The Crimson Rooms (49 page)

She blew smoke, took another swig, and examined her little naked feet with their crimson toenails. “So, in any case,” she said, “if you’re in love, my girl, does that mean that you won’t be interested in my proposal? I have come up with a final plan. If this one doesn’t work, I do believe I’ll give up and go back to Canada, so it’s down to you. I arrived here and disliked you. Then you hit me and I loathed you. Then, I think, we started to soften toward each other. And now I find I am very interested in you. I even think I like you enough to want to live with you permanently. I thought you and I could set up somewhere. Leave the others in this house, get them to take a couple of lady lodgers to compensate for your income. Within a few months they’ll scarcely notice anything has changed.”

I was so taken aback that I made the first objection that came into my head. “Prudence will notice. Prudence worships you. Didn’t you realize?”

“Ah, you’ve spotted that, have you? Then don’t you see that for her sake, if for no other reason, I must move out, and soon?”

“How would we manage? I’d be working . . . there’s Edmund.”

“I’ve thought it all out. I will return to nursing, earn some money. Yes, I’ll retrain, find my way back. And I shall paint. And you will look after Edmund while I’m out in the evenings or we’ll hire Min to come in from time to time. Or he can come back here for his tea. And you and I will have each other and we will be wild and free, a couple of spinster girls. But all this is a pipe dream now because you have this man, whoever he is. Or am I wrong?”

Another surge of blood to the heart. Nicholas.

The sky was now ink-dark except for a sliver of moon. The city was much quieter, as if the night sky was heavy, like pudding, and pressed a hush on the traffic. I said: “But how can you forgive me for James? Won’t I remind you of James?”

Her eyes were wide and unblinking. I saw the religious in her, I saw her as an ecstatic who wanted nothing less than to give everything. I felt the spiky complexity of her character and that she was constantly striving to smooth herself out, to find a way of being that would make life bearable. “You do remind me of James. You were a great part of James, did you know? I never told you, did I, that he once said how much he missed you.”

“Did he say that?”

“He did. He described this house as pretty dull, I’m afraid, and the future that had been planned for him as one he would sooner get out of. But he described you as his champion, his friend. He said you were much sharper than he. I was interested in you even then.”

Did I believe her? Did it matter?

“Anyway, I want to be reminded of James,” she said. “I have spent years trying to forget and it doesn’t work. Not just what James did to me but the whole show comes back to haunt me. I have only to see a dead tree or a man on a crutch and there I am, probing a foul wound or closing a dead boy’s eyes. When I see mud or blood or any kind of ugliness, I am reminded. And each time it’s a blow. It makes me shrink because I’m always cowering, waiting for the next. But when I’m with you, however vile you are, I feel better. You are a consequence, a continuum, and not all bad. Do you understand?”

After a long pause, she added: “But listen, Sylvia knows of a flat in Pimlico overlooking the river, quite cheap, she thought no more than fourteen shillings a week each—a friend of hers is renting at the moment but is getting married so it will be vacant from next month. She’s arranging for me to go visit on Thursday afternoon. If you won’t share with me, I might find someone else, maybe from the art class—not Margot, I can’t stand her. Sylvia. Ah. But she’s engaged, isn’t she? She won’t be looking to share a flat with anyone.”

Did she know? She couldn’t know. For a moment I wondered whether this entire conversation had been staged so that we would reach this point. Her face was turned toward me, eyes huge in the moonlight, little teeth glinting.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say: I couldn’t help myself, Meredith, I had to have him. But how could I, to her of all people?

Her parting shot was: “Prudence has agreed to collect Edmund from school the next couple of days because I want to come with you to the trial. Would I get a seat, do you think? After all, I went to all those hospitals with you, I feel as if I have a stake in poor Stella’s fate.”

The terrible irony was that I tried to dissuade her. I didn’t want her there, for the craven reason that
he
might come back early, that his business in Manchester might soon be finished, and I thought then he would come hotfoot to me. But her mind was made up, she would attend the trial except that on Thursday she would leave early to get to Pimlico on time and she would wear her green dress and hat, which she now considered to be her
courtroom
attire.

N
ext morning I found Meredith
a space high up in the public gallery, then joined Breen in the lawyers’ benches and told him Thorne had arranged for me to visit a Lady Curren in relation to the Marchant children. Breen tap-tapped the top of his pen on the bench in front of him. “You spoke to Thorne about the Marchants.”

“You know he was involved in Mrs. Marchant’s case, sir. He defended her.”

“Well, it’s good of him to take an interest.”

“Are you content for me to go alone to visit Lady Curren?”

“I don’t appear to have much choice. It’s short notice, Wolfe is busy, I’m needed here. Keep quiet and take notes. Even you should be capable of that.”

At that moment, in came the judge swathed in the stifling robes that already, this early in the day, made him sweat. Wainwright stood up, glanced at a watch hanging from a chain stretching from one side of his belly to the other, and said: “I’ll call Mr. Wheeler.”

It was something of a shock to see Wheeler’s legs and highly polished shoes when he was escorted from the dock to the witness box. His posture and heavy gait were bearlike. We had no idea whether or not he would choose to speak and when he was asked to swear on the Bible there was a moment’s absolute silence. Then he read the oath in his dismal voice, gripped the edge of the box, and fixed Wainwright with those oddly liquid eyes of his.

Not by a glimmer did Wainwright betray his relief that his chief witness was prepared to talk as he began with soothing questions about Wheeler’s name, address, occupation, war service, and finally the date of his marriage.

“That must have been a very happy day for you, Mr. Wheeler.”

“I never trusted my luck until that moment.” I remembered the wedding photograph, Stella’s regular little features, the flash of a false smile; Stella the dancing girl, waitress, fashion-lover. She was there in the courtroom all right, a will-o’-the-wisp to the rest of us but such a real, marvelous girl to dewy-eyed Wheeler.

“Mr. Wheeler, you wrote to your wife constantly during the war, didn’t you, and she replied? It’s painful for you, I know, but might the court be read some of your letters? If my learned friend is content, I shall read just two from the war, as an example of the others. But then I shall read another, written just before you and Stella were married.”

“Mr. Wheeler,” said Wainwright, “this last letter suggests that you still had your doubts, even on the eve of your wedding, about whether or not Stella wanted to marry you.”

The reading of the letters had a profound effect on Wheeler, though neither his posture nor his expression had changed. It was rather as if he had been struck so that even the blood in his veins trembled. There was a long silence while he dragged his attention back to the courtroom. “I still had my doubts about whether I was good enough for her.”

Wainwright paused while the jury absorbed this information, then embarked on a different tack. “Mr. Wheeler, the prosecution has been hinting that you retained that Webley service revolver after the war for somewhat sinister reasons. Can you explain its presence in your shed?”

“We all took stuff after the war. The CO wasn’t much interested in me—he was on the lookout for the real villains who would try to smuggle anything out and sell it off.”

“But why keep the revolver?”

“I thought it might come in useful sometime.”

Shocked murmur in the courthouse. “How, Mr. Wheeler? What possible purpose could a revolver have?”

“I thought it might be useful, should I ever want, you know . . . for myself.”

“Suicide is a very terrible thought, Mr. Wheeler. Why would you consider such a thing?”

“Why would I not? It was all one to me whether I lived or died, except for Stell. I never told her this, of course, but if she hadn’t wanted me, in the end, I would have done it.”

“Why would you have chosen to die, Mr. Wheeler, having survived the war?”

“Why would I want to live? I don’t want to live among the dead. They are in my head, night and day. I dream about them. It’s like I told Stell, even while I was fighting the war it didn’t much matter what happened to me except for her letters. Only they counted. She was the one bright thing. Otherwise I knew I’d be better off dead than living with what I’d seen and done.”

Wainwright again allowed the silence to extend before he said softly: “We’ve heard of one incident, related to a friend of yours, to whom you showed great compassion. Would you like to tell the court about the occasion you formed part of a firing squad?”

Silence.

“Why did you not attempt to be excused, Mr. Wheeler, when the lad was a friend of yours?”

Silence. Prolonged. Wheeler, with his head down and his hands gripping the dock, was inexorable.

Eventually, Wainwright changed the subject: “But once you were married, Mr. Wheeler, and you had won your Stella, why keep the revolver, then?”

His head came up. “Habit. And if she ever left me.”

“If Stella had left, what would you have done with the revolver?”

No answer.

“You say that you never told your wife that you had these suicidal thoughts. But you told the police that she knew about the revolver.”

“Yes. She wanted to see what I’d brought back from the war so I showed her. She held the revolver and said how heavy it was. She wanted to know all about what it felt like to kill a man. She was always asking about the war, I wished she wouldn’t. It was horrible to see the revolver in her lap.”

“Mr. Wheeler, forgive these intimate questions. You’ve heard Stella’s sister suggest that you were a jealous man. Did you ever have cause to be jealous of Stella?”

“Never. Never. Never.”

“She loved dancing. Describe her to me, as she danced.”

Wheeler put his head on one side and fixed his eyes on the clerk’s desk as if it were a dance floor. “She wore a little dress with silky bows on the hips. They’d play something like ‘Tiger Rag,’ she loved that, and this look would come into her eye, a faraway look like she was listening for something. And then suddenly she’d be off, grabbing one of her girlfriends, or a partner would tap her shoulder and she’d give him this smile like a yes, yes please, but dancing was serious for her, and once she started her body would free itself and her eyes would shine and her jaw would set, she didn’t smile when she was dancing, and those hands and feet would go. Syncopation. You know.”

“And that didn’t make you jealous?”

“It made me glad. She was so happy when she danced. And then I was sad because however gay she was, she wasn’t like that with me.”

“It must have grieved you that you couldn’t dance together.”