The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  I walked home and told Mike I was leaving him.

  He wouldn't take it in. For one thing he wouldn't stop working. I tried to get him to stop by saying I wanted to talk to him, I had something very important to say. It was no use. He said he'd made up his mind to get the conservatory done by Christmas and this was his last chance till Friday.

  He went on trowelling on the mortar between those tiles and while he did it he kept saying there must be something wrong with me, always trying to get him to talk, to stop working, to do something else, anything else but what he was set on doing. Why had I said I wanted a conservatory if I wasn't willing to let him get on with it?

  I'd had enough. I said I'd never asked him, it was all in his head. He didn't answer. He said marriage was give and take, had I forgotten that? And was it something called PMT I'd got? The fellows on the site said their girlfriends got it and a real pain in the tit it was. Of course that made me laugh too. No wonder he thought I was going mad.

  I didn't think I could just walk out without explanation, so I went upstairs and packed all my clothes, everything I had, into three suitcases. I brought them downstairs and put them in the car. He was still working, whistling happily. I said,

  ‘I'm leaving you, Mike. I'm going now. I've tried to tell you but you won't listen.’

  ‘Don't be silly,’ he said.

  ‘I'm going to the Legion,’ I said. ‘For the present. I don't want anything from you. You can keep the house. I don't want any money.’

  He thought I was joking, though I must have sounded grim.

  ‘Take the washing machine,’ he said, ‘but leave me the car.’

  ‘It's my car,’ I said.

  It was. And in car world I needed it almost more than a house. Mum was about to open, putting out nuts on the bar top and mince pies because it was nearly Christmas. She wasn't pleased to see me, she didn't exactly make me welcome but there wasn't any question of her saying no. I'd never lived there, I was married before she took the Legion on, so I put my cases in one of the spare bedrooms, the one at the back with its windows looking across the fields. Sitting on the bed I thought, what a lot I'll have to tell Stella. I could tell Stella about Ned and somehow I knew she'd understand where Philippa hadn't understood. And then I remembered Stella was dead. I started to cry and I couldn't stop, though I wasn't crying for me but for Stella that I was never going to see again and never talk to.

  Her funeral was on the Wednesday. We all went, Lena and Stanley, Sharon and Pauline and me. The florist had got my order wrong on two counts. She'd made the wreath with red and pink flowers and put ‘In loving memory’ on the card. I minded about the words being changed but red carnations among the pink chrysanths didn't worry me. What could happen to me worse than had already happened?

  It was the first burial I'd ever been to. People nearly always choose to be cremated, don't they? Stella had specially asked to be buried, and her children, unlike so many, respected their mother's wishes. We sang ‘When the day of toil is done, When the race of life is run’, and trooped out through the rain to the graveyard. Marianne broke away from the boyfriend, came up to me and took my arm, which pleased me, I don't know why, because I could sense she did it more for her own support than mine.

  The grave was a deep pit lined with synthetic green stuff on to which the rain pattered. In the distance I could hear winter thunder rumbling. The vicar said all those things about ashes to ashes and dust to dust and a woman that I think was Priscilla Newland threw a handful of earth on to the coffin. Marianne didn't throw earth and nor did Richard. They asked us back to the hotel for a glass of sherry but Lena said with a bright smile, No, thank you very much, duty calls, and that went for all of us.

  Carolyn had been holding the fort, as Lena put it, back at Middleton Hall and she'd received our new resident. That was worse than the funeral, nearly as bad as seeing Stella die, finding a newcomer in her room. It was a man, which no doubt pleased Sharon. He's eighty-one, an ex-Brigadier, former Master of Foxhounds and reader of books on World War II. I think he's brought his whole library with him. What kind of a family must he come from that he's moved into a residential home just before Christmas? One thing I could be sure of, he doesn't care for Lena calling him Tommy.

  I was late leaving and didn't get back to the Legion till six. Mike was in the bar with an Abbot in front of him. As soon as he saw me he began haranguing me. When was I coming back? OK, I'd made my point but the joke was over now and it was time I came home. He'd meant to finish the conservatory by Christmas but how could he when I had him down at the Legion arguing every night?

  If I'd ever thought in the past how it would be if I left my husband, the last thing to come to mind would have been that he'd fail to take my departure seriously. To this minute I don't know if it was cunning on his part that made him adopt that line, or if he just didn't understand; if he couldn't take it in because the idea that I could actually contemplate leaving him was incredible.

  It's difficult to handle, that attitude. I didn't know what to do. I went upstairs to my room, but he came after me and stood outside banging on the door and telling me to stop my nonsense, to put my coat on and give him the car keys and he'd drive me home. It had been the same the night before and the night before that, only he'd varied it on the Monday by saying he was sick of waiting to get his tea cooked and on the Tuesday by asking me if I didn't want to see what the floor looked like now he'd got the tiles down.

  There's nowhere to hide in a pub. I'd tried going round to Janis the evening before but he'd followed me and banged on her door. So I went out in the car. It was the only thing I could do and not be followed. I drove around for half an hour, not knowing where to go, sitting in a lay-by for a while until a man passing me in a van hooted and flashed up his lights. You can drive forty miles in this countryside and use up a lot of petrol and still only waste an hour. There was only one place to go and I went there. I drove up the wet and muddy track, parked the car and sat there in the dark for ten minutes before I went in.

  Stella was dead and I had no business to be at her house any more. Once I was inside I realized that what I was feeling was surprise – surprise that the lights weren't blazing and Richard and Marianne in here discovering the place for the first time, marvelling, wondering why their mother kept her secret for so long. But not on the day of her funeral. No, I could understand that. They would come tomorrow.

  I lit the candles and took one upstairs with me to light my way while I fetched the oil stove. This would be my last visit to Molucca. Down in the living room I had no sense of waiting for Ned to come. I had only once waited here for him, I had always been up in the bedroom, watching from the window, and we'd seldom if ever set foot in this room together. The cold was just the same, though, the cold that had been the most memorable thing about those last days of my love affair and could serve as its symbol. I sat on the floor up against the heater, holding my hands half an inch from its black-painted cylinder. Why can't I be angry with him, I thought, why can't I hate him? Why is it I can only ask over and over, why, why, why?

  The house began to fill with the smell of oil. Pink paraffin isn't supposed to smell but the truth is it smells just a bit less than the blue kind. Another thing to remind me of my love. One day, I thought, when I have a house of my own, I'll have any kind of heating but oil, I won't even have an oil tank in my garden.

  ‘There's nothing in the house or the garden,’ Stella had said, she'd made them write it down for me. Sitting on the floor, warming my hands, I tried to think what it meant, but I got nowhere. The truth was I could think of nothing and no one but Ned, though imagining him in that holiday place skiing, laughing with Jane and Hannah, the sharp snowflakes glittering on his hair, was the bitterest pain. I thought of him unwillingly, because I couldn't help it.

  When it was nearly ten I wound down the heater wick and blew out the candles. I had to drive back the way I'd always driven when I was happy, when we'd made love and my mouth felt soft from Ned's
kisses and my skin warm. I drove past the house he'd rented, its windows deeply dark. Inside the Legion it was very noisy and the air unbreathable with smoke. Mum said Mike had given up on me at nine-fifteen and taken himself back to Chandler Gardens.

  ‘Dennis was the same,’ she said, speaking of her second husband. ‘Round here night after night, couldn't let things be, I'd find him in the bar regular as clockwork and I was married to Ron before it stopped.’

  That wasn't you, Diane,’ said Len, ‘that was the beer he come for.’

  But, as it happened, I didn't see Mike again till Christmas Eve. He walked in the minute Mum opened at ten-thirty, said he was going to his parents for Christmas unless I'd changed my mind and was seeing sense at last, and this letter had come for me. He held it out at arm's length as if it smelt.

  You won't believe anyone can be such a fool but I thought it was from Ned. I don't get many letters. Who is there to write to me? All my friends and relations live round here. Junk mail comes and bills come, but not letters and hardly any postcards. So I thought it must be from Ned. The blood went into my face and my heart jumped and I thought, he wouldn't do to me what he did to Linda Owen, he loves me, how could I doubt him, he can explain it all, oh, forgive me, Ned…

  How can you think all those things in the instant it takes to receive an envelope into your hand from another hand? You can. You can dream too of everything being made well again, of love strengthened, mistakes set right, misunderstandings explained, all in a tiny flashing moment.

  The postmark was Diss. The address was typed and so was the name, Mrs G. Warner. I felt the sun go in. That was just what it was like, the light put out and the dull grey weather coming back.

  ‘Have a good Christmas,’ I said to Mike. ‘Tell your parents we've split up.’

  ‘Tell them I'm getting a psychiatrist to see to you,’ he said.

  I went upstairs. I took the letter over to the window to open it and catch some of the gloomy light. It was from a firm of solicitors in Diss and started ‘Dear Mrs Warner.’ I couldn't take it in at first, it didn't seem to make sense. What was that sentence doing in there, those old-fashioned words I'd first read aloud to Stella back in August? ‘The freehold property known as Molucca and situate in Thelmarsh in the County of Norfolk.’ I'd repeated that line as we stood upstairs at Middleton Hall, looking across the fields, corn-green and goose-white and blonde like cropped hair. I read it again and at once all was clear.

  Stella had left me her house.

  22

  Marianne and Richard might have been expected to mind but it was Lena who minded. How she found out I don't know. I didn't tell her. I was going to say that you can't keep secrets in a place like this and then I remember how successfully Stella had kept hers.

  It was on the 2nd of January, a Monday, the day everyone has off but not carers in residential homes. The minute I got in Lena sent Carolyn to fetch me to the office.

  She was wearing a new track suit, a Christmas present from Stanley I guessed, purple velour with a yellow cardigan over it. There was a dog sitting on either side of her, each of them brainwashed to be as fierce as a labrador can. Dobermanns or Rottweilers would have been more her kind of dog. Unfortunately for Lena the one called Ben started thumping his tail the moment I came in.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘Not that it took much effort, did it? Like taking a Yorkie bar from a retard, that must have been. A little kiss here, a little bit of hand-holding there, and lo and behold you're a woman of property.’

  I didn't say anything. I didn't mention Edith and Maud, the latter-day saint and the Bible readings. Jobs are hard to come by and I need mine.

  ‘It's the son and daughter I pity,’ said Lena. ‘Their nest egg they must have been counting on snatched away by a… by a…’

  Cuckoo, I wanted to say but didn't.

  ‘A predator,’ said Lena. I don't think she knows what it means. ‘That charming Dr Newland. I expect he and his sister will bring a lawsuit to upset the will.’ She gets these expressions from American cop shows. ‘It's only what anyone would do in their place. I shall be happy to testify old lady Newland went wobbly months ago.’

  ‘You must do as you think best,’ I said.

  One of the first things I'd done after I'd got that letter was contact Richard and tell him I couldn't take the house. I phoned Marianne and told her I couldn't take it. They both insisted. They said no one would live in it if I wouldn't. They didn't want it. What could it mean to them when they hadn't even known their mother owned it?

  ‘I don't suppose I'll ever see the place,’ Richard said, ‘unless you invite me round for a cup of tea.’

  It was to the solicitors he and Stella had been that day when she dressed up and forced herself to go in his car. She'd told him she wanted to make provision for me in her will but not what she'd be leaving me. They were surprised about the house, he and Marianne, probably a lot more surprised than they let me see. Innocent people who have led blameless lives don't own secret houses. They must have wondered, they must have been afraid to find out.

  I stood in front of Lena, waiting for her to sack me. One of the dogs got up, came over and started licking my hand.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘stop that!’ Her eyes lighted on me and then were cast up to the ceiling. ‘Well, don't stand there,’ she said. ‘Tommy's waiting for his breakfast. Call him sir, why don't you, and maybe he'll put you down in his will for all his war memoirs.’

  That was that. Not another word. It was my day off on Wednesday and I moved in. Marianne and Richard knew I'd nowhere to go, you see, and if the family approved the solicitors had no objection. Mum promised not to tell Mike where I was. Of course there isn't a chance of keeping my new address dark for long, not with Len knowing it and Janis knowing it, neither of them being much renowned for discretion. Philippa would let herself be tortured, like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man she said, before she'd say a word.

  The strangest thing was having the electricity turned on. I lit the boiler and real hot water came out of the taps. I ordered coal and lit fires in the fireplaces. But I couldn't sleep in that bedroom, though I did try. The dream I had was of Ned lying beside me and holding me in his arms, saying it was warm at last, why was it warm? I woke up to the empty bed and in the morning I dragged it and the rest of the furniture into one of the back bedrooms.

  That magic day, the 3rd of January, when he'd be back from Interlaken, was past and gone. I didn't fool myself he'd tried to phone me at home and given up because I wasn't there. If you want someone you find her. You phone her at work, you go to the house where you used to meet, you inquire at the pub her mother keeps. You don't just give up. You aren't indifferent. Unless that's what you want, to get rid of her, as easily and as straightforwardly as he'd got rid of me.

  Under Stella's will I'd inherited not just the house but all its contents. Everything in it became mine. Did that include the red Ford Anglia in the garage? The idea of consulting solicitors unnerved me, I'd heard their charges could be astronomical, but Richard's advice was free. I told him that according to his mother the car had once belonged to Gilda Brent. He traced it through the car tax office and found the owner – or ‘keeper’ I believe they call it – registered as Mrs Gwendoline Tyzark.

  ‘I can just remember her,’ he said. ‘Marianne liked her but I didn't. She frightened me. For some reason I confused her with Cruella de Ville in A Hundred and One Dalmatians. I even thought she'd want to make me into a fur coat.’

  ‘So whose car is it now?’ I said.

  ‘Hers, I suppose.’

  ‘Your mother said she was dead. Perhaps the car had better just stay there for the time being.’

  He suggested I advertise for her in the papers and I did phone one of them to ask what it would cost. Forty or fifty pounds, they said. I didn't have that kind of money, money was very tight for me, and the chances are no one would answer the advertisement anyway. But I thought about Gilda a lot. It was a kind of game for me too, not
a Killing Gilda but a Keeping Gilda Alive, the purpose being to distract my mind.

  That of course wasn't really possible. When you'e loved someone and lost him the way I'd loved and lost Ned it's not just love and sorrow that fill your mind but a terrible bitterness and resentment. A sort of indignation, maybe outrage is the better word, that anyone could deceive you so and delude you so, tell you such lies, debase you so. For if I once said that Ned made me a good self-image with his love, what did that do to me when I knew he'd never loved me? He'd just used me to feed a sort of sickness he has that makes him want women to love him, any women, so long as they're nice to look at and young, so long as they'll keep telling him they love him and listen when he says the same to them. All the things Mum said and Philippa implied about him wanting me for my looks and my body were true. And if they hadn't said anything about him being a love fetishist that was because they didn't know someone could be.

  So if I wasn't to go mad or have a breakdown I had to have something else to turn my mind to. It was as if I had developed a switch in my brain that I pushed down when my thoughts went to Ned. It switched off Ned and switched on Gilda. Or that was the idea. It didn't always work, it often didn't work, or it worked for a while and then Ned and what he'd done by-passed the switch, came back and drove everything else away.

  But when I was in Gilda mode, as people who know about technology might say, I thought about her leaving Alan for another man, which is what some people said she'd done, and the more I thought of it the more peculiar it seemed. For Stella had never mentioned any other man in Gilda's life apart from general admirers. Had some man suddenly come along and swept her away? Stranger things have happened but I found it hard to believe. And if she had gone away with a lover to France, surely that would have been just what Stella and Alan had wished for. In that case there would have been no problem about divorce and no threat from Gilda if they lived together. They would have married eventually.