The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  I turned the matter over and over again in my mind, agonizing in my indecision. At one moment I was able to convince myself that he had seen and heard nothing and was blissfully unaware of any problem. At the next I was worried that he had seen and heard everything and was traumatized and in shock; that what he had witnessed must have done him emotional damage. Feeling unable to cope with the uncertainty, I determined to ask him more questions, but then just a few moments later I decided the opposite. It would take a supreme effort of will not to do so, but in the end I felt sure that it would be best to wait until he or other circumstances brought up the subject. Prompting him could easily be counterproductive, and the longer it took, the better were my chances that he might forget or be confused about what he had seen and when he had seen it.

  All this time, I was still feeling the stomach-churning aftereffects of all the alcohol I had consumed the previous evening. I had already felt nauseated as I cleared away the broken glass and the empty wine bottles, but now I experienced a further wave of disgust at the thought of myself as a violent and wretched drunk. I reflected on the need for clear thinking in the days and weeks ahead, and the mix of self-loathing and pragmatism made me resolve there and then to curb my drinking habits.

  Eventually I pulled myself together enough to call the office and speak to the branch librarian Mr Waddington. I told him that I had a touch of a flu virus and that I would be unlikely to be back at work until the following Monday. He said not to worry – obviously more concerned that I should not bring flu into the office than by my absence.

  “When is your wife coming down for Christmas?” he asked, and it occurred to me that he might suspect that my sudden need for a day off was to do with her return.

  “Oh, not until tomorrow,” I said. “That’s why I want to stay in bed today, so I have a chance of being on the mend by the time she gets here.” I felt that he probably believed me. In the afternoon I walked down to meet Roger from the bus as usual, and he and I walked back to the flat.

  “I went down to the insect farm today, Roger,” I said to him. He seemed pleased. There was always a sense that he would have liked me to be more interested in what was his obsession than I sometimes appeared to be, so he no doubt regarded the information as welcome. “Yes, I thought I might try to spend a bit more time there with you. I made up my own box to keep some worms in. One of those we put together a few months ago. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Roger didn’t mind at all, and we agreed that after tea we would go down to the shed to have a look at my work and make some more plans. As we left the house and set off down the street, I noticed that the builders’ skip was full to overflowing with rubble, and that someone had tied a tarpaulin over the top of it. I allowed myself a moment to feel hopeful.

  Once at the insect farm, for the first half hour or so, Roger seemed to be completely carefree. Maybe he really had seen and heard nothing last night. Maybe the memory of his face was part of a subconscious nightmare which had afflicted me after the deed. I began to hope, but then gradually I started to become aware that something was darkening his mood. When I looked over towards him, he was standing next to one of the tanks and muttering to himself.

  “What is it, Roger?” I asked him. “Is something troubling you?”

  He did not turn, but mumbled something back to me. At first I could not make out what he was saying.

  “These cockroaches.”

  I walked over to look more closely into the tank which was distracting him.

  “What about them?”

  “I’ve put them in with these termites, and I thought they would get along all right. But the cockroaches are eating too many of the termites, and if I am not careful we won’t have any termites left at all.”

  “Can we put the cockroaches somewhere else?” I asked.

  “Not easily,” he said. “I think we are going to have to kill them.”

  “Really?” I said. I was amazed. I hadn’t known him to kill any of his collection before, and was surprised to hear him say so.

  “Yes. I’ve tried them in a few places, and they do have to be fed, but they are too greedy. They upset the balance.” And with that Roger put his hand into the tank, closed his fist around one of the cockroaches, and simply squeezed it. I continued to watch as he pulled out the carcass, put it into the pocket of his jacket, and then repeated the exercise with another one. I heard the crunch of its body, like a dried leaf underfoot, as it was crushed to death. I looked at Roger’s face and saw that he seemed to be sad.

  “Are you OK Roger? I didn’t know that was part of keeping insects.”

  “Not very often,” he said. “Usually they get along and find some sort of way. But occasionally, if they can’t sort out a way to live together, I have to sort it out for them.”

  Part of me at that moment thought that perhaps Roger was blanking out what had been a horrible experience. Another part wondered if he had seen anything at all. The only thing which did not seem possible was that he knew everything and had decided that the best thing he could do was to keep quiet.

  On the following day, I took Roger to the bus, and then walked to the shops to buy enough groceries to make dinner and breakfast for three people. I was never a great cook, but I had made something of a speciality of chicken casserole, and at lunchtime I put all the ingredients into a dish and put it in the oven on a slow heat. At 1 p.m., I took a last look around the flat and, God help me, I made a banner which I strung across an alcove that read: “Welcome home Hattie”. I never called her Hattie, always Harriet, and perhaps I felt guilt about even writing her real name. As luck would have it, when I left the flat on my way towards King’s Cross, I met my downstairs neighbour Mrs Chambers on the stairs.

  “On my way to meet my wife,” I said, and then wondered of this seemed a bit forced. Too late, it was out.

  “Oh, do give her my best regards,” she said. “I hope you’ll all have a lovely Christmas.” I detected no sign of anything untoward in her manner. Another huge hurdle cleared. “Oh, there is just one thing,” she said, and my heart missed a beat. “I have been meaning to say to you that if Olly is becoming a nuisance to you, you should shoo him out downstairs. I hardly ever see him these days.” I said that Olly wasn’t a nuisance at all and that he was good company for Roger and me. Mrs Chambers seemed to be content with that answer and went into her flat.

  I took my usual public-transport journey to the station, trying to act exactly as I would have done in normal circumstances. I even considered buying flowers, but as I had never done so before, I thought it might be going a bit too far. Harriet had originally intended to come down on a train arriving at 2 p.m., and I was a few minutes early. A sign on the indicator board said platform 7, so I took up my position at that gate.

  At this point I was trying to do my best to live the part I had set for myself, so that as much as possible of the story I would eventually tell would be true. I’m not proud of the fact that I cooked a meal and set the table for a dinner for three which I knew would never take place. Such was my turmoil and madness that there may have been a few moments when I even imagined how delighted Harriet would be at my efforts. Of course I had not for a second forgotten the trauma and nightmare of the last thirty-six hours, but it certainly is extraordinary what tricks your own mind can play.

  As I stood alongside a gaggle of assorted parents and lovers waiting to meet the train from Newcastle, I found myself scanning the faces of the people leaping from the open doors of the carriages, keen to get a head start on the crowds. Yes, there were several girls of around Harriet’s size and shape and hair colour and style, but there was certainly no moment when I thought anyone looked spookily like her. I continued looking until the majority of passengers had passed me by, many of them falling into the arms of their loved ones as Harriet would have done if all this had been for real. Now there were only some older people and a few stragglers struggling with oversized luggage.

  I considered what to do. It was too soon
to sound any kind of alarm or alert the police. What would I do if these circumstances were real? If I had really expected to meet her from this train and she hadn’t been on it? Probably I would make a call to the house that Harriet was living in, just to check that she had left on time, or maybe to see whether her luggage was still in evidence. I knew the telephone number in my head and was feeling in my pockets for change for the phone box, when I sensed the presence of someone at my shoulder. The person seemed to make no move to greet or touch me – but was standing closer than a stranger would normally stand.

  I looked up and saw that it was Brendan Harcourt.

  For an instant I felt that my knees would buckle beneath me. Of all the eventualities I had anticipated, this had not been one of them. I looked straight into the face I so despised; the face which I had imagined so many times in intimate relationship to the woman I loved. So much and so long, in fact, that now the reality seemed somehow less real than the imagined images. His features were less sharp than they were in my mind’s eye. His hair colour less flaming. His skin colour less vivid. His eyes less serpentine. Taking in all this in a few seconds, I realized that I needed to say something quickly, but was still collecting my thoughts when he spoke first.

  “Jonathan. What are you doing here?”

  By now I had caught up.

  “I came to meet Harriet from the train. I didn’t know she was coming down with you. Where is she? Did you leave her struggling with her luggage? That’s not very gentlemanly.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “She wasn’t on the train. She came down a couple of days ago.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, an unconscious echo. “She didn’t. She was due to get this train. She told me. She bought her tickets a while ago.”

  “I know she did,” he said, “but then she got finished with something she had to do a bit sooner than she expected and said she was coming down earlier in the week.”

  “Well, why didn’t she tell me?” I said, and paused, as if lost in thought. “But wait a minute. She can’t have done that, because she would have turned up. If she decided to come down early she would have had to come home. Apart from anything, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go.” Immediately I began to wonder if I was getting ahead of myself and started to row back. “You must be mistaken. If she had been coming down early she would have told me. She must still be on the train or somewhere. I was about to call the house in Newcastle to make sure she left in time to catch that train. I left our flat a while ago, so if she had been held up for any reason, she might not have been able to get to a phone in time to tell me.”

  “Jonathan,” he said, “you aren’t listening to me. Harriet came down on the train on Tuesday.”

  “Brendan” – again I was unconsciously echoing him, but this time with growing dissonance – “she can’t have. If she had, she would have told me, and she didn’t. Why would she come to London ahead of her schedule and not tell me? It’s not like it’s my birthday or something.”

  “I don’t know why she didn’t tell you. I had assumed that she had, but I know for sure that she left Newcastle on Tuesday, bound for London.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. By now I could almost feel myself clambering into the driving seat. “Did you see her off on the train?” I sensed that he was beginning to flounder, perhaps remembering the need to lie, but confused about the truth.

  “Of course not. It’s just that she mentioned it to the three of us. On Monday, I think. Yes, Monday. She said she was going down on the following day instead of on Thursday. We had all planned to go out for an end-of-term drink, and she said she would miss it.”

  “That’s a pity for you all,” I said, trying to confine the irony. “So where the hell is she?” Should I seem worried, confused, more concerned than I was pretending? I was making this up as I went along, and was not sure how to get the mix right. What I did feel sure of was that Brendan believed me when I said I had expected to meet Harriet from this train. “I’m going to have a walk down the carriages just to make sure she hasn’t fallen asleep or anything.”

  I was about to start walking towards the train when he stopped me. “Jonathan. There is no point in doing that. I just know that she came down on Tuesday.”

  “But I still don’t understand how you could know that for certain unless you saw her off. Did you?”

  “No,” he said. The more uncomfortable he became in his role as a liar the more comfortable I became in mine. “I told you. But I did see her that morning, two days ago, and she was packing her stuff and shortly going to leave for the station.”

  “Were you round at her house then?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I popped round to return a book she said she needed for study over the holidays.”

  “Really?” Damn me if I wasn’t beginning to enjoy myself. “What time was that? Because to get the train arriving at two she would have had to be at the station by nine. You must have been an early riser?”

  “Yes, because it was a book I had borrowed and which she said she badly needed.”

  “Which one?”

  “What?”

  “What book was it that you returned to her because she badly needed it? I’m just curious.”

  I knew this was getting off track and, despite the pleasure I was beginning to have in making Brendan squirm, something told me that I was at risk of over-playing my hand and should return to the question of Harriet’s whereabouts. Brendan’s lies might be useful to me later, and so maybe better not to give him a chance to get his story straight right now. I could tell that he was as concerned as I appeared to be about what might have become of Harriet. It’s just that we both had our own very different reasons for not saying everything we knew.

  “Well, I’m going to call her house in Newcastle. Who knows, maybe she left the precious book behind, got off the train at Durham and went back. We just don’t know. Why don’t I do that, and you ring Martin and Jed at their parents’ houses to see if they know anything? Then we can compare notes.”

  Obviously still totally bewildered, Brendan agreed. As I began to turn over the situation in my mind, I guessed that he had spent the night with her on Monday, and then maybe had walked her to the station the following morning. Probably he saw her off from the platform, and I could imagine their tearful farewells. Perhaps he had been urging her to leave me and she had been saying that she would, but not quite yet. I would never know, and I had to hope that no one else ever would know either.

  So there we were, an odd couple, making our calls from adjacent telephone booths on the station platform, each holding on to his secrets about what he knew of the other. Brendan, worried about his lover, but also worried that I may soon discover that he had been having sex with another man’s wife – my wife. I, not at all confused about what had happened to my wife, but preoccupied with playing the role of the anxious husband with no idea that his beloved was being unfaithful with another man. I had to hope that his lies would get him into difficulties before mine would have the chance to catch up with me.

  “I think we need to inform the police,” I said.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I had worked out some sort of masterplan to enable me to get away with killing my wife and was carrying it out step by step. I had not. At this point my mind was still plagued at every moment by nightmare images and by the horror of what I had done. I have seen this sort of thing described as a living hell, and it was something like that. Experienced as though you are an unwilling witness to events over which you have no control; a world in which the bizarre becomes the everyday, the surreal becomes familiar. And in and among all this I felt that I had no choice but to do whatever I could to keep myself safe from the consequences of my actions.

  Proscriptions on both murder and adultery are among the most fundamental of human laws; as old as the Ten Commandments themselves, and no doubt older than that. Only a fool would put them on an equivalent level, but nonetheless both Brendan and
I had each committed a mortal sin which we were now trying to conceal. While my purpose was simply to appear to know nothing about the disappearance of my wife, his imperatives were far more complex. His instinct to conceal his infidelity was in direct conflict with his concern about her whereabouts, and that was bound to lead him into making mistakes.

  The very first questions the police were likely to ask would probably reveal that he had lied about when he had last seen her, and the chances are that his thoughts were going crazy trying to work out the ramifications of whatever he might say. If a few questions from the police revealed that he and she had been lovers, and then she turned up within hours with some innocuous explanation for her absence, their secret would be blown. I cannot know whether or how Harriet had planned to tell me about her love of several different types of music, but whatever her plans were they certainly would not have included a police inquiry.

  “Surely there’s no need to alert the authorities just yet,” Brendan said. “I’m sure there must be an obvious explanation we haven’t thought of.”

  “What, like she got off at York, went shopping and fell asleep?” I said. Again, I don’t now know if I was getting agitated for effect, or whether I was just naturally taking to the part of a distraught husband. “People don’t just vanish, Brendan. If, as you say, she left Newcastle on Tuesday, why hasn’t she turned up here?”

  He had no answer. His calls to Martin and Jed had revealed nothing new. Neither of them had a clear idea of what her plans had been. They vaguely thought she was travelling down on Tuesday, but had no way to be sure.