Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  And in spite of her first horrified rejection of the notion, in spite of the way she had refused even to think about it, here she now sat over delicate china cups full of pale amber jasmine tea, talking about it as calmly as they might have talked about getting mice out of a kitchen or cockroaches from a cellar. It just didn’t seem believable.

  ‘I don’t like ways that make the police interested. Even the most efficient ways. Once they start putting their noses in it upsets people, you understand? Better they don’t get involved. And there’s no skill in just popping off with pieces either. Anyone can fix this. From me, you expect other ideas, hmm?’ And again he beamed at her and this time she managed to smile back. Why not smile, after all? He was being so kind, so caring, so helpful.

  She picked up the little cup and began to sip her cooling tea, glad to have something on which to concentrate. Holding it still, getting the edge of the cup to her lips, all this took effort and while she was doing that she couldn’t think of other things. Like the pain in her muscles and her back and the fact that this man was sitting opposite her and planning to kill two people simply because they had made her unhappy and were trying to rob her of the most important person in her life. And she raised her eyes to look at him and saw again that resemblance to Alfred and thought muzzily, Daddy, Daddy always takes care of me. I was so wicked, Daddy …

  ‘Better ideas,’ he said again and slowly began to smile. ‘Right?’

  ‘Hmm?’ she said a little dreamily. The fatigue in her was beginning to make her feel as strange as last night’s whisky had done, though without the sense of sickness.

  ‘I have one. It’s summer – such a difficult time, summer.’ His grin widened. ‘Everyone down at the beach, all the extra pressure on the local people and the services. It’s difficult. So, so hot –’

  ‘Very hot,’ she agreed, wondering lazily what he was talking about. Was he still making his plan, still offering to get rid of Cray and his hateful daughter? And suddenly, quite unbidden, Gloria’s face came into her mind’s eye as clear and as sharp as if she had been standing right in front of her. There was the glossy complexion and the droop of the carefully painted mouth and the hair pulled back into such a classically elegant style and – she shook her head and put down her cup so sharply that it tipped on the table and spilled its contents into a little pool.

  ‘This time of the year,’ Gian was saying, ‘is not a healthy time. For houses, you understand me? Fires happen all the time. It’s a bad thing, fires. They spread so fast in these seaside houses.’ He looked at her then, very seriously. ‘They’re timber-framed houses, you see. Clapboard. Pretty, old and pretty, but all the same –’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘If they catch from a cigarette end or a forgotten TV set or a barbecue not put out right it can go up whoosh – like that –’ And he threw his hands up in a quaint little gesture that made her smile.

  He looked at her benevolently and then said, ‘You like that, hmm?’ and she thought again of the gesture he had made and smiled even more widely.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘You’re so funny, Gian. So funny and nice and kind –’

  He patted her hand and then, purposefully, pushed back his chair. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said and went away and she sat there at the table staring through the now almost empty restaurant to the window, beyond which the street signs and the cars still livened Kneeland Street, even though it was so late, and didn’t think of anything much.

  Her head was spinning still, and she felt as though she weren’t here at all really. She had split into two separate people, and one of them was sitting here, trying to keep her exhausted eyes open and the other one was curled up, fast asleep, somewhere high in a corner of this odd room. And she lifted her eyes and stared round at the dusty cornices and the tasselled Chinese lanterns and embroidered silk pictures, trying to see that curled-up self.

  ‘There we are, then,’ he said and she blinked and focused her eyes on him again as he came and settled himself at the table once more.

  ‘What?’ she said stupidly.

  ‘Not another thought,’ he said happily. ‘Don’t give it another thought. I fixed it, I told you. I have my ways. Not another thought do you need. Have some more food, cara. You ate nothing. A little egg Foo Yong, maybe, a piece of their lemon chicken?’

  ‘Fixed it,’ she said, still stupidly, and then more sharply, ‘fixed it?’

  ‘I have people at Orleans. It’s not that far from Osterville. Half an hour in the Packard maybe on a good night. Small country roads, you understand how it is. But not far. They’ll sort it out. Now, let me call the waiter and –’

  She put out one hand and gripped his like a vice. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘What I told you I’d do,’ he said and smiled at her. ‘I fixed it so Cray Costello and Gloria will not be a problem any more. Soon you’ll hear. They don’t waste time, my friends, you know? It doesn’t do to waste time. A day or so, and you’ll hear. They’ll sort it all out and your Jay will come back to you and I –’ He sighed and looked at her with his eyes once again bright with emotion, tears of self sacrifice hovering there on the lids, ‘I’ll go back home and think about you and your little men, happy again, and that will be enough for me. It’ll be enough I could help you.’ And he closed his hand on hers and smiled in her eyes, ‘Because you’re a lovely lady, a lovely little Momma and to help you is my pleasure.’

  And she sat and stared at him and thought, it’s not true, it can’t be true. Only a madman talks such rubbish. It isn’t true and it’s time I went back to the hotel and to bed and got rid of him. I’ll talk to Jay tomorrow, sort it all out tomorrow.

  So she smiled at him and said only, ‘Please, Gian, take me back to the hotel. I’m so tired –’

  35

  August 1953

  Again she needed whisky to get to sleep. She should have been able to lie on a pin and sleep, she told herself, exhausted as she was, but once she got back to the silent suite with its litter of toys and the faint sound of Daphne’s snoring coming from behind the closed door of the room she shared with the boys she was so tense she couldn’t imagine lying down anywhere.

  She stood in the middle of the sitting room and looked round and tried to pretend that nothing that she saw was real. All this was a dreadful dream, and she was really at home in her bedroom at Stanmore, Jay asleep beside her while she dreamed these horrors. And she folded her arms across her chest with a convulsive movement and pinched both her upper arms hard until she winced. And it wasn’t a dream, none of it, and after that whisky seemed the only answer.

  When she woke late the next afternoon, it seemed to her that she was experiencing bad dreams in layers; last night with Gian Giovale had been another nightmare to add to the one she had already been having and now she was seized by another, and she lay on her back in the vast rumpled bed, tasting the sickly sourness of the whisky on her furred tongue and tried to remember all Giovale had said and what she had said in response. And was so appalled when she did remember that she couldn’t bear to think of it at all, and struggled out of bed and went padding off to the sitting room to find Daphne and the boys. She needed them suddenly, needed their noise and their fussing because they were normal everyday things that would drag her some way out of this horrible sensation of being not quite real.

  But they were not there. She stood in the middle of the sitting room, her toes curling against the thick carpet and clutching to her chest the sheet with which she had wrapped herself and felt tears rise in her throat. She wanted her boys and they weren’t here and she was dreadfully alone and dreadfully miserable, and she lifted her head and let the feelings erupt into a howl.

  ‘Maddie, Maddie, it’s all right –’ Annie cried and reached for her, but Joe pulled hard on her arm and made her fall back.

  ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘don’t stop her. If you try to make it easier for her she’ll refuse to dig it out. It’s got to be faced, however much it hurts. Leave her be –’

  ‘But
how can you be so cruel? Look at her! She’s in a dreadful state.’

  ‘The more dreadful the better,’ Joe said grimly and held on to her so hard that his fingers dug into her arm. ‘Let her suffer. If she doesn’t suffer now, it’s all wasted. Let her suffer –

  The shower helped and so did getting dressed and then she went downstairs to sit in the lobby and try to think. Sitting in the suite was horrible, bleak and empty as it was, and there was always the chance Daphne would get back soon with the boys and she could see them coming into the lobby through the great revolving doors. She’d wait for them there, she thought, and then, when they came in, take them for an ice-cream soda. That would be fun, to take her two little boys for an American soda, even though Daphne would look disapproving, and she managed a small private smile as she imagined Daphne looking at her and saying in that loud bossy voice of hers, ‘Really, Mummy, they’ll never eat their suppers!’ as she took them, jumping and laughing, to the soda fountain. My two little boys, she thought, and suddenly heard Gian Giovale’s sentimental tones in her ears: ‘Two little men, such lovely little men’. And she shivered and got to her feet with a sudden movement to walk round the lobby and the desks and shops instead of just sitting there. It would give her something to do while she waited; while she was looking at things she couldn’t be thinking …

  But thinking was unavoidable. All the time as she loitered past the shops the vision of Jay and Gloria Costello sitting together, walking together, being together, snaked in and out her thoughts, slippery and swift, and she had to make an almost physical effort to stop herself from crying her rage and distress aloud again as she had upstairs in the empty suite. There it hadn’t mattered, but here where people would see her and hear her – somehow she had to hold on to the shreds of her normal self, somehow had to look and be like other people.

  It was when she reached the car hire desk that the idea suddenly came to her. So far she had thought of various people she could turn to to help her deal with her pain, two in particular who could intercede for her with Jay, or with Costello, and put an end to this sickening nightmare. And they had failed her hopelessly, being either impotent or mad with crazy dangerous ideas. But there was one person, and only one who really could make things right for her, and she wondered, as she stood there staring at the poster that had caught her eye from its commanding place behind the desk and stared at the wide Cape Cod beach and the white clapboard houses of a small town it depicted, why she had not thought of him before.

  He had been pleasant enough to her when they had met in London, had seemed a reasonable enough sort of man, she told herself. Maybe he was besotted with his horrible daughter, but that didn’t mean he was not approachable, did it? If she went there to see him, took her little boys with her, discussed the situation with him calmly and simply and honestly, wouldn’t he see how absurd it all was? Wouldn’t he see too that she was as good a businesswoman as anyone would want to deal with? There she was, with her father’s business safe in her own hands at home in London, and thriving too, and that meant she had something to offer him.

  And offer it she would. She stood there in the lobby of the Copley Plaza Hotel and saw herself standing beside Jay, her Jay, and telling him she had given up all she had for him. Her business in London, her inheritance, all her assets, Costello could have them all in exchange for what she had a right to hold – her own husband. And Jay would laugh down at her with those blazing blue eyes of his and say, ‘You’re a crazy kid, Maddie, you know that? One crazy kid and I love you for it.’ And the nightmare would be over for ever –

  The girl at the desk was remarkably helpful. A car to rent? Of course. What would she like? A Packard, a Plymouth, or maybe a Lincoln? She had a nice convertible available this morning, a very fast good car, ideal for runs to the beach. Ah, with small children? No, then better not a convertible. A Studebaker or – no, the best would be the Plymouth. On Mr Kincaid’s account? Of course, no problem.

  And then the girl took all the time Maddie needed to help her work out how to get there. Looked up the Costello address in Osterville in her collection of telephone directories and then showed her the route. Leave the city on Hancock, join the Southern Artery and then out through Weymouth and Rockland and on down to Kingston, Plymouth and Sandwich, and Maddie felt a great wave of optimism wash over her as the familiar English place names rang in her ears. It was all going to be all right. She wasn’t an alien in a strange unwelcoming place that hated her and treated her like a nothing, that tried to rob her of the only person who mattered in her life. This was after all the real world where people understood and things could be sorted out with a little simple wheeling and dealing. Hadn’t she been doing that successfully all her life? Hadn’t she shown what an excellent businesswoman she was? Well, she could be just as excellent a businesswoman in her private life. If a business had to be fought for and finagled for and bargained for, so did love and so did husbands. And she would do it.

  And she folded the map with its careful pencil marks which the girl had given her and took the keys for the car and went down to the garage to see it, a handsome dark red Plymouth, and patted its bonnet as though it were a living thing and went back upstairs to wait for the boys. She would still give them their sodas but after that they would set out for Osterville; it was just a two-hour drive, the girl had said, in that car, with a little speeding, ‘But watch out for the cops. They get nasty on that road south sometimes, especially on Fridays. But if you keep a sharp eye out you can get away fast enough. I do it often –’ So that was what she would do. And she went and sat in the lobby, to wait for her two little boys and their nanny.

  By eight o’clock she was angry still, but also very frightened. She had been merely irritated at first, as the afternoon had crept on round the clock and the people in the lobby had ebbed and flowed around her as though she were an inanimate thing, and then had castigated herself for her own foolishness. Daphne was the best nanny she had ever had, and the fact that she found places in this strange town to take her small charges to enjoy themselves instead of sitting cooped up moping in a hotel room, neglected by their mother, was something to be grateful for, not to find annoying.

  So she went to the coffee shop and made herself eat, ordering a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. But when it arrived it was so vast and the amount of trimming that came with it in the form of salads and potato chips so lavish that the sight of it sickened her, and all she could manage to swallow was some of the toast. But it used up time and after she had finished and paid, she made her way, loitering a little to make assurance doubly sure, back to the suite, certain that Daphne and the boys would be there.

  But they were not and the clock crept even more slowly onwards, and by nine o’clock she was so alarmed that she was ready to call the police and put out searches. Daphne had always been so punctilious about the boys’ bedtimes. Six o’clock for Danny, seven o’clock for Buster, unless he had been naughty (which was fairly often) with a special stay-up-late treat at the weekends sometimes. But nine o’clock? She would never keep them up so late, let alone out in the streets …

  But for some reason she couldn’t pick up the phone yet, and after a moment she went across the room to the bar and took some more whisky. It nagged at the back of her mind that this was the third day running she’d taken the stuff, she who never drank. Everyone knows that in times of stress people need strong liquor, but all the same – but she ignored her inner doubts and poured a large glass of the stuff and splashed in some soda and drank half of it in a single swallow. It steadied her nerves a little, and made it easier for her to control her fear, but she set the glass down on the bar so sharply that it splashed some of its contents on to her, and she swore softly and dabbed at the stain, knowing it would mark, and then lifted her head sharply as at last she heard a key in the door.

  Daphne came in, alone, and Maddie stood there beside the bar, holding on to the edge of it and stared at her, startled, and was plunged again into it, that drea
dful feeling of unreality that had so plagued her yesterday evening. Once again she felt like a half person, with the most important part of her curled up somewhere above her head, watching with a beady-eyed stare all that was going on.

  And then she closed her eyes and shook her head a little and opened them again and knew why she had felt so strange. She had only once before seen Daphne out of her uniform, for which the girl clearly had a great affection. That had been on the day she had come for her interview for the job, and she had worn a civilian coat and hat, but it was not all that unlike the uniform ones she had always worn thereafter. She had appeared dull and ordinary and that had been one of the most comfortable things about her. She had looked what she was: reliable.

  But now she was wearing a tightly fitted red suit in heavy linen which was rather crumpled and which looked less than ideal an her plump figure, straining at the very seams every time she moved, while perched on the top of her head was a red hat with a scrap of dotted veiling which hung over her eyes and made her look slightly cross-eyed. She was smiling a little with inexpertly painted lips and she had blue eyeshadow smudged over her lids.

  Maddie caught her breath and Daphne turned at the sound and stared at her, obviously startled, and then grinned.

  ‘Why, Mummy, you gave me such a start! I didn’t see you. Have you had a good day? Do you feel a bit better? You slept so heavily this afternoon I didn’t like to wake you – but you look as right as ninepence now, though a bit peaky. It’s the heat, I dare say. It does get to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Where are the boys?’ Maddie said. And then as Daphne stared at her, her voice rose. ‘Where are they? And where have you been, looking like that? I’ve never seen you in such things –’