by Barbara Vine
She had never talked to me for so long. She wanted to go on but I wouldn't let her. I fetched her blanket and covered her up. Her hands were cold so I rubbed them between mine before tucking them under the cover.
Philippa and Steve had been out for a meal on their wedding anniversary so she had had to choose between recording Seaforth and Postcards From the Edge. I did the one she didn't, which was how I came to take the video of the third episode of Seaforth round to her at eight.
Steve had gone down to the pub. She had the TV on, she always has the TV on, and was watching Peter O'Toole in Stunt Man while she wrote her Christmas cards. I hadn't even thought about Christmas cards, I hadn't done any Christmas shopping. Mike was doing a job in Yorkshire the following week, he'd be away for four nights, so he'd said he'd be giving any Christmas parties and family gatherings that might be going a miss and he'd work on the conservatory right through the holiday.
‘Be thankful,’ said Philippa, ‘he's got something to keep him occupied.’
‘Keep him out of mischief, you mean?’
‘You said it, not me. Don't suppose he gets into mischief, does he?’
‘I don't know,’ I said, ‘and I don't care. I'm leaving him.’
She actually turned off the telly. I told her about Ned then. I told her how he'd wanted me to go away with him from the first and how for a long time I'd refused. She listened, she nodded, but I could read it in her look, her eyes: fancy a man like that wanting someone like you. Well, she could understand the wanting, but not the wanting for ever. I knew it, I'd wondered too, but I'd come to accept it as one of life's marvels, helped by the love philtre and the ferns in his shoe.
‘When are you going to tell Mike?’
‘Next week,’ I said. ‘When he gets back from Yorkshire. You can keep it dark till then.’
‘You bet,’ she said. ‘There's one of your Gilda Brent's films on tomorrow, two p.m., you'll be at work, so d'you want me to video it for you? The Skies Above Us, 1945, black-and-white and dead boring, frankly.’
Mike was doing the glazing when I got back. He stopped for five minutes and gave me a lecture on thermostatic bars. They're window catches filled up with oil which make the windows open automatically when the sun shines and heats the oil so that it expands. The floor tiles would be coming next week, special ceramic jobs from Italy in écru and ivory and black. He won't be here so he'd like me to arrange to be at home and take the delivery in. I said all right, because it was easier than an argument, and I didn't want him to say that again, about him doing it all for me so the least I could do was open the door to the tile man.
Ladybirds are lucky creatures and this winter lots of them have taken refuge indoors. Do they find places to sleep in till spring? I don't know but I'm careful not to harm them. Mum told me she only had Nick because of harming a ladybird. Of course she wouldn't be without him now and she was thrilled to have a boy after us girls but it was a blow to her at the time. She trod on this ladybird by accident and instead of burying it, stamping on the grave three times and reciting Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, she just sucked it up in the Hoover and that same night she fell for Nick.
I found twelve ladybirds in my bathroom that morning and another five in Stella's. The trouble is you don't know what to do for the best in the wintertime. Still, there was no frost on the ground, so I took the five ladybirds tenderly in my hands and put them out of Stella's window into a dry cosy spot under the scimmia bush. There's a poem my nan used to say that I've remembered all my life, more than I can say for the ones we did at school.
‘This lady-fly I take from off the grass,
Whose spotted back might scarlet-red surpass.
Fly, Lady-bird, north, south, or east or west,
Fly where the man is found that I love best.
He leaves my hand, see to the west he's flown,
To call my true love from the faithless town.’
That made Stella laugh. It was the laughter of pleasure, not at something funny. ‘How clever you are, Genevieve! Where does that come from?’
My nan, I said. I didn't know more than that. I was thinking about the man I love and how he was my true love that I'd call from the faithless town, whatever that may mean. Maybe one of the ladybirds I'd saved would fly up to Norwich and find him.
Stella was still in bed and wanted to stay there, but Lena had said she had to get up. She could have a lie-in but staying in bed wasn't good for her and anyway Marianne had phoned to say she'd be along in the afternoon.
‘No reason why you shouldn't stay there till just before your lunch,’ I said.
‘The pain is beginning,’ she said. ‘Do you know, I've not really had any pain till now.’
What could I say? I sat on the bed and took her hand. Her grip was still strong but she'd cut and filed down her once-sharp nails. She looked into my face the way she's begun to do, very searchingly, as if she's testing me, even as if she wonders about trusting me.
‘Genevieve, have you still got the key to my house?’
It's funny how you feel yourself blush. When I was a kid and we used to have coal fires I'd put my face close to the flames and feel the heat on my skin. Blushing is just the same feeling, a flame heating the skin. She was looking at me, watching my face get red, I expect. I nodded. I thought she'd ask for the key back.
‘That's all right,’ she said. ‘You hold on to it. As long as I know where it is.’
I knew then that I had to tell her. It was inside me, the guilt of it, swelling up and bursting to get out. For an instant I was a child again, back at school, owning up. I'm sorry, Miss, it was me, I did it. I took a breath.
‘Stella, I've been going to your house. To Molucca. I mean, me and Ned have. We've been meeting there. I should have asked you, I know that, I honestly don't know now why I didn't. Well, I do know. I thought you'd say no.’
‘You've been going to my house?’
‘We had to have somewhere to meet. I'm sorry, Stella, I should have asked you.’
She smiled. Her hand gave mine a squeeze. ‘I'm glad.’
‘You're glad?’
‘I like to think of happy lovers being there. We were very happy when we were there, Alan and I. There was only one occasion when we were there and we weren't – oh, tremendously happy.’
I felt a chill. That's always the way I react to an omen. ‘But once you weren't?’
‘Once we weren't. The last time. You must have been very cold there.’
I told her about the oil heaters. I told her how I'd cleaned the place and put flowers everywhere.
‘I was going to have central heating put in. But it would have meant builders and a lot more people knowing the house was mine. It was still a secret place, you see. But I think I would have had it done that autumn.’ She hung her head.
She does that more and more often now. ‘The autumn after the summer I was telling you about. Only time stopped and we never got there.’
‘You must have got there, you're here now.’
Stella gave her thin ghostly laugh. ‘Barely. But I must hang on for a while longer.’ She laid her head back on the pillow. She spoke softly. ‘Do you believe you can fight death?’
‘For a while, I reckon,’ I said. ‘Not for ever.’
‘No, certainly not for ever. But you with your strange beliefs, I fancied you might have ideas about keeping death at bay.’ She smiled at me. ‘Never mind. Do you remember the day we saw the dalmatian and you said to make a wish?’
Of course I remembered. ‘Mine's coming true now,’ I said. ‘How about yours?’
‘Genevieve, you said we must have got to the autumn – well, we did, but not together. After Priscilla there was one woman after another that Gilda suspected, all their friends and neighbours – not that they had many. She talked to me incessantly about the evidence she had against Alan, all those absurd things like lipstick on his handkerchiefs and blonde hairs on his jackets. It was all made up or at any rate it was all in her head.’
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br /> ‘Why not you?' I said.
‘I was too old, just as I was too old to have my portrait painted. She said as much. Oh, much later when she confronted us. “Why her?” she said. “Why not some young girl?” Men loved young girls, you see, men only loved beauties. That was the world she lived in, you see, the world of…’
‘B movies?’ I said.
She smiled. ‘If you like. It went on all summer, Gilda talking about Alan's women. She turned him into a monster, much as I had turned Rex into one. Yet I've never known how much she really believed herself, if it wasn't just another scene in the dramatic scenario she had to make for herself. Instead of a life, Genevieve. Instead of a life. I sometimes thought she'd divided her existence into these phases, youth that was glamorous and exciting, marriage to the man who was madly in love with her, now middle age when he strayed and she fought to get him back. It was as if she was saying, this is woman's lot and I have to act it out.
‘The part of the wronged wife – she'd played that in so many films, the words came naturally to her. I don't think she knew where it came from when she said she had given him the best years of her life and he'd cast her away like an old shoe. She just said it because that is what wronged wives say in bad films, so therefore it was what she had to say.
‘When she followed him in her car, she was only doing what the woman did in The Wife's Story. She even told him about it, she boasted to him about it, how she'd followed him to Norwich and gone into a coffee bar to wait for him. She'd sat at a table by herself, she said, and everyone had been staring at her. Someone came up and asked for her autograph. She was distraught with grief, hardly knew what she was doing, and she told the autograph hunter she was going to kill herself. Alan asked her if she realized she'd just described the climax of The Wife's Story to him but that made her start screaming and overturning the furniture. That was something she just couldn't take, having her acting exposed for what it was. Poor thing, poor Gilda.’
I think I must have been looking at Stella in amazement, or at any rate in a very bewildered way. At last I said, ‘I don't really understand why he didn't leave her. What was there to stop him just leaving her?’
‘But he did leave her,’ Stella said. ‘He did in the end.’
‘He left her and came to you?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Why didn't you say so before?’
‘I don't know. I meant to. He left her for me. But that's the end of the story, Genevieve. I mean, that's the end if you like.’
‘A happy ending,’ I said, though that wasn't the way it felt.
‘Why not happy? You know what I wished when we saw the dalmatian? I wished for a happy ending.’
It's always clear when she intends to say no more. She cuts things off, terminates talk, calls a stop. She reached for her tape recorder and put in a cassette. She smiled, taking hold of my arm to stop me getting up.
Maybe I can get to like classical music the way she does. I educate myself with my dictionary and I try to learn new things all the time for Ned's sake. I'm trying to learn to read good books, appreciate art, so why not symphonies and operas too? A thin tinkly tune filled the air, unfamiliar, difficult stuff if you're used to country and western. I listened for a while, making an effort to understand. Then I gently removed Stella's hand, gave her a kiss and went off to see to Gracie.
When I next came along Stella's corridor a good many hours had passed and it was already dusk. No light showed under her door. Perhaps she was asleep. Then I heard her voice, low, conversational, yet a steady monologue. Unlike so many of them here, I'm not a listener at keyholes so I only paused momentarily. Something cautioned me not to open the door or even knock.
But when I asked Stanley, who was in the hall ready to take the dogs out, if Stella had a visitor he shook his head. A Mrs Browning had come in to see her but was gone by twelve.
Stella, alone, had been talking to herself.
Philippa had dropped the video of The Skies Above Us through my letter box.
The bath was full of ladybirds. I wondered what it meant and phoned Mum to ask but Len answered and said she'd gone round to Nan‘s, so I picked all the ladybirds up in a silk scarf, put them in the flower bed and covered them with fallen yellow oak leaves.
Then I made myself a cup of tea and watched The Skies Above Us, another one of those dramas about the Royal Air Force, the Battle of Britain and women waiting at home for missing Spitfire pilots. Gilda Brent, who was one of the waiting wives, looked more like Joan Crawford than I'd ever seen her and her clothes were pure Hollywood, tailored suits and fox furs with little faces and tails, veiled hats and stilt heels for a bunch of women who were supposed to be dressing on clothing coupons.
It was uncanny hearing her say those things Stella told me the real woman had said: ‘I've given him the best years of my life,’ and, ‘Why her? Why not some young girl?’ About ten minutes before the end she asked the flight lieutenant's wife, who was played by Glynis Johns, ‘Do you think you can take him away from me?’
But she had. Finally she had. And Gilda had run away and disappeared from their lives. All those ideas for killing her were over, they had never been real, anyway. Not really real. They had never meant them.
Stella and Alan had lived together in the house called Molucca and Richard had lived with them and learned to think of Alan as his father. They kept a bedroom for Marianne when she came home for the holidays. Gilda had left Alan her car when she went away and he and Stella had kept it. They only needed one car, so they sold theirs and kept Gilda's. They were happy.
I expect you know about the theory of the parallel universe? Ned told me about it once. It's about what might have been or what might have happened if you'd taken a different road to the one you took. That alternative is going along at the same time but in different space from what's happening in your life. For instance, there's one universe with me in it living with Mike all our long lives and another, the real one, for me and Ned. That's how it must have been for Stella and Alan, and their real universe hadn't been the one I've imagined, but an ugly parallel of chaos and destruction and a living unhappily ever after.
18
All I know of making statements to the police is what I have read in detective stories, but I doubt if I could make a statement without someone there to question and prompt me. So I'm going to talk until I have said it all or until I'm too tired to go on. Whichever is the sooner, as Alan used to say.
There is a purpose in all this. Its purpose is to tell what happened to Gilda Brent, who was also Gwendoline Brant and then Gwendoline Tyzark. I shall soon die but I don't want to die and leave her alive, or at least officially alive, which as far as others are concerned amounts to the same thing. For no one is really dead unless death is recorded, registered, rubber-stamped as we used to say – computer data'd now, I suppose. So Gilda is not dead and will never die, will have eternal life, unless I or Alan speak, and Alan is dead.
I rehearsed those last few sentences. Well, as a matter of fact, I wrote them down and read them aloud. I shall not do that any more but just talk as the words come.
In the summer following their father's death, both my children spent a fortnight's holiday with my next-door neighbours Madge and John Browning and their two sons in a cottage they took in south Cornwall. It was the first time Richard had ever been anywhere without me but he enjoyed himself with his friends from next door, who went to the same school as he did. He wanted to go again when the Brownings took the cottage in 1970 and was very happy to be invited. I was very happy too – no, I don't quite mean that. I wasn't happy to be separated from him, I'd have done nothing to encourage him to go if he hadn't wanted to, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But he did want to go, he was longing to go, and this meant I'd have two weeks with Alan, something wonderful and unprecedented, for Gilda was also going away at almost exactly the same time. She was visiting her friend in the South of France as she did most years, though not usually in the height of summer.
Marianne, at seventeen, no longer wanted to spend her holidays with me, that was only natural, and though she'd been invited wasn't much inclined for a holiday in Cornwall with two middle-aged people and three little boys for company.
It was August. Marianne went off with three girlfriends to the Costa Brava and Mallorca on August the 20th. They were to be away for three weeks and though this worried me a little, I thought I could trust Marianne to be sensible; she was quite mature for her age in some ways. And of course she came to no harm, she had a marvellous time, it was her mother who came to harm. On August the 25th, the Brownings came and fetched Richard to take him with them to Cornwall. You see how I remember these dates as if I had written them down and memorized them. But they were never written down.
Gilda went away, or said she was going away – perhaps I shouldn't have said that, but still, why not? I'm not in the business of creating suspense, I'm only telling a story that is grim enough without suspense. She went away on August the 28th, she left St Michael's Farm in her car, a red Ford Anglia, the model that was made in the early sixties I think, with a bonnet like a wide downturned mouth full of teeth, a grin like a piranha's. I always saw it like that. Perhaps I saw it like that because it was her car, I don't know.
The next day Alan and I went to Molucca. We went there to be together for the rest of our lives, though I didn't know it then.
We had been planning it for weeks. It was our main topic of conversation, the thing to drive away talk of killing Gilda. It was our new game, what we would do, what we would eat, which days we would go to the seaside and which we'd stay up all night and stay in bed all next day. The Killing Gilda game was over, the complicated insane methods we thought of and in which we collaborated to dispose of her, all these stopped and instead we played house again. I suppose you could say we played at honeymoons.