The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  The man said, ‘I've got the same model myself. It should be OK.’ He held up his hands and said, ‘Fingers crossed.’

  I can see him now, on that hot dusty evening, holding up his crossed fingers. He was our fateful messenger but we were also his. He got into his van and drove away, home to those children, I supposed, till Alan set me right.

  I got into Gilda's car next to him. Hundreds of times I'd sat there in the past, going out to tea with her, going to the cinema but I'd only once been in it with him before. Alan started talking as if nothing had happened. The garage man had told him that thanks to us he'd be late home again. He had laughed and winked but he was serious. His wife had told him this was his last chance. If he was late again ‘he'd had his chips’, she was throwing him out, so since he'd be late anyway now he was going to keep a date he'd made with a woman called Kath and get home really late. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, he'd said.

  ‘Why are you telling me all this? I said.

  ‘I thought it might amuse you.’

  I asked if he was going to phone the police or if he'd like me to do it. My voice sounded cold and hard. He looked into my eyes and shook his head slowly, as if by that shake of the head he was trying to make me understand many things. He lit two cigarettes in his mouth and gave me one.

  ‘No one's phoning the police,’ he said.

  ‘We must,’ I said.

  ‘We can't. Think about it, sweetheart. We told the garage man no one was hurt. We let him think you were my wife and there had been just the two of us in the car.’

  I said stupidly, shifting the blame, ‘He suggested it.’

  ‘So? We didn't have to do it, any more than he had to stop for us. You know, I actually thought of saying, “She's not my wife,” but I couldn't. It made me think of that joke about the man who can't make love unless he keeps saying to himself, “She's not my wife, she's not my wife.” I thought if I said it I'd start laughing.’ One of the things I loved him for was his light-heartedness. In that moment I hated it. ‘We didn't tell him Gilda was hurt,’ he said. ‘We didn't even tell him she was there.’

  ‘But Gilda's not just hurt,’ I said. ‘She's dead.’

  ‘All the more reason. What would you say to them? That we had an accident and Gilda was thrown out but we didn't mention it to the chap from the garage who came to pick up the crash car. We didn't mention it because she was dead by then and anyway, this lady is not my wife and I was drunk. Is that what we'd say? And if not what would we say?’

  I said we should have got the police straightaway, we should have got the police and an ambulance, before having the car moved. Why hadn't we?

  Because the garage man came up with this idea, he said. A godsend. A friend in need. A Good Samaritan, one of those who hadn't passed by.

  ‘I'd better keep the car going,’ he said. I didn't know what he meant. ‘In case the battery goes down again. When you're ready, we'll go.’

  ‘Go where?’ I said.

  ‘To fetch Gilda.’

  I nearly screamed. I would have done but I clapped both hands across my mouth.

  ‘That's why I had that chap fix the car,’ he said.

  We drove back. I was beginning to know that stretch of road very well. The combine was still there. The only mark Alan's car had made on it was to remove a few inches of yellow paint from its rear. Everything was the same, the grass verge, the hay and the weeds that were six feet tall, the hedge behind, the trees. Did I expect it to have changed? Only the sky and the air had altered, the smoke nearly departed, evening sunshine pouring through the haze.

  This is the first side of the second tape.

  Alan edged the car right up on to the verge. The ground was dry and hard. He turned the car so that the rear was to the hedge. A truck passed by, then a motor bike. A car came in the opposite direction. By chance we had come back there in Curton's rush hour, such as it was. Alan opened the boot and took out two deck chairs, that he must have fetched from the garage. He set them up on the verge with the picnic table between them and put a bottle on the table and a packet of cigarettes.

  It's curious how, when something like this happens to you, you move very easily into the – well, scenario is Marianne's word – the scenario of a detective story. You become aware of things that up till then have belonged only in books. I said to him,

  ‘If you do that anyone who sees us will remember we were here. They'll remember seeing picnickers.’

  ‘There won't be anyone asking,’ he said. ‘It's for now not the future that I don't want to attract their attention.’ He put out his hand and indicated the deck chair, ‘Won't you sit down?’ I did as he asked. ‘Want a fag?’ he said.

  We each had a cigarette. We sat side by side admiring the view, yellow fields where the corn had been cut and black fields where the stubble had been burnt. A police car went by, and the driver raised one friendly hand in a salute.

  I'd always been amazed by those people who drive out into the country just to sit by the roadside. We were those people now. Lovers don't behave like that but married couples do. Who would have guessed we were guilty lovers? We were smoking and drinking wine at a picnic table on a warm evening, and in the ditch behind us was his wife's dead body.

  When the traffic came to an end and the last car had gone home, we put one of the deck chairs back into the car and we put the table inside in the back. The other deck chair we used as a stretcher.

  Alan took her head and I her feet. There were grass seeds in her hair. We laid her on the stretcher, carried her to the car and tipped her gently into the boot. She was very light, I doubt if she was more than seven stone. I looked just once at her dead face. The green scarf was no longer tied round her neck but lying across her chest. Even then I was sure that when she got into the car the green chiffon was at her throat.

  We put the deck chair in on top of the body and closed the lid. I have described that in a very matter-of-fact way, but that was not at all how I felt. While I helped Alan move Gilda's body I felt unreal, as if in a dream. I would wake up and find myself on the sofa with my head on his shoulder, our dance over, the wine gone to our heads. But I believe this is the way all people feel when called upon to do some act that is utterly alien to their normal life, as if translated into nightmare.

  Not a single car had passed while we did this. All was still and silent. We drove back to Molucca. Alan opened the garage doors and put Gilda's car inside, Gilda's body inside in Gilda's car. As we went into the house I noted that it was the exact time we had booked the table for our romantic dinner. He said,

  ‘I'm going to have a bath and then a hair of the dog. How about you?’

  ‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do.’

  He said conversationally, as if nothing had happened, ‘They used to think eating a hair of the dog that had bitten you would cure the bite. Did you know that, my star?’

  The last person you would have expected me to think about then was Richard. But I did think of him, down there in Cornwall, enjoying himself, on the beach all day most probably, and now having his supper, soon to go to bed. I thought how terrible it was for him to have a mother who could do what I was doing. When Alan came downstairs, bathed and his hair washed and in clean clothes, I was still where he'd left me and on my third cigarette.

  He had never seen me look the way I must have looked then, dirty, my hair untidy and full of smuts, my hands bleeding, my bare legs scratched, my dress filthy with corn smuts and earth and blood. The sight of me made him laugh.

  ‘Oh God, sweetheart, you should see yourself! The little match-girl. Mrs Guy Fawkes.’

  He seemed quite restored. He was cheerful, his old self. I said to him,

  ‘When I was sitting there, before the garage man came back, and you were kneeling beside her, what did you do to her? Did you do anything to her, Alan?’

  He was laughing again. What do you mean?

  ‘She was only thrown a couple of yards out of a car.
Perhaps she hit her head against that tree and again perhaps she didn't. Would someone die of that?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Alan,’ I said. ‘Did you…?’ But I couldn't ask him.

  The words I hadn't used are those you read in books or hear someone say on television. They have nothing to do with real life. You accept hearing them said, you even expect to hear them said in the course of a play or a film, but not in an ordinary day to day existence. In ordinary life they are grotesque. One would laugh at them, the scornful way one laughs at clichés.

  I hadn't said them but he knew what I'd tried to say. He often knew what I was thinking, the precise words of my thoughts. But he was smiling, he was cheerful, he answered me cheerfully.

  ‘Of course not. Of course I didn't.’

  ‘You were alone with her,’ I said, ‘oh, for a long time.’

  ‘I've often been alone with her for a long time,’ he said. ‘Too long. That's been the trouble.’

  He picked up the phone and dialled the number the garage man had given him. I heard him start talking to the farmer who owned the combine. He was very polite, apologetic, hazarding a little joke about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. I went upstairs and had a bath. Whatever happens, I thought, tomorrow I'll go out and buy myself a pair of flat sandals. I hung up my beautiful dirty dress in the wardrobe and put on another. I combed my hair and I thought about making up my face and asked myself, are you mad? But I did make up my face, as I'd have made it up if I'd been going to my own execution. When the man who worked the guillotine lifted up my head there would have been rouge on my cheeks and lipstick on my mouth.

  So I went down again, dressed the way other women dress for a party or a wedding. Alan was sitting there, drinking tomato juice or, more probably, a Bloody Mary.

  ‘Vitamin C is never wrong,’ he said. And then, ‘Nice chap, that farmer. He asked us over for a drink. I said I'd ask you and call him back.’

  ‘You said what?’

  ‘A joke. He said to forget about his machine and there was nothing a lick of paint, I quote, wouldn't cure.’

  ‘What time is it?’ I said.

  ‘Two minutes past eight. We've missed our dinner. The problem would have been getting there. Of course we do have a car but, on the other hand, we don't exactly have a car. Remember the people whose grandmother died in Spain.’

  ‘What people?’ I said.

  I must have been the only person in England who had never heard the story about the couple driving their grandmother over the border from France into Spain. The old woman dies and they put her body in the boot of the car to take her back into France. They leave the car for ten minutes in the town square while they have a drink and when they come back the body has gone, never to be found. But you've heard it, over and over probably, along with the other apocryphal stories about the cat eating the chihua-hua and the human tooth in the hamburger.

  It didn't seem funny to me. I said to Alan, ‘How can you?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I'm hysterical. Ignore me’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  Only what we meant to have for lunch,’ I said.

  I remember every word of that conversation, trivial though it was. All the time I was wanting to ask that question again but I was afraid. After a little while he left the room and although he hadn't said I knew where he had gone. I watched him back Gilda's car out of the garage. He came in and said we were going out to eat, to the hotel in Thelmarsh, the White Hart. They did meals and they went on serving until late. I looked at the car, at the boot of the car, and he said not to worry about that, he'd seen to that, though on the whole what had happened to the grandmother in the story might be a blessing for us.

  While we were out I tried to talk to him as if nothing had happened. I talked about Richard. I talked about my house in Bury and where we would live, there or at Molucca. After a while my voice tailed away, he hadn't said much anyway, we both fell silent. I couldn't eat but he could. He ate his way steadily through three courses and he drank a lot. It was a warm, sultry night. The sky had cleared and through the White Hart's window you could see a host of stars. I said – and it was very unlike me, ‘I wish we could walk back.’

  He still joked. He tapped his glass. ‘We may have to.’ When he'd paid the bill, he said to me, ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Say “back” and not “home”?’

  ‘I don't know,’ I said, though I did know.

  I drove us back, going slowly. I put the car into the garage. She was wrapped in a plaid car rug lying up against the left-hand wall. It was then that I thought, when this is all over I will never drive a car again. The time was nearly midnight as we entered the house. We went upstairs and lay down on our bed. I said to him,

  ‘Did you do anything to her?’

  His speech was thick. ‘D'you mean, did I kill her?’

  ‘Yes, that's what I mean.’

  ‘Of course I didn't.’

  ‘Alan, please tell me the truth.’

  ‘I didn't kill her.’

  I took off my clothes and put on a nightdress and a dressing-gown, washed my face and combed my hair. Not looking at him, I said, ‘If you didn't do anything to her –’ I couldn't say ‘kill’ – ‘why can't we tell the police? Why can't we have her taken away?’

  He had fallen asleep. I lay down beside him for a while. I felt as if we were refugees, strangers fleeing from some disaster, and because neither of us had anywhere else to sleep we were obliged to lie on the same bed. I thought about what had happened and I understood the answers to my questions. If we were going to tell someone we should have done so at once, from the beginning, and we would have if the garage man had not presented us with a way out, had not advised us how to proceed.

  He was not to blame, we weren't obliged to take his advice, but it had been given and we had taken it. From then on we had let him call me Alan's wife and the farmer do so too, for all I knew. We had sat on the grass verge in deck chairs having a picnic for the Curton rush-hour traffic to see. We had moved Gilda's body. We had gone out to dinner in Thelmarsh in her car. Her body lay some twenty feet from us now, on the garage floor. It was too late to tell anyone, too late for anything. I got up and went back downstairs and lay on the sofa where I finally did sleep. I slept till the birds began and the house was full of the sound of their singing in the fen.

  It was strange, we met but we didn't speak. We went about the house, tidying up, making coffee, getting something to eat, but it was a long time before we said anything. Eventually he said, ‘Do you really want to know why?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I know why.’

  He smiled wanly. ‘Good for you.’ He had the most appalling hangover. ‘I think I need to sleep some more.’

  It was hot again and there was more smoke in the air, though not as much as the day before. I lay on the lawn at the back of the house, not sleeping, staring at the sky, wondering how normal ordinary people passed the time, what did they do all day, what was there to do? Somewhere about the middle of the day Alan came out to find me.

  ‘You know what we're going to have to do, don't you?’ he said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Come into the house.’

  We sat down opposite each other in the living room.

  ‘I think I know how to do it,’ he said. ‘Have we plenty of oil?’

  I stared at him. He might have been talking some obscure foreign language.

  ‘Paraffin, I mean. Have we plenty?’

  ‘Five gallons. It's in the garage.’

  He said he'd go out and get some more. Then he told me what he planned to do, what we must do. I said nothing, I just sat there, shaking my head, but in wonder and horror, not saying no.

  ‘Petrol too,’ he said, ‘or is that too dangerous?’

  I tried the phone but for some reason it was out of order. While Alan was away I walked down the road in my high heels to the nearest call box, it
was nearly a mile, and used up all the change I had phoning Madge Browning to find out how Richard was. For some reason I had this premonition that while I was at the house, doing and contemplating these dreadful things, a more dreadful thing had happened to him and he was drowned or terribly injured in a fall. But he was fine and happy and, indoors for an hour for lunch, came to the phone and talked to me, telling me about the farm and the animals and the beach.

  The day before I'd promised myself to buy a pair of sandals, but I didn't. It no longer seemed to matter if my high heels broke or my feet blistered. Alan had returned before I got back. His face lit up when he saw me and he seized me in his arms, he had been so worried, anything might have happened to me, his world collapsed without me. Where had I been? I told him. I let him hold me. Then we sat at the dining table and ate some of the food he had bought. We drank a bottle of red wine and we slept, but not together.

  It was strange, the way this wasn't discussed but taken for granted, that I would lie on the bed upstairs and he on the sofa. I slept heavily. When I woke up the sun was setting. I went into one of the empty back rooms and watched it set behind the fen, an angry orange-red in a dusty sky. Alan wasn't downstairs. I went into the garage. He had the car boot open and Gilda's body back inside it.

  The green scarf was nowhere to be seen. I remembered how it had been knotted round her neck when she came to the house – yesterday, was it really only yesterday? - but when we lifted her body to bring it here the scarf lay loose on her chest. I shocked him, he didn't expect it of me, that I would bend over the body, that I would touch it, and examine the neck. She was cool and stiff. There was no mark on the neck, the dark strangle line that you read about in crime books, that wasn't there.

  He knew what I was looking for. I saw it in his eyes, but he said nothing. He put the paraffin in the boot and the two cans of petrol he had bought and a pile of newspapers that had accumulated over the years.

  ‘Put on your dirty dress,’ he said.