by Jill Dawson
Smythson-Balby stood at the bar, smiling down at her. She bought herself a shandy with obvious inexperience, having to ask the price twice, dropping money as she fumbled with her pocket book, then turning, rather awkwardly, to offer to buy Pat a drink. Another whisky was secured and then the girl sat next to her, gushing:
‘Just, you know, as I say. Whenever you can. Thank you so much for agreeing. The book titles, the spellings, that kind of thing. I’d hate to get anything wrong.’
Pat did not remembering agreeing, but said nothing. She glugged back her drink too quickly; the ice knocked against her teeth. The girl had pushed some typewritten pages towards her.
‘I’ve actually never been in here,’ Smythson-Balby confided, leaning forward in a gust of that overwhelming scent. ‘Or in fact . . . probably any pub, on my own. Don’t you feel as if everyone is staring at you?’
They were now. The old men looked as if someone had run a shot of electricity through them. Their hair practically stood on end, Pat noticed. They were trying not to stare at the mini-skirt, the legs, the deep crease between Smythson-Balby’s attention-seeking breasts when she leaned forward to pick up a pound note she’d dropped on the floor. Her hair today was glossier and redder in colour than ever, and piled on top of her head like the Eiffel Tower – could that actually be all her own hair or was it some kind of elaborate hairpiece? It looked like plastic; Pat was tempted to put her hand out and touch it.
‘Actually, there is something I’d like to ask you,’ the young woman said.
Here it comes: she’s writing a novel, Pat thought at once. She wants to ask me to read it. It had happened many times before; a hazard of the profession. Pushing her fringe out of her eyes, she tapped the ash from her cigarette into an ashtray that said Guinness is Good for You, wondering how she would manage to say no.
‘Might you be interested in buying my car?’ Smythson-Balby continued. ‘I’ve bought the red one from Izzie – she was taking me for a spin in it just now and, well, of course, it’s not very often in England one can drive with the roof down but still. It’s such a joy. And that means I have to get rid of the Anglia and . . . I thought of you. You’re pretty stuck out here without a car. A new one would be nearly five hundred but, of course, I’d let you have it for a good price.’
Pat pulled on her cigarette and considered. Sure, she could use a car. She’d thought of that when Sam said she couldn’t come to visit. She’d wanted at once to drive to London and snatch her away, elope with her. She’d driven cars with stick-shift gears in France and Germany, she was a confident driver, and the Ford Anglia was quite an appealing little model. But what was this young woman really asking? Did it insinuate her into Pat’s life in some way, oblige her? If she said yes, would the girl find fresh excuses to visit her at Bridge Cottage every five minutes, to make herself indispensable to her?
‘How much?’ Pat asked.
‘Two hundred pounds? You can have a little drive in it if you like. It’s outside.’
‘What’s the perfume you’re wearing?’ Pat asked.
‘Coty. L’Aimant. Do you like it?’
Pat stood up, placing the book on Gastropoda in her jacket pocket and her arms in the sleeves. Smythson-Balby’s typed pages lay on the Singer table with a faint ringed stain where Pat had rested her whisky glass; she picked them up. The younger woman beamed and nodded towards the front door. As they left, the old men lifted their heads and noses, like pigs beside a trough as the bucket approaches.
‘I won a Vogue contest,’ Smythson-Balby was saying. ‘Mother is really thrilled about it. A writing competition. Fifty pounds. Mrs Kennedy won the American one, you know, years ago, so it’s rather something . . .’
‘That dreadful Cutty Sark whisky,’ Pat mumbled, not listening. ‘I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.’ The advertising slogan was: A man’s drink that women enjoy. That summed it up. Dumb women of no discernment, who were afraid to drink whisky, of course. It was the only kind the Victoria served.
The bar had closed late, something the locals called a ‘lock-in’. It was dusk now. The car hurtled rather pleasingly down softly darkening lanes, its full beam catching and freezing a muntjac deer as it sprinted across the road, and then a tiny stoat, dashing for its life. The wattle and daub houses of Earl Soham, with their thatched roofs and some with pantiles that glowed orange in the car’s headlamps (‘Roman tiles’ particular to this part of Suffolk, Ronnie had lovingly explained), were replaced by empty fields, spidery lanes and black ditches. Tail-lights from a jet at the Bentwater airfield sailed over them, like fish in an inky black tank.
Pat was enjoying being behind the wheel. The dumb girl’s chatter and the smell of the L’Aimant nonsense was barely penetrating her consciousness; she was thinking only of Sam. Sam and Gerald, with his big hands and his square head, the strange, deceptive softness that flowed from him; the way that his pupils blackened his irises sometimes, black saturating the blue, like ink flooding water, when he was angry. Was Sam in danger? Had Gerald found out something – had something monstrous happened? Sam had sounded overwrought on the telephone earlier. Not herself, now that Pat came to think of it. Constrained. Pat had not believed she was ill. Or that Minty was ill. It was something else, and now that she was in the car, careering past a suddenly illuminated vicarage with its handsome cedar of Lebanon, she realised, with a chill shock, what it was. Sam had sounded frightened.
‘Izzie’s a grand girl.’ Smythson-Balby was still prattling.
Pat interrupted: ‘One hundred and fifty pounds. The clutch is shot to hell.’
Smythson-Balby’s face was unreadable. ‘Well, Daddy said it was in awfully good condition.’
‘One hundred and sixty. It’s pretty banged-up. I didn’t ask you to bring it. I can live without a car.’
‘Done!’
Pat swung the car to a wild turn in the middle of the lane and began driving home. Would she dare to call Sam? She needed to talk to her – she had to know she was safe.
‘Thanks for the offer of the car, and the article. I’ll see you tomorrow. Could you bring the car early? There’s a journey I should take. I’ll have the cash for you. Matter of fact, I have it now,’ Pat said.
‘I could pop in and get it?’ There was a note in Smythson-Balby’s voice that Pat thought she recognised.
‘Sure, but how will you get home?’ Pat was distracted. The obvious answer did not seem apparent to her.
‘You might drive me?’ the girl said sweetly.
Pat cut the engine outside Bridge Cottage. She had a glimpse of Smythson-Balby’s startled expression in the interior light. She was thinking only: With a car, I could retrieve Sam. I could drive to London and rescue her from that old dope. Inside the cottage, she was almost running. She switched lights on, rummaged roughly in an old tin money box near her bed. She liked to keep cash the way she liked to keep folded shirts, and snails. She knew she had the cash. But the girl could go jump in the lake if she wanted a ride. Pat had a better idea.
‘Why don’t you call your little friend Izzie from the telephone booth? She can come for you in the red sporty number and we can have some highballs here while we wait.’
Again, Smythson-Balby looked startled. Pat stared at her, feeling as if she was watching the little mind working, the girl trying to figure out some logical reason to refuse. At last, admitting defeat, she asked for coins, then went outside to telephone Izzie. She didn’t look behind her. Pat didn’t see her expression, but she was sure the girl was angry.
Pat stood in the same phone booth, in a gusting wind, several hours later. She had finally got rid of Izzie and Smythson-Balby and the white Anglia was waiting like an angelic little saviour on the forecourt near the cottage. Izzie had been hammering at her, some nonsense about paperwork and road tax, but Pat was certain one journey without such things would not be a risk and was planning to go fetch Sam just as soon as they left. She had found her resolve, and now she was shivering and coatless, feeding coins into the phone and
waiting. Gerald’s voice came across the line, croaky with sleep, wary: ‘Hello?’ She immediately cut the call dead.
Goddamn him. She loathed him. She felt desolate as she remembered again the strained conversation with Sam and the curious thrumming tension, the weight in Sam’s voice as she’d said she wasn’t coming. Pat’s tussle to repress her own disappointment had meant she hadn’t been willing to listen properly. But now she went over it in her mind and the inconsistencies, the facts, seemed to be there. The Minty being sick story had been dropped. There was now no mention of Minty. There was a mention of Gerald, though, and a little nervous laugh when Sam had said that Gerald was in a ‘filthy temper’. Did he suspect something? Had Sam told him, in a reckless gesture of self-defeat (this one she could hardly credit, because Sam was the silky-smoothest woman she had ever met; the one most able to keep a secret to the point of death)? What then? Had he struck her?
Pushing open the unlocked front door of Bridge Cottage, Pat tossed her coat onto the sofa and put the kettle on the gas hob to make herself some Nescafé. She paced the room a few times, then snatched up the five pages of typed script that Smythson-Balby had left. Reading quickened her heartbeat. She immediately spotted a split infinitive. She was secretly rather impressed with the phrase ‘the low, flat, compellingly psychotic murmur’ that Smythson-Balby had used to describe Patricia Highsmith’s voice in her fictions. But the article did nothing to quell her dislike of circling vultures.
She flung the pages down and did not bother to rearrange them when they fanned into a sprawl over the table. A groggily ashamed feeling flooded over her, the one she always felt on seeing her name in print.
Sleep would never come now. The cover came off the Olympia and she abandoned the Nescafé, pouring herself a whisky instead, using a red plastic tooth-mug because there were no washed glasses. She picked up the notebook marked ‘Notes on an Ever-present Subject’ but she wasn’t in the mood for that one; equally threatening was her soon-to-be published novel and the pile of Joan’s notes on the manuscript. She rolled a fresh page into the machine and began tapping out some lines. After a time she was calmed by the sound of the typewriter’s thoughtful pecking, as familiar as her own heartbeat.
Darling, I want you to creep up me like ivy, tattoo me like ink in my blood, I love you, I long for you, I want you, I love you now, then and forever . . .
She ripped this page out, put a fresh sheet in the typewriter. She should be working on her novel, but she was out of the mood to continue. How to get out of a fix? Plain hard work. She carried on typing, sipping the whisky intermittently.
It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.
Maybe that was the trouble: too many things under way. Her diaries, her book on how to write suspense fiction, her new novel hammering at her; her attempt at a first-person account of her times with Sam. She had an idea of writing all of them at once. But then there was the shady dread she felt every time she glanced at the manuscript of the soon-to-be-published novel she was supposed to be checking.
In the end, she had set up her desk slightly away from the window in the living room, facing the flower-pocked wall (she craned the goose-neck lamp over her and kept the curtains closed), and that suited her just fine. The cottage was so cramped that this was best if she wanted to avoid having her back to either the front or the kitchen door. And she did want to avoid that. A creepy feeling of someone being behind her would tickle up her spine if she allowed it; someone ready to tap her on the shoulder. This way, if she kept the door between front room and kitchen open, she could keep one ear out for Mrs Ingham or anyone approaching via the back door. This irritating sense of vigil never left her. She knew that someone was always in danger of bursting in, of interrupting, of wrenching her away from what she wanted to do most in the world. Lose herself in work, dissolve into work and disappear.
She smoked and typed. A quiet bump-bump accompanied her: the window had become unlatched and was knocking in the wind but she didn’t care to get up and close it. Her head ached around the scalp, as it did most days. And Sam, a vision of Sam in all her blue and white elongation, all her extended loveliness, hovered over her, as sinuous as blue smoke.
Now she had the car she would drive to Sam’s place in London. She’d make an excuse. Gerald would let her in. Gerald knew nothing, she’d been wrong about that. Gerald would never hurt Sam – the man hadn’t enough courage to do anything that would draw attention to himself. And that disturbing melting softness, limpness, that hung around him. The way he dropped your hand the second you offered it, without shaking. The smile, out of the side of the mouth, designed to deflect. Perhaps Sam was simply ill in bed, had been taken ill, had sounded frightened because she was worried about upsetting Pat. That now seemed plausible, though it hadn’t an hour ago.
She could hear an owl hooting softly in the back garden and the reply – a sharp, silly little yap from Mrs Ingham’s house – as Reggie perked up. That dog was very selective in his barking, she noticed. Shame he hadn’t seen off the fox that had killed poor Bunnikins, instead of yapping at an innocent owl. The wrong things always got it in the neck. And, with that thought, she finally quit typing random sentences, and felt able to turn to her novel again.
Her own neck was cold and ached from the hunching, from the tension. Hours flew by and she typed on, more awake now than she’d been all day. She stretched. She balanced the cigarette she was smoking on the saucer beside her, occasionally poking at the hot ash. It was a pleasure to feel the burn it gave her. It helped her keep awake.
When she’d typed enough pages of her novel to feel satisfied (six usually did it), she turned to proofing the manuscript that had arrived in Friday’s mail, a task she hated, one that filled her with anxiety. The fear of making an idiotic error if she didn’t do it well enough. The horrible feeling that the book was done now, and it was too late to claw it back. The horror of another round of interviews, talks, the whole damn embarrassing circus. And the title! No one had liked her suggestion. ‘I’m afraid “Janus” just isn’t a word the English-speaking world is familiar with,’ Joan had said, and the temptation to reply, ‘Well, call it something that rhymes and stick it there too,’ was powerful, though resisted, of course. Joan already thought her half cracked. She had an idea not to make matters worse.
Sometimes I think of him with such a force of hatred that it shakes me. His square head. His posture. That sloping, selfish, swanking way he strides in, as if everything he touches, everything in his range, is his by right.
What has he ever done to deserve her? Just be him, that’s all. A loafing, stupid man who leaves tiny hairs like ants crawling over the sink whenever he’s shaved and hasn’t got the sense to see when he’s being duped, when the woman he’s lying next to at night flinches at his touch, doesn’t even love him; not one jot. And the thought that follows is always: how I’d like to shove him. While he sleeps. Launch myself at him. Push him. Thump him. Bury his face in his pillow. Or, better still, smother him, force cotton and feathers into his face, crush it into his nose, feel his legs thrash under me, press and press, use all my strength, every last squeeze of it. Get rid of him. Have her all to myself, back how things were. He’s skinny, he’s limp, he’s disgusting. What right has he to exist? He shouldn’t put a paw on her; he’s sickening.
As early as she dared, Pat went out to telephone Sam. Inside the booth it was chilly. Some kind of ivy plant crept through one broken windowpane and tickled her face. Her feet crunched on cubes of broken glass. Somewhere in the village she could hear the ugly shriek of a pheasant caw-cawing and when she closed the door to the booth, a cabbage-white butterfly stole in with her. A servant answered – Pat reckoned she must be the au pair. A girl with a pleasant voice, who called Sam ‘Mrs Gosforth’.
When Sam got on the phone she immediately scuttled the idea of Pat coming to her.
‘Don’t be silly. I’ll come next weekend. Gerald has rearranged his golf trip for then.’
> Sam was whispering, her voice warm and familiar, but then it altered suddenly and she laughed and sounded breezy and somehow different, neutral. Gerald had come into the room.
There was nothing for it but to agree.
At nine on Monday, Smythson-Balby came by (thankfully, without her little friend) to drop off some paperwork about the ownership of the vehicle and pick up the article she’d left with Pat. She lingered, eyeing the black coffee in Pat’s cup. Pat had not yet been to bed, but she felt light and refreshed, tap-tapping in her heart in time with the keys; she felt better than she had for weeks.
‘Oh!’ the girl said, hawk-like in her nosiness, whirling round. ‘Where’s your television set? You didn’t manage to order it?’
‘Coming later this week,’ Pat replied, with a shrug. She was still smarting over that telephone conversation. So Gerald had rearranged things. So that was the reason their plans were all cock-eyed and slapdash: because of his plans to play golf. Holy crap. Why did Sam keep funking telling Gerald about them? So much time wasted! She’d promised Pat she would not duck out on it.
And then the damn Smythson-Balby accepted Pat’s reluctant and not at all genuinely meant offer of a coffee. She plonked herself down on a chair at the kitchen table, crossing and re-crossing her legs, encased today in some bell-bottomed blue jeans with little flowers embroidering the hem. She asked in a cheery way about the article she’d given Pat to read. Pat had an idea the cheeriness was not at all how she felt. She handed the pages back. She watched as Smythson-Balby read her comments, neat and careful in their black ink.
Smythson-Balby looked up with a sunny smile.
‘Thank you. I’ll make those amendments straight away.’
Her voice was pleasant, controlled.
‘I thought it a – a fine piece,’ Pat said, suddenly aware that the girl was rather hurt. ‘I was glad that you repeated that line – where is it? This one: “Calling her a mystery writer or crime writer is a bit like calling Picasso a draughtsman.”’