Читать книгу The Office of the Dead - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 12

I don’t keep many photographs. I am afraid of nostalgia. You can drown in dead emotions.

Among the photographs I have thrown away is the shot of Henry bouncing on his widow on the beach. I knew at once that it could be valuable, that it meant I could divorce Henry without any trouble. At the time, the remarkable thing was how little the end of the marriage seemed to matter. Perhaps, I thought as I took the film out of the camera, perhaps it was never really a marriage at all, just a mutually convenient arrangement which had now reached a mutually convenient end.

I still have a snap of us by the pool in somebody’s back garden in Durban with Henry sucking in his tummy and me showing what at the time seemed a daring amount of naked flesh. There’s just the two of us in the photograph, but it’s obvious from the body language that Henry and I aren’t a couple in any meaningful sense of the word. Obvious with twenty-twenty hindsight, anyway.

In my letters to Janet I had been honest about everything except Henry. I didn’t conceal the fact that money was sometimes tight, or even that I was drinking too much. But I referred to Henry with wifely affection. ‘Must close now – His Nibs has just come in, and he wants his tea. He sends his love, as do I.’

It was pride. Janet had her Mr Perfect and I wanted mine, or at least the illusion of him. But I think I’d known the marriage was in trouble before the episode with the widow. What I saw on the beach merely confirmed it.

‘I want a divorce,’ I said to Henry when he came back to our room in the hotel. By the smell of him he’d fortified himself in the bar downstairs.

‘Wendy – please. Can’t we –?’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘Darling. Listen to me. I –’

‘I mean it.’

‘All right,’ he said, his opposition crumbling with humiliating speed. ‘As soon as you like.’

I felt sober now and I had a headache. I had found the bottle of black hair dye hidden as usual in one of the pockets of his suitcase. It was empty now. I’d poured the contents over his suits and shirts.

‘No hard feelings,’ I lied. ‘I’ll let you have some money.’

He looked across the room at me and smiled rather sadly. ‘What money?’

‘You know something?’ I said. ‘When I saw you on top of that cow, your bum was wobbling around all over the place. It was like an old man’s. The skin looked as if it needed ironing.’

In the four months after I found Henry doing physical jerks on top of his widow, I wrote to Janet less often than usual. I sent her a lot of postcards. Henry and I were moving around, I said, which was true. Except, of course, we weren’t moving around together. In a sense I spent those four months pretending to myself and everyone else that everything was normal. I didn’t want to leave my rut even if Henry was no longer in there with me.

Eventually the money ran low and I made up my mind I had to do something. I came back to London. It was February now, and the city was grey and dank. I found a solicitor in the phone book. His name was Fielder, and the thing I remember most about him was the ill-fitting toupee whose colour did not quite match his natural hair. He had an office in Praed Street above a hardware shop near the junction with Edgware Road.

I went to see him, explained the situation and gave him the address of Henry’s solicitor. I told him about the photograph but didn’t show it to him, and I mentioned my mother’s money too. He said he’d see what he could do and made an appointment for me the following week.

Time crawled while I waited. I had too much to think about and not enough to do. When the day came round, I went back to Fielder’s office.

‘Well, Mrs Appleyard, things are moving now.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards me. ‘The wheels are turning. Time for a fresh start, eh?’

I opened the sheet of paper. It was a bill.

‘Just for interim expenses, Mrs Appleyard. No point in letting them mount up.’

‘What does my husband’s solicitor say?’

‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem there.’ Mr Fielder patted his face with a grubby handkerchief. He wore a brown double-breasted pinstripe suit which encased him like a suit of armour and looked thick enough for an Arctic winter. There were drops of moisture on his forehead, and his neck bulged over his tight, hard collar. ‘Yes, a bit of a problem.’

‘Do you mean there isn’t any money?’

‘I did have a reply from Mr Appleyard’s solicitor.’ Fielder scrabbled among the papers on his desk for a few seconds and then gave up the search. ‘The long and the short of it is that Mr Appleyard told him your joint assets no longer seem to exist.’

‘But there must be something left. Can’t we take him to court?’

‘We could, Mrs Appleyard, we could. But we’d have to find him first. Unfortunately Mr Appleyard seems to have left the country. In confidence I may tell you he hasn’t even settled his own solicitor’s bill.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not a desirable state of affairs at all. Not at all. Which reminds me …?’

‘Don’t worry.’ I opened my handbag and dropped the bill into it.

‘Of course. And then we’ll carry on in Mr Appleyard’s absence. It should be quite straightforward.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By the way, your husband left a letter for you care of his solicitor. I have it here.’

‘I don’t want to see it.’

‘Then what would you like me to do with it?’

‘I don’t care. Put it in the wastepaper basket.’ My voice sounded harsh, more Bradford than Hillgard House. ‘I don’t mean to seem rude, Mr Fielder, but I don’t think he has anything to say that I want to hear.’

Walking back to my room along the crowded pavement I wanted to blame Fielder. He had been inefficient, he had been corrupt, but even then I knew neither of these things were true. I just wanted to blame somebody for the mess my life was in. Henry was my preferred candidate but he wasn’t available. So I had to focus my anger on poor Fielder. Before I reached my room, I’d invented at least three cutting curtain lines I might have used, and also constructed a satisfying fantasy which ended with him in the dock at the Old Bailey with myself as the chief prosecution witness. Fantasies reveal the infant that lives within us all. Which is why they’re dangerous because the usual social constraints don’t operate on infants.

When I went into the house, Mrs Hyson, the landlady, opened the kitchen door a crack and peered at me, but said nothing. I ate dry bread and elderly cheese in my room for lunch to save money. I kept on my overcoat to postpone putting a shilling in the gas meter. Since leaving Henry I had lived on the contents of my current account at the bank and my Post Office Savings Account, a total of about two hundred pounds, and by selling a fur coat and one or two pieces of jewellery.

I wasn’t even sure I could afford to divorce Henry. First I needed to find a job but I was not trained to do anything. I was twenty-six years old and completely unemployable. There were relations in Leeds – a couple of aunts I hadn’t seen for years and cousins I’d never met. Even if I could track them down there was no reason why they should help me. That’s when I opened my writing case and began the letter to Janet.

Looking back, I think I must have been very near a nervous breakdown when I wrote that letter. It’s more than forty years ago now, but I can still remember how the panic welled up. The certainties were gone. In the past I’d always known what to do next. I often didn’t want to do it but that was not the point. What had counted was the fact the future was mapped out. I’d also taken for granted there would be a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food on the table. But now I had nothing.

I looked for the letter after Janet’s death and was glad I could not find it. I hope she destroyed it. I cannot remember exactly what I told her, though I would have kept nothing back except perhaps my envy of her. What I do remember is how I felt while I was writing that letter in the chilly little room in Paddington. I felt I was trying to swim in a black sea. The waves were so rough and my waterlogged clothes weighed me down. I was drowning.

Early in the evening I went out to post the letter. On the way back I passed a pub. A few yards down the pavement I stopped, turned back and went into the saloon bar. It was a high-ceilinged room with mirrors on the walls and chairs upholstered in faded purple velvet. Apart from two old ladies drinking port, it was almost empty, which gave me courage. I marched up to the counter and ordered a large gin and bitter lemon, not caring what they thought of me.

‘Waiting for someone then?’ the barmaid asked.

‘No.’ I watched the gin sliding into the glass and moistened my lips. ‘You’re not very busy tonight.’

I doubt if the place was ever busy. It smelled of failure. That suited me. I sat in the corner and drank first one drink, then another and then a third. A man tried to pick me up and I almost said yes, just for the hell of it.

There were women around here who made a living from men. You saw them hanging round the station and on street corners, huddled in doorways or bending down to a car window to talk to the man inside. Could I do that? Would you ever get used to having strange men pawing at you? How much would you charge them? And what happened when you grew old and they stopped wanting you?

To escape the questions I couldn’t answer, I had another drink, and then another. In the end I lost count. I knew I was drinking tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s supper, and then the day after’s meals as well, and in a way that added to the despairing pleasure the process gave me. The barmaid and her mother persuaded me to leave when I ran out of money and started crying.

I dragged myself back to the bed and breakfast. On my way in I met Mrs Hyson. She knew what I’d been doing, I could see it in her face. She could hardly have avoided knowing. I must have smelt like a distillery and it was a miracle I got up those stairs without falling over. It was too much trouble to take off my clothes. The room was swaying so I lay down on top of the eiderdown. Slowly the walls began to revolve round the bed. The whole world had tugged itself free from its moorings. The last thing I remember thinking was that Mrs Hyson would probably want me out of her house by tomorrow.