The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  And then the thought flies suddenly at me: Where is Gerald? His face flashes up for me with details I’d forgotten I knew, a small pock-sized scar under one eye, pale lashes, a rather fat mouth, a little obscene. Are you really gone, then, really and for ever? It makes me shudder, thinking that Gerald feels more vivid, horribly nearer than ever.

  And if anyone cared to question me, ask, am I different now? Sure, I’m special, because it puts you in a very small minority, a small percentage of the human population who’ve done what you’ve done. I can just imagine what others – weaker types – would like to ask me, and it’s all about regrets. Well, naturally, I regret the loss of a human life. But you have to understand. The man was despicable. It was the heat of the moment. He was raping his wife and not for the first time either. You think a man can’t rape his own wife? Well, I’m here to tell you he can.

  They’d so like to ask me, Miss Highsmith, could you ever see yourself, you know, committing another murder?

  Well, I’d hope not to, of course. But under certain circumstances . . .

  And at any rate. Murder is a tricky thing. Sometimes we dress people up in certain clothes and outfits, soldiers, executioners, abortionists, and say: It’s OK for you to take a life. But not for others. Not for others to exercise their own judgement. Only those we decree. How does a judge, a man who has sent dozens of people to Old Sparky, how does he square his conscience at night? And maybe, just maybe, those ideas are conventions, ideas that change with the era and the situation. One time or place illegal, unthinkable; another time, another place, not.

  Sam moves around the room as if she’s on castors or sliding on ice. She’s wearing the lapis-lazuli pendant I bought her, the heavy point of blue on a gold chain slipping just inside the neckline of her black dress. Now some woman – who is it? Perhaps someone from the bank, someone from Gerald’s work – is kissing her and they are putting their cheeks together for a moment while the woman hugs her. I sit a little more upright. The more you thought about killing, the more you thought about living. There were six Turkish boys and we butchered them right quick. Ronnie’s book. His interviews with people from his village. They’re all obsessed with the war, as if it was yesterday. Not even the Second World War: some of the old men in the village are still talking about Gallipoli, the Somme. ‘My mate went off like a firework,’ one says. ‘All the cartridges strapped to his chest were exploding.’ The more you thought about killing, the more you thought about living. Ronnie lets me read the drafts. I don’t know what to say. Ronnie’s book is so far from what I’m writing. I would never let him read my drafts but he doesn’t mind. I just tell him the word count.

  Fear trickles through me as I realise someone just asked me something. It’s Charles Latimer. He apparently knows I’m living in Suffolk and is saying something like did I see the Beatles at the Gaumont Theatre in Ipswich last year? ‘Do I look like someone who would care for the Beatles?’ I ask, not bothering to explain that I have only been in Suffolk for a few months. Charles laughs. ‘Ah, darling, how I’ve missed you!’ he says. I pretend not to know what he means. Then, to provoke me further, he leans in close and says: ‘I believe the Beatles are back in Ipswich this very month. Young women are already queuing for tickets . . .’ He turns away, chuckling, to greet a young publicist with buck teeth and cheeks dusted with the desiccated coconut. I stay seated, rigid, my cigarette done, nothing to do with my hands. But he turns back to me and continues in a quieter voice: ‘Dear Gerry was depressed, wasn’t he? I could see it. He mentioned a few times, something about her “spending a lot of time away”. What do you think?’

  ‘I can’t talk just now!’ I say, and leap up, leaving him staring after me. Is it my imagination, or does Sam shoot me a frightened glance from somewhere in the room?

  Such a strange, strange child aren’t you, my Patsy? I’m cursed to know you!

  Mother. Why is Mother’s voice never far away?

  In Sam’s elegant bathroom I lock the door. I splash my face with cold water, sit on the closed seat of the John, my head in my hands. I splash more cold water on my face and then notice it’s making dark wet spots on my blouse and am reminded suddenly of the wetness of the bottom of my blue jeans, of the sea sloshing into my car. Maybe Sam has a pill in that medicine cabinet I can take. I fan my face with one hand. I stare at myself in the mirrored cabinet: I look terrified. I see myself talking to some solemn grey bewigged judge, an English judge, and saying: Sam had nothing to do with it. Leave her out of it. She took a lot from him and, matter of fact, it was me who snapped . . . m’ lord.

  The room swims a little and I wish I’d brought the sherry in here with me for a top-up. It’s all black and white hexagonal floor tiles, oversized white bathtub with feet, and blue glass bottles, high windows pouring in light. The contrivance of it, the schematic colours in here surprise me. Blue towels, blue china soap dish. I’m stung suddenly: what must Sam think when she comes to mine, where she’s lucky if there’s a clean towel and a new bar of Wrights Coal Tar soap? Oh, Sam, oh, Sam. How will she cope? Sure she’s cool, she’s a holder of secrets, ordinarily, but is she up to the task? My heart beats wildly. I find I’m staring at the bottles in Sam’s cabinet. I don’t know if I’m thinking of anything at all except that.

  A bottle of Fenjal Creme Bath – my heart is going like sixty. Plix by L’Oréal, ‘for a double-life set’ – the phrase from the ad comes back to me, and the stiffness of Sam’s hair today. A tin of Cuticura. I really must catch a breath, drink some water. A box of Lil-Lets. A wrapped bar of Imperial Leather soap. A jar of Endocil beauty treatment cream – I open this and sniff it and, yes, this smells like Sam, like her cheek when I kiss it. Senocal sleeping pills. (Her doctor’s name, written on the side, is Dr Death I think at first, incredulously, then squint again and see that the writing says Dr Deacon.) Morny Lily of the Valley talcum powder and the packaging for some bath tablets, empty. Elizabeth Arden lipstick, colour Sheik: a sort of tasteful pink that Sam leaves in mouth-shaped blots everywhere, on wine glasses or white china cups. Something makes me gasp, blurs my eyes with tears. In a box, some contraceptive jelly and a plastic scallop-shaped container with her diaphragm in it.

  I close the cabinet, put my hands over my eyes. Of course, of course. She said they rarely made love but – well, what married lover admits otherwise? (A horrible flash here, Gerald’s white ass, his pants puddling around his ankles.) There are voices outside the bathroom door, perhaps raised voices. A tremor of alarm streaks through me. My hand is shaking as I go to flush the John, aware that I’ve been in here awhile. Just outside the bathroom door is the woman who was hugging Sam earlier. She gives me a condescending smile (she’s wearing a grisly shade of peach lipstick) as I pass her on the landing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the woman says, and I force myself to nod and say, ‘Sure, fine, thank you.’

  The son of a bitch is dead now, I tell myself. The Problem, such as it was, is over. There Sam is, downstairs – I peek over the banister (this upstairs landing is all muted colours, lilac and grey) – talking to a friend from the bridge club; her fine ankles in her lizard heels, her simple, elegant, understated silk dress, her necklace dripping down the front of it, disappearing between her breasts. We’re free to carry on now, everything is fine, we can begin at last, begin again, start afresh. I stare at my hands – my big hands, how Mother always laughed at them – and they’re gripping the banister like they intend to break it. Notes from a piano plonk up to me: Minty, no doubt, playing for the guests. Good God! Is there no end to the torture that child must endure? Why can’t you leave the poor girl alone, get off her back for one goddamn minute?

  I take a deep breath. Several. I release my hands from the banister and the wood has made red marks on my palms. I smooth down the shirt beneath my leather gilet. I put one hand into the pocket of my skirt, reaching for the snail, take it out to check on it. Some nacreous silvery patches gleam among the workaday brown. It’s an ordinary garden snail, a moist body the col
our of milky coffee. It pulls in its horns – its little eyes on telescopes – and I slip it back into my pocket.

  No one is looking up here. Sam has gone to have a lie-down, I hear someone say. I have to believe in her, that’s all. There will be months, maybe years, of this. It’s just as I once said: I’m alone forever. I could scream over the banister at the top of my voice: I did it, I killed the bastard, and all the faces below would tilt up to me . . . like petals turning to the sun.

  But I won’t. I’m smoothing down my shirt. I’m walking back downstairs and I’m about to say to Ronnie that I have a headache, that I don’t care to stay. I’d like to go home now.

  And so Friday afternoon arrives and the damned girl turns up perky as ever to drive me to London. Why I didn’t insist on driving myself I can’t now remember, but too late, I have to endure a couple of hours of her blatting at me. She puts my bag in the car with a quizzical look: a weekend bag – am I planning to stay over? I shake my head – so nosy! – and she slams the trunk with a flourish. And today she’s wearing a caramel-coloured leather jacket, a suede skirt, cream satin blouse and achingly bright yellow scarf tied round her ponytail. Also jingling necklace and huge hoop earrings. She passes me her cigarettes and asks if I’d like the roof closed. It’s windy: of course I’d like the fucking roof closed.

  As she’s driving I’m thinking about Ronnie’s warning. Where did he get the idea she was a biographer? And how can I find out if he’s right and head her off at the pass?

  ‘Is it going well, then, your novel?’ she says, after a noisy suck on her cigarette and a ridiculously exaggerated exhalation of smoke. The painted nails, frosty pink, tap on the steering-wheel and she keeps admiring them.

  The most banal question ever. I guess it will get me in practice for the goddamn interview ahead.

  ‘I’ve changed the title twice already. But I do know it will be a suspense novel without a murder in it.’

  ‘Is it set in America? Or here in Suffolk?’

  ‘An American man is married to an English woman, living in a house very like Bridge Cottage. And he fantasises all the time about killing her, and the reader isn’t sure whether he really does, or whether he simply imagines it and she goes missing or perhaps commits suicide. That’s what I’m writing at the moment, at any rate. There might be a murder by the end.’

  ‘Not the prowler one?’ she asks. I’m surprised she remembered. I’m tempted to say: Didn’t you realise it was a lie? I was deflecting you, but I let it go.

  I try to indicate then, with a sort of hunkering down deeper into my seat, that I don’t want to talk more, but the damn girl is inured to subtlety and blithely carries on.

  ‘I’m glad you’re setting it in Suffolk! I thought I saw you in Aldeburgh last weekend. Very late – Friday, or was it Saturday night? Were you there? I think it was you. You were with a friend, a woman, though I only saw you from the back, just getting into your car . . .’

  I dive forward suddenly, head on my knees, then put my hand on the car door handle. Smythson-Balby glances worriedly across at me and rapidly changes down a couple of gears.

  ‘I’m sorry – I feel a little car sick,’ I mutter.

  ‘Oh dear. You do look – pale . . .’

  She pulls into a lay-by and wrenches up the handbrake. I jump out of my side and am sick, loudly and ingloriously, into some brambles. Thorns snag at my shirt as I climb back into the car and a purple blot appears on the sleeve where a late, leftover berry squished itself against me.

  ‘Damn!’ I say, twisting the material round a little, to study it.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Smythson-Balby rummages in her purse and flourishes an embroidered handkerchief at me. I think I notice a family crest of some sort.

  ‘Go ahead – spit on it,’ she says. More tempting than she could possibly know.

  I dab dubiously at the vivid mark on my sleeve and am not surprised when there is no impact whatsoever. She starts up the engine again.

  ‘Terribly sorry! I really am. I’ll drive slowly. I used to get terribly car-sick as a girl. Daddy said I had to sit in the front and stare straight ahead. Maybe that will help.’

  I’m still pressing the dampened handkerchief to the stain on my sleeve, pretending to be more concerned than I really am about it; hoping to distract her. A cold prickling creeps around my hairline, as if someone was enclosing it in an icy brace. If she feels guilty for her damned awful driving, or worried that she’s made me fret, which will make the interview difficult, perhaps it will take her mind off what she just said about Aldeburgh. Though I have a contrary desire to probe her about it – what did she see, exactly? What time was it? (It must have been when we were returning to my car, about to drive home together. What on earth was she doing in Aldeburgh in the early hours of the morning? Did she see us from a house window, or another car, or was she actually out and about somewhere near the beach? Surely she would have mentioned Gerald, at any rate, if she’d seen that a man, a drunk, was propped up – dragged like an effigy – between us and left behind! Or if she’d seen me stride out into the sea with him, fully dressed.)

  This is my one moment to ask further questions about her comment, and for it to seem natural, to discover whether the remark was innocent or not, what she saw and what she would say if ever asked about it (by the police, for example). If I raise it later it will surely look contrived and betray anxiety. But the moment passes. She moves on to other baloney – chit-chat about where we’re heading for in Soho to do the interview, and then a lot of garbage about a pirate station called Radio Caroline, which is broadcast from a ship off the coast of Suffolk, pretty close to us, in fact: have I a radio and have I listened to it? And how she can’t admit to this woman – some distant relative – who is going to interview me, Frances, that she listens to it, when it’s, you know, illegal, and stuff, and Frances works for the BBC . . .

  And so the journey goes, with the harvested fields looking disgustingly bleached and shaved; exposed. Naked. Smythson-Balby’s nose could use some powder. My dread of the grilling ahead intensifies with every mile.

  We arrive at the bar in Frith Street at ten minutes to two, after a ridiculous amount of time spent finding a parking space. We emerge onto the street, press a buzzer, beside a black, unprepossessing door. Smythson-Balby announces herself in an insufferably silly voice into a button, then we trudge up some stairs to a small landing and a room behind it with dark wood, and smoke, and visible whisky bottles at the bar, and a masculine air: the first good sign of the day. Smythson-Balby shuffles her backside into a red leather chair beside me and – it’s too much, I mean, I really have been a paragon of restraint – I burst out: ‘You’re not staying for the interview?’

  Smythson-Balby’s eyes widen innocently as she plays for time, retying the yellow scarf around her ponytail. ‘No, of course not. I thought I’d just do the – the introductions, you know. And then I’ll – I can come back here and drive you to the BBC for the next part. How does that sound?’

  ‘At any rate, I can get a cab on my own.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no trouble!’

  I bet. She takes out her cigarettes and offers me one. And then, just as she’s fumbling to light mine for me, a small woman with dark clothes, a skirt suit in a strange style of inexplicable randomness, a hat with black feathers and a kind of tippet that seems to be feathers too – so many flounces and flutters – strides over to us. A crow or a raven, I picture at once, hopping around a lump of road kill. Me.

  ‘Frances!’ Smythson-Balby leaps up.

  ‘Who else?’ the tiny woman growls.

  I stand up and hands are offered, drinks ordered and chairs shuffled. The feathered hat and tippet are removed and Frances reduces significantly in size but not volume, revealing rather shorn, reddish-brown hair capping her head. And then Smythson-Balby wriggles her arms back into her caramel-coloured leather jacket and says she’ll see me downstairs in front of the black door in around an hour. She looks as if she wants to say more, wants – I’
d guess – to offer some half-assed reassurance of some kind, maybe even an apology, but thankfully thinks better of it. Her bouncy derrière disappears down the stairs.

  Two Scotch and sodas are brought. Frances accepts a cigarette. On the table in front of her is a copy of the new newspaper the Brits keep going on about: the Sun. She taps it with her fingertips and says, ‘Ghastly rag, have you seen it?’ before stretching over to slap it onto another table. She speaks in a smoker’s dry voice, one of those crispy voices that suggest an old, used-up throat. I guess she does a lot more talking than listening.

  ‘So what has our little Ginny told you about me?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Isn’t she a cutie?’ the woman continues. I refuse to rise to her bait, even to give her the benefit of letting on that I know what she’s talking about. A pause; the woman inhales, blows a smoke-ring. I expect her beady green eyes to be on me – glance at her to see if she’s appraising me – but find her instead fiddling in her pocket book for a mirror, flipping it open, rubbing at one eye with a finger, removing a smudge of flicked-up black eye-liner. She snaps the compact away.

  ‘I’m a biographer,’ she says, then goes on to name her books: a couple of writers I’ve never heard of and one woman novelist I have read. ‘I know more about that woman than any person alive,’ she adds.

  ‘Did you meet her?’ I ask, as I met her once, too, at a party, and remembered her as shy, a woman who wanted to melt into the cloakroom and vanish into the boots and cast-off furs.