerates, accidentally knocking the wiper switch as she goes so it feels as if she drives through a storm.

  She hears the telephone ringing when she’s got her key halfway in the lock. She has made up her mind not to answer it. Let him worry. Let him not know how she’s thinking or what she is feeling
. If she can only make Malc suffer just a modicum of what she is suffering.

  She rams in the key, flings open the door and races across the hall to pick it up. ‘Malc?’

  ‘It’s me,’ says Malc. ‘I tried earlier but got no reply.’

  ‘I’ve been out,’ says Ellie, but Malc does not ask her where. So he does not think he has those rights any longer? No one has those rights over Ellie any more. She has relinquished them involuntarily, she feels desolate and despairing.

  ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘I hardly had any sleep at all.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Malc, and his voice is curiously distant. ‘It might be a good idea if you went to the doctor’s and asked for something to help you.’

  ‘Sleeping pills?’ Does he hate her that much? Is he angling for her to take her own life?

  ‘Just for a little while, until the worst of this is all over. And maybe he could give you something to help you through the day.’

  This! From Malc—who used to pour scorn on Disprin, who chose to stand out in the yard breathing deeply if he got a headache rather than take anything ‘those bastards are pushing out’. This must be the de Courtney woman’s influence—she looks like the type who would fly to a bottle for comfort.

  ‘I would rather try not to do that,’ says Ellie with dignity. ‘Not unless it is really necessary.’ Hah! Give him something to worry about, let him think she has not hit rock bottom yet.

  She can tell that Malc is checking his watch when he says, ‘Now, Ellie, what about me coming over?’

  ‘Yes, that might be a good idea.’

  ‘What time would you like me?’

  Ellie’s day is hardly hemmed in by appointments, she’s hardly got to fetch her diary to check it. ‘Any time. Now?’

  ‘Right away?’

  ‘You might as well.’

  ‘Right. I’ll see you in about forty minutes, then.’

  Where is he speaking from? Work, or the home of the slut? It must be from Gabriella’s because it’s not ten o’clock and he wouldn’t go into work for an hour, not if he’s planning to leave so soon. And if it’s HER house he’s ringing from then SHE is probably listening.

  ‘Is she listening?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gabriella?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ellie.’ And she has the feeling that is the way she is going to be spoken to whenever she expresses herself honestly now. ‘Don’t be silly, Ellie, don’t be silly.’ Without a man, immediately she is relegated to the status of child.

  Will their conversations over the coming weeks get longer and longer or shorter and shorter, until they stop having conversations at all, just like it used to be? Until they merely grunt acknowledgements while passing? Will she pass him? Once he’s gone, if he goes, will she ever pass him, or, in the end, will he be just one more stranger in the umbrella and pinstripe horde?

  And is Gabriella de Courtney uneasy about Malc coming over? Did he have to argue with her in order to get his way—oh, Ellie does hope so.

  She ought to get the house straight, she ought to have it fresh and smelling nice. And herself… she doesn’t want Malc to see her looking like this. She has always been the strong one—she led, Malc followed. She’d held him for years by being like that; it would be folly to change that now, just because of her need.

  ‘A brick’, that’s what she was, and she can be a brick again if she works the cement in hard.

  So Ellie turns herself into a whirlwind, and right deep inside this flashing, spinning vision of washing-up mop and hoover, down in the breathless vortex, is the hope that if she plays this one right he might agree to come home.

  And then this whole nightmare will be over.

  She always was a creature of hope. Malc’s leaving hasn’t changed that, nothing had ever been able to change that.

  So it’s a clean house that Malc comes home to, and a kitchen that smells of lemon and a wife who smells of tears. But it’s all shipshape on the surface and what shows is what matters now.

  When he comes into the house—he does not ring the bell, he uses his own key—Ellie sees, with some satisfaction, that he has not slept well either. They are two tired people sitting down at a new kitchen table with a new kind of strangeness between them. It manifests itself as politeness. Ellie asks to be excused as she goes to fetch the milk from the step and she casts worried eyes at next door in case Maria Williams saw him coming home.

  ‘I am going to turn the heating to the automatic timer again, Malc,’ she says, ‘because I know I’ll never remember to turn it off every night manually.’ She wants to hear him say, ‘Don’t bother,’ and she wants to hear him say, ‘This isn’t going to last long enough for us to change our old habits,’ but Malc just looks surprised, astonished to find that her mind is still on such mundane matters.

  ‘And that is something else we are going to have to discuss at some stage,’ he says. ‘Money.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Yes. I want to reassure you straight away that money is one thing you don’t have to worry about.’

  Well, and isn’t that sweet of him?

  ‘I am going to try and make it possible for you to stay here and that your standard of living does not drop. I want you to be able to keep your little car…’

  It sounds as if he is never coming back.

  ‘And all the time you are going to be living somewhere else?’

  ‘Yes, at the moment it looks like that, yes.’

  ‘With her?’

  ‘That’s how it’s going to be, yes.’

  ‘Does she have a house of her own?’

  ‘Gabriella has her own flat.’

  And now comes the appalling realisation that he is going to remove his things. ‘So we are going to have to decide which belongings are yours and which are mine, aren’t we?’ says Ellie.

  Malc seems surprised to hear Ellie being so practical. ‘I wasn’t going to bring that matter up yet.’

  ‘Why not? It is something I am going to have to face at some point, isn’t it?’

  ‘I have a small case at Gabriella’s. I will collect some more clothes before I leave this morning, but I don’t want to hurt you any more than I have to.’

  ‘Yes, I remember you saying that last night, Malc, but please don’t expect me to be grateful for that.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t want your gratitude.’ And here is his hang-dog expression again.

  She is genuinely curious. ‘What do you want from me, Malc?’

  ‘I would like us to go through this thing with the minimum of bitterness, so that afterwards we can face each other with some dignity left. And in order to achieve this I want you to tell me how you are coping. I want you to feel free to contact me, to talk to me whenever you need to.’

  Ellie remembers sitting here in this same chair a week ago, before Maria Williams came round with that magazine. She sat on the same chair but she was a different person then. And incredibly, Malc thinks she is that last-week person; he is talking to her as if she is, reasoning with her as if she still has a brain in her head and human thoughts and emotions. He does not see the animal with the sore, yellow eyes, the bared teeth and the hackles that bristle around her neck. Nor can he hear her panting, or the soft pad-pad of the desperate animal who has to kill or be killed. With a kind of sickly sweetness, hiding her scent, she responds, ‘I think what would help me more than anything else just now would be to meet this Gabriella of yours.’

  Right now. Let’s see if the bitch is up to this! This challenge of Ellie’s is bound to shake her. Rigid.

  Malc answers quickly, ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea.’

  Ellie smiles. How pathetic, he is protecting the cow. But she is determined to be persistent. ‘I can see that she might feel uncomfortable about talking to me in the circumstances. I can understand that she might need some time to think about it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think Gabriella would mind. In fact, she has told me she would like
to meet you, very much. It’s me, Elle. I don’t know if I could handle that—not now. Not yet.’

  Incredible! What sort of hard-faced woman is this, and can it be true that Gabriella is eager to meet her? Ellie presses her challenge. ‘You told me to tell you honestly, you said you wanted to know how I felt.’

  Malc says, ‘But I just can’t see how any good could come from a meeting between you.’

  ‘Perhaps no good would come from it, but I would have satisfied some need in myself. I want to know what she’s like, Malc. I want to see how she feels about this.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you just let me tell you?’

  ‘Because that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.’

  And Ellie knows that all he honestly wants to discuss are the practicalities of all this, the money, the ‘arrangements’. Oh, men are all the same. They say they want to talk but they don’t. They are happier with car engines and football scores, the latest price of redwood shutters and, just recently, the movements of stocks and shares.

  There seems to be no room anywhere in all this for talking about Malc coming back. He is too busy smoothing his path clear for leaving, and to do that successfully he has to make certain that Ellie will be all right. She can see how wary he is, listening carefully for the slightest crack in her voice that will warn him that she’s changing back into the violent creature she was last night.

  She keeps that creature hidden behind her wounded smile, but it’s still there… and it’s breathing softly…

  ‘If that’s what you’re sure you want to do.’

  ‘Yes, I am quite sure about that, Malc’ She expects Gabriella to back down.

  ‘When would you like this meeting?’

  ‘Oh, as soon as possible I think, don’t you?’

  He looks at Ellie suspiciously. ‘You’re not going to make a scene or anything like that, are you, because that won’t work with Gabriella. Nothing like that will work.’

  ‘You are being unkind to me, Malc’

  He shakes his head wearily. ‘I am just worried, that’s all. You seem too calm and collected this morning.’