No Love Lost (20 page)

‘Well,' I said, ‘there's the remains of lunch, chum. We'll go into housekeeping tomorrow when we see what the form is.'

Dinner was on the drab side and Izzy enjoyed it more than I did. There was nothing but tepid water out of the bathroom tap to drink, and I discovered that the main boilers from which we were supplied were out and there was no hot water. Finally I had a brain wave and went down to the secretary's room. There I discovered what I expected. Tucked away in a cupboard was a small tin kettle and a half-full packet of tea. There was sugar there and a cup, but no milk, and a gas ring in the fireplace. I made tea.

It was while I was drinking the abominable stuff, and fighting the unreal atmosphere of the empty school buildings crowding in all round me, that it occurred to me that if Victor had been an ordinary human being he would at least have left me a message. If he had it would have been a note. He was a man of notes and the whole school seemed to copy him. At Buchanan House no one ever seemed to use a phone or send a verbal message. If they were going to be late for dinner, or the team had won a match, or a leak had been discovered in a bathroom, someone sat down and wrote someone else a little note about it. There was no sign of an envelope upstairs but it occurred to me that he might have left one for me in his study and I went in there to see. There was nothing on the mantelshelf and I went over to the desk and crossed round behind the big chair. There were no loose papers, no miscellany, and certainly no note propped for me to find. Everything was meticulously tidy, as if its owner had cleared up before he left. The only sign of use was the blotter, well inked over because Victor was careful over small matters like stationery and did not have it changed until he had to.

I glanced at it casually and suddenly stood transfixed, my heart jolting on a long and painful beat.

One of my minor accomplishments is that I can read what is called ‘mirror writing' quite easily. I had been the overworked editor of a school magazine which had been produced on one of those home-made jelly duplicators, and I had learned the trick to facilitate corrections. Now, as I stood staring at the blotter, a message in Victor's precise handwriting stood out from the rest with startling vividness.

‘Thursday the 27th then, my darling. Until … rest assu .. love you … difficult … know that. Always, V.'

I glanced up from the message to the desk calendar, which was neatly kept to date: ‘Thursday, July' and underneath a huge red ‘27'.

I ought to have been furious, sick, outraged. The conventional streak in me which Andy had pointed out was aware of all the right reactions, but I felt none of them. I felt freed.

I suppose it was the generations of proud law-abiding religious women behind me whose legacies were deep in me, forming my reactions despite any fancy thinking which I might be doing on my own account, who suddenly let up and washed their hands of Victor. I realized I could go. I was absolved. I could depart and not look back … but not untidily. That was the last of the iron rules which must be obeyed. I could go free but I must not take revenge. I must not ruin him and above all I must not foul my own nest. He and I must come to understand one another and the parting must be arranged without fuss.

I took the sheet of blotting paper out of the pad and rolled it carefully into a cylinder.

‘Come on,' I said to Izzy, ‘we can go from here, old boy. But we must tell him first.'

It was about half after midnight, I think, when I decided to try out the home perm outfit on the side pieces of my hair. I had packed most of my clothes and I had very few other possessions because I'd been living rather as if I were in a hotel. Wherever I was going, I shouldn't have much luggage to bother about. I was not sleepy and I was not worried. At last I knew what I had to tell Victor, and I knew I had to do it the moment he came in. I should not look very imposing with my hair in curlers and he'd probably be scandalized by them, but that didn't matter any more. I had plenty of time and I wanted to get it done.

It was quite a business because of the hot water. Izzy and I trotted up and down several times with our kettle, and the directions on the flimsy folder inside the perm packet were long and complicated. All the same, we conquered, and by the time I'd
got to ‘
Operation
8:
rinse thoroughly but do not unwind
' the clock on my bedside table said two-fifteen.

I was in the bathroom with my head tied up like a pudding when Izzy began to growl. It was his warning noise, very deep and soft in the back of his throat, and it sent the blood tingling into the nerves of my face and back. I hurried into the bedroom to find him stiff-legged in the middle of the floor, his ears coming off the top of his head, every hair quivering as he faced the open window. Someone was in the courtyard, and since he had not entered presumably it was not Victor. I stood listening and presently I heard an odd splattering sound high up under the window. Izzy growled and started back as a pebble sailed in and rolled on the carpet near him.

I went over at once and put my head out, towel and all.

‘What is it?' I demanded.

‘Mrs Lane …?' It was Maureen Jackson's voice and I could just see her in the dusk. She was wrapped in something which I took to be an evening cloak. There was another shadow in the darkness behind her. I could hardly make it out at all and I assumed it was her dancing partner. I drew back at once. My towel was slipping and I was coy about the curlers.

‘Yes,' I said from just inside the room, ‘what on earth is it?'

‘Could – could I possibly speak to the Headmaster?' Her voice was most unnatural and it came to me that she was suppressing giggles. This was most unlike her, of course, but then the hour was not exactly usual. I could hear the engine of a sports car throbbing somewhere in the stillness and I decided that they were on their way home from a party where they had got a little high. Perhaps there had been a lot of gossip about us. Perhaps Victor had been seen with someone. Perhaps Maureen had been dared to find out if I knew.

‘Is he in?'

Something in the question raised a devil in me that I did not know that I possessed. I made a sudden irritable movement and did the silliest thing I have ever done in my life.

‘Yes, of course he is,' I said firmly, ‘fast asleep, and I shouldn't dream of waking him. Whatever it is must wait till tomorrow. Good night.'

Then I closed the window.

It was a mad thing to do, criminally idiotic. At the time I felt a vague premonition about it, but I did not dream then just how insane it was going to prove to be, for it was not until the following afternoon that Victor's body was discovered and by then he had been dead between twelve and twenty-four hours, so the police doctor said.

The day began quietly enough.

By half past four in the morning I had still had no sleep, although I had been lying on my bed for some time. Izzy was restless too, I noticed, as he lay on the rug before the dressing-table. His ears were pricked forward and he whimpered a little every time the school clock struck the quarter hour.

My wretched curlers were abominably uncomfortable and I was tempted to take them out, but I am one of those people who read instructions very carefully and in this case they were specific that five hours was the drying time. I bore the discomfort grimly.
Il faut souffrir pour être belle
, said the proverb. I didn't know if I was going to look particularly
belle
, but at any rate I thought I'd be a bit better. I had come to hate my role of the forlorn wife, and I was thankful I'd made a start at least to stop looking like one.

At five I got up and made myself another pot of the milkless tea. While I was drinking it dawn broke, and rather guiltily I took another look at the sheet of blotting paper I'd brought upstairs. I wanted to see if I could find out when the revealing message had been written. But all the other fragments were meaningless to me, and there seemed nothing to show how long the paper had been in use. I rolled it up again and put it in the long bottom drawer of the chest which I had emptied when I packed.

By this time I had decided where Victor was. I had made up my mind that he had driven to London to meet someone who had probably gone up there from Tinworth by train. I felt fairly certain he had intended to come home during the night but had changed his mind and stayed. I thought he had not telephoned because he had not wanted to bother to make excuses. He knew that I would put up with it, or had decided that it did not matter if I did not.

The more I thought about it the more obvious all this appeared. The tone of the note had suggested an old love affair,
which argued that the woman, whoever she was, probably was one of the local ladies who had caused the scandal last winter. It was because of that scandal that I thought they wouldn't risk spending an evening together nearer than the city, and I guessed he had not kept, me informed because he knew that I would never fly into a panic and start telephoning round the town. He had trained me never to do that. There had been a most unfortunate incident a few weeks after our marriage when Victor had gone over to Tortham College for an evening conference. The meeting had gone on much longer than anyone had expected and he had accepted a bed from one of the house-masters without letting me know. I had got frightened that he might have had an accident with the car and had telephoned the Head's house at one in the morning. My call had caused no end of fuss in that fortress of academic conventionalism, and the savagery and the sarcasm of the reprimand I had received from Victor still brought the colour to my face whenever I remembered it. It had not been very fair, of course, but then that had been one of the lessons which had taught me not to expect ordinary fair behaviour from the man I had married.

I crawled back into my bed and lay there wondering who the woman was. I was ashamed of myself for not feeling more bitter about her. All my upbringing had taught that a good wife ought to know by some sort of magical divination the woman whom her husband prefers, but my intelligence warned me that this was moonshine. Victor had always kept me at arm's length. I did not know him. I did not know his taste, even.

I thought I had only closed my eyes for an instant, but when I opened them again the sun was pouring in through the window, Izzy was barking like a lunatic, and standing at the end of my bed was a little old woman in a bright overall and a shabby black hat which boasted a bunch of tousled but valiant feathers in it. She was watching me with a strange intensity, her eyes very wide open and her thin nose twitching like Izzy's own.

‘E's gorn,' she said with dramatic suddenness. ‘'Is bed ain't slep' in. Did you know?'

I lay looking at her stupidly for a moment while all the facts slowly reassembled themselves in my mind, and I remembered
the charwoman Miss Richardson had promised to send me.

‘You're Mrs Veal,' I said at last.

‘That's right.' Her unnerving gaze never left my face. ‘Come to do for yer. 'Aven't slep','ave yer?'

‘Not very well,' I admitted, struggling up into a sitting position and wondering what on earth had happened to my head that it should feel as if it had been scalped. ‘What's the time? Nine?' I stared at the clock on the bedside table with unfocusing eyes. ‘How awful. I'm so sorry.'

‘Don't you move.' In Mrs Veal's dramatic tones, which I had not yet learned were habitual with her, the words were a command. ‘Stay where you are. You 'aven't slep' a wink, you 'aven't. I saw it as soon as I come in. Lie there until I get you a cupper-tea, and particularly don't look at yerself in the glass. It'll give yer a turn. You look like a pore young corp. Don't you worry about nothing. I've got milk in me bag
and
a small brown loaf. “There won't be nothing there,” Miss Richardson said,' she said, ‘and so I come prepared.' She paused for breath and gave me another searching stare. ‘You
can't
'ave slep'. I saw my sister's youngest when the undertaker had done with 'er and she looked more alive than you do now, and that's the truth. Tossin' and turnin' all night, that's what you must 'ave been. Lie where you are until I come back.'

She scuttled out as suddenly as she had arrived and I pulled myself wearily out of bed and peered fearfully in the looking glass. The sight was almost reassuring. It was still me. I looked a bit of a mess and my eyes were smudgy and hollow, but I was recognizable. I began to pull out the curlers which had made my head ache, and was gratified to see a gentle but unmistakable wave. I put a comb through it gingerly, but it persisted and there was no sign of the frizzing I had feared. I was still examining my handiwork when the door opened uncermoniously.

‘There's no kitchen in this ‘ouse.' Sheer astonishment seemed to have robbed Mrs Veal of her histrionic powers. She spoke almost mildly.

‘No,' I said, and added almost idiotically, ‘I know.'

‘
No kitchen!
'

‘Well,' I began apologetically, ‘you see, in the ordinary way the school …'

‘Oh yers, I daresay.' She swept my explanation aside with magnificent contempt. ‘The school looks after yer like a mother, I don't doubt, but
no kitchen
… and they call it a gentleman's residence. Well, I never did, I
never
did! I didn't really. I'll go straight to Mrs Williams and see what she can provide and no one shall stop me.'

She was gone again with the speed of a bird, only to put her head in a moment later.

‘No master in ‘is bed and no kitchen,' she remarked devastatingly. ‘Whatever next?'

She went out again and I hurried after her and called to her down the stairs. It had occurred to me that if she was going into the Williamses I ought to make some sort of excuse for Victor's absence, since I'd asked the porter to leave the gate for him.