by Paul Charles
We made love.
And the whole point was that if we’d had sex before we’d made love, it would have been wrong and we could have ruined it. Don’t you see that’s how close we all are in our lives to getting things wrong? Wrong is never always at the completely opposite end of the scale to right. It’s just they are so close sometimes you can’t even see the join. Hey, maybe there isn’t even a join; maybe they’re the same thing in the end. But when you discover that there is a possibility you might, just might, really click, you realise how absolutely important it is to hold out and get it right.
And that was the start of Mary Skeffington and me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
Have you ever wondered what happens in the movies just after the end credits roll and they’re all meant to go off and live happily ever after? You know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes through the wars of life, comes out of his battles a better person, returns to the girl, girl looks at the boy with different eyes, boy wins girl back again and in the dying seconds of the movie you see them drive off into the sunset? Have you ever wondered what happens when the screen goes to black?
I have.
That’s the film I’d really like to see. This film would start with our loving couple waking up the following morning and then they would get into it from there. Yes, our male hero did know how to look after himself in all those battles, and yes he does cut a mean silhouette against the orange sundown, but then he opens his mouth and he sounds more like Michael Crawford in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em than Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Not only that, but he starts to talk about horses or cars or his top ten rodeos or the top ten acres, and if his talking doesn’t drive her to distraction, the combination of his bad breath and yellow teeth might. And then our lucky lady, our heroine, perhaps she’s got nothing at all to say the following day. Perhaps her role has just been to sit and look pretty for the camera, and he discovers she’s as deep as the cardboard cut-out that represents her in the cinema foyer. Yes, that’s when the real story really starts.
I moved in to the Gladstone Road flat with Mary a couple of weeks later. We didn’t labour over the decision, we just did it. Neither did we talk in detail about marriage; we just knew that we would marry. Her mother knew that we would eventually (Hermione’s word and pronounced – like her daughter – in italics) and she seemed totally fine with us living together. Although, having said that, every time we visited her, she’d always make up two rooms for us – she’d never insist we use them, but she’d always have them made up.
The next time Jean Simpson rang it was the middle of the week before I moved in with Mary, I think. I told her simply and honestly that I wouldn’t be up for any more encounters, as I had started to see a girl. I told her that ‘Yes, it is serious’ and ‘No, it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to go to the Marquee Club together any more.’
She sounded shocked, as in dumbfounded, at the other end of the phone. I mean, it was probably down to the contrast. She came on the line so positive and the call ended with her being as down as I’d ever heard her, and I felt totally responsible for that and guilty for the same. It was such a horrible feeling. It’s at times like these when you realise why some people avoid break-ups; there’s nearly nothing you wouldn’t do to avoid making someone feel as bad as that.
No, I didn’t tell her that the girl I was serious about was the very same Mary Skeffington she’d stolen John Harrison from.
Why didn’t I?
Good question. I suppose the honest answer was I just couldn’t bring myself to do so. Maybe I was just scared or maybe I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I already had. Or perhaps I was, pure and simple, just scared she would tell Mary Skeffington about our encounters. It appeared Miss Simpson had already taken the trouble to map out our next one. Either way I figured that she and John and the other Jean, for that matter, would find out through the grapevine about Mary Skeffington and I, and when she, Jean Simpson, did, she’d surely come to the conclusion that it’d be much better that all parties involved ceased communications.
Did I really think that was the case? I don’t know. I was too up on my relationship with Mary Skeffington to give it too much consideration to be honest. Was I guilty of wanting some time to pass so that the lines between: (a) Mary Skeffington saying she wanted to try to make it work with me; (b) Jean Simpson and I having our final encounter; (c) Mary and I having our memorable dinner and making love for the first time; and (d) Mary and I moving in together, became clearer? Of course I was, but maybe only subconsciously. Even if I wasn’t admitting it to myself, I was certainly aware that if I could just put some time between those four monumental events and people catching on to the fact that Mary and I were a couple, I could certainly avoid some awkward questions. In my defence, I will say that after Mary and I made love for the first time, I never for one second considered another encounter with Jean Simpson.
But, as I say, I did keep my head down and willed the time to pass.
And then before I knew it, some time had passed, possibly as much as six weeks, and I’d heard nothing directly or indirectly from that camp, and you know what they say about sleeping dogs? Let them lie. Yes. Oh how I wished the sleeping dogs had been allowed to lie.
Why?
Because exactly seven weeks to the day after Mary and I made love for the first time, I received a telephone call from a very agitated John Harrison.
‘I don’t know exactly what’s going on,’ he wheezed down the line, ‘but I felt you should know that one of our Jeans is missing!’
Part Three: After.
Silence is Easy
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
You know when you hear something – it could be bad, it could even be good, or, it could be nothing – but you invariably always immediately start to think the worst? Well, that’s what John Harrison’s declaration did to me.
I felt physically sick in the very centre of the pit of my stomach.
The scene of my meeting Jean & Jean for the first time in the residents’ lounge, in the Wimbledon hostel, flashed into my mind. Very melodramatic, I know, but I was overcome by what we’d all been through, separately and in our various duos, trios and later, with John Harrison and Mary Skeffington on the scene, quartets and quintet.
Then I started to think ‘Poor Jean Kerr.’
She’d obviously let all of her problems with her boss, her work, her romantic life, her illness get the better of her. Maybe she’d run off somewhere and taken her life. I wondered who would discover her body and in what state it would be.
I admit I felt guilty, very guilty. I tried (alas in vain) to convince myself that it had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Yes, she had led the way through our brief relationship-of-sorts. But I could have very easily said no at any time. But I didn’t; I just went with the flow, no matter how much I claimed it to be an unpleasant experience. I should have said no the first time, and if not the first time then most definitely the second time, and double that for the third time. First time, shame on her; second time, shame on me; third time, an even bigger shame on me.
Then I thought that Jean Simpson must be beside herself with worry and, like myself, fearing the worst. They’d been friends for fifteen years and though it had certainly been rocky lately, they were still each other’s nominated best friend.
My mind flew off on another tangent: if Jean Kerr really was missing then there had to be a chance she’d been murdered. You immediately chastise yourself for entertaining such thoughts though, don’t you? You know, fearing the very worst. But then, statistically speaking, there must be similar occasions when people fear the same worst only to discover that their fears were founded.
Jean Simpson must have also been having that thought, and probably at that exact moment.
‘How’s your Jean reacting to this news, John?’ I asked, voicing the words fresh in my mind.
He’d been muttering away in the background, mostly to himself, I thought, as I was living through my worst nightmares.<
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‘David,’ he shouted down the phone at the top of his voice, ‘you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said! I’m not talking about Jean Kerr. I’m talking about my Jean. It’s my Jean who’s gone missing!
Good God, Jean Simpson! I instantly had this flash of her lying across a bed somewhere, dressed in her undies, as she had been during our last encounter. Of course, I should have said there during our final encounter. I didn’t recognise the location in my vision and I suppose she could have been sleeping, but she seemed quite lifeless to me. I remember reflecting on how great her legs looked for a split second longer than I should have. My next thought was of the two Jeans together, the simple solution to the mystery being that Jean Simpson was up in Derby, cajoling Jean Kerr into getting her life back on the rails. I figured that the latter was the more likely of the two scenarios.
Not that John Harrison seemed unduly concerned. That just might have been a performance for me, of course; you know, trying to appear casual in case I was going to say something like, ‘Oh, didn’t you know that Mary and I are shacked up together?’ Totally bizarre I know, but these were the things floating through my mind. Those facts I eventually did manage to garner from John were: 1) He hadn’t seen Jean Simpson for a going on a week; 2) She wasn’t at her flat; and 3) The girls in the flat above them hadn’t seen her for going on a week, either. And in response to John’s phone call, Jean Kerr assured John that his Jean wasn’t in Derby; in fact, just that very day, Miss Kerr had visited Miss Simpson’s family home.
That was about it.
Except it wasn’t.
Except it was troubling me.
Okay, as I saw it, the Top Five things that could have happened to Miss Simpson were:
1. She’d got bored with John – she’d predicted just as much last time we met – and she’d returned to Derby and had sworn Jean Kerr to secrecy.
2. She was still in London, also hiding out from John Harrison.
3. She’d had an accident.
4. Someone had done her harm.
5. She’d found a replacement for me in her adventures. We know for a fact there was that one night where she wasn’t with either me or John.
Yes, the whole thing troubled me and it troubled me because, if something had happened to her, had it happened because I’d stopped seeing her? Had she gone to ground to regroup, commence planning her attack on Mary and I? If Mary ever found out what Jean and I had been up to, surely it would signal the end of our relationship. So could the reason behind Jean’s disappearance be as simple as getting me to sweat a bit?
But what about an accident? I’d forgotten to ask John if he’d checked with all the hospitals in the district. I hadn’t forgotten to ask him if he’d checked with the police – he hadn’t – I’d just forgotten to ask him about the hospitals, and he just hadn’t offered. I was going to start making a few calls myself, but then I thought I would wait until Mary came home. She was at night class in Twickenham and I wiled away the hours (two) trying to read (impossible), trying to listen to music (even more impossible) and eventually spending the time walking around her flat (yes, I still referred to it as her flat even though I was living there now) thinking about what could have happened, fearing the worst.
My heart leapt up to my throat as I heard her key in the door.
‘God, you’re white as a sheet, David!’ she said, as she dropped her bags to the floor and ran over to me. ‘What’s happened?’
‘John Harrison rang two hours ago.’
‘Oh?’ she said, and meant it.
‘Jean Simpson has gone missing.’
‘Oh!’
‘And there’s more,’ I said, hearing a faltering in my voice, ‘there’s something else I need to tell you.’
‘Oh?’ she said raising her eyebrows.
‘Well, I should have told you this before, and I would have! I mean, there’s no reason not to have told you, only that I hadn’t told you and the longer I hadn’t told you the harder it was to tell you.’
‘Oh?’ she coaxed. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what it was that I was having such great difficulty telling her.
I started several different ways, and all of them sounded terrible to me, so in the end I just went with: ‘First off, nothing has happened since you and I started going out together. But I had a bit of a relationship with Jean.’
‘You fool’ she said, visibly relaxing, ‘of course you told me that! You told me that you and Jean Kerr had had a bit of a fling when the Jeans moved into the hostel.’
‘Ah. No. I mean, yes, I did tell you that, but what I hadn’t told you was that I’d also had a bit of a relationship with the other Jean.’
‘What!’ she began, a bemused but cautious look creeping across her face, ‘you mean John’s Jean – Jean Simpson?’
I nodded.
She took my hand and pulled me over to the sofa, leaving her bags still standing by the open hall door.
‘Okay, you had a scene with both the Jeans. Both before you met me. That’s fine, I went out with John Harrison – you know I went to bed with him. I don’t see where your concern is coming from. Did you date her after you’d finished with the first Jean and before the second Jean had started with John? Goodness, with all these Jeans this is all starting to get incredibly confusing.’
I knew she’d said that as a comfort to me. I knew she was not one bit confused by any of this. You’ll have also noticed that I let one little bit of inaccurate information go uncorrected in her last statement. She’d said, when referring to my relationships with the Jeans that they had been: ‘Both before you met me’. Technically speaking, that was not strictly true, as you well know. I returned to my mother’s words of advice when I was much younger: ‘Be careful because your lies will find you out.’ I wasn’t actually lying, but maybe I was being somewhat economical with the truth.
‘Not exactly,’ I continued.
‘Okay, I think you’d better explain. But can I just say, that from what you’ve just told me, you’d stopped seeing her when you started seeing me. In which case, we have nothing to worry about.’
You see, that sentence right there showed how generous Mary Skeffington was. She hadn’t said, ‘In which case you have nothing to worry about.’ She’d said, ‘In which case we have nothing to worry about.’ We were a team and we were in this together.
However, just in case I was in any doubt as to whether or not she would follow me blindly while chasing a pack of lies, she then asked me, quite firmly and looking deep into my eyes without letting go of my hands, ‘You haven’t being seeing her since we started going out together, have you David?’
‘No,’ I said, emphatically shaking my head.
‘So what’s your concern then?’
‘I was seeing her when she was dating John.’
‘Oh,’ she said blowing the ‘oh’ out to a full block-bursting word, ‘I see. She was seeing you behind John’s back. Omigoodness! Were you sleeping with her?’
‘No! Just… messing around,’ I admitted allowing myself, I suppose, a very liberal interpretation of the phrase ‘messing around’.
‘How long did this go on?’
‘Until you and I started going out together. Then I stopped it immediately.’
‘And was this a regular thing or what?’
‘I took her out to the clubs, you know, to see some of the groups. We sometimes went back to her flat or my flat and… messed around. That was it.’
‘Define “messing around”, David.’
‘We never had sex, we never kissed; we just messed around. There was no love mentioned or even considered. She was going to marry John but she just wanted to have a bit of fun. I wasn’t seeing anybody, I was up for a bit of fun as well; I suppose we were just using each other.’
‘I believe it’s referred to as dry humping,’ she said, very matter of fact.
Only someone like Mary Skeffington would have a word to describe what Jean Simpson
and I had been up to. And here I was thinking we’d invented it.
‘The pair of you sound just like Mrs Wallis and Jimmy Donahue,’ she said, smiling for the first time since she’d sat down. I noticed a bit of the colour return to her cheeks.
‘Sorry?’ I asked. That one had gone completely over my head.
‘Oh, it’s not important, I’ll tell you another time,’ she replied, dropping her smile and getting serious again. ‘Look. When you and I started going out and you told Jean that you didn’t want to see her any more, did you tell her it was because of me?’
‘No, I didn’t. I told her I was very serious about someone. I didn’t particularly want the two Jeans and John running around behind our backs, gossiping about us.’
‘But she would have found out.’
‘I’d say for sure that she’s found out,’ I replied.
‘And now she’s missing,’ Mary sighed. She walked over, closed the door and brought her bags into the flat, as I replied,
‘And now she’s missing.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Well, the first thing I wanted to do was to tell you about her, about us. I mean, John said that no one had officially told the police yet because everyone was expecting her to turn up at some point,’ I said, at the same time thinking what should we do next?
‘So all the time you were seeing her, what was she saying about her relationship with John for heaven’s sake?’
‘Well, she kind of compartmentalised it. She was still going to marry him, and she always made it clear she was just messing around with me.’
‘It all sounds frightfully simple when you say it like that, David,’ she said.
She’d stopped unpacking her bags and was standing, mid-job, staring at me. I couldn’t quite make out her stare. It worried me slightly to be honest.
‘Well, in a way it was – like I said, we were only messing about. I mean, it was definitely never anything serious,’ I offered, in hopes that she wouldn’t play my bluff and say, ‘Define messing about more exactly?’