by Weldon, Fay
The doorbell went. A flashbulb popped in her face. She slammed the door shut, went into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and crouched the other side of the door. The bell rang again. She opened the door quickly, brandishing the knife. But it was only a bunch of flowers from the local florist, cellophane-wrapped. They were from Lucy Lint.
‘Forgive and forget,’ it read. ‘In fond friendship, Lucy.’
Alexandra threw them after the florist, and then, as they scattered over the path, noticed a man with a camera standing among the long artichokes, beneath the clothes line, where the green sheets from the marital bed had lately hung to dry. ‘Just a minute there!’ he called to her, so she quickly went inside and called the police. They said they’d send someone as soon as possible.
The phone rang. It was Abbie. She said she couldn’t get over because one of her Japanese students had choked on a plum stone and become hysterical. No, the girl was fine physically, just humiliated. The Japanese were like that. Abbie would come over in the afternoon. She’d hoped Lucy Lint would stay quiet and out of the way, but apparently not. The only thing to do with her was physically to throw her out.
‘That’s what I did,’ said Alexandra.
‘She’s had a crush on Ned for years,’ said Abbie. ‘She’s on the verge of psychopathic. She’d hang round in the garden a lot. He’s had to call the police. You know, like Fatal Attraction but without the sex. A total fan. A kind of sub-stalker.’
‘Why didn’t Ned tell me?’
‘It was embarrassing, I suppose,’ said Abbie.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ asked Alexandra.
‘She was so pathetic. It was so ridiculous. I just thought she’d go away or be locked up or something, and we’d all forget it. I’d rather tell you this in person. It’s so cold like this. Can’t it wait till this afternoon?’
‘No. It’s Wednesday. Hamish is coming this afternoon.’
‘Thank God for that. At least you’ll have someone there to keep you company.’
‘You called me at five-thirty on Sunday morning,’ said Alexandra. ‘I was there by Sunday lunchtime. In that time you called the police, the doctor, me, Vilna, and the ambulance, and you cleaned my house from top to bottom, and washed my sheets.’
‘I didn’t do any cleaning,’ said Abbie. ‘I just changed the sheets and ran the old ones through the washing machine. If you run a residential language school it gets to be second nature. If in doubt change the sheets and serve food. Joke?’
Alexandra laughed a little.
‘That’s better,’ said Abbie.
‘Then who did the cleaning?’ asked Alexandra. ‘Theresa’s still away. It wasn’t her.’
‘I expect Ned did. He’s not hopeless. You hadn’t been home since the previous Tuesday.’
‘He doesn’t vacuum under beds if it means moving two suitcases. Sorry, delete doesn’t. Insert was not accustomed to.’
‘Vilna might have done it,’ said Abbie, ignoring Alexandra’s joke. ‘During the morning Vilna may have run round with the vacuum and the duster. People behave oddly when there’s a body in the house.’
‘Abbie, that’s my body,’ said Alexandra, and began to choke and cry. ‘And this is my house. I don’t want strangers like Vilna and Lucy Lint making free with it.’
‘Oh God,’ said Abbie. ‘I ought to be with you. I’m coming over. The Japanese girl will just have to do without me.’ She put the phone down.
Alexandra went to the door and looked round. The photographer had gone; there was no sign of Lucy Lint. Flowers dozed in the sun. There was the gentlest of breezes. There were runner beans on the tall pole pyramids which needed picking. She’d try and do it this evening. Ned fretted if the pods stayed on the plants long enough to become stringy. She lived in a beautiful house, in a beautiful place. She was a widow.
She called the Eddon Gurney police station to say not to bother to send anyone up; everything was now quiet. They were relieved because they were understaffed; they’d take it off their list of calls; they expressed their sorrow about her husband’s death. Ned Ludd was such a loss to the community. Would she be staying in the house?
‘Of course,’ she said.
They’d thought she might be selling, moving up to London altogether, to the bright lights. Wouldn’t have much time for slow country folk and their country ways. What was to keep her in the countryside now?
Alexandra resisted the temptation to say if they talked less they might have got someone over earlier to chase the photographer out of her garden, but it is never wise to rile the police so she said, with truth, how much she loved the area, how after twelve years The Cottage felt like home; now that her husband had died she would need more than ever the support of the community, and so forth, and they said call if there was any trouble and they’d be up at once. To let them know.
Abbie called Alexandra to say she couldn’t come over. Now a young Gulf Arab boy had bitten into a plum and got stung on the tongue by a wasp, and though there seemed no swelling they’d thought it best to call the doctor.
Alexandra suggested that Arthur cut down the plum tree.
‘Abbie,’ she asked. ‘There are still some things you haven’t told me. Lucy Lint was in the house on Sunday morning. Did she just turn up, or what? Or did you call her too?’
‘Of course I didn’t call her. She was outside the house when I arrived,’ said Abbie. ‘In the front, behind the privet hedge. Kind of lurking. Ned once told me she’d do that, in the very early mornings. Sometimes when he let Diamond out first thing Lucy Lint would be there, and she and Diamond would go off for a walk together. Well, it saved Ned walking the dog himself, didn’t it?’
‘You mean Ned used her? She was obsessed with him and he used her? To walk Diamond?’
‘It’s not so bad a thing, Alexandra,’ said Abbie mildly. ‘When you think of other male sins. He felt bad about Lucy. Her life was so empty, he said. He tried all kinds of things to make her leave him alone. Being horrid, being nice, appealing to reason. Perhaps he thought if Diamond wore her out she’d give up. Diamond would wear anyone out.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘A couple of years, I suppose.’
‘Years?’ Alexandra was incredulous. ‘Who knew about this?’
‘Most people, I suppose.’
Alexandra absorbed this.
‘Extraordinary,’ she said.
‘Not really,’ said Abbie. ‘If someone’s having an affair the partner’s always the last to know. No one likes to be the one to break the news; and anyway they think it will all go away, or even perhaps they’re wrong. Of course this wasn’t an affair, don’t think that. Lucy just pestered him. She’s an obsessive.’
‘But people like that can be dangerous,’ said Alexandra. ‘Sometimes they even kill. I should have been told.’
‘You’re an artist,’ said Abbie, with just a hint of malice. ‘No one wants to upset you. You have to be away from home a lot; you can’t help it: not much fun for you to know there’s a mad woman stalking your husband.’
‘It’s not a bundle of laughs,’ said Alexandra. ‘Then what happened?’
‘I opened the back door, Diamond ran out and went off with Lucy,’ said Abbie. ‘Then I looked through the window and saw the body and came in and started making phone calls, then Lucy came back with Diamond, right into the house, and saw the body and had hysterics and ran round like a mad thing all morning tearing her hair as if she were in some Greek tragedy. So I called Vilna because she’s good at seeing people off, and Vilna did; she saw Lucy Lint off. Vilna can be marvellous.’
‘Well, whatever Vilna did then,’ said Alexandra, ‘Lucy Lint’s come back. She’s unbalanced. One moment she wants to be friends, the next she hates me.’
‘That’s what Ned said,’ observed Abbie. ‘She’s unbalanced. That always seemed to be the worst sin in Ned’s eyes. He didn’t like nutty people. The only reason he liked me was because I was so observably sane, I sometimes think. Alexandra
, I have to go. The doctor’s coming up the drive.’
‘Dr Moebius?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t he in his surgery?’
‘Wasp stings to the tongue count as an emergency, especially if it’s an Arab princeling with enough money to buy up all Eddon Gurney.’
Abbie went to answer the door to the doctor. The student with the stung tongue met her in the corridor and said, carefully, ‘I might have just imagined it, having seen the wasp fly away.’ He got his tenses right and Arthur, who had also gone to answer the door, was pleased with him; Abbie less so. It was the school’s responsibility to pay for medical emergencies, and Dr Moebius had been called out, and would charge. Dr Moebius went away, but gave the lad an injection, just to be on the safe side. Anti-histamine.
Alexandra left the house and drove the half-mile to Vilna’s place. Vilna lived in a small mansion in a charming, olde-world village where property prices were the highest around. The house was called Pineapple Lodge because of two large carved stone pineapples, circa 1750, sitting on each of the gateposts which flanked the wrought-iron gates (Coalbrookdale, 1830) to the drive. The gate, once permanently open, was now permanently closed, and could be opened only by remote control from inside the house. Security devices were everywhere. Vilna’s husband was in prison. He was an Australian junk-bond dealer who had run into trouble with the law three years back. Most of his properties had been sold, except for this one, originally purchased for Vilna’s mother, who had got out of Yugoslavia just before the country collapsed into little murderous parts, and could enter five songs, not one, for the Eurovision Song Contest. Here the two women, mother and daughter, waited until the time came when Clive would be paroled. Then their plan was to move to South Africa. In the meantime they made do with the West Country. Clive had many enemies, and they felt safer here. Strange faces in a remote country area were quickly spotted and obliged to account for themselves.
Ned and Alexandra had been to visit Vilna once or twice, but had been taken aback by the style and colour of the soft furnishings in a house rigorous in its original simplicity.
‘It shouldn’t matter,’ said Ned, ‘that the place looks like a Turkish harem, but it does. It makes it hard to take Vilna seriously.’
The English countryside, everyone knew, was a place where mud must be taken into account, and dogs, and bicycles: where the furniture was oak or pine, antique, and where wealth was always understated. Ned said this was the Englishman’s traditional defence against the mob. Only the rich and knowledgeable could tell wealth from poverty. Even Mrs Edwards, the live-in housekeeper, would complain at the store that her employers simply didn’t know how to behave. They were ostentatious and didn’t fit in.
The Cottage went for the most part unlocked – who could tell that that scrawl on the battered wall was a Picasso; that the old wood box was a Jacobean coffer, the coal scuttle a fine piece of Arts and Crafts in beaten copper, that the blackened fireback, circa 1705, was priceless? Vilna and Maria’s house, with its elaborately papered walls, its swathes of curtains, its plump sofas, its mahogany and walnut furniture, the plenitude of ormolu, and with TV and video everywhere in sight, was obviously worth robbing. Not just a casual village break-in, either. The real, planned stuff. What one villain owed to another. Clive Mansell’s family home.
So Vilna, not fitting in, was kept on the outskirts of the social life which centred round The Cottage and which easily embraced most of the eccentrics in the area – not quite excluded, not quite included. She would be asked to lunch, but seldom to dinner. That her husband was in prison was not held against her – he was a financial wizard, not any kind of common criminal, and had probably been framed anyway. So Abbie, who liked Vilna, and rather cared for vulgar cocktails clinking with ice served in elaborate glasses by the side of the swimming pool, told everyone, and many believed her.
Alexandra knew well enough that she herself was not exempt from local criticism. All right for Ned, although a newcomer to the area, to be a writer and critic. The occupation was familiar. There’d always been those about, moved down from the city: Thomas Hardy being an earlier example. Just about all right for Alexandra to be an actress, so long as she was a failed actress, a woman trying to get pregnant – for as such they defined her, once the receptionist at the surgery had spread the news. Alexandra was acceptable inasmuch as her husband was, and as long as she was unfortunate and could be pitied. But once her fortunes changed, once the run of A Doll’s House had started, once her picture was in the paper, once she’d had her photograph taken with Princess Anne – and since she now had a child and couldn’t be pitied and, worse, had more or less handed the child over to be looked after by Theresa the help – she was seen as flashy. Sussex would be a better county for her.
‘Vilna,’ said Alexandra, ‘what do you know about Lucy Lint?’
‘I try not to think about her,’ said Vilna. ‘Why depress oneself? She is quite mad. Why don’t you forget her?’
‘Because she makes it difficult,’ said Alexandra. ‘She keeps popping up. And because I have no idea what there is to forget. No one says anything clearly enough. If Lucy Lint was going round pestering my husband, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Darling, I don’t know you very well. We have been acquaintances, not friends. That has not been my doing. People round here are stand-offish. Abbie told me that word. Abbie is your friend: she should have told you. But she was too English. She thought if she looked the other way it would go away. She told me that.’
‘I am sorry if I have seemed stand-offish,’ said Alexandra, and she was. In the grim light of death anyone who lives seems valuable. Though the light quickly fades and we are back to normal. ‘I have just been so busy lately.’
‘Did Ned encourage Lucy Lint in any way?’ she asked. ‘Had he given her any reason to behave in the way she is?’
‘You know Ned, darling,’ said Vilna. ‘Always the ladies’ man.’
‘No, I didn’t know him as that way at all,’ said Alexandra stiffly, deciding she preferred Vilna as an acquaintance not a friend after all. ‘Ned was a very wife-and-child sort of man. A family man.’
‘One can be so wrong about people,’ said Vilna. ‘Even if married to them. I lived with Clive for four years and never knew he was a crim. I learnt that word from his friends. It is short for criminal.’
Vilna and Alexandra sat at the bar of the swimming pool and had drinks. Plum trees bent over the glass roof as if trying to get at the water below. The swimming pool, Alexandra realised, was where once the walled kitchen garden had been. The end wall of the room still incorporated some original Elizabethan brick. Everywhere else was gold and black mosaic. ‘Isn’t this a fantastic pool? Otto Cavalier was the interior designer, darling, did you know?’
Alexandra said she’d never heard of Otto Cavalier, which didn’t go down too well. She returned to the subject of Clive, in which she felt safe.
‘Nobody around here believes Clive is a criminal,’ said Alexandra politely. ‘Not even his city colleagues. He was framed; he was a sacrificial victim. Everyone knows that. You mustn’t feel bad about it.’
‘He is a crim,’ said Vilna firmly. ‘I know that for a fact. An English judge said so and British law is the envy of the world. That is one of the reasons my mother and I came to this country in the first place. Your husband was not a criminal but he was certainly highly sexed. He would press any pretty woman up against a wall at a party; at least that was my experience. You would not want it otherwise, I suppose? Who wants a gelded horse when they can have the real thing?’
Alexandra, who had never thought of Vilna as pretty, just rather over made-up, decided Vilna was one of those women who are convinced that all men have designs upon them, so deluded are they about their own attractions. She did not have the energy to defend Ned’s reputation. She simply discounted Vilna’s account of him.
‘Tell me about Sunday morning,’ she said.
‘Abbie called me at about ten in the
morning and I went round to The Cottage,’ said Vilna, as if she had been rehearsed. ‘When I got there the ambulance was just leaving with the body. I was disappointed. I’d never seen a dead body.’
‘I’m so sorry you were disappointed,’ said Alexandra.
‘Darling, I have offended you!’ cried Vilna. ‘I am so tactless. Cancel, cancel, as they say! There was Lucy Lint running up and down like a cat in a seizure with hardly a stitch of clothing on. I could afford to run around like that; believe me, Lucy Lint cannot. Flop, bounce, wobble! I would be so ashamed. That woman could afford to lose at least thirty pounds.’
‘No clothes on?’
‘She had one of your nighties on. I think Abbie made her put it on, to save her modesty. But it was very light and lacey. Dr Moebius gave her pills but they made no difference at all.’
‘Dr Moebius gave Lucy Lint pills?’
‘It might have been a jab, darling, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Forget it, darling. Your husband is gone. All men are bastards. Find another one, better than the last.’
‘I need to get things clear in my head,’ said Alexandra. ‘I know you are all trying to protect me but I wish you wouldn’t. And my husband was not all men, he was not a bastard. I love him.’
‘It is only a figure of speech,’ said Vilna. ‘Customary in this country.’
‘How exactly did you see Lucy Lint off?’ enquired Alexandra.
‘I hit her,’ said Vilna. ‘Forget it. We’re on your side, Alexandra.’
‘There isn’t a side to be on,’ said Alexandra. ‘Lucy Lint is just a sodding nuisance. I don’t want her saying anything to the fucking newspapers. What has Ned dying got to do with her? I don’t want her coming to the funeral, the bitch!’
‘There is no need to swear,’ said the wild woman of the mountain tribes, primly.