Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘It wasn’t all in my mind, was it? He does exist, doesn’t he? Can I tell a liar from a lover? I dunno.’

  There was this fact about Glenmorangie: it kept on tasting good. Not as good as the first sip, but still good.

  ‘No, he wasn’t entirely a creature of fiction. Maybe fifty per cent the fevered imagination of those reporting on him, but more than a grain of truth.’

  ‘The man’s a bastard gone to ground, wherever he is. Where the hell has he gone?’ Ryan grunted, resolving privately, as he had publicly, that he personally was never going to search. They would turn over what they knew to the medical establishment, let them hound him out. If Littleton could not practise, he had no base for manipulation. It irked him that that was all they could do.

  ‘Where’s he gone? People asked the same questions about you a couple of days ago,’ Bailey said. ‘What makes you think you’re the only one with licence to disappear? The doc’s got plenty of money. Goes where he likes, and when. Earned money, own money, a mixture of both; mystery man. You’re a shit, Ryan. Why didn’t you trust me?’

  Ryan remembered to pause and think about his answer. Bailey had spent years teaching him that.

  ‘Didn’t. Couldn’t. You had a job to do and you know me too well. You knew I could have gone off the rails; you know how close I’ve been … Besides, I wanted to hit you for not being able to spring me out of there. I wanted to hit you. Kick you. In the balls. But you were always out of reach; like Helen always seems.’

  ‘Helen isn’t out of reach,’ Bailey said. ‘Merely absent.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of fucking it up; the wedding, I mean? Well, stone me; if you have to get married in secret, you ain’t got a lot going for you, have you? I didn’t believe you’d ever do it; nor did she. Funny what she said in the middle of the night.’

  Then he found Bailey standing over him. Pulling him up by the sleeves, shaking him like a rat, the sound of cloth tearing. Controlled violence of some intensity, designed to intimidate. It had been a good shirt, once.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, leave it alone, will you? Would I ever touch your woman, you stupid idiot? Even less, would she touch me? Hates my guts; don’t fancy me either. Nor me the other way round, if I’m being frank. Leave off, Bailey. There, that’s better.’

  Bailey returned to the opposite chair, calm as a sleepy spider. Jealousy had not really featured in his action; merely a vague suspicion that Ryan’s sabotage of his own marriage plans had been, in some sense, deliberate.

  ‘She talks in her sleep, that’s all, and she talks loud. Carries through to that sofa in the living room where she parked me for the night. All sorts of stuff. Like she thinks she don’t live up to a man like you. Well, thinking the way you think – namby-pamby, forgiving everybody – she may be right.’

  Ryan became restless, the way he did with emotion in anything other than a professional context. He could handle weeping women, provided they were strangers. Emotional men were another matter, and besides he was not being entirely truthful. He’d always thought Helen was a very tasty piece, likeable or not.

  ‘So what’s the state of play now?’ he demanded. Bailey misunderstood, deliberately.

  ‘Oh, stalemate. There’s not enough of anything to justify getting out a warrant for the doctor’s arrest. The verdict on Shelley Pelmore will come back as death by misadventure. The pathologist suspects embolism, but can’t put a hand on her own cardiac machinery and say for sure; could have been a freak result of the couple of drinks and couple of paracetamol she had on board … If the doctor came back, we could question him, that’s all. And if he said nothing, that would be that. And we could go back to the women in your little black book, but since they gave unreliable accounts first time round, they’d never be credible. And then there’s this Anna Stirland, who’s off sick and told me on the phone she’s not saying anything. Amen. Can’t force her. All we know is that he couldn’t be a rapist. Not with his equipment.’

  It was repetition of old ground. Ryan was sick of it.

  ‘Do you have to pay a cancellation fee if you don’t turn up at the register office?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Only what you’ve paid already. They’re used to it, apparently. Some don’t turn up. Others turn up every few years.’ Bailey was not going to be drawn further.

  ‘I hope they don’t reinstate me before I finish the pond,’ Ryan said.

  Helen was not to be drawn either.

  ‘All right. If you didn’t get married, now that Ryan’s off the hook, you’ll do it, won’t you?’ Rose was asking.

  ‘Stand still. The label’s sticking out at the back. There.’

  ‘… Only don’t do it without me. Promise?’

  ‘Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die. You look … well, wonderful.’

  ‘’S all right, innit?’

  Rose stood before the full-length mirror, stuck out one hip and crossed her eyes. Her hair was soft and full, a compromise between spikes and curls. Small nuggets of silver sparkled in her ears. The dress was a short-sleeved shift of soft crimson. Designer label, courtesy of Oxfam. Who would know, Rose had asked, and if they did, who would care that it cost five quid? Must have been a person who got too fat for it and gave it away in a fit of pique. My good fortune; meant for me. I’ll do the same. Watch me, lover, watch me.

  Standing back, Helen compared the effect to a young Audrey Hepburn en route to breakfast at Tiffany’s. This was no sacrificial lamb; this was breathtaking.

  ‘I sort of wish this was in church,’ Helen said. ‘So the vicar would faint.’

  ‘Stuff ’em all. S’long as Michael likes it. Here we go.’

  Michael at his mother’s, chewing his knuckles; Helen and Rose in the upstairs bedroom, watching for the car, making the last unnecessary adjustments to perfection. It wasn’t so much the dress, Helen thought later, as Rose’s total appearance that brought gasps of admiration on the town-hall steps; it was the poise, the complete assurance, which brought tears to her eyes and a pang of non-malicious envy to her heart. Oh, to be like that, to have such belief that you would make everything work and that what was broken you would fix.

  If she had ever had that kind of confidence, she no longer had it now, but she rejoiced to see such utter certainty in another. There was such a thing as true uncomplicated love. There was, but it simply needed belief in itself to flourish. A childhood deprived of it, perhaps, so that it was easy to recognize and vital to preserve in a tight fist. That was what Rose had: a rigid grasp on reality. Her kind of true love was not so fanciful after all.

  There was a brief exchange of vows; the hall was full to bursting, extra chairs provided. On Rose’s express instructions, issued on pain of death, each woman was dressed to excess. I want you costumed over the top, she had ordered. There were hats with feathers a foot long, puffy taffeta skirts, ear-rings the size of tin lids, plenty of sheer thigh, and a total inability on the part of the crowd to keep quiet. Chatter only fell to nothing during the making of promises, when a snuffling into handkerchiefs replaced it. Standing next to her, one of the few men who looked at ease in a suit; Bailey dug into his pocket and handed Helen his hanky. The extra-wide brim of her overlarge deep-blue sombrero, worn low over her forehead, hid the act of blowing her nose.

  ‘I don’t want anyone sitting down,’ Rose had said of her own reception. ‘It creases the frocks. I want ’em all moving around, eating and drinking and showing off and talking to one another.’

  Which they did in the hotel room with buffet and garden attached, where food was less important than drink and the sixty of them, chattering, made a fine volume of noise amid too much of a squash for anyone to notice the dearth of floral decoration. Bailey unbent from his great height, enjoying himself, Helen hoped, since she was herself, out of relief as much as anything else, because it was turning into exactly the kind of thrash Rose had planned. They would probably leave before the lights came on in the garden and the music, Rose’s secret weapon to subvert the tendency to
speeches, began to invite dancing.

  ‘What kind of dancing?’ Bailey asked suspiciously.

  ‘Any old kind of shuffle. We’ve got three generations here.’

  ‘So I can waltz, can I?’

  ‘We can watch, first.’

  He took her hand. They sat in a corner of the garden; he observing, with evident pleasure, the ranks of Michael’s aunts and uncles towing each other about with concentrated movements, some serious, some laughing throughout.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s possible to have a wedding without relatives,’ Bailey shouted above the din.

  ‘No fun at all,’ Helen agreed.

  ‘I think I’ve only got two left,’ he added. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done with them all.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Look, Helen,’ he was bellowing. ‘We can’t go on like this, we really can’t. It’s no good, it’s become a neurosis.’

  She could feel herself freeze. She did not want a conversation about the issues between them; not here, not now.

  ‘Why am I so bloody frightened of dancing?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Do you reckon it goes back to school? When I trod on Gloria Smith’s toes and she screamed as if I’d raped her?’

  Music swelled in Anna Stirland’s house. She was busy with the flowers. The backyard was a profusion of late-flowering stock, mostly leaves. The wedding-present window-boxes had been dismantled and added to the borders, making up for the gaps where she had picked the blooms she would otherwise have left to fade into blowsiness on their own stems. Whenever life was more complicated than usual, it was always a comfort to have extra flowers in the house, and the irony was that her aunt, the kindest relative a motherless woman could have, had added to the quantity by sending more, in commiseration for sickness, accompanied by a note saying she would miss Anna at the wedding and would love to see her when she was better.

  To look at happy snaps, Anna thought, standing rose stems in boiled water; or, God help her, a video.

  The hot-house blooms provided by the doctor as his hospitality gift had been binned, long since. Their falling petals and rancid leaves made a mess.

  She went upstairs slowly and added a touch of fern to the arrangement beside the bed. Even with the window open and a gentle breeze, the scent of the room was heavily floral, as if a housewife had gone mad with artificial air freshener and a ton of pot-pourri, all of it underlaid with a bite of antiseptic.

  ‘All right?’ she asked him sweetly, stroking his brow. The skin was the texture of candle wax. Beeswax, more precisely; yellowish rather than white.

  One of the skills she had inadvertently acquired as a midwife, taught by an older mentor, was how to lay out the body of a dead baby without crying throughout the process. And although the laying out of the body of a grown man was, of course, substantially more difficult, she thought she’d made a reasonable fist of it. Even if poorly done, it was adequate to preserve him with the help of preservative, which was easy to obtain for those who knew how. There was that artist who used it to exhibit a dead sheep. Not that Anna had any intention of putting the doctor on show, aware as she was of her own lack of equipment and her serious shortcomings in the funereal arts, and even more aware that this was a temporary measure. Nor did she like the fact that he lay with his head on one side, revealing a handsome profile, in a pose which made him look, somehow, shy. The left side of his face, unfortunately badly damaged as a result of repeated blows from the champagne bottle, lay snug against the pillow. Anna was fairly sure that it was not the facial injuries which had proved fatal… they rarely were … the blow to the back of the neck had done it, but even so, he had taken his time while she fussed around, doing what she was good at, namely, nursing; her skills entirely confused by the ambivalence of her own wishes about whether he should live or die. In the end, he decided it for her.

  ‘What good were you ever going to be to me?’ she had asked him. ‘Whatever did I see in you?’

  She knew she would have to get rid of him soon before she put the house back on the market and made all those other decisions about her life, but she was fairly sure, between moments of acute anxiety, that she would find a way. As for the vexed question of whether this remaindered hunk of manhood deserved the fate she had merely encouraged him to receive, it was not a discussion she could afford to have with him, or with herself, at the moment. Conscience was a luxury and his skin was so cold, even in the cooling heat of the season, he no longer seemed entirely real. A figment of the imagination. A shadow of substance.

  Anna sighed at the enormity of the tasks which lay before her. And, at the end of them all, she supposed she would have to paint the house, again.

  Someone would buy, if only for the sake of the yard.

  Dusk turned to darkness. She went downstairs, slightly reluctantly. In his own particular way, he was company. Never had such a handsome man remained in her house so long. In the kitchen, she fiddled with the radio until she found Classic FM. They were playing Strauss.

  ‘He does a passable waltz, old Bailey,’ Rose remarked to Michael. ‘But a waltz! When was he born?’

  ‘Same year as my mother,’ Michael said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  The music ceased in preparation for a major change; all part of Rose’s plan. In the interlude of silence between prerecorded orchestral palm-court schmaltz and the heavy pulse of disco sound there was the audible sound of a bleep from Bailey’s belt. Half of the spectators understood, half not; there was laughter and a smattering of sympathetic applause. Rose grabbed Helen by the arm. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘even if he goes, you don’t have to, do you? We ain’t hardly started yet.’

  Helen followed Bailey out to the foyer. She was accustomed to interrupted evenings, but, on this occasion felt it was either preordained or prearranged and she liked to see him leaving in good spirits.

  ‘Grand wedding,’ he said, pausing by the door of his car. ‘Does it matter, do you think, that we missed the boat? Or is it more important that, at some stage, we actually had the will to catch it?’

  ‘That is what matters,’ Helen said, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure you don’t mind going home on your own?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ he murmured. ‘Comes naturally, doesn’t it? You’ll always want to go home alone and I shall never be sure of you, shall I?’

  ‘I don’t deserve you,’ Helen said.

  Back later; see you soon; take care; be in touch; adieu; so long; call me. There were a dozen different phrases which meant goodbye. Including a gap, where neither could say anything at all.

  So he thought she’d been crying in the service out of sentiment, did he? Instead of crying about an ending rather than a beginning. At least he had left her his handkerchief.

  Perhaps the desire for her own company first was unnatural. Perhaps she should see a doctor.

  Perhaps tomorrow, in the wilderness of a blank Sunday, she would try and find Anna Stirland. Tell her about the party. Discuss the benefits of the single state, the reality of true love, the importance of hope, the dignity of living alone, and the comfort of growing things.

  About the Author

  FRANCES FYFIELD has spent much of her professional life practicing as a criminal lawyer, work which has informed her highly acclaimed novels. She has been the recipient of both the Gold and Silver Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. She is also a regular broadcaster on Radio 4, most recently as the presenter of the series ‘Tales from the Stave.’ She lives in London and in Deal, overlooking the sea, which is her passion.

  www.francesfyfield.co.uk

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Frances Fyfield

  A Question of Guilt

  Shadows on the Mirror

  Trial by Fire

  Shadow Play

  Perfectly Pure and Good

  A Clear Conscience

  Blind Date

  Staring
at the Light

  Undercurrents

  The Nature of the Beast

  Seeking Sanctuary

  Looking Down

  The Playroom

  Half Light

  Safer Than Houses

  Let’s Dance

  The Art of Drowning

  Blood from Stone

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book was previously published in 2012 by Hachette Digital.

  WITHOUT CONSENT. Copyright © 1996 by Frances Fyfield. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.