Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  The UK version of this stuff was Bloody Murder: London—as I’ve mentioned, I’d done much of the casting for that show. So when I say Catherine Z-J, I know what I’m talking about. Sooner or later, Anna’s death would be featured, no question about it. I figured maybe I could wangle a comeback when it was. Now that would be interesting.

  Having “promised” Will I would go and talk to Oscar, I figured I might as well make good on it. It might prove useful, and Oscar—well, at least Oscar was never boring.

  “Besides,” I added, letting Will in on some of my thinking, “I need to talk to someone right now. And Oscar’s good at getting me out of a slump.”

  “Is that what you call it?” he said, not completely unkindly. Not completely. There was a shade of old Will peering out from behind fed-up, up-himself Will now. And there was a softening in his voice that allowed me to say, “The thing with Anna. It reminds me of my brother somehow. She … it’s so … awful. I don’t know if I can stand to relive it. But I don’t seem to have a choice.”

  He nodded. I had told Will soon after we first met about my brother, and I could see how it got to him, the pity in his eyes. Pity is such a dangerous emotion; it can masquerade as love. I told him how I did everything I could to save my brother, and how I still felt the most terrible guilt.

  “Of course you did everything you could,” he’d insisted. “You were only a child yourself.”

  I knew my face now reflected some of my turmoil. His was pale, devoid of color. He looked like he’d aged ten years. He also looked as if he might have been crying.

  The uncaring Will of recent weeks was gone and for the moment, my Will was back. He reached out and drew me onto his chest, holding me and kissing the top of my head. It was so unexpected, so tender; the treacherous tears I had banished forever, ages ago, sprang to my eyes.

  This is what kept me off balance—this thing Will was doing, right there and then. He could not bear to see anyone suffer, you see. Especially when he was the cause. Otherwise Will was careful to avoid any scene with the potential to turn emotional.

  Eventually, he extricated himself from my grasp. Furiously I dug my fists into my eyes to quell the tears. I didn’t want his sympathy. What was wrong with me?

  “Look, I’m going out,” he said. “I have to go out,” he amended. “I’m meeting Gideon’s father for a drink.” This was a huge concession; Will seldom bothered anymore to tell me where he was going or who with. “You’ll be all right on your own?”

  I nodded mutely. Wasn’t I always? All right, and on my own?

  “Look,” he said. “Just—try to be … calm. Relax, if you can. And no more drink, at least for tonight, all right?”

  I almost laughed. It was so Will. So very British. Just pull your socks up, stay sober, and everything will be fine.

  “Are you happy?” I asked him. “I mean, despite … ?” It was a ridiculous question, given the circumstances. We barely spoke anymore; it had all broken down. Why would I care if he was happy?

  But I wanted to hear what he’d say.

  Predictably, the question embarrassed him. “You mean, despite all this.” He swept his hand vaguely about the room, and I was reminded of the Monty Python line, “What, the curtains?”

  I wanted to laugh but I just nodded.

  “Not happy,” he said. “No. Dazed would be a better word. We’ll—we’ll sort it all out. Just give it time. Let’s … For now, I’m content to wait and see.”

  The way he said it, I could hear things unspoken. “We’ll sort it all out, and then … ” And then what? Goodbye?

  I decided not to press. So long as Will was content for now, I thought, that’s good.

  That was all that mattered.

  Part 3

  16

  I am a stranger in a strange land. As much as I love England, apart from the soggy winters, I know I will always be a stranger; I will spend my entire life on this island peering into other’s lives from outside. Perhaps that’s just what writers do, anyway.

  But at least living in the UK expands your vocabulary with words like “bedsit” and “chunder” and phrases like “two up two down.” There’s that.

  I still don’t know offhand the difference between icing sugar and powdered sugar, or my way around frosting and butter icing and royal icing and just plain icing, not to mention caster sugar, and whether you pronounce scones as “scons” or “scoans”—the British don’t seem sure of that one, either (Will’s mother pronounced it “scons,” so we can probably take that as gospel). Then there are muffins and crumpets; there are cookers and stoves and ovens. These are just the problems I’ve had in the kitchen. The universal language of love is not, I’ve found, all that universal.

  Celsius versus Fahrenheit, millimeter versus ounce—once you’ve got that down, as well as the wardrobe, particularly the shoes, you’re a native. The accent is harder to pass off and I never wanted to join the pretentious who try to adopt the posh version. Even trained actors fail here; we’ve all heard some calamitous bits of miscasting on the silver screen. This crosses both ways: I kept wondering why Rosamund Pike kept sneering and whining through her nose throughout Gone Girl until I realized that’s how we sound to the British.

  Will had the most desirable accent of all; he went to Eton. And he had the hair—mountains of thick wavy hair cut in that voluminous, floppy Etonian way. They all look alike, these boys of privilege: they talk alike, they walk alike, they talk about all the same things, and the best-trained actor can’t begin to imitate them.

  Will told me something of his life at Eton, which I gathered was not always a laugh riot. That constant if unstated pressure to be better-than, which pressure I understood completely. The fact that showing weakness was never allowed, even though you were just a kid of thirteen. You had to be a man. I felt a bit sorry for Will, hearing this. This was before I knew about pity, how it can be confused with love, and how dangerous that is.

  Apart from that sense of being an alien, the real problem I had in Weycombe was that I was bored, depressed, and down on myself for being made redundant (that lovely British euphemism meaning canned, your key card confiscated, your computer locked). Although for a while there I’d enjoyed my freedom. Early on I literally ran about the house hugging myself (once Will was safely on his way to the train station), so happy I didn’t have to trail along beside him in heels, clutching my leather tote with its laptop and iPhone and all the toys grown-ups play “business” with. None of that for me, the pointless shuffling of papers and creating new problems to solve. I was going to make money on my own terms, answering only to myself.

  But doing what, exactly?

  I only wanted to write and I kept circling back to that.

  Write what? That I didn’t know.

  It is possible recent experience with Will contributed to my utter inability to write erotica but I didn’t want to think too much about that. I did try writing a Regency romance, but that stalled out at fifty pages.

  How did these superwomen do it? The ones who found time away from playdates and diaper changes to do something dynamic and financially rewarding inside the home, avoiding the commute, pausing only long enough to be interviewed over Skype about their amazing success. I didn’t even have the excuse of childrearing to fill the hours that began to stretch from ten a.m., when I returned from my daily walk, to five p.m., when I would start to cook dinner. Or three p.m., when I might sometimes have a glass of wine. Will wanted to wait to have children “until we were more settled.” Something told me not to push too hard on that subject. What if I asked him point-blank and his answer was no, never—or worse, not with you? I want children but not with you?

  What else was there to engage me, then? Writing a memoir? My memoirs would fill at best a few paragraphs: I, Jillian Anna Violet White, was born with an ability to memorize almost anything you put in front of me. Any scene, any page. That was my
one gift, my ticket to a scholarship at Wellesley.

  Nothing in my childhood had prepared me for life with blue-blooded Will. My parents briefly separated when I was fifteen and my mother and I went to live with my grandmother, who was the antithesis of upper crust. In my memory she is always in her lavender stretch pants from Sears with a starched white top tucked into the elastic waist. She dotted vanilla extract behind her ears for scent and always looked clean and neat and dirt poor. I tried to picture my grandmother sitting in Will’s mother’s tufted sitting room and it was impossible.

  She was for me an oasis of sanity. She lived in Virginia, in the sort of little town that made you think of endless summers and apple pies and white wicker rockers on the front porch. It had rows of nineteenth-century houses and shops; to kids from the nearby farms it was the Big City. The last time I went to see her was just before the Parkinson’s took hold and she found it difficult to walk or talk. The conversation, as usual, turned to my brother. Which is kind of why I started avoiding her. She got morbid in her old age, paranoid and rambling, turning on people. Turning on me. The doctor said that was a normal part of the disease, only to be expected.

  I’d been brought up on or around military bases stretching from California to New Hampshire, living with a constant background hum of jets flying overhead. It made me feel safe, knowing someone was always patrolling the skies on my behalf, especially since no one on the ground could really be bothered.

  Then my father retired and moved us to Maine, in what was clearly a midlife overreaction to the rules and regulations of military life. It was at this point he began falling apart, becoming enamored of hunting and little else. Without someone to tell him what to do and when to do it, he was lost, and what really pissed him off, I think, was finding how hopeless he was at life. My mother was not strong enough to fill the void or create the structure that he needed. My grandmother tried but she was too far away. She’d send these little care packages, tins of homemade cookies cushioned in popcorn.

  My father began to drink once he retired. Or maybe he’d never stopped and it just became more apparent he was drunk once he was underfoot all the time. I suppose it is just possible he was on his face all day on the job and nobody noticed. Because he was in intelligence—the irony, I know—they did random drug testing on all those guys. But my dad was in charge of his squadron and maybe it never occurred to anyone to test the boss. If that makes you sleep less well tonight, knowing someone with his finger on the button might be drunk off his ass, well—yeah. It should.

  I had to get out or turn into them, into my parents. That fear guided my every move.

  My looks helped. I was aware of that from about junior high on, once I’d shed my ugly duckling carapace. But it was my brains that got me out of Dodge.

  My looks don’t matter to my story, except that without them, Will would never have noticed me, I would never have married my titled almost-prince, and I would never have had Weycombe to write about. If it matters to posterior, as Macy would say, I had brown hair falling past my shoulders and light brown eyes, and a heart-shaped face with a widow’s peak. I carried just 125 pounds on a five-foot-seven-inch frame, although under stress I weighed less. At the time Anna died, my Bugs Bunny pajama bottoms were barely clinging to the tops of my hips, and I knew I’d probably have to go to the next size down.

  I wondered if the local lingerie shop, Intime, carried Bugs Bunny PJs.

  17

  It might have been smarter to stay on the sidelines than investigate Anna Monroe’s death. But I had always been fascinated by crime—by murder, to be specific. Not by court dramas: by the time lawyers get involved the truth never comes out. But by the people who commit crimes. By the reasons behind premeditated crime, domestic crime, malice foreign and malice domestic. And all the ways a killer can get away with it—or thinks he can.

  At the BBC I started out doing broader categories of show but soon all my assignments were for Bloody Murder: London. It was an enormous hit from the day it launched, and I’ll take credit for that. I even wrote the scripts for some of the better shows. What I learned is that people don’t half get up to some crazy stuff, and they always get caught because they do one stupid thing that gets them caught. In domestic murders, especially, the necessary detachment is missing.

  I learned a lot about forensics doing the BM:L gig. For instance, did you know a tongue print is as good as a fingerprint for identification purposes? That everyone’s teeth are different—that even identical twins have different teeth?

  Also, FYI, if you’re going to do away with someone, just do it yourself. Hiring a hit man is never the way to go. Those cheap losers who hang around bars trying to find someone to kill their spouse for five hundred pounds—those are the ones who always get caught. The police even send out people to hang in bars, just trolling for malcontents.

  I remembered a conversation I had with my BM:L boss. A lecture, rather. He actually wagged his finger at me. “This isn’t fiction, Jillian,” he said. “It’s supposed to be true crime.” In my experience, true crime bears less relation to reality than does fiction, but I didn’t argue with him. The show’s sponsors were unhappy and that’s what mattered.

  Now Weycombe villagers would be starring in BM:L or some other British version of Dateline on OWN and here was I. How could I not want in?

  My parents once lived off-base near a house where a woman had been murdered five years earlier. I passed that house on my way to and from school—it was yellow, two stories with a red door—and every day I pictured the woman who had died there, lying mutilated in a pool of her own blood, sprawled at the foot of the stairs in the dirt-floor basement until someone at her job finally wondered where she’d got to. A boyfriend did it, they said. Her married lover. They never were able to pin it on him, if he did it. He was rich. He was connected.

  You just know that sort of thing happens a whole lot more than people think it does.

  How I landed that job at the BBC is difficult to explain, because to this day I don’t know why they thought I was qualified to do it. I applied not exactly as a lark but not expecting much, either. I seriously needed to find a job in the UK or be tossed out as an illegal alien, so I was applying for everything going, in scattershot fashion, only to be pipped at the post by some less qualified but native-born applicant. The only good thing was that the British have a wonderfully fair and polite system whereby if they call you for an interview, they pay for your transportation, realizing, as their American counterparts should do, that the expedition is costly and inconvenient to the applicant who most likely, being unemployed, is broke. In this way I traveled for free a good bit to and from London and Oxford, stopping in after interviews to see every play I could. This went on for months before I took my degree. While it was a good deal for me I was, as I say, growing increasingly worried that no one would hire me and I’d have to leave.

  The day of my interview with Eric Avalon, the man I’d soon come to think of as Beelzebub, I was let into his office by his assistant, Noelette Minon, whose finest quality as far as I ever was concerned was that wonderful, toady name. In addition to kowtowing to Eric she acted as his spy, reporting back on infractions large and small.

  It turned out that what made me perfect for the job in their eyes (Noelette stayed for the interview, glowering suspiciously throughout) was my Americanness, which they seemed to define as outgoing, friendly, and ballsy. I will own to the latter but not to the rest. I am in fact an introvert. People exhaust me and I am happiest in my own company, where I can withdraw and assess what happened during any unavoidable transactions with the outside world. But Eric had got it into his head that I would be able to draw in the right people with the talent and knowhow for any upcoming production. Finally I realized my spell of employment with Hollywood Green Productions had created this misapprehension. HGP was a deli in Wellesley, Massachusetts. But my experience in amateur theater at Oxford may also have help
ed.

  Of course I did what I could to foster this illusion of vast expertise—I knew I’d learn on the job once I’d landed it. That part of my confidence was, I suppose, pure American. And I had screwed myself up to a fever pitch over this. There was a letter from my Oxford college officials sitting on my desk, asking me to vacate my rooms by the end of summer so they could be readied for the next influx of graduate students. They’d let me overstay by several months after I’d completed all the work for my degree, drag it out as I might, being aware as they were of my circumstances. I had thrown myself on the mercy of the bursar, but even he did not have the authority to let me stay forever. I had to get out of there.

  So when Eric asked what I had actually done at HGP, I had done enough research on talent scouts to be able to describe my work at the deli in human resources terms, throwing around words like procurement and interview and due diligence, grinning at him with what I hoped was an energetic, can-do Yankee attitude.

  I glossed over the fact that my stint at HGP came just before I was forced to endure death by teenager at a newspaper, a gig that came along when I already thought life had kicked the last bit of stuffing out of me. I was working in a deli, for God’s sake—a college graduate who had gone heavily into student loan debt so I wouldn’t have to work in a goddamn deli.

  My journalism career didn’t last long, either. My boss at the small daily was a senior editor by virtue of being old—Mike had to be over sixty-five—and of having survived several past pogroms. The rumor was he had something on the publisher, some dirt or other that allowed him to hang on to his head while those around him were losing theirs.