The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘Not on the wagon, are we?’ Pat asked. ‘There’s a brand new bottle of J&B in that sink unit. Shall we pep up our coffee?’

  Ginny obliged. Now the hat sat on the table between them, like a big furry barrier, and Ginny’s coat shouldered the chair. Underneath she wore a baby pink turtle-neck and three strings of pearls that rattled wildly as she bounced around the kitchen, pouring things, putting bottles away. Pat sensed the mood Ginny was in – it came off her like steam. No doubt the irritating girl would like her to take her to bed. Again.

  ‘I suddenly wondered,’ Ginny began shyly. ‘That woman you were with that night in Aldeburgh when I was with Izzie. It was dark, of course. But she was tall, I saw that. Slim, and with blonde hair. I thought it at the time, actually. Was it Sam Gosforth?’

  The kitchen was so quiet Pat could hear snow falling outside. Sliding past the salmon pink walls of Bridge Cottage, coating the trees, freezing the stream, weighting branches, icing the whole of Suffolk in Christmas-cake white. She was thankful she’d defied Ronnie and Mother and brought her snails back in from outside; they were safely snuggled in her art room. The phone booth would be frosted over, the door packed and stuck. The oak tree weighted, and poised. And what of the silly statue, the totem, as Pat thought of it, in the village? Eric Gill weird, now blobbed with snow like an ice-cream cone.

  Pat poured a giant slug of whisky into her coffee cup and shook her head.

  ‘No. It wasn’t. Peppy little numbers like yourself – not married women – are more my dish.’

  Ginny simpered, then suddenly looked as if she ought to be offended, trying to suppress her smile. It was impossible for Pat to know whether Ginny believed her. She suspected she didn’t, but would let it go. For now.

  ‘So,’ Ginny said, with insane cheerfulness, ‘is the writing going well?’

  Pat made a sound that could mean anything, but she got up, and they moved into the living room, where the fire was dying in the grate. Pat prodded it with the long poker – Might the poker do? she wondered, twirling the end, almost wanting to lick it, to see it sizzle – and added another log. Ginny sat down, cross-legged, on the floor in front of the fire, and giggled for no reason. She seemed a little high already.

  Pat’s pages were piled next to her naked typewriter (that is, the cover was off) on a new work table, one that Ronnie had found for her in Abbott’s, the second-hand store in Debenham. Pat had protested that it was foolish to buy new stuff when – she could feel this now, somehow – she wouldn’t be staying in Suffolk for much longer, but Ronnie had replied that he’d like to keep it after she’d left so it wouldn’t be a wasted purchase.

  ‘You know,’ Ginny was saying, off on one of her schoolgirl-debate-society subjects; ‘why do men like Gerald beat their wives?’

  ‘How do you know he did?’ Pat asked, startled.

  ‘Oh, you remember I worked there? As an au-pair. Even then I knew Samantha was afraid of him. He had a filthy temper.’

  A pang of jealousy throbbed through Pat at the thought of Ginny, a young Ginny, in Sam’s home.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this. About the sort of cases that Daddy sees. I’ve often wondered why it is just men. Women have as much reason – if not more – to be violent, to erupt.’

  ‘And what pearl of wisdom have you come up with?’ Pat said. She had brought the whisky bottle into the living room. Of course she was meant to quit drinking. Ronnie was too polite to mention it but she knew the doctor would not have been constrained. She poured a generous slosh into each cup. The coffee had gone now and it was more of a whisky slush with a coffee aftertaste.

  ‘Well,’ Ginny persisted, ‘men might be . . . trying to attack their own desire. The women they love represent vulnerability, the one thing that can hurt them. They want to crush it. And since women are more comfortable with their feelings, feelings of weakness – that’s our lot, most of the time – we don’t need to attack it. Kill it in others where we foolishly imagine it lives. If you see what I mean.’

  Ginny’s last words came out rather slurred: she was showing her drinks already. Pat glanced out of the living-room window and glimpsed Ginny’s little red car, all spattered with white, like something covered with a lace doily, parked there at the front of the cottage. Again she imagined it veering off the road, tyres sliding on black ice, Ginny’s hands on the steering-wheel, a tree looming up. Too much to hope for? Many drunks drive home safely, in conditions worse than these. Maybe a further helping hand is required.

  ‘I don’t happen to agree. Wives, girlfriends, prostitutes, the women in their lives – they’re just in the wrong place. They’re just who men can get at. Murderous rage. And women are spineless. Nothing more sophisticated than that. Women are pushed by circumstances instead of pushing. Your explanation is so much Freudian voodoo, if you want the truth,’ Pat murmured.

  Killing your desires – what hooey. Killing, crushing, despising what you desire, whatever makes you vulnerable; your own feelings of desire, in fact, being repugnant to you. Pat was thinking: Maybe the library in Ipswich has a book on car maintenance. Tampering with brakes. Is that possible, or is it just a movie cliché? I mean, why wouldn’t a driver just tug on the handbrake? Ginny was not much intellectually and a damn fool driver. Woolly ideas about men and feminism. Pat’s eyes strayed to Ginny’s sweater. At the voluptuous strings of – probably first class – pearls. The girl caught her look and smiled, stretching out the legs in pink slacks. She glanced at Pat over the rim of her cup, trying, Pat knew, to be flirtatious. Pat edged closer to her. Put one hand on Ginny’s thigh. That was all it took for the girl to drop her head against Pat’s shoulder, and sigh.

  And then Pat reached for the little zip at the front of the pink slacks, flipping the button free from the button hole and pulling the zip with a ripping noise so loud that they both laughed. Pat’s hand there on the metal felt extraordinarily hot. She paused to pour them both more whisky. The burning taste of that, too, melted the room to one tightening, brown-toned embrace. Ginny Smythson-Balby stretched out in front of the hearth like a cat and allowed Pat to tug the slacks from her body, wriggling and lifting her backside (her lovely fat derrière, Pat couldn’t keep from thinking, though she wished she were less entranced) to help her. She wore small pink cotton underpants, with a daisy embroidered on one hip. Pat kissed this, then peeled the cotton, kissing the dark pubic hair, rubbing her face in the warm salty heat at the centre of Ginny, until the room itself trembled and groaned around them, and the fire blazed at Pat’s cheek and once again, for a while, all other thoughts were soothed.

  Mother. On the doorstep at Bridge Cottage, a suitcase beside her. Mother, glittery and smart, snappy in her silver fox fur with her newly dyed black bob and leather gloves, saying: ‘Well. I found you through some friends of yours in Islington. You’re still the same stingy little shit. You might have telephoned or arranged a cab for me from Ipswich. I’ve been on that butt-freezing station best part of an hour. You didn’t get my letter?’

  A letter that apparently told Pat that Mother was arriving, and dates. A letter Pat hadn’t opened. And Mother always acting as if her own behaviour – bent on chasing Pat halfway around the world – was perfectly normal, as if no one would accuse her of being anything less than sane. Pat was in some kind of smog of despair and not really functioning and it was a shock to open the door to her.

  ‘I didn’t get any letter.’

  Pat wanted to ask: how the hell did you find me? But that would let Mary know how much she’d rattled her. Her mother stepped in without wiping her boots on the welcome mat. She sighed and lifted her lizard-skin case over the threshold herself. A tiny case not much bigger than a weekend case: the only reassuring sign.

  ‘No Stanley?’ Pat asked, kissing her on both of her icy cheeks, because Mary turning up in Suffolk from Texas was extraordinary enough. Who was to say who else might come?

  ‘Why in God’s name would Stanley come?’ was all her mother said. She puffed herself onto the sofa
without taking off the fur coat and looked around the front room of Bridge Cottage with undisguised repulsion.

  ‘Jeez, Pats. These places get worse! No telephone. Don’t you even have heating here?’

  ‘I was working! I can fix a fire. You didn’t just come from— Where did you fly from?’

  ‘I’ve been staying in Islington. With friends of yours. AS I TOLD YOU IN MY LETTER.’

  And then, with a chilling, creeping feeling stealing from her toes to the hairs on the back of her neck, Pat thought: It can’t be. The letter she’d thought was – the letter that was like all the others. She had never opened it. That letter? It was from Mother.

  She fetched it from under the newspapers in the kindling. It was covered with flecks of wood. Pat’s hand was trembling; she tore it open. It contained one page in Mother’s round hand. Signed: Mother. Not Stanley. Not Brother Death, or BD. Not typed, nothing threatening. Actually, not like the other letters at all. No ‘I know where you are’ or ‘No one will ever believe you’, just a limber, chatty, folksy letter saying she was coming to visit, with flight numbers and times and . . .

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t read it!’ Mary flounced, watching Pat with small dark eyes. Currants, black buttons. The dead eyes of a snowman, or a gingerbread boy. She was shrugging her arms out of the coat, wafting the scent of Chanel No 5, making the front room of Bridge Cottage smell like the beauty parlour in Fort Worth. Saturday afternoons. Hairspray and red-polished nails.

  ‘I thought . . .’ Pat said, and flipped the envelope to the front again, to study the typed address. But that part did look the same. Surely the same typewriter.

  ‘Did you type the envelope?’ Pat asked her.

  Mary leaped up then. ‘Let me take a look at that! What’s so goddamn interesting about an envelope?’ She snatched the envelope from Pat and examined it, and Pat wondered again: did her flustered shoving back of the envelope at her mean that realisation had dawned and she understood she’d made a revealing mistake? Usually the envelopes on letters from Mother were handwritten. The letters from Brother Death or Stanley – the letters that had pursued her and alarmed her and blighted her life for the last few years in Paris, the letters from, well, she knew now who it was – they were always typed, both inside and out, with that wonkily pasted-on stamp, and the address not quite aligned properly.

  Mary’s mood changed at once and she gave a sharp laugh, like a bark, and a sly smile.

  ‘Can’t a mother let her daughter know she’s thinking of her? If that same goddamn daughter travels all over the world and never writes her, and tries to cut her mother out of her life . . .’

  ‘Is that a confession, then? You’re owning up to them?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  She sank back into the rickety sofa, which made an odd assortment of clicks and creaks, as there was a pile of metal coat-hangers beside her, which Pat had been meaning to take upstairs.

  ‘Wine, Pats? You gonna offer me some wine? Or a highball?’

  Pat went to the kitchen to fix her a drink and give herself time to think, time for her heart to quit its crazy ticking. She was like an overwound clock. Snap out of it, Pats. She can’t stay long. What can she want? At least she had found out about the letters. Although what was truly frightening (and confusing) was that, as the police in Paris pointed out, the frank on the envelope, if you could read it at all, was usually local. Which meant . . . what? Mother had got someone to mail them for her in Paris? How the hell had she managed to go to so much trouble? Still, she did know a lot of people, friends of Pat’s, and it did make sense of how he – ‘Stanley’ or ‘Brother Death’ (that name from one of Pat’s own novels too) – always knew where she was.

  ‘Shall I fix up the fire?’ Mary called, never able to quit her habit of interfering, and of continuing a conversation with Pat regardless of which room she was in.

  Pat ignored the singsong voice and bit her lip, putting two glasses of Frascati on a flower-patterned tray. She glanced at the clock in the kitchen: 10 a.m. It was going to be a long day.

  Mary was shaking out her hair, arranging her skirts and preening, gently pushing the coat-hangers away from her, when Pat came back into the room. She was nowhere near the fire and had no intention of fixing it. She had simply meant: you go fix us a fire. So Pat did, glad that the leather hod next to the fire was filled with kindling that someone – presumably Ronnie – had left there for her, and folded copies of the Ipswich Star, which she began wadding into balls.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ Mother said.

  ‘I’ve been ill.’ In fact, as Pat suddenly realised, she’d been mostly in bed since leaving Sam. There was something large and balloon-like that pressed at her chest, a physical illness or an emotional one, she didn’t know. She glanced down and was surprised to find she was dressed in Levi’s, her lizard-skin belt and a clean shirt, though her feet were bare. Had she been intending to do something when she’d been interrupted by that brutal, startling rap at the door? Sure. She had been coming downstairs to start work on the novel again. Out of the corner of her eye a mouse ran along the skirting-board. Mother watched her glance at it, watched her face, and laughed.

  ‘You could use losing a few more pounds.’

  Pat looked at the Levi’s, which were bagging around the thighs and hips and didn’t say anything, hoping Mary would go no further.

  ‘Sitting on your ass all day, drinking. No wonder you’re fat!’

  She sipped her wine and glanced at Pat over the top of the glass, before breaking into another little peal of laughter, which she no doubt thought was girlish and becoming.

  ‘Last time I weighed myself I was one hundred and ten, tops. I don’t happen to think that’s fat.’

  ‘Ha! I’m just telling it like it is, Pats. Your best friends sure wouldn’t tell you. It’s a mother’s unwelcome task.’

  Pat struck the match and the newspaper caught, blossoming to a blue smoky flame and a crackle. She sipped her wine. ‘We could go for a walk later. Ronnie’s been showing me some pretty churches in Suffolk . . .’

  ‘Ronnie! Schmonny, what kind of name is that?’

  ‘Matter of fact—’

  ‘And, anyways, don’t you find these English country places so little? I brought my paints. I thought I’d paint for a day or two. But the scale is already boring me. The pretty-pretty Suffolk. No colour like fall on the east coast. It’s all so subtle.’

  Ha. Subtle. Not her forte.

  ‘Well, ain’t this nice?’ she said, when her glass was drained, holding it out for a top-up. Pat had anticipated this and brought the wine bottle in on the tray, so she obliged.

  ‘Catching up,’ Mary continued, ‘mother and daughter. And you’ve been getting some nice reviews. And your friends in Islington – Betty – said you’d won a prize or something? Oh, and an old friend of yours, Lil. Did I tell you about her? Exposed herself to Stanley. That’s right. He was downstairs mixing drinks and she followed him down and sat on the top stair. He turned around and she was letting him have it. Can you believe that? Bent on making my husband. That’s what your little friends are like.’

  ‘Those letters. Paris. Signing them “From Stanley” . . .’

  ‘Letters from me and Stanley? What’s your problem? I don’t get it.’

  ‘Do you know I went to the police about them in Paris?’

  She laughed gaily.

  ‘Oh, Pats. Have you been to a doctor lately? Had any blackouts? How much are you drinking?’

  ‘I thought it was some creep, you know. A prowler or something. It got so that—’

  ‘You always were paranoid. Tip you over the edge, did they? Well, I always said you were a crackpot.’

  More laughter. Pat was standing, kind of towering over her mother, aware that she was clenching her fists. Mary swatted at her knee – the only part she could reach – with her hand.

  ‘You know I spoke to Dr Carstairs about you. He has some very interesting theories.’ />
  Ignore her. Pat asked tightly if Mother wanted some olives, or crackers and cheese to go with that wine. Took the tray into the kitchen, trying to gather herself, knit herself back together, fend off the buzzing in her ears. A sound, she realised, that being around Mother often produced. She took a long while to arrange crackers on a plate. Added a knife. Unwrapped a wedge of English Cheddar from waxed paper. And then went back in.

  ‘Oh, and you know,’ Mary was saying, ‘I’ll tell you. I’m done with that schmuck! That son of a bitch! I’ve left him, Pats. I can’t stand another day of it.’

  There was no need to say anything. This was familiar enough and this was how it would go. Pat hadn’t thought Mary would come all this way, travel halfway across the world at sixty-two years old, just to pummel her with it, like – like someone throwing snowballs at a fence, but she’d clearly underestimated her mother.

  ‘I’ve been telling your little chum Betty and – what was her name? That other one. The bull-dyke. Nell. They were awful nice. They sure were understanding. I hope you will be too, Pats.’

  And out they came. Stanley’s latest crimes, oiled with the rest of the bottle of wine. They were no worse than they had been on any other occasion. Pat at first felt resigned: so Mary’s need to regale her had not abated, her conviction that Pat’s job since early childhood was to be a listening post, an absorbing handkerchief. As Mary shifted excitedly on the sofa the coat-hangers rattled and chattered; she seemed not to notice and kept blatting at her. What it amounted to was this: there was some task, a faucet that could use fixing in the yard, always some task like this, something that Stanley hadn’t tackled. And she’d tried not to nag him, folks would tell you she’d held her tongue, she’d been a saint, other women would have cracked sooner, but, no, that man had gone weeks before he’d even got off his ass . . .

  Holy crap. Halfway across the world to tell Pat this?