Last Act of All

by Aline Templeton

  Last Act of All

  Aline Templeton

  Copyright © Aline Templeton 2014

  The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To JWR and MMR with love and gratitude

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  PART TWO

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Extract from Past Praying For by Aline Templeton

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Each time tonight, when her eyelids dropped over burning eyes, she could see the scene again, lit by memory as mercilessly as any performed under television arc-lights. His shoulders, straining the Tattersall checked shirt as he slumped across the figured walnut desk; his hands splayed in stark surprise, and his profile sharp in relief against disordered papers, the visible eye open but glassily unseeing; the back of his head—

  Always, at this point, her eyes shot wide open, staring into soundless dark. Heart pumping erratically, she gulped the stale air inside the cell, her only orientation threadlines of light leaking round the edges of the peephole shutter.

  The last night. Tomorrow she need not lie in darkness, confined with the hobgoblins of night. Tonight, her mind was stirring, like the Kraken, dislodging from fathomless trenches the ugliness she had buried there.

  There was fear; there was rage; there was confusion; there was deathly sorrow. But she, with somewhere still a small core of fierce pride in her skill at acting these emotions, unfelt, had contrived to invert that talent. It had enabled her to banish thought, even when the key was turned in the lock, and she lay down upon the narrow bed. There was only the texture of blankets under her fingers, then oblivion, descending as heavily as a big brass poker with a shiny knob on the end.

  But tonight she was feeling something, like the tingle of pins and needles, the forerunner of pain in a frost-bitten limb. Excitement — no; that suggested pleasure or happiness, emotions she had relinquished with the rest, though round the words still hung a faint, recollected fragrance. Fear, perhaps?

  She had been very afraid at first, rigid, almost cataleptic in her terror, but gradually a survival strategy was born.

  Every minute of every hour of every day was a discrete entity, unconnected to those gone before, or coming after. ‘I will measure out my life in coffee spoons.’ Her mouth might frame the words, but her mind had to learn not to trace their source.

  Minute by minute, she loosened her spirit from the fetters of memory, and the tide of pain and retrospection ebbed, leaving her mind blank as sea-scoured sand.

  Even the other women, whom she had feared, became blessedly remote, and they, after initial reaction to her notoriety as the woman who murdered Neville Fielding — ‘Badman’ Harry Bradman to his numberless fans — lost interest in the quiet, unresponsive robot she had created. This useful artefact she programmed as the perfect prisoner, learning Spanish or doing the most unpleasant kitchen chore with the same obedient indifference.

  Tomorrow was an abyss of uncertainty. Tomorrow Edward, her husband, would be waiting for her. She had not thought about him, did not wish to think about him now. Yet thoughts wormed in and writhed about her mind.

  Could she bear, tomorrow night, to lie with another body close, breathing, turning, intruding on her space? Could she bear his touch, or would caressing hands burn like a garment of flame?

  His letters, which she opened dutifully and passed her eyes across, spoke of love, but it meant nothing now. It was a word, like happiness, from another country. The wench he loved was dead; had she loved him, even then?

  She had loved Neville, when they were married, or perhaps she had hated him. There didn’t, now, seem to be much difference. Helena had felt both passions, but Helena was insubstantial, like a character in an ill-remembered novel. It would be strange, being Helena again.

  Or Mother.

  That ultimate, forbidden thought brought her upright, in a spasm of agony. She must not lie here, while the smooth, taut, blank sheet of her mind grew rumpled and soiled.

  She got up, not caring that the floor struck icy, February chill to her shrinking bare feet. Up, down, across; six steps, four steps, six steps, three to the bed. She stopped only once, when the shutter on the peephole was momentarily lifted. But no one came in, and like the polar bear going slowly mad on its apron of concrete, she resumed her pacing, four, six, three, six again.

  But she was used to confinement. Perhaps her whole life had been a restricting process, forcing her into smaller and smaller spaces, till she was nothing but a tiny wooden doll, coffined at the heart of it.

  *

  In the mirk of the February morning, the meagre-faced clock on the gatehouse of the women’s prison showed eight o’clock, and as it began a tinny chime the postern in the huge black gate began to open.

  The figure that appeared, a carry-all in her hand, was small and slight. Her hair was silver-blonde slipping imperceptibly into grey, unskilfully cut into a longish bob.

  As she surveyed the world outside, her gaze was almost blind; a blank, incurious stare from shadowed eyes huge in the pinched peskiness of her face.

  She stepped over the deep sill and turned blunderingly to her left. She was wearing a suede jacket and an expensive tweed skirt: good clothes, but the skirt hung in folds as if bought for a larger person, and the drooping jacket was creased by folding.

  A Rover, not new, but well-polished and maintained, was parked on the other side of the street. A man was climbing out of it and hurrying towards her, a tall man, but otherwise nondescript; thin-faced, with light brown hair receding at the temples.

  He didn’t look exactly exciting, and she didn’t look exactly excited, stopping short of the step that would have taken her into his arms.

  He said, ‘Hello, darling, how are you?’ then bent forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

  Sensing her withdrawal, Edward acknowledged withdrawal in himself. She was his wife, his own Helena, of course, but she looked so — so strange, thin and ungainly, with a disturbing emptiness in her eyes, and even — though perhaps he imagined it — with a faint whiff of the prison smell about her. He had experienced this flicker of revulsion before, when he had visited her, but believed he had ignored it.

  He relieved her of her bag, then grasped her elbow to escort her across the road. He might almost have been collecting her from the London train.

  ‘Edward. Thank you for meeting me.’ Helena turned up the corners of her mouth in a smile, as if someone had instructed her that this was how it was done. He could feel her shaking, her arm fragile as a chicken’s bone under his fingers.

  The car was warm; he settled her in the passenger seat as solicitously as if she were an invalid, then got in himself.

  A small, cold fear was edging itself into his mind. What if the experience had left her permanently unbalanced? How would he, with what he himself would have described as a thoroughly normal English distaste for any kind of untidy emotion, cope with a wife who was not — normal?

  There was nothing new about human life presenting problems, and over the centuries usef
ul strategies had been devised for coping with them. You couldn’t change the past, so agonizing messily and uncontrollably over the whole thing wouldn’t help. Like spent nuclear fuel, it had to be effectively sealed off, dumped and forgotten, if you didn’t want to find that the contamination had spread.

  Social structures were there to take precisely that sort of strain, to help you keep your life within your control. It might not be feasible to put things back exactly as they had been, but by following the rules, you could avoid violent and unproductive change.

  Which made sense. If he smashed one of his Chelsea teacups, he wanted it repaired as perfectly as possible, even if there would always be some hairline cracks. It wouldn’t help to start from the pieces and try to make a wholly inadequate milk-jug instead.

  But the image made him wince. It was her beauty he ached for, the perfection that had drawn him to her in the first place. Beauty was rare in Radnesfield, which was perhaps why it meant so much to him; he had thought himself the luckiest man in the world when she had agreed to marry him. The way she looked now provoked not admiration, but pity.

  And guilt. His responsibility was to protect her; he had failed, and all he could do to compensate was to try to restore now, as nearly as possible, what she had lost.

  That he could acknowledge; strictly censored had been any recognition of anger, his own anger that she had, by her actions, implicitly rejected that protection at the outset.

  That was behind them now, anyway. What lay ahead — what must lie ahead — was the smoothest possible return to everyday life.

  So Edward began to talk, easily and superficially, as if Helena had returned after some quite ordinary absence — a holiday, perhaps, or a visit to friends. He talked about the house, about the garden, about the effect of the housing market on his estate agent’s business, and like the actress she still was she played to the cues he fed her.

  At last, firmly as a horseman with a nervous mare, he brought her round to the first of the hurdles.

  ‘Stephanie should be at home by the time we get there. Darnley Hall agreed to let her come home for the weekend.’

  At her daughter’s name, he felt her stiffen, and knew, as if he could read her mind, that she was reliving their last meeting, suffering once more the agony of the child’s frantic rejection. He carried on, swiftly and smoothly.

  ‘I think there was a hockey match or something, but I got the impression that Stephie wasn’t too heartbroken to miss it.’ Her voice was not entirely steady, but at least she replied. ‘She was never too keen on hockey. Horses, now...”

  He laughed. ‘Oh, horses!’ he said, with a gesture of resignation. A little silence fell.

  His next task was more difficult, but it was not one that he could shirk. He had gambled everything on this one bold act, and she had to accept it, she had to agree...

  He spoke unemphatically, though out of the corner of his eye he was watching for reaction.

  ‘I decided it would be a good idea to have a party for you, darling — just to celebrate having you home again. The day after tomorrow — I’ve asked everybody I can think of, and we’ve arranged the catering from Limber. So there’s nothing you need do except enjoy yourself, and catch up with all your old friends.’

  He sensed that, like the nervous horse, she was going to refuse. Her hands, previously unnaturally still in her lap, began a panicky fluttering of protest, and glancing at her he could see that she had turned pale.

  He reached across to imprison one of her hands with a grip that was so urgent as to be painful.

  ‘No, Helena, you mustn’t. You’ve been doing so well. Can’t you see, my darling? This is what we must do. Get it all over at once, behave normally, and you’ll see — no one will ever mention it again. It’s over. Finished. Sealed book.’

  Sealed book. Those were clearly the words that caught her attention; the philosophy that chimed with her own. Close it. Shut it off. Bury it, so that not even in dreams need she glance at its pages.

  ‘Finished,’ she murmured, her eyes closed.

  ‘Finished,’ he said, and it was a promise.

  There was a long, long silence. He looked at her anxiously once or twice, but said nothing, and eventually she opened her eyes. When she spoke, she sounded almost casual.

  ‘How many people are coming?’ she asked, any wife to any husband.

  His relief was such that it was difficult to match her dispassionate tone.

  ‘It’s hard to say, really — I haven’t given them much time to reply. I’ve asked all the usual village people, and our neighbours nearby — the Morleys, Annabel and James, if his political duties allow, Nick and the Whites and one or two others from the office — you know...’

  ‘And — Lilian?’ she said stiffly.

  ‘My dear girl, you should know by now that if you don’t ask Lilian and she wants to be there, she’ll come anyway.’

  He thought that she almost smiled. Certainly, inviting Neville’s widow to this sort of coming-out party could have been tactless to an offensive degree. But Lilian being Lilian, she had contented herself with a brief cameo performance of the widow’s role, before reverting to one more suited to her disposition.

  ‘Surely she wouldn’t want to come?’

  There was a trace of panic in her voice, and he soothed her swiftly.

  ‘Oh, she’ll certainly behave with perfect sang-froid if she does. She’s got nerve enough for anything. And talking of nerve, Chris Dyer’s coming.’

  His voice darkened at the mention of the television producer, and for the first time Helena turned her head to look at him, though she said nothing.

  ‘He phoned me yesterday, asking about you. I made it clear it was none of his business, but all he said was that he had the hide of a bull rhinoceros and would be coming to see you anyway. So I asked him to the party by way of damage limitation. His lease is up on the cottage, apparently, so he’s going to clear it at the same time. So at least we should have seen the last of him after that.’

  ‘Tell your gorgeous Helena I can’t wait to see her again,’ Dyer had managed to slip in, before Edward sharply replaced the receiver, but Edward did not relay the message.

  ‘Oh look,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Radnesfield, nine miles. Not long now.’

  With his head turned to look at the signboard, he did not notice the shudder of revulsion which wracked his wife’s slight frame.

  *

  ‘Bringing her home today, he is.’

  A silence fell as Martha Bateman, making a pretence of consulting her shopping-list, tossed the remark to the other women in the village shop.

  She was tall and raw-boned, with a face that could have belonged to any period of history in this part of the Fens, angular, harsh and leathery of complexion, with watchful eyes under hooded lids. She looked as if the lighter experiences of life had passed her by, but her thin-lipped, unpainted mouth suggested that she would not have welcomed them. She dominated her audience without exertion, not only by her membership, both by birth and marriage, of two of the three local families who went back to the days of the Old ‘Uns, or by her position as housekeeper at the Red House, but also by the steeliness of character which had long established her the ultimate authority on every question from morals to spring-cleaning. She was graceless, insular, secretive and suspicious by nature, brusquely implacable in her judgements.

  In a sense, she was Radnesfield.

  *

  Right at the point where, in the Upper Pleistocene period, the primeval ice-sheet had stopped its advance on the east coast of the British Isles, south of the Wash, Radnesfield had its beginnings in a circle of skin tents. Later, there were mud huts: later still, farming homesteads began to crown the ridges of the low, smooth glacial folds.

  By the time it had a name, it had been ignored by half a dozen foreign invasions, lived under Roman law and Danelaw while ignorant of either, and brought itself painfully into the age of the wheel, the horse, and the iron ploughshare.

/>   Turning a wet, heavy furrow is a slow business, and they became deliberate of speech and manner, taciturn and stubborn, as set in their ways as impacted mud, their feet planted firm in the solid clay.

  Two thousand years later they were little different, fiercely private in an age when cars and the television set threatened the age-old rhythms of village life.

  Now there were strangers, ‘foreigners’, who came into the pub among the close-mouthed countrymen, talking too loudly and too familiarly, until frozen out by annihilating indifference: they were dismissed, afterwards, with a devastating, ‘Don’t know enough to keep their great old mouth shut.’

  It was not considered unkindness. As well ask a badger to relate to a humming-bird, as ask the villagers to appreciate attitudes which were as unreal to them as the images that flickered across their television screens in the darkened parlours.

  Confidences were, to them, embarrassing as nakedness, while, paradoxically, gossip wove the fabric of their lives. Gossip was an art form, related and received with a relish betraying its origins: what, after all, did Homer do but spread some unfounded and scurrilous rumours about what Odysseus got up to on a business trip abroad?

  It was a game with unspoken rules, where investigation was part of the pleasure. Questioning was as vulgar as obscenity; learning your neighbour’s business was a slow, absorbing, lifetime’s occupation. Life was people, not ideas.

  Ideas were dangerous. ‘Fancy ideas’ had lost the village many of its young, lured by the brighter lights and prospects of Cambridge or Ipswich or even, unimaginably, further afield. They would never know its comfortable, uncritical acceptance where the easy, half-contemptuous, ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ was all that need be said.

  With these desertions, the last days were upon them, when treasured links back to the Old ‘Uns would be severed, and the established order, the secrets and certainties of village life, would be blown away upon the winds of change.