31st Of February (7 page)

Val had kept her job on
Woman Beautiful,
so when Elaine came the girls would talk office gossip all evening long. Fletchley never seemed to mind, just as he never seemed to mind Elaine going out with other men. “She always comes back,” he used to say to me. “She always comes back to old Fletch.” But at this time, when they first came here, Elaine didn’t go out much. She would talk office gossip with Val in the evening until I was nearly crazy. Occasionally I thought she was intending to make a pass at me, but Fletchley never seemed to notice, so perhaps I was wrong. I got so crazy with their talk that I suggested in desperation to Val that we should go out and drink. Six months ago she’d have leaped at the suggestion, but now she didn’t much want to do anything but drink a pint or two of black-market whisky by her own comfortable electric fireside while she chattered to Elaine. And when we did go out it wasn’t any good, because I didn’t really care for drinking and I could hardly even be polite to Val. “You’re never nice to me, Andy, the way you used to be,” she’d say tearfully, and look at me with her head slightly on one side Was it true? Had I ever been nice to her? I can’t believe that I ever was. She’d invented my niceness in the past to contrast with my howwidness in the present. We can’t recreate the past, but we can always soothe sorrow and vanity by inventing it.

So drinking was no good, and after a couple of years there was another thing that was no good, too. I couldn’t work up the least flicker of interest in Val while I was with her. When I was away from her – in the office writing copy, interviewing a client, sitting round a conference table – then very often I would positively shiver with desire for her. The most powerful and violent sexual images came to my mind, and they were not merely vague images – they had a positive association with Val. As soon as I saw her, though – as soon, even, as I knew I would see her within half an hour – they vanished altogether. It would all have been comic if it had not been deeply humiliating.

All this sounds like a good case for divorce, or at any rate separation. But strangely enough, Val never wanted a separation – throughout the whole of our life together she was absolutely devoted to me. And why did I stay with Val? I find the question absolutely unanswerable. It would have been difficult, I suppose, to arrange a separation. She would have wanted to go on living with Elaine. I should have had to get out of Joseph Street, and I didn’t want to get out. Then again I should have been lonely. She had become a habit, and we live by our habits. But there was something outside all that, something that held me to her. It was, it seems to me, precisely
because
I disliked her, because she filled our home with hideous furniture and empty chatter, that I wanted to live with her. The things that I most detested were the things I most desired! Shall I put down the image that came to me most often when I saw Val, tearstained and reproachful, or limply acquiescent in my unkindness? It was of my mother, and the ghastly house we lived in so many years ago – and of holding my mother’s hand as she lay, a pitiful and repulsive skeleton, upon her deathbed.

But now I come to the real reason for writing in this book – the effect Val’s death has had on me. We lived together for several detestable years. For the whole of that time I had seen with irritation the grease on her face at night, and her intolerable cheerfulness in the morning. I’d listened all that time to her inanities about clothes and film stars. Unconsciously, I must dozens of times have wished her dead. But now that she
is
dead, and the bathroom is free when I want to use it and I no longer find hairpins in the bed, I am oppressed by an extraordinary sense of loss. Not loss of Val exactly – that seems not to enter into it. Rather, part of myself seems to have disappeared. I feel like one of those insects – that goes on living even after being cut in half.

On Monday, February 4th, we went to work as usual. Val sang “Berkeley Square,” out of her repertory of out-of-date songs, in her bath. I had a worrying day at the office.

There the writing ended. Anderson’s perfect absorption in the black book had been such that he had forgotten to turn on the electric fire, and he now became conscious that he was cold. He was sitting also in an uncomfortable position, so that something in his pocket pressed sharply into his side. He put his hand in his pocket, drew out the pot of Preparation Number 1, and placed it upon a red-topped table with chromium legs. He flicked a switch, and the firebar glowed. But there was some other cause for disturbance – what was it? Sickly-sweet chimes sounded in the room. Of course! Val’s musical doorbell. Anderson put the book back in the small secret drawer, and closed and locked the desk. Then he went to the front door, and opened it to reveal a burly figure. The street lamp cast the shadow of this patiently waiting figure into Anderson’s hall. The face was left dark, but Anderson recognized Inspector Cresse by his bowler hat.

“Come in,” Anderson said with self-mocking gaiety. “Come in, Inspector.” With a catlike, almost mincing step, he led the way into the room he had just left. The Inspector followed more deliberately. Under the tubular lighting his face showed large, blue-white, slightly dented, with two strongly marked lines running from nose to mouth. The whole face was flattish, the nose a large, blunt wedge, the mouth broad and shapeless, but turned down slightly at the corners in an expression both clownish and severe. But the balance of these heavy features was changed altogether when the Inspector took off his bowler hat, revealing a great white head that was completely bald. What had been menacing now appeared ludicrous; and such sudden changes of appearance and gesture appeared to be part of the Inspector’s stock-in-trade. He had presented, Anderson thought, a quite farcical figure at the inquest; and yet at odd moments there was something in the firm fit of his clothes and his blank forward-looking stare that gave an impression of intellectual strength, though not of subtlety. Behind the figure of farce lay the man of power, behind the man of power lurked the irrepressibly clownish comedian. The comedian was uppermost when the Inspector took off his hat, and placed it, with a wonderfully whimsical gesture, upon the red table by the pot of cream.

“A drink?” Anderson almost danced round the thickset figure. “A cigarette? Sit down. It’s rather cold in here, I’m afraid.” He shivered in an exaggerated manner.

The Inspector sat in one of the chromium-armed chairs, his hard bulk filling it without overflowing. His voice was rich and thick, and at times he did not articulate with absolute distinctness. “I’ll take just a little whisky. Thank you, Mr Anderson. Nothing in it.” He held the amber liquid in one large blunt paw. “I called earlier this evening.”

“Fletchley told me. You wanted to know the width of his pyjama stripes. You Gallup Poll policeman!” Soda water sizzled in Anderson’s glass. He almost giggled.

“We had a little chat,” the Inspector said vaguely. “He’s a man with a sense of humour, which is something I always enjoy.” On another chromium chair, bent deferentially a little forward, Anderson smiled agreement, rocked by an obscure secret merriment. “A nice idea of his, to write those cards for birthdays and Christmas. Ingenious, too.”

“A nice sentiment.” Anderson rocked again.

“That’s right. Or don’t you think so?” A vacant orb, emptied of expression, the Inspector’s eye rolled.

“I’m not called upon to express an opinion.” Anderson spoke a little huffily.

“But I’m interested” – the Inspector’s great head nodded in puzzlement – “to know what you think. An intellectual man like yourself; you’d call yourself an intellectual now, wouldn’t you?”

“An advertising man merely.”

“Those verses he writes – you couldn’t call them great art now?” Anderson shook his bead. “But they help to increase friendliness between human beings, don’t they? Isn’t that a good thing?”

With complete self-possession Anderson smiled at the heavy face opposite him. “The verses Fletchley writes are in every way contemptible. They pander deliberately to the vulgarian who lives in all of us. They exploit the lowest depth of public taste. That’s what is wrong with Fletchley’s rhymes.”

With clownish pleasure the inspector said: “I do admire the way you talk, now. But tell me – as a plain man now – if there’s a demand for something, can it be wrong to supply it?” The vacant eye rolled round the room. “You don’t have a woman in,” he added. Anderson was taken aback.

“What?”

“Dust.” The great bald head was slowly shaken. “You’re letting things go, Mr Anderson. This room looks altogether different from the way it did when I first saw it. That was three weeks ago. Your wife kept it very nice, if I may say so. Not my own taste, of course, but –” The great flat hand moved embracingly to include carpet, curtains, chairs, lamps, everything. “Very nice. And now look.” One great finger moved on the red table, sketched a face in dust, skirted the bowler hat and picked up the pot. “Preparation Number One,” he read as slowly as a peasant. “Preparation for what, if it’s not a rude question?”

Anderson leaned forward again, pleased that the conversation had moved away from his wife. “That little pot, Inspector, contains a cream designed to eliminate shaving from our lives forever. It is a small part of the twentieth-century revolution.”

“And what might that be, when it’s at home?”

“Hygiene, asepsis, artificial insemination.”

The lines on the great blue-white face deepened as the Inspector laughed. “You’re in favour of modernity, though, Mr Anderson. How about the refrigerator in the kitchen? And” – his hand moved embracingly again – “all this.”

Anderson said stiffly: “My wife furnished this flat.”

“Ah, she was a modern,” the Inspector said sepulchrally. “I’m old-fashioned. But hygiene and asepsis – I’m modern enough to believe in them.”

“But don’t you see that they’re unimportant?” Anderson cried. He was moved suddenly by the need for explanation.

“Unimportant?”

“When a doctor saves human lives he is committed to the belief that they are valuable. But be may be quite wrong. It’s only during the past few hundred years that we’ve come to assume that there is something intrinsically important about the fact of life itself, and now soil conservers are telling us that the world’s population is too large for the amount of food available, that we are slowly starving to death. Improved maternity statistics and better dental treatment have no importance in themselves. The important thing to find out about any man or woman is whether he’s preserved his soul alive.”

The Inspector looked at Anderson. Anderson looked at the Inspector. “Have you got a match?” the Inspector asked vacantly. Anderson gave him a box of Swan Vestas, and the Inspector lighted a cigarette. “Matches,” he said absently. “That’s what I was going to say.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” The vacant eyes rested on Anderson. “Have you got any enemies?”

“Enemies?”

“We have received a letter – in fact, we have received two letters.” Suddenly two pieces of paper were in the great hand. “We don’t pay much attention to such things in general, but just in this case we’d like to know who sent them.” Anderson read the letters. The first suggested that he hated his wife and made her life miserable for years. It asked why Anderson’s statement at the inquest that his married life had been “normally happy” had been left uncorroborated. The second said that Anderson had been persistently unfaithful to his wife. “And then he insured her life for £5,000. And then she fell downstairs. Cui Bono?” Anderson read the letters and returned them without comment.

“Typed on a Remington 12 machine, posted in Central London, no fingerprints,” the Inspector said. The clownishness had dropped from him, the heavy face was alert, the eyes’ vacancy might be interpreted as alertness. “The first of them came a week ago, the second three days after it. Nothing since. You’ve no idea who wrote them, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Stuff like this now – in one way it’s beneath contempt. And yet in another it’s interesting. It’s the sort of thing that sets us thinking.” With a return to clownishness, the Inspector ran a hand over his great bald head; the humorous action was somehow more menacing than a threat could have been. “A clever chap like you now, you’re thinking all the time. But a policeman only thinks when he needs to, and that’s not very often. A bit of low cunning’s enough for our purposes usually, when we’re dealing with the uneducated classes. But with a gentleman like yourself—”

“I went to a grammar school,” Anderson said sharply, to check this ponderous humour.

The Inspector was unperturbed. “That’s just what I mean. You’re a well-read man, an intellectual. A policeman’s got to be clever to keep up with you. When we got these letters we thought back over the case, and you know what we discovered? We hadn’t been clever enough. But that won’t be any surprise to somebody like yourself.” The Inspector slapped his knee with a meaty hand, and laughed.

“Not clever enough?”

“We had failed to read our Sherlock Holmes. The curious incident of the matches. Although, of course, in a way the reverse of
Silver Blaze.
You have read that, of course.”

“I’m afraid not, no.”

“Detective fiction,” the Inspector said with a sigh. “But the box of matches worries me, I must confess. You don’t understand me?” Anderson shook his head. In his thick voice the Inspector said: “Your wife left the sitting room—”

“The kitchen. She was cooking the supper.”

“Left the kitchen, passed through the sitting room, went out into the passage, to the head of the cellar stairs, turned on the switch and found that the light had fused. Unhappy that the light should have fused, is it not, just at that particular moment? Tragic, even. Then she struck a match, began to descend the stairs, slipped–” The Inspector paused delicately, and then looked up. “But did she strike a match? Where did the box of matches come from that was found by her body?” The question was asked in a gentle voice. Anderson goggled at him. “She would hardly have taken matches from the kitchen when she supposed that the cellar light would be on? Of course she wouldn’t. She would not find matches in the passage. She didn’t come back or call to you when she found that the cellar light was out of order. And yet – a box of matches was found by the side of her body.”