Death of a Salesperson (7 page)

He had dispensed with the services of the make-up girl. He had been the only regular on
Wake Up, Britain
to demand one anyway, and the studio was surprised but pleased when Ben decided she was no longer required. Now he could watch the previous evening's cavortings without the damper of her adolescent disapproval from behind his shoulder.

And now he could plan.

One of the factors that just had to be turned to his advantage was Caroline's deplorable housekeeping. All the table-tops of the kitchen were littered with bits of this and that—herbs, spices, sauces, old margarine tubs, bits of jam on dishes. The fridge was like the basement of the Victoria
and Albert Museum, and the freezer was a record of their married life. And on the window-ledge in the kitchen were the things he used to do his little bit of gardening . . .

Ben and Caroline inhabited one of twenty modern service flats in a block. Most of the gardening was done by employees of the landlords, yet some little patches were allotted to tenants who expressed an interest. Ben had always kept up his patch, though (as was the way of such things) it was more productive of self-satisfaction than of fruit or veg. ‘From our own garden', he would say, as he served his guests horrid little bowls of red currants.

Already on the window-ledge in the kitchen there was a little bottle of paraquat.

That afternoon he pottered around in his mouldy little patch. By the time he had finished and washed his hands under the kitchen tap the paraquat had found its way next to the box of tea-bags standing by the kettle. The top of the paraquat was loose, having been screwed only about half way round.

‘Does you good to get out on your own patch of earth,' Ben observed to Caroline, as he went through to his study.

• • •

The next question that presented itself was: when? There were all sorts of possibilities—including that the police would immediately arrest him for murder, he was reconciled to that—but he thought that on the whole it would be best to do it on the morning when he was latest home. Paraquat could be a long time in taking effect, he knew, but there was always a chance that they would not decide to call medical help until it was too late. If he was to come home to a poisoned wife and lover in the flat, he wanted them to be well and truly dead. Wednesday was the day when all the breakfast TV team met in committee to hear what was planned for the next week: which ageing star would be plugging her memoirs, which singer plugging his forthcoming
British tour. Wednesdays Ben often didn't get home till early afternoon. Wednesday it was.

Tentatively in his mental engagements book he pencilled in Wednesday, May 15.

Whether the paraquat would be in the teapot of the Teasmade, or in the tea-bag, or how it would be administered, was a minor matter that he could settle long before the crucial Tuesday night when the tea-things for the morning had to be got ready. The main thing was that everything was decided.

• • •

May 15—undoubtedly a turning-point in her life—began badly for Caroline. First of all Ben kissed her goodbye before he set off for the studio, something he had not done since the early days of his engagement on breakfast television. Michael had come in at five o'clock as usual, but his love-making was forced, lacking in tenderness. Caroline lay there for an hour in his arms afterwards, wondering if anything was worrying him. He didn't say anything for some time—not till the television was switched on. Probably he relied on the bromides and the plugs to distract Caroline's attention from what he was going to say.

He had taken up his textbook, and the kettle of the Teasmade was beginning to hum, when he said, in his gruff, teenage way:

‘Won't be much more of this.'

Caroline was watching clips from a Frank Bruno fight, and not giving him her full attention. When it was over, she turned to him:

‘Sorry—what did you say?'

‘I said there won't be much more of this.'

A dagger went to her heart, which seemed to stop beating for minutes. When she could speak, the words came out terribly middle-class-matron.

‘I don't quite understand. Much more of what?'

‘This. You and me together in the mornings.'

‘You don't mean your parents are coming home early?'

‘No. I've . . . got a flat. Nearer college. So there's not so much travelling in the mornings and evenings.'

‘You're just
moving out
?'

‘Pretty much so. Can't live with my parents for ever.'

Caroline's voice grew louder and higher.

‘You're not living with your parents. It's six months before they come home. You're moving out
on me.
Do you have the impression that I'm the sort of person you can just move in with when it suits you, and then flit away from when it doesn't suit you any longer?'

‘Well . . . yes, actually. I'm a free agent.'

‘You
bas
tard! You
bas
tard!'

She would have liked to take him by the shoulder and shake him till the teeth rattled in his head. Instead she sat there on the bed, coldly furious. It was 7.15. The kettle whistled and poured boiling water on to the tea-bags in the teapot.

‘Have some tea or coffee,' said Ben on the screen to his politician guest, with a smile that came out as a death's head grin. ‘It's about early morning tea-time.'

‘It's someone else, isn't it?' finally said Caroline, her voice kept steady with difficulty. ‘A new girlfriend.'

‘All right, it's a new girlfriend,' agreed Michael.

‘Someone younger.'

‘Of course someone younger,' said Michael, taking up his book again, and sinking into monetarist theory.

Silently Caroline screamed:
Of course someone younger.
What the hell's that supposed to mean? They don't come any older than you? Of course I was just passing the time with a crone like you until someone my own age came along?

‘You're moving in with a girl,' she said, the desolation throbbing in her voice.

‘Yeah,' said Michael, from within his Hayek.

‘Tea all right?' Ben asked his guest.

Caroline sat there, watching the flickering images on the
screen, while the tea in the pot turned from hot to warm. The future spread before her like a desert—a future as wife and mother. What kind of life was that, for God's sake? For some odd reason a future as
lover
had seemed, when she had thought about it at all, fulfilling, traditional and dignified. Now any picture she might have of the years to come was turned into a hideous, mocking, negative image, just as the body beside her in the bed had turned from a glamorous sex object into a boorish, ungrateful teenager.

They were having trouble in the
Wake Up, Britain
studio, where the two anchor people had got mixed up as to who was introducing what. Caroline focused on the screen: she always enjoyed it when Ben muffed something.

‘Sorry,' said Ben, smiling his kindly-uncle smile. ‘I thought it was Maria, but in fact it's me. Let's see . . . I know it's David, our resident medico, but actually I don't know what your subject is today, David.'

‘Poison,' said David.

But the camera had not switched to him, and the instant he dropped the word into the ambient atmosphere Caroline (and one million other viewers) saw Ben's jaw drop, and an expression of panic flash like lightning through his eyes.

‘I've had a lot of letters from parents of small children,' said David, in his calm, everything-will-be-all-right voice, ‘about what to do if the kids get hold of poison. Old medicines, household detergents, gardening stuff—they can all be dangerous, and some can be deadly.' Caroline saw Ben, the camera still agonizingly on him, swallow hard and put his hand up to his throat. Then, mercifully, the producer changed the shot at last to the doctor, leaning forward and doing his thing. ‘So here are a few basic rules about what to do in that sort of emergency . . .'

Caroline's was not a quick mind, but suddenly a succession of images came together: Ben's kiss that morning, his smile as he offered his guest early morning tea, a bottle of paraquat standing next to the box of tea-bags in the
kitchen, Ben's dropping jaw at the sudden mention of poison.

‘Michael,' she said.

‘What?' he asked, hardly bothering to take his head out of his book.

She looked at the self-absorbed, casually cruel body, and her blood boiled.

‘Oh, nothing,' she said. ‘Let's have tea. It'll be practically cold by now.'

She poured two cups, and handed him his. He put aside his book, which he had hardly been reading, congratulating himself in his mind on having got out of this so lightly. He took the cup, and sat on the bed watching the screen, where the sports man was now introducing highlights of last night's athletics meeting from Oslo.

‘Boy!' said Michael appreciatively, stirring his tea. ‘That was a great run!'

He took a great gulp of the tea, then hurriedly put the cup down, turned to look at Caroline, and then choked.

Caroline had not taken up her tea, but sat there looking at the graceless youth. Round her lips there played a smile of triumphal revenge—a smile that the camera whirring away in the secrecy of the study cupboard perfectly caught for Ben, and for the criminal court that tried them, ironically, together.

‘J
eremy Fortescue?' Janice's mother had said in a voice shrill with horror. ‘You most certainly are
not
engaged to Jeremy Fortescue! The man's a fornicator, a child-molester and a drunkard!'

‘Not
that
Jeremy Fortescue,' said Janice.

It certainly was not. The well-known Jeremy Fortescue had become a British and international film star in the late 'sixties—an exciting image to suit the dangerous tastes of the time: square of shoulder, shirt open to the navel, a mocking smile on his lips that seemed both to invite women and to despise them for their inevitable fall. Byron's was the name most often invoked to describe both his persona and his private life which, as chronicled in the tabloids, suggested ruthlessness combined with an insatiable appetite for outré experience.

Janice's Jeremy Fortescue, the little-known one, was something in insurance and not anything very interesting in insurance at that. He was, on the other hand, a pudgy but likeable young man, and Janice's mother was soon quite happy about the engagement, though Janice's Jeremy always believed that she looked at him hard whenever he took a second drink, and imagined the other vices following in the train of drunkenness.

Even after five or six years of marriage Janice found that she had nothing much to complain of in the drink, fornication or child-molesting lines: the odd fumble at the office party, a
possible
dirty weekend away that she would like to be more sure about before she brought it up during a disagreement—these were very mild bumps on the highway of a marriage. Really they were very happy. Children could wait until they were both more settled. Because Janice
had a job with a local doctor, was active in the Conservative Association, and a keen tennis player. Added to which she was, as she put it, ‘very much involved in things'.

Janice's mother had all her life been a great letter-writer, and the trait had descended to Janice. These were letters to council offices, firms, official bodies, national politicians: letters of complaint, protest, warning and admonishment. They were public-spirited letters, concerned letters. The tone of Janice's was more reasonable than her mother's: you could do an awful lot, she always said, if you kept the correspondence pleasant. She was not a busybody; she merely thought that people should do their job, and provide the services that they promised.

She found something out quite early in her career of public usefulness: she got much better results if she signed those letters Mrs Jeremy Fortescue. Mere Janice Fortescue would be treated politely enough by the bodies to which she had complained, but Mrs Jeremy Fortescue got results. Heaven knows what the feminist movement would say, she often said with a wry smile; but if it got street-lamps fixed, or proper policing in dangerous areas, well, wasn't it worth it? Janice loved to be able to point to results.

She also, as it happened, liked to get good service. And, after all, there was nothing
wrong
in using that form in personal matters as well, was there? When all was said and done, it
was
her name—that usage was perfectly all right, and had been very frequent twenty or thirty years ago. If a complaint to a shop or a ring to a plumber brought better service when you said ‘Mrs Jeremy Fortescue', then why not say it? Janice knew her own mind, easily sorted out her moral priorities. She often chaired meetings of the Bridgehead Conservative Association and—young as she was—a lot of members thought of her as a bit of a tartar.

It was as Deputy Chairman of the Association that she went to Matching, one spring in the late 'seventies. The occasion was the spring meeting of the Conservative Associations
of the South-West—not a terribly important meeting, but since the Chairman had another engagement Janice thought she'd like to go. Politics was about meeting people, wasn't it, so it seemed silly not to seize the opportunity. Matching was a lovely old town, and she looked it up in the AA book and telephoned for a room in the best hotel. This wasn't graft: she was paying for it herself. One did in the Bridgehead Conservative Association.

When she arrived in Matching she felt pleased with herself for her decision, and walked from the station through the lovely old town on a wave of euphoria. When she caught a sight of the Prince Frederick, a little off from the town centre, on a little square that had once been the market, she was pleased with her choice of hotel: it was a cool, spacious, eighteenth-century establishment that seemed to exhale the atmosphere of a more leisurely era. She put down her little suitcase, just to take in the elegant expanse of its frontage. Then she took it up again and marched confidently up to Reception.