Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  Maude.... They actually chop up the body?

  Martha.... Not even key-hole surgery?

  ‘They open it up, yes,’ said the young man.

  Maude.... To get at the brain?

  Martha.... They have to use some sort of saw?

  The doctor agreed that yes they would. The NHS was investigating the use of non-invasive forensic techniques where possible but they were not yet operational.

  Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

  Yes, why had Dr Nevis insisted on an autopsy? Ted had been to visit him in August for a malaria jab: Nevis could have stretched a point and ticked the ‘been seen by doctor within last three months’ easily enough, but he didn’t. Had he suspected something? Murder? But then the coroner had eventually signed the death certificate. Could Dr Nevis have been involved in the plot? No, that was absurd, the wake-up pills were doing things to my brain. And God alone knew what Robbie’s little pink pills were doing to me.

  The twins would be off to college with the new spring term and I’d be glad of it. I didn’t want to have to think of the reality of what an autopsy meant, and they would make sure I did. A buzz-saw, splinters of bone and splashes of cold, cold blood. My Ted.

  ‘And then they plonk the top of the skull back on again, I suppose,’ one or both of them had said, ‘for appearance’s sake. And who are these pissy “they” anyway?’

  Maude.... Then they pluck out the heart, all dripping—

  Martha.... —with blood, like in a horror film.

  Then they’d both said ‘Sorry, Mum,’ for which I was grateful. But whether it was for saying ‘pissy’ or because they realised I can’t stand too much reality I don’t know. I took them home as soon as I could, and waited as instructed to hear from the Coroner’s office. It was a busy time of year, I was told, and there was a shortage of pathologists prepared to do this specialist work so I should be patient. I resigned myself to waiting, and getting on with all the letters, phone calls, notifications, the closing of bank accounts and so on that go with a death. Ted’s brothers stayed around to help.

  Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.

  I waited and waited for Ted to say goodbye, for his spirit to touch me before it departed, but he did not come. There was a kind of heavy silence in the house, a blankness. My deceased birth mother had come to sit on my bed, my adoptive parents had said goodbye as they left; but from Ted, my husband of twenty years, nothing. I’d felt aggrieved at the time but I wonder now if the delay was because Ted was waiting for me to avenge his death but I was doing nothing.

  Then Cynara called me out of the blue on New Year’s Eve to say how sorry she was to hear of my loss and how fond she had been of Ted. Such a dear, darling man, such a great loss, but she felt better because he’d visited her in a dream the previous night.

  ‘Such a vivid dream, Phyllis. I woke and Ted was standing beside my bed! He smiled at me and said he was okay and wished me well. Then he kind of faded out. I went back to sleep and felt so much better in the morning. As if he’d wiped away my grief.’

  ‘I’m happy for you, Cynara,’ I said, though it took considerable effort to say so. I hated her. Why had he come first to her, not me? The answer was horribly clear. Cynara had been more on Ted’s mind when he passed on than I had been. A simple affair I could have forgiven; it had happened before and meant nothing in the long run. But this?

  ‘I’ve been so upset,’ Cynara complained. ‘And nobody called me to tell me. I was left to find out from strangers.’ Her voice was a little slurred. It occurred to me that she was a little drunk. Many people are at that time of year.

  ‘I’ve been rather upset too,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you have, poor darling. I’m such a selfish bitch. But you must tell me when the funeral is.’

  I told her it was not yet settled. Ted’s family were over from Ireland. I didn’t mention the autopsy; I didn’t want to engage with her.

  ‘Oh yes, all those brothers,’ she said. ‘Me, I’m so alone in the world. And Phyllis, I just have to say this. I didn’t have any kind of affair with your Ted. We just worked together. He was my business partner. It was purely business. I want you to know that.’

  Which of course made me the surer that she was lying. Why even mention it otherwise? She was feeling guilty.

  ‘Why thank you, Cynara,’ I said, cool as cool. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you. All my best wishes to you both for a happy New Year.’ And I put the phone down. I suspected her of not being alone. I resolved not to tell her anything about the funeral: I didn’t want her turning up.

  Ted’s three older brothers all came back to visit in that strange lost time between Christmas and the New Year, when the whole country falls back into a kind of exhausted stupor. All three, left-side dominants (left brain is rational, orderly, analytical – right brain fuzzy, creative, intuitive) had regarded Ted as the arty and confused sibling; the irresponsible one, the right-brainer. Frank and Hector were accountants – or so they described themselves, though I’d have called them hedge-fund managers – and Aidan was a lawyer. They lost no time. They went through Ted’s papers. A trendy art gallery in the West End was out of their ken, though they seemed impressed by the mark-up considered normal in the art world. But the gallery was obviously a risky project – a market for fakes people knew were fakes could only be a flash in the pan – and Cynara was a wild card. But I was glad of the brothers’ comfort and support.

  Their wives and hangers-on were a different matter. They did not take the arrival of New Year as a signal to go away. The wives saw it as their duty to sit with me a lot, though the body itself was away for the autopsy and the funeral couldn’t happen until the coroner said so, and of course the New Year sales were on. All had to be fed and watered by me, though all assured me of their willingness to ‘help’. There was a lot of running to and from Marks and Spencer on my behalf for chilled food of the expensive kind – they were a well-heeled and classy lot – and no end of sherry, gin and Guinness. They were also quarrelsome, large and noisy and kept turning up the heating, when all I wanted was cold and cool. They’d throw their arms around me and squeeze the breath out of me, weeping for my loss. I needed Ted to come back and say goodbye to me, but how could he, why would he, with all this going on?

  They disapproved of so many things –

  ....‘Sure and why didn’t you keep the body at home, girl? Throwing him out of the house and his body not yet cold. Those morgues are terrible, terrible places.’

  ....‘Those girls of yours need to learn not be mean. Those mince-pie fillings were a disgrace. They do everything by halves. We don’t have twins on our side of the family.’

  ....‘We can’t even go down to the morgue to view! You English just love to sweep everything under the carpet, even dead bodies.’

  ....‘An autopsy? They want to cut our poor Ted open? This country’s a madhouse.’

  ....‘But we can’t stay around forever waiting for a funeral. Not if we’ve already had the wake on Christmas Day.’

  They took the Christmas baubles down, not waiting for Twelfth Night, saying they were tired of looking at them. I was glad: I couldn’t bear the sight of the decorations now, though Ted had always been a great stickler for keeping them up. I didn’t have the will power to make the decision to take them down myself and it didn’t seem right to ask the twins to do it – they’d put them up in the first place: too much the stuff memories are made of. Martha and Maude sobbed in unison and worried about the effect of tears on the skin beneath the eyes. I didn’t do much sobbing, though. I couldn’t believe Ted was dead, just that he had rather wilfully deserted me.

  It was after Cynara’s phone call that I began to ‘hear’ the relatives, still busy embracing and weeping over me, saying things to my face that were simply too rude and callous to be said aloud. I was hearing their thoughts as well as their words. F
rank’s ex-wife’s mother, who seemed to travel everywhere with his new wife, began it at breakfast: ‘I didn’t sleep a wink. Nylon sheets! Cheap, slippery and hot. And those towels! Thin and scratchy. Ted should never have married her.’ I stared at her in disbelief and then realised no-one else seemed to have heard what I had. It got worse:

  ....‘People don’t just up and die like that for no reason. Must be something she did.’

  ....‘No instant coffee in the house. A rotten house-keeper she is!’

  ....‘Those twins of hers. Spooky! Poor Ted, no wonder he wanted out. I expect she destroyed the suicide note.’

  ....‘One person in two bodies, those twins. Like seeing double. In a lot of countries they put them down at birth.’

  And then ‘she’ became ‘you’, which was worse.

  ....‘You’re a rotten cook. You do realise that? That omelette would kill anyone.’

  ....‘You murdered him! He was having it off with that rich girl in his shop and you didn’t like it.’

  ....‘Even your daughters call you a witch. You’re always seeing things. You probably just looked daggers at him, and he upped and died.’

  ....‘Did you put a stone in his mouth to stop him walking, the way his great grandpa did. It runs in the family.’

  I suppose it all came out of my own mind, not from theirs, but I still found it hard to forgive them. It was ‘rotten cook’ that hurt most. I’m actually quite good.

  Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.

  It was not out of the question that I was the guilty party and just didn’t remember. It’s possible to hypnotise people into doing things and then forgetting they’ve done it. Forget that, re-wind. It’s an absurd proposition. Oh Finnigan! as Ted would say. Beginagain!

  I made more coffee. I felt perfectly alert. The wake-up pills were working well. I realised that I didn’t want to go to sleep anyway in case Ted came walking out of my dreams into my real life. He seemed so much on the verge of doing so. If he did, where would my loyalties lie? Odd that I now loved Robbie as once I’d loved Ted. Cynara had suggested over lunch that love had nothing to do with romance, just with the nature of the sexual relationship. And it is true that many a girl in an arranged marriage will say ‘I did not see my husband until my wedding day, but I came to love him almost at once’ – she lived happily enough before him, but now can’t envisage life without him: she is addicted to him.

  Perhaps Cynara is right. Love is the product of a hormonal exchange between two people. An addiction to Robbie has simply replaced an addiction to Ted. Odd too that Robbie had chosen tonight of all nights to be trapped in his office. If indeed he had been. Whatever his motives, whatever ‘they’ had to do with it – and it was important that I did not let my incipient jealousy of Cynara interfere with my judgement – at least I had a few hours before his return in which to gather my wits.

  I went to find the death certificate. I remembered shoving it into the living-room bureau after a brief look at ‘cause of death’, and thinking I’d deal with it later. Rather to my surprise it was still there. (Robbie had done a great clear-out when we got married because it was to be a new beginning for both of us. The house these days looked the way Robbie liked a home to look, neat, tidy, rather male and without clutter. Robbie favoured disambiguation.) The reality, the finality of the document was rather shocking; it had been filled with a pen hand, not a computer, in a rather thin and tremulous but determined hand, as if by an old person sticking to older ways. It was as I remembered it: ‘Cause of Death – apoplexy; query? cerebral thrombosis. Query? arteriovenous malformation.’

  The coroner’s letter had not arrived until January 21st, and was at odds with what the locum had told us. He had simply assumed SADS. I went down to the surgery with the twins to check it out. Who these days spoke of apoplexy? Ted’s family had melted away back to Ireland – most had decided not to come to the funeral; they had surely done their duty by me – and my sudden acute attach of telepathy evaporated as they did. I could once again hear only what others wanted me to hear, and thanked God for it. Dr Nevis had returned from his ‘well-earned holiday’.

  ‘Apoplexy: death by rage?’ I complained. ‘What kind of medical term is that? No-one talks of apoplexy these days.’

  ‘The Scots still do,’ he’d said. ‘Up there it’s a recognised cause of death. Down here in the South you get more detail.’

  ‘But we are down here in the South,’ I said.

  But a post mortem had been obligatory, it seemed. The death ranked as ‘mysterious’ though non-suspicious, and it being the holiday season and very few pathologists around at the best of times – autopsies were a messy job and delay distressing for the loved ones – Dr Nevis had done what he could and found a slot in Scotland. The body had been transferred by ambulance from the Royal Free to the Edinburgh City infirmary and hence by taxi to the city morgue for the autopsy.

  ‘By taxi? Just ordinary taxi?’

  ‘One of the new ones big enough for wheelchairs.’ Ted’s corpse would have travelled with a nurse attendant. It was a short distance and taxis were quicker, simpler and cheaper than ambulances.

  Cynara at lunch: ‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you, just how important you are to the future: that is to say, how much money they’re prepared to spend on you.’

  So many people had been involved – corners must have been cut, taxi drivers could have been bribed, even pathologists – ‘cause of death: apoplexy’ in a tremulous hand – filled in by some unpaid intern, or some batty old morgue attendant anxious to get rid of a body and home for his tea. Do coroners keep their blank forms under lock and key? Once you begin to doubt you doubt everything. The cost of anything simply did not apply if you were thinking of the behaviour of social media, or the search engine people, or the great Internet stores – the ‘they’ to whom Cynara referred. The ‘they’ who had sent Robbie in to keep an eye on me, because of my alleged closeness to the other side. Blast this bloody wicked paranoiac nonsense, breeding paranoia in me…

  I wondered if I should call the twins in the morning and ask them if they thought there was anything strange about their father’s death. But then I thought no, they would not, like Hamlet, feel the need to avenge their father’s most foul and unnatural murder – if that’s what it had been. It was hardly in their interest. They no longer lived with us – they now shared a flat near Lambeth Bridge, overlooking the Thames: Robbie had put down the deposit for them a month or so after we were married. I hadn’t asked how much, but it can’t have been cheap – three rooms, bathroom, kitchen and a river view in central London? And he’d paid off their student loans, at £9,000 a year each hardly negligible. Was Robbie paid so much that he could afford this kind of thing almost without noticing?

  Were ‘they’ involved in some way, even in this? Had the twins too been bought off – my lovely, light, dancing, two-peas-in-a-pod girls? Mind you, life with the twins wasn’t always sweetness and light. On bad days during their childhood, when I was tired and low, I’d resented the fact that I had one child but twice the work. Most identical twins develop differences in looks and temperament as they grow older, but not ours. Martha and Maude just seemed to become more and more alike. I’d said as much to Jill Woodward on the day that Ted died, ‘It’s all so unfair. All that work with Ted and now he’s just gone, and all that work with the twins and still there’s only one of them,’ and she’d looked at me blankly with her botoxed face. If she felt sorry for me she couldn’t show it even if she wanted to. She was unreadable.

  In their early teens the twins make a real effort to become more easily recognised as separate individuals, wearing different clothes and following different celebrities but by the time they were nineteen they’d given up – they looked and moved and thought like the same person, ultra, ultra identicals. People accuse me of being telepathic, when all I am is normally empathetic, just over-sensitive to what others must be feeling, but I�
�m nothing compared to Martha and Maude: their bickerings often end (and they do bicker) just because one of them is using the other’s lines and they get confused.

  Robbie of course has always wanted to take them off to the Portal Inc lab to ‘check out their brain wirings’ as he put it, but so far as I know they’ve never gone along with that. One of Robbie’s neurobiologist colleagues is working on twinning, researching the effects of mitochondrial insufficiency on the development of the foetus. (That’s me, apparently. Mitochondrially deficient! It figures: when in doubt just blame the mother, ha-ha-ha.) There are degrees of twin-ness in identical twins. Normally mitochondrial traces continue to work on the fertilised foetuses so that as they grow older differences in appearance and personality become more and more pronounced, but not with Martha and Maude. Robbie suggested a link between my (alleged) mitochondrial insufficiency and my oestrogen over-sufficiency, probably contributing to my menstrual mood swings – but I really didn’t want to know. Enough is enough. I’m a person, not a bundle of hormones and chemicals, and I’m not going to be defined away by my DNA. It’s reductionist. On the other hand, if there could be some link between my mood swings and a dream life which is beginning to oppress me, next time Robbie suggests it maybe I will go and ‘see someone’ at Portal Inc. It can do no harm.

  Oh God, so much is all my fault – my insufficient mitochondria having failed to enable the twins to differentiate as they grew older, and one can only suppose I drove my natural parents to murder and suicide, my father getting fed up and killing my mother. I said earlier that ‘he had changed his mind’ and shot himself, but actually he did fire at me and I was hospitalised but survived: the police had to shoot him. One way and another I think it’s a miracle I’m as sane as I am.

  And the twins had always seemed to me to be over-fond of Cynara, almost taking her part against mine. They admired her style, the sheer extravagance of her manners. They’d even met Robbie before I had. They’d happened to drop by to see Ted in the Gallery: he wasn’t there, but Cynara, as it happened, was – on the very day when Robbie was there, interested in buying a fake Franz Hals for his office foyer. A strange coincidence. Stranger still, come to think about it, that since we were married Robbie had showed so little interest in paintings. The ones we had on our walls had been bought and hung by Ted: and though I had suggested to Robbie that we simply give them back to the gallery and have done with them (I’d always been a little disconcerted by Ted’s interest in fakes) so that Robbie could have his own space on the walls, he’d not taken the suggestion up. Ted’s choice of paintings hung stubbornly on our walls. Married life is like that – all compromise.