Читать книгу Every Woman For Herself - Trisha Ashley - Страница 10

Late that night Angie came to the door and beat on it, screaming hysterically, ‘Bitch! Whore! Murderess!’

The last was the only one I felt truly applied.

Fortunately I was sitting in the upstairs bay window, sleep being something I’d lost the hang of, and my legs had gone too numb to go down, otherwise sheer guilt would probably have made me go and let her in.

After a while lights went on in several neighbouring houses, including Miss Grinch’s, and shortly after that a police car coasted quietly up and removed Angie.

There was a faint, receding cry of, ‘Pigs! Pigs! Arrest the murderess!’ and then the street slowly sunk back into dark silence.

I’d been wondering how I could break the news of the accident to Matt, but in the end I didn’t have to, because Angie did it for me.

He phoned to inform me tersely that henceforth all communication would be through the solicitor, and then put the phone down.

I suppose murdering his best friend was a pretty irreconcilable marital difference.

Miss Grinch continued to be my comfort and guide throughout this nightmare. I didn’t know what I’d have done without her, which was a far cry from the way I felt about her before she became the star witness for the defence.

She was now my bestest friend. Not so much a mother figure, as an acidulated spinster figure – everyone should have one, but they are a dying breed.

Em would have come to stay for a few days, but Father’s latest mistress was still infesting the house.

The housekeeping was, and always had been, Em’s preserve, and she wouldn’t stand interference, let alone a takeover bid. Outright war had been declared.

Normally this would all have interested me extremely, especially since one of the combatants was occupying the hallowed ground of my bedroom, but now I moved through the days like an automaton. I signed everything the solicitor sent me; Matt, true to his word, having ceased personal contact.

I’d be lucky if I even got the duck now.

Miss Grinch, like Anne, urged me to get my own solicitor and a better deal, but so far as I could see there wasn’t anything but debts and an absent husband, and I didn’t want half of either of those.

Anyway, I didn’t feel I deserved anything any more.

All I could think of was that ghastly thud as the pan connected with Greg’s head, and I was tortured with wondering whether I could have prevented it: I mean, when I hit him, I wanted to hit him – so was it really an accident? Was there a moment when I could have diverted the fatal downward swing?

I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure. And I felt like a murderess – I had killed someone.

Miss Grinch didn’t understand that. She said God would look into my heart and judge me, but I was afraid He already had. He just hadn’t told me the outcome.

We had had several people round to view the house, though I didn’t know how many were simply motivated by the thrill of blood. Miss Grinch had been conducting the sightseeing tours with a brisk efficiency reminiscent of Anne and Em. Perhaps that was why I liked her so much.

She had also helped me pack up most of the house contents, and soon everything except a few necessities had gone to auction. I didn’t keep a lot – I felt a certain revulsion at the things that reminded me of Matt (and through him, Greg), which most things did. Anything unsaleable had gone to the nearest charity shop, or in the bin.

I sent a small van of things to Em to store for me: the driver was cheap, but he certainly wasn’t willing, especially when it came to my plants. He said he had hay fever and wouldn’t take any of them, so I would just have to fit as many of them as I could into my 2CV when I moved, with the roof open, even though it was pretty cold to be transporting tropical foliage. I gave a lot of the smaller ones to Miss Grinch, who was delighted, so at least they’d gone to a good home.

Eventually there was just me, Flossie, and a few vital odds and ends left. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, we were marooned until after the inquest.

Angie had made banshee late-night appearances twice more on my doorstep, but been removed much faster than the first time.

I had been buying head-sized melons.

Skint Old Gardening Tips, No. 1

Always keep margarine tubs of compost on your windowsills, and whenever you eat fruit, push the pips or stones in. Water daily, and eventually something will come up. The novelty of this method is that you won’t have the faintest idea what it is.

Even in my numb state – which by then seemed part of me, like permafrost – I found the inquest appalling, although but for Miss Grinch it might have been a murder trial, which would have been very much worse.

The kindly coroner treated me like a frail little flower, and Miss Grinch with respect, but was firm about having Angie removed from the room when she became hysterical and demanded the death penalty.

She was still screaming, ‘Murderess! Murderess!’ as she was escorted out.

I knew in my heart of hearts she was right, even though the coroner assured me it wasn’t my fault at all, and urged me to put it behind me. The verdict was brought in as accidental death.

The coroner added a little speech to the effect that people who succumbed to the current craze for heavy cast-iron pans would do better not to hang them from the ceiling, and I’d have to second that one.

By the time I got out of the hearing the reporters from the local paper were encouraging Angie to stage the scene of her life.

She spotted me. ‘Murderess!’ she screamed with a certain monotony, tossing her black veil over her shoulders and then lunging at me with blood-red talons like a deranged harpy. ‘Murdering harlot!’

Well, that was different – but why harlot? Surely it was because I’d resisted her leching husband that he was dead? And she knew what he was like.

Fortunately, one or two people were holding her back, since I was transfixed by all the avid stares.

‘I’ll never let this rest until my poor Greg has justice!’ Angie howled. ‘Wherever you go I’ll find you, and make sure people know the sort of woman you are!’

I wished I knew what sort of woman I was.

‘You’ll never be able to forget it.’

Well, that was certainly true.

‘Wherever you go, I’ll follow you,’ she added, sounding suddenly exhausted, and dangling limply from the hands that a moment before had been restraining her. ‘You’ll never escape.’

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide …

‘Why, Angie?’ I asked. ‘You must realise by now I didn’t mean to kill him. Don’t you think I feel badly enough about it already?’

‘No, but I’ll make sure you know what it’s like to suffer – to be friendless and alone … like me.’ She drew a dramatic hand across her eyes and gave a broken sob.

‘But, Angie, Greg walked into my house uninvited and indecently assaulted me! And you must have known he was serially unfaithful?’

‘Yes, but none of them ever killed him!’

Well, there was that. And the more I protested, the guiltier I felt. Could I really not have diverted that fatal downward swing?

‘Besides, whatever his faults, he loved me,’ declaimed Angie, looking tragic.

‘Maybe he did, but he slept with anyone he could get,’ I pointed out.

‘They weren’t important.’

The voices of the listeners now rose in a babble of questions, but Miss Grinch popped up suddenly at my side, seized her chance, and hurried me through a gap to the waiting taxi.

‘How tall was Greg?’ I whispered as we climbed in. ‘Did you find out?’

‘Five feet, ten inches exactly, dear,’ she replied.

Looking back, I could see Angie still holding forth on the steps like Lady Macbeth.

‘I wish I was dead,’ I said dully. ‘There doesn’t seem any point to living any more.’

‘Clearly God still has a use for you,’ Miss Grinch said placidly.

‘Compost?’ I suggested.

‘We are all God’s compost, if you like,’ she said. ‘Interesting – I’ve never thought of it like that before. However, I am sure he has something in mind for you before that. He moves in mysterious ways.’

‘Like the frying pan,’ I agreed, and we were silent until we reached the house.

Miss Grinch bought the local papers, and thankfully I hadn’t merited the front page. Even with Angie’s theatrics I suppose they can only get so much story from a domestic accident without insinuating something libellous.

I was described throughout as Mrs Charlotte Fry (although I’ve always called myself by my maiden name), and there were several photographs of me looking very small and weird, like a glaze-eyed rabbit cowering under the menacing overhang of Angie’s bust.

My hair was now a clear white for about an inch at the roots.

‘I always wondered about that very dense blue-black shade,’ Miss Grinch said, scrutinising a particularly hideous photo.

‘It was my natural colour.’

‘Believe me, it is a mistake, once a woman reaches forty, to dye her hair a dark colour. Your skin has lost the fresh bloom of youth and the contrast is too severe.’

‘I know, but Matt wanted me to keep it black. He liked this sort of Goth look with the long hair and the dark eye make-up, because he thought it made me look young. He was so much older, so I was a sort of a Trophy Wife, you know?’

‘Yes, but you can do what you like now, dear.’

‘I don’t think I care.’

‘I’ll have my hairdresser come round and do something with it – have it made as God intended.’

‘God intended my hair to turn silver at thirty, like my mother’s, but my eyebrows and eyelashes to stay dark.’

Mother is Lally Tooke and when I see her on the jacket of one of her radical feminist books, or on TV, she looks a bit like she’s wearing a powdered wig, but she also looks good. We have the same big dark eyes, the purplish colour of black grapes.

Matt was always impressed by Father’s fame (or notoriety), dragging his name into conversations like a dog with some malodorous and grisly find. ‘My father-in-law, Ranulf Rhymer …’

He never felt the same way about my far-flying mother, but then, neither do I: that hand did not so much rock the cradle as break off shards and wage a bloody battle with them before leaving the field for ever.

‘You could start wearing prettier colours than black,’ suggested Miss Grinch, who had been pursuing thoughts of her own.

‘I don’t have anything else. Most of my clothes come from charity shops and jumble sales anyway.’

‘Time for a change.’

‘I can’t afford a change.’

‘My hairdresser’s very cheap,’ she assured me, and looking at her frizzed ginger-grey curls I could believe it.

She was right: her hairdresser was cheap. In a moment of madness induced by receiving the decree nisi in the post, I summoned her and had all my hair chopped off: very cathartic.

It was now clipped short and close to my head like a convict’s, but at least it was all silver. I left off the heavy eye make-up, which made me look like a marmoset in combination with the cropped head, but the loose black clothes (I’d lost weight) and big boots now looked ridiculous.

I’d forgotten how to eat as well as sleep, which was why my clothes hung on me, but there was no more money so the escaped fugitive look would have to remain for the time being.

A rare phone call from Mother in America.

The last time she’d called me was after I married Matt, when she’d said that I was a pathetic, downtrodden negation of everything the women’s movement had ever fought for.

Perhaps I was. And perhaps I might have turned out differently had she taken us children with her on her flight from Father; but then again, maybe not.

This time it was a congratulatory phone call, she having heard about Dead Greg.

‘Well done!’ she said. ‘A blow struck right at the heart of male oppression.’

‘More the head, Mother. And I’m not proud of it. I’m finding it very hard to live with the idea that I’ve killed someone.’

‘The guilt was his: it was his own fault.’

‘True, but somehow that doesn’t seem to make it feel any better. Mother, did you know Matt and I are divorcing? We’re waiting for the final bit to come through.’

There was a pause. ‘I’d have loved to have had you to stay with me,’ she said eventually, as though I’d asked. ‘But I’m afraid I’m about to go on a lecture tour for my next book, and – wait, though! – you could come with me, and tell everyone about—’

‘No, thanks,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m going home to Upvale.’

‘You can open the cage door, but you can’t force the animals out,’ she said cryptically, sighing.