Sunday Best

by Bernice Rubens

  ‘Hullo?’ It was Joy’s voice. The voice made Emily tremble, and it was all she could do to remember her voice pitch and to press it home through the receiver.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘Can I speak to Mrs Verrey Smith?’ The name astonished her, and she tried not to hear the fear panting over the line.

  ‘Mrs Verrey Smith speaking.’

  ‘My name is Mrs Emily Price,’ she said, loud and clear, not confident enough in the name to have to repeat it. ‘I’m a friend of your husband’s.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Joy shouted. It was not just a question. It was an expression of terrible anger, a release of pent-up pain, a flood of concern, and above all, a searing jealousy. ‘Are you with him?’ she asked, and the ‘with’ meant bed and betrayal.

  Such an interpretation had not occurred to Emily Price and she was totally unprepared to handle it.

  ‘No, it’s not like that at all,’ she said, playing it off the cuff. ‘We’ve only just met, and he wants me to get a message to you.

  ‘He’s well,’ she went on quickly, ‘and he says that one day he’ll explain everything. But he wants you to know he had nothing to do with Parsons. Nothing at all. Nothing.’ She paused, listening to her own desperation. ‘That’s all he wanted me to tell you.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Joy whispered, as if she was being overheard. ‘Where are you speaking from? Why can’t I speak to him?’

  Her pain was torture to hear. ‘He told me,’ Emily said, ‘to tell you he loves you and he always will.’

  ‘Tell him,’ Joy was weeping now, ‘tell him, I’ll do anything for him. Tell him that. And Mrs Price – look after him, please.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Emily said.

  ‘Will you phone me again?’

  ‘Yes, but say nothing about the calls. I’ll phone when I can.’

  ‘Why did he go away?’ she begged.

  ‘I don’t think he knows himself,’ and Emily said it with feeling.

  ‘Will he come back?’ she pleaded.

  ‘He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to think about it.’

  ‘If he’s innocent he’s got to come back. Otherwise it makes it worse for him.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘but for that reason itself he cannot come back.’ She put the phone down quickly, before Joy could argue, and she stayed in the box to steady herself. The decision to leave her old life had been involuntary. It had happened to her from outside. Likewise, the decision not to return was not hers either. The police had decided that she could not go back. She felt suddenly trapped, and doubly trapped. George Verrey Smith had trapped her in the trap of Emily Price, and in return she had trapped him. There was no way out for either of them.

  Back at the station, the Superintendent, having checked the source of the call, took off his headphones.

  ‘Brighton,’ he expostulated, as it rang a thousand bells. Parsons had a fiancée in Brighton. The school staff had told him. So that was it. George Verrey Smith had killed Parsons, and had gone off with his fiancée. It all fitted. The motive was clear. ‘Find the woman,’ he said to his trusted lieutenant, ‘and she will lead us to the man.’ So Brighton was their next stop and Mrs Emily Price, their quarry.

  Chapter Five

  Emily Price went quickly back to the hotel. She felt uncomfortable and for the first time since her change, her clothes irritated her. Once in her room, she undressed completely, and naked, she felt free. She avoided the mirrors and stood central in the room. Now she was nothing, neither him nor her. She had stripped into a limbo where possibly her true identity lay. She wondered what she should do. She didn’t want to put on the dress again, or the wig, or any of the trappings of her chosen self. She looked at her silk dress and she shivered, partly from chill, but more from repulsion. She reached into her suitcase for something to cover herself. She found herself trousered, and the shirt followed. And then, though warm now, the jacket as well. Automatically she reached for the shoes and socks. She stood up, fully dressed, tingling with a relief that surprised her. Until she looked in the mirror, and she saw the man they were looking for to help them with their inquiries. They had trapped her into that now loathed silk dress and its security. Mrs Jumble was now out of the question. She couldn’t read a newspaper, it’s true, but she had television, and people talked. It was too much of a risk. And there was Bobby her son. He had seen her, talked to her, read the papers. In time, he might make the connection. She had to get out of Brighton. She had to get some money. She had to get a job. She had to go on living, and in a guise that was no longer pleasurable. A deep longing for George Verrey Smith came over her. She took off his clothes with care, and folded them tenderly into the suitcase. She intended in time to come back to them, and to stay with them for ever. Only the wig she would keep from her present trappings. That would be enough to appease part of her father’s ghost. And as for him, that rotten old father of hers, well, she would take him along too. If only she could get back to her study, her Sundays, her school, even her wife, all her erstwhile fiction. Hers was the choice after all between the lie and the fantasy, and the latter, after hard wear, tended to wear very thin. She put on her Emily clothes again with loathing. She knew she had to, no longer from any secret appetite, but because it was her only security. The Law compelled the fraud. She counted out her money. Her extravagance on make-up, the last she swore she would ever buy, had put her back in her finances. Now she had only enough to pay for the hotel and sustenance for two or three days more. She closed the case down and checked out at reception. ‘A mysterious lady,’ the proprietor said to his wife, ‘who came and went without reason.’

  Outside it was dark, and she was glad of it, for it was yet another disguise. She waited at the bus stop on the promenade, determined to keep to the coast. Inland lay London, and the cities; any place away from the sea was a halt. The coastline was infinite as a circle. On the bus, she took the maximum ticket, which would take her to Worthing. She was careful to speak to nobody, even though the lady by her side smiled at her, and would have been happy to exchange a few words. She too, from her ticket, was going to Worthing, and as soon as the bus emptied a little, Emily Price moved to a seat on her own, where nothing was expected of her.

  At the end of the line, she got out and looked around. It was quite dark now, and she knew that she must not stand still for long, in case she risked another Bobby-like encounter. So she moved forward purposefully, but with no direction in mind. It was a warm evening, and she wanted to stay in the air for a while. Besides, she was loath to go to a boarding-house, and negotiate any kind of arrangement in speech. She didn’t trust her Emily voice any more, because her heart was no longer in it. Yet she had to keep in practice, for until her innocence was proved, and God knew how or when, she was stuck with the mezzo-forte contralto, of which she had once been so proud. So she began talking to herself, outlining the items of evidence that weighed against her, and they bred like a snowball, and she was forced to prepare a defence, and it amounted to nothing except a complete denial that had absolutely no proof to support it. In answers to questions of who she was, where and why she was there, she gave no reply, because all that had nothing to do with anything. It was a pretty poor defence, she knew, and she found herself making it to the sea, where she had arrived without intent. She hoped she would not be seen. A black-clad, middle-aged lady, traipsing across the sands at night, carrying a suitcase, would be an object of suspicion in any circumstances. She hurried over to the rocks where there was shelter. She found a cave with a natural rock seat as its base, and she put down her case and considered what to do. She was hidden there and safe. The water never came that far. She would sleep there and spend what money she had on food. She dared not think of the future. What had already become of her was enough. She looked down at her dress. It was crumpled, and at the seams, already frayed. She thought of Ethel. She had been right. It wasn’t a good buy, but then, as she herself had said, but for different reasons, she wasn’t buying for durability. She didn�
�t regret that the dress was wearing out. She had come to loath its necessity, and all that it stood for. She looked around her, avoiding her clothing. She couldn’t stay in this cave for ever. She looked at the sea, and it roared back at her like an inquisitor. She turned her back, and staring into a rugged slab of rock, she tried not to think of who she was, neither in her terms nor in theirs, for she knew that both were unreliable.

  Chapter Six

  The Superintendent sent his trusted lieutenant to Brighton to carry out the initial ferreting. He himself would arrive for the kill. Besides, he had to complete routine investigations in London. He had not yet visited Parsons’s lodgings. His landlady had come to identify the body, but he knew nothing of the way Parsons had lived. For the Superintendent, the visit was a formality only. In his mind, George Verrey Smith had done the job and his motive was very clear. Verrey Smith had probably been after Mrs Price for some while. It was possibly she who had spent a furtive night or two in the Verrey Smith study. Things had come to a head when Parsons’s little diversions had been revealed. Parsons had proved himself even less worthy of Mrs Price’s attentions than Verrey Smith had already supposed. And so Verrey Smith had taught Parsons a lesson, an extreme one to say the least. The Superintendent knew there were certain factors in his solution that could not be accounted for. Verrey Smith’s reported friendship with Parsons, and his alleged defence of the murdered man. But apart from those two factors, everything else fitted. The Superintendent liked his solution, and he expected to make an arrest within the week.

  Parsons lived near the school. It was a bed and breakfast arrangement, with full meals at the weekends. Mrs Jenkins, his landlady, did for other gentlemen besides Parsons. All professional people, she hastened to tell the Superintendent. ‘I don’t take anybody and my gentlemen have been with me for years.’ Mrs Jenkins was far more concerned with the possible stain on the reputation of her establishment, than she was for the loss of a tenant, a highly replaceable commodity in view of the waiting list that clamoured for vacancies. There was very little Mrs Jenkins could contribute to her late gentleman’s character, except that he was, like all her gentlemen, quiet and decent – Mrs Jenkins obviously knew nothing about the maintenance shed – and that he kept himself to himself.

  ‘Did he have any visitors, Mrs Jenkins? Any colleagues from the school perhaps?’

  ‘No one from the school,’ Mrs Jenkins said, ‘I don’t think he had any proper friends there. Kept things apart you know. Come four-thirty, and school was over.’

  ‘How did he spend his evenings, and his weekends?’

  ‘Well, I’m not a one to pry, Inspector,’ she said. ‘He had a fiancée in Brighton, he told me, and I think he spent most weekends there. He had a regular visitor every Friday night. A Mr Chippie. Jolly man. He never stayed very long. But he was a regular. Every Friday.’

  ‘D’you know anything more about this Mr Chippie? Where he lived? What he did for a living?’

  ‘I make it my business not to interfere with the private lives of my gentlemen, Inspector,’ she said. ‘That’s all I know about him. Just his name and what he looks like.’

  ‘How d’you come to know his name, Mrs Jenkins, since you are not the interfering type?’

  Mrs Jenkins sneered. ‘He’s been coming here every Friday for the past four years. Ever since Mr Parsons, the late Mr Parsons I should say, moved in, in fact. Used to answer the door to him myself, sometimes. But that’s all I know about him.’

  ‘How long did he stay on a Friday?’

  ‘I didn’t time him, Inspector. What my gentlemen do, and for how long they do it, is their own business.’

  Mrs Jenkins was beginning to wear the Superintendent down. He was irritated by her desperate respectability. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could stay there. Mrs Jenkins was giving away nothing, possibly because she had nothing to give, but she was certainly making a virtue of it. Parsons had no relatives, and it seemed, apart from Mr Chippie and his Brighton fiancée, no friends. The Superintendent’s whole interest was focused on Brighton, and Mr Chippie was an irritating irrelevancy, who would no doubt show up and be accounted for. The other gentlemen in the house had had little to do with Parsons, and had even less than Mrs Jenkins to offer. All this, the Superintendent was sure, was a waste of time. There was Parsons’s room to be examined, and after that he himself would take off for Brighton after his key witness.

  Mrs Jenkins led the way up the stairs. ‘Do not’ notices were everywhere, referring to rubbish, lights, taps and visitors, interspersed with ‘God is Love’ and ‘Home sweet Home,’ further threats to the intimidated lodger. Parsons’s room revealed very little that added to the Superintendent’s picture of the murdered man. It was scrupulously clean and tidy. An unfinished crossword puzzle lay on the table alongside a prepared draughts board, obviously, the Superintendent concluded, his regular Friday occupation with Mr Chippie. Then there was Parsons’s desk, with his papers neatly arranged in cubby holes. ‘I would like to go through his papers, Mrs Jenkins,’ the Superintendent said. ‘I shan’t be needing you.’

  Mrs Jenkins made no move. ‘I’m responsible for my gentlemen’s belongings,’ she said.

  ‘Your gentleman has been murdered, Mrs Jenkins. His belongings are no longer your responsibility. The police have the right to investigate wherever they feel it is neccessary. I shall not need you here.’

  ‘I don’t like doing this, Inspector,’ she said.

  ‘I will take full responsibility, Mrs Jenkins.’

  She sulked out of the room, straightening the late Mr Parsons’s already straight counterpane.

  The Superintendent started to go through the papers. There were no letters of any relevance, or notebooks. There were collections of postcards of old master reproductions, purchased from the National Gallery. There were cellophane packets of foreign stamps and semi-precious stones. And there was his bankbook, statements and cheques. The Superintendent went through these thoroughly, though with little heart, for his thoughts were itching for Brighton, but after a perusal of Parsons’s accounts, he was bound to admit that Parsons drew an inordinately large sum every week, considering his comparatively frugal way of life. It was a clue he could not in all conscience dismiss. He packed the accounts into his brief-case and went downstairs.

  On his way back to the station, he tried to find some innocent explanation of the large withdrawals. The obvious answer, which in any other case the Superintendent would have reached for, was possible blackmail, but his thinking was so fixedly pointed in George Verrey Smith’s direction, and to his obvious motive, that he would not admit of this possibility. So he decided with equal logic that Parsons was keeping Mrs Price in Brighton, and that the extra cash was for her rent and board. He was delighted with his reasoning, and hurried back to the station to collect any new developments. There was nothing from Brighton – he didn’t, in any case, expect news so soon. He plugged in his headphones to hear if Mrs Verrey Smith had anything new to offer. There had been two calls, one that Mrs Verrey Smith had made herself; a pathetic apology to a Mrs Bakewell for verbal insults tendered, which ended in an invitation to tea from the latter to prove that she, Mrs Bakewell, knew the meaning of true friendship. The second call announced Mrs Verrey Smith’s great and good fortune in having been chosen to receive six free dancing lessons from the Rainbow Teaching Establishment, and Mrs Verrey Smith’s not surprising, if rather vociferous, refusal. He took his headphones off. It was early days. He was not dissatisfied.

  Chapter Seven

  It was now the seventh day of his disappearance, and Joy Verrey Smith was losing hope of ever seeing him again. Apart from a hurried cup of tea at Mrs Bakewell’s, to whom she had confided all that Mrs Bakewell already knew from the papers, she had not left the house since George’s disappearance. He had not phoned again, but she hadn’t given up hope, and every time the phone rang, which was rarely, she rushed to the receiver in a burst of anger and forgiveness. But such calls as she had received had merited n
either. Apart from the news reporters, few people had come to see her. Some neighbours had offered to do her shopping and laundry. Mrs Johnson had opted to stay with her own mourning, and for that Joy Verrey Smith was grateful.

  The house was quiet and dirty. Over the Georgeless days, it had accumulated dust and dishes, and a mountain of cigarette ends. Spit and Polish were suddenly misnomers, their brass cage tarnished and lack-lustre, and their occasional songs likewise. As the days passed, the newspaper coverage lessened, so it was less of an agony to pick up the morning’s paper from the doormat. But today, a letter had come with it, and she sat at the kitchen table looking at it, as she had done for the last two hours, not daring to open it for she sensed that it contained a clue that might undo her. It was a familiar handwriting, and a familiar postmark. Ireland. A letter had come for George from Ireland every week and, though she had always been curious, she had never dared to refer to it. Only once, and it was the first time such a letter had arrived, had she asked George about it, and he was so outraged by her interference that she had said no more. But every week she had slid the letter under his study door, and tried to forget about it, till the next one arrived. Now there was no delivery room, and no one but herself to open it. She dreaded that it would reveal a story of which she had been happily ignorant until now. But she knew she had to open it, sooner or later. It could well be a clue, not to his present disappearance, but to the reasons why he went at all.

  She covered Spit and Polish’s cage. The letter was strictly private. Once again she read the sender’s address on the back of the envelope. It was the same as it had been over the years, but there was no name attached. She was careful not to tear into it as she opened the letter. She waited for a while before taking the letter out, for a sign perhaps that she should not do it, for a ring at the doorbell, or the telephone, or a scream from Spit or Polish. But there was nothing in the silent house to stop her.