by Maeve Binchy
Linda smiled. ‘Isn’t it funny?’ she said. ‘After all these years, and we both find it very anxious-making and . . . and well. . . disturbing.’
‘Yes,’ said Joy. ‘That’s exactly what it is. Disturbing.’
‘Then why did you suggest it, I mean if it’s going to make us both anxious and act out of character, what’s the point?’ Linda’s face looked troubled.
Joy paused to order two gin and tonics and to tell the waiter that they would like a little time before they made up their minds about the lunch menu.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I had to. You see I want you to help me. I want you and I together to murder Edward. Seriously. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll help me to do.’
Most of Linda’s omelette aux fines herbes lay untouched. But Joy had managed to eat much of the wholewheat pizza. Linda had managed one sip of the dry white wine but it had tasted very sour. The longer Joy talked the more Linda realised that she was indeed perfectly serious.
‘Well, it stands to reason that he’s a man the world would be much better off without. We all agree about that. Well, Linda, be reasonable. There was my divorce. I haven’t seen my son for nine and a half years because of Edward. If it hadn’t been for Edward I would have a perfectly normal and happy relationship with my son who is now sixteen. As it is I am not allowed to visit him at school; everyone agrees it is less distressing for Anthony if his mother is kept away. Later when he’s an adult I shall have some ridiculous “civilised” meeting with him, where we will have nothing to say. So that was one thing Edward destroyed.’
‘But you were willing to divorce your husband, to leave everything for Edward. Wasn’t it your fault too?’
‘No it was not my fault,’ Joy was calm and unemotional. ‘I was twenty-eight and bored with marriage and a demanding child and Edward lied to me, used me, filled my head with nonsenses, betrayed me and then would not stop by me after I had done what he begged and implored me to do – leave home, leave my husband and child and run away with him. He laughed at me.’
Linda said: ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘And look what he did to you. A nervous breakdown. A serious two-year depression. Two years out of your life because you believed him, and couldn’t accept his betrayals, his double life, his endless pointless lies.’
Linda said: ‘I didn’t think you knew that.’
‘There were people before us, Linda, there were people after us. Mine wasn’t the only divorce he caused, yours wasn’t the only nervous illness. And nobody has punished him. Nobody has said this man is evil and he must be stopped. He mustn’t be allowed to roam the world destroying, destroying, turning good to bad and dark, turning simple things to twisted and frightening.’ Joy’s voice hadn’t raised itself a decibel but there was something in it that was a little like a preacher, like some Southern Baptist in a movie describing Satan. It chilled Linda and forced her to speak.
‘But it’s all over Joy, it’s all done. It’s all finished. Other people are being silly and foolish nowadays, like you and I once were stupid. They’re making mistakes now. Not us.’
Joy interrupted her. ‘We were not silly, we made no mistakes, neither do his women of today. We all behaved normally as if Edward were normal. When we said things we meant them. When we told him tales they were true, when we made promises they were sincere.’
Once more her voice was uncomfortably like a preacher. In the busy crowded restaurant Linda felt frightened.
‘But you don’t seriously want to . . . er . . . get rid of him?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Joy.
‘But why now? Why not years ago, when it hurt more?’
‘It hurts just as much now,’ said Joy.
‘Oh, but it can’t,’ Linda cried sympathetically. ‘Not now.’
‘Not for myself,’ said Joy. ‘But now he has gone too far. Now he has done something he can’t be forgiven for. He’s taken my niece to live with him. She is, of course, utterly besotted with him. She’s given up her job for him like you gave up yours, she’s given up her fiancé like I gave up my marriage. She will shortly give up her sanity like you did, and her happiness like I did.’
Linda felt a little faint. The smart restaurant seemed somehow claustrophobic.
‘Are you very concerned about your niece?’ she asked, her voice coming from a long way away. She wanted to keep Joy talking. She didn’t want to have to say anything herself.
‘Yes, she lives with me. She’s all I’ve got. I’ve had her since she was seventeen, three years. I thought that if, well if I did a good job looking after her, they might let me have Anthony back too. Anyway, I’m very attached to Barbara, I’ve told her everything, she’s learning the trade in our company, she’s studying art history as well. The one thing I couldn’t foresee in a city of twelve million people was that she might meet Edward.’
‘Does she know? Does he know?’ Linda’s voice was still weak: there was a coldness in Joy’s tone now that terrified her.
‘Barbara doesn’t know. I’ve never seen any reason to tell her about my relationship with Edward. And Edward doesn’t remember me.’
‘What?’
‘He came to the house, to my house last month to collect Barbara, she introduced him to me proudly. His eyes rested on me easily. He doesn’t remember me, Linda. He has forgotten me.’
Linda was swept by sympathy for the woman ten years previously she would have liked to have killed.
‘He pretended. It was another ploy. He can’t have forgotten you. Joy, don’t get hurt over it, you know what he was like. He’s just trying to wound you. Don’t let him.’
‘He had forgotten me, Linda. I am certain he has forgotten you too, and Susan or whoever came after us. I will not let him use Barbara. She took her things last week and has gone to him!’
‘She’s twenty years of age Joy, these days that’s old enough . . .’
‘No day is anyone old enough for Edward, or cruel enough,’ said Joy. ‘Oh, Barbara is sure she is doing the right thing:
“You know how it is, Auntie Joy.
“You were wild once they say, Auntie Joy.
“If you knew how he makes me need him, Auntie Joy.”’
Linda looked across the table. ‘Don’t tell me what you want to do,’ she said.
Joy reached for her hand. ‘Please, please. It needs two. You know, you understand, you and I were the same age, we went through the same things. We know. No one else can do it.’
‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear,’ said Linda.
‘We need two. Nobody can ever connect you with it. You can come up to London for a day, just like today, to buy curtains or whatever. It’s in two parts. You needn’t even look at him I tell you. He’ll be unconscious anyway. I shall have given him the tablets first.’
Linda stood up shakily. ‘I beg you not to think about it any more. Do something, anything. Go away. Come and stay in the country with me. Just stop planning it.’
‘It has been planned. It’s all planned. You are to come to my house, I’ll leave the key and the gun.’
‘I won’t listen,’ said Linda. ‘I can’t listen. You don’t want to kill him, you want him back. You don’t give two damns about your niece. You want Edward. You want him dead if you can’t have him. It gives you a wave of pleasure just thinking of his head on one side, dead. His mouth still, his eyes open but not seeing things, not darting . . .’
‘How do you know? How can you know that it’s like that?’ Joy’s eyes were bright.
‘Because I planned to kill him ten years ago. Ten years ago when you went to live with him. I planned it, too. But I had to plan it on my own. I wasn’t confident enough.’
‘You what?’ Joy looked at her in disbelief.
‘I planned it all, I would tell him I needed to see him once. I would assure him there would be no scenes, I would ask him to my flat but in fact I would have some friends there and when he came I would pretend that he had attacked me and that I was fighting him off in s
elf-defence. In the mêlée a knife would be used.’
‘Why didn’t you do it?’ asked Joy.
‘Because of you. I knew that you would have known it was murder. You would know Edward didn’t care enough for me to attack me. You could have had me convicted.’
‘How far had you got?’ whispered Joy.
‘As far as organising the knife, the friends in my flat, and asking him to come and see me.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Oh when he called, I told him I had changed my mind, I didn’t want to see him after all. He stayed for one drink, long enough to bewitch Alexandra, my friend.’
‘Alex. Oh God! She was your friend?’
‘So you saved me from doing it. Let me save you.’
Joy pulled herself together. It was almost a visible thing. First her spine straightened. Then her brow became unlined. A small smile came to her mouth.
‘We are being very dramatic, aren’t we?’ she said in a brittle voice.
‘Very,’ agreed Linda politely.
‘Shall we have coffee, or are you in a hurry to get on with your shopping?’
‘Rather a hurry actually,’ said Linda.
‘So you’re off back to Hampshire then and the peaceful life,’ said Joy waving for the bill.
‘Yes, nothing much to do,’ said Linda.
‘Very quiet and tranquil I expect,’ Joy said producing her credit card for the waiter.
‘Only excitement I get is reading the papers, seeing who’s saying what and doing what. Reading about the things that happen in London, sudden deaths, scandal. You know the kind of thing.’
A small and almost genuine smile came to Joy’s eyes.
‘I see,’ she said.
Linda left, pausing to ask the waiter if there was a phone she could use. She told Hugh that she was very pleased with her check-up and she might catch the earlier train home. He sounded very pleased. And, for the first time in a long time, his pleasure gave her pleasure too.
GREEN PARK
They had both sworn that they would not dress up. They had assured each other that it would be ridiculous to try to compete with Jane after all these years and considering all the money she had. Very immature really to try on fine feathers and glad rags – like children dressing up and playing games. Yet when they met at the station they were almost unrecognisable from their usual selves.
Helen had bought a new hat with a jaunty feather, and Margaret had borrowed a little fur cape. Both of them wore smart shoes and their faces normally innocent of powder had definite evidence of rouge and even eye-shadow. After much mutual recrimination they agreed that they both looked delightful and settled themselves into the train to London with more excitement than two schoolgirls.
How extraordinary to be heading off for tea at the Ritz with Jane. Helen whispered that she would love to tell everybody in the railway compartment that this was where they were heading. Margaret said it would be more fun to let it fall casually in conversation afterwards: ‘How nice you look today, Mrs Brown, what a sensible colour to wear, lots of people in the Ritz last week seemed to be wearing it.’
And of course they giggled all the more because, in spite of sending themselves up, they actually were a little nervous about going to somewhere as splendid as the Ritz. They were over-awed. The very mention of the Ritz made them nervous. It was for perfumed, furred people not people who had dabbed some of last Christmas’s perfume behind the ears and borrowed a sister-in-law’s well-worn Indian lamb.
In some way both Helen and Margaret feared they might be unmasked when they got there. And they giggled and joked all the more to stifle this fear.
None of their fear was directed towards Jane. Jane was one of their own. Jane had trained to be a children’s nanny with them all those years ago. You don’t forget the friends made during that kind of apprenticeship. It was far more binding than the services were for men. It was almost like having survived a shipwreck – the eighteen girls who survived that particular obstacle race in the school for nannies, which had long since closed down, had forged a friendship which would last for life. Some of them had gone to the Gulf states and they wrote regular newsletters saying how they were getting on. Some, like Helen and Margaret, had married and applied their nanny training to their own children; only Jane had become spectacular and famous. But because she was Jane from the nanny training school it didn’t matter if she became head of the United Nations, Helen and Margaret would never be in awe of her.
They changed trains, twittering happily at Euston and took the underground to Green Park.
‘Perhaps people think we are career women, dropping into the Ritz for a business conference,’ whispered Helen.
‘Or wealthy wives up for a day’s shopping,’ sighed Margaret.
Neither Margaret nor Helen were wealthy. Margaret was actually married to a vicar and lived in a draughty vicarage. She was so much the vicar’s wife now that she felt quite guilty about wearing the Indian lamb in case any of her husband’s parishioners saw her and wondered about her showiness. Helen, too, was far from wealthy. Jeff, her husband, had a flair for backing things that went wrong and that included horses. Yet never had a hint of envy been spoken or indeed felt by the two women about the wealthy friend they were en route to meet.
Jane was the mistress of a very eccentric and extraordinarily wealthy American industrialist. He had bought her many gifts, including a ranch and a small television station; she was one of the world’s richest and best known kept women.
For the twentieth time Margaret wondered if Jane could possibly look as well as she appeared in the photographs, and for the twentieth time Helen said it was quite possible. If you didn’t have to do anything each day except make yourself look well, then it was obvious you could look magnificent. Suppose each day when Margaret got up she didn’t have to clean the vicarage, take her children to school, shop, cook, wash, go to coffee mornings, sales of work, cookery demonstrations and entertain the doctor, the curate, the headmaster – think how well she could look. Margaret had a very good bone structure, Helen agreed grudgingly, she could look very striking if only she had time to lavish on herself. Margaret felt a bit depressed by this; she knew that Helen meant it as a compliment but it left her feeling as if she were in fact a great mess because she didn’t have this time, and that her good bone structure was wasted.
As they came up from Green Park tube station into the sunlight of Piccadilly the two women giggled again and reached for their powder compacts before they crossed the road to the Ritz.
‘Aren’t we silly?’ tittered Helen. ‘I mean we’re forty years of age.’
‘Yes, so is Jane of course,’ said Margaret as if that was some kind of steadying fact. Something that would keep their feet on the ground.
Jane had been attractive twenty years ago, but she was a beauty now.
‘You look ridiculous,’ gasped Helen. ‘Your face, your whole face, it’s the face of a twenty year old. You look better than when we were all teenagers.’
Jane gave a great laugh showing all her perfect teeth.
‘Aw, for Christ’s sake Helen, I bought this face, and bloody boring it was, I tell you. It’s easy to have a face like that. Just give it to someone else to massage it and pummel it and file the teeth down and put caps on, no the face isn’t any problem.’
Margaret felt that she wished the foyer of this overpowering hotel would open and gulp her into the basement area. She had never felt so foolish, in her ratty overdressed, over-done bit of Indian lamb.
‘Come on, we’ll go to the suite,’ Jane said, an arm around each of their shoulders. She noticed how impressed Helen and Margaret were with the tea lounge and the pillars and the little arm chairs beside little tables where only the very confident could sit waiting casually for their friends. She knew they would love to sit in the public area and drink it all in with Jane herself there to protect them.
‘We’ll come back and do the grand tour later, but now we go and meet Charl
es.’
‘Charles?’ Both women said it together with the alarm that might be generated at a dorm feast if someone mentioned that the headmistress was on her way. It was obvious that neither of them had thought that the ordeal of meeting Charles was included in the invitation of tea.
‘Oh yeah, the old bat wants to make sure I really am meeting two old chums from the college. He has a fear, you see, that I’ll have hired two male go-go dancers from some show. I want him to get a look at you so that he can see you are the genuine article, not something I made up. Come on, we’ll get it over with, and then we can settle down to cream cakes and tea and gins and tonics.’
Because Jane had shepherded them so expertly towards the lift, Margaret and Helen hadn’t even had time to exchange a glance until they found themselves outside a door where two tall men stood.
‘Are they bodyguards?’ whispered Margaret.
‘They speak English,’ laughed Jane. ‘I know they look like waxworks, but that’s part of the qualifications. If you came in here with a machine-gun to kill Charles you wouldn’t get far.’
They were nodded in by the unsmiling heavies at the door, and Charles was visible. He stood by the window looking out at the traffic below. A small, old, worried man. He looked a bit like her father-in-law, Helen thought suddenly. A fussy little man in an old people’s home who didn’t really care when she and Jeff went to see him, he only cared about what time it was, and was constantly checking his watch with clocks.
When Charles did give them his attention he had a wonderful smile. It was all over his face, even his nose and chin seemed to be smiling. Margaret and Helen stopped being nervous.
‘I’m a foolish old gentleman,’ he said in a Southern States drawl. ‘I’m jes’ so nervous of my Jane, I always want to see who she goes out with.’
‘Heavens,’ said Margaret.
‘Well, I see, how nice,’ stammered Helen.
‘You ladies jes’ must understand me. I guess you know how it is when you only live with someone, you aren’t so sure, it’s not the same binding thing as marriage,’ he looked at them winningly, expecting some support.