Later that night, as they were undressing for bed, Terry’s mum, who had been thinking, said to Terry’s dad:
‘Walter: you don’t think we ought to have told them about Wayne Catherick’s gran, do you?’
‘What about her?’
‘Old Mrs Corfitt, who lived next door. Should we have told them that she died of an overdose?’
‘No. ’Course not. What’s it to do with Terry? They said the old lady got confused and gave herself an extra lot.’
‘I suppose it would just have caused more trouble,’ agreed Mrs Mumford. ‘And as you say, it was nothing to do with Terry, was it?’
She turned out the light.
‘Well,’ she said, as she prepared for sleep, ‘I hope next time we go on holiday Terry finds someone nicer than that to make friends with!’
BREAKFAST TELEVISION
The coming of Breakfast Television has been a great boon to the British.
Caroline Worsley thought so anyway, as she sat in bed eating toast and sipping tea, the flesh of her arm companionably warm against the flesh of Michael’s arm. Soon they would make love again, perhaps while the consumer lady had her spot about dangerous toys, or during the review of the papers, or the resident doctor’s phone-in on acne. They would do it when and how the fancy took them—or as Michael’s fancy took him, for he was very imperative at times—and this implied no dislike or disrespect for the breakfast-time performer concerned. For Caroline liked them all, and could lie there quite happily watching any one of them: David the doctor, Jason the pop-chart commentator, Selma the fashion expert, Jemima the problems expert, Reg the sports round-up man, and Maria the link-up lady. And of course Ben, the link-up man.
Ben, her husband.
It had all worked out very nicely indeed. Ben was called for by the studio at four-thirty. Michael always waited for half an hour after that, in case Ben had forgotten something and made a sudden dash back to the flat for it. Michael was a serious, slightly gauche young man, who would hate to be caught out in a situation both compromising and ridiculous. Michael was that rare thing, a studious student—though very well-built too, Caroline told herself appreciatively. His interests were work, athletics, and sex. It was Caroline who had initiated him into the pleasures of regular sex. At five o’clock his alarm clock went off, though as he told Caroline, it was rarely necessary. His parents were away in Africa, dispensing aid, know-how and Oxfam beatitudes in some godforsaken part of Africa, so he was alone in their flat. He put his tracksuit on, so that in the unlikely event of his being seen in the corridor he could pretend to be going running. But he never had been. By five past he was in Caroline’s flat, and in the bedroom she shared with Ben. They had almost an hour and a half of sleeping and love-making before breakfast television began.
Not that Michael watched it with the enthusiasm of Caroline. Sometimes he took a book along and read it while Caroline was drawing in her breath in horror at combustible toys, or tut-tutting at some defaulting businessman who had left his customers in the lurch. He would lie there immersed in The Mechanics of the Money Supply or Some Problems of Exchange-Rate Theory—something reasonably straightforward, anyway, because he had to read against the voice from the set, and from time to time he was conscious of Ben looking directly at him. He never quite got used to that.
It didn’t bother Caroline at all.
‘Oh look, his tie’s gone askew,’ she would say, or: ‘You know, Ben’s much balder than he was twelve months ago—I’ve never noticed it in the flesh.’ Michael seldom managed to assent to such propositions with any easy grace. He was much too conscious of balding, genial, avuncular Ben, grinning out from the television screen, as he tried to wring from some graceless pop-star three words strung together consecutively that actually made sense. ‘I think he’s getting fatter in the face,’ said Caroline, licking marmalade off her fingers.
• • •
‘I am not getting fatter in the face,’ shouted Ben. ‘Balder, yes, fatter in the face definitely not.’ He added in a voice soaked in vitriol: ‘Bitch!’
He was watching a video of yesterday’s love-making on a set in his dressing-room, after the morning’s television session had ended. His friend Frank, from the technical staff, had rigged up the camera in the cupboard of his study, next door to the bedroom. The small hole that was necessary in the wall had been expertly disguised. Luckily Caroline was a deplorable housewife. Eventually she might have discovered the sound apparatus under the double bed, but even then she would probably have assumed it was some junk of Ben’s that he had shoved there out of harm’s way. Anyway, long before then . . .
Long before then—what?
‘Hypocritical swine!’ yelled Ben, as he heard Caroline laughing with Michael that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had really wiped the floor with him in that interview. ‘She told me when I got home yesterday how well I’d handled it.’
As the shadowy figures on the screen turned to each other again, their bare flesh glistening dully in the dim light, Ben hissed: ‘Whore!’
The make-up girl concentrated on removing the traces of powder from his neck and shirt-collar, and studiously avoided comment.
‘I suppose you think this is sick, don’t you?’ demanded Ben.
‘It’s none of my business,’ the girl said, but added: ‘If she is carrying on, it’s not surprising, is it? Not with the hours we work.’
‘Not surprising? I tell you, I was bloody surprised! Just think how you would feel if your husband, or bloke, was two-timing you while you were at the studio.’
‘He is,’ said the girl. But Ben hadn’t heard. He frequently didn’t hear other people when he was off camera. His comfortable, sympathetic-daddy image was something that seldom spilled over into his private life. Indeed, at his worst, he could slip up even on camera: he could be leant forwards, listening to his interviewees with appearance of the warmest interest, then reveal by his next question that he hadn’t heard a word they were saying. But that happened very infrequently, and only when he was extremely preoccupied. Ben was very good at his job.
‘Now they’ll have tea,’ he said. ‘Everyone needs a tea-break in their working morning.’
Tea . . .
• • •
Shortly after this there was a break in Caroline’s delicious early-morning routine: her son Malcolm came home for a long weekend from school. Michael became no more than the neighbour’s son, at whom she smiled in the corridor. She and Malcolm had breakfast round the kitchen table. It was on Tuesday morning, when Malcolm was due to depart later in the day, that Ben made one of his little slips.
He was interviewing Cassy Le Beau from the long-running pop group The Crunch, and as he leaned forward to introduce a clip from the video of their latest musical crime, he said:
‘Now, this is going to interest Caroline and Michael, watching at home—’
‘Why did he say Michael?’ asked Caroline aloud, before she could stop herself.
‘He meant Malcolm,’ said their son. ‘Anyway, it’s bloody insulting, him thinking I’d be interested in The Crunch.’
Because Malcolm was currently rehearsing Elgar’s Second with the London Youth Orchestra. Ben was about two years out of date with his interests.
• • •
‘Did you see that yesterday morning?’ Caroline asked Michael, the next day.
‘What?’
‘Ben’s slip on Wake Up, Britain yesterday.’
‘I don’t watch breakfast telly when I’m not with you.’
‘Well, he did one of those “little messages home” that he does—you probably don’t remember, but there was all this publicity about the families when Wake Up, Britain started, and Ben got into the habit of putting little messages to Malcolm and me into the programme. Ever so cosy and ever so bogus. Anyway, he did one yesterday, as Malcolm was home, only he said “Caroline and Michael”. Not Malcolm, but Michael.’
Michael shrugged.
‘Just a slip of the tongue.’
&n
bsp; ‘But his own son, for Christ’s sake! And for the slip to come out as Michael!’
‘These things happen,’ said Michael, putting his arm around her and pushing her head back on to the pillow. ‘Was there a Michael on the show yesterday?’
‘There was Michael Heseltine on, as usual.’
‘There you are, you see.’
‘But Heseltine’s an ex-cabinet minister. He would never call him Michael.’
‘But the name was in his head. These things happen. Remember, Ben’s getting old.’
‘True,’ said Caroline, who was two years younger than her husband.
• • •
‘Old!’ shouted Ben, dabbing at his artificially-darkened eyebrows, one eye on the screen. ‘You think I’m old? I’ll show you I’ve still got some bolts left in my locker.’
He had dispensed with the services of the make-up girl. He had been the only regular on Wake Up, Britain to demand one anyway, and the studio was surprised but pleased when Ben decided she was no longer required. Now he could watch the previous evening’s cavortings without the damper of her adolescent disapproval from behind his shoulder.
And now he could plan.
One of the factors that just had to be turned to his advantage was Caroline’s deplorable housekeeping. All the table-tops of the kitchen were littered with bits of this and that—herbs, spices, sauces, old margarine tubs, bits of jam on dishes. The fridge was like the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the freezer was a record of their married life. And on the window-ledge in the kitchen were the things he used to do his little bit of gardening . . .
Ben and Caroline inhabited one of twenty modern service flats in a block. Most of the gardening was done by employees of the landlords, yet some little patches were allotted to tenants who expressed an interest. Ben had always kept up his patch, though (as was the way of such things) it was more productive of self-satisfaction than of fruit or veg. ‘From our own garden’, he would say, as he served his guests horrid little bowls of red currants.
Already on the window-ledge in the kitchen there was a little bottle of paraquat.
That afternoon he pottered around in his mouldy little patch. By the time he had finished and washed his hands under the kitchen tap the paraquat had found its way next to the box of tea-bags standing by the kettle. The top of the paraquat was loose, having been screwed only about half way round.
‘Does you good to get out on your own patch of earth,’ Ben observed to Caroline, as he went through to his study.
• • •
The next question that presented itself was: when? There were all sorts of possibilities—including that the police would immediately arrest him for murder, he was reconciled to that—but he thought that on the whole it would be best to do it on the morning when he was latest home. Paraquat could be a long time in taking effect, he knew, but there was always a chance that they would not decide to call medical help until it was too late. If he was to come home to a poisoned wife and lover in the flat, he wanted them to be well and truly dead. Wednesday was the day when all the breakfast TV team met in committee to hear what was planned for the next week: which ageing star would be plugging her memoirs, which singer plugging his forthcoming British tour. Wednesdays Ben often didn’t get home till early afternoon. Wednesday it was.
Tentatively in his mental engagements book he pencilled in Wednesday, May 15.
Whether the paraquat would be in the teapot of the Teasmade, or in the tea-bag, or how it would be administered, was a minor matter that he could settle long before the crucial Tuesday night when the tea-things for the morning had to be got ready. The main thing was that everything was decided.
• • •
May 15—undoubtedly a turning-point in her life—began badly for Caroline. First of all Ben kissed her goodbye before he set off for the studio, something he had not done since the early days of his engagement on breakfast television. Michael had come in at five o’clock as usual, but his love-making was forced, lacking in tenderness. Caroline lay there for an hour in his arms afterwards, wondering if anything was worrying him. He didn’t say anything for some time—not till the television was switched on. Probably he relied on the bromides and the plugs to distract Caroline’s attention from what he was going to say.
He had taken up his textbook, and the kettle of the Teasmade was beginning to hum, when he said, in his gruff, teenage way:
‘Won’t be much more of this.’
Caroline was watching clips from a Frank Bruno fight, and not giving him her full attention. When it was over, she turned to him:
‘Sorry—what did you say?’
‘I said there won’t be much more of this.’
A dagger went to her heart, which seemed to stop beating for minutes. When she could speak, the words came out terribly middle-class-matron.
‘I don’t quite understand. Much more of what?’
‘This. You and me together in the mornings.’
‘You don’t mean your parents are coming home early?’
‘No. I’ve . . . got a flat. Nearer college. So there’s not so much travelling in the mornings and evenings.’
‘You’re just moving out?’
‘Pretty much so. Can’t live with my parents for ever.’
Caroline’s voice grew louder and higher.
‘You’re not living with your parents. It’s six months before they come home. You’re moving out on me. Do you have the impression that I’m the sort of person you can just move in with when it suits you, and then flit away from when it doesn’t suit you any longer?’
‘Well . . . yes, actually. I’m a free agent.’
‘You bastard! You bastard!’
She would have liked to take him by the shoulder and shake him till the teeth rattled in his head. Instead she sat there on the bed, coldly furious. It was 7.15. The kettle whistled and poured boiling water on to the tea-bags in the teapot.
‘Have some tea or coffee,’ said Ben on the screen to his politician guest, with a smile that came out as a death’s head grin. ‘It’s about early morning tea-time.’
‘It’s someone else, isn’t it?’ finally said Caroline, her voice kept steady with difficulty. ‘A new girlfriend.’
‘All right, it’s a new girlfriend,’ agreed Michael.
‘Someone younger.’
‘Of course someone younger,’ said Michael, taking up his book again, and sinking into monetarist theory.
Silently Caroline screamed: Of course someone younger. What the hell’s that supposed to mean? They don’t come any older than you? Of course I was just passing the time with a crone like you until someone my own age came along?
‘You’re moving in with a girl,’ she said, the desolation throbbing in her voice.
‘Yeah,’ said Michael, from within his Hayek.
‘Tea all right?’ Ben asked his guest.
Caroline sat there, watching the flickering images on the screen, while the tea in the pot turned from hot to warm. The future spread before her like a desert—a future as wife and mother. What kind of life was that, for God’s sake? For some odd reason a future as lover had seemed, when she had thought about it at all, fulfilling, traditional and dignified. Now any picture she might have of the years to come was turned into a hideous, mocking, negative image, just as the body beside her in the bed had turned from a glamorous sex object into a boorish, ungrateful teenager.
They were having trouble in the Wake Up, Britain studio, where the two anchor people had got mixed up as to who was introducing what. Caroline focused on the screen: she always enjoyed it when Ben muffed something.
‘Sorry,’ said Ben, smiling his kindly-uncle smile. ‘I thought it was Maria, but in fact it’s me. Let’s see . . . I know it’s David, our resident medico, but actually I don’t know what your subject is today, David.’
‘Poison,’ said David.
But the camera had not switched to him, and the instant he dropped the word into the ambient atmosphere
Caroline (and one million other viewers) saw Ben’s jaw drop, and an expression of panic flash like lightning through his eyes.
‘I’ve had a lot of letters from parents of small children,’ said David, in his calm, everything-will-be-all-right voice, ‘about what to do if the kids get hold of poison. Old medicines, household detergents, gardening stuff—they can all be dangerous, and some can be deadly.’ Caroline saw Ben, the camera still agonizingly on him, swallow hard and put his hand up to his throat. Then, mercifully, the producer changed the shot at last to the doctor, leaning forward and doing his thing. ‘So here are a few basic rules about what to do in that sort of emergency . . .’
Caroline’s was not a quick mind, but suddenly a succession of images came together: Ben’s kiss that morning, his smile as he offered his guest early morning tea, a bottle of paraquat standing next to the box of tea-bags in the kitchen, Ben’s dropping jaw at the sudden mention of poison.
‘Michael,’ she said.
‘What?’ he asked, hardly bothering to take his head out of his book.
She looked at the self-absorbed, casually cruel body, and her blood boiled.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Let’s have tea. It’ll be practically cold by now.’
She poured two cups, and handed him his. He put aside his book, which he had hardly been reading, congratulating himself in his mind on having got out of this so lightly. He took the cup, and sat on the bed watching the screen, where the sports man was now introducing highlights of last night’s athletics meeting from Oslo.
‘Boy!’ said Michael appreciatively, stirring his tea. ‘That was a great run!’
He took a great gulp of the tea, then hurriedly put the cup down, turned to look at Caroline, and then choked.
Caroline had not taken up her tea, but sat there looking at the graceless youth. Round her lips there played a smile of triumphal revenge—a smile that the camera whirring away in the secrecy of the study cupboard perfectly caught for Ben, and for the criminal court that tried them, ironically, together.
Death of a Salesperson Page 5