Collected Short Stories Page 3

It was about a year ago that I first noticed a coolness between Gwendolen and Reeve. The banter they had gone in for, which had consisted in wry confessions or flirtatious compliments from him, and shy, somewhat maternal reproofs from her, stopped almost entirely. When we all three were together they talked to each other through me, as if I were their interpreter. I asked Gwendolen if he’d done something to upset: her.

  She looked extremely taken aback. ‘What makes you ask?’

  ‘You always seem a bit peeved with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to be nicer. I didn’t know I’d changed.’

  She had changed to me too. She flinched sometimes when I touched her, and although she never refused me, there was an apathy about her love-making.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her after a failure which disturbed me because it was so unprecedented.

  She said it was nothing, and then, ‘We’re getting older. You can’t expect things to be the same as when we were first married.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You’re thirty-five and I’m thirty-nine. We’re not in our dotage.’

  She sighed and looked unhappy. She had become moody and difficult. Although she hardly opened her mouth in Reeve’s presence, she talked about him a lot when he wasn’t there, seizing upon almost any excuse to discuss him and speculate about his character. And she seemed inexplicably annoyed when, on our tenth wedding anniversary, a greetings card arrived addressed to us both from him. I, of course, had sent her roses. At the end of the week I missed a receipt for a bill I’d paid – as an accountant I’m naturally circumspect about these things – and I searched through our wastepaper basket, thinking I might have thrown it away. I found it, and I also found the anniversary card I’d sent Gwendolen to accompany the roses.

  All these things I noticed. That was the trouble with me – I noticed things but I lacked the experience of life to add them up and make a significant total. I didn’t have the worldly wisdom to guess why my wife was always out when I phoned her in the afternoons, or why she was forever buying new clothes. I noticed, I wondered, that was all.

  I noticed things about Reeve too. For one thing, that he’d stopped talking about his girl friends.

  ‘He’s growing up at last,’ I said to Gwendolen.

  She reacted with warmth, with enthusiasm. ‘I really think he is.’

  But she was wrong. He had only three months of what I thought of as celibacy. And then when he talked of a new girl friend, it was to me alone. Confidentially, over a Friday night drink in the pub, he told me of this ‘marvellous chick’, twenty years old, he had met at a party the week before.

  ‘It won’t last, Reeve,’ I said.

  ‘I sincerely hope not. Who wants it to last?’

  Not Gwendolen, certainly. When I told her she was incredulous, then aghast. And when I said I was sorry I’d told her since Reeve’s backsliding upset her so much, she snapped at me that she didn’t want to discuss him. She became even more snappy and nervous and depressed too. Whenever the phone rang she jumped. Once or twice I came home to find no wife, no dinner prepared; then she’d come in, looking haggard, to say she’d been out for a walk. I got her to see our doctor and he put her on tranquillizers which just made her more depressed.

  I hadn’t seen Reeve for ages. Then, out of the blue he phoned me at work to say he was off to the South of France for three weeks.

  ‘In your state of financial health?’ I said. I’d had a struggle getting him to pay the January instalment of his twice-yearly income tax, and I knew he was practically broke till he got the advance on his new book in May. ‘The South of France is a bit pricey, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ he said. ‘My bank manager’s one of my fans and he’s let me have an overdraft.’

  Gwendolen didn’t seem very surprised to hear about Reeve’s holiday. He’d told me he was going on his own – the ‘marvellous chick’ had long disappeared – and she said she thought he needed the rest, especially as there wouldn’t be any of those girls to bother him, as she put it.

  When I first met Reeve he’d been renting a flat but I persuaded him to buy one, for security and as an investment. The place was known euphemistically as a garden flat but it was in fact a basement, the lower ground floor of a big Victorian house in Bayswater. My usual route to work didn’t take me along his street, but sometimes when the traffic was heavy I’d go through the back doubles and past his house. After he’d been away for about two weeks I happened to do this one morning and, of course, I glanced at Reeve’s window. One always does glance at a friend’s house, I think, when one is passing even if one knows that friend isn’t at home. His bedroom was at the front, the top half of the window visible, the lower half concealed by the rise of lawn. I noticed that the curtains were drawn. Not particularly wise, I thought, an invitation to burglars, and then I forgot about it. But two mornings later I passed that way again, passed very slowly this time as there was a traffic hold-up, and again I glanced at Reeve’s window. The curtains were no longer quite drawn. There was a gap about six inches wide between them. Now whatever a burglar may do, it’s very unlikely he’ll pull back drawn curtains. I didn’t consider burglars this time. I thought Reeve must have come back early.

  Telling myself I should be late for work anyway if I struggled along in this traffic jam, I parked the car as soon as I could at a meter. I’ll knock on old Reeve’s door, I thought, and get him to make me a cup of coffee. There was no answer. But as I looked once more at that window I was almost certain those curtains had been moved again, and in the past ten minutes. I rang the doorbell of the woman in the flat upstairs. She came down in her dressing gown.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘But do you happen to know if Mr Baker’s come back?’

  ‘He’s not coming back till Saturday,’ she said.

  ‘Sure of that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said rather huffily. ‘I put a note through his door Monday, and if he was back he’d have come straight up for this parcel I took in for him.’

  ‘Did he take his car, d’you know?’ I said, feeling like a detective in one of my favourite crime novels.

  ‘Of course he did. What is this? What’s he done?’

  I said he’d done nothing, as far as I knew, and she banged the door in my face. So I went down the road to the row of lock-up garages. I couldn’t see much through the little panes of frosted glass in the door of Reeve’s garage, just enough to be certain the interior wasn’t empty but that that greenish blur was the body of Reeve’s Fiat. And then I knew for sure. He hadn’t gone away at all. I chuckled to myself as I imagined him lying low for these three weeks in his flat, living off food from the deep freeze and spending most of his time in the back regions where, enclosed as those rooms were by a courtyard with high walls, he could show lights day and night with impunity. Just wait till Saturday, I thought, and I pictured myself asking him for details of his holiday, laying little traps for him, until even he with his writer’s powers of invention would have to admit he’d never been away at all.

  Gwendolen was laying the table for our evening meal when I got in. She, I’d decided, was the only person with whom I’d share this joke. I got all her attention the minute I mentioned Reeve’s name, but when I reached the bit about his car being in the garage she stared at me and all the colour went out of her face. She sat down, letting the bunch of knives and forks she was holding fall into her lap.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘How could he be so cruel? How could he do that to anyone?’

  ‘Oh, my dear, Reeve’s quite ruthless where women are concerned. You remember, he told us he’d done it before.’

  ‘I’m going to phone him,’ she said, and I saw that she was shivering. She dialled his number and I heard the ringing tone start.

  ‘He won’t answer,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought it was going to upset you.’

  She didn’t say any more
. There were things cooking on the stove and the table was half-laid, but she left all that and went into the hall. Almost immediately afterwards I heard the front door close.

  I know I’m slow on the uptake in some ways but I’m not stupid. Even a husband who trusts his wife like I trusted mine – or, rather, never considered there was any need for trust – would know, after that, that something had been going on. Nothing much, though, I told myself. A crush perhaps on her part, hero-worship which his flattery and his confidences had fanned. Naturally, she’d feel let down, betrayed, when she discovered he’d deceived her as to his whereabouts when he’d led her to believe she was a special friend and privy to all his secrets. But I went upstairs just the same to reassure myself by looking in that dressing table drawer where she kept her souvenirs. Dishonourable? I don’t think so. She had never locked it or tried to keep its contents private from me.

  And all those little mementoes of our first meeting, our courtship, our marriage, were still there. Between a birthday card and a Valentine I saw a pressed rose. But there too, alone in a nest made out of a lace handkerchief I had given her, were a locket and a button. The locket was one her mother had left to her, but the photograph in it, that of some long-dead unidentifiable relative, had been replaced by a cut-out of Reeve from a snapshot. On the reverse side was a lock of hair. The button I recognized as coming from Reeve’s blazer, though it hadn’t, I noticed, been cut off. He must have lost it in our house and she’d picked it up. The hair was Reeve’s, black, wavy, here and there with a thread of grey, but again it hadn’t been cut off. On one of our visits to his flat she must have combed it out of his hairbrush and twisted it into a lock. Poor little Gwendolen . . . Briefly, I’d suspected Reeve. For one dreadful moment, sitting down there after she’d gone out, I’d asked myself, could he have . . . ? Could my best friend have . . . ? But, no. He hadn’t even sent her a letter or a flower. It had been all on her side, and for that reason – I knew where she was bound for – I must stop her reaching him and humiliating herself.

  I slipped the things into my pocket with some vague idea of using them to show her how childish she was being. She hadn’t taken her car. Gwendolen always disliked driving in central London. I took mine and drove to the tube station I knew she’d go to.

  She came out a quarter of an hour after I got there, walking fast and glancing nervously to the right and left of her. When she saw me she gave a little gasp and stood stock-still.

  ‘Get in, darling,’ I said gently. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  She got in but she didn’t speak. I drove down to the Bayswater Road and into the Park. There, on the Ring, I parked under the plane trees, and because she still didn’t utter a word, I said:

  ‘You mustn’t think I don’t understand. We’ve been married ten years and I daresay I’m a dull sort of chap. Reeve’s exciting and different and – well, maybe it’s only natural for you to think you’ve fallen for him.’

  She stared at me stonily. ‘I love him and he loves me.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ I said, but it wasn’t the chill of the spring evening that made me shiver. ‘Just because he’s used that charm of his on you . . .’

  She interrupted me. ‘I want a divorce.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘You hardly know Reeve. You’ve never been alone with him, have you?’

  ‘Never been alone with him?’ She gave a brittle, desperate laugh. ‘He’s been my lover for six months. And now I’m going to him. I’m going to tell him he doesn’t have to hide from women any more because I’ll be with him all the time.’

  In the half-dark I gaped at her. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, but I did. I did. ‘You mean you along with all the rest . . . ? My wife?’

  ‘I’m going to be Reeve’s wife. I’m the only one that understands him, the only one he can talk to. He told me that just before – before he went away.’

  ‘Only he didn’t go away.’ There was a great redness in front of my eyes like a lake of blood. ‘You fool,’ I shouted at her. ‘Don’t you see it’s you he’s hiding from, you? He’s done this to get away from you like he’s got away from all the others. Love you? He never even gave you a present, not even a photograph. If you go there, he won’t let you in. You’re the last person he’d let in.’

  ‘I’m going to him,’ she cried, and she began to struggle with the car door. ‘I’m going to him, to live with him, and I never want to see you again!’

  In the end I drove home alone. Her wish came true and she never did see me again.

  When she wasn’t back by eleven I called the police. They asked me to go down to the police station and fill out a Missing Persons form, but they didn’t take my fear very seriously. Apparently, when a woman of Gwendolen’s age disappears they take it for granted she’s gone off with a man. They took it seriously all right when a park keeper found her strangled body among some bushes in the morning.

  That was on the Thursday. The police wanted to know where Gwendolen could have been going so far from her home. They wanted the names and addresses of all our friends. Was there anyone we knew in Kensington or Paddington or Bayswater, anywhere in the vicinity of the Park? I said there was no one. The next day they asked me again and I said, as if I’d just remembered:

  ‘Only Reeve Baker. The novelist, you know.’ I gave them his address. ‘But he’s away on holiday, has been for three weeks. He’s not coming home till tomorrow.’

  What happened after that I know from the evidence given at Reeve’s trial, his trial for the murder of my wife. The police called on him on Saturday morning. I don’t think they suspected him at all at first. My reading of crime fiction has taught me they would have asked him for any information he could give about our private life.

  Unfortunately for him, they had already talked to some of his neighbours. Reeve had led all these people to think he had really gone away. The milkman and the paper boy were both certain he had been away. So when the police questioned him about that, and he knew just why they were questioning him, he got into a panic. He didn’t dare say he’d been in France. They could have shown that to be false without the least trouble. Instead, he told the truth and said he’d been lying low to escape the attentions of a woman. Which woman? He wouldn’t say, but the woman in the flat upstairs would. Time and time again she had seen Gwendolen visit him in the afternoons, had heard them quarrelling, Gwendolen protesting her love for him and he shouting that he wouldn’t be controlled, that he’d do anything to escape her possessiveness.

  He had, of course, no alibi for the Wednesday night. But the judge and the jury could see he’d done his best to arrange one. Novelists are apt to let their imaginations run away with them; they don’t realize how astute and thorough the police are. And there was firmer evidence of his guilt even than that. Three main exhibits were produced in the court: Reeve’s blazer with a button missing from the sleeve; that very button; a cluster of his hairs. The button had been found by Gwendolen’s body and the hairs on her coat . . .

  My reading of detective stories hadn’t been in vain, though I haven’t read one since then. People don’t, I suppose, after a thing like that.

  A Bad Heart

  They had been very pressing and at last, on the third time of asking, he had accepted. Resignedly, almost fatalistically, he had agreed to dine with them. But as he began the long drive out of London, he thought petulantly that they ought to have had the tact to drop the acquaintance altogether. No other employee he had sacked had ever made such approaches to him. Threats, yes. Several had threatened him and one had tried blackmail, but no one had ever had the effrontery to invite him to dinner. It wasn’t done. A discreet man wouldn’t have done it. But of course Hugo Crouch wasn’t a discreet man and that, among other things, was why he had been sacked.

  He knew why they had asked him. They wanted to hold a court of enquiry, to have the whole thing out. Knowing this, he had suggested they meet in a restaurant and at his expense. They couldn’t harangue a man in a pu
blic restaurant and he wouldn’t be at their mercy. But they had insisted he come to their house and in the end he had given way. He was an elderly man with a heart condition; it was sixteen miles slow driving from his flat to their house – monstrous on a filthy February night – but he would show them he could take it, he would be one too many for them. The chairman of Frasers would show them he wasn’t to be intimidated by a bumptious do-gooder like Hugo Crouch, and he would cope with the situation just as he had coped in the past with the blackmailer.

  By the time he reached the outskirts of the Forest the rain was coming down so hard that he had to put his windscreen wipers on at full speed, and he felt more than ever thankful that he had got his new car with all its efficient gadgets. Certainly, the firm wouldn’t have been able to run to it if he had kept Hugo Crouch on a day longer. If he had agreed to all Hugo’s demands, he would still be stuck with that old Daimler and he would never have managed that winter cruise. Hugo had been a real thorn in his flesh what with his extravagance and his choosing to live in a house in the middle of Epping Forest. And it was in the middle, totally isolated, not even on the edge of one of the Forest villages. The general manager of Frasers had to be within reach, on call. Burying oneself out here was ridiculous.

  The car’s powerful headlights showed a dark winding lane ahead, the grey tree trunks making it appear like some sombre pillared corridor. And this picture was cut off every few seconds by a curtain of rain, to reappear with the sweep of the wipers. Fortunately, he had been there once before, otherwise he might have passed the high brick wall and the wooden gates behind which stood the Crouch house, the peak-roofed Victorian villa, drab, shabby, and to his eyes quite hideous. Anyone who put a demolition order on that would be doing a service to the environment, he thought, and then he drove in through the gates.

  There wasn’t a single light showing. He remembered that they lived in the back, but they might have put a light on to greet him. But for his car headlamps, he wouldn’t have been able to see his way at all. Clutching the box of peppermint creams he had bought for Elizabeth Crouch, he splashed across the almost flooded paving, under eaves from which water poured as from a row of taps, and made for the front door which happened to be – which would be – at the far side of the house. It was hard to tell where their garden ended and the Forest began, for no demarcation was visible. Nothing was visible but black rain-lashed branches faintly illuminated by a dim glow showing through the fanlight over the door.