The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘Are you always so quiet?’ she asked me, across two white cups of burning black coffee, two dried-up sweet pastries between us. Her pocket book and gloves were carefully arranged on the chair beside her, her jacket draped elegantly behind her. The smell of tobacco, coffee, the smell of Sam came at me in gusts: I was feeling delirious.

  ‘I guess.’ I didn’t know how to say: only with you. Usually my shyness made me garrulous.

  ‘And you gave the women a happy ending. In your novel, I mean. That was marvellous. That was bravest of all – I felt.’

  ‘Why not?’ I ask, unable to think of any other answer.

  ‘Well – because most people consider women like Therese and Carol as unnatural at best and wicked at worst. The Church says we’re evil and there’s no support from families either. We can only experience rejection.’

  ‘We’, she said. She said ‘us’. The most extraordinarily bold admission; she must have thought it had been said already. She wanted me to know.

  ‘I don’t care. I’m inured to rejection,’ I said, leaned across the table and kissed her on the mouth.

  She pulled away from me as if I’d struck her.

  At that, I had to laugh. ‘Look around you,’ I said. ‘There’s a peer group here.’ The bar was quiet, and she had failed to notice that the half-dozen patrons, all those sitting at little tables with tasselled lamps, hugging their pastis, leaning towards each other, holding hands or perched at the bar, were women. Matter of fact, now I looked, a couple of them were dressed like men, and that might – on first glance – have confused her.

  ‘You have a surprising voice,’ she said, widening her eyes and nodding, trying to recover her composure. Her mouth had felt warm, her lips soft – faint flavour of lipstick and coffee. I could still taste it. My heart was racing like a locomotive up a hill but I knew now that, outwardly, I had the greater control. She picked up a little pack of matches from the bar, began tearing one off. Her hands shook.

  ‘It’s a posh voice, isn’t it, not particularly American? I suppose you’ve lived in Europe for so long you don’t sound at all Texan. Cultured. You speak slowly . . .’ She was determined to smooth things over.

  Here I had to smile. ‘Posh? That’s rather a statement.’

  ‘And you say “rather” a lot.’

  When I looked quizzical at this, wondering how on earth she could deduce that from such a short conversation, she added: ‘I heard you on the radio, talking about Hitchcock making a film of Strangers on a Train, and there was some silly chap who kept trying to trip you up. I had to pull over, actually, to listen on the car radio, because your voice was so pretty, so calm and so soft. And you’re not a bit calm!’

  She’d read my novel, she’d listened to me on the radio. All those months she had been as hipped on me as I had on her.

  ‘And what of all the lies we have to tell everyone, our colleagues, our family?’ she said plaintively, returning to her former subject.

  You’re speaking for yourself, I thought. You have to live that way with a child and a husband, but not me. ‘Some of us don’t.’

  ‘You aren’t deceiving your mother and father?’

  ‘My mother and stepfather. They both assume I’m queer. They wish it were otherwise but they’re not in any doubt.’

  She pulled out another cigarette for herself but instead of smoking it she laid it on the table and lit a match. ‘Blow,’ she said, holding the match in front of my mouth. I did, and I caught her wrist, and held her hand there, in front of my lips, her elbow resting on the table. A slender wrist, circled by a fine gold bracelet, nails carefully shaped, white and girlish. She tugged a little and laughed. I held tighter, and she shook the dead match free onto the table between us.

  The bartender’s eyes flicked over us. I looked into her huge cornflower blue eyes. A confident, flirtatious gaze. A gaze of naked feeling came back at me. I thought: No one will ever make me feel this way, and now I’m in a spot. The smell of sulphur lingered, as she finally dropped her eyes, picked up the cigarette and struck another match.

  All the things I loved about Sam were there from the start. Her strange mixture of boldness – she had come all that way, she had spoken so openly – mixed with something profoundly conventional, cautious. Her tremendous grace and poise, like the calm surface of a dangerous lake, with the promise that trembled within it of something utterly unruly. Her maturity, the kindness, her thoughtful, logical self, the loveliness. And fire. Whenever Sam was in the room flames were somewhere close.

  Later, much later, at the end of that first, long, weekend, I remember us standing outside Notre Dame and Sam saying, ‘You think I’m so good’ (I had used this very word) ‘but I’m not. When Minty was a toddler, in the early days of my marriage, I fell for a girl. And I tried to – finish myself off, with pills. Gerald never knew the reason, but he said suicide was a very, very wicked thing. He said I should see someone, you know, a psychiatrist. And it’s only down to him that I’m still here.’

  We were staring up at the roof of the cathedral, those ghastly gargoyles – one great beast biting off the head of another, one open-mouthed with claws and outstretched talons, one a sort of foul-tempered Pan, head in hands, sulky. Of course, the most terrible fear ran through me as she said that. Rain was still falling, the spray visible in streetlamps. I kissed her so hard, I felt suddenly frightened, and we laughed, and held each other close, letting rain trickle down the necks of our jackets.

  And then the bells of Notre Dame started chiming, I don’t know why, a clanging, wild-in-God’s-glory sort of sound. Such enormous bells, such deafening vibrations. A chime and then a smash, again and again. We put our hands over our ears and laughed.

  ‘What on earth?’ she asked, as the clanging went on and on, tumultuous, crazy, on and on. Perhaps it was midnight. Perhaps it was some French celebration we didn’t know about. And just when we thought it was over, it started again, on a different note, like a new set of smaller bells, or like a small heart clanging in a chamber.

  Sam pulled a face and said, ‘Let’s go’, as if Notre Dame was admonishing us with its centuries of rebuke, its dominating sounds. But I heard something else. I heard joy and glory. I heard celebration. Ancient, tribal blood-pumping.

  I love her I love her I love her

  The bells rang out, as if our lives together would be charmed, as if they would never cease.

  Then, after the cops have gone, I think: What am I afraid of? The world isn’t interested in seeing justice done. I telephone to make an arrangement to see Sam, and she sounds – what does she sound? – she sounds willing to see me, at least. She suggests next weekend and that we bring Minty with us, take her to the zoo. Given that a while back I was mentally chiding her for forgetting Minty, I’m surprised to find myself terribly disappointed by this suggestion. An image of Minty with her dark eyes and penetrating stare imprints itself on the windowpane in the phone booth, against the dark November green. I can hardly say no. I’ve been reading an early draft of a novel Ronnie is writing and lines come to me from it. He’s writing about boys – about a particular old spinster’s dislike of boys, as ‘embryo men’ – and then writes: ‘Their pain was an unpleasant snivelling. Their joy was a guffaw . . . Like green plums their skins might glow, but remained essentially nasty.’

  Boys: essentially nasty. I almost laugh, thinking of this, and what a surprise that Ronnie can write so well about the mean-spiritedness of others, of bitter old ladies. I might be wrong about his understanding of me, after all. The memory of the white, clean pages of his manuscript – piled so neatly on the floor beside my bed: I always take special care of anything belonging to Ronnie – comforts me, and allows me to murmur the right things to Sam down the line about bringing poor little Minty along. I long to rush back to my bedroom, snuggle into my robe and pyjamas and abandon myself to reading. Perhaps I can find a hot-water bottle somewhere. Didn’t I perhaps unpack one and leave it lying on one of the shelves in the airing cupboard? Or was it the cu
pboard under the sink? (No, that was where I put the Black & Decker, its cord tightly wound, its drill bit replaced and lying with the others.)

  And it’s when I’m looking in the airing cupboard, just after my hand has taken out the cold rubber bottle, that I come across it, with a short vicious shock. A letter from Stanley. In a sealed envelope, stamped, franked, postmark unreadable. Holy crap! But unopened. My stomach plunges, a feeling as if my bowels were falling away from me. How the hell did a letter from Stanley find its way into the airing cupboard?

  So when my mind has gone wildly through who has been in the house, who could have left a letter there – Mrs Ingham, Sam, Ronnie, Smythson-Balby, Gerald, all possible, inexplicable, crazy – it dawns on me. Didn’t I put some rain-soaked letters and the damp local newspaper into the airing cupboard to dry only a few days ago? Was it possible that this letter was among them and I didn’t see it? Is it possible that this sealed envelope has been lying there on that wooden slat, face down, drying itself toastily under the Ipswich Star for several days now, and that when I finally picked up the paper to read the other day, I didn’t see it?

  I force myself to pick it up and look at it again. The deeply familiar feeling of dread begins washing over me on staring at the typeface. The slightly raised letter e. The address set out badly, sloping too far to the left . . . It’s just like all the others. The same cheap white envelope. The stamp that’s always a little on the skew, as if hastily stuck. No postmark visible. I have a horrible sensation, as if icy water is trickling down my back. Perhaps it is. Perhaps I’m a tipped-up egg-timer and my sand is draining out.

  He’s found me.

  I fetch the whisky bottle and take it to the sofa with me, and the hot-water bottle, and the moment I take a deep, deep sip I know what’s coming.

  The moment my eyes close the tiny grey blob is there, crouching, and when I open them it skitters fast across the cushion and down beneath the sofa. I search for the hot-water bottle, wrapped in a flannel, and place it on my stomach, and screw my eyes closed again.

  This time the dream is of the desert between Fort Worth and Albuquerque, the view seen from a train. Beautiful colours, tan and green. And blood red.

  Again, I will myself to wake up. Because here he is and, sure, this time it’s a dream, but in every other respect, he’s real, and he’s the same. The little man. His stumpy, squat body.

  And then the dream ends and a train somewhere sounds – mournful, low – passing its long lonely journey from then to now along the tracks of the night, tearing me awake. Me aged twelve, at the door of the boarding-house in Fort Worth, Red Alley behind us, Granny Mae hovering inside and Mother on the doorstep with her lizard-skin cases, a glowering Stanley in his white suit beside her. And I’m crying, and clinging to Mother’s legs. The Justin boot factory looms behind her, the sky horribly blue, like a vast blue dish, pressing down on her. The bricks of the factory building horribly red, the men pouring out for lunch like a stream of booted black ants.

  Mother’s legs are the only thing that’s real. The taste of my own tears, and her nylon stockings, scented with the Buffalo Trace bourbon that she favours, that she might have spilled some time. ‘You said you were going to divorce him!’ I mumble into her legs. But what child can get away with accusing her mother of lying, of inconsistency, of being spineless?

  Instead I have to straighten up and step forward for her kiss (and his), listen to all the platitudes about how an independent year in Texas with Granny Mae will be so ‘good’ for me, listen to the impatient snap of Stanley’s heels on the step of our wooden-framed house, while she tells me how much she loves me, and suffer her stupid presents for me: a jumping frog and a new sketchbook and a set of watercolours.

  ‘Funny how you love the smell of turpentine, Patsy,’ she once said, ‘when, after all, I did once try to get rid of you by drinking it.’ And at my horrified expression she laughed and added: ‘It was your father’s suggestion! Don’t look so shocked. And it didn’t work, did it? You’re still here.’

  And I think of that, and the lightness with which she told me. That she tried to ‘get rid of’ me. Abort me. Murder me. That, really, she didn’t want me at all, never had, and it was only my strange persistence and stubbornness that had brought me here and was keeping me here. You beastly child, I wish you had miscarried, you beastly husband, I wish I had never married . . . Lines from a poem come to me whenever I think of her. And the final lines are my reply, wondering often why it is that I’m still here, alive, after all: You hear the north wind riding fast past the window? He calls me. Do you suppose I shall stay when I can go so easily?

  I must have been a horrible, dreadful, monstrous, evil child to be so violently unloved.

  I said this once to Sam, and her reply astonished me: ‘Why do you say that, darling? Mightn’t it be that Mother was the monstrous person, unable to love her child? Some women are like that. And to divorce your father nine days before you were born, that’s quite the thing in 1921, isn’t it? There must have been something seriously wrong between them for a woman back then to think of divorcing a husband when so heavily pregnant and going it alone. She must have had her reasons?’

  The curious thing is, I don’t know those reasons. Was he violent? Did he beat her, have affairs? Did she?

  One time when Sam asked me where I got my almond eyes, my Oriental beauty from, I wondered with a start was my father – Jay Bernard Plangman – inside me, looking out at her. I told Sam, ‘I like to think I have Cheyenne blood.’ Anything but what I really thought: I have no idea. I met my father for the first time that same year, that sad Fort Worth year, and also once when I was a young woman and, sure, the resemblance was alarming but I didn’t want to talk about it.

  There was something I did want to talk about, a question that had long troubled me. Sam was a mother, and I had often wondered, was it normal for a woman to leave a baby, as Mother did, when the infant was only three weeks old? Would Mother have been fully recovered from the birth, would she still have been bleeding, her breasts full of milk? She left me with Granny Mae. She did come back, of course, but I had always puzzled over it. Was it perhaps unusual behaviour for a young mother?

  Sam’s eyes swam with tears when I asked her. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said. She bit her lip, but then couldn’t resist adding: ‘Most mothers can’t leave a baby next door for an hour’s nap when it’s just three weeks old.’

  That confirmed it. I was the most unlovable child who ever drew breath.

  I’m hotly awake by now. And there’s only one cure for this level of insomnia: writing. I creep downstairs to put some of these thoughts directly into type. The letter from Stanley simmers beside the typewriter; I still haven’t opened it. I throw it towards the grate, where it lands with a soft pat; I’m unable to prevent myself noting from its weight that there’s probably only one sheet of paper in it. Then I rescue it. It’s somehow impossible that I should burn it so I put it instead in the leather hod where the kindling goes, beneath the neatly chopped sticks.

  ‘How does this letter-writer, how does he – or she – know the name of your most hateful stepfather?’ was the only question the doctor in Paris was interested in, pushing his stupid glasses further up his nose (he should have shoved them up his ass). My answer – ‘Yes, that’s it! How does he know so many things about me?’ – did not interest him at all.

  The consensus was that a letter-writer who knew some facts about me and wrote nothing much that was threatening except to say that he was not an admirer of my work particularly but found it addictive was not something to be concerned about. Matter of fact, it was my concern that troubled everyone most. ‘If you write the books, people will read them,’ the doctor said. ‘And these readers, they will have their opinions about you. And this you cannot prevent. You should, in fact, be pleased, no, that you have these – how do you call them? – these fanatics who follow you.’

  The police had been even more dismissive. My feeling that someone was following me was r
idiculed. Sometimes I had noticed in the street outside my apartment that someone had moved trivial things to show me that they had been there – once a glove placed on a low wall, once a stone positioned near the entrance to the building. ‘Why should these things distress you?’ the police said; it was not a crime to pick up a lost glove. Other times, a car would move away as I came out of my front door and I’d think the same thing: someone was waiting there, and watching. And more and more, the people I told (what kind of letters? Matter of fact, it’s fan mail. Oh, well, thees is OK, isn’t it?) made me feel that my own neurosis was the question, that my responses, my anxiety and fear of the letters were the problem and nothing more.

  One gendarme told me, in barely suppressed exasperation, that being a writer of ‘the crimes’ I should surely know that the person who wrote letters with phrases like ‘I am obsessed with you and your work and I don’t know why’ was probably not the same kind of person who would leap out and stab you or break into your house and wait behind the wardrobe for you, and therefore there was nothing to be done. Crazies existed, and since letter-writing was not a crime, we had to put up with them. But how could the authorities be so sure? Didn’t even ‘types’, straightforward creeps, turn into psychos and buck a trend occasionally?

  ‘When did they start, the letters?’ Sam had asked. Sam and Ronnie, the only friends who showed any kindness, any concern.

  I honestly couldn’t remember. Paris. 1960? A year or two before I met Sam. The first was innocuous; it didn’t frighten me. Beyond the observation that the name Stanley was the same as my stepfather’s (which anyone might know) and noticing that it was franked in Paris, with no address or signature or anything further; beyond that, I made no observation. I think the first one simply said something friendly, like ‘Hello, did you think I’d forgotten you?’ as if the person knew me, and there was nothing threatening in the tone. It was when they stepped up that I became alarmed. Almost one a day during the writing of . . . Which book was it? The Two Faces of January, perhaps.