‘Evita…
‘Evita…
‘…Evita!’
The body lay there, inert and unmoving, frighteningly still to see.
‘Oh my God. Evita!’
Downstairs the telephone was ringing. It was a compulsion of Petula’s to answer the phone, no matter what she was in the middle of, the device having a totemic importance for her. One never knew who might be on the other end. Swiftly she retraced her steps, having the presence of mind to bolt the attic door from the outside, and made her way down to the second-floor landing. There she cleared her throat and, spotting herself in the mirror, her shirt bloodied and torn, answered the phone with a cheerful nonchalance not normally associated with one who has just strangled her daughter.
‘Petula Montague speaking!’
The voice at the other end sounded official and Petula felt the cold hand of destiny play havoc with her insides; it had all gone wrong. She stared glassily at a print of the Cathedral at Reims, long enough for her to preempt defeat and know how badly she would bear up to it.
‘What? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, it’s a bad line. Could you please repeat that or speak up?’
Yes, it may have all gone wrong but the jig was not up, not until they had her before the beak in leg irons staring at a thirty stretch in the Tower. Fight, fight, fight and never give up!
‘Regan! Oh hello darling! What? What! No, I’m fine, of course I am, you’ve just got me out of the bath. What? What’s happened to Regan? You say, a lift from the station, oh, this is Regan! I’m sorry darling, I didn’t recognise you, you sound so old! You mean you already are at the station, what now? How the devil did you get there so quickly? Yes, no, of course, by train, I know that, you must have caught a very early one. I can’t, I’m afraid, my hands are perfectly full here with one thing or another. No. Yes, you’ll have to take a taxi. If you don’t have the money I can pay when you get here. Yes, see you then sweetie, goodbye… by-e-e-e-e.’
Allowing for rogue tractors and, if she was lucky, an Asian cabbie who did not know his way from Darlington to Mockery Gap, there was about an hour to play with before Regan got home. Long enough to clear up, rebuild the day and start over again. She knew her odds, one disaster at a time, keep each piece separate and throw a bracket round them all. This morning was what the game was all about: establishing her own brand of facts as truth.
Petula strode towards the ‘spare’ guest bathroom, the least used in the house on account of it not being adjoined to any room, or near one that was in use. It was a long and cold space, not double-glazed, in which the bath had been torn out and a shower installed in its place for variation’s sake. Quickly she stripped, soaped herself in a lather and allowed the cold blast of water to do its worst. What had happened? No, that was the wrong question, it could be asked later, would have to be, but for now survival was paramount and she should think of nothing that could imperil it. If she was in shock, and there was little doubt she was, the best thing to do was to use it to her advantage. Stepping into a large brown robe borrowed from the New York Sheridan, Petula stuffed her clothes into an airing cupboard and examined her face in the mirror.
Ignoring the temptation to stare into her eyes, she took a flannel to rub the last of the blood away and see the damage done. Far less than she thought. The nose did not look broken, a little bent, which actually looked sexily distinguished, there was one scratch which she could have done to herself and a small lump on the side of her head no sod would see. Nothing that was not consistent with falling out of bed in the middle of the night after a bottle too many of Chablis. Already she had a picture in her mind of the clothing appropriate to the day, one where glorious normality, restored to its usual place, would revel in unnoticed innocence.
Wisely the offer of paying Jazzy to help at his sister’s party had neutralised his latest revolt, at least for the present. Jazzy could be holier than thou about money when it suited his overall purpose, and touchily proud. However, with an MoT coming up on his van, and Bad Brains playing Leeds, his going price was affordably low. It would at least keep him out of the way for the next hour, during which time he might find some consolation in the skinny arms of that emaciated elf of his. Having crossed the landing, Petula took the side staircase to her floor. Outside the sound of the Postman’s van coming to a halt on the gravel, letters being pushed through the box and the van’s engine starting again sent a chill across her bows. It would be so easy for someone to simply walk in. The front door was never locked. Although she complained about people (and then only some) calling all hours, treating The Heights as an open house, Petula needed them, missed them when they weren’t there and wondered what was wrong if a weekend passed without guests. Today, without equivocation, she would be glad to host no one. The trouble was she could not shake the feeling that someone was watching her and could see everything. Usually she would dismiss this as a muddle between what she saw, forgot, and subsequently attributed to another, a confusion consistent with the way her mind was jumping like a stylus in a room of jiving hippopotami, and the erroneous belief that this perspective, or to give it its proper name, God, existed.
This was different, and as she entered her bedroom Petula self-consciously looked behind her, not so much to catch an intruder on her tail, as to show the cosmic force that begat her she knew it was still there. With a stagy flourish she opened the wardrobe and ran her hand over the hangers, the familiar colours and textures comforting to touch. If a grand recording of her life were to be played back to the thousands she had hoodwinked or outmanoeuvred on the Day of Judgement, it was as well to choose something striking to be damned in. Petula found what she was looking for, simple in a wardrobe as ordered as hers, and allowed her robe to drop off her shoulders to the floor. So what if there was a heavenly screening of her breaking a few of the Ten Commandments? Anyone who had been through life would understand, and who was to say the Divinity only gave marks for priggery, there could be points for ingenuity, skill and daring too; the Lord God had created them all. Impartial and disinterested goodness had never made any sense to Petula, a perspective divorced from the person and interest it served was no more than a causeless effect, a meaningless chimera parroted by hypocrites and peasants. True goodness was about energy, how much you produced and the amount you carried into other people’s lives, a completely amoral phenomenon and every daughter of Eve’s true religion.
Petula pulled on her new, never-worn, cream corduroy jeans, as fitting as tights, and a thin denim shirt. In principle it was a far better thing to be too cold than overheat and the last thing she needed was a red nose. Thankfully, The Heights’ many drafts would help her keep cool once the face-to-face stuff started. Leaving her hair down and clicking her tongue, Petula as good as strutted from the room feeling every inch the Yorkshire Cowgirl, a down-home look that could sell cigarettes on advertising hoardings she thought, as she closed the door. Hesitating, she realised what was wrong. Her feet were still bare. Choosing footwear that was suggestive of an immobility at odds with the true speed of events was the touch the occasion required, clogs without socks would do. It was like opening the batting in a game of cricket, a sport she had never had much use for, a mistake was most likely in the first over or so – once she was settled at the crease there was nothing to stop her from going on to score a hundred. Petula paused by the dresser and picked a pair of chunky rings that would have made strangling anyone difficult. In the end it could all come down to details.
All this self-overhearing had left Petula in severe need of a cup of tea. It was a school-girl error she was not going to fall into. For all the philosophers and poets who talked of ‘the journey’ being the thing, it was final realities that interested her. She had a duty to her daughter to settle before the pleasing consolations of Darjeeling. It was unthinkable that Evita should lie in the open to be found, unlikely though that was. Furthermore, leaving her uncovered would not do out of respect for the dead. Petula coughed into her hand and pulled a face th
at would have upset her rhythm had she been able to see it. Until now she had not thought of Evita as dead, not really dead, merely as out-ofthe-way and no longer a problem. That second part she liked, the first she did not; death was a great destroyer of options, and in this instance, not only for the departed. Wanting someone dead, as she had often desired of Evita, and acknowledging they were (and that one was not entirely blameless in making them that way), made her queasy. Petula had wanted to keep matters on a strictly practical footing yet the inhuman self-discipline this operation required was too much for her. An involuntary eruption of feeling could not be ruled out, better to ask what she felt about the body in the attic now than find out later in public, breaking down over the pudding or somewhere equally incriminating.
Petula had never asked herself a question that had not already been answered in that chamber of justification that passed for her unconscious. That her reaction to the accident upstairs had thus far been a touch un-maternal was obvious. She had spent so much of her life worrying about Evita that it was difficult to remember where love fitted into the relationship. There were flashes, glances that passed between them, especially when Evita was younger, things she had done for her that looked like love, and ways Evita responded that also looked that way. They had probably both needed to believe it, suspecting perfectly well that nothing remotely of the kind existed, only sham variations on what the world expected of a mother and daughter. Backdated sentimentality could not sweeten the true and bitter fruit of memory. Evita and Anycock had been too busy tormenting her, creating problems in ways big and small, for her to discover or explore an emotion like care. And what little she had managed saw its potential exhausted in putting out one fire after another. For as far back as she could remember Evita had puzzled and confounded her, an alien being expressing the attitudes, impulses and wants of a complete stranger, albeit a stranger known to and feared by her. Perhaps ‘love’ in this climate was one of those virtues that could only be preached later, to be discovered in the faroff future like an archaeological relic in the ashes of a volcano. In real time she and Evita had left each other’s lives years ago, the incident in the attic that morning a formal seal on a deed already done. All she needed to know about their ‘bond’ was contained in the last hour, a tragedy to look back on in the complete secrecy of solitude, another cross to bear, all part of the saddest story that could never be told. Petula fought a tear; she could see a friend, an intimate and sensitive one, perhaps even Wrath, looking into her eyes and asking what the matter was and she saying, with the resolve of a stoic, why, nothing, nothing at all my dear, I was just thinking of how sad life can be at times… because perhaps, after all, she really did love her.
Petula recrossed the landing, tender misgivings nearly banished to the hinterland of unserious speculation. Of course, there would always be a fifth columnist in her head that would argue that as a mother it should have fallen to her to be the victim, and expired first. If she had known her place, and died not a thousand deaths in Evita’s stead, in other words stayed with Anycock, none of this would have happened. True, but this advocate of the Devil would have to insist on her failing the most important test of all, the one owed by her talent to its potential. A heavy hand was pulling her vitality into her southern-most extremities, and out the other end. The idea of her still married to Anycock on that wreck of a farm, frying ham rinds to an audience of idiot children and a husband who’d have been better off perched on the walls of Notre Dame with the other gargoyles, was an offence against life. That’s where Nazarene morality would have had her, all the joy she had brought the world wasted on selfish cretins who would not have noticed if she had been swapped for a tent peg, providing it could still poach eggs. Petula shook her head as she watched the four of them (though God knows how many more children Anycock would have had her bear) carrying on like a family in a corn-flakes advert, daily outings to local attractions and holidays in a caravan, one unrecoverable summer after another until they found her on the bathroom floor, frothing from the mouth. If this was the fate Evita’s dying had saved her from then who was she to argue? She stopped at the bottom of the wooden staircase that led to the east-wing attic and looked directly up at the door. It appeared as she left it, closed at any rate.
Petula bit her thumb; hide the body under a dust cloth and then what? Was there another way, a stroke of genius that in her haste she had overlooked, a possibility that even now she could hide in the light and pass this off as just one of those things… She took her thumb out of her mouth, of course there was! There was no need for her to resort to subterfuge as though some terrible crime had taken place, this was no conspiracy after all, no, an unforeseen accident that had already claimed one victim and might, if her wits were to desert her, take down one more. In the circumstances, she should proceed guiltlessly and leave the body exactly where it lay. The evidence was entirely consistent with a narrative that need not incriminate her in any untoward doings, of course it was! Evita had been ready to die of suffocation when she first walked in on her, was ready to hang herself, for crying out loud! Had she entered the room a second or so later that is exactly what would have happened. All she had done, in a manner of speaking, was allow the girl to have her own way, after having first frustrated her in her enterprise. There was enough truth in that version for it to be acceptable in any court of law, if it got that far, which of course it would not; who would think of prosecuting a grieving mother who had already lost her daughter to a hideous tragedy? And again, it was no more than the truth with a small omission or two, pretty well how the greater part of humanity lived their lives from day to day. Yes, Evita had hanged herself and fallen from the ceiling in her death throes. And by the time she had entered the room it was already too late to try to save her life, which she had tried to do of course, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a dead child in her arms, there was the real story.
Petula waited with one foot on the stair for the impact to sink in. Could she do it? Could she repeat it for the rest of her life and never speak the truth in her sleep… No, it would not do, she would get away with it, yes, but her reputation would not, and what use was life without that? The innuendo, suspicion and gossipy malice would follow her around like halitosis… and besides, she did not have the necessary energy to carry on without a breather. If she were to begin this performance it would be one she could never take leave of. She checked her watch, forty minutes had passed since Regan’s phone call. Quickly, in-out, hide the body, work out what to do later, then downstairs buttering toast and listening to Radio 4 with the telephone in her hand, awaiting discovery behind the mask of her morning ritual. That was the way ahead. Taking two steps at a time, and losing a clog on the way, Petula bound up to, unbolted and threw open the door as purposefully as any spring cleaner.
She came to a majestic halt; the Titanic had hit an iceberg. As carnivals of bad karma went, this one was proving to be a rare classic. Evita was not there. The chair, the tatty old rope, the mattress and an overturned mug were all present and correct but Evita’s body, unless her eyes teased her, was nowhere to be seen!
‘Thank God, thank God for that,’ she said aloud and loudly. Petula waited for an answer. There was a muffled cry from behind the door and an unintelligible flurry of half-spoken sobs, ‘You killed, you would have killed me…’
‘Nonsense, we had an argument that got out of hand, on both our parts, that’s all.’
‘You left me for dead!’
‘I knew you couldn’t have been,’ replied Petula thinking quickly, ‘your eyes weren’t open. Dead people’s eyes always are. Anyway, we probably both went a bit crazy back there… though that’s no excuse for thinking such a thing. Kill you? Please!’
Evita came out from behind the door. If Petula had undergone a resurrection since they last clashed, Evita was only one step ahead of the worms, her pallor the colour of the sky on a sleety morning and cracked lips a vampiric red. She flinched defensively as she saw her mother, her body undergoing an
attack of the shakes. With an exaggerated effort of will she dragged the rack of hair off her eyes and repeated, her voice cracking under a new onslaught of sobs, ‘Dead… you left me dead…’
Her tone was hesitant and if Petula’s instincts were right, there was a hint of guilt common to those with memory loss. It was possible that Evita was concussed, confused and, providence be thanked, immanently malleable.
‘Cut it out! We argued badly, okay? Both said things we probably shouldn’t have, or didn’t mean, and I admit it, I haven’t been that cross for a while, right? But that’s no reason for you to go off your rocker dramatising everything. It was awful enough without that. Really, you’re my flesh and blood! Get a grip of yourself.’ Petula could see that she had started to convince her daughter halfway through this but finished anyway. One-hundred-and-eighty-degree about-turns were all about making sure.
‘If I hadn’t dragged you off me I wouldn’t be here now. Come to that, if I hadn’t got you down from your hanging tree, nor would you. Insanity. Complete insanity. You culd have knocked my teeth down my throat, I had to subdue you, you were like an animal Evita, something wild and dangerous.’
Evita frowned, reality being bent and warped too fast for her to grab the parts she last saw and claim them for what she thought they were. Unsteadily, she lowered her guard and shuffled over to her mother. For a dreadful moment Petula thought she was going to hug her but instead Evita said, ‘I’d never have tried to kill myself, never, not any of the times I tried, if I knew that you really wanted me dead, wanted me dead all along… all this time.’
‘My God, listen to you, you should be under sedation. There’s a world of difference between thinking you have no use for somebody and then wanting them dead, as you’d have it. Give me some credit at least.’
And Evita did; she believed her mother, and in doing so underestimated her. ‘Can you blame me, can you? You, your way, it’s always been “be my best friend, accept my patronage or I’ll kill you.” I never obeyed, I was my own person, I…’
Nature and Necessity Page 17