The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  A violent stab suddenly as I wonder: Were they ever lovers? Is that what she’s hinting at?

  I put the whisky back in the glove compartment. I need to feel sharp.

  ‘Sure, I know Sam Gosforth, a little,’ I say casually. ‘Terrible about the husband. I believe the daughter is eight or nine?’

  ‘Minty. Poor little mite. I was invited to the funeral, it was last week, but I woke that morning with the most filthy migraine – did you go?’

  ‘Yes.’ Here I’m struggling to find words relaxed enough in their delivery to convey, yes, I knew them a little, sure, I went to the funeral and, yes, there’s nothing more to it than that. I’m scared that my voice will betray something, that my laboured breathing is visible. In fact, my chest is so tight I’m not able to take a breath, and I feel as if all of me is clenched.

  Smythson-Balby recognises me, I know that. And Sam is a sexy, attractive woman, and if Smythson-Balby knows her well, she knows, meaning she can know about us. Migraine. The very mention of it brings on one of my own, sweeping down on me like a hood. We’re nearly at Earl Soham. Now her yellow scarf, the ponytail, has come undone entirely. A great launch of chestnut hair rolls over her shoulders; she’s well aware of this, I think. Aware of her charms; all the tricks. Aware from the start.

  ‘Come in. I could use a coffee,’ I say. ‘I’ll let you fix it. I’ll give you the odd snippet for your friend Frances and then maybe she’ll leave me alone.’

  ‘Oh, Frances is a bloodhound. She’ll never let go, now she has the scent.’

  We’re drawing up to the outside of Bridge Cottage and she’s parking on the opposite side, next to the telephone booth. Could I take her to bed? If I have to. If it’s the only way to sucker her in; get her off the track. Or find out what she saw that night and who she might mention it to.

  I notice she leaves her jacket heaped over her purse on the back seat of her car. Does that mean she’ll only come in for a short while – she’s not counting her chickens? Or perhaps it only means it’s Suffolk, the safest little place on earth. She doesn’t trouble to lock it.

  She places the little percolator on the stove, moving round my kitchen with a confident air, a girl who is used to fixing coffee in the kitchens of older women. I fetch the liquor bottle to add to it. I notice Mrs Ingham’s light is on in the house opposite the kitchen window and wonder, Didn’t I just see a figure there in a high-necked gown? Matter of fact, what I really long to do is to telephone Sam, to hear Sam’s voice, but I don’t care to think about that now. There’s work here to do.

  I run my fingers through my hair, tuck my shirt a little tighter into my jeans, undo the second button, run my tongue along my top teeth to make them feel cleaner. I glance at my bangs in the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, pulling down my lower eyelids to see how red the insides look. Hmm. I wonder if I can even remember how. Smythson-Balby is sitting at the kitchen table. She flashes me a wide – too wide – smile. She too has tucked her satin blouse in tighter at the waist but this crummy effort is hardly necessary with every button straining like that, those breasts like performing monkeys, out to catch the eye.

  ‘I feel as if you’re still cross with me,’ she says. ‘About the biography. The notes. I feel rather awful, actually. I mean – I could say to Frances, I can’t do any more. Stop now.’

  ‘I happen to think there’s no point. I guess you’ve already told her plenty.’ I pour a good slug into each cup and offer her milk from the bottle, which she shakes her head at.

  She crosses her legs, untangles the yellow scarf from the last strand of hair and lays it on the table. It’s flat and long. For some cock-eyed reason the idea of a nylon stocking, without a leg in it, pops into my head. Snap out of it, I want to tell myself.

  ‘Just the things we talked about. The interview. The things in the paper. There’s nothing more, really. Of course I’ve figured out who your gentleman caller is and done a précis of each of your novels for her, breaking them into themes, looking at the message of the work . . .’

  ‘Message? Holy crap, not really?’

  Her bottom lip comes out then, a little stubbornly.

  ‘There clearly are messages in your work. You know, the ordinariness of evil lurking in domestic settings, the doppelganger theme – the bad guy and the good guy who change places, who are the same person. And there’s the murderer celebrated as ultimate rebel, an amoral or subversive hero, the forces of law and order as toothless against evil, the victim as repulsive or contemptible or silly in some way and deserving of death . . .’

  And here, suddenly, I forget the business I invited her in for and feel my blood start to pound in my brain.

  ‘I wonder why reviewers and critics always put it like that? As if I’m writing in another language they need to translate? Why should I go to the trouble to make up characters, plots and settings and all that? You talk as if a story is just a bottle to hide a message in. Ornamental words to hide a rational thought, which no doubt you think is the true thought.’

  ‘I’m so tempted to write this down.’

  ‘Well, don’t! Can’t this conversation be private? I happen to think that it’s the only way to contain the truth. Art is understood not just by the mind, is it, but by the emotions and by the body itself? Fiction is my first language. Reducing it to another one – messages, for Christ’s sake – is radically, destructively incomplete.’

  ‘You do think of your writing as art, then, despite what you said to Frances before?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. What are you selling your soul to that damned bitch for anyway? Are you in love with her?’

  Well, so now it’s out there. Not with my usual skill but it hits the mark. Her eyes blaze at me and a deep red colour slides, like a bloody cloud, from her throat to her face.

  ‘I most certainly am not! She’s a distant cousin, for God’s sake.’

  ‘They’re all in love with their cousins round here. Why should you be different?’

  So, it’s a stand-off, then, and a fight, after all. Sordid and unsubtle. All plans to make it otherwise have gone to hell. Smythson-Balby scrapes her chair back and stands, snatching up her yellow scarf, earrings wobbling, flouncing like a girl of fifteen.

  ‘I should go.’

  ‘Where is it you live, anyways? You seem damn close – you pop up often enough.’

  ‘I’m staying with Izzie in Aldeburgh.’

  This time the way she says Izzie has a flavour to it. She is at least conceding that. Her next tight little speech is in response, I know, to my throwing up earlier in the day. But, thankfully, she put another spin on it.

  ‘Look,’ she says, bold now, the drink loosening her up, ‘Izzie and I, we’d been for a midnight dip. Toes only: it was jolly cold. We saw you and your friend. You were going back to your car from the beach, your friend wasn’t wearing a coat. I recognised the car first. But you needn’t worry. I never intended to add that – you and your friend – to the notes I’m giving to Frances. I don’t see – well, I don’t see that it’s anything she needs to know.’

  And if she’d recognised this friend as Sam Gosforth, now would be the moment to say so, yes? I wait for a second before nodding. She manages to look both prim and coquettish at the same time, scooping the hair up from her neck and winding it securely in the yellow scarf. It’s not just vanity: I really don’t think I’m wrong about her feelings for me. They seep from her like that powerful, unsettling perfume – the smell of a girls’ locker-room – whenever I’m around her. And will these be useful in the end, or will they lead her to a greater and greater interest in me, to an endless pursuit? In fact, is it my imagination or has she in fact been pursuing me with a crazy, spectacular kind of compulsion already?

  ‘You know, it’s an open secret,’ I say. ‘Sure, people keep asking me about The Price of Salt, whether I might republish now under my own name. But there’s still Mother and Granny Mae. And Fort Worth. I don’t know why that should matter, but it does.’

  ‘It’s an abso
lute smash at the L. The same status as The Well of Loneliness. But I don’t think it’s known here, or the name Claire Morgan either.’

  She’s let her guard down now, and what that last remark tells me is that she knows the L in Greenwich Village. And probably the Grapevine and a deal of others too. So I wasn’t far off in those early musings about where we’d met. But the flavour of the night has altered. I want to talk to Sam so badly that agitation has snuck into my movements. I’m practically rapping my fingers on the table, willing Smythson-Balby to leave. She, at any rate, has sensed this and is putting on her jacket.

  ‘They can write what they like – tinker with me all they want – after I’m dead,’ I mutter. It’s not much of a reply to all that has been said and unsaid between us but it’s all I can think of and for now it will have to do.

  In the night-time phone booth with its silly little royal crown above the door and its now so familiar smell of nettles and warmed-up paper, the over-baked telephone directory, the line rings and rings, but Sam doesn’t answer. I picture her in that fancy London apartment, with her long hair in blonde plaits, Heidi-style, the way I’ve sometimes seen her fix it before bed, and drinking neat gin in a priceless glass, and . . . what else? I feel certain she’s there, ignoring the telephone’s scream. Punishing me somehow. And I have an uneasy feeling that I’m being watched, that despite hearing the red car roll away, Smythson-Balby is still here somehow, waiting to pounce.

  What part of our conversation will she relay to her little friend Frances? And how could I have imagined that seducing her would achieve anything, secure her silence, when it would surely only stoke her interest, give her added excuses to visit more and more often?

  I click the receiver dead and then, an afterthought, one last dial. And this time, on the first ring, a breathless voice: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Honey. You’re still up!’ I say.

  ‘I just came in. Gerald’s parents wanted to talk about the urn. They’re still cross with me that it wasn’t a proper burial and want to order an engraved plaque to put on the urn. Should it say “Devoted husband and beloved father and son” or “Beloved husband and devoted father and son”?’

  She sounds drunk. She sounds bitter or angry or something unreachable, and a great panic wells in me as I try to reel her in, soften her up.

  ‘Honey . . . if only I could hold you now, and stroke your hair . . .’

  The snuffling at the end of the line tells me that she’s crying, and I press for an advantage.

  ‘Come visit soon so that I can do that, just as soon as you’re able.’

  But her reply comes back sharply, with a wail: ‘How can I? What about Minty? It’s impossible – she needs me. She’s so shocked, Pats, it’s horrible. She hasn’t said a word about it. But I know she’s thinking: Daddy left me. He didn’t care a hoot about me, he wanted to leave. And that’s the worst part because, of course, no child likes to feel that a parent chose to end their life. If only I could say to her it was a ghastly accident . . .’

  My ribcage contracts, as if someone is squeezing all the life out of me.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that?’

  ‘You have no idea – it’s so easy for you. You don’t have to walk around the house, see his things, see Minty’s stunned little face . . .’

  Such a trite, traditional sentiment, I think, and crush the thought. Her voice is childish, sulky.

  And now more sobbing and there’s nothing I can do but cradle the receiver (actually I’m not cradling it at all, I’m slapping it in my hand, not listening to her deep inhalations and choking sniffs, giving myself time to compose myself so I don’t say anything rash). But the sobbing just continues, and after a while, the coins run out and I tell her in a desperate voice that I have to go, that I’ll call again tomorrow, that she’s got to be strong, that I love her. She’ll calm down, I tell myself. It’s early days, it’s understandable: Gerald has only been dead for a matter of weeks! When Minty is back at school and life is back to normal, she’ll see sense, we can resume, she’ll realise how easy it’s become now to see one another, without the Great Impediment (as I always thought of him) getting in the way.

  A dash across the road, and back at the cottage, I turn on the faucets for a soothing bath.

  Pats. I think we should cool things for a while. I’m not going to be able to come to see you any more. She didn’t say that. It sounds much too composed: she wasn’t in a state to say anything so rational. But still, in my head, I hear that phrase as if she already said it: my worst fear. I know it’s coming.

  I pace around the bathroom naked. I check on my snails. I think: I did it for you, for you, Sam. I risked everything. Can’t you be a little bit grateful?

  I try to undo that thought. It’s beneath me.

  And then something Sam said about Minty resurfaces: Daddy left me. He didn’t care a hoot about me, he wanted to leave. And I think of Mother – that year she left me in Fort Worth with Granny, and that same breath-stealing feeling creeps back into my chest, hands twisting my heart, and I have to sit on the bed and put my head in my hands.

  When I raise my head, I see something. A mouse. A small grey shape, racing along the skirting-board, under the window. Fear trickles along my spine.

  ‘Leave me alone, why don’t you,’ I say, quietly.

  There’s a sound of breathing in the room. And then unmistakably from somewhere: a burst of laughter.

  That year: 1933–4. The saddest, the longest of my life. After Mother had betrayed me, told me she’d divorce him, then gone back to New York and Stanley, leaving me in Fort Worth. My little bedroom at the back of the boarding-house, above all those rooms. The boarders, mostly salesmen, those great lunks in their square-toed boots and overalls, eating Granny Mae’s steel-cut oats and sorghum. Their masculine smells of tobacco, of cattle-dung. They’d ruffle my bangs – How you doin’, Toots? – and I’d fly up to my room and comb it back again. My first taste of pure, sweeping longing: Come back, why don’t you come for me? Whispering into the pillow.

  I’d hear a train moaning. Was it on its way from Texas to New York, to Mother? Or was it bringing her to me? When would she come? When would I see her again? I’d kiss her creased photograph, under my pillow. Just me and you and Granny Mae, that’s what you said. Come back now, Mama! Your Patsy needs you. The moan of the train again. A wild sound, pure sorrow.

  Sometimes I think that year was preparing me for something. Teaching me who I am. This is going to be your lot. You are going to spend your life longing for something to arrive, someone, something who never shows up. Here it is: the feeling that’s yours alone, the special one. Are you ready?

  Will you come back? Will you ever come?

  I picture Granny Mae, creaking down beside me on the counterpane – crochet squares of every colour, moth-holed and unravelling – stroking my hair. ‘What is it you see, honey-pie, that’s so darn frightening?’ she’d ask. And then she’d give a little frightened jump when I’d scream again, and she’d look at where I was pointing. Scolding me fiercely then: ‘Darn fool girl, you’re scaring your old granny now. I’ll fix you some hot milk and you get yourself on back to bed.’

  So I told her. It’s a mouse, a little grey mouse. And she bought me Sparkie, who slept purring in a black coil beside me on my pillow. But, after all, the mouse was just the beginning. The mouse was – I realise now – the warning sign.

  That first time. That glimpse. Just a movement at the corner of my eye as I’m snuggling under the covers. I forgot about it. The second time, I’m restless and sleepless on top of the covers, the heat of the day barely seeping away, light streaming in beneath curtains that I’d parted to open the window. My bedroom door ajar to make a cool through-draught, but none has materialised. I’m sweaty, limbs flung angrily in a star shape, staring at nothing. And there it is, standing in the light where the bedroom door is ajar: a little stumpy figure – a child? a doll? – some kind of monstrously disabled man, a dwarf, a mongoloid? It has an outsized head,
it’s wearing boots.

  I leap from my bed, rigid, run to the doorway. It’s looking at me. My body quivers from my toes to my teeth. A great swilling heat pours through me, as if I’m about to faint. I run back, climb onto my bed, whispering: there’s nothing there, there’s nobody! And for a while, it was true . . .

  Oh, God, don’t think of it, don’t think of it now. It can’t come if you don’t think of it. Think only of Sam. Sam will come back soon. This is about Sam, about fear, isn’t it? Sam is not like Mother, like all the rest. Sam loves me.

  I have a strange, ridiculous desire to shout for Granny. That first time after the shock, I thought, no, not a dwarf, one of the boarders, one of the salesmen, must be playing some kind of trick on me. And then it slid towards me, as if on ice, backing me into my bedroom. Now it’s saying something to me, something indecipherable. That whispery voice, not a human voice at all. It’s all in your head, I say, but I can still hear it.

  So I check under the bed, open the wardrobe where wooden hangers knock emptily; shut it again; open and draw closed the curtains. All in apple-pie order. There’s nothing, he’s not here. I didn’t hear anything. Heat starts ebbing away from me and my breathing slows to normal. Am I half cracked? Snap out of it. It’s just – emotion. Missing Sam, that’s all. The aftermath of what we did.

  A shocking thought about Sam, about the power she has over me: one word from Sam now will detonate me – police, scandal, prison, shame, end of career, end of my life, everything. And then something comes to me with violent clarity: I already felt like this. Before killing Gerald. That’s what loving Sam is: I felt it the minute I fell for her. I’ve never been in love like this before. I gave her the power to demolish me. I never gave myself fully to another woman after Mother. It was a mistake to do so this time, but it’s done now.