She nodded. She seemed paler than usual and her hands were taut, the blue veins showing. I thought of her stubborn taciturn mother upstairs and wondered whether my wife, drifting prematurely into sullen stoicism, was a victim of her genes, her mother, or of me. I took the empty tray away and she set the cold cuts down, cautiously, as though afraid they might leap from her hands. There were four different kinds of cold cuts, laid out in perfect rows, lapped like roof tiles and spaced with parsley and sliced tomatoes. Perhaps I should find someone to be with her. ‘Don’t bother Mother just yet,’ she said, as though reading my mind. ‘There’s no need to upset her, and there’s nothing she can do.’
‘No,’ I agreed. It felt like a recitation, and I remembered something my grandmother, a religious woman, had once said about freedom. ‘Besides, Mark’s just getting settled down and …’
She nodded again, leaning over the cold cuts as though studying a dummy hand in bridge, her slender nape under the tightly rolled hair (free to do what we must, my child, she’d said with her sweet clenched smile, free to do what we must) sliced by the thin pallor of the fluorescent light from the kitchen behind her. ‘You’d better go back in there, Gerald,’ she said without looking up. ‘You might be needed.’
Once, somewhere, long ago, I recalled, her nape had shone that way from the light of the moon: was it on the Riviera? during a transatlantic cruise? The memory, what was left of it, saddened me. It’s not enough, I thought, as I left her there – it’s beautiful, but it’s just not enough.
On the way back in, I passed Vic coming out. He looked terrible, his large-boned face ashen and collapsed, thick hair snarled, eyes damp, movements clumsy, his blue workshirt sweaty. ‘You already out?’ he asked sourly, poking an empty whiskey bottle at me. I pointed toward the sideboard, clustered round now with other guests (through the door into the TV room I could see Dickie arguing with Charley Trainer’s wife Janny: ‘Me? You’re crazy!’ he shouted – she was biting her little pink lip and there were tears starting in the corners of her mascaraed eyes, but she continued to stare straight at him), and again found myself with something in my hand, this time the empty tray. I seem to be having trouble letting go of things tonight, I said to myself (to Vic I said, ‘Down below, on the left …’), and set the tray down behind the antique prie-dieu. ‘What a fucking mess,’ Vic grumbled, and gave the doorjamb a glancing blow as he bulled through. I didn’t think he was drunk: it was still early and Vic could hold his liquor. It was more like some final exasperation.
In the living room, Inspector Pardew, ringed round by a crowd of gaping faces, was crouching beside Ros’s body, examining the wound, while the two officers, their criminalistic gear beside them, held Roger up a few feet away. Roger was apparently in a state of shock, eyes crossed, head lolling idiotically on his bloodstained chest, legs sagging outward at the knees like an unstrung puppet’s. One side of him hung lower than the other, due to the mismatched sizes of the two policemen supporting him, adding to the poignancy of his grief. Tania, who was now kneeling by Mavis, watched Roger with concern. Mavis was sitting lotuslike in the spot where before she’d been standing, her legs apparently having ceased to hold her up. She stared dull-eyed at Ros’s corpse, but seemed to be gazing far beyond it. It was as though, in her quiet matronly way, she had guessed something that none of the rest of us had become aware of yet, and the knowledge, as visions have been known to do, had struck her dumb. Ros’s wound had at last stopped flowing, but the blood seemed almost to be spreading on its own: through the carpet under Mavis’s bottom to Roger’s feet, up the shoes and uniforms of the two policemen, down Tania’s front and Kitty’s knees, even turning up on Jim’s white shirt, Michelle’s cheek, the Inspector’s drooping moustache.
‘Ah!’ the Inspector exclaimed now. ‘What’s this—?!’
He asked for a pair of tweezers and the women scrambled about, looking for their handbags. Naomi, another of Dickie’s entourage, a bigboned girl over six feet tall with naturally flushed cheeks and long blond hair clasped at the nape, lurched forward impulsively and emptied out her shoulderbag all over the floor: compacts, cigarettes, lipstick, earrings and bracelets and spare hairclasps, postcards, safety pins, a handkerchief, combs and coins, birth-control pills, antacids, ticket stubs, zippers and buttons, a driver’s license, body and hair sprays, maps, matches, tampons and timetables, thread, newspaper clippings, breath sweeteners, photographs, chewing gum, a ladies’ switchblade, addresses, tranquillizers, credit cards, hormone cream, shopping lists, a toothbrush, candy bars, a dog-eared valentine, flashlight, vial of petroleum jelly, sunglasses, paper panties, and little balls of hair and dust all tumbled out – even a tube of athlete’s foot ointment, a half-completed peckersweater, one knitting needle, and one of my Mexican ashtrays – but no tweezers. ‘I’m just sure I had some,’ she insisted, scratching around at the bottom of her bag, turning it upside down and shaking it. My wife, I knew, kept a pair in the upstairs bathroom, and I wondered if I should go get them. ‘I have a fingernail file,’ offered Mrs Draper. Tania stood with a grunt, putting her spectacles on and fishing through her pockets, but then Patrick produced a silver pair from his keyholder.
The Inspector studied Patrick skeptically a moment, squinted down his nose at the tweezers, then with a shrug bent over the body once more, his white scarf falling over Ros’s breasts like theater curtains. Jim knelt beside him, observing critically. Working with meticulous care, the Inspector extracted what looked like a bloody hair, or a thread maybe, from Ros’s wound. He held it up to the light a moment, then sandwiched it carefully between two glass slides he’d been carrying in his pocket. Watching him, I had a sudden recollection of my biology teacher in high school, fastidiously tugging on a pair of transparent gloves, finger by finger, before dissecting for us the fetus of a pig. The gloves, I remembered, had made his hands look as wet and translucent as the pickled fetus, and when he’d had them on, what he’d said was, ‘All right, boys and girls, ready for our little party?’
Dickie came in, but without Janice, and stepped up beside me, toothpick in his teeth, hands stuffed in the pockets of his crisp white pants. He looked harassed, chewing fiercely on his pick. It was ironic to see him so unsettled by a person as simple as Janice Trainer – even Chooch, her husband, liked to say that under all that makeup there was nothing but a doublejointed flytrap on a broomstick, and most people supposed he was being generous. ‘Hey, Ger, what the hell’s going on?’ he whispered around the toothpick.
‘Pardew is examining the body.’
‘No, I mean, what’s Naomi doing down there on her hands and knees with her shit all over the floor?’
‘Sshh!’ Howard admonished. Others were glaring.
Indeed it had become very quiet. The Inspector, bending closely, was probing the wound again with Patrick’s tweezers (Patrick, flushing, winced, his teeth showing), and there was an attentive stillness, almost breathless, in the room. Jim stood with a frown on his square face, troubled about something. Is the hole the empty part in the middle, Daddy, Mark once asked me, or the hard part all around? I didn’t know the answer then and I didn’t know it now. Distantly, I could hear the thuck of darts hitting the dart board down in the rec room. Almost like the ticking of a slow clock. The chopping of ice. The bib of Ros’s bloodstained frock was in the Inspector’s way: he pulled part of it aside and one white breast slid free.
Whereupon Roger started screaming wildly again, shattering the silence and making us all jump. Patrick squeaked and dropped his drink, Mavis groaned, and Tania cried, ‘Oh my god!’ sinking to her knees again.
Roger, eyes starting as though to fly from their sockets, struggled desperately to reach Ros’s body, the two police officers hanging on, grappling for balance and handholds, their veins popping. ‘Kee-rist!’ hissed Dickie between his teeth, and Naomi, picking up her things, dropped them again. One of the officers lost his hat and the other stumbled once to his knees, but they managed to subdue Roger and pin him back against a wall. ‘Easy
now, fella, easy!’ gasped the shorter one, pressing his knee into Roger’s bloodsoaked groin, then, glancing at me over his shoulder, he shook his head as though sharing something privately with me and blew his cheeks out.
Inspector Pardew, absorbed in his examination, noticed little of it. Using the glass slides as a makeshift magnifying glass, he peered closely at the wound, poking and probing, muttering enigmatically from time to time. He picked Ros’s breast up once by the nipple to peer under and around it, but he seemed disinterested in the breast itself – if anything, it was an obstacle to him. I couldn’t get my eyes off it. Ros was famous for her breasts, and seeing the exposed one there now, so soft and vulnerable, its shrunken nipple looking like a soft pierced bruise, pecked fruit, I felt the sorrow I’d been holding back rise like hard rubber in my throat. I glanced up and found Alison watching me, tears running down her cheeks. She smiled faintly, and it was a smile so full of love and understanding that for a moment I could see nothing else in the room, not even Roger in his despair or poor, drained Ros, such that when I heard the Inspector ask, shouting over Roger, ‘How long ago did this happen?’ I realized that it was at least the second time he had asked it and that he was looking straight at me.
‘I – I can’t remember,’ I stammered hoarsely. I looked at my watch but I couldn’t see the dial.
‘Here, use mine,’ said Dickie.
‘Wait a minute—!’ barked Pardew, rising.
Dickie smiled, shrugged, took his watch back. I rubbed at my eyes: there were tears in them.
‘Hey! Where’s Sally Ann?’ shouted Vic, blundering in. He seemed to be asking Eileen, who was sitting up now, face buried in her hands, looking distraught, and I was invaded by the same feeling I’d had earlier with Alison: that all this had happened before. But then it went away as Sally Ann appeared in the doorway and said: ‘What do you want, Dad?’ I glanced across the room at Alison, still watching me, damp-eyed and gently smiling, looking almost fragile now in her soft satiny dress with its slashed sleeves, its frail silken folds. She touched the glass of vermouth to her lips. No, I thought, as Vic grunted ambiguously and shoved his way out of the room again, I hadn’t really had that feeling with Alison before. I’d only wished to.
‘The time,’ the Inspector was insisting. ‘This is important—!’
‘How long,’ I asked, turning to him, not really thinking about what I was saying, my mind on an earlier Alison, playful and mischievous, now nearly as remote to me as that girl from Italy (and I recalled now from that night, as though my memory were being palpated, the splatter of a pot on a cobbled street, a wail, something about gypsies in another country, and the way the girl’s pubic hair branched apart like brown bunny ears: discoveries like that were important then), ‘does it take ice to melt in a pitcher?’
‘Ice?’ exclaimed the Inspector, genuinely astonished.
‘I’m sorry. What I mean is—’
‘Ice—?!’
‘When you came in,’ I tried to explain, ‘I was—’
‘Ah yes,’ interrupted the Inspector, ‘so you were.’ He drew a large Dutch billiard pipe and tobacco pouch from his pockets. Roger’s ravings had subsided to a soft whimper, and he’d sagged lopsidedly into the arms of the policemen once more. The tall one stared at me coldly, leaning on his short leg, a dark line of sweat staining the collar of his shirt. The short one had unbuttoned his blue coat, and his shirtfront, stretched over his bulging low-slung belly, was soaked with blood. He nodded me back to the Inspector, who asked: ‘I wonder … has the murder weapon been found?’
‘No,’ I replied. He peered at me closely, one finger in the bowl of his pipe like an accusation. Inexplicably, I felt my face reddening. ‘We left her exactly—’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure.’ He lifted his gaze to the ceiling as though studying something there, and involuntarily, the rest of us looked up as well. Nothing to see: a plain white ceiling, overlapping circles of light cast on it by the various lamps in the room. In some odd way, in its blankness, it seemed to be looking down on us, dwarfing us. I wondered, staring at it, if Alison might not be thinking the same thing – or, knowing I’d be having such thoughts, refuting me: there is no audience, Gerald, that’s what makes it so sad. Hadn’t I said much the same thing the night we met: that the principal invention of playwrights was not plays or actors but audiences? ‘Curious … ,’ mused the Inspector. He was gazing down at Ros again. As though directed, so then did we. Her breast was covered by the frock once more, but now her legs seemed farther apart, the silvery skirt riding halfway up her stockinged thighs, and she had some kind of apparatus stuck in her mouth. An X-ray unit maybe. ‘You’d think a girl like her …’ He paused thoughtfully, zipping up the tobacco pouch. What had he meant? There was a heavy stillness in the room, broken only by Roger’s muffled sob, a low hum (the hi-fi? or that thing in Ros’s mouth?), and the labored breathing of the two police officers. Inspector Pardew sighed as though in regret, then looked up at me: ‘But excuse me, you were speaking of an ice pick, I believe …’
I started. ‘No … ice!’ It was a cheap trick. Not to say a complete absurdity. And yet (I was finding it hard to catch my breath), hadn’t I just been … ? ‘There – there was ice in the pitcher I was carrying when you—’
‘Of course.’ He smiled, making an arch pretense of believing me. He tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, returned the pouch to his pocket, withdrew a lighter. ‘So you’ve said …’
‘You think she might have been killed with an ice pick, do you?’ I shot back, though I felt I was blustering, inventing somehow my own predicament. Where did all this come from?
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, tucking the pipe in his mouth, watching me closely. Behind him, Jim was shaking his head at me. Most of the others simply looked amazed. Or distracted. ‘Do you?’
‘We – we don’t even have an ice pick, Inspector,’ I replied. This seemed more sensible, but I still felt like I had lost my place somehow. ‘Our refrigerator has an automatic unit which—’
‘One moment!’ cried Pardew, his attention drawn suddenly to something at the other side of the room. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, we shall find what we are looking for in that white chair over there!’ Pocketing his unlit pipe, he strode over to it, guests parting to form a corridor. We all saw it now: something glinting just behind the cushion at the back, red stains on the creamy velvet. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed as he lifted the cushion. I half-expected him to produce an ice pick from under it, absurd as that seemed, but there was only a knife. I recognized it: it was my wife’s butcher knife. Just as I’d seen it in the kitchen. ‘It’s been wiped clean, I see,’ he observed, picking it up with a handkerchief from his trousers pocket. ‘But there are streaks on it still of something like blood … !’
Distantly, in another room, half-lost in shadows, I saw my wife, slipping back toward the kitchen again. She was gazing tenderly at me over the heads of our guests, through the bluish haze of cigarette smoke and what seemed almost like steam (I wiped my brow with a shirtsleeve), looking more serene than I’d seen her for months. Yet pained, too, and a bit forlorn. Love is not an art, Gerald, she had once shouted at me in rare anger but common misunderstanding: It is a desperate compulsion! Like death throes! ‘What? What did you say?’ I asked.
The Inspector was holding the knife up in front of my face. The handkerchief in which he cradled it was wrinkled and discolored, clotted with dried and drying mucus. ‘I said, do you recognize it?’
‘Yes, it’s ours.’ I looked up into his penetrating gaze. ‘It’s from our kitchen.’
‘I see … and who would have access—?’
‘Anybody. It hangs on a wall by the oven.’
‘Hmmm.’ He stared down at the knife, lips pursed, twisting one end of his moustache meditatively – then he arched his brows and, handing the knife to Anatole, blew his nose in the handkerchief. Anatole studied the knife skeptically, weighed it in his palm, tightened his fingers around the handle, tested the cutt
ing edge with his thumb, and then, while the Inspector stared absently into his filthy handkerchief, passed it on to Patrick, crowding in at his elbow. Patrick jumped. Someone said: ‘Is that it?’ Patrick, panicking, held it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger as though it might contaminate him. He pushed it toward the distracted Inspector, back at Anatole who shrugged it off, then thrust it at Dickie. Laughing, Dickie tossed it up in the air, caught it by the handle, wiped the blade on the seat of Patrick’s green trousers (‘Naughty boy!’ squeaked Patrick, twisting about, trying to see over his hip where Dickie had wiped), and handed it on to Charley Trainer, who had just come in with his wife, Janice, she still looking a bit weepy. Charley said: ‘What is it, huh, some kinda joke?’
And so it went around the room, passing from hand to hand as though seeking recognition, approval, community, and, as I watched, it suddenly and finally came home to me: Ros, our own inimitable Ros, was dead. All those breathless hugs: gone forever. And now everything was different. Fundamentally different. I felt as though I were witnessing the hardening of time. And the world, ruptured by it, turning to jelly.
‘Tell me,’ said Inspector Pardew, looking up from his handkerchief, ‘is your wife here?’
‘Yes, of course, in the kitchen – but she had nothing to do with this!’
‘Who said she did?’ asked the Inspector, eyeing me narrowly. He stuffed the wad of yellowed handkerchief back in his pocket. The knife was still moving like a message around the room. It reached Tania on the floor, who explored it dreamily with both hands, her eyes closed. ‘All the same, we’d better interview her,’ said the Inspector to his assistants, nodding toward the back of the house.
‘Yessir,’ said the shorter one, as the Inspector set up a tripod, unwrapped some film. ‘Can you handle him, Bob?’
The tall one, Bob, nodded grimly and gave an extra twist on Roger’s arm, but just then Tania opened her eyes, lifted her spectacles onto her nose, and, frowning curiously at the knife in her hands, leaned over and touched its tip to Ros’s wound. ‘WrraAARGHH!’ screamed Roger and broke free.
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