Jumping the Queue

by Mary Wesley

  ‘That dog is yours, as Old Smelly was your mother’s.’

  Hugh shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘What future had your mother?’

  ‘There was nothing really wrong with her.’

  ‘And nothing really right.’ Matilda pounced. ‘Why should you and the Major bother? You would have put her into an old people’s home and forgotten her.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t face; losing my faculties and being put away into a safe place. I am leaving everything tidy, I’m off for my picnic, swimming out while the swimming’s good. Now you’ve turned up and spoilt it.’

  Hugh laughed. ‘That’s tough.’

  Matilda’s anger switched to merriment. ‘I think you did your mother a very good turn. One good bang with a heavy tray and Whoops! she’s gone. No more worries.’

  Hugh winced. ‘She had no worries.’

  ‘How do you know? Sure, she had her memories. “She lives with her memories,” people say. I hear them all the time. How d’you know she liked her memories? People don’t necessarily like memories. Christ!’ Matilda cried, ‘of course they don’t. Old people are like empty paper bags. You blew yours up, gave it a bang, and pop, that was the lot, her lot anyway.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘You’ve interfered.’ Matilda pulled on her espadrilles. ‘I’d better stop talking and go to the village, buy the papers, cash a cheque, do some shopping.’

  ‘Very practical all of a sudden.’

  ‘I am practical. Keep out of sight, won’t you? I’ll leave your dog with you. Don’t answer the phone.’

  ‘A loss to the W.I.’

  ‘They don’t think so.’

  ‘Show me the house before you go.’ Hugh stood up, towering above Matilda. ‘You are the same height as my mother.’

  ‘I don’t want to think about her any more. I’ll show you round.’ She led the way. ‘Here, in this front room if taken unawares you can hide in here or here. They are the old fireplaces, cupboards now for logs for that.’ She gestured to a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room. ‘You can get right up the chimneys to the roof. Claud did once. He got filthy.’ Hugh stooped and went into one of the cupboards. ‘Can you stand upright? You are taller than Claud.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Claud once locked Anabel in one and Louise in the other and went out for the day.’

  ‘How did they get out?’

  ‘Mr Jones heard their screams. He was passing, luckily for them. You’ve seen the kitchen and scullery, come upstairs. Mr Jones is my only neighbour. No bother. If you see anyone coming you can hide in those cupboards or in the one in my room, it’s huge. Anyway I always know when someone is coming, Gus honks.’

  ‘But I thought –’

  ‘Oh God!’ Matilda’s eyes filled. ‘I’d forgotten. How could I? He’s not here, he’s climbing onto all those geese, covering them, whatever it’s called, or is that only for horses?’

  ‘I don’t know. I believe geese copulate.’

  ‘I hope he enjoys it. He’s had a sexually deprived life.’

  ‘I shall keep my ears alert.’

  ‘Yes, do that.’

  ‘You do worry about your goose.’

  ‘Gander. Yes I do, of course I worry. If you’d seen him in that sack driving away –’

  ‘The cupboard upstairs.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She led the way upstairs to the room from which he’d heard snores reverberate. ‘Here’s the cupboard. It’s deep, it goes on for miles behind those clothes.’ She pushed an open palm against hangers. ‘Behind these there’s lots of room. It’s L-shaped, turns to the right, almost another little room.’

  Hugh peered in. ‘What’s that?’

  Matilda leant forward, her hair brushing his face. ‘Ah. Claud’s fancy dress.’ She took a hanger off the rail and slipped a caftan over her shoulders. ‘Look.’ As she turned her back he saw the back of the garment was painted with a skeleton. ‘He had castanets and clicked them.’ She began to dance, making the skeleton move eerily. Hugh drew back in vague distaste. ‘He scared the girls.’

  ‘Why should he want to do that?’

  ‘It was Louise, she had –’ Matilda pulled the caftan round her.

  ‘She had – what? What had she done?’

  ‘I always think of it as the Postman’s Ball. Louise was – poor Louise was going with the postman. She had planned to have him for herself. Yes, I think she had. I know she had. It was to be the postman. He wasn’t the postman then. They were all at school together. It’s a long time ago. I expect he’s forgotten – I mean Claud – the postman wouldn’t forget, one doesn’t, does one?’ She paused, looking at Hugh, pulling the caftan over her shoulders, putting it back on its hanger. She repeated, as she hung the caftan on the rail, ‘One doesn’t forget, does one?’

  ‘Forget what?’ Hugh looking down at her, thought that her skin was good for her age, smooth, hardly lined.

  ‘One’s first love. One never forgets one’s first love.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Claud is homosexual. The postman wasn’t even pretty. I don’t think he knew until Louise started making jokes, sly digs.’

  ‘Not nice of her.’

  ‘None of her business, was it?’ Matilda shook her head. ‘Well, behind that fancy dress there’s miles of cupboard. All the garden cushions are in there for the winter. It’s very clean, I’ve just swept it out. I’ve kept Claud’s dress, some of Louise’s and Anabel’s things too. I borrow them occasionally.’

  ‘Do they wear them when they visit you?’

  ‘They don’t visit. I have kept them in case they’d like them when I’m dead. Some of those clothes of Anabel’s are dateless and Louise always buys wonderful material, she could use it to cover cushions, couldn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The boy’s clothes are in your room, mixed up with Tom’s. I thought –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t tidy Tom away quite as much as myself. It’s me they don’t come and see.’

  Hugh said nothing. Matilda closed the cupboard.

  ‘If really pushed you can go up that ladder to the attic. I even cleaned that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have some more coffee before I go to the village.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Hugh followed her downstairs, noting that she walked like a dancer, straight backed.

  ‘Are you a dancer?’

  ‘No. I used to do yoga at one time.’

  ‘So did my mother. She stood on her head and sat in the lotus position, all that.’

  ‘Wasn’t brisk enough to avoid that tea-tray.’

  ‘She was frightened,’ Hugh expostulated.

  ‘I bet she was.’ Matilda, reaching the kitchen, poured the coffee into a pan to reheat.

  ‘Help yourself. I’m off.’ But she lingered in the doorway, obviously wanting to say something more. Hugh looked enquiringly over the rim of his cup. ‘You must think I don’t love my children from the way I talk about them.’

  ‘You seem a bit – well, casual.’

  ‘They will like me better out of the way, the girls especially.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They think I love Claud best. Those dresses upstairs are dresses he pinched from them. Claud is far more beautiful than either Louise or Anabel, far more attractive.’

  ‘You said he is gay.’

  ‘In more ways than one.’ Matilda laughed. ‘He went to a party in one of those dresses in the days when boys wore their hair long. He snitched all the girls’ fellows, quite disrupted Anabel’s life – it was a dreadful evening.’ Matilda grinned reminiscently. ‘Louise had the big feller – she called him her “feller” – he went over the moon and as for Anabel’s boy – well –’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Claud lives in New York.’ Matilda turned on her heel and went off leaving Hugh sitting at the table, holding a cooling cup of coffee, wondering about her. With the kitc
hen knife in his other hand he tapped a tune on the deal table, trying to remember his actions of the last days. Then, followed by the dog, he left the house and let himself through the gate into the wood, walking along the stream until he found a patch of sunlight and sat down to watch it cunningly run and circle over the stones. Stroking the dog, who came to loll beside him, he reviewed the jumble of thoughts and terrors which had accompanied him ever since he killed his mother. They could perhaps be looked at clearly now that he had stopped running. He was puzzled that he had run at all. Why had he not stayed? Why take flight, leaving the tray flung down beside her dead body? She had looked peaceful, composed, happier than he had seen her for a long time, certainly happier than during the preceding moments when she had been in a state of extreme terror.

  The extraordinary moment with the tray was clear enough, but he was still puzzled by his actions afterwards, his instant flight to his car, leaving his mother, the tray flung down beside her. She was dead. What seemed callous was that he had stopped at the bank in the town to cash as large a cheque as he could without drawing attention to himself. To be overcome by panic was unforgivable. He had driven to London, left his car in Hans Crescent then taken the Knightsbridge tube. Since then he had been on the move, expecting every minute a hand on his shoulder.

  The sound of the stream was mesmeric. Hugh dozed. Matilda might not belong to the W.I. but she was capable. ‘I’ll go back presently and they’ll be there. No more running.’

  When Matilda came back with her shopping and the papers she found the cottage empty. Her feelings of relief were equal to her sense of disappointment. She was not used to ambivalence, it worried her. She looked closely in the looking glass above the sink, trying to read her feelings in her face but it was the same face as usual, a mask for whatever feelings or thoughts there might be inside this middle-aged face which was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, just her face as usual which protected her from the prying world.

  8

  MATILDA LAID THE papers on the kitchen table, put her shopping away, sat down to read. The Matricide no longer rated the front pages. No mention of him in the Guardian. She had not been able to buy either The Times or the Daily Telegraph, only the Mirror, the Sun and the Express.

  ‘Thought you didn’t read the Express, Mrs Poliport,’ the postmaster, Mr Hicks, had remarked, taking her money.

  ‘Fascist rag.’ Matilda smiled. ‘Very occasionally I like to see it, keeps the mind open to read lots of papers.’

  ‘I read the local.’

  ‘Yes, that tells you all you want and it’s unbiased.’

  ‘That’s so.’ Mr Hicks, a stout bald man, gave Matilda her change. ‘Is there anything else, Mrs Poliport?’ He pronounced it ‘Pollyput’ as did most local people.

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot. I need a dog licence.’

  ‘A dog licence?’ Mr Hicks had been astonished. ‘I thought –’

  ‘I know, I said never again. I know I did. I’m weak. It’s a mongrel from the Lost Dogs, just a little mongrel.’

  ‘Said you didn’t want another dog, didn’t want to be tied.’

  ‘I know. I changed my mind. There it is.’

  ‘You were offered that Boxer, pure bred.’ Mr Hicks could be seen thinking even less of her than usual.

  ‘Well, this is a mongrel. How much is the licence? I forget.’

  Mr Hicks had found a licence form. Matilda could hear him presently telling Mrs Hicks that Mrs Pollyput got a mongrel from the Lost Dogs when she could have had that Boxer almost free. They would sigh together over her folly.

  ‘I shall call her Folly.’ Mr Hicks was writing slowly, breathing hard through his well-picked nose, wide-nostrilled. ‘Hairy as a fernfilled grotto.’ Tom’s voice from the past. None of her family liked Mr Hicks. Louise said he steamed open letters, Mark that he had bugged the call box outside – an unusual flight of fancy for Mark. ‘How else could he know so much about everything?’ She tried to hear Mark’s voice but failed. Perhaps one only heard the voices of the dead? Anabel claimed that he had put his hand up her skirts at the school sports, a thick fingered hairy hand slowly filling in the form. Mr Hicks had all the time in the world.

  ‘Folly, eh? And how is Claud?’ Mr Hicks knew all about the postman’s reign in Claud’s affections and never hesitated to put in a reminding pin. Matilda, waiting for the man to finish writing the few words and find the date stamp, leafed through the paper.

  ‘No sub-post offices robbed lately,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Busy murdering their mothers.’ Mr Hicks brought the date stamp down hard on the dog licence. ‘There’s your Folly all legal.’

  Matilda interpreted this as a quick dig against sex between consenting males. ‘I don’t feel matricide and robbery go together somehow. I haven’t seen anything that he robbed his mother, only that he killed her.’

  ‘Only!’ Mr Hicks, still holding the dog licence between finger and thumb, stared at Matilda through his thick lenses which hid his piggy eyes, ‘Only! That sort of man doesn’t need to rob, he’s rich, isn’t he? A toff who went to Winchester and New College.’

  ‘What a delightfully old-fashioned word – a toff.’ Matilda regretted the days of long ago when sub-post offices were not guarded by barriers of glass. Mr Hicks, holding the licence in his horrible fingers, was safe. He held her in his power, fixed her with his glittering glasses. She could not snatch the licence and so she must wait for him to pass it through the hatch. Had those fingers pried up Anabel’s parts? One could never tell when Anabel was lying, she was a compulsive liar whose highest flights of fancy often turned out to be true.

  ‘Lots of our Trade Union leaders went to New College, Mr Hicks.’

  ‘But not to Winchester.’ Mr Hicks was studying the licence. ‘That school should be closed. It breeds more commies than any other school in England. I read it in a book.’ By ‘book’ Mr Hicks meant magazine. Matilda bit her lip.

  ‘Your party too, Mr Hicks.’

  ‘My party?’ Mr Hicks, fingers holding the licence, rested behind the glass as he leaned on the counter to see her better.

  ‘Fascist – anti-nig-nog.’ Matilda could just reach and take the licence without seeming to snatch. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Hicks. Lovely day.’ She left the shop regretting her anger, for he would know, as he always knew everything, that she was angry and he would wonder why. Very likely he would set about finding out.

  She took the licence from her purse and stuck it on a hook on the dresser. If the murderer had taken Folly with him it would be more money wasted. She perused the papers.

  Nothing in the Sun. She turned to the Express. Ah, here was something. Matricide’s car found at Harwich. Search for him intensified in Scandinavia. Fru Sonja Andersson from Copenhagen had identified the killer on the ship. Why had she not reported her suspicions to the Captain? She had not been sure at first, but now she was asked, as were some of her fellow-passengers, she was sure and so was the friend travelling with her.

  Bully for you, Sonja Andersson. The Mirror had in its inner page Matricide in Porn Capital. Goody! Matilda, hearing a step, looked up.

  ‘I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘I thought you’d have a Panda car waiting.’

  Folly greeted Matilda enthusiastically.

  ‘I bought her a licence,’ she said shamefacedly.

  ‘She trusts us.’

  ‘Mm, puts us to shame.’

  ‘Anything in the papers?’

  ‘Yes, your car’s been found at Harwich and you were seen by passengers on the boat to Denmark. How’s that?’

  ‘My car? Where?’

  ‘If you left the keys in it somebody’s pinched it.’

  ‘That’s very helpful.’

  ‘Look, Matricide in Porn Capital. That’s helpful. Nothing in any paper except the Express and Mirror. Your story is stale; they’ve run it into the ground.’

  ‘Maybe, but the police –’

  ‘They never give up but other things take the
ir time. Look, here’s a story of a wife’s disappearance. Naked. Just her footmarks in the sand leading inland, uphill away from her clothes and her honeymoon husband.’

  ‘Aahh.’

  ‘And this one. Man ate dog for bet. Mr Hooper of Saxon Lane, Hertford, killed his wife’s spaniel dog, skinned it, roasted it in butter and ate it with caper sauce. Says it tasted rather strong.’

  ‘The British public won’t like that.’

  ‘Interviewed last night Mrs Hooper said, in tears, I shall divorce him. Of course she must.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Matilda handed Hugh the paper. ‘Could you manage some bread and cheese and salad? I don’t usually eat much lunch.’

  ‘When I’ve recovered from the roast dog story.’

  ‘No worse than Matricide. I’ll pick a lettuce.’ She paused in the doorway, her face in shadow. ‘Incidentally, why did you do it?’

  Hugh blushed. ‘I’ll tell you some time, not now.’ He bent down, embarrassed, stroking Folly’s ears.

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘And you can tell me why you really planned your picnic.’

  ‘Easy – but not now either.’

  Together they shied away from their fear and horror, their pain and remorse.

  We have quite a lot in common, Matilda thought wryly as she chose a lettuce, pulled spring onions and radishes.

  ‘How tall are you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Clothes.’

  ‘Oh, six foot one or two if I hold myself straight.’

  ‘If you’ve finished eating you had better come up and change your clothes. I’ll burn yours.’

  ‘Why? I’m not so desperately dirty.’

  ‘It isn’t the dirt, it’s the description. All England, all Europe for that matter, knows you are wearing blue socks, suede shoes, fawn corduroy trousers, a check shirt, red and white, a red scarf round your neck and that you wear your watch on your right wrist.’

  ‘How exact.’ Hugh took off his watch. ‘There’s a sunburn mark.’

  ‘We’ll rub in shoe polish. Come on.’

  Touching Tom’s clothes Matilda felt detached. A year ago she could not have opened his cupboard or chest of drawers without gulps of hysteria. Now she picked out a white T-shirt, a blue pullover, pants, jeans, and handed them to Hugh. ‘Try his shoes for size.’ She pointed to a row of shoes. ‘Give me your clothes.’