‘Afternoon, Michael,’ he said as he went past the cab.
Michael goggled. The Professor, of course, had no idea of the part played by Michael in the midnight stripping of his home, in the early-morning stripping of his wife. The Professor was descending upon his adulterous wife without an idea that her young lover was gawping in his rear-view mirror, a feeble and terrorized bystander to the drama of life.
But Michael was an indecisive, inexperienced youth no more. Michael had been Mrs Hartley’s lover. Michael’s heart had beaten with the deep rhythms of the earth. Michael had made love (or at any rate very nearly) on a stone floor. Michael had been accessory to murder, partner in adultery, accomplice in fraud. He did not hesitate for a moment.
He let in the clutch as softly as a ballet dancer performing the pas de cheval, and sweetly, almost silently, drove away.
He waited outside the drama centre, as he had been told to do, like an apprentice knight unkindly ordered to face west and wait for the sun to rise before him by jovial time-served knights, who would in later incarnations send lads to the company stores with instructions to ask for ‘a long stand’. But he waited without hope. He saw too clearly in his mind the heavy disgruntled face of Professor Hartley as he strode past the van with his weighty patriarchal tread. Alice, untying straps on the car, was as slight and as vulnerable as a peasant girl twisting ribbons around a maypole before the arrival of Cromwell in Michael’s loving and historically flawed imagination. There was no chance that Alice, struggling with the blue tarpaulin, could have engaged in battle with the elephantine Professor. Michael waited for her, not as an expectant lover, but as a man faithfully performing the last rites. He waited because he said he would wait. He knew she would never come.
He filled in the time by telephoning his mother.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ she asked perceptively when he had said nothing but his initial ‘hello’ for long moments.
‘Well, Aunty Sarah was dead,’ Michael said with a sigh. ‘And I was in love with this woman and we were going to use the house for an alternative therapy centre. But now I think her husband has got her, so I suppose she won’t be allowed.’
‘Oh dear,’ Michael’s mother said comfortingly. ‘That’s a pity, darling. What a shame. Did you say Sarah was dead?’
‘Yes,’ Michael said. ‘Eventually.’
‘Oh dear,’ his mother said again. ‘Never mind, dear. Are you eating enough?’
‘Yes,’ Michael said sadly.
‘And who does your washing?’
‘Laun-der-rette,’ Michael sighed.
‘Your father wants a word …’ his mother said.
Michael looked up and out of the phone box.
The long silver-grey Jaguar car whispered around the corner and drew up beside the phone box. Alice leaned over and swung open the door.
‘Gosh,’ Michael said breathlessly.
‘What’s this I’ve been hearing?’ the phone trumpeted. ‘What’s this about Sarah and some crackpot scheme of yours? If I have to come down to Suffix again you’ll be sorry, young man! All of Sarah’s estate is to be held in trust, Michael. Don’t you go meddling with it. I’ll get my man on to it first thing next week. Everything else can be dealt with by the doctor there, he’s a solid sort of chap. Don’t you go butting in when you’re not wanted. You should be concentrating on your studies … I don’t pay good money for you to …’
Michael, dazed, still holding the telephone, wandered towards the car, the curly telephone cable straightening and elongating behind him.
‘Another thing,’ the phone said nastily. ‘I’ve been reading up on the statistics of graduate unemployment so there’s no need for you to think you’ve got a meal-ticket for life …’
Alice, like Boadicea in her chariot, beamed at Michael. The reassuring smell of old leather and deeply polished teak enveloped him as his knees buckled beneath him and tipped him into the passenger seat of Professor Hartley’s Jaguar.
‘How?’ he gulped.
Alice leaned across him and drew the door shut. It closed with a smooth ‘chunk’ sound which spoke loudly to Michael of thousands of pounds worth of craftsmanship. The car moved forward pulling firmly and relentlessly on the phone cable while the phone, held limply and completely unconsciously in Michael’s hand, continued to convey the unending crackle of anger. Michael watched behind them in silent surprise as the stalk of the phone booth bowed towards them, and then twanged upright as the cable finally snapped. The snarl of Michael’s father’s instructions stopped abruptly. Michael absent-mindedly dropped the silent phone to the floor of the car.
‘How?’ he asked again.
Alice glanced at him swiftly, with her strong sweet smile and the car powered forward with its engine going ‘purrahh purrahh, purrahh’ especially softly. Michael felt his knees go all soppy.
‘I bundled him,’ she said simply.
‘Unnhnnh?’
‘I bundled him,’ she repeated.
She glanced at Michael as she paused for a break in the traffic to let them out on to the main road.
Michael’s reeling brain staggered in diminishing concentric circles inside the echoing caverns of his head. He knew that ‘bundling’ was a courtship ritual, much beloved of peasant folk in cold climates, whereby the affianced couple cuddle together under blankets and indulge in heavy petting. But she had only been gone seven minutes! And it was broad daylight! And Professor Hartley surely would not …?
‘I threw the tarpaulin over his head,’ she said.
The car moved forward and then leaped with a muted growl as Mrs Hartley hit the accelerator with a potent toe. ‘It has elasticated straps,’ she said contentedly. ‘It was easy to roll him up, and easy to clip them on.’
She flicked Professor Hartley’s right-hand indicator with contemptuous skill, and Professor Hartley’s car moved out into the fast lane. The loudest noise was the elegant ‘wink wink wink’ of the little light bulb at the end of the indicator arm.
‘You’ve left him?’ Michael confirmed.
‘Thrashing around like a netted elephant under the tarpaulin,’ she said contentedly. ‘It’ll be hours before anyone gets him out.’
‘Golly,’ Michael said, inadequately.
Alice smiled. ‘He gets claustrophobia,’ she said. Her voice was silky with pleasure. ‘He gets claustrophobia something rotten,’ she said.
They did not go straight home. The afternoon sun was too tempting, the fine spring weather was urging birds to sing and lovers to play truant from work and duty. In the little pubs that fringe the South Downs, pallid area managers inveigled secretaries out for lunch and slid vodka into their grapefruit juices. Dozing reps forgot to phone their wives to tell them they would be late home for dinner. Commercial salesmen rested their suitcases of samples on those brass rails which ring traditional bars, for no reason known to man, unless they are there to cling to when drink has brought the customer so low that even lying prone on the floor will not keep it steady.
Alice and Michael, warmed by their illicit love and now by joint theft, as well as murder, fraud, deception and vandalism of a BT public phone box, cruised gaily around the South Downs lanes. Alice wound down the windows and the sweet light smell of the summer flowers flowed in like elderflower champagne. The sides of the grey Jaguar brushed against gypsy lace, bee orchids, scabious, and poppies in the hedgerows and collected sticky raindrops of nectar and a dusting of pale pollen. A small chalk blue butterfly, almost extinct as a species, but clinging on in favourable nooks and crannies of habitat, fluttered through the car, past Michael’s ecstatically sniffing nose. It waggled its antennae at him, a friendly signal from one imperilled specimen to another.
Alice stopped the car in a gateway and they joined hands and walked together up the smooth turf slope to the crest of the hill. Small, star-like flowers grew in the grass around Alice’s feet, birds of one sort or another warbled and cheeped in a medley of sound attractive only to another bird of that specific sort or a
nother. When they rested at the brow of the hill the whole of southern England seemed laid at their feet. Another bit of Sussex ahead of them, and a bit of something which was probably Kent to their right.
‘Heaven,’ Alice said contentedly. She lay back on the grass and lifted her face to the warm sunshine. A fat furry bee bumbled past them, drunk with cowslip pollen. High up in the blue sky a bird as small as a dot circled looking down, possibly an eagle, probably not.
‘Breathe deeply,’ Alice commanded. ‘Be At One with Nature.’
And Michael, high on fear, drunk with success, hallucinating from lack of sleep and drained of every scrap of essence in him, breathed deeply, and deeply fell asleep.
They lay for an hour or two in the sunshine, like little babes in the woods, but when the sun went in and no kindly robins covered them with leaves Michael shivered and sat up.
‘Cold!’ he said to the empty hills.
Alice lazily opened her eyes and chuckled. ‘Me too,’ she said and sighed. ‘I’ve not slept in the open air for years,’ she said wonderingly. ‘I’d forgotten how it felt.’
Michael leaped to his feet, alive with energy and joy. ‘Race you to the car!’ he yelled.
Alice sprang to her feet laughing. Scarves streaming behind her, she pursued him down the hill, her sandalled feet twinkling quickly over the grass. She ran well and they were neck and neck when they reached the car and laughing and breathless as they tumbled in.
Michael stretched in the comfort of the upholstered leather bucket seat as if he had driven in such a car every day of his life.
‘This is nice,’ he said, forgetting for a moment where it had come from. ‘I’ve always wanted a car like this.’
‘So have I,’ said Alice, who had had a car like this in the garage of the house where she lived for the past sixteen years but never called it her own.
She drove carefully home, and when they reached the drive Michael got out and opened the gates, and then walked down the drive to open the garage doors for the car.
‘Should we clean it?’ he offered unwillingly, looking at the gleaming chrome now faintly dulled with dust and spotted with the excrement and corpses of very small flying creatures who had tested to their utmost Newton’s Law of Motion and whose final thought was that the Law stinks.
‘Oh no,’ Alice said casually. ‘We’re not going to wash it, and polish it all the time. Personkind should not be enslaved by machines. We’re free spirits, you and me, Michael.’
‘Oh good,’ Michael said. He fitted the door key into the lock and held out his hand to Alice. With a limpid smile she stepped inside the circle of his arm. Michael caressed her shoulder with newly assumed confidence and rising desire as they went inside. For the first time in their relationship Michael was about to make a sexual move which was not premature ejaculation.
‘Alice,’ he said seductively. ‘Shall we …’
SUDDENLY THERE WAS A DREADFUL HAMMERING NOISE ON THE CEILING!
The blood drained from Michael’s face; he was as sallow as Caerphilly cheese.
‘What’s that?’ he hissed, glaring at Alice.
She was pale too, but she gathered up her long skirts and petticoats and scurried up the stairs, past the master bedroom where Aunty had been freed from her negative life force, across the landing to the spare bedroom where Aunty’s corpse had been stored awaiting burial. The door was closed. From behind it came the peremptory, familiar knocking, and a cracked old voice yelling:
‘Where’s my sherry? It’s past five o’clock. It’s time for my sherry. Where is it?’
Alice’s eyes darkened, and her jaw firmed. She threw open the door and the thumping abruptly stopped.
‘Aunty Sarah, you should be dead!’she said crossly.
There was a split second of silence. Michael trembled in the void.
‘I know!’ the old voice cackled. ‘They all say that! The doctor! The daily! M’lawyer! They all say it, but I’ll outlive them all! I’ll outlive all of you! You too, Heidi, or whatever your name is! Now get me my sherry. And I’ll have chicken in tarragon again tonight. It’s my favourite. And that cheesecake pudding with chocolate ice-cream. I need building up after the sleep I had this afternoon. I can’t remember when I slept so well. Scurry about, Heidi! It’s Top of the Pops on the radiovision later!’
Alice shut the door so softly that it scarcely clicked. She walked downstairs with her graceful measured tread. She went past Michael and her face was blank. He followed her, like an imprinted duckling, into the kitchen and watched her sink on to the kitchen chair and rest her head in her hands.
Nobody spoke for quite a long time.
‘I find I don’t quite like your Aunty Sarah,’ Alice said after a little while.
Michael breathed out with a gasp which sounded like a squeak of assent.
‘She has a remarkably strong Life Force,’ Alice conceded. ‘But I don’t find her … sympathetic!’
‘No,’ Michael agreed.
Alice sighed, as many women sigh who have the care of elderly relatives thrust upon them and little help (Lord knows) from the Social Services; and don’t mention the Voluntary because it’s just more old ladies only a little more skittish.
‘Michael, I shall have to give you a shopping list,’ she said wearily. ‘You’ll have to go into the town, you can take the Jaguar. She wants chicken in tarragon for dinner and I don’t have any meat in my freezer. I’ll write down what I need.’
Michael nodded sorrowfully. His passing idea of snatching Alice on the threshold of their new home had fled as soon as he heard the hammering. He could scarcely remember what it felt like to feel his manhood coursing through his loins or anywhere else, come to that.
‘All right,’ he said humbly.
Alice drew a pad and a pen towards her and wrote out Michael’s shopping list for Aunty’s supper. Michael took it and then paused. This is what it said:
3 pieces of fresh chicken
1 packet dried tarragon
1 carton single cream
1 live black cockerel
10 cloves garlic
1 new (wrapped) meat cleaver with wood handle
1 box white chalk
1 box rock salt
1 bottle witch hazel
1 rock crystal
1 white nightgown
20 wax white candles
1 antique sword or dagger
‘I don’t have enough money for all this,’ he said, glancing down the ingredients.
Alice sighed patiently, went to her rucksack and drew out Professor Hartley’s housekeeping money. ‘Use this,’ she said. ‘It should be enough.’
Michael nodded, he stepped towards Alice and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
‘Don’t be upset,’ he said nobly. ‘You have no cause for regrets. I will release you. It’s all right with me if you want to leave. You can always go home.’
A mournful smile flickered across Alice’s pale face as she thought of her home stripped of belongings, and her husband enmeshed and bound in his blue plastic car-cover thrashing around the university car park, the stolen furniture, the kidnapped car, the insulted marital counsellor.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I can.’
Michael nodded, pleased that he had found the right thing to say – something to cheer her up. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said sweetly, and went.
Alice sat for a long while in the sunny kitchen on her own. There was a frenzied knocking upstairs from time to time but Alice ignored it. She glanced at Michael’s jacket, left carelessly over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. The black cover of a diary showed, poking out of a pocket. Without hesitation Alice took it out and opened it. She turned to January the First; there was the usual January the First entry.
Got this from Mummy. Really mean to keep a diary all year. Can look back on it for memoirs. Should be really interesting – back to university, mixing with people who will run the country in the future etc. Shall make an entry every day.
Starting
today. So here goes!
January 1st Nothing much happened.
January 2nd Really plan to keep this up. Second day Second entry! So far so good. Nothing much happened.
January 3rd Nothing much happened. Wish I was back at Suffix. Nothing ever happens here.
January 4th Mummy made me go to church with her. It was really boring. Nothing happened.
January 5th Nothing at all happened today.
There then followed a flutter of blank pages. Alice idly turned to the back of the book and her attention sharpened.
People I wish I knew, and their phone numbers
1. Sarah Underwood is the president of the Lesbian Actresses Association. I wish I were a girl and then she would fancy me. Her phone is 63241.
2. John Cleary – (80688) they say he deals in drugs!!!!
3. Ruth Maxwell (97364) but she is gay too.
4. Stephen Simmonds – anyway I know him. He says he and Ruth Maxwell did it, but I know he did not. (97867)
Alice scanned the list. Without conscious intent Michael had listed the sexual preferences of the natural leaders of his year – some fifty names. And he had listed their phone numbers too. Alice, with her mind on the arrival of her friends that evening, and her heart yearning towards an alternative therapy centre despite the yells of protest from the upstairs bedroom, scanned the list with a growing smile. Then she took the diary and, reading it as she walked, went back to the sitting-room and started telephoning again.
Michael was as quick as he could be, but there were a number of small purchases on his list not stocked by the supermarket. The live black cockerel was a particular problem until he remembered a pet shop on the outside of town. He also had some trouble in parking the car since he could not find reverse gear and the gear lever was too refined to engrave vulgar instructions on the knob at the top. It took him a little forethought to go to an out-of-town hypermarket where the car park was sufficiently empty for him to drive forwards to park, and forwards to the exit.
Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Page 6