by Jill Dawson
The sea bites at my ankles in their jeans and slops around in my shoes. How far will I need to go out? The tide is coming in, I feel the water deepening by the second; my plan is to wade deep enough to ensure that he’s carried away – I need him to sink under the waves, rather than float – and I don’t want the bastard washing up on the shingle immediately, for all to see. Let him wash up, but later.
I’m already exhausted and hoping I won’t have to go out too deep, stumbling against the force of the waves and with the slippery stones jabbing through the soles of my shoes. The salty taste is in my mouth, the spray on my face. My pants wrap around my legs, stickily, bitterly cold. The mumbo-jumbo sound of the sea around us. Further in, up to my knees now, and wrapping the cold wet nastiness of Gerald with my arms, as if holding a lover.
Surely the tide will lug him away from me (then offer him back; endlessly returning, endlessly offered back). Too late I remember about the blow to his head and hope that the cut will seem like one produced by a fall, knocked about on a rock, perhaps, or be washed spotless by the briny sea. Maybe by the time they recover the body his skull will be too bloated and waterlogged for the cut to be visible, or pecked at by gulls (though even in my hopefulness I suspect that, in fact, the cut will be opened up, yellowed and bleached and gaping . . .). His eyes are black. I can barely see him in the milky light but I see them open suddenly, staring at me, like the gaze of the eeriest white monster from the deep, some serpent-like shape, evil and ever-present: I’m close enough to kiss him. Didn’t you always know there was evil in the world, didn’t your childhood show you it in the purest, whitest form? And here it is again: like a gull sweeping to pluck at your eyes, a white slice of fierce bone, hasn’t it travelled beside you night and day from the beginning? What made you think you would ever escape? And here Gerald is laughing and laughing and suddenly liberating himself from my clasp, flinging himself head first into the waves, then bobbing like a ghostly white seal on the surface, and I’m thinking of those times when I submerged my head, all those occasions when Stanley taught me to swim, the yellow garter snakes I was afraid of, the shadowy depths. Now it’s just a mouthful of salt, and icy water up to my waist, and a noseful of sea-flavoured mucus and it’s done – if I go an inch further the tide will claim me too; I’ve already stumbled once and am icily cold up to my shoulders. With a last spurt of energy I throw him away from me, away at last, and for ever! I watch the white form plunge under a wave and spin away, bob atop a dark crest and vanish again.
Yes, I see the little man there, the Thing, I know he is there, atop a wave. But I don’t turn to look.
I stride back to the beach. My jeans slip and slop against me and my feet slurp inside the wet shoes and my ribs give a stabbing pain as I try to catch my breath. I pause for a moment to check: no one has appeared. No lights have appeared. I glance back at the black sea and hear it rush in my ears, like distant gunshot, like a prowling beast, but I do not see the white of him, though it must be bobbing somewhere. No sounds of a car engine starting up, not even in the distance.
I walk past the little pile of his clothes on the pebbles, everything grey in the darkness; even the nasty mustard-coloured socks have been soaked up by a deep, absolving grey. Extraordinarily easy. I feel delirious. Denim slapping wet at my calves, water slopping in my shoes, striding towards the two neat cars. How modern and dry and alive and civilised those cars look. The epitome of ordinariness, I suddenly feel. And not a single witness! All these years. Whoever would believe it could be that simple? His life snuffed out in one big swat, the way you would crush a mosquito. Almost unbelievably lucky, as if the world was on our side and agreed with us that it was a better place without Gerald in it.
Two parked cars, and the dark figure of a lovely woman, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me. She hands me Gerald’s car keys and the cloth with the blackened stains on it and I make one last dash towards the white spume of the waves, to wrap the keys in the cloth and throw them away from me, out towards the curling rush.
Inside, my car is dark and innocent, with its familiar smell of warm orange peel and traces of Smythson-Balby’s powerful perfume. I daren’t risk a glance at Sam, but the interior is filled with the soft sound of her sniffing and sobs. Easing myself into the driver’s seat makes obscene sucking sounds as my wet clothes grip the leather, and I stifle a giggle. The car starts obediently. Seawater pools at my feet and my body is suddenly convulsed with violent shivers, my teeth chattering. I’d like to ask, ‘Say, could you pass me that blanket on the back seat to dry myself?’ but I don’t.
And now the journey to Hades and a watery underworld is to be replaced with a journey back up to the light – perhaps, perhaps, but only if Sam will allow it. I wait for the car to warm me a little and my teeth to quit chattering. Then I try, in a tone I hope is intelligent and firm, the tone of a reasonable person, a friend (not the tone of a murderer trying to cover her tracks, no: not that!):
‘Of course, you have to say to the police – or whoever – that when you left yesterday morning, Gerald was home. They’ll hammer at you. Say that nothing was wrong and, no, as far as you know, he had no idea, no plans, you know, to – do anything foolish. You could add that maybe he had gotten himself a little depressed. He was sometimes a little hysterical. Jealous of a lover he imagined you had. No, don’t mention the lover. Everyone knew Gerald liked the liquor. But, then, what if Minty mentions you had a fight? OK, say you had a fight. You have to report him missing. This evening, I guess, when you get home. Make out you feel some, you know . . . some worry. The amount of worry of a worried wife whose husband is not home when she expects him to be. But not too much. Can you do that?’
Sam makes no reply; her unreadable blonde head is turned towards the window.
A hot blade of fear slices through me. I try again:
‘Of course it’s going to be tough. The questions. But after that. They’ll quit. They’ll find him. Once they’ve found him, and the car and the clothes, they’ll quit. There’ll be the funeral to get through, of course – didn’t you say his parents are still alive? But then most wives barely function at funerals. No one will find that suspicious. Then after that. Much easier, OK, honey? The relief – not having him in your life. Not being afraid. And after a time, after whatever we think is a decent time . . .’
But I can’t finish this sentence. What on earth is Sam thinking? I suspect she is thinking about Minty, and here I am lost, I have nothing to say, nothing at all to offer to the world of motherhood, the dark reaches of mothers, a murderous species if ever there was one, a space I’ve always been excluded from. I shift on my seat, shivering violently again. The wet clothes clinging to me are deeply unpleasant. I will have to try and dry the car out tomorrow with a hairdryer (but, then, maybe Mrs Ingham will see this and it will look queer?). A grey blob – a weird vision of Gerald, bobbing away from me – floats into the corner of my eye. I shake my head briskly. Sam has quit her crying and from the position of her shoulders I see now that she is stiffening. Stiffening her resolve, perhaps? I hope that this is a good sign.
‘Goddamn it,’ I try. ‘He did some god-awful things to you, Sam. I know that wasn’t the first occasion.’
I want to say: Do you really think a man like Gerald, a wife-beating, sinister, slimy, deceitful man – a violent rapist – should be allowed to live and be happy, and that happiness should be denied to you and me? Silence. Trees loom mustard-yellow and sinister in the headlights, like a forest that wants to clamber into the car with us.
‘There will be questions, Sam . . .’
I can hear her breathing. My lungs tighten; the interior of the car is full of an oppressive lack, an absence of something, of air or oxygen, something that threatens to end us, to choke us both.
‘You know, don’t you still have the death penalty here? That John Christie case. It’s being debated. Or, even if it’s abolished, I’d go to prison for a very long time. They’d never believe me, Sam,’ I say.
They’l
l never believe you. Stanley’s long, dark head and his insolent smile leap into the car, and I have to grab the wheel tight to prevent us swerving off the road.
‘Once . . .’ Sam says slowly. ‘One night Gerald came to bed and I wouldn’t, you know, I wasn’t in the mood. And he started right on, and actually I had the curse, that was the reason I hadn’t wanted to, and he didn’t put the bedroom lamp on, and he didn’t see at first. There was blood everywhere. The bed. The sheets – I had to get rid of them. When I put the bedside light on it looked like a blood bath. And afterwards Gerald said: “You’re filthy. You make me feel sick.”’
Sam turns a soft face to me and puts her hand on the wet denim of my knee. A surge of happiness flies up. Everything will be OK. And after that a feeling of deep exhaustion and relief descends. Like waking, and a nightmare that kept stopping and starting is finally over.
‘And then other times. He was so charming, wasn’t he?’ she continues. ‘So smooth and soft and clever. All charm at work. So sorry and so loving. That day when the whole house was filled with flowers, roses, every colour, every kind of smell. Do you remember? Something happened at work, some shares went up or something, and he was thrilled and he wanted everyone to know it. And always he was hanging on, going to those events, so jealous of his brother’s world. The arty-farty world, as he called it. It was confusing. The worst time. The worst thing I remember. He trapped me in a doorway. Can you imagine that? I was coming through and he started pushing me and closing the door, trapping my shoulder and my arm – in our kitchen, a heavy wooden door, he was calling me a bitch. I can’t remember what I’d done to infuriate him but I saw that look and I was screaming at him to release the door because my arm hurt so much and then I saw Minty appear and run away again. Minty didn’t come to help me – she didn’t know what to do.’
Her voice has become hushed: she’s talking to herself.
‘I hated Gerald then. I was screaming, I was in pain, but I was furious too and degraded and that’s when you have degrading thoughts, isn’t it? My poor little girl, growing up like this. Poor Minty, seeing this.’
I glance at her and notice only that a forgotten hair-grip dangles from a long strand of fair hair, like a tiny ballet dancer, clinging to her by one outstretched leg. Then my eyes return to the road: empty, desolate. I have to concentrate hard, hold on tight.
She continues softly talking and now her voice is warmer, dreamy.
‘I think that’s what attracted me to you. I could tell you were – you knew. You weren’t one of those people who read the paper and say: “I can’t imagine it – what on earth makes people do such things?” You remember that dinner party? I’d just read the first scene of The Blunderer. God, that scene is vicious. And I remember thinking: This woman knows. The feeling of hatred, of wanting to do something sordid. It’s – pungent, almost. She’s like me, I thought.’
Cool, poised, profoundly competent and graceful Sam, like me? I don’t want her to say that. She’s not like me: she’s everything I’m not! Good and clean and . . . I’m concentrating, my eyes on the road; my usual replies form but I don’t utter them – Of course an author must be able to write of things that he or she has not experienced, imagine them. I’m aware that I’m gripping the steering-wheel with way too much pressure but it’s because any minute I might take my hands off, throw them up into the air in front of my face, let the car swerve and buck and shimmy and do whatever the hell it likes with us, offer us up into the Suffolk blanketing dark, like a little cup of stars; my hands feel thick with blood throbbing with something strange and ghastly that tiptoes towards me getting close, closer . . .
‘People who have never felt in fear of their lives can’t know what a horrible feeling it is, sordid and corrosive,’ Sam says, staring at the windshield and not glancing at me. ‘I’ve sometimes looked into prams – you know the nannies on Hampstead Heath – and thought: Well, how do you make a child into a murderer? If a child has never had its dear sweet trusting little face bellowed into, then does it ever learn the depths of terror? I know Gerald was brought up in that way – in fear – and somehow I always knew that you must have been too, dear Patsy. Before living with Gerald I had no idea I could feel – imagine – such violent, ghastly things to do to another human being. It was either kill him or kill myself, I often thought. There were many times when I wanted to do to Gerald exactly what you did.’
Don’t ever talk of killing yourself, I want to say.
The road blurs and undulates, rears up like a snake. I rub at my eyes to try to refocus, wondering at the tears that slide from my chin. I must not take us off the road. I must not drive into a tree. I must stay calm. I must think only of the sweetness of Sam beside me, the dark wild sweetness in my bedroom earlier. I must think of that, and how best to capture it, which words will net it (though none will, none will); only thinking of that, only work, the austere servitude of words, the thoughtful peck of fingers on keys, only that will save me.
Back at Bridge Cottage, I roll up the rug and prop it by the front door, exposing the red-brick tiles beneath. I scrub them with a rag, which I burn on the fire. Sam goes upstairs as if to bed, then reappears, running her hands through her hair and saying: ‘I left my seconal at home – do you have a sleeping pill?’ When I say no, she hovers by me in the kitchen, murmuring: ‘There’s just no chance whatsoever that I’ll sleep.’
I heat up some milk in the pan on the stove and catch it just as it swells to boil. Carrying the mugs into the front room, I hesitate: somehow it doesn’t feel OK to sit in there. It sizzles with too much – atmosphere. So I carry the mugs – white china with bluebells on them – back into the kitchen and set them on the table. If Mrs Ingham is looking out from her window across the garden, out in the direction that Bunnikins used to have his hutch, or scanning for a fox, this is what she’ll see: two old friends at five in the morning, drinking hot milk from bluebell mugs and smoking, at a table with a posy of flowers on it and folded napkins piled at one end.
‘I remember when I couldn’t bear the taste of milk,’ I say. ‘A bit too real, isn’t it? Makes you think of cows.’ Sam says nothing.
When the sun comes up, Sam gets her bag from upstairs and I drive her to Ipswich station. In the car we barely talk. I want to say, ‘Is everything OK between us?’ but I hardly know how to. I can’t think what possible reply Sam can give to the woman who just killed her husband.
As we part, she now wrapped in the tightly belted trench coat and clipping along the station platform in her black suede pumps, I try once more to plead with her. ‘You remember Ellen Hill? I told you about her, didn’t I?’ I ask nervously. Sam nods. ‘And you remember she was always talking of . . . doing away with herself, and after I’d been through that once with Allela, it made me mad as hell. Matter of fact, I felt she was torturing me, making me responsible for her life, for whether she lived or died. And in the end—’
‘Pats, my train. I’ve got to go,’ she breaks in, as the noise thunders overs us and the carriages roll to a halt beside us. She steps inside with only the curtest of kisses, barely looking back.
She’d said she’d call the police station tonight at about 10 p.m. She will say casually that it’s Sunday now and she was expecting her husband home and that he has not returned, and he hasn’t phoned, and she’s a little worried. Then she will call the telephone outside Bridge Cottage and I will be there, waiting.
October. It was liquid and insecure. October was falling, slipping; things losing shape. Solid things – leaves, ground, love affairs – turning to mush. If she had been six years old and in Fort Worth just now, she would have been burrowing inside the straggly orange flesh of a pumpkin with her knife, carving two dangerous, dark, unseeing eyes. Here, October slid towards the end of the year: low sunlight, soggy leaves, equal parts sunny and cold, runny and solid, good and bad, like the curate’s egg. The children in the English village seemed not to celebrate Hallowe’en; not to know that October was the crack in the year when the ghost
s came out to play.
She was in the car with Ronnie, hands resting lightly on the steering-wheel, the handbrake still pulled on, engine cut. And then Ronnie said: ‘I heard about her husband going missing. Chap I know knows his brother, a writer. Says Gerald was erratic, volatile.’
‘Yes,’ Pat said, staring at her hands, at her big splayed fingers. She did not tap them, but she counted in her head. Five long seconds passed.
‘Have they heard anything more? Less than a week . . .’ Ronnie said. ‘That’s not very long. He could just be . . . were there problems at the bank? Did he have a mistress?’
‘There were rumours of mistresses, yes. He was hard to get along with.’ She wondered whether to add more. Conversations with Ronnie were not like those with others: he was not much of a gossip and sentences could end with a clear thud and silence reign and Ronnie, she knew, wouldn’t notice.
‘Still. For Sam, it’s rotten . . .’ Pat added. Her voice wobbled a little on Sam’s name. She started the engine and swung the car into the road without a glance in the mirror. It was rare to meet another car round here, only tractors and bicycles. Was Ronnie going to say more about Gerald? The inside of the car was fraught with held breath. She felt her cheek prickle and was sure that he was staring at the side of her face, although she didn’t dare glance at him to check. She felt his gaze beside her, and somehow she felt, too, his fear of her suddenly. His gaze, his eyes, seeking hers. She stared at the road. She would remember this minute all her life. Something strange seemed to pass between them. Some idea, some awful hint, something hideous, some slip understood on both sides. Was Ronnie looking at her the way Razumikhin looked at Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment? Did he know?