This Way Out

by Sheila Radley

Derek groaned with relief, though he tried to disguise it as a yawn. Untangling himself from the duvet, he staggered to the bathroom – but quietly, so as not to wake his mother-in-law – and sluiced his face. His heart was still thumping abnormally, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. His cheeks, reflected in the mirror, were sickly pale under the stubble, and his bloodshot eyes had an alarming residual stare.

  How could Christine not know what he’d just been doing in his sleep? He had shouted aloud as he tightened his grip on Enid’s throat. Pliable as putty, it had offered no resistance to his squeezing hands. His thumbs could find no windpipe to crush, and he had shouted in panic because the old woman refused to die. Surely Christine must have heard him?

  He rinsed his mouth, and padded back to the bedroom. His wife, still propped in the same position, smiled at him.

  ‘Did you catch it?’ she asked.

  He kept his eyes averted, and slid back into bed. ‘Catch what?’

  ‘The rabbit you were chasing. You’ve been after it three or four times during the past few weeks.’

  Sitting up beside her, his head deliberately higher than hers so that she couldn’t see his face, Derek tried to laugh the subject away. His rabbit was an elusive major client, he told her. But it worried him that she knew he’d had the dream more than once before.

  ‘I haven’t been talking in my sleep, have I? Don’t want to start giving away details of a client’s finances!’

  ‘Not talking, no. Whimpering a bit, sometimes – just like Sam …’

  Whimpering? For a moment, Derek felt almost offended. His dream-experience had shocked him with its ferocity. How could such a brutal act – committed only in the imagination, true, but with such intensity that it had left his arm and stomach muscles aching – have been expressed in reality by nothing more than a twitch and a whimper?

  But thank God Christine suspected nothing.

  He eased down in the bed, stretched his right arm across the pillows, and gathered his wife to him. Christine rested her head on his shoulder, and gave a half-suppressed sigh.

  Derek kissed her forehead. ‘Sorry I woke you, darling.’ Her skin was dry under his lips, and unduly – slightly feverishly – warm. He stroked her hair: once so thick and glossy, it had lost some of its life since her operation.

  ‘I was awake anyway.’

  He paused in mid-caress, anxiously alert. ‘Are you feeling ill?’

  ‘Not really. I just couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘I’ll make you some tea.’ He started to get out of bed, but she drew him back.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘Not unless we have to for Mum.’

  Derek made no attempt to suppress his sigh. With tender care, he folded his wife in his arms. Bleakly – because of course he wouldn’t murder Enid in real life; morality apart, he knew that he could never bring himself to attempt it, except in those savage dreams – he contemplated the unhopeful future.

  There had seemed to be so much to hope for, once Enid had got them both going again after Laurie’s death.

  Christine had still needed time to mourn, of course. The first Christmas after bereavement is difficult for any family, and Derek had dreaded it on his wife’s behalf because the season had always given Laurie such particular delight.

  But their older children had rallied round magnificently. They had come home from their respective occupations (Tim, massively bearded, from his job as assistant warden of a nature reserve; Richard, in collar and tie, from a polytechnic course in business management; Lyn, as tough and style-conscious as her grandmother, from medical school) to fill the house with so much noise and clutter, and to make so many deliberately outrageous demands on the time and energy of their parents that however many private tears were shed, collective sorrow never got a look-in.

  Immediately after their children scattered again, Derek had booked a holiday for Christine and himself. They hadn’t been abroad for years. Laurie had suffered from travel sickness, and while she was alive they had been restricted to the holidays that suited her best, in self-catering seaside cottages not too far from home.

  The travel brochures had provided hours of family entertainment over Christmas. Their offspring had insisted that they ought to go somewhere different: on the Trans-Siberian railway, or a ninety-mile walking tour in the Apennines, or a tent-trek across the Sahara. But Christine had eventually decided that what she really wanted to do was to learn to ski, and so Derek had booked a late-February winter sports holiday in the Austrian Tyrol.

  By the time their holiday came, Christine was beginning to look much better. By the time they returned to Wyveling, with Alpine sun-tans and an exhilarating sense of achievement, she was once again as vivacious as she had been in the early years of their marriage. Derek was delighted for her.

  Delighted by her, too. He was proud of his wife, and of the fact that – while some couples they knew had been divorced or were contemplating it – he and Christine were still friends and lovers after twenty-three years of marriage. He attributed this, partly, to natural reticence. Having known each other since they were children, they instinctively respected each other’s areas of privacy. As adults, they had never discussed their inmost thoughts. Their unspoken agreement was not to probe.

  He had never questioned Christine about her feelings over Laurie’s death, just as he had never revealed his own – or her mother’s – to her. After their skiing holiday they had rarely talked about Laurie. Christine seemed to be reconciled to their child’s death, and eager to begin a new phase of her own life.

  Having studied fabric design at art school in her youth, and subsequently done all her own home decorating and curtain-making, she had found a job with a friend, the wife of an architect, who had recently opened an interior design consultancy in Breckham Market. Christine loved the job. She did it well, and her friend had offered her the prospect of becoming a partner in the business.

  But that was before her mother had had her accident.

  Naturally, Christine had taken leave from work so that she could make the long daily trip to the hospital to visit her mother. Derek had thought it would be a good idea to bring Enid to the Brickyard for her convalescence, simply because it would enable Christine to return to work. His wife, although eager to get back to her job, had not been enthusiastic about having her mother to stay; and when Enid showed no inclination to leave, Christine had become tight-lipped.

  Derek had never enquired into the relationship between mother and daughter. That was another of the areas he had preferred not to probe. He had always known that they got on better on the telephone than they did in the flesh, and gradually he began to realize why.

  Even after all those years of independent living, the two women were unable to see each other as people. When they were together, they reverted to their original roles. Enid – over-compensating, perhaps, for her loss of confidence after her accident – played the authoritative mother; Christine’s response was instinctively adolescent. The atmosphere between them was one of hardly suppressed impatience, erupting every so often in bursts of exasperation.

  Finally, Christine had said to her husband: ‘It’s no good, Derek – she’ll have to go. I know it’s undutiful of me, but I can’t stand having her here any longer. I will not be treated like an irresponsible teenager in my own home. But if I try to be firm with her we shall end up having an almighty row, and I don’t want that. You’ve always been her blue-eyed boy – you tell her.’

  At the time, Derek was under considerable pressure at work. He would have objected to being dragged in to resolve Christine’s difficulties with her mother, were it not that his wife was looking unusually tired.

  His solution to Christine’s problem was to book an immediate long-stay holiday for Enid at a hotel near her apartment in Majorca. His mother-in-law had objected: it was too early in the season, she didn’t know whether she felt up to the journey, she didn’t want to spend so much money, she needed time to make up her own mind. Derek ignored her pr
otests. He drove her to Heathrow and told her firmly that when she returned, fit and well, he would be there to meet her and take her straight to her own flat in Southwold.

  Shortly after his mother-in-law’s departure, Derek made a discovery that explained Christine’s tiredness. He persuaded his wife to see her doctor for the first time in years, and she was almost immediately called into hospital for an operation.

  To his great relief Christine was home again within a fortnight, although she needed some further out-patient treatment. They had agreed not to let Enid know about the operation; no point in worrying the old girl, and the last thing they wanted was to encourage her to think that her daughter might need her. By the time Enid was due to return, Christine would be – in the event was – making a satisfactory recovery.

  But Derek’s plan for taking his mother-in-law straight back to Southwold was never put into practice. Enid appeared to be in excellent health; a bit shaky, still, but obviously capable of living on her own. Christine, however, had thought that they ought to invite her mother to return to Wyveling for one night at least to rest after the journey, and Enid had accepted.

  Derek never knew what passed between mother and daughter that evening. But on the following morning Christine had said to him, ‘Mum is going to stay with us a bit longer, if that’s all right with you.’

  What could he say? It was Christine who had been adamant that her mother must go. He didn’t want to have Enid there, for heaven’s sake; but he worked such long hours that her presence didn’t particularly bother him. Enid usually kept to her own sitting-room – Laurie’s former playroom – when he was at home, and he felt that he could put up with her if Christine could.

  How Christine could put up with her, though, was a mystery to him. The relationship between the two women almost immediately resumed its former irritability; more so, because Christine was not yet fit to return to full-time work and they spent longer in each other’s company. In the weeks that followed, Derek kept expecting his wife to announce, as before, that she couldn’t stand Enid’s presence any longer. But all she did was to tighten her lips and bear it.

  Concerned for Christine’s health, Derek had begun to urge her to get rid of her mother. Christine refused; and refused to discuss the subject. Enid stayed on. And Derek, baffled by his wife’s obstinacy but loving her too compassionately to be angry with her, found himself dreaming of taking the problem into his own hands and providing a fearful, final solution.

  The Cartwrights had been accustomed throughout their marriage to compose themselves for sleep in a particular way, both lying on their right sides with Christine fitting snugly against Derek, as though she were sitting on his knee. Since her operation, she had adopted a position that retained their closeness but helped to ease the discomfort of her weakened arm. Now, after Derek had recovered from his nightmare, they settled down again: he on his right side as usual, Christine on her back. As usual he put his left arm round her, slipping his hand inside her nightdress.

  He had always been attracted to her breasts. It had been the fevered adolescent recollection of those soft twin cones, each with its delicate central eruption outlined by the cling of her clothes, that had first sent him bicycling crazily from Chelmsford to Southwold to renew his holiday acquaintance with Mrs Long’s daughter.

  Childbearing had of course changed the shape of Christine’s breasts, and maturity had rounded them, but their attraction for him had remained constant. Always, he had settled himself for sleep with his left hand cupping her right breast in an attitude of love.

  Now, as always, he slid his hand across her left breast, caressing its fullness in passing. As always, he opened his hand to encompass her right breast. Tenderly, but without pause – because to pause would be to betray his wife, allowing her to think that he felt the revulsion he denied – he placed his hand on the alien skin, part flat, part hollowed, part ridged with a long horizontal scar, that covered the place where her breast had once been.

  ‘Darling,’ he whispered. ‘Chrissie darling …’

  Christine murmured something that he couldn’t hear. They lay in silence for several minutes, both of them mourning their loss. He felt her body stiffen against his, and knew that she was trying not to weep.

  He kissed her hair and whispered once again what he hoped would reassure her: that no one could tell from her appearance that she had had the operation, that her femininity was still complete, that dressed or undressed she attracted him as much as ever. But about their deeper cause for depression, the fear that she might die, there was nothing he could say.

  Christine’s surgeon had told them that the cancer might never recur, especially after the post-operational radiotherapy treatment; and indeed Derek’s cousin’s wife had had a mastectomy six years before, and was now leading a normal, active life. But then again, Christine had had a friend –

  The fear was always there, though they tried not to dwell on it. One-day-at-a-time was the way they had lived while Laurie was alive, and that was how they lived now. The exciting glimpse they had once had of a long and interesting future had after all been nothing but fantasy.

  What seemed to him particularly cruel about the drastic curtailment of Christine’s life expectancy was that she had already foregone so much for Laurie’s sake. And now their handicapped child’s bedroom was occupied by another dependant who, having accurately identified poor Laurie as a burden, was unable (or unwilling) to conceive that she herself might be an encumbrance.

  Derek felt no personal animosity towards Enid. That was probably why he never saw her face in his dreams. But on the rare occasions when he allowed himself to dwell on the fact that his mother-in-law would probably outlive his wife, he was filled with impotent anger.

  He was still raging inside his head when the sound came from what he thought of as Laurie’s room. It was soft at first, the mewling cry of a small baby with nothing in particular to grumble about. He held his breath, as he had done when their children were babies, willing it not to recur.

  Then it came again, louder, a rising wail that – like a demanding child’s – could penetrate the deepest sleep. Christine woke, and groaned. They held each other for a few moments, hoping that this would be one of the nights when the noise suddenly stopped. Instead it increased in volume, a prolonged eerie cry of oh oh oh … oh oh oh …

  Like Derek, Enid had begun to suffer from occasional bad dreams. Fortunately for his conscience – since she insisted on relating them in detail as soon as she was woken – they were usually of non-violent burglaries of her flat. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, they reinforced her disinclination to return to it.

  He rolled reluctantly out of bed. Christine was already up and putting on her dressing gown. ‘Don’t you come, love,’ she said. ‘You’ve already had a bad night, and I know you’ve got an important meeting tomorrow. She isn’t your responsibility.’

  ‘It’s not her sake I’m coming for.’

  They followed their routine, Christine going to rouse her mother from her uneasy sleep, Derek going downstairs to make a pot of tea. He carried it up on a tray, with cups for all of them.

  Christine met him at the door of her mother’s room. It was on occasions like this, when his wife was without her brave daytime camouflage, that he grieved for her most. Her eyes were hugely weary in her pale face. Loosened from its pleat, her once-lovely dark hair hung as though it too was exhausted. In the absence of the prosthesis that she wore in the cup of her bra, the empty right side of her dressing gown sagged against her mutilated body.

  ‘I must go to the loo,’ she said. ‘Be a love and take in Mum’s tea. She’s perfectly all right – she just needs someone to talk at.’

  Enid was sitting up in bed, capped by a mauve sleeping net, flushed and cheerfully garrulous. Derek put the cup on her bedside table and let her talk on. His attention was concentrated on her throat. Now that he could see it properly, scarfless, drooping against the lacy plunge-neck of her nightgown, he knew that it wa
s not the same throat that he squeezed in his dreams. That was inert, a column of putty. This was a warm trembling dewlap – something that he would be even less able in reality to bring himself to grasp.

  Enid lay back against her pillows. Having related every inconsequential detail of her dream, she allowed her eyelids to droop. In that moment it came to Derek that his fixation on strangling was as unnecessary as it was fearful. There would be a much less distasteful method of killing his mother-in-law.

  He had no need to touch her slack flesh at all. He could simply snatch up a pillow and press it over her face.

  It would be so simple, so merciful, such an easy way out. Not now, this moment, of course; but when he’d had time to get it all planned.

  Except that he wouldn’t ever be able to do it.

  He knew quite well that he couldn’t use the pillow method, any more than strangulation. It was a matter not of technique, nor of the fear of discovery, but of morality. He looked at his mother-in-law, now fully recovered and happily sipping tea. However much he longed, for Christine’s sake, to remove the old woman permanently from their home, he couldn’t possibly take her life. His respectable background, his Sunday school and Scout upbringing, his own sense of values would always stay his hand.

  For a decent, honourable man, there was no way out.

  Chapter Three

  Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Rowland Lumsden, OBE, MC, late the Suffolk Regiment, was dead and buried but by no means forgotten.

  Born and educated in Yarchester, he had dedicated his life since his retirement from the army to the service of the cathedral city. As a boy he had been a chorister in the cathedral. Latterly – until shortly before his death – he had been honorary secretary of the Friends of Yarchester Cathedral, the volunteer fund-raising organization that kept the fabric of the great building in good repair. It was therefore entirely appropriate that, some weeks after his death, a thanksgiving service in his memory was held in the cathedral he had loved.