Death of a Perfect Mother

by Robert Barnard

  At last Brian, deep in memories, said: ‘No, it’s not the climate. It’s Lill.’

  ‘And it’s Lill,’ said Gordon, ‘makes us the laughing-stocks of the town. Disgraces us every time we try to climb out of the mud. You know what people say about you and me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brian. ‘I know. Still, when all’s said and done—’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Gordon quickly, ‘your role is to be my alibi. Your health doesn’t matter. You haven’t got to do anything.’

  ‘It sounds a bit feeble,’ complained Brian.

  ‘What’s the point of all this training I do if I can’t even kill off my own mother? It’s got to be one of us, not both, and obviously I’m the fit one.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’m even giving up smoking tomorrow—for the duration. Yours is the brainy bit. You’ve got to convince the police I was in the pub the whole evening, except for the odd minute in the bog. You’ve got to have it off pat, the whole story.’

  ‘What about if Lill opens her big mouth and draws attention to it, like she did on Saturday?’

  ‘We’ve got to make damn sure she doesn’t.’ Gordon lay on his back, looking darkly at the ceiling. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I think we could work it like this: if I slip off a couple of minutes before Lill’s due to go, and say “I’m just nipping over to have a word with John” or Chris or whoever happens to be in the pub that night —“see you at supper”, then she won’t comment on my not being there. And I’ll make sure I do have a word with them some time in the evening, in case anyone asks. Either just before or just after.’

  ‘You’ve got to be careful just after,’ said Brian. ‘I’ve read about the physical effects of murdering someone. It makes you want to—’

  ‘I know it makes you want to—well, that’s what Lill’s done to me all her life.’

  ‘Just be careful. Even if you’re only a bit jittery, people notice things. You’d better just come back to the table and talk to me . . . What are you going to do it with? Not your hands?’

  ‘No,’ said Gordon. ‘Though I could. But it’s too risky. I’ll use rope. I can get a short bit from work.’

  ‘They’d be able to trace the type.’

  ‘It’s common stuff. You can buy it anywhere.’

  ‘Why not just hit her on the head?’

  ‘It might not kill her, not with that thick skull. If I hit her several times, there’d probably be blood. That’s one thing I can’t risk, blood . . . Anyway,’ he added slowly, ‘I don’t think it would give me the same pleasure.’ A smile was on his full lips.

  ‘You’re really looking forward to this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, baby brother, I’m looking forward to it.’ He looked mockingly at Brian across the bare length of their room. ‘Aren’t you? Touch of the cold feet?’

  ‘No,’ said Brian carefully. ‘No. But if I was actually doing it . . . The alibi business, that’s a piece of cake. I’ll enjoy that. The other, the . . . strangling, I don’t know if I could. She’s our mother.’ He swallowed. ‘When it comes down to it, I don’t suppose she’s meant any harm.’

  ‘Christ, you bloody intellectuals,’ hissed Gordon through his teeth. ‘You never go straight at a thing, do you? Never meant any harm? What else has she ever meant? In twenty years you’ll be toasting her on the anniversary of all this with tears in your eyes: “To the finest Mum a man ever had!” ’

  ‘Don’t be daft . . .’

  ‘And in twenty years, I’ll join you.’

  CHAPTER 5

  TUESDAY

  Lill’s life changed course somewhat on Tuesday, though by no means as drastically as it was to later in the week. The day began in the usual way, with the family crawling reluctantly out of their beds, quarrelling over the bathroom and loo, slouching down to breakfast half asleep (a good job, really, because the poached eggs were hard as stones), and gradually dispersing themselves in their various directions. Once that was over, the day opened up with manifold possibilities for Lill. Now she could dispose of her hours as she would, captain of her fate, mistress of her soul; meaning, in fact, that she could plan any manner of mischief she set her heart on.

  Lill wondered whether Guy Fawcett would be home next door during the day.

  The thought stayed with her as she performed in her slapdash way her various early morning chores. The cat—black with white paws and whiskers, and knowing eyes that saw through Lill all right—demanded breakfast, and Lill reached down a tin. As she opened it she noticed a By Appointment sign on the label, and said to herself: Blimey, you’d have thought she could afford something better than this! She washed up the breakfast things, and slapped a greasy cloth over the kitchen table. Then she put some coke on the kitchen stove and emptied the ashes from underneath. Throughout she kept half an eye on the kitchen window and the gardens outside.

  At nine-fifteen Guy Fawcett appeared beyond the next-door fence, large and visible, and carrying a spade which he showed no inclination to use.

  Didn’t do to seem too eager. Lill knew the moves in the game as well as anyone alive. She went upstairs to make the beds, opened the bedroom windows wide, and carrolled in her crow-scaring singing voice the first two lines or so of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’, over and over. She knew the ropes. It gave him an opening. ‘You sound happy today,’ he could say when she finally emerged into the back garden. As she made Brian and Gordon’s beds her eyes strayed to the figure of Guy Fawcett, wandering around his back lawn in the pallid April sunshine. His heart doesn’t seem to be in it, she thought. Better give him something to keep his pecker up. So when she went downstairs, she took out the sink-tidy, with the rubbish from breakfast, and slapped the contents into the dustbin, humming cheerily the while a healthy Cliff Richard number.

  ‘You sound happy this fine morning,’ said Guy Fawcett from over the garden fence. ‘Come into a fortune?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Lill, not pausing in her trot back to the kitchen. ‘I come into the pools. Just like that woman said, it’s going to be “Spend, Spend, Spend” with me.’

  ‘It would be too with you, Lill,’ said Fawcett, his bass baritone throbbing with admiration. Lill laughed all the way down the scale, threw him a sideways look that could mean whatever he chose it to, and charged through the back door. The first move had been made. The gunfighters were circling warily round the dusty town square, waiting for the moment when they would come out into the open, all cylinders blazing.

  Lill hurried through the rest of her chores. After all, though it doesn’t do to seem too anxious, still—Fred and Gordon would be back at five past one. Another little bout of teasing would be strictly within the rules of the game, but it would take time. She finished her scanty Hoovering, decided not to dust the bits of brass, china dogs, cheap African pots and other ornaments dotted around her mantelpiece and window ledges, then fetched her handbag and put on a bit of make-up lovingly in front of the mirror: not too much—didn’t want to make it too obvious; not too little—have to give him an excuse for mentioning it. She smirked at herself when she had finished: she could still show the young ’uns a thing or two! This done, she armed herself with a fearsome pair of secateurs from Fred’s gardening drawer, and sallied out into the fresh air.

  The garden was Fred’s responsibility. When not tending the parish parks he came back to dig his own potato patch, and it would never have occurred to him to complain at this. Now and then Lill acted in a supervisory capacity, told him what she wanted, where, and so on; but basically she took no interest in it. Flowers, like cats, were too involved in their own intricate magnificence to minister to her self-love. So beyond demanding great clumps of gladioli, peonies, or any other slightly monstrous bloom that caught her eye in other gardens, she left it to Fred. And it looked like it. Fred had his successes, mainly turnips and chrysanthemums, but he could not be said to run to a green finger. The Hodsdens’ back garden was a dull little patch of earth.

  Still, spring flowers there were, and the
odd bush she could make feints at, in pretence of pruning. Which is more than could be said for Guy Fawcett’s garden, which was a weedy lawn, and beyond that a wilderness: tall straggly bits of weeds, grasses and flowers that had been planted and forgotten. Any less blatant person would have been embarrassed at the pretence of ever working in it or caring what happened to it.

  ‘Hot work this,’ said Guy, unbending from doing nothing very much by a border and drawing a fleshy arm across his brow.

  ‘Got to be done,’ said Lill, flashing a head-on smile while snapping away at a depressed and dusty rose-bush that looked more in need of pep-pills than pruning. ‘You don’t get anything in this world you don’t work for.’

  ‘True,’ said Guy, though neither of them believed a word of it: neither of them had got where they were, or enjoyed the pleasures they did enjoy, as a result of the sweat of their brows. Guy weighed straight in, as was his custom. ‘God, you look a million dollars today, Lill. I don’t know how you do it. Time doesn’t just stand still with you. It walks backwards, like leaving the Queen’s presence.’

  This flowery compliment was typical of Guy in the early stages, but it was wasted on Lill, who knew nothing of the mysteries of locomotion before royalty. ‘Go on,’ she said, which was a good all-purpose remark she made a lot of use of. ‘Few more years and I’ll be past my prime!’

  ‘I shan’t live to see that,’ returned Guy. As though drawn by invisible plastic gardening twine they both approached the waist-high fence. Lill threw up her arms in a gesture of girlish ecstasy and exclaimed: ‘Oh, I love Spring!’

  They looked at the scratchy earth, poked through by the dusty leaves of newly-sprouting bulbs and sighed sentimentally. ‘Yes, it makes you think, Spring,’ said Guy. His thick, sensual, self-admiring lips slid into a meaningful grin: ‘Eh, Lill? Doesn’t Spring make you think of a lot of things you could be doing?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lill. ‘And I don’t suppose you mean digging the potato patch either.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ agreed Guy, the grin still fixed but mobile on his lips, and his eyes resting on her powdery face. ‘But when you get to our age—say thirty-five—’

  ‘Say twenty-five if you like,’ said Lill agreeably.

  ‘—you realize there’s some things—things you want to do—and that time’s not on your side any longer—that you’d be silly not to do them if that’s what you fancy—because in a few years it’ll be too late, if you follow me.’

  ‘Just about,’ said Lill. ‘It’s difficult, but I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Specially,’ concluded Guy with a leer, ‘when they hurt nobody. Not, of course, that anybody’d know anyway.’

  ‘My Fred’s a terror when he’s roused,’ said Lill. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but by golly he is!’

  Guy repressed a chortle of disbelief, and tensed his shoulders and arms to show off his biceps. I’d fight for you, Lill, he was saying as clearly as if he’d spoken. Lill was thrilled. She said: ‘Naturally whatever I did I’d always be careful, because of Fred . . .’

  The half-concession was obvious, but Guy played his game for one more move. He put on an expression of great tenderness: ‘You’re lucky to have someone who really cares. I don’t think my wife would care at all, whatever I did. Ours is a funny marriage. My wife doesn’t understand me at all.’

  ‘Blimey, she ought to,’ cackled Lill, breaking the mood. ‘I understand you all right.’

  ‘Why are we wasting time, then, eh Lill?’ And Guy Fawcett bent his heavy body urgently forward to hers over the fence. ‘Let’s get on with it. Have a bit of fun before your lot comes back for their lunch.’

  Lill retreated flirtatiously to the depressing rose-bush. ‘Well, I don’t say that if you come round the back door in ten minutes with a book you’d promised to lend me I wouldn’t let you in.’

  ‘Oh, come off it Lill. Since when have you taken up with literature? Nobody’d buy that even if they heard me. I’ll just hop over the fence—’

  ‘Hey, give over you saucy bastard—’ But by then Guy Fawcett had done a one-hand spring over the rickety fence and was approaching her with looks of cinematic lust in his eyes. ‘Hey, give over Guy, someone might see us. Me mother—’

  And at that moment Lill, in giggling mock-flight, did turn her head round in the direction of her mother’s garden, and saw through the gap in the straggling hedge her mother, square and aproned on a kitchen chair, peeling potatoes in the watery sun and regarding them with an air of malevolent disapproval, lips pursed, old black eyes flashing.

  Lill’s reaction was instantaneous and sincere: she turned back towards the gap in the hedge and whipped her fingers into a vicious V-sign. Then she put her arm around Guy Fawcett’s substantial waist, let him paw over her shoulders and round to her triumphal breasts, and so the pair went off towards the kitchen door in an ecstasy of simulated amusement. The back door was shut with tremendous emphasis, and strain as her old ears might, Mrs Casey heard no more. Lill and Fred’s bedroom was at the front of the house. Shaking her head, and with a tear of shame or rage at the corners of her eyes, she put a cloth over her bowl of potatoes and slowly, arthritically, made her way back to her own kitchen.

  • • •

  ‘Penny for ’em, Fred. What are you thinking about?’

  It was one of Fred’s mates in the parks department who asked, coming up behind him as he filled in time before the dinner-hour in the garden around the war memorial. It was a question they often felt impelled to ask him, as he poked aimlessly around with hoe or rake, doing no good to anyone and positive harm to the newly bedded plants that before many weeks were out would spell ‘Welcome to Todmarsh’ in pink, yellow and blue under the names of the fallen. And when he was challenged, Fred usually replied: ‘Wondering what’ll win the two-thirty at Newmarket,’ or ‘Remembering that goal in the second half of the cup-tie last Saturday,’ and then went back a little more purposefully to his work. A more honest reply would have been ‘Nothing.’ For in fact Fred had a tremendous capacity for letting his mind go completely blank and stay that way for hours at a time. But even Fred realized that reply would lay him open to ridicule, so he always concocted something. Today he said: ‘Just thinking that if I’d got that double seven in the darts Saturday night we’d’ve won.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said his mate. ‘Thought you were down the Rose and Crown Saturday night with your family.’

  ‘Only early on,’ said Fred, perking up a little, and excavating energetically around a petunia which would very much rather have been left alone. ‘Only early on. Couldn’t let the team down.’

  ‘Celebration, wasn’t it? Birthday or summat?’

  ‘My Gordon’s twenty-sixth,’ said Fred, his skinny frame swelling with pride.

  ‘Glad he’s out the army and doing well for himself. Looks a fine lad. Twenty-six, eh? Wouldn’t have thought it possible, looking at your Lill.’

  ‘No, you’re right. She’s a fine woman. O’ course I married her young.’

  ‘You must have, at that. Bit of a handful for you, eh Fred? Beautiful woman like that?’ His mate nudged him in the ribs. ‘Better keep her on a short leash, eh, or there’ll be others wanting to poke your grate.’ And he snickered.

  Fred remained for a minute in contemplation, and then he said with the shadow of a spark: ‘Hold on, Bill. I don’t like you making suggestions like that.’

  But by this time his mate had gone back to his work, and after looking blearily at his back for a minute or two, Fred went on with his picking and poking around the flower-beds that never came to anything very much. It would be difficult to tell whether he was deep in thought.

  • • •

  ‘Oh lumme, what are you doing?’ shouted Lill, dying with laughter. ‘Blimey, I never thought of that one!’

  ‘Learn a lot when you’re with me, Lill,’ said Guy Fawcett, continuing what he was doing.

  • • •

  Mrs Casey went around her house, meticulously dusting and wiping
over her relics of Leicester in the ’thirties. Then she finished the preparations for her lunch. She had been so long alone that cooking for one presented no problems for her. Today she had a little bit of cod, which she was fond of and which had become quite a treat in recent years. But now her heart wasn’t in her preparations. She read her paper, but it was one that had recently been shaved down into a tabloid, and it gave her no pleasure. There are no newspapers now for the Mrs Caseys of this world. She took up her library book, but she had lost the thread of the story and failed to pick it up again. In the end she gave in, and sat before the electric fire in her front room, just staring ahead of her.

  Finally, she said to herself aloud—that aloudness giving it the seal of a conclusion or a decision: ‘It’s a right shame. In his house too. Someone ought to tell Fred about it.’