The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘Oh, but it’s true! I’m a huge fan of your work. Surely you realised that.’

  Pat pulled out another chair at the kitchen table and sat down, to avoid towering above the girl.

  ‘I guess I don’t happen to care for . . . compliments. Matter of fact, I’d rather talk about something else. Other things.’

  The girl sipped her black coffee. Pat had finally got the espresso machine she’d bought in Italy out of its box and, despite her initial reluctance to have the girl stay, was grateful to be shown how to use it. Smythson-Balby was practical, she could see that. And the coffee was good. Much better than that stinking Nescafé.

  ‘I brought you a map of Suffolk. For driving. Izzie thought you might need one,’ Smythson-Balby was saying.

  ‘Have we met before?’ Pat suddenly said.

  Smythson-Balby swallowed loudly.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I keep having that feeling. New York . . . Paris? A club. Have I met you at one of those places . . . perhaps with someone else?’

  She watched Smythson-Balby closely. The girl showed no reaction. One leg remained crossed over the other. The kitchen table was between them and Smythson-Balby rested one manicured hand lightly on the wood. The hand didn’t shake and she didn’t pause as she replied.

  ‘Well, Paris, I’ve been, of course. And New York. And—’

  ‘Greenwich Village?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ the girl carefully said.

  ‘Huh?’ Pat replied, puzzled. This wasn’t quite fitting with the memory she was searching for, which definitely had a European feel to it. Mardi Gras ball somewhere, she felt sure. Her eyes covered with sparkly cardboard. Or the heat, the light, white light, sun-bleached legs. Positano?

  ‘I have travelled in Europe, of course. And, yes, I was in the States for a while. I had a friend – Marijane – who studied at Barnard College . . .’

  Pat did not care to mention that Barnard was her own old college or that she knew a young woman called Marijane and ask if it was the same one. She thought the girl was deflecting. She waited for more, but nothing was forthcoming, so she prompted again:

  ‘Did you ever go to a restaurant in the Village called Potpourri? Do you happen to know a writer called Lorraine Hansberry?’

  Not a flicker of recognition and the effort to continue the conversation was exhausting her.

  Pat drank her own coffee and muttered, ‘Lorraine waited tables there. Then she quit after her first play hit Broadway and was a terrific success. First Negro woman to have that honour. Thought you might know her.’

  And we all knew her girlfriend, Pat thought of adding, but saw there was no point. Smythson-Balby said she did not know Lorraine Hansberry and the subject was dropped. Coffee-cup drained, she stood up to go, unwrapping the shoulder strap of her satchel from around the kitchen chair.

  ‘Well, enjoy the car. London’s about an hour and a half away, Aldeburgh about thirty minutes. It’s lovely driving round here. Not too many cars on the road.’

  As she spoke, Pat suddenly knew. It wasn’t Greenwich Village. It was Paris. She knew it with absolute certainty. Pat had been there with an old girlfriend – Lynn, was it? – and there had been three women in the banquette in one corner, younger women. They’d joshed each other about them. They knew they were rookies, watching Lynn and herself avidly for tips. One had been a striking redhead with a green velvet cap and smoky black eyes. This young woman. A journalist – if she really was. Who, for whatever reason, didn’t want Pat to know she frequented the lesbian bars of Paris.

  Moments later Pat felt exactly the same certainty that she was wrong: it wasn’t Paris at all but somewhere else, somewhere longer ago, and the girl had looked different, not a redhead then. It was infuriating and she decided stubbornly that she could match Smythson-Balby’s opaqueness with her own and simply wouldn’t ask. Let the damned girl be the first to volunteer it; she didn’t care a hang if that didn’t happen.

  Smythson-Balby picked up her article and pushed it into the leather bag she now wore strapped across her chest, mailman-style. And she produced a folded road map, which she offered.

  ‘I don’t know how well you know it round here. I think you said you’d only been in Suffolk a few weeks.’

  Pat felt sure she hadn’t said anything about how long she’d been there. Another fact the girl had gleaned herself, from observation of the boxes that were still packed, presumably. She fought the temptation to unfold the map to the part she wanted, the part that would show her the route to London, to Sam. But she knew better than to do that in front of this girl.

  As she was trying to usher Smythson-Balby out, she realised that she was being asked something possibly quite important. At any rate, she should have been listening.

  ‘Her name is Frances. She’s awfully nice. It will be terribly prestigious, you know. The BBC, if you agree to the interview. It will help. You know. In Britain. The same way you’re known elsewhere in Europe, I mean.’

  ‘Were you ever in a bar in Paris, near Notre Dame? I can’t remember the name – red banquette seats? Small, you had to go down some treacherous steps to get to it.’

  Damn. Pat had broken her resolve already.

  ‘It doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid. So shall I tell Frances yes? And she can write to you about it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I guess so . . .’

  The girl smiled, and turned her head slightly to the kitchen door as they both heard a light tap. Ronnie. What a saviour. He was smiling. He tapped a thermos at the back window, and held up a small backpack. A picnic. She suddenly remembered they’d made this arrangement a few days ago. Ronnie was always dreaming up places he wanted to take her. Last week it was the Dolphin, a bar at Thorpeness. ‘I’m the only light drinker in there,’ he said. ‘You’d feel at home, Pats.’

  There was an awkwardness to the moment as she tried to introduce them – using Smythson-Balby’s Christian name for the first time: Virginia. She was surprised to find she’d remembered it, as she continued with her hasty ushering out. Eventually that was done, and Ronnie – beaming his handsome smile at the girl – turned away from Smythson-Balby back to her and gave her a reassuring pat on the arm, stepping into the kitchen, removing his shoes and socks, then making his characteristic little hopping movements, like a robin, springing from spot to spot on the cold bricks of the kitchen floor.

  ‘What d’ya take offa your socks for if we’re going out?’

  Her Texan accent sometimes reasserted itself around Ronnie, a sort of American swaggering that she felt he rather admired.

  ‘I thought you’d need to rant at me for a good ten minutes first. I’m assuming some kind of animus towards our Smythson-Balby? One must always be ready as a courageous listener.’

  This brought a grudging smile.

  ‘Darling, if you need any laundry done I’ve found a smashing lady who will do mine for five shillings,’ Ronnie said. Trying to be helpful, as always. Pat said nothing, only tipped some cold coffee from her cup into a pan on the stove and lit the gas to reheat it, planning to relate all. But first she took Ronnie upstairs to show him the snails – she’d added two others she’d found. Next to the snail she feared was dead, she’d uncovered a pile of powdery earth, which she’d explored with her fingernail. Poking around in it, she found a small pile of little beads.

  She showed Ronnie. ‘Must be their eggs!’ he said. ‘Splendid!’.

  She would have to get proper tanks soon, glass tanks. The saucer was a temporary measure.

  ‘Oh, and something else!’ Now she was shy. They were standing by the window in her bedroom. There was a faint earthy, fishy smell from the snail saucers on the window ledge mingling with the smell of wood and sawdust. Pat did not like the intimacy that bedrooms always suggested and preferred to transform her own into a toolshed. Next to her made bed – with her coat laid out on it – were her wood-working tools, a Black & Decker, and a small bookshelf she’d been making for Ronnie. She now presented him
with it, smiling with embarrassment.

  ‘It’s a bit wobbly, I guess. It’s my first attempt. I won’t be offended if you don’t want it . . .’

  ‘Splendid!’ She could see Ronnie was genuinely pleased, as she’d known he would be. Ronnie had a great talent for both solitude and friendship, was capable of an unspectacular joy and endless wonder. That was why she felt easy around him; he was the perfect companion for a person of her character. Ronnie did not judge. There was only one characteristic of Ronnie that Pat might wish to alter, might once have wished to alter. That had been long ago and never acknowledged and would have involved a matching alteration of her own. In fact, these days she felt that had probably been a narrow escape because if the thought had been allowed to form then the friendship, the very real friendship she had with Ronnie, would perhaps have been over. If secrets existed between them it was because they didn’t know how to tell them.

  Now the bookshelf was admired, and Ronnie put the book on Gastropoda on the uppermost shelf and they both laughed when it slid to the edge and fell off.

  ‘Splendid! Thank you, darling – how clever you are,’ Ronnie repeated, with a sandpapery kiss on her forehead.

  There followed a short discussion about the wood she’d used, and Ronnie’s offer to fetch her some more from a chap he knew in Fram, because she had an idea to make something similar, or perhaps carve some bookends, for Sam. They returned to the kitchen, picked up the tartan thermos and the canvas backpack, now warm to the touch from the low October sunlight streaming in through the window, and suddenly a glorious fall picnic beckoned, with its promise of leafy-damp ground and horse-chestnuts to gather; there would be a church in Long Melford for Ronnie to sketch, good coffee in the thermos and boiled eggs on napkins, a piece of lemon sponge cake, remnants of gifts from Mrs Ingham. Ronnie would talk to her about the book he was writing, the interviews with local people, the young farmer who had said, ‘I read quite a lot of novels but most of my reading is connected to pigs,’ and that the dances he went to in Framlingham to find a girlfriend were mostly full of Mods. Framlingham was once called Frannegan, Ronnie would say, and a few of the old folk still used the name. He would be reciting poems (as he always was): ‘Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake . . . My house was on a cliff. The thing could take . . . Bookloads off shelves. Break bottles in a row . . .’

  Thank Christ that, for now, the little hell, which was Smythson-Balby, Sam and the Problem, the proofing required for her last novel (which Ronnie described as ‘nice drudgery’ but on that she could never agree) and the terrifying interview she had accidentally just got herself into with this crank Frances, all could be, for a few sweet hours, forgotten.

  And at last she’s here, she’s here: I’m meeting her at Ipswich station. I park outside, keep the engine running. It’s a sputtering, inconsistent engine, given to roaring surges, like a heart surrendering to bursts of sudden joy . . .

  She’s wearing a cream trench coat, neatly belted, her blonde hair, so gracefully piled up against her head, and perfectly made up, as ever, but in such a subtle and skilful way that only a good friend – or a lover – would know it. And a scarf, vivid colours of poppy-red and cornflower-blue, and that smell she always has when she kisses me: marzipan, sweetness, something earthy and feminine. We hug in a manner we hope is befitting of two good friends, and I carry her case to the car.

  ‘You’re a dab hand with that Black & Decker,’ Ronnie told Pat. Another day, another picnic. An October picnic, close to Bridge Cottage, where they lay on the grass under the deep violet shade of a copper beech, eating boiled eggs from Mrs Ingham’s chickens, and talked mostly of the books they were reading and writing.

  He was so glad of the new bookshelf she’d made him, he said. He’d been rearranging his study – a bookshelf cull – and had inevitably become bogged down in the procedure. Of course he needed four different editions of Emma; of course it was distracting to gather the once read, the never read, the four times read and hug them in his arms, going up and down a dusty ladder to the very highest shelf.

  The little floury cheese and pickle buns eaten and the thermos emptied, they were lying on the red tartan rug, she chewing the sweet stalks of the clover flowers that Ronnie assured her were edible. The fall sunshine tilted the English countryside and she stretched her legs and rubbed a cramp in her calf. Ronnie had been talking of a painter friend of his and how this woman had never changed the bedside offering on the bookshelves in the guest room: always the same books.

  ‘Ancient gardening catalogues, The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull. That kind of thing,’ he murmured.

  ‘And why not? Why would you change the sequence? It’s best to have books just where you want them, isn’t it, so you can lay a hand on them immediately?’

  She was thinking of Crime and Punishment; she’d been reading it again. She had been memorising passages. The lines ‘an extraordinary man has the right, that is, not an official right, but an inner right, to decide in his own conscience to overstep . . .’ and thinking of the terrible dream where the little donkey is flogged over and over, the whip flaying it in the eyes. She was thinking, too, of a story of her own, an early story – and had it been a memory, too? – about the ill-treatment of a terrapin. In books about murder, so much easier to raise sympathy for an animal, she mused.

  They smiled up at the sky, heads now resting on their folded arms. It wasn’t quite warm enough to be outside but they were both pretending otherwise. A bird, hunting, flickered in the sheet of airmail blue above them.

  ‘Kestrel,’ Ronnie pointed out. She thought he probably knew that a kestrel was the one bird in England she could recognise, with its unmistakable hovering stance that always made her feel like she wanted to spread her fingers and mimic the movements with her splayed hand, but Ronnie was a natural teacher, a pointer-out of things. ‘I saw – I saw, the artist says, a tree against a sky or a blank wall at sunlight, and it was so thrilling, so arresting, so particularly itself, that – well, really, I must show you . . . There!’

  This, Ronnie said, was a quote from Rupert Brooke, his statement of the impulse behind all art.

  ‘Yes. “The thingness of things”. As a better poet than Brooke said,’ Pat murmured. She had finished two bottles of beer and was now feeling her drinks. She couldn’t remember which poet it was. Was it the young American, the woman, who had committed suicide last year when her husband left her? For one instant, as the word ‘suicide’ formed, she felt she knew exactly what it was. To be on the receiving end of a suicide, to feel that dark stab under the ribs – Allela had done it, her girlfriend Ellen and Mother had threatened – the knife wound that would never heal. Sam says she’s thought of it. She could do that to Pat: twink out her life with her fingers. And then the word, and its meaning, slipped back into shadows.

  ‘So . . . your chap, your Stanley – what did the police call him, your fan? They haven’t found out anything more about him?’ Ronnie asked, as they folded the blanket and screwed the lid on the thermos and began packing things into Ronnie’s backpack.

  ‘No. I’ve had a couple of official letters forwarded from the French police since I moved, saying the case is closed – that’s it. And, of course, they’re sure that moving here would be the end of it. But . . .’

  She felt for her cigarettes in the pockets of her jeans. Ronnie disapproved, but she needed one now. He lit it for her anyway, gentlemanly as ever, using her own lighter, cupping one palm around it against the wind and picking up a tiny piece of silver foil that fell onto the leaves at their feet.

  ‘When I first moved in,’ Pat said, exhaling the smoke, ‘a fox killed Mrs Ingham’s rabbit and there were some noises. At night, I mean. I had an idea that— At any rate, I guess I’m being ridiculous.’

  ‘Yes, darling, you probably are.’ Ronnie kissed her forehead. He knew she didn’t care to be touched, she involuntarily recoiled a little every time, but what Pat loved about Ronnie was that he understood other people’s foibles b
ut persisted diligently in being himself. He wasn’t going to modify his own warmth one whit just because he’d met a chilly response. And at any rate, he was right: she didn’t mean anything by it, she couldn’t help herself. She’d never much enjoyed being hugged, unless it was sexual and she was open to it, like a switch being flipped. Other than that she didn’t care to be caressed either. That was just how it was.

  ‘But, after all, they were never quite – threatening, the letters, were they? Just the amount of them, and the mystery? Or the silly tone?’

  She didn’t know how to answer this without sounding foolish; she smoked her cigarette and didn’t reply. No, they were not threatening in tone, but there were a great many of them and they frequently talked of death. One of them began: ‘I’ve no idea why I’m writing this. You’ll probably be dead for twenty years by the time you read it.’ What could that mean? How could a dead person read a letter? And what the French police had failed to understand too (in the end she quit showing them the letters because standing there while an officer translated stupidly – who is this Frère Death, a monk? – felt like a further violation) was how intrusive they were, how much simply receiving them, anonymous letters, rattled her. The first one had been lying inside her apartment mailbox when she unlocked it; a flat white tongue in a slick black mouth. White envelope, one sheet of plain white paper. Typed, no sender’s address and the signature typed too, one name. Afterwards she wished she’d studied the envelope – was it franked in Paris? Or did someone sneak in past the concierge and manage to drop it into the box while the mailman was delivering? Was that possible?

  After reading it with its breezy ‘I’ve found you at last! I’m like you: I love to hide behind masks and disguises so I’m not going to tell you my full name. I don’t think you could call me an admirer. I find much of your writing strangely distasteful to be perfectly frank, but compulsive and I can’t stop reading you . . .’ These words (she had instinctively crumpled it into the wastepaper basket) told her that it wasn’t written by the Stanley she knew in Fort Worth. He would not have had ‘compulsive’ in his workbag of usable words. And ‘perfectly frank’ sounded rather English, too, or at any rate, it sounded like a person with a better education than Stanley. She tried now to remember when the last letter had come. The day she left Paris. She’d ripped it open, but she hadn’t kept it. That was the moment she had decided not to show them the letters – there were by now about a hundred of them: she’d suffered enough mockery from the Gendarmerie. Why did M’selle Highsmith think thees Stanley was following her? Why did such seemple phrases, like ‘I love your new trench coat’, cause her to feel afraid?