A Lovely Day to Die (13 page)

T
HE EFFORT OF
opening her eyes was enormous, and no sooner had Maggie achieved it than the light pounced like knives, and she closed them again.

She thought at first that it was the sun, that she was sunbathing, sunbathing for too long, on a scorching Mediterranean beach, on holiday somewhere or other. This must be heat-stroke she’d got, she felt so weak and numbed, almost paralysed. Even her jaw would not move, her teeth were clenched in some sort of tension whose cause she could not at the moment recall; so that when she tried to speak, the words would not come.

“I think I’m getting heat-stroke, darling,” she wanted to say, reproachfully, in a feeble effort to arouse Rodney’s sympathy and concern. “I’ve been lying here too long, why didn’t you wake me ..?”

But it was no good, something seemed to be blocking the sounds, choking them back into her throat; and anyway, Rodney wasn’t listening.

Well of course he wasn’t. He never listened to her, these days. Maybe he wasn’t even there; maybe he’d wandered off by now, bored and restless, eyeing desultorily the other female figures spread-eagled on the sand, and thinking about his work.

He never thought about anything else any more, at home or away; a far cry indeed from those golden holidays in the first years of their marriage, when he’d sit or lie beside her hour after hour, rubbing oil on her brown body, murmuring into her ear nonsense to make her laugh or endearments to make her glow — face down on the hot sand—with secret joy.

Maybe he
was
still sitting there after all, right beside her? Reading, of course, and making notes. Going over those eternal papers and documents which he lugged with him everywhere, even
on holiday; the dry, convoluted paragraphs curling under the Mediterranean heat, the sand seeping into the interstices of his bulging, important briefcase.

To hell with Rodney’s importance, his rocketing success! Success had come suddenly, attacking her marriage like a fast-growing cancer, with metastases spreading into every corner of their relationship.

“Rodney ..?”—she tried to put appeal, reproach and pathos into the syllables; but once again, no sound came from her throat.

And now a memory … a suspicion … an unease lurched inside her, and she forced herself once more to open her eyes, to peer through the dazzle with narrowed, burning lids.

*

No beach. No blazing Mediterranean sun. Only a reading-lamp—and a shaded one at that—casting its mild 60-watts across the littered desk; and straight in front of her, propped carefully at eye-level, just where she had left it, was her suicide-note.

So she was still alive. The thought was a neutral one to Maggie at first—neither surprising nor unsurprising. Nor did she feel either relieved or dismayed at this miscarriage of her plans.

Her plans? What, actually,
were
her plans? What had the whole thing been about? Letting her lids fall closed again against the baffling light of Reality (Reality?—Oh,
not
again
..!)—Maggie set herself to fumbling through the cotton-wool that right now was her brain, seeking the relevant connections, trying to recall, through the confusion of her thoughts and the singing in her ears, the sequence of events that had landed her here, in her husband’s own special wing-chair, in his own well-ordered study, with an empty bottle of sleeping-pills at her elbow.

No, not empty. Half the pills were still there—no, more than half—the blur of blueness reached way up the glass sides—two-thirds up at least.

So what had gone wrong? She’d intended to take the lot, of that she was certain. What had prevented her? Had she been overcome by unconsciousness before she’d had time to swallow more than a
dozen or so of the things? Or had she, on the very verge of oblivion, somehow lost her nerve ..?

This, of course, would explain why she was still alive, she reflected, with slow, laborious logic; and still she could feel neither pleased nor sorry at the outcome. She could, though, feel a weak stir of anger about it all. It was so unfair! Why was everything, for her, always so difficult?
Other
people commit suicide in their hundreds of thousands, all over the world, why should
she
be the one who never managed to bring it off?

Because this wasn’t the first time she had tried—Oh, by no means. In these past two or three years—the years since Rodney’s spectacular promotion at the Foreign Office had changed him from a shy, pleasant, young man into a dynamo of ruthless energy—during these years, Maggie had made two other suicide attempts—three, if you counted that first one of all, which (as she now admitted to herself) hadn’t really been an attempt at all, but merely a ruse for getting attention—
forcing
attention, indeed, at pistol-point—from her increasingly remote and preoccupied
husband
.

She’d worked it out so carefully, too. He was to have come home (late, as usual) to find his wife dead in a gas-filled bathroom. He was to have kicked and battered on the bathroom door: “Let me
in,
darling, let me
in
!” he was to have yelled, white-lipped at the keyhole, rattling and bashing, shaking the handle loose from its moorings, pushing until the hinges groaned, and the door finally caved in before him. She saw him dragging her limp figure out of the bath, across the landing, long mousey hair dripping like Ophelia’s, and finally laying it on the bed, covering it with kisses …

“Wake up, my darling … Oh, wake up!” he was to have sobbed, distraught with grief and with remorse. “Oh, Maggie, Maggie, come back to me! I love you … I need you ..!”

Too late the kisses. Too late the wild words of love. His tears of remorse would fall upon her dead face in vain.

Or would they? It would be a shame, when you came to think about it, to be missing it all. How about if she stirred and murmured his name at some point in the proceedings, when he had suffered
enough, had repented enough of his shortcomings? “Rodney … Rodney ..!” she would whisper with her first faint breath of returning life: and from there to his promising to give up his demanding job and stay home in the evenings would be but a few delicious, night-long steps …

With a surge of steaming water, Maggie had lurched upwards into a sitting position and turned off the un-lit jets of the
water-heater,
leaving only the pilot to do its feeble worst. Then she lay back once more into the water, warmed through and through, and blissfully expectant.

*

And after all that, he hadn’t come into the bathroom at all! Hadn’t smelt the gas seeping out under the door—nothing! She’d lain there in the cooling water from midnight until a quarter past one, only to hear him slam the front door and go straight upstairs to the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

For several minutes, Maggie had lain there, incredulous. Surely, when he saw the empty bed, he would come in search of her? She waited; the minutes passed; and presently, chilled and desperate, she dragged herself out of the now nearly-cold water, wrapped a towel round her shivering body, and went to investigate—only to find him snoring peacefully on his own side of the big double bed.

*

“I thought you must have stayed the night at your sister’s, or somewhere,” he’d explained off-handedly the next morning: and on Maggie’s insisting that she “might have died!” he’d merely said “Ridiculous!”—then added: “You’d better phone the gas people and get them to send someone. It’s a waste of gas to have a pilot that keeps blowing out”—and with that he’d gone off to the office as if nothing had happened.

“Ridiculous”, indeed!
I’ll
show
him,
she thought; and a couple of months later she did—or nearly. The occasion had been the “official entertaining” of a Scandinavian diplomat—blonde, and not a day over thirty-five—from which duty Rodney had come home at one in the morning to find a policeman at his door and an urgent summons to the local hospital.

She’d intended, of course, that he should find the policeman at his door; also that he should have to rush to the hospital. But she
hadn’t
intended—well, of course she hadn’t—that as soon as he reached the hospital he should be told there was nothing to worry about: “She’ll be all right; she’s coming round nicely!”

“Nothing to worry about”—when the whole aim and object of the harrowing, nerve-racking episode had been to
make
him worry! These damned interfering medicos—she hadn’t meant to “come round” at all, let alone as quickly as this, before Rodney had had so much as fifteen minutes of real anxiety! How could
she
have known that forty tranquillizers wouldn’t be enough to finish her off? Or that consuming them on a park bench on a freezing February night would actually detract from, rather than add to, their efficacy?

“The cold gives a shock to the system, it delays the onset of coma,” Sister explained, with a touch of malicious triumph, pulling down Maggie’s lower eyelids, one after the other, while she spoke, and examining their inner surfaces for God knows what sign or symptom (dying was no simple thing, Maggie had discovered; it seemed to involve the most unexpected areas of the body, and to expose you to the most complicated and irrelevant procedures at all hours of the day and night). “And anyway,” Sister continued, still smugly, “you can’t kill yourself with tranquillizers no matter how many you take; they’re not strong enough.”

How could Maggie have known? How
did
people find out these things?

And likewise, how could she have known, the very next summer, on holiday, that if you can swim at all, however poorly, then it is impossible deliberately to drown?

*

They’d gone to Ibiza this time for their holiday—if you could call it a holiday with Rodney working all day and all night on his wretched Report—scribbling, crossing-out, jotting down figures, frowning, staring blind as a stone into the glory of the summer sea: seeing nothing, saying nothing, as unaware of Maggie as if she was dead. It was on the sixth day of this holiday, a day of blue water and white, shimmering heat, that he’d told her, quite casually, at
lunch-time, that he had to fly back to London that very
afternoon.
Yes, it was an awful shame; and yes, he’d try to get back within two or three days; but just
supposing
he couldn’t make it before the end of their three weeks, then …

Then Maggie must stay on and enjoy herself Just like last summer, and the summer before that … not to mention the Easter holiday they’d had in Madeira. It was always the same … Maggie staying on and enjoying herself in some awful foreign hotel where she didn’t know a soul … a surplus woman, eyed by her fellow-guests, served pityingly by the waiters, dragging out the remaining days of her “holiday” as if it was a prison-sentence.

And as if this wasn’t enough, there’d been the quarrel as well—and this, too, followed the familiar pattern: But it’s my
job,
darling, don’t you see? Your job, your job, always your damn job, you never think of anything else, can’t you ever think of
me,
for a change? Think of
you
—hell, who do you think I’m slaving away earning the money
for
?
I notice you’re not behindhand in
spending
it—new kitchen-unit—new curtains—wall-to-wall carpets! Hell, you’ve got
everything
!
And expensive holidays thrown in! Do you realise what this hotel costs?—just bed and breakfast alone comes

Shut up, shut up, shut up, all you ever think of is money! Money, money, money! I hate your money, I don’t want your money, I just want you to love me, like you used to do …

Oh Lord, Oh God, don’t start
that
again! Look, dear, do
please
try to pull yourself together. I have to be at the airport by five, and I was hoping we could have one last swim …

One last swim. Rodney must have been surprised at Maggie’s sudden silence, and at the way all the temper seemed to drain out of her. All of a sudden, she became quiet and co-operative, agreeing to join him for his swim … even walking into the sea ahead of him …

*

How
do
people drown? How
do
they decide to swim
this
stroke, but not the next one ..?

At first, swimming away from the shimmering beach, away from Rodney fixing his snorkel in the middle distance, it had all seemed so easy. All she had to do was to go on swimming, on and on, through the warm silky water, until the end came.

“
HOLIDAY BATHING TRAGEDY
”—she saw the headline in her mind’s eye; thought about Rodney seeing it too,—covering up his eyes, perhaps, to shut out the terrible words … the terrible remorse … the despairing realization of how much he had loved her … a realization that had come too late …

A small wave, whose coming she had not noticed, slapped against her face, a little peremptorily, and she spluttered for a second or two, coughed, and went on swimming—noticing, for the first time, that the water seemed colder than it had a little while ago. Her arms were beginning to ache, and her back too.

“
YOUNG WIFE SWIMS TO HER DEATH
” …

Well, fairly young. Thirty-three isn’t
old,
and the reporters would naturally want to make a meal of it if they could.

“
MYSTERY OF DROWNED BLONDE
”—well, not blonde exactly, but they could hardly say “
DROWNED MOUSE
”, could they—and then the Coroner’s questions. Did the dead woman have any worries? Was she depressed? In financial difficulties? No, poor Rodney would have to answer: No, and No, and No. No, she had everything.
Everything.

“
THE WOMAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING
”—that would be the next headline. On the second day, that would be—the day after tomorrow.

The day after tomorrow. As soon as that, she, Maggie, just wouldn’t be there any more. Sooner, actually. Much sooner. By this evening, probably. By the time the lights along the shore were switched on tonight, she just wouldn’t be there to see them.

Another wave spluttered in her face … and another. Out here, the water was getting choppy, and very cold. She thought of turning back, then remembered why she was here.