The One and Only

by Francis King

  ‘You have the perfect motive, you know.’

  ‘The perfect motive? For what?’ But I think that I already knew the answer.

  ‘For bumping her off.’ Then he laughed as though to say: This is all a joke.

  ‘You’re crazy!’

  ‘Not at all. Why should you let her fritter away a lot of money which she never earned? Soon she’ll probably have to mortgage that house. Eventually she’ll probably have to sell it. And then where will you be? In the ministra – as they say in these parts of the world.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  He jumped off the bed and came over to the window. He lowered himself on to the sill beside me and also looked down at the lake. ‘We must think how best to do it,’ he said. Again he gave that laugh, intended to say: This is all a joke, of course. ‘With all that water, it’s a pity one can’t just drown her in it. But that might present too many problems. We must think of something better.’

  ‘I’m going to get dressed. And have a shower.’ I had already had a shower before we had made love; but now I felt dirty. I could not face Ma feeling like that.

  ‘Shall I join you in the shower?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ At the door to the bathroom I turned: ‘Beat it!’

  ‘Okay! … See you below.’

  Under the shower, the water only lukewarm because Ma must have used up most of what was in the hot tank, I began for the first time to think, with a mingling of terror, excitement and guilt, of the possibility of It. The best way that I can describe this tumultuous mingling of emotions is to say that it was as though a black, savage bird, long sleeping, had all at once aroused itself within me, unsheathed its talons and begun to flap its wings.

  Strangely, it was with exactly the same tumultuous mingling of terror, excitement and guilt that I had now come to think of Bob and myself making our greedy, clumsy love.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  The antiquated Citroën was adamant in refusing to respond to the self-starter; and even when Tim used the handle, it was a long time before it wheezed and spluttered into life. Tim looked at his hands. They were streaked with grease. ‘ Oh, God, look at my hands. I’ll never get this off. What will the Traceys think of me, my hands filthy?’

  ‘You can explain,’ Ma said.

  Tim rushed off to wash his hands, while we sat in the car, waiting for him.

  ‘I’ll have to speak to them,’ Ma said. ‘They’ or ‘them’ always meant the owners of the villa. She was going to speak to them not merely about the car but also about such things as the wireless in the sitting-room, which had an exasperating habit of constantly fading; about the vacuum-cleaner, which from time to time vomited out dust instead of sucking it in; and about the hot-water system, which did not allow her constantly to run hot water while she soaked in the bath for as much as an hour on end.

  ‘That’s a bit better,’ Tim said, returning. ‘I ought really to have changed my shirt. it’s got a smudge on one cuff. Of course, it had to be one of the new silk ones.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Ma cried out. ‘Not one of those!’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ He laughed. ‘You’ll just have to buy me another.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the kind. I’ve run through almost all my traveller’s cheques.’

  ‘Well, wire your bank to transfer some cash.’ The car began to move off.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s all that much to transfer.’

  ‘It’s always people with money who constantly complain they have none.’

  ‘Remind me to show you my pass-book.’

  ‘This car is a disgrace,’ Tim said, changing the gears with a terrible scrunching. ‘It’s due for the scrap-heap.’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to speak to them about it. When they said they were leaving us a Citroën, I thought of one of those black police cars you see in French films. I never thought for one moment that it would be a beat-up wreck like this.’

  Ma had had an introduction to the people who had invited us over for drinks. An elderly couple, white-haired, tall and stiff, they had spent the last ten years or so on landscaping the hillside behind their villa, to spectacular effect. ‘It’s old money,’ Ma had said of them. In her eyes, old money was always superior to new. ‘ He’s never done a day’s work in his whole life, I gather.’

  There was an immediate awkwardness when Mrs Tracey, having greeted Ma, then turned to Tim beside her and exclaimed: ‘And this must be your son!’ But Ma passed it off with a tinkle of laughter: ‘Oh, dear me, no! Do I really look old enough to be his mother? No, he’s just a friend, a very dear friend. Timothy – Timothy Packer. This one here – this is my son. Mervyn. And that one there is Mervyn’s friend, Bob. It’s just as well to get these things straight, isn’t it?’

  Mrs Tracey gave a taut, wintry smile. Then she began to introduce us to her other guests. Some were English, staying at the more expensive of the hotels round the lake, others were Italian, owners of summer villas.

  ‘Do you speak Italian?’ Mr Tracey asked Ma.

  ‘A little!’ By now, Ma had given up the pretence that she was adept at the language.

  ‘In any case, non monta! Most of the Italians here speak English. Usually learned from their English nannies.’

  Ma looked around her. ‘This garden is heaven, absolute heaven. I gather you put in years of work to get it as it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Tracey confirmed with satisfaction. ‘And we started absolutely from scratch.’

  ‘A miracle,’ Ma said. ‘ If you come over to our rented villa – as I hope you will soon – you will see how not to plan a garden. There are no vistas, none at all. Everything so crowded. Everything so garish. Vulgar, I’m afraid.’

  Mr Tracey frowned and put a long, bony finger to his lips. ‘ Sh! The lady over there – the one with the Pekinese – is the niece of your landlady.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Ma’s laughter pealed out.

  It was easy to see that Mr Tracey, for all his air of formidable coldness, was taken with her. He began to ask her if she had visited this or that church or museum. Ma had little interest in either art or architecture, but she now kept answering: ‘Alas, I’ve still not been there,’ or ‘That’s one of the things I most want to see,’ or ‘We set out for it but then our wretched car went and had a puncture.’ Soon, Mr Tracey was offering to take her on a sightseeing tour in his own car – ‘It’s an Alfa Romeo – almost brand new. The last word in comfort.’

  Tim, leaning over the balustrade of the terrace, was talking vivaciously to a beautiful young girl who, from the back, might have been mistaken for a beautiful young boy, so slim was her figure and so short was her hair. I wondered if Ma would notice them and try to get Tim away. But she was too much taken up with Mr Tracey.

  Bob came over to me, where I stood sheepishly alone. He had been talking to an elderly man in a white linen suit and panama hat, who kept sneezing into a handkerchief; but the man, having grown fidgety – I could hear Bob going on about the geology of the district – eventually excused himself by saying that he would have to go indoors, since he was suffering so much from his hay-fever.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ Bob asked.

  ‘Oh, no, no!’ the old man replied quickly, in panic. ‘I wouldn’t dream of dragging you indoors on a day as beautiful as this.’

  Bob and I then wandered away from the others, up the hillside and into a copse. A Siamese cat emerged from the undergrowth and coquettishly sidled up to us. Bob stooped and stroked it under the chin. It stood on tiptoe, the bell on its velveteen collar tinkling, and arched its neck for him. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told it. ‘Far more beautiful than anyone down there.’ Then he said to me: ‘Dreadful people. When I see people like that, I think, ‘‘ Better dead,’’ like that doctor in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Better dead. One could say that of so many people. Which reminds me. I suddenly thought in the car of another way of doing it. One could do something to the brakes. Tim and your mother both go on and on about how ancient that car is, how un
reliable. No one would think anything of it if the brakes failed.’ He gave an impish grin. ‘ I’m sure I could arrange it. I’m good at that sort of thing. You know that.’

  ‘We’d better go back. They’ll be wondering what has happened to us.’

  I was desperate to ignore what, in seeming jest, he had proposed. Yet later, against my will, my mind kept slithering back to it, just as it kept slithering back to the thought of Bob’s body intertwined with my own.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jack stands over me, while I weed the herbaceous border.

  Noreen once said that he looked as if he had got squashed in a door. His shoulders, hips and head are all extremely narrow, and they seem even narrower because he is almost six-and-a-half foot tall. His high forehead has three deep furrows in it, and furrows no less deep run from either side of his pointed nose to either side of his thin-lipped mouth.

  ‘I wish you’d give me your advice,’ he says, pleading with me now. ‘I trust you. I feel that you have so much – so much judgement, where moral problems are concerned.’

  ‘I really don’t know what to say.’ Nor do I.

  Now he squats beside me, all jutting chin and jutting knees and elbows. He twists his wide wedding-ring round its finger. ‘In a way, I still love Moira. I really do. But it’s years since I was in love with her. She’s been a good wife to me and I like to think that, until now, I’ve been a good husband to her. But the sex thing ended ages ago between us – her decision – and she now lives a life strangely detached from mine. Well, you may have noticed that yourself.’

  I rub some soil off my fingers. I look sideways at him, and the obliquity of my gaze seems merely part of the obliquity of my whole stance in regard to his problem. I like him and I want to help him. But I feel that I am as incompetent to give him advice about whether he should precipitate a scandal or not as I should be incompetent to give him advice as to how to invest his money.

  ‘Don’t do anything irrevocable without a lot of thought,’ I eventually get out.

  Now he is impatient with me, even exasperated. ‘ Do you think I haven’t already given this a lot of thought? I lie awake night after night – thank goodness Moira and I no longer share a room – or I get up in the early hours and brood over a cup of tea in the kitchen. It’s terrible to know that, whatever conclusion one reaches, one has got to hurt someone. The point is: who will I hurt the most? Moira has her own life – all that voluntary work of hers and her amateur dramatics. To be without me might hurt her amour propre but it wouldn’t hurt her essential self. Whereas … I don’t see how Iris would really get through without me. She’s had a wretched life, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Round and round we go.

  ‘What does Noreen think?’

  ‘I’ve not really discussed it with her.’ But that is. untrue. She thinks that Jack should stick with his wife. Most wives think that of most errant husbands.

  ‘I wish you would discuss it with her.’

  ‘I will. When she’s better. She’s in so much pain at present. The first gold injection seemed to have a miraculous effect, but since then …’

  ‘It’s tough on her,’ he says. But he is not really thinking about Noreen. He is thinking only about the toughness of the decision ahead of him.

  Eventually I walk with him up the lawn and out to the front of the house, where he has left his bicycle.

  ‘Don’t you have a lock?’

  He gives a weak smile as he gets astride it. ‘I try to make it my policy to trust people,’ he says.

  I wonder if Moira makes it her policy to trust him.

  ‘When Noreen is better, we must have a rubber of bridge.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ I reply. I hate playing bridge with Moira and Jack. They make one realise the full, dire meaning of the phrase ‘vicarage bridge’.

  When he has swayed off on the rusty, old-fashioned bicycle with the high saddle and handle-bars, I go up to see how Noreen is. She is lying with her face to the wall, her knees drawn up. Perhaps she is asleep? But she turns over at the sound of my entrance.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘My advice. Which I can longer give him. I just don’t feel competent any longer.’

  ‘Things haven’t changed. And you haven’t changed. What’s the difference?’

  ‘I’d feel such a hypocrite.’

  ‘We’re all hypocrites to some degree or another. Jack certainly is.’

  It is unlike her to be so cynical.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  As though she has not heard me, she says: ‘I keep thinking about that book of his. And I keep asking myself: Why, why, why? Why, after so many years, should he do this to us?’

  ‘He seems to hate us,’ I say.

  Chapter Thirty One

  Tim and Ma had another squabble, so public, out on the terrace, and so noisy that yet again I was sickened by the gaudy thread of exhibitionism which flashed through almost all their behaviour together. Just as they would fondle and even kiss each other not merely in the house and on the terrace but also in restaurants and cafés or walking by the lake, so too they would savage each other with an equal craving to be heard and seen.

  Bob and I were once again upstairs in my room, this time playing not chess but bezique (‘You’ve just got to face it,’ Bob had said, ‘you’re not up to chess’) when we heard the voices. ‘Oh, lord,’ Bob said, ‘not again! What will those two biddies next door think?’

  ‘They’ll think what they must have been thinking for a long time.’

  Loud and clear, I could hear Tim’s: ‘ You stupid cunt!’, followed by Ma’s: ‘How dare you speak to me like that! How dare you!’

  I put my hands over my ears. ‘What I can’t bear is the mess,’ I said. ‘Wherever Ma goes and whatever she does, there has to be mess. Day after day Maria and Violetta tidy up, and day after day she turns eveiything into a mess again.’ I was thinking of the bathing towel which, returning from the hotel swimming pool, she would abandon over a chair in the hall; of the shoes which she would kick off on the terrace and then forget; of the cigarette-ash scattered over the parquet and the cigarettes stubbed out in teacups or saucers. I was also thinking of the emotional mess in which she lived, passion and hate and jealousy slopping out in all directions.

  ‘Delenda est,’ Bob said, fanning his cards. His tone was matter-of-fact. He might have been talking of the putting down of a cat or a dog. ‘But how? There’s the car idea. Or there’s poison. How about some poisoned chocolates? She’s always guzzling chocolates.’ He began to tell me of a recent murder case, in which a poisoned chocolate had been the means chosen by a retired army officer to murder his neighbour. But how was the murderer to ensure that his victim ate that particular chocolate and no other? The murderer had held it out: ‘ Excuse fingers,’ he had said. ‘With your mother you wouldn’t have that problem. Given a box of chocolates, she could be relied on to demolish the lot.’ He picked up his cards again. He played one. ‘ Oxalic acid,’ he said. ‘That would be a possibility. Thar s what’s used in that novel I’ve been reading – Death of My Aunt. The best thing, of course, would be to give her an injection of insulin. That would leave no traces. But how would we get hold of it?’

  Was he joking? Was he being serious? I could not be sure.

  Certainly he must have been joking when he went on to speak about the possibility of pushing Ma into the huge oven in the antiquated kitchen and roasting her – ‘It would be like the witch in Hansel and Gretel – but think of the pong!’

  When we eventually went downstairs for dinner, Tim had vanished and Ma was slumped on the sofa, legs up, with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth and nose.

  ‘Whars up?’ I asked, although I knew perfectly well. ‘Oh, Tim’s just been horrid to me, perfectly horrid.’ She gave a small, choking sob into the handkerchief and then put it down in her lap, before stretching out for her glass of neat gin on the rocks. ‘ Why does he have to be so horrid to me?’ s
he demanded. ‘I do so much for him, I constantly spend money on him.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if you did less and spent less.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say that! If I weren’t so generous, he’d just walk out on me. That Platz creature telephoned from Rome this afternoon. I couldn’t help overhearing. Of course he’s trying to lure him away. How am I supposed to compete with a millionaire film producer?’

  ‘People say his career is on the skids,’ Bob interjected. Ma glared at him over her upraised glass. ‘Would you mind not

  butting in? We’re discussing a purely – a purely f-f-familiable matter.’ It was then, as she ludicrously stumbled over the non-existent

  word, that I realised that that gin was not the first, there had been

  many before it.

  I stooped and began to pick up the sheets of the Daily Sketch

  littered around her.

  ‘I do wish you’d find him,’ Ma said in a fretful voice, close to

  tears.

  ‘Oh, I expect he’ll be back for dinner. He’s unlikely to miss that.’

  ‘Don’t, don’t be so utterly heartless!’ Ma wailed. ‘In his present

  mood, he could do anything.’

  I heard a sound in the hall.

  ‘He’s back,’ I said.

  Ma jumped to her feet. ‘ Tim! Tim! Is that you? Oh, darling, I

  was so worried – so upset …’

  Bob looked over to me.

  Then, for the first time, I really thought that I could kill her;

  and really hoped that Bob, who would do it so much more efficiently

  and resourcefully, would kill her for me.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  In an art bookshop in Milan I had found a copy of the Studio. Although it was two months old, it was one that I had not read. With it, I lay out on a deck-chair in the garden.