Theresa came down the stairs slowly; thud-thud-thud. She scowled at her pregnant sister-in-law.
“We don’t let people in here,” Theresa said. “This is our place.”
“Sorry,” said the pregnant girl, and scuttled.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Theresa. “It’s not the way it looks.”
“I’m not thinking anything,” said Alexandra, wishing she had not come round, not come in. “Though I would like the tablecloth back, some time. No hurry.”
“You just shove it in the wash,” said Theresa. “I look after it properly. It’s so delicate. It’s antique. It’s safer here.”
“All the same,” said Alexandra, mildly.
“So, what do you want?” asked Theresa. On her home ground she seemed a different person. More bad tempered, more aggressive. “All the way up here! It’s my day off. I deserve some peace. I’ve been upset too. You think you’re the only one, but you’re not.”
Alexandra said she understood that: everyone was in quite a state. She explained to Theresa that Sascha wouldn’t be back for a week: could Theresa hold on for that long? Theresa said she supposed so, if Mrs. Ludd didn’t mind paying her to waste her time.
Alexandra said she didn’t. She would heed help sorting Ned’s clothes.
Perhaps Theresa could come down to The Cottage and help her, and then she wouldn’t be wasting her time.
Theresa said she wasn’t paid to sort through dead people’s clothes, she was paid for child-care.
Theresa sat down in an armchair, pushing the arms out with her bulk as she did so. They were already half-off: effectively, they were hinged. Alexandra sat in the chair opposite. A small child with a grubby face and bare legs ran between them, and pinched some potato crisps from a glass bowl which Alexandra observed to be her own, leaded crystal, French,
circa
1705, £830. Theresa slapped the child’s legs as she ran off. The hand was large: the blow sudden. The child let out a howl. “Don’t worry, I don’t hit yours,” Theresa said. “Ned said not to so I don’t, but life with Sascha would be a lot easier if someone did. That kid is spoiled rotten.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘spoiling,’ ” said Alexandra. “Do explain.”
“You are a sarcastic bitch,” shouted Theresa, getting to her feet. The chair came with her. Theresa had to knock it away from her flesh. One of the arms finally detached itself so it fell separately. “Mr. Ludd gave me all these things. You can’t prove he didn’t.”
“I’m not giving them a second thought,” said Alexandra.
“Who do you think you are, anyway?” said Theresa. “You never loved Ned, you don’t even love your own child. Everyone knew that. You just had him to save your marriage. Why bother to have a baby at all if you just give it to someone else to look after? That’s what beats me.”
“Because I have to work,” said Alexandra. She could see that without Ned’s presence in the house Theresa as child-care was impossible. She had already given in: she could hardly be bothered to fight.
“You don’t have to work,” said Theresa. “No one has to work. You just love it, your face in the papers. If you wanted to, you could live off benefits like everyone else, but you don’t want to. You have to be someone special. You have to have someone like me to be better than, so you can boss them about. I’m so sorry for that poor little boy: he needs a firm hand and a visit to a psychologist. He’s disturbed.”
“It was your red bracelet on the bed,” said Alexandra. “Just your style. If it isn’t stolen, it’s plastic.”
“Nothing happened,” said Theresa. “I swear it on my life.”
Alexandra wanted to ask the nature of the non-happening but in the end didn’t. What was the point of that either?
“I guess we’ve reached the parting of the ways,” she said.
A
LEXANDRA CALLED BY THE
morgue. Ned had company now. A metal trolley on wheels had been placed next to his. A small group of shocked relatives stood and stared at the body of a thin, elderly woman. Her jaw was bound to keep it closed. It was strange, thought Alexandra, how few people seemed to die, considering everyone did; how few dead bodies a living person encountered; how shocking it was when they did.
Alexandra had never hit Ned in life: though he had hit her once, during the herpes episode. But she hadn’t taken it badly; rather she had taken responsibility for his state of mind. She had assumed he was part of her, she an extension of him. She thought perhaps women minding men hitting them was a recent cultural innovation: in the past women had never tried to be separate from their husbands, or claim their separate personality. The aim was to incorporate, not stay distinguished. His flesh yours, your flesh his. But Ned’s death had put a stop to all that. So far as she was concerned, his part of the union was dead, hers went on living. Separation, individuality, had been forced upon her. She would have hit him now but could hardly do so in front of the old lady’s relatives. One was meant to respect the dead, unless the Government declared them an official enemy, in which case you just shovelled them into common graves so you didn’t get the plague. Alexandra aimed a quick kick at the trolley wheels instead: the trolley clanged into the end wall. Ned’s body shuddered, but stayed in place. She walked out. The others stared after her, further bewildered.
A
LEXANDRA CALLED AT ELDER
House. Abbie’s coolness had evaporated. She greeted her friend with a hug. Arthur wasn’t there. He had taken the students on a coach trip to Lyme Regis, where they were to have cream teas and look at Jane Austen’s house. Abbie was making plum jam. The air in the kitchen was full of a pungent sweetness. Abbie hoped the plums were not too ripe. They should have been picked a week earlier.
“But you were looking after me,” said Alexandra. “So they stayed on the bough.”
“True,” said Abbie. “But being with you at such a time was the most important thing of all. We’re friends.”
“But you were angry with me yesterday,” said Alexandra, “and now you’re not. Why’s that?”
Abbie didn’t reply. So Alexandra described to her, complete with mime and appropriate facial expressions, the circumstances in which she had fired Theresa. “I always knew Theresa was hopeless,” said Abbie. “You’re so easily conned, Alexandra, you can hardly blame others when they do it.” And Abbie went on at some length as to how Theresa had been okay while Ned was there to keep an eye on things, but now what was she, Alexandra, to do: she couldn’t just land Sascha with a stranger at a time like this; he’d be traumatised enough; losing his father, his mother away all week. Babies were one thing: you could pay through the nose and get qualified nannies, but four-year-olds knew too much of what was going on ever to be shuffled off and not know it. Alexandra would just have to give up work for a time. Abbie knew Alexandra would be bored stiff in the country. She’d miss the thrills and the publicity and the media attention, but once a woman had a child, she was a mother first and foremost, and Alexandra must put Sascha before anything. Otherwise she was being selfish.
“The great modern sin,” said Alexandra. “Being selfish.” Abbie said that Alexandra must allow herself time to grieve, settle down in The Cottage and make it a happy home for Sascha. And be sure not to fall into anyone else’s arms too soon. But Alexandra would have all her friends around her to protect her. People who loved her. “Oh yes,” said Alexandra. “Them. The jam’s burning.”
A smell of scorching filled the air, mixed with sweetness. Alexandra quite liked it. But Abbie squealed and rushed to attend to it. She heaved the great steel pan off the stove to the side of the sink, and as swiftly as she could transferred the still-bubbling, viscous contents to a succession of smaller pans: pouring when she could, ladling when she couldn’t. It was dangerous work.
“Don’t burn yourself,” said Alexandra. Abbie looked at her friend uneasily, and while she lost concentration slopped a splodge of still-scalding jam on to her sandalled toe and the bare and tender skin of her upper foot. How she hopped about!
“You and Arthur and Ned and Jenny were planning a property deal, I hear,” said Alexandra.
“Who did you hear that from?” asked Abbie, startled. She had ice in a plastic bag and was applying it to her foot.
“Mr. Quatrop,” said Alexandra.
“Oh,” said Abbie.
“What was I meant to do?” asked Alexandra. “Or didn’t you think of that?”
“We thought of it a lot,” said Abbie. “Believe me, we worried about you all the time. But you would have had the London flat. You were always so happy there, Ned said. It was all just speculation. Testing the water. If you and Ned were to get divorced—”
“Takes two to divorce,” said Alexandra.
“But Ned said you and he were talking about it.”
“Always the humorist,” said Alexandra.
“Believe me, Alexandra,” said Abbie. “I only wanted your happiness. Ned just didn’t deserve you. It was horrible, what was going on behind your back. You’ve no idea.”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to tell me?” asked Alexandra.
Abbie abandoned the jam altogether and started crying, bending over her blistering toe. The sandal strap had stuck to it. “I didn’t have the courage. Nobody did. Somebody had to do something to bring things to a head so I thought this was it. You might just about notice a For Sale sign going up. I don’t know why one does things. Ned could be so persuasive.”
“But I would never have given my permission,” said Alexandra. “Ned knew that. He knew how I loved The Cottage. It’s my home. What would I want to be involved with a Theatrical Design Centre
for
, Abbie?”
“Perhaps he thought you wouldn’t want to be,” said Abbie. “Perhaps he thought you’d just drift off to London and the Sloane Square house. Perhaps he thought he didn’t need your permission to sell.” She kept her eyes lowered. Her foot was flaring nastily. The ice cubes hurt too much to keep in place. Alexandra thought a little before she spoke.
“It’s possible the house is in Ned’s name only,” said Alexandra. “I realise that. But he and I were married and have a child. Any court will recognise my claim to live in it.”
“That’s okay then,” said Abbie, flatly. “Jenny’s like a steamroller when she gets her tiny teeth into something.”
“She got her teeth into Eric Stenstrom’s dick a year or two back,” said Alexandra, “and turned it inside out. Did you know about that?”
Abbie said she didn’t, with an expression both so helpless and aghast that Alexandra believed her.
“I saw your name up on Dr. Moebius’s screen,” said Alexandra. “I guess you went into the surgery in a real hurry when you heard my name linked with Eric Stenstrom.”
“His partner died of AIDS,” said Abbie. “Dr. Moebius said I was right to worry. I wasn’t being neurotic. He said he’d hurry the results through for me. I was in such a state!”
“Why? Because you’d fucked with a man who’d been fucked by a woman who’d been fucked by a man who might have had AIDS?”
“Yes,” said Abbie. “I’m so ashamed.”
“I think you should get the plum tree cut down,” said Alexandra. “It brings no one any luck.”
Abbie pulled herself together, hobbled to the sink, and started cleaning the bottom of the big steel pan of its blackened layer of caramelised cooked plums. Wasps began to congregate. Alexandra had one on her hand. Let it crawl.
“You were with Ned when he died,” said Alexandra. “It wasn’t Jenny at all. She came into the bedroom and found you fucking my husband, and that’s when he had his heart attack.”
Abbie had the bottom of the pan smooth. She dried it out carefully. Then she began to empty pan after pan of semi-liquid plum jam back into it.
“Jenny’s excessive hysterics,” said Alexandra, “your excessive house-cleaning. These things come to one.”
“It was only the once,” said Abbie. “Honestly. Only the once.” Alexandra sighed.
“I did it for you, Alexandra,” said Abbie. “To break the Jenny spell.” Alexandra laughed.
“You couldn’t have borne it, Alexandra. I saved you from it. Having Ned die all over me. I’m glad for you it happened that way. I am your friend. I’d do anything for you.”
“Thank you, Abbie.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Alexandra, on top of everything. You don’t know how important you are to me. Please!”
“And you hung around to mock me and keep secrets, and conspire, having learned the habit from Ned, I suppose?”
“I hung around to look after you, Alexandra; I knew you’d be devastated. Better you thought it was Jenny than me, your best friend. Best of all no one. But that didn’t work.”
“You probably didn’t want to face Arthur too soon. You might have told him the truth.”
“I do tend to blurt it out,” said Abbie.
“Yes, you do,” said Alexandra. “I wish you didn’t. It was only another far-fetched theory of mine, waiting for denial. Now look. Does Vilna know?”
Abbie shook her head. She put the big pan and its contents on the stove and started swilling out the lesser containers. Boiling jam had splashed everywhere in Abbie’s haste to save at least some of the batch from contamination, from the taste of burning, and the sticky stuff had now congealed. Alexandra finally rose from her chair to help Abbie. She took a sharp, short kitchen knife and started easing off the deep purple drips from tiles and cooker.
“And now the whole world believes Ned died in Jenny Linden’s arms,” said Alexandra, “because she tells them so. She wants to own him in death as she never could in life. And she’s got her husband back and she’s laughing.”
“Yes,” said Abbie.
“You played into her hands, Abbie,” said Alexandra, “by not telling the truth.”
“I’m sorry,” said Abbie.
“And no one’s told Arthur,” said Alexandra.
“Of course not,” said Abbie, shocked.
“Well, well,” said Alexandra.
“It was you Ned loved,” said Abbie. “He talked about you all the time. It’s just you were away so often and Jenny was there in front of him all the time, lying down with her legs open.”
“I think she was very important to him,” said Alexandra. “At least at one time.” Worst fears!
“But I wasn’t important,” said Abbie, hopefully.
“You were still in my bed,” said Alexandra. The knife didn’t seem so short any more, and it squeaked against the ceramic as if it were very sharp. She raised it.