Life Class (7 page)

‘It’s bloody freezing,’ Paul said.

‘You need to keep moving.’

They swam off in opposite directions. Paul circled the boundary ropes twice, sometimes clinging to the rope to watch the other swimmers. The shock of the water on his skin had cleared his mind, that, or seeing Neville’s work. The strength of it. In some mysterious way Neville had become his marker. It wasn’t friendship, though a friendship might develop; it wasn’t rivalry either. Neville was too far ahead of him for that. He didn’t know what it was. Only that he’d had close friendships that were less important than this wary, sniffing-about-each-other acquaintanceship.

The banks were covered with the starfish shapes of men spread out to expose the maximum amount of skin. Deciding he’d had enough of the cold, Paul hauled himself out of the water, found a space and lay down, shrugging away the scratching of coarse grass between his shoulder blades. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the orange glare behind his lids. Purple blotches drifted across, fading to nothing. All his doubts about his painting, his envy of Neville’s talent, his constant anxiety over Teresa’s husband dissolved into the warm air. He was drifting off to sleep when the orange light behind his lids darkened to black and a shadow fell across his skin.

Paul opened his eyes, squinting between his spread fingers. Of course. Neville. Eyes gleaming bright and malicious beneath wet hanks of hair.

‘
You
didn’t last long.’

‘Bloody freezing, man.’

‘You should try it in winter.’

Paul smiled. ‘You don’t mean to tell me you come here in winter?’

‘It’s been known.’

Extraordinary – when he seemed so fond of his comfort in every other respect. The man lying next to Paul stood up, scratched the grass marks on the backs of his thighs and wandered off. Neville took the vacant place.

Disliking the proximity of so much chilly wet flesh, Paul closed his eyes again. He could hear Neville’s breathing, feel him wanting to talk.

‘I’ve known Elinor a long time.’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘I suppose you must have done.’

‘The thing is, I’m in love with her.’ He waited for a response. ‘And I think you are too.’

Reluctantly Paul turned to face him. There was such an intensity of suffering on Neville’s chubby features that Paul could hardly bear to meet his eyes. ‘
No.
We see a lot of each other, obviously, because we’re in the same year, and I do like her. But I’m going out with Teresa.’

‘Teresa Halliday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’ He took a moment to think about it. ‘That’s all right, then.’

What an inept, bumbling approach. He was a strange man. Talented, yes, but malicious, too tormented himself to feel much kindness for other people, and bitter. What did he have to be bitter about? Choking on his golden spoon. But since he was here, he might as well get some information out of him. ‘Have you know Teresa long?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Neville said. ‘Way back. She used to model at the Slade when I was a student.’

‘Have you ever met her husband?’

‘No – and neither has anybody else. Why?’

Paul could feel Neville’s gaze on the side of his face. ‘I just wondered.’

‘You mean, you wonder if he really exists?’

Paul sat up. ‘You think she’s making it all up?’

Neville shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She likes drama. She likes to be at the centre of the stage with everybody else revolving round her. You saw her, the first night we met. She wouldn’t let Elinor talk to
anybody else.’ He waited for Paul to say something. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s a bit odd he never actually shows up. Look, all I’m saying is,
if
he’s real, why has nobody ever seen him?’ He rolled on to his back. ‘In two years.’

‘She does seem to be genuinely frightened.’

‘She’s an actress. They all are.’

They? Who were ‘they’, for God’s sake? Women? Models? None of it made any sense. And why should other people have seen Halliday? He was hardly likely to stroll into the Café Royal and drag her out into the street.

Abruptly, Paul got to his feet.

‘It’s getting a bit chilly.’

He wanted to get away from Neville.

‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll get dressed.’

He needed to be with Teresa, to reassure himself that none of this was true.

Seven

That conversation with Neville changed everything. He tried not to let it and, for a time, seemed to be succeeding, but the next time Teresa announced that she’d heard a noise and asked him to go outside and check, he refused. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

They were lying in the bed after making love. For a moment there was silence. He felt the tension in the arm that lay alongside his.

‘I’ll go,’ she said, reaching for her wrap.

‘No –’

Too late. He heard her bare feet slapping on the lino and then the creak of the front door opening. A current of colder air rippled across his skin. He waited. When she didn’t return immediately he got up and followed her.

She was standing halfway up the basement stairs, peering out between the railings. ‘Look, do you see?’

He followed her pointing finger across the road to a house with a large porch. In the deep shadow he thought he could see a figure, but even as he watched, it split into two. A courting couple.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, struggling to keep the impatience he felt out of his voice.

Teresa turned to look at him.

‘Come back inside.’

She followed him down the steps and back along the passage into the bedroom. ‘You don’t believe me.’

‘I do. But there’s never anybody there when I look.’

‘You think I’m making it up.’

‘No, I don’t think that. But I do think you might be getting it out of proportion.’

‘I had another letter.’

It was the first he’d heard of any letters.

‘Saying what?’

‘The usual.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘I burnt it.’

‘
Why
?’

She turned away from him. ‘Because I couldn’t bear to have it in the house.’

‘What did it say?’

‘That he’s going to kill me.’ She managed a smile. ‘They don’t vary much.’

‘And you don’t keep them?’

‘Would you want something like that in your flat?’

‘No, but I’d keep it. It’s evidence, for God’s sake.’ She shook her head.

‘If you took those letters to the police they’d have to take it seriously. Promise me you’ll keep the next one.’

‘All right.’

He sat down on the bed, his thoughts seething. He watched her carefully all evening. She didn’t seem particularly worried … Later, after they’d eaten, she got her dressmaking dummy out of the spare room, and went on with a jacket she was making. She was actually humming under her breath as she draped cloth along its curved side. He lay on the sofa pretending to read, but then got his sketch-book out and started drawing her, because this gave him the excuse to do what he was compelled to do anyway: search her face. Her eyes. Her mouth, thinned suddenly to a hard line, bristling with pins. He didn’t know what to think.

That was Sunday. On the Friday following, they got back to Teresa’s flat from an evening at the music hall, and found a letter on the doormat. No postage. Obviously delivered by hand. While Paul locked and bolted the door, Teresa carried the letter through into the living room.

He found her standing by the mantelpiece with a sheet of flimsy blue paper in her hand. Wordlessly, she handed it to him.

He read: I’LL KILL THE PAIR OF YOU – JACK

The capital letters exactly filled the space between the lines so the impression was of a child’s handwriting exercise. ‘Are they all like this?’

‘Pretty much.’

She was waiting to see how he’d react. He’d have given anything, at that moment, to have believed her, but even as he took her in his arms his mind whirred with suspicion. Capital letters. Why go to the trouble of disguising your handwriting and then add your name? It seemed stupid, but then, for all he knew, Halliday
was
stupid. He knew nothing about him. No, this was madness. He had to believe her. If she was lying now she was … What? Manipulative? Insane?

She was smiling in triumph. ‘There, you see? I told you he was hanging round.’

‘Why do you think he sends them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think he’s drunk when he writes them?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘Did he always drink? I mean, when you first met him?’

‘You mean, did I drive him to it?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Yes, he drank. Only it didn’t seem to have the same effect on him then. He just got a bit …’ A faint, unconscious smile. ‘Cuddly. But then after we married he started drinking more and … Well, if he was bad-tempered when he started it made him fifty times worse. Whatever he was feeling it made it worse. I’ve seen him sometimes, on a Saturday night, he’d have offered his own Granny out to fight.’

‘Where did he get the money?’

‘He worked for it. He was a furnace man. They work bloody hard. And they do need the drink. You see them come off shift, it’s straight across the road into the pub. They’ll sink five, six pints, think nothing of it, and they’re not drunk on it either. And if he was ever short of a few bob he only had to go bare-knuckle fighting. Take anybody on. The other lads used to lay bets on him.’

The warmth faded from her face.

‘Have you got a photograph of him?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘If he’s going to kill me I’d like to be able to recognize him. If you don’t mind?’

She went to the sideboard, reached under a tablecloth in the top drawer, and brought out a photograph. It was a wedding portrait, the two of them together, standing outside a church. Teresa was plump, smiling, full of hope, pretty, but not beautiful as she was now. Halliday was tall, dark-haired, not bad-looking, though his head and neck were unusually long so that his shoulders seemed to be surmounted by a tower.

Teresa stared at the photograph and her expression softened. Oh, she’d loved him once. How on earth had they got from the moment outside the church to where they were now?

‘I suppose he still loves you.’

She waved the letter. ‘You call that love?’

Her face was white and shrivelled. Coarse. For the first time she repelled him. Knowing it was the wrong thing to do, he began interrogating her. When had she left Halliday? How often did he turn up? When was the last time? She became restless under the questioning, and no wonder. He was being tedious, bad-mannered. No, worse than that, he was behaving like a bully, but he kept on. It was a relief when she finally lost her temper and told him to get out. He went without argument. He’d got as far as the door when she came after him, holding on to his arm, begging him to stay.

He let himself be persuaded. As she led him along the corridor to the bedroom, he felt the same urgency of desire as he’d felt the first time. He knew he ought to break off the relationship now, but he couldn’t. Beside these moments: the salty taste of oysters on her tongue, the fumbling with her dress, the smell of her skin, the rumbling of a train that shook the bed, besides these moments the threat from Halliday meant nothing.

After their lovemaking, he lay in the candlelight absent-mindedly stroking her hand. She didn’t wear a wedding ring, but worse – because it seemed to symbolize the power of the past more trenchantly – the flesh on her ring finger was permanently indented.
Unconsciously, he began picking at the groove in her skin until she snatched her hand away.

Paul lay for a moment in silence. Then: ‘Was he a good lover?’

‘Who?’

Who indeed. ‘Jack.’

‘No, not really. He only cared about himself.’

He wondered what she’d say about him. After a while she turned away from him and he heard from her breathing that she was asleep, but it was a long time before he was able to follow her and even then he had long confused dreams that were always threatening to turn into nightmares. In one of them he sat by his mother’s grave drinking a cup of tea, with a plate of sandwiches and fancy cakes balanced on his knee. When he looked up everybody he knew was there, eating and drinking, talking, laughing, their chairs turned in to face the headstone. And then, looking down, he saw the grave was open.

He came awake with a jump, staring around him, but gradually his breathing quietened. Nothing to be afraid of, he told himself, knowing all the time that he had every reason to be afraid. She’ll never rest, his grandmother had said. And she never had. Night after night she walked the corridors of his dreams.

But he was used to her presence. He didn’t mind. Pressing his cheek against Teresa’s back, he breathed in the smell of her hair, and, after a while, drifted back to sleep.

Normally Paul left before breakfast, going back to his own flat to shave and change his clothes, but this morning he lingered. They ate toast and drank coffee lying in bed and then she went off to the bathroom to get ready for her day.

As soon as he heard the bathroom door close he was out of bed. He began searching through her drawers, the bottom of the wardrobe, the sideboard, anywhere, not even trying to justify his behaviour. He needed to know – that was all. He didn’t even admit to himself what he was looking for, until the last second, when he held it in his hand.

A cheap blue notepad. Going across to the window, pressing his
shoulder against the glass to get as much light as the grey morning allowed, he saw that the paper was the same weight and colour as the letter she’d received last night. He put the pad and the letter side by side, rubbed the bottom edge of the pages between his thumb and forefinger, held them up to the light to check the watermark. Identical. That, by itself, didn’t mean much – notepads like this were sold in every corner shop and every branch of Woolworths in England. But on the first page of the pad he could see the indentation of letters where the writer had pressed hard. The K in KILL was particularly sharp and deep, but if you looked closely you could make out the whole sentence.

I’LL KILL THE PAIR OF YOU – JACK

There could be no doubt. He saw no way round it. She’d written the letter herself.