Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  Then, as if to confound such reasoning, Sarah said in a tone of humorous indulgence, “Well, go on then. Tell me all about it.”

  “A car came to Nightingales about half an hour ago. A black Mercedes.”

  “Simone’s back?”

  “No. It was a man with a briefcase. Alan let him in. He only stayed a few minutes but when he left he wasn’t carrying the case.”

  Sarah burst out laughing. “I wouldn’t like to try concealing anything in this place.”

  “It was pure coincidence I happened to be passing.” Avis blushed defiantly. “I was taking old Mrs. Perkins’ repeat arthritis prescription. Saves her walking to the surgery.”

  “Did you get the car’s number?”

  “All right, all right.” Annoyed at being made to feel foolish, Avis stopped worrying about appearing undisciplined, got the tin down and cut herself a large chunk of cake. “But you can’t deny it’s all very mysterious. For instance, Alan hasn’t left the house since Simone disappeared. You’d think he’d be out looking for her.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t know where to start.”

  “What about his work?”

  “What about his work?” repeated Sarah, her tranquil voice emphasising the second word.

  “Everyone says he’s going to pieces.”

  “How do they know if he hasn’t left the house?”

  “Ohhh!” Avis’s voice flared with irritation. She swallowed her cake and dropped the fork which clattered on to her plate. “Why are you always so . . .” Thinking pedantic might offend, she chose rational.

  “Because irrationality alarms me.”

  The two women looked at each other. Avis swallowed again, this time from nervous excitement. Sarah had never before today offered even the smallest, most innocuous personal revelation. And now, two in succession. Avis seized on what she determined to regard as an invitation to friendship and her mind leaped into the future. They would tell each other the complete story of their lives and discuss everything both trivial and profound. Sarah would talk about her work and Avis would learn about art and music and literature. She saw her horizons stretching wider and wider, her plain old world transformed into something both complex and extraordinary. Her mind would open like a flower.

  Sarah, having finished her coffee, was getting up to go in the same composed, unhurried way that she had arrived. Picking up her beautiful mottled bowl of eggs she moved towards the door.

  “Shall I see you next week?” cried Avis, already looking forward to it.

  “Doubt it. These will probably last me quite a while.”

  “That batty old woman next door’s been to the police.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Teddy Grimshaw saw her. He was talking about it in the pensions queue.” Reg had not himself been in the line-up. The Brockleys’ joint pensions went straight into his bank account. But the post office also doubled as a newsagents and he was in there paying the monthly paper bill. The Daily and Sunday Express, Radio Times and, for Iris, the Lady. Green Fingers, the gardening journal taken for many years, had recently been cancelled after some female jobbing columnist had taken it upon herself to suggest that excessive neatness in a plot was not only bad for the plants but denoted a seriously neurotic personality in the plantsman.

  “What on earth was Mr. Grimshaw doing in the police station?”

  “Making a formal complaint about that abandoned traffic cone.”

  “The one leaning against the wall behind the phone box?”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting another has sprung up, Iris.”

  “No wonder house prices are plummeting.”

  The Brockleys were taking tea on the patio. Now Reg got up from his green plastic chair and walked down the steps. As he contemplated his lawn, close-shaven in lines straight as prison bars, his prim lips tuckered into a smirk of satisfaction.

  He walked down the path, his eyes swivelling, alert for alien seedlings or overconfident species that had ceased to know their place. Spotting a lacewing clinging to a violent orange floribunda, he broke off the leaf, squeezed it round the offending insect and dropped the shrouded corpse into the dustbin.

  The Brockleys had no compost heap and could not understand those who did. To them the whole point of having a garden was to keep it contained, not encourage it to go burgeoning about all over the place.

  Iris called out, “Another finger dainty, dear?”

  Receiving no reply, she picked up a sunray of bloater paste fingers and made her way towards her husband, her stout little feet carefully avoiding the cracks in the crazy paving. No point in deliberately courting bad luck.

  Reg had eased his way behind a ceanothus and was now peering into the Hollingsworths’ unruly herbaceous border. In the early evening silence frogs plopped in and out of a tiny pond. What he saw disturbed him greatly. As he wriggled back into his original position, Iris clicked her tongue.

  “You’ve snagged your cardie.”

  “Iris—”

  “Your best Fair Isle.”

  This garment was Reg’s only concession to retirement. Beneath it he wore a crisp collared and cuffed shirt, a plain closely-knotted tie and a park of dark trousers with creases so sharp they could have opened an oyster.

  “He’s digging, Iris.”

  “Digging?”

  “A hole.”

  “But he never touches the garden. He hates gardening.”

  “Nevertheless . . .”

  “And the ground’s like a rock.”

  “He’s turned the hose on it.”

  After Iris had also craned round the ceanothus for a sight of the excavation they returned soberly to the house only just in time for the six o’clock news to which Reg, for the first time that either of them could remember, could hardly give his full attention.

  Iris was distracted to such a degree that Shona was allowed to emerge from her basket and stand quietly in the centre of the room without being reprimanded. In gratitude she started to wag her tail.

  “He must be burying something,” suggested Reg.

  His wife, rinsing the crockery for the second time in clear running water, drew in her breath. One long, excited sibilation. “You don’t think . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Nelson?” The cat had still not reappeared and Alan was no longer to be heard calling him. Iris added, with a trembly wince in her voice, “How big’s the hole?”

  “Impossible to guess from that angle. I’d need to look out of Brenda’s bedroom window.”

  “Chance’d be a fine thing.” Iris laid the cloth and sat down to face her husband over the kitchen table. The discovery of the hole could well presage imminent upheaval and the Brockleys were torn between pleasure at the prospect of an exciting scandal and alarm at the thought that chaos could possibly ensue, chaos that might tip the precisely weighted balance of their world and introduce more than a touch of Iris’s “hurly burly.”

  “I can’t help thinking of that terrible business in Gloucester last year.”

  “Ohhh!” cried Iris. Her hands, two little pink lumps of dough, flew together and became one large pink lump. Her features shimmered under a racing flood of emotion. Alarm, pleasure, titillation, dread. “But it’s been four days since she disappeared. Surely he would have . . .” Iris hesitated, unable to bring herself to utter the word “buried.” Disposed of seemed demeaning, as if Simone was something less than human. Concealed suggested inefficiency on Alan’s part. Hidden was rather lightweight and might be said to reduce the whole terrible business to no more than a macabre parlour game. Iris decided to pass, concluding tamely, “by now.”

  That was when Brenda arrived from work. After she had completed her ablutions and was sitting down letting a nice cup of tea get cold and picking the onion out of the pasty, Reg slipped away.

  His daughter’s door was ajar. He pushed it just as wide as he needed to get inside—fortunately it did not squeak. He tiptoed to the larger of the two windows which looked over th
e back garden. From here he could see the hole quite clearly. As far as he could judge it seemed to be about four feet round and two feet deep. Nowhere near big enough to accommodate a body even if tightly curled. On the other hand Hollingsworth had plainly not finished digging, for the spade was left jammed into the ground.

  Reg, who always cleaned his tools with newspaper before hanging them on their clearly labelled hooks, gave a “tsk” of censure. Though he would have been outraged if such a suggestion had been put to him, in truth Reg disapproved more of this example of slovenliness than if he had come across Alan actually interring his spouse.

  And then the man himself appeared. Suddenly he was there, on the terrace. Reg jumped back out of sight. After a moment he heard the sound of the spade scraping and chopping at something and then repeated hard bangs as if the earth was being beaten level. He risked a peep round the curtain and saw that the hole was being filled in.

  Reg hurried away, adjusting the door, as precisely as he could remember, to show exactly the same gap.

  As he sat down again, Iris raised her finely pencilled brows, indicating the food still lying on the table.

  “She’s hardly eaten a thing.” She scraped the remains of Brenda’s supper into a bowl marked DOG.

  “Now, Iris. I’ve surveyed the—”

  “I mentioned he’d been digging and how he never had before. She said, in that cold sort of way she’s taken on lately, ‘A person can change, I hope, Mother.’ I thought, he’s not the only one.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I am. Just because I’m talking doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

  “I would say that hole was of a size to comfortably accommodate a medium-sized box file.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “However, the situation has now changed somewhat . . .”

  Brenda was sitting on the sofa in the lounge. Ostensibly transfixed by Watchdog, she was in fact preoccupied entirely with her own private misery. She could hear her parents droning on but only remotely, like waves on a distant beach. Queasily swamped by thoughts of Alan Hollingsworth, she stared at the screen, not registering the everyday saga of crooked folk and their imaginative swindles.

  Since that dreadful moment when their eyes had met through the glass of her bedroom window, he had not been out of her thoughts for an instant. Her work had suffered. Asked that morning to take one of the tills, a rare and unwished for honour, she had been so locked within a remorseful maze of argument and counter-argument that she had not even registered the sympathetic—or repelled—glances her appearance always provoked.

  “If only” had been the gist of her anguished reasoning. If only she hadn’t looked out precisely at that moment. If only he hadn’t glanced up exactly when he did. But by now, a bare two days after the event, these feverish reflections had inflated the incident into a tragedy of Sophoclean weight and proportion.

  Bearing the unbearable had brought her almost to the point of exhaustion. She had not slept and now, though so tired she could barely focus, knew she would sleep fitfully if at all the coming night.

  Aware at one level that she was being ridiculous, Brenda had striven to see the incident as if from an outsider’s point of view, to establish in her mind its essential triviality. But her exertions had seemed to make matters worse. Like a swimmer struggling against a powerful current, she had become more and more enmeshed. She realised now that, until matters had been put right between them, the black torment would continue. She saw herself becoming really ill.

  Brenda got up quickly before fear could atrophy her limbs, hurried into the hall, grabbed her keys and put on her coat. Her mother’s “Where are you going?” was cut off by the door slam.

  Brenda ran down the path, round to Nightingales’ tall black and gold gates and wrenched them open. She could do it as long as she didn’t stop to think. Opening gambits—I can’t say how sorry. What you must think. I couldn’t bear it if—floated to the surface of her mind, broke like bubbles and were straightaway replaced by more.

  These remedial flourishes brought Brenda to the front door. On the point of dissolving into desperate tears, she knocked very loudly.

  Immediately the door was opened. Alan Hollingsworth came out and moved forcefully forward. For one terrible moment Brenda thought he was going to push her off the step. Or even knock her down. He slammed the door behind him and started walking towards the garage.

  Impossible as it might appear, Brenda was instantly convinced he hadn’t seen her. His eyes appeared to be fixed on some distant point or object. He could almost have been in a trance. His face was ghastly; grey-white with little cuts on his cheeks and chin. One or two had tufts of cotton wool with traces of blood sticking to them. His movements were mechanistic and strangely concentrated.

  Brenda, horrified, watched as the car was backed out. Surely he wasn’t going to drive in that zombie-like state. He would have an accident and kill someone. Or, a million times worse, himself!

  She ran across the gravel crying, “Wait!” but the car was already reversing down the drive. Brenda waved her arms, crossing and recrossing them at the wrists as if signalling on a flight path.

  Now he was turning. She saw his shoulder dip as he bent to change gear. She raced back to The Larches—blessing the key ring in her pocket—and flung herself into the Metro. The engine caught first time. Brenda, briefly aware of her parents’ startled faces at the kitchen window, scraped a wing on the gatepost. Then she was out in the lane and away.

  At the T-junction where St. Chad’s Lane ran into the main street Brenda stopped and looked anxiously both ways. On the outskirts of the right-hand exit from Fawcett Green the tarmac was being repaired and a set of traffic lights had been installed. They showed red. Two cars were waiting, neither of which belonged to Alan.

  Guessing that he would not have had time to precede them and praying she was right, Brenda turned left and put her foot down. Usually a timid and decorous driver, she touched fifty while still in the village and sixty the second she was on the open road. Within minutes she had spotted the Audi.

  It was moving along quite slowly. Brenda settled down to follow, keeping just one vehicle, an electrical van, between them. When this turned off, she remained unconcerned, reasoning that if Alan had not noticed her standing under his nose on Nightingales’ doorstep he was hardly likely to spot her in the present circumstances.

  He drove through Causton and Uxbridge before taking the road towards West Drayton. They passed the stately building of the Montessori School, half hidden behind tall trees, and the much less stately Crowne Plaza Holiday Inn. At one point a massive blue and white container lorry, Transports Frigorifigues European, roared by. When the driver pulled over to the inside lane, Brenda lost sight of Alan and had to grip the wheel very tightly to stop the sudden trembling in her hands. Unable to overtake the lorry, she could do nothing but follow it and pray that the Audi would not suddenly enter the middle lane and speed off, for she was sure she would not have the skill or courage to follow.

  Then came a nightmare four-lane intersection with signs to Heathrow, Central London and Slough. She saw Alan in the second stream. Gritting her teeth and screwing up her face with anxiety and effort, Brenda overtook the great pantechnicon, fleetingly aware of two great blue interlocking circles on its mile-long chassis. Several horns hooted so she knew she had done something wrong.

  Alan was following the sign for Heathrow. Once more safely on his tail, Brenda relaxed slightly. She was starting to feel happy, or at least pleasurably excited, and realised that, for the first time in her life, she was having an adventure. She sat up straighter in the car, lifted her chin in a daredevil sort of way and briefly drove with one hand on the wheel. A huge white model of Concorde flashed by to her right and they were in the airport tunnel.

  There was a great deal of noise, screaming whoops and wails as two police cars tore by closely followed by an ambulance. A Sheraton Heathrow bus blocked her view and, emergin
g into the light again, Brenda discovered that Alan was now in the nearside lane and aiming for the Short Stay Car Park. Confused, uncertain and desperate not to lose him, she signalled and simultaneously swung over directly in front of a black cab. The driver signalled viciously in return and further demonstrated his fury by a stream of rabidly picturesque sound bites as he passed.

  Alan was reaching through his window for a ticket from the machine at the entrance. Brenda did the same then wondered how, having no purse, she would be able to pay for it. At least she had filled up with petrol on her way home from work. Alan drove to the higher level and Brenda followed. He got out carrying a small case and made his way towards the lifts.

  Brenda crept out of her car using the door furthest away. Having parked with about a dozen vehicles between them, she sidled, half crouching, past several rear number plates ready to duck should her quarry decide to retrace his steps. As Alan pressed the lift button he glanced about him and Brenda remained very still, unaware that she was an object of humorous derision to a couple in a nearby Saab.

  As soon as the lift doors closed, she ran forward and rested her finger on the descending arrow, burning with impatience. She had never been to an airport but her feverish imagination had already supplied a teeming concourse in which Alan would be swallowed up without trace the moment he set foot on it.

  The second lift arrived and when she emerged at ground level Brenda’s worst fears were realised. Tears of frustration welled as she dodged cars and mini buses and crossed two roads to gain the automatic swing door that was the entrance to the terminus.