02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (29 page)

I knew his faults, every last one of them. I knew he was arrogant, but I thought he was entitled to be. I knew there were other women. That part of our lives together— the physical—had never been a big part of the relationship. Perhaps at first it was my fear of pregnancy, being so much older than he. And how could I have a child by someone I essentially regarded as a child himself?

Nonetheless, he stayed with me—I comforted myself with that—long after his success made my fortune unnecessary. All I asked was that I be permitted, as his wife, to share in his successes, bask in his reflected glory. And that he never lie to me nor humiliate me.

Strangely though, as his social skills increased, mine seemed to decline even more. I was so long in his shadow, as I had been in my father’s, that I became almost invisible. At some point, I think, I ceased to have a separate identity at all. I went almost nowhere alone, and an old dread of social situations I had known as a child came back with a vengeance.

Except at my club.

I think I described a little of my life to you that day you visited the house. I’m not sure if I was able to convey to you how much I enjoyed the few hours every day I spent at my club, cocooned in a soft pink haze against the world.

I’d go for lunch, almost every day. I knew the staff and many of the other members by sight, if not intimately, the menu from memory, although it didn’t matter, since I had the same meal, the house salad, every time. After lunch, I’d swim in the pool, relax in the sauna, and then, anonymous in a pale rose bathrobe, I’d curl up in the lower lounge pretending to read a book, but in actual fact, listening, eavesdropping, I suppose, on the casual conversations of the women around me. I listened to them talk about their children, their husbands, their hairdressers, their various medical conditions. It didn’t matter to me what they talked about, only that I could experience their lives, banal though they might be, in this vicarious and comfortingly safe way.

But then that day, the last I was there. One of the women in the club I like least, detest actually, is a woman by the name of Rose Devere. She calls herself a journalist, but she is really a gossip columnist. She insinuates her way into people’s lives—hinting, falsely I’m sure, of some exotic personal background—and then reports in a petty and occasionally malicious way about the people she seeks to befriend. It was a wonder to me that she is able to move in the circles she does. She is, in my opinion, and I hope I do not sound too much of a snob, simply common.

In the lower lounge of the club there is a telephone for use of the members. Rose got all kinds of calls, of course, and I really tried not to listen to her conversations because they invariably disturbed the tranquility of my day.

That day, that fateful day, she was called to the telephone as usual. I tried not to listen, also as usual. But one word caught my attention.

“Malta!” she exclaimed. “You expect me to drop everything and fly off with you to some tiny little island I’ve barely even heard of? Why would I do that?”

I could not, of course, hear the reply. “Help you entertain important people? Like who?”

Another pause while the person on the other end of the telephone apparently pleaded with her to come.

“All right, but I’ll need new clothes,” she said at last, putting the phone down. “Gotta run, girls. Things to do, people to see, dresses to buy,” she said to no one in particular as she hurried from the room, taking with her all the pleasure, the comfort, the security, I had ever felt in that place.

I actually didn’t feel anything. Not then. I calmly changed back into my street clothes, called the valet for my car, and drove home. I listened to the phone messages, one about a party a week or so later, the other a message from your shipper saying he would be by for the furniture before eight. I packed Martin’s suitcase for his trip as I always did. And then because he had asked for a light meal before his flight and it was Coralee’s day off, I set his place at the counter in the kitchen with my characteristic care—Martin liked everything to be just so—and sat in the darkening room, waiting for him to come home.

When he did, for a time I did nothing. If he thought it strange that I had been sitting in the kitchen in the dark, he didn’t say anything. I made him bacon and eggs and toast as I always do on Coralee’s day off. I am not a good cook, and this is really the only thing I can make that Martin likes… liked. While he ate, he talked a bit about the project he was working on in Rome where he was going to spend a couple of days, about the flight that evening, complaining there was no first or business class, then he started talking about Malta.

“So sorry you can’t come with me this time. But it’s business. Lots of boring entertaining. The Prime Minister and a couple of Cabinet Ministers. Men only. Just as well. It’s not your cup of tea, I know. You find these social events difficult. But when I get back, we’ll go to the house in the Caribbean, just the two of us, for a rest. A little romantic interlude, okay?”

I tried to respond to him, but I couldn’t. I felt as if all the air had been sucked from the room, my lungs, then my veins and arteries, collapsing in the vacuum until a film, a kind of reddish haze, covered my eyes.

What was I feeling? Fear? Anger? Rage?

The knife was just lying there. I have asked myself over and over, what would have happened if it hadn’t been there, if it had not been Coralee’s day off? But it was. Perhaps the question I should ask myself is, why? After all this time? Knowing him as I did?

With a strength I didn’t know I had, I stabbed him. He did not die immediately. Instead, for a few moments we were both locked in suspended animation, he with a surprised, almost sad, expression on his face. Then he just fell.

There was surprisingly little blood, not nearly as much as I would have expected, just a few spots brilliant red against the white marble. The strength that had driven the knife into him with such ferocity stayed with me as I lifted him into the oak chest, pulled the knife out, cutting myself in the process, and closed the lid.

With a strangely methodical quality, I cleaned up the blood with a paper towel, which I then flushed away, and then I removed your yellow marker from the sideboard in the hallway, and put it on his—coffin. I owe you an apology for that. I wasn’t thinking very clearly and it pains me to think I had inadvertently ensured you would be the one to find the body.

I changed my clothes and packed a few of my own clothes, only the barest of necessities, in his suitcase, took his billfold with the airline ticket, money, and passport, and drove his car, wearing his driving gloves, to the airport. I knew your shipper would be calling for the furniture shortly, but I also knew Coralee, predictable as always, would be home by the time he arrived. Indeed, as I got to the end of the street, I saw Coralee descending from the bus, but I don’t believe she saw the car. On my way to the airport, I dropped the knife and my blouse with Martin’s blood on it into a large garbage bin in an industrial park far from the house.

At the airline counter I presented his ticket and my own passport. Have you noticed how they never really look at you? No one noticed that the M. Galea on the ticket was a Mr. rather than a Mrs., and I boarded the plane, which was full. There was a mix-up with the seats of some kind. I did not get the one allocated to me, but it didn’t really matter. Nothing did.

In Rome, I encountered no difficulties. Here too they barely look at you. I’d worried all the way over about filling in a tourist card, but none was required. I showed my passport to the customs official, but he was talking to one of his colleagues in the next booth and never directly looked at me at all when he stamped my passport. And then I just disappeared.

I will not tell you where I went from there, nor how I did it. There were people who helped me out of sheer kindness, and I would not wish their generosity blunted by learning they helped a murderer. All I will say is that it is surprisingly easy, and requires very modest sums of money, to effectively vanish.

As I think I told you earlier, I have a little money, not much, but enough to live relatively well in a place where poverty is the norm, and where relatively small amounts of money have the potential to greatly ease the misery of those around me. I have pledged myself to do that, at least, to make up in some small way for what I have done.

It will be a novel experience for me, living without the perpetual advice and counsel of either my father or my husband, but I believe I will grow a little more confident every day. The Worryman you gave me that day in the shop is with me still, and I think of you when I rub my troubles on his back.

You will be surprised, no doubt, when I say that while I do not regret that last fateful act of my relationship with Martin, would even do it again, if the circumstances were the same, that I miss him so very much. I dream about him vividly, and wake with a feeling of his presence so real that I reach out to touch him. If I could bring him back, if I had godlike powers to make that happen, I think perhaps I would. But we, the two of us, would have to work out a new relationship, one where my newfound independence could be accommodated, where my opinions were held to be of some consequence.

I gather from the newspapers that the authorities believe that I may be dead, killed by whoever killed my husband. I would wish to remain so, yet I feel compelled to write to you. You were very kind to me on those few occasions we met. You seemed interested in what I had to say and respected my feelings. Now my fate rests with you. If you choose to tell the authorities of this letter— this confession—then so be it. I do not know if they can find me, but I know they will surely try. That decision I leave, perhaps unfairly, to you.

With best regards—and love, Marilyn Galea.

I sat for a very long time that evening, very still, watching the flames in the fireplace flicker in front of me, thinking about what I had read. I thought about all the truly dreadful things that had happened in the past weeks, the ache of the loss of friends, the anger that still was in me. Where was the Goddess now?

I am at the beginning as I am at the end. I am the sacred circle, spinner of the web of space and time. I am the cosmic “And”: life and death, order and chaos, eternal and finite.

How is it that you wrenched apart that which is inseparable? Why did you create the Either/Or? Because when you did, when you replaced Me with your despotic sky gods who rule from Without, you made Me something to be mastered, something to be conquered…

Neglected, devalued, insulted, and profaned I may be, but I remain. I wait in my sacred places, I live in your dreams. Nammu, Isis, Aphrodite. Inanna, Astarte, Anath. Call me whichever of my manifestations you will. I am the Great Goddess, and I will be avenged.

I took the letters, both of them, and page by page, consigned them to the flames.