The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘Suicide is a ghastly business. People always blame themselves – perhaps that’s the intention. I’ve always thought that if someone is determined to end their life, no one could stop them. The wonder is that Gerald did not consider the child in all of this.’

  ‘Suicide,’ Pat repeated. ‘Sure.’ Then, suddenly uncertain again, plucking at Ronnie’s sleeve: ‘But they didn’t find a note, did they? They found a body, but no suicide note?’

  ‘I believe they did find a note. I’m sure someone – Charles, perhaps – mentioned it to me at the funeral. Yes. Gerald had a lot of problems, darling, at the bank. An investigation. Other women, you know.’

  ‘Suicide,’ Pat repeated again, like a child. Then suddenly remembering: ‘But what about the head injury? Wasn’t there a head injury?’ She felt muddled, faintly dizzy.

  Ronnie stared at her with a puzzled expression. He gave her a look so sympathetic that neither of them could bear it; he quickly turned back to the drawings. He murmured quietly: ‘I don’t know anything about a head injury. There was no injury to the head. He drowned himself, that’s all.’

  Silence for a few seconds. Pat breathed heavily.

  ‘I’ve been writing,’ she said, from nowhere, as if in answer to a question Ronnie had asked.

  ‘Not drinking too much. Writing too much.’

  Ronnie smiled. ‘And drinking too, darling.’

  He had been kneeling on the floor to look at her drawings and now gently replaced the sketchbook with the others, tipped against the wall. He leaned back on his heels for a moment to watch a new flurry of snow fret the windowpane, murmuring to himself: ‘Britten once told me how he would leave a shiny black piano downstairs and find a matt white one when he woke up. Old, old flour would drift down on it from the seamy beams all night.’

  Pat struggled to think harder about Gerald, to take in what Ronnie had said. Of course. No head injury. A suicide note – did she know about that? The body washed up at the Martello tower. Something came back to Pat then. Some painful hastening feeling, like gathering fear: was it really over with Sam? But surely there was something she could say, some line, some way to convince Sam of how much she loved her. And then a slap of shame as she remembered Sam’s calm, firm words, and muddlingly, maddeningly, another thought: lines from Ronnie’s novel, a novel she’d read when she first came to Suffolk, a novel about a young man, Dick Brand, that she took to be a version of Ronnie, because Dick Brand lived in Suffolk and was destined for the Church but wanted to be a writer. It had amused her, this novel, because she recognised so much of Ronnie in it, as one always did in reading novels written by friends. It also reassured her that she and Ronnie, as she’d always believed, were opposites in personality, and in their writing style they were centuries apart. His syntax, his sub-clauses and his vocabulary, not to mention characters with names like Quenny and Old Yockers, his positively Forsterian tone, made her feel exhilaratingly modern, almost hard-boiled; made her feel positively swinging in comparison.

  The line that flew through her mind then was when Dick Brand complained of having a kind of ‘literary mattress’ wedged between him and life; a poetic, intellectualising sensibility that got in the way. She felt it now. Ronnie had an advanced intellectual capacity; she envied him that. He was cleverer, kinder, more cultured, better read and better educated than she, better in every way but one. She had the ability to feel – to name – the blast of things. In that alone she was his superior.

  ‘I don’t see why you think it impossible that I might—’ she began, meaning to prolong her confession, to enjoy again the delicious relief of saying the phrase to Ronnie, but he cut her off.

  ‘I love these charcoal snails,’ he said, picking up two sketches that had been abandoned, pages torn from a pad and thrown across the room in the direction of the wastepaper basket, remaining where they fell. He studied them for a moment. ‘That one looks as if somebody tipped it out, almost as if the body is made of liquid,’ he said, and then: ‘They’re in nice new aquaria outside. You mustn’t worry, darling. I bought them myself from the pet shop. I rigged up the canopy too. They had become rather a lot, hadn’t they? They kept on laying eggs, I presume, and multiplying . . .’

  Ronnie’s tenderness, his quiet solicitude and acceptance, touched her. But the need to unburden herself was strong and she made one more attempt:

  ‘Sam, she doesn’t care to see me again. She thinks we will never get past our troubles. And it’s over because – well, she knows that Gerald’s death was my fault . . .’

  Ronnie stood up, knees creaking, and replaced the sketches neatly on her desk. He looked closely at her, his eyes meeting hers, then resting somehow on the jam-jar containing paintbrushes dipped in an inch of grey water on her desk. He said: ‘I saw that you were out of Quink. I bought you a little bottle. I’ll get it. When you’re feeling better we can go to the church I wanted to show you at Fram,’ and he began to make his way downstairs.

  She followed him, first going to her bedroom and wrapping the bathrobe round her pyjamas. She was thinking of the night she’d watched Héloise and Abelard making love, had stood there with Ginny . . . How long ago was that, and why does it feel more real suddenly than a long love affair with Sam? She remembered a detail she’d read somewhere – of snails mating for life, of a snail crossing a long, high garden wall with great difficulty in order to find its mate. That was her definition of true love: it should last for ever and involve suffering; perhaps it should cost you your life.

  Mother, in her crude way, all those lifetimes ago: ‘Are you a les?’ she’d thrown at Pat when Pat was twelve. ‘Because you’re starting to make sounds like one.’

  ‘Have I been ill?’ Pat asked Ronnie now, pausing halfway down the stairs.

  He turned over his shoulder: ‘The doctor came,’ he answered. ‘You were sedated.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And Gerald committed suicide.’

  She wondered again: how late in January was it? How long had she been ill? Other memories loomed up, billowy, ill-formed. The grey blob, the little shape, skittering at one side of her vision. The blankness, familiar to her from previous alcoholic phases, snatching pictures away.

  ‘I think you had . . .’ Ronnie was saying now as they reached the front room. He picked up a cushion distractedly, plumped it and threw it back. ‘Well, it was down to Mary that you weren’t locked up. A breakdown, she called it, and simply insisted the doctor treat you here. She nursed you. We should go for a walk now you’re brightening. The Martello tower . . .’

  ‘Mother nursed me?’

  This didn’t fit at all with anything that Pat could remember; anything from childhood. Nursing? Did Mother even have it in her? With the name Mary, or Mother, there came always only the stretched, snaking feeling that something about her was profoundly wrong, foul and unlovable, because what girl in the world had a mother who didn’t want her – worse, didn’t even like her?

  ‘I think we fought, if you want the truth,’ Pat murmured. ‘I think I fainted when Mother arrived.’

  Ronnie laughed, an easy laugh, as if he already knew this.

  ‘I think she might have – attacked me, at one point,’ Pat said, one finger rubbing at a place in her eyebrow where she can feel a small cut healing. ‘Can that be true? With a coat-hanger? Was the doctor here then? And did we have to be separated?’

  Ronnie glanced down now at the desk in the living room, at the little bottle of Quink he had placed there in a brown-paper bag; embarrassed or amused, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘Hush, Pats. You weren’t well. Mary is – well, she’s extreme, isn’t she? I suppose she’s had – her own privations, to make her that way.’

  ‘She made a stink, you mean,’ Pat said, and Ronnie laughed again, glad, he said, that she sounded more like her old self.

  The cloud was clearing, and a few memories peeked through the shreds.

  There was Ginny Smythson-Balby in her silky black slip. There were her manuscripts, her diaries and
her cahiers and the novel she was writing: she saw it as if in a dream, pages and pages covered with typed script that seemed to mass on the page, like murmurations of black starlings in a white sky. There was Sam’s apartment, the shiny harlequin tiles in the bathroom, and then this, suddenly: imagining herself standing next to the medicine cabinet, with a container of pills; holding Sam’s reading-glasses close to her nose, reading the warnings on the seconal pills and thinking: How easy it would be to give those to Sam and make it look as if Sam had done it to herself. The capsules split with nail-scissors, the powder, almost invisible, scattered along the cold white porcelain of the bath. And how she could drop them so easily into the wine glass, Sam’s glass with the Elizabeth Arden Sheik crescent on the rim.

  The sordid way her mind worked, this she was ashamed of. Did others do it? She had always done it, and now the habit had crossed over to addiction. She indulged herself, imagining leaving the apartment, glancing back at the scene behind her: Sam’s black hair spidery, Sam lying face down on the sofa. Someone reaching inside her chest, and twisting her heart with their fist. She pictured herself washing her own wine glass in Sam’s kitchen, squirting inside it with washing-up liquid, the water trickling hot over her wrist, her palms stinging red as she wiped the glass with the dish towel and put it away. When she left there would be only the one glass, next to Sam; she imagined it tipped up on the floor beside her, empty except for the traces of wine and perhaps tablets. Innocent or sinister; whatever one wanted it to be.

  Other thoughts now, equally murky, snatches of a dream, or . . . pages of her writing. If there were secrets between us it’s because we didn’t know how to tell them. She would have to think of everything for this scene to be convincing, imagine it all in the fullest of details. She would need to convince herself, first.

  So, perhaps it could be like this: the child, Minty. OK, she’d say to the police that her mother’s friend, the writer Patricia Highsmith, had been visiting earlier that day; they’d been to the zoo together; they’d bought some iced cookies in the shape of Christmas trees in waxed paper in a delicatessen near Regent’s Park; they’d had supper at home, but then Miss Highsmith had left; she’d seen her put on her coat, then say goodnight to Minty and her mother; that would have been around 10 p.m. And the time of her mother’s death would be – let’s say – 3 a.m. Yes, that would be the right time to choose. Then she’d have the police come. The cops would conclude that this lonely hour was the one that had got the better of Mrs Gerald Gosforth and made her down those sleeping pills, the pink bottle of seconal, the capsules of pills all snipped up in the bathroom, the powder carefully dissolved into her wine. The loss of her husband too much to bear, poor woman. They’d believe it was suicide, not murder. Perhaps – if the police knew Pat was there, if she had Minty let slip this part, just to add a little pep – well, they might assume Miss Highsmith had been there confessing to an affair with the deceased husband and exonerate her entirely. That would be the piece of information, the final ironic piece, that made Sam’s death – her imagined death – seem like a convincing suicide. Genius! That one little detail about her own address in Gerald’s billfold – she’d often wondered where that had floated in from – would now add up perfectly. This satisfied her. She almost purred with relief. This she could make believable, she felt.

  Suddenly, Pat said to Ronnie: ‘I’m writing a novel. About – you know, all of this: Suffolk, Sam. As well as the Plotting book. As well as the other novel, now called The Story-teller. First person singular, and rather confessional in style, you know. It has one murder – of the husband – and now perhaps another. I may abandon it.’

  Ronnie was in the kitchen, pulling on boots and suggesting she grab her coat. She looked down at the shine of his luxuriant shoulder-length hair. He turned his face to her. He seemed to be biting his lip, stifling a smile or tucking some words away, but that was just Ronnie’s expression, the way he always looked: impish, she thought, with his small mouth, his slightly rounded cheeks. Mischievous, like a small boy struggling to keep quiet about a prank he just played on you.

  ‘A difficult form – the first person singular. I thought you mostly wrote in third?’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I’ve gotten rather bogged down in it . . . It sounds like more of a confession. I’m not even sure it’s a novel.’ (Was that true? Matter of fact, she felt certain for the first time that it was a novel, just then.) Deflated, as she had once put it, like a soufflé lifted from the oven too soon.

  Was it over? she wondered. Could she still finish it, that novel? If she knew everything that happened, it was never such fun to write it. She liked to surprise herself first. She felt emptied. A thought swam to her, as she dressed and found a cigarette in the pocket of her coat and put it to her mouth, that her plotting was all wrong, all those details she’d thought of a moment ago, the Sam-suicide part – all of that would have to go.

  Ronnie was pulling on his duffel coat and leaned forward with it half on, one sleeve dangling, to light the cigarette for her. At the first inhalation a sensuous abandonment trickled through her. Such bliss to feel this blank. How would it be not to care about anything very much at all? And then Ronnie’s voice waylaid her: as they stepped out of the back door onto the crisp bite of snow she realised he had been saying something.

  ‘So I told her, no, but give it a week. I’m sure she’ll be up to it in a week.’

  ‘Who – Mother? I thought you said she’d gone back to the States,’ Pat asked, blowing out a smoke-ring.

  ‘No, the little Smythson-Balby girl. She’s been calling most days. She’s pretty intense, isn’t she? I’d call it a major crush, darling. I’ve fended her off because I didn’t want – all of this finding its way into her notes. But she’s awfully persistent.’

  The toes of their boots, their heels crunched on the step outside the kitchen door, leaving satisfying marks on the virgin white – like marks from a typewriter key biting into a page. Blankness lifted from Pat; she felt the last remnants of her illness dissolve in the snap of the white, bracing air. So. Vigilance required, as ever, she thought. A lifetime’s awareness of the loathsome nature of things, of the direction they were likely to travel in, of course, of course. The journey was always from bad to worse. And the solution? Work, above all else. Work, discipline, vigilance.

  She had almost, for a second there, forgotten. Hadn’t she always been pushing, fighting? Hadn’t her own mother tried to poison her in the embryonic stage, wipe her out? Ha. This discovery, once she’d recovered from it, had powered her. She was like the devil himself, like desire, like a searing bleach or the plague. There was no checking or combating her. There was only this: secrecy. Nosy little bitches, biographers, vultures, all of them, trying to worm their way into your secret heart, winkle out the darkness and deceit, take your life – a kind of disgusting symbolic murder – and make it their own. Sure, she might throw you a line, here and there. Night fishing, who knows what you might drag up to the surface? But Patricia Highsmith was no fool. It was a joy to be hidden, she knew. But the greatest joy was if she was never to be found.

  Smythson-Balby arrived a few days later and found Pat sitting at the kitchen table, writing a cheque for the milkman. A milk bill had come from Framlingham Dairy for the last quarter, for one pound three shillings. Pat signed her name and folded the cheque, shook the snow from the bottom of the milk bottle onto the dish towel and poked the folded cheque inside.

  ‘Yoo-hoo,’ Smythson-Balby said, just inside the door, singsong style. She had already let herself in, and was now slapping her gloved hands together, dripping wet slush onto the kitchen floor. Pat stared at the girl’s outfit: wellies, pink, bell-bottomed slacks, rabbit-fur hat and coat with white fur cuffs. The tip of Ginny’s nose was pink and her eyes bright, her breath steaming up the windows.

  ‘Still snowing out there, then,’ Pat said, getting up to rattle the slatted lid closed on the breadbin. But she was thinking: The girl looks really pretty; it’s a shame she’s
such a jerk.

  Ginny took off the rabbit-fur hat and shook out her hair. ‘Whoo-eeee,’ she said childishly. Pat made a grunt.

  ‘So glad you’re up and about,’ Ginny said. ‘And looks like you’ve been writing, too.’ Her eyes fell on a diary, next to the bottle of Quink and Pat’s fountain pen. Pat quickly closed it. ‘Shall I make us some coffee?’ Ginny said, as if she hadn’t noticed.

  Presumptuous. Proprietorial now, Pat realised, and shuddered. I love you. Whatever else, she hadn’t forgotten the – the audacity of that.

  ‘Matter of fact, I wondered how long was I ill for.’ Pat wanted to know.

  Ginny glanced up at the kitchen calendar and flipped the page over from December to January. A robin gazed out with beady eyes. ‘Today’s the eighteenth, I think.’

  ‘My birthday tomorrow.’

  ‘Ooh, lovely – we should celebrate!’ Ginny’s back was to her, as she stood at the window, shaking the old coffee grounds into the kitchen garbage can.

  Danger, danger. Every inch of Pat was alert, although she appeared to be merely watching Ginny as the girl spooned ground coffee from a screw-top jar on the shelf in the pantry, then came back and lit the gas under the little pot on the stove. Ginny was at home here, finding cups easily and now – it took only a minute or two for the coffee to brew – handing over Pat’s drink just as she liked it, strong, with no milk. Pat sipped it while it was tongue-burningly hot, holding the cup in hands that trembled only a little and could be explained by her recent illness or even – let’s face it, Ginny knew it well enough – her alcoholism.

  In Pat’s head, Ginny had died fifty times already. A crack to the head, a tumble down the stairs, a fall in the garden, face mushed down in the stream, something lethal slipped in her tea. But all of them improbable and provoking suspicion, Pat felt, because they would centre on Pat, on Bridge Cottage, and bring the law here and further investigation. So many things could look like accidents. That was in her favour. Cars sliding off the road in the snow and the slush, for instance. Drivers a little the worse for wear. Police in English villages don’t automatically suspect foul play, and why should they?