Atherton closed his notebook. ‘Thank you very much Mr Ringham. You’ve been very helpful. Now if you should remember anything else, anything at all, no matter how trivial it seems to you, you will be sure to let me know, won’t you. You can reach me on this number.’
‘Yes, okay – but look here, I won’t be involved in anything, will I? I mean, I can’t identify this man or anything, and I’ve got Denise and the kid to think about.’
Well, all witnesses have their limitations, Atherton thought, and reassured him with some vaguenesses and long words. In his own powder-blue Sierra, driving home to the sanctuary of his civilised little house, cat, real fire and elegant supper, he wondered how far this had got them. Enter Mr X in sinister trilby. He never trusted men who wore hats like that. So they now knew that she met the murderer at The Dog and Scrotum, and though the description was not promising, it might just as well have been Thompson. He was just the kind of jerk who would attempt to disguise himself by wearing a very obvious hat and muffler.
Anyway, at least they knew that she went to the White City in her own car. It would be worth interviewing the residents of Barry House again and asking about a red MGB. Surely someone must have noticed such a speciality car?
The atmosphere in the house was as icy as Slider had expected it to be.
Irene gave him a boiled stare and said, ‘There’s nothing for supper, except what’s in the fridge. I wasn’t to know you’d be home, and I’m not endlessly cooking meals to throw them away.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Slider patient under insult. ‘I can get myself something.’ Even as he said it, he wondered what. Irene was not the sort of person to tolerate leftovers. The fridge would most likely be as innocent of food as an operating-table of germs – and for much the same reason. Atherton had long ago pointed out to him – in a different context of course – the correlation between lack of sexual outlet and an obsession with hygiene.
Both the children were home and had friends in, and Slider was able to use them, as so often before, as a screen. He asked Matthew about his football match, and sat through an interminable verbal action-replay. Matthew’s friend, a pinch-nosed, adenoidal boy called Sibod, with such flamingly red hair that it looked like a deliberate insult, repeated everything half a beat behind, so that Slider got it all, or rather failed to get it at all, in an unsynchronised, faulty stereophony.
‘So you won, then, did you?’ Slider asked at last, groping for comprehension.
‘Well, yes, we did win,’ Matthew said with an anxious frown, ‘and if we win again next Saturday against Beverley’s, we win the Shield. Only they’re very good, and if we only draw, it goes on goals, and we didn’t do very well on goals.’ From his worried expression, it was plain that the whole responsibility for their goal-less state rested on his shoulders. Like father, like son.
‘Well, even if you don’t win, it doesn’t matter, as long as you do your best,’ Slider said, as parents have said throughout the ages. Simon and Matthew both looked uncomprehending of his stupidity.
‘But it’s the Shield!’ Matthew began, desperate to get this point across to unfeeling parenthood.
Slider forestalled him hastily. ‘Matthew, is that bubble gum you’re eating? I’ve told you again and again, I won’t have you eating that disgusting stuff. Take it out and throw it away.’
‘But you let me eat chewing gum,’ Matthew protested. ‘Only you can’t make decent bubbles with chewing gum.’
‘Chewing gum’s different,’ Slider said. The next question would be why. And since he didn’t know, other than that it was personal prejudice, because the smell of bubble gum reminded him of the smell of the rubber mask they used to put over your face to give you gas in the dental hospital back in the dark ages of his childhood, he took refuge in authority.
‘Please don’t argue with me. Just do as I say. Take it out and throw it away, please – and wrap it in something first,’ he added as Matthew, sighing heavily, stumped off towards the kitchen. Simon followed him, and he felt Irene’s eye on him, saying as clearly as words, My how you love to play the heavy father, don’t you? It’s all Action Man, as long as it’s only a couple of kids you have to stand up to.
He postponed being alone with her and her eye by going upstairs to see Kate, who was locked into one of her intensely private and uncomfortably ritualised games with Slider’s least favourite of her best friends – a fat child called Emma who was so relentlessly sentimental and feminine that it made him squirm with embarrassment. When he pushed open the bedroom door, they were engaged in being schoolteachers to a class of six dolls, including a bald and one-legged Barbie of hideous aspect, a toy monkey and a bear. Emma’s part at the point of his entry was confined to watching admiringly and breathing heavily through her mouth, but Kate was haranguing her victims in such tones of hectoring sarcasm that Slider wondered afresh if that was the way adults really appeared to children.
‘I think I’ve told you before never, never to do that, haven’t I?’ Kate was saying to the teddy bear. Slider had long ago named it Gladly, because its eyes were sewn on asymmetrically, and there had been a hymn he had sung in Sunday school when he was a child called ‘Gladly my Cross I’d Bear’. Kate had accepted the name unquestioningly as she accepted all the incomprehensibilities of the grown-up world, as if they were nothing to do with her. Slider remembered being as young as that, with a mind gloriously untrammelled by a knowledge of the probabilities. When he was very small, he’d thought God’s name was Harold, because of the second line of the Lord’s Prayer, and it had not seemed at all surprising. Similarly he had believed for a very long time that there was a senior government official called The Lord Priwy, whose rod of office was an eel.
The thing, he thought, that marked him apart from his own children was that when he learned the truth of these matters it struck him as interesting and memorable. Nothing, he felt, would ever interest Kate beyond her own immediate sensations. She had already created herself in what she considered an acceptable image, and while that image would undergo subtle alterations year by year, the primary purpose of her life would always be the maintenance of whatever was the current version.
He regarded her sadly as she broke off her diatribe and looked at him with disfavour, minute fists on hips, lips narrowed in an uncomfortably familiar way. How was it, he thought, that without ever in the least intending to, we recreate our idiosyncrasies in our children? Already Matthew was exhibiting signs of Slider’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility, his indecisiveness and tendency to worry about what he could not change. And Kate was turning day by day into a grotesque caricature of her mother. How could it have happened? For in sad truth, he had spent horribly little time with either of them since they were babies. Once they had settled into regular bedtimes, they had been lost to him. It must be Original Sin, he thought sadly.
He had intended asking his daughter about her fête, but she said, ‘Go away Daddy. We don’t want you now,’ and self-respect and a sense of duty obliged him instead to deliver a lecture on good manners. Kate listened to it with indifferent eyes and the patience of one who knows that resistance will only prolong the interruption. She was so different in that respect from Matthew, who would have flung himself into the situation with the burning conviction of a martyr, and ended in tears. Kate, Slider thought, had been born aged well over forty. Having finished with his bit of rôle-play, he left the room, and before he had shut the door behind him he heard Kate’s instant resumption of hers: ‘Now I’m sure you don’t want me to have to smack you again, do you?’ Even from his limited knowledge of Kate’s games, he didn’t think Gladly had much chance of talking himself out of that one.
And now there was no alternative but to descend to the realm of snow and ice, and face up to his other responsibility; his other, he supposed, creation – for Irene had not always been like this, and what could have shaped her apart from the interaction of his influence on her basic matter? She was sitting on the sofa staring at the televisio
n, though he knew she wasn’t watching it. It was, however, The News, and one of the rules Irene had made for herself was that The News was important and mustn’t be disturbed or talked during.
As far as he could see the news was itself and always the same: on the screen now was a battered street in some hot part of the world where houses are made of concrete filled with steel rods, like motorway bridges. An intermittent brattle of machine-gun fire was punctuating the urgent, segmented commentary, and interchangeable men in identical drab battledress were running and ducking and, presumably, dying. It struck him as odd how news of war, though it was repetitive and completely unsurprising, should be regarded as ‘real’ news, whereas anything which exemplified the kindness or inventiveness or compassion of human beings was included, if at all, only at the end of the bulletin as a sop to old ladies and housewives – the ‘And finally’ item.
All the same he was glad for the moment of the flickering images of death and suffering as a way to avoid talking to his wife. How many marriages were kept intact that way, he wondered wearily. His mind felt numb and exhausted with the effort of guilt and anxiety, and the frustration of being in the middle of a maze with no idea which was the way out, or even if there was one. Irene; the children; Anne-Marie; Thompson; Atherton; the Supér: all revolved like Macbeth’s witches, indistinct, dangerous, clamouring for his attention – all expecting answers from him, who had no idea even of the questions. O’Flaherty’s voice waxed and waned like the sea, warning him of some danger in a booming, portentous voice; and far, far away, small and clear like something seen through crystal, was Joanna – almost out of reach, too far, and fading, fading …
‘If you’re going to fall asleep, you might as well go to bed,’ Irene said, jerking him back out of a doze. The news had finished, to be replaced by that witless sitcom about a couple who had reversed their traditional rôles, she going out to work while he stayed home and minded the house. The laughs were presumably generated by the sight of a man wearing an apron and not knowing how to operate the dishwasher. It was depressingly 1950s.
‘Eh?’ he said, trying to look interested in the programme. The man was holding a nappy and looking at the baby with a puzzled expression. Any minute now he would say ‘Now which end does this go on?’
‘It’s useless sitting there pretending you’re watching when you were snoring a minute ago,’ Irene went on, and then, with an excess of vicious irritation, ‘I hate it when your head slips over, and you keep jerking it up every three seconds!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly, meaning it, and she just looked at him with a resentment so chronic, so weary, that he was filled with a sense of helplessness. It was so vast that for a moment it seemed to blot out his personality entirely. He ought to take her hand, ask her what was wrong, try to reach her and comfort her, this woman whom he daily hurt and saddened; and yet how could he help her, when it was the simple fact of his existence which made her unhappy? He couldn’t ask what was wrong, when there was nothing he could do to put it right, and the pity he felt was as useless, as unuseable, as that which he felt for the crumpled bodies on the television news film. That was the intractable, daily dilemma of married life, and it blocked the flow of tenderness, and finally even killed the desire for it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. It would have been better not to have spoken, to have got up in silence and gone up to bed, leaving the unsayable unsaid. She knew it too. She turned her head away from him, a gesture of adult hurt he had seen her make almost all their lives together.
‘For what?’ she said.
For what indeed? For the fact that the only way he could live with his crippling sense of responsibility was to be a policeman and do the one thing he could do well to make the world a better place. Fat comfort.
‘It isn’t nice for me either,’ he said at last. ‘Never being home. Never seeing my children. Do you know, Kate looked at me just now like a stranger. She just stood there waiting for me to go away again.’
There were many things Irene might have said or done in response to that appeal, but instead, after a short silence, she said in a neutral voice, ‘Marilyn Cripps rang earlier on.’
The Cripps were a couple they had met some time ago at a garden party: he was a magistrate, and she was on the PC of Dorney Church and was a voluntary steward for the National Trust at Cliveden. They had a large detached house and a son at Eton, and Irene had been almost humble when after the first meeting Mrs Cripps had proved willing to continue the acquaintance. That was the kind of society she had always longed for; the sort she would have had as of right if Slider had only been promoted as he ought to have been. The wife of a police commissioner might mix on equal terms with the highest in the land.
‘She asked us to a dinner party,’ she went on unemphatically, ‘but I couldn’t accept without consulting you. With most husbands, of course, that would be just a formality, but with you I suppose it’s hardly even worth asking.’
‘Well, when is it, exactly,’ Slider began dishonestly, for he knew her indifferent tone of voice was assumed.
‘What’s the point? Even if you say yes, when the time comes you’ll call it off at the last minute, which is so rude to the hostess. Or you’ll turn up late, which is worse. And even if you do go, you’ll complain about having to wear a dinner jacket, and sulk, and sit there staring at the wall and saying nothing, and start like an imbecile if anyone talks to you.’
‘Why don’t you go without me?’ Slider said cautiously.
‘Don’t be stupid!’ She showed a flash of anger. ‘We were invited as a couple. You don’t go to dinner parties like that on your own. I wouldn’t be so inconsiderate as to suggest it.’
There was nothing he could say to that, so he kept silent. After a moment she went on, in a low, grumbling tone, like a volcano building up to its eruption.
‘I hate going out without you. Everyone looks at me so pityingly, as if I were a leper. How can I have any kind of decent social life with you? How am I ever going to meet anyone. It’s bad enough living on this estate –’
‘I thought you liked this estate.’
‘You know nothing about what I like!’ she flared. ‘I liked it all right as a start, but I never thought we’d be staying here permanently. I thought you’d get on, and then we’d move to somewhere better; somewhere like Datchet or Chalfont, where nice people live. Somewhere the children can make the right sort of friends. Somewhere where they give dinner parties!’
Slider managed not to smile at that, for she was deadly serious. ‘Well if you’re not happy here, we’ll move,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you start looking round –’
‘How can we move?’ she cried, goaded. ‘We can’t afford anywhere decent on what you earn! God knows you’re never here, you work long enough hours – or so you tell me – but where does it get you? Other people are always being promoted ahead of you. And you know why – because they know you’ve got no ambition. You don’t care. You won’t speak up for yourself. You won’t make the effort to be nice to the right people …’
‘There’s such a thing as pride –’
‘Oh! Pride! Are you proud of being everyone’s dogsbody? Are you proud of being left all the rotten jobs? Being left behind by men half your age? They don’t respect you for it, you know. I’ve seen you at those department parties, standing on your own, refusing to talk to anyone in case they think you’re sucking up to them. And I’ve seen the way they look at you. You embarrass them. You’re a white elephant.’
She stopped abruptly, hearing the echo of her own words, unforgivable, on the air. He was silent. Policemen should never marry, he thought dully, because they couldn’t honour all their obligations and still do their job properly. And yet if they didn’t marry, like priests they wouldn’t be whole people; and how could they do their job properly if they were in ignorance of the way ninety per cent of people lived?
For a fleeting, guilty moment he thought of Joanna, and how if he were married to someone like her
it would be all right. No, not someone like her, but her. With her he could be a good policeman, and happy. Happy and good, and understood. His tired mind reeled. He mustn’t think about Joanna in the middle of a row with Irene. That was bad.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this is a very bad case I’m in the middle of, and –’
She didn’t wait for him to finish. ‘You can’t even pay me the compliment of being angry, can you. Oh God!’ She stared at him, furious and helpless, frozen like an illustration in the Strand Magazine. ‘Baffled’, was the word they would have used.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he began again, ‘but this is a particularly horrible case. An old woman and a young man have been killed since the original murder, and I feel partly to blame for that. It’s going to take up all my time and energy until I can get further forward, and that simply can’t be helped. But I promise you, when it’s over, we’ll really get down to it and have a long talk, and try to sort things out. Will you try and be patient, please?’
She shrugged.
‘And now I think I will go up to bed. I haven’t had any sleep for ages, and I’m dead beat.’
Typically, once he had gone upstairs and undressed and cleaned his teeth and got into bed, he found himself wide awake, his mind ready and eager to tramp endlessly over the beaten ground of the case. In self-defence he took up his bedside book, a long-neglected and suitably soporific Jeffrey Archer, and thus was still sitting up reading when Irene came in.
‘I thought you were dead beat,’ she said neutrally. The heaviness of her tread spoke of her unhappiness: she had always been a brisk, light mover.
‘Getting ready for bed woke me up, so I thought I’d read for a bit,’ he said. She turned away to make her own preparations, and he watched her covertly while pretending to be engrossed in the book. In complete contrast to Joanna, she was a woman who looked better dressed than undressed: she had the kind of figure that clothes were designed to look good on, but which was of little interest viewed solely as a body. She was slender without being either rounded or supple; she had straight arms and legs, flat hips, and small, dim breasts which, he thought now, had only ever made him feel sad.
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