Beneath the Skin (22 page)

The study contained two filing cabinets, one tall and brown, the other short, stubby gray metal. I opened them both and flicked through the folders and papers, but they were incredibly boring. Mortgage documents, instruction booklets, endless receipts and bills and guarantees, invoices, accountants’ letters. It made me feel a small glow of love for Clive. This was what he did so that I didn’t have to. He let me do just the interesting, creative part, and he did all this. And it was all done, all arranged. There was nothing pending, no bill unpaid, no letter unanswered. What could I ever have done without him? I didn’t look at the individual pieces of paper. I just wanted to check that there was no file containing anything that wasn’t boring.

I closed the second filing cabinet. It was all so stupid. There was nothing here that could possibly be of any interest to the police unless they wanted to read through our mortgage agreement. Just more misdirected effort. I could have told them if they’d only asked me.

I rolled back the top of the desk. It made a horrible noise and I looked round nervously. I was careful not to do anything that couldn’t be undone in a few seconds if the front door were to ring. Nothing of interest, needless to say. Clive always said that one of his strictest rules was always to clear his desk before he got up from it. There was nothing on the work surface but pens, pencils, erasers, a rather expensive electric pencil sharpener, rubber bands, paper clips, all in some container or dish specially meant for them. There were pigeonholes with envelopes, notepaper, cards, labels. If nothing else, the police would certainly be impressed.

All that remained were the drawers. I sat at his chair. Above my knees was a shallow drawer. Picture postcards. I examined them. All blank. Then the drawers on either side. Checkbooks, new and empty. Holiday brochures for the winter. A whole lot of paperwork from Matheson Jeffries, where Clive works. All blessedly tedious.

The bottom right-hand drawer contained some large, bulky, brown envelopes. I examined the top one. It was full of handwritten letters. The same handwriting. I looked at the end of one of them. It was a long letter on three sheets of paper. Signed Gloria. I knew that one of the wrongest things you can do is to read anybody’s private letters without their permission. “Nobody ever overhears good about themselves” was a saying that came into my mind. I knew I mustn’t read them and what I really ought to do was to put them back and go to bed and put all this out of my mind. At the same time it occurred to me that in the morning the police might be reading these letters for reasons of their own. Shouldn’t I have some idea of what they contained?

I compromised by skimming the letters and looking at a phrase here and a word there. It may seem difficult to make sense of letters in that way, but words seemed to jump up off the page at me: darling . . . I miss you desperately . . . thoughts of last night . . . counting the hours. Funnily enough, my initial feeling was not anger against Clive or even against Gloria. At first I just felt contemptuous at the triteness of her letters. Do people having secret affairs have to express themselves in the same old hackneyed phrases? Couldn’t Clive do better than that? Then I thought of her at dinner when I had last seen her, leaning over to whisper something to him, looking over the table at him, and my cheeks burned. I carefully put the letters back in the envelope. The last letter was the most recent. I shouldn’t have read them; it would do nothing but harm, cause more pain, more humiliation.

Just one more bit. One paragraph, not just a phrase. I would allow Gloria a paragraph to do herself justice. The last one of that most recent letter. I needed to know where I stood.

“And now I must close, my darling. I’m writing this at work and it’s time to go home. I can’t bear not seeing you, but in September we’ll have Geneva.” Geneva. A business trip. He hadn’t mentioned that yet. “It seems awful to admit, but sometimes I hate her too, nearly as much as you.”

I laid the letter down for a moment and swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away. Hated me. So he hated me. Not loved. Not even liked. Not indifferent. Hated. I looked down at the letter again. “But we mustn’t. We’ll work things out and be together somehow. We will find a way, I trusted you when you said that. All my loveliest love, Gloria.”

I folded the letter and slipped it into the large brown envelope carefully, at the bottom, where it was meant to be. I looked at the other stuffed envelopes in the drawer, and even the thought of what they contained filled me with such desolation. I lifted the top one and underneath it was a photograph. It was a woman but it wasn’t Gloria. She looked as if she was at a party. She was holding a drink and she was raising it to the photographer in a jokey way and laughing. She looked different from any woman I knew. Fun. Small and slim and very young. Dark blond hair, short skirt, strange all-over-the-place blouse. But all quite casual-looking. I thought for a mad moment that she looked nice, that she could have been my friend, and then I felt angry and sick and I couldn’t bear any more. I put the photograph back under the second bundle and closed the drawer. I left the room, remembering to switch off the light.

I was in the dark. My life was the dark place. Everything I had once taken for granted now loomed over me, horrible. I had thought there was someone out there who wanted to harm me, and that had seemed terrifying enough, but now I realized nowhere was safe. Not out there, not in here, not with the person I had been married to for fifteen years, not in my own house, my own room, my own bed. Nowhere.

Josh and Harry were in America, in some tent up a mountain, far from home. Christo was pretending I wasn’t his mother at all. And Clive hated me; that’s what he had said to Gloria. Lying in bed that night, I tested that word, like testing a battery by laying the tip of your tongue against it. Hated. Hated. Hated. The word stung in my brain. My husband hated me. How long, I wondered, had he hated me? Since Gloria, or for years and years? Always?

Outside, there was a faint sigh of wind in the limp trees. I imagined eyes out there, watching my window.

Maybe my husband wanted me dead.

I sat up in bed, turned on the light beside me. That was ridiculous. Mad, a mad thing to think. Except, why were the police holding him for so long?

At dawn, after a night of jumbled dreams, I went into Christo’s room and sat beside him while he slept. Light was filtering in through his fish curtains; it was going to be another scorching day. He had thrown off his covers and his pajama top was unbuttoned. The fluffy dolphin that Lena had bought him at the zoo was clasped in one fist. His mouth was slightly open and every so often he mumbled something incomprehensible. Today, I thought, I would arrange to send him with Lena to my parents. I should have done it before. This was no place for a child to be.

The police arrived early, three of them, who moved into Clive’s study like a task force. I pretended they weren’t there.

I made Christo and Lena a cooked breakfast, though Lena, who never ate anything, merely picked at the grilled tomato with her fork and tried to push the rest of it into a pile so it would look as if she’d eaten some. And Christo, after piercing the yolk of the fried egg and smearing it round his plate, said it was all yuck and couldn’t he have his chocolate flakes instead? What was the magic word? I asked automatically. Please. Please could he not eat this disgusting mess.

The police left, carrying boxes. It was just a few months since they’d all been brought in and piled high at random by a group of surly and resentful removal men. Christo didn’t ask where his father was, because Clive was usually gone before he woke up anyway. Gone before he woke up, back after he had gone to sleep. Hated. My husband hated me.

The kitchen was a mess. The whole house was a mess now that I’d sent Mary off. I’d clean it tomorrow. Not today. I looked down at my bare legs. They needed waxing again, I thought, and my nail varnish was beginning to chip.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Hintlesham?” Lena asked me in her singsong voice. What a pretty girl she was, so blond and slim in her tiny sundress, her delicate arms tanned from the summer. Maybe Clive had thought so too. I stared at her until her face swam.

“Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“Fine.” I put my fingers against my face; my skin felt thin and old. “I slept badly. . . .” I trailed off.

“I want to watch the cartoons.”

“Not now, Christo.”

“I want to watch cartoons!”

“No.”

“You’re a bumhole.”

“Christo!” I seized his upper arm and pinched it fiercely.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

I let go of his arm and turned to Lena, who was looking demure.

“Today is a bit complicated,” I said vaguely. “Maybe you and Christo could go to the park, take a picnic, go to the bouncy castle.”

“I don’t wanner picnic.”

“Please, Christo.”

“I wanner stay with you.”

“Not today, darling.”

“Come on, Chrissy, let’s choose your clothes.” Lena stood up. No wonder Christo loved her. She never got cross, just chanted things at him in her funny voice.

I put my head in my hands. Dust and dirt everywhere. Ironing to be done. No one to help me. Clive in the police station, answering questions. What questions? Do you hate your wife, Mr. Hintlesham? How much do you hate her? Enough to send her razor blades?

They left together, hand in hand. Christo wore red shorts and a stripy shirt. I stared at the congealing food on their plates. I stared at the window, which needed washing. And there was a spider’s web on the light above me. Where was the spider, I wondered.

The doorbell rang and I jumped. It was Stadler, crumpled and sweaty, with stubble on his face. He looked as if he hadn’t gone to bed.

“Can I just ask a couple of questions, Jenny?” He always called me Jenny now, as if we were friends, lovers.

“More questions?”

“One,” he said, with a tired smile.

We walked downstairs, where he turned down offers of coffee and breakfast. He looked around.

“Where’s Lynne?” he asked.

“Sitting outside in her car,” I said. “You must have passed her.”

“Right,” he said dully. He hardly seemed awake.

“You wanted to ask a question?”

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s just a detail. Can you remember where you were on Saturday July seventeenth?”

I made a feeble attempt to recall and gave up.

“You’ve got my appointment book, haven’t you?”

“Yes. All you wrote on that day was ‘Collect fish.’ ”

“Oh, yes, I remember.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was at home. Cooking, preparing things.”

“With your husband?”

“No,” I said. Stadler gave a visible start, then a smile of suppressed triumph. “I don’t see why you need to look surprised. As you know, he’s hardly ever here.”

“Do you know where he was?”

“He had to go out, he told me. Urgent business.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I was cooking a meal for us. He told me in the morning he had to go out.”

I remembered the day clearly. It had been Lena’s day off. Harry and Josh had lounged around and squabbled, before going out with separate friends; Christo had watched television most of the day, and played with his Legos, and gone to bed early, worn out by heat and bad temper, and I had sat in the kitchen with the ruined day behind me and my beautiful meal spread out on the table, long-stemmed wineglasses and flowers from the garden, and he hadn’t come back.

“He was out the whole day then?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you be precise about times?”

As I spoke I could hear my own voice, flat, sad.

“He left too early to be able to go to the fishmonger’s. He came back at about midnight. Maybe a bit later. He wasn’t there when I went to sleep.”

“Are you willing to make a statement repeating all that?”

I shrugged.

“If you want. I assume you’re not going to tell me why it matters.”

Stadler startled me by taking hold of my hand and holding it.

“Jenny,” he said softly, his voice like a caress. “All I can tell you is that all of this will soon be over, if that is of any comfort to you.”

I felt myself going red.

“Oh” was all I could manage in response, like some village idiot.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

I didn’t want him to go, but I couldn’t say that, of course. I pulled my hands away.

“Good,” I said.

I lay on my bed in a puddle of sunlight. I couldn’t move. My limbs felt weighted down and my brain sluggish, as if I were under water.

I lay in a cool bath and closed my eyes and tried not to think. I wandered from room to room. Why had I ever liked this house? It was ugly, cold-hearted, unsatisfactory. I would move from here, start again.

I wished Josh would call me. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to stay there if he hated it so very much. It wasn’t worth the wretchedness; I saw that now.

I went into the boys’ rooms and fingered the clothes in their wardrobes, the trophies on their shelves. We were all so very far from each other. I caught sight of myself in the long mirror in the hall—a thin, middle-aged woman with greasy hair and bony knees, wandering about like a lost thing in a house that was too large for her.

Outside, the sky was hazy with heat and fumes.

Maybe we could move to the country, to a small cottage with roses round the door. We could have a swimming pool and a beech tree the boys could climb.

I opened the fridge and stared inside.

The doorbell rang.

I was unable to speak. It was just not possible. It wasn’t real. I just shook my head as if I could clear the confusion away. Links leaned closer, as if I were short-sighted and deaf as well as mad.

“Did you hear what I said, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“What?”

“Your husband, Clive Hintlesham,” he said, as if it had to be spelled out, detail by detail. “An hour ago. We charged him with the murder of Zoe Haratounian on the morning of July seventeenth, nineteen ninety-nine.”