Designs on Life (17 page)

She gave a soft laugh and seemed to relax. “Then I’ll tell you. I went to a party given by Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler, who live at number twelve Grove Avenue. I got there about eight o’clock and I came home only a little while before you got here. I’d just had time to change out of my evening dress when you arrived.”

“Will Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler be able to say that you didn’t disappear even for a Httle while during the evening?” he asked. “Number twelve can’t be very far from here.”

“Oh yes, they’ll be quite sure,” she said. “So will several other people. It was quite a small party. If I’d vanished for a time it would certainly have been noticed. I’m not a murderess, Mr. Mellor.”

“Then I can think of only one other explanation,” Mellor said, “and perhaps you can help me with it. For instance, I’m sure you can tell me whether the man who did the murder is still here, or has he gone away without you? You were just going to leave with him, weren’t you, when we showed up? You’re fully dressed under that handsome housecoat.”

Catching Arkell’s eye, he gave a slight nod and Arkell went quietly out of the room.

“I may as well tell you,” Mellor went on, “that if he hasn’t gone already, it’s too late now, because the house is surrounded.”

As he spoke there was the sound of a shot in the garden. It was followed by excited cries, then by a voice shouting orders.

The woman leapt to her feet.

“The fool, I told him it wouldn’t work!” she cried. “But he said after the old man saw him he’d got to get rid of him, and he said I’d got to go with him, because he was sure, if I didn’t, I’d talk. Oh, the fool! As if I’d ever have talked. But he never trusted anybody.”

“And no doubt he said he’d manage it so no one would wonder why you’d disappeared,” Mellor said. “We were supposed to be looking for a dead woman, not a live one.”

The door was thrown open and Arkell reappeared, accompanied by a constable. Between them they had a man who was struggling fiercely as each of them gripped him by an arm. He was a short, squat man with crudely shaped features, which, in spite of their coarseness, bore a faint resemblance to the delicate features of the woman.

“Nobody hurt,” Arkell said. “He tried shooting it out, but Fred here got him.”

“Ah, I see, I see—one of the old familiar faces,” Mellor said. “Your brother, Miss Beddowes? Though his name was Hewitt when I heard of him last. How long since you escaped from Parkhurst, Hewitt? Three days? Seems it was hardly worth the effort. And Arthur Crick saw you here this evening, getting ready to leave, and recognised you, didn’t he? He’d seen you in court some time, I suppose. But how did you persuade him to write that letter before you killed him? By the threat of a beating-up, was it? He knew you were going to kill him anyhow, but in return for that letter you did it painlessly. But as your sister said, he was a very intelligent man. With you standing over him, he quietly put a stamp on the envelope. I expect that seemed to you a quite normal thing for him to do. But in fact he was leaving me a message that that letter wasn’t what it seemed. So even if the two of you had got away in time, we’d have tracked you down sooner or later. Now you can both come along to the police station.”

And wearily, because he had had a long day and knew that there was a long night ahead of him, Mellor added the words of the official warning.

On nights like tonight, about the beginning of December, I often suffer from an attack of depression and insomnia and find myself wandering about the house, feeling that there is something special that I ought to be doing, but not knowing what it is. I find myself wanting a cigarette, although normally I am a non-smoker. I start wanting to ring up friends on the telephone for no particular reason.

My husband understands these moods of mine and does not interfere with me. He is a very kind and tolerant man. He knows that the moods generally come on about the anniversary of the night my father died. That is how I like to put it to myself. I think, I speak, of the night he died, or passed on, or passed away, and my husband does the same. But both of us know, of course, that what we are doing is only avoiding saying, “the night he was killed, the night he was murdered.” Time does not soften the brutality of those words. If anything, it makes them crueller. After twenty years I find I shrink from using them even more than I did at the time, when there was no evading them.

Tonight my mood is an especially bad one, which is why I have started to write down some of my feelings. I should like to be rid of the past, and perhaps writing of it may help. I have heard people say that it does, and at least it is something that I have never tried before. I have tried travel, drink, even drugs. But the ghosts always return and while they are with me they utterly destroy the orderly contentment of my life, which I value beyond everything.

I know that the weather tonight is half the trouble. All day long it has looked as if it were going to snow, yet no snow has fallen. That is how it was on that day twenty years ago. About halfway through the morning the daylight grew murky and as I went about my usual work in the house, I started turning on lights in all the rooms. My father shouted at me from his downstairs’ bedroom that this was another example of my recent, insane extravagance, but really I could not see without the lights. Thick clouds had spread quickly over the sky. It was dark grey and looked like a dirty old pillow, ready to burst and spread its white feathers all over the city.

Feathers…

There I go, thinking of them again.

I had a dream about them last night. I dreamt that I had bought a new fur coat. As it happens, I already have four, my new ocelot that my husband gave me for my birthday, and my old mink, which was one of the first things I bought for myself when I inherited my money, and a very smart, short black sealskin jacket, which is about two years old now, and the musquash, which my father let me buy I do not know how many years ago and which I still keep for running around the shops. But last night, in my dream, I bought a fifth coat. I do not know what I thought the fur was, but it was dark grey and soft and silky. And then, when I got it home, I found that the coat was not made of fur at all, but all of feathers. Nothing but feathers. For some reason, this was terrifying. The dream turned into a nightmare and I woke up, shivering with panic.

My father had been sleeping in that downstairs room for several years before his death. He had bad arthritis, a bad heart, some trouble with his kidneys, and had had a slight stroke. Our doctor once said to me jovially that Mr. Greenbank had at least six illnesses which ought to have killed him, but that he would probably outlive us all. I almost believed this. I saw him as indestructible. Half helpless as he was, he clung to life with a kind of ferocity, growing murderously angry with anything that struck him as a threat to his security.

I think, in his situation, I should have been glad to die, but his limited, crippled life was astoundingly dear to him.

He was sure, from the start, that my marriage threatened him. I told him, I swore to him, that I would never leave him as long as he needed me, that Garry was going to move into the house with us and that that would mean that my father would have more help than before, not less. He only muttered some of the ugly words that he liked to use and asked me jeeringly if I really did not know that Garry was only marrying me for the money that would one day be mine, and was he likely, that being so, to trouble himself much about my poor old father?

Perhaps I should explain here that my father could not stop the money coming to me. I am sure he would have, if he could. But it had been my mother’s, most of it willed to my father only for his life-time, and when he died it would be mine. I sometimes think that that will of my mother’s may have been one of the reasons why he had that bitter determination to live on and on. For when he died he would lose all his power over me, except through what he had managed to make of me while he was alive, and that was the only power he had left over anyone. He had once been managing director of a big firm that manufactured woollen goods, and had had a lot of power over a great many people, but now his world had shrunk to me and the few old cronies who still came to see him sometimes.

I was thirty-two when I married Garry. My mother had died when I was fifteen, so my father had had seventeen years in which to mould my character. Garry was three years younger than I was. He was a small man, which for some reason I found intensely attractive. I am big myself, tall and lumpy, rather like my father, with an indifferent complexion and thin, mouse-brown hair. The sort of good-natured charm that I am told I possess now had had no chance to develop then, because I was about as lacking in self-confidence as a young woman can be.

Garry’s hair was fair and curly and his eyes were a vivid blue. All his movements were quick, vigorous and decisive. He had immense vitality. And he had a number of habits which I thought of as wholly, uniquely masculine and so accepted as somehow peculiarly endearing. He was extremely untidy. If he opened a drawer to take something out, he never thought of shutting it again, but assumed that someone would always be there to do it for him. When a shirt, or socks, or his underwear were soiled, he simply dropped them on the floor, knowing that I would pick them up and put them in the linen-basket. He was a chain-smoker, and used only to aim his cigarettes in the vaguest way in the direction of an ashtray. But he never said anything wounding or spiteful. He was generous with presents. And as for him having married me for my money, he had a good job with a big firm of estate agents in our northern town, and soon after moving into our house, he took to paying the housekeeping bills himself, to save me the humiliation, so he told me, of having to ask my father for the money. Also, Garry paid for our wedding reception, when, of course, my father should have done it.

My father would not come to the wedding and would not have the reception in our house.

“I don’t want a lot of people here whom I don’t know from Adam,” he said, “eating and drinking and making a racket. It wouldn’t be good for me. If you want to do such a damnfool thing, go on and do it, I can’t stop you. But count me out of it.”

So we had the reception in an hotel, and there, for the first time, I met Garry’s brother, Alec.

If there was one thing from the first that I did not like about Garry, it was Alec. I know that sounds absurd. A man’s brother is not a part of him. Yet, as it happens, Garry and Alec were more a part of one another than brothers usually are. Both their parents had died when they were boys, leaving them very badly off, and Alec, who was five years older than Garry, had always looked after him until he was able to stand on his own feet. So I did my best to see the good in Alec. It must be there, I thought, if Garry could be so fond of him. He was in the habit of consulting Alec about everything. He used to quote the things Alec said, kept telephoning him, and from time to time, if some specially difficult problem connected with his work came up, went up to London to stay with him overnight. For Alec was in the London headquarters of the same firm as Garry and had helped him to get his job with them.

But Alec was a noisy, vulgar man, red-faced, thick-necked, burly, with sly little eyes under thick lids with hardly any eyelashes, and he thought it was funny to be rude and ask such things as whether I couldn’t find a wife for him just like myself, rich and beautiful. He was drunk by the time he said it, and I could see how embarrassed Garry was, because even he never made out that I was a beauty. So I pretended to be amused and said that I would do my best, at which Alec flung an arm round me, gave me a great kiss on my cheek and said, “Ah, there aren’t any more like you, love!”

Garry and I had no honeymoon, as my father could not be left alone for long enough for us to go away. Mrs. Clarke, our daily, who did not mind coming to sit with him in the evenings when I went to the Townswomen’s Guild or to a concert, could not possibly have looked after him for a whole weekend. So as soon as the reception was over, Garry and I went back to the house and began our life together there. Garry went to the office on Monday morning and I went on doing the cooking, as I always had, as well as a fair amount of the housework. Mrs. Clarke, who came for three hours each morning, was too old, and the house was too big and inconvenient, for her to be able to manage it by herself. Garry asked me once if I would not like someone younger to work for me, or even a maid to live in, but I knew what an upheaval like that would do to my father, after the shock of my marriage, so I said I was perfectly happy with things as they were.

In fact, I was unbelievably happy. I had never minded doing the cooking and the housework. I had never been trained for anything else. And I went out so seldom that if I had not had some kind of work to do, I should long ago have died of boredom. And now I had Garry to cook for and look after, and for the first time in my life had the glorious experience of hearing my cooking praised when I had taken the trouble to make something specially good, and of being thanked for doing little things for him, so little that sometimes I was hardly aware that I had done them.

What a lot Garry taught me about living! I discovered my own body through him. There I was, thirty-two, and I had never known what a body was meant for. It was like being given the gift of life for a second time. I also learnt how much two people can enjoy themselves just talking together over a bottle of good sherry in the evenings, telling each other things which I had never dreamt it was possible to share with a single soul. You had no need of other friends if you could do that. There was also the joy of being told, not that I was incompetent, lazy and indifferent to the sufferings of others, but too kind for my own good, sweet-natured, gentle and in need of cherishing.

And always there was the delight of simply seeing Garry about the house, small, taut, vital, male. I loved simply to sit and look at him and think of nothing but him.

The flaws in my happiness were Alec and the silent war between Garry and my father. It became a silent war, not an open one, very quickly, when my father discovered that Garry never answered back. To sarcasm, unkind innuendoes and violent tirades, his only answer was a rather odd smile, as if he were enjoying a joke that could not be shared with anyone, not even with me. Then he would go out of the room and quietly do whatever he had meant to do all along. So Garry was always easily the victor and my father learnt to avoid quarrels which he was sure to lose.