Designs on Life (19 page)

There was the usual click, then Garry’s voice said, “Darling? I’m sorry it’s so late, but Alec insisted on taking me out to dinner and a theatre he’d got tickets for and we’ve only just got in. How are things?”

“Fine,” I said. “Wonderful.”

“Now, what’s all this?” he said. “Things aren’t supposed to be wonderful when I’m away. You’re supposed to worry all the time. Or haven’t I understood you in the past?”

“Ah, of course you have,” I said. “I’ve been on edge all day, just as usual. But what I meant was, my father came and talked to me all about you, and I simply walked out. He said horrible things about you, and I simply walked out.”

“Now, that really
is
fine,” Garry said. “I’ll make an adult woman of you yet. What were the horrible things he said about me? Just the usual?”

“Oh, don’t let’s talk about them,” I answered. “None of it matters. I’m beginning to grasp that things that simply aren’t true don’t matter. You can laugh at them. Tell me about the play.”

“It’s not worth talking about either. It was just a lot of nonsense about people popping in and out of bed with the wrong people, and losing their trousers and falling over the furniture. I found it hard work to raise a laugh, even to please Alec, but he seemed to enjoy it. Then he wanted to drop into a pub on the way home, so I couldn’t help being late, could I?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I thought perhaps I shouldn’t call you at all,” he said. “I thought perhaps you’d have taken your sleeping-pill already and gone to sleep.”

“I never take it till after you’ve rung,” I answered. “If you hadn’t, I’d just have lain here awake, waiting.”

“Well, take it now and have a good night.”

“Yes, I will. And you take care, driving home tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Of course. I always do. Good night, darling. I love you.”

“Oh Garry…” My voice broke and I could not get out what I wanted to say. There was too much love in me for me to be able to direct a trickle of it into something so small as the mouthpiece of a telephone. I held it tightly for a moment, then gave a deep sigh and put it down. Reaching out for the capsule that I had put ready on the bedside table with a glass of water, I swallowed the pill, turned off the light, lay back on my pillows and slept deeply and dreamlessly.

The alarm clock woke me at seven o’clock. I always got up then to make my father his morning tea. Then I would have a bath, get dressed and cook the breakfast. It was still dark. It was still very cold too. Going to the window, I expected to see the pale glitter of snow in the darkness, but everything was utterly black. I did not like it. There was something eerie and threatening about that icy barrenness. I put on my dressing-gown and slippers, went downstairs, made the tea and carried it into my father’s room.

I know I am very slow in my reactions. Some people take this for stupidity. Cleverer people realise that I am simply very slow. I need time to put together what I see, what I think and what I feel. I need time to understand. But in the end I do. Indeed, I do.

What I saw as I stood there in the doorway was whiteness. It was all over the bed and the carpet and the furniture. Also I saw a great jagged hole in the plate glass of the window, through which a freezing draught was blowing in. It was as if the draught had blown a snowstorm into the room, although there was no snow outside in the garden. The whiteness stirred gently here and there in the current of air from the window.

Of course, it was not snow. It was feathers. Someone had pressed a pillow down over my father’s face and the pillow had burst and the draught had carried the blizzard of little downy feathers all over the room. But the pillow had done its work. My father was dead.

Because I am so slow, I stood there for some seconds before, quite gently, I let the tea-tray slide out of my hands and fall with a crash. Hot tea splashed over my feet and bare ankles. I began to scream. Naturally, there was no one to hear me. After a moment I stopped. I did not go near the bed, for I knew my father was dead and that there was nothing I could do for him. There was a feather on his face, just by one of his nostrils, and it was motionless.

Turning, holding to the wall as I went, because I was so dizzy, I went to the sitting-room, dropped on to the sofa and picked up the telephone.

I was going to dial 999.

But just before I started, I noticed a disconcerting thing. It caught my attention, made me wonder, frown, then thoughtfully put the telephone down again.

On the carpet, close to where I was sitting, was a little heap of cigarette ash.

It was on just about the spot where Garry had a habit of letting his ash fall during those long conversations that he used to have with Alec. But I had been over that part of the carpet the evening before with the vacuum-cleaner. I knew I had. I remembered moving the sofa so that I could clean the spot where it usually stood, as well as all round it. Moving that heavy old sofa was a thing that you remembered.

But now there was a little heap of ash where there could not be one.

My first impulse was to put my slipper down on it and flatten it into the carpet and forget about it. For ever. But then my mind began to work. Thoughts began to come to me. Slow, slow thoughts.

At first only one was clear. Garry had been here last night.

It was not easy to believe, but it was easier than to look at that heap of ash and convince myself that I had missed it with the vacuum-leaner, or simply that it did not exist. I had to face it, he had been here, had sat just where I was sitting and had smoked a cigarette.

Drawing my feet up under me on the sofa, I clasped my arms tightly round me to keep out the awful chill of the room. But the chill was in my own blood, seeping out of my bones. I started shivering and found that I could not stop it.

I started thinking of all sorts of unimportant things, like the chocolate cake that I had made, and a pink feather hat that I had bought a few weeks before that Garry had said he liked, and some gold cuff-links that I had seen in a shop a day or so ago which I had thought of buying for him, but had not, because I was too unsure of his tastes. I often wanted to buy things for him and then did not, because I never trusted myself to guess what he would like. I had had very little experience of buying presents for anyone and was so nervous of choosing the wrong things, which he would only thank me for out of politeness, that possibly I had appeared ungenerous. That was a wretched thought. I brooded on it for a while as I sat there and shivered.

Then, with a jolt, I thought again that Garry had sat here in this room. He had smoked a cigarette. He had talked to me on the telephone.

But how can you ring up a person on an extension of the telephone you are using yourself?

I began to think that I would like a cup of tea. I went out to the kitchen, where the kettle that I had used to make the tea for my father was still warm, and made another pot and took it back to the sitting-room and sat down on the sofa again.

By then I understood how the telephone call had reached me. It had been Alec who had telephoned from London and asked the operator for that transferred charge call. Then, as soon as it had rung here and I had picked up the telephone by my bed, Garry had picked up this one. And so we had been connected and had been able to talk to one another. He must have been sitting here quietly, waiting for the call to come through, for some time, and smoking as usual and forgetting to notice where his ash fell. All as usual. It was such a familiar scene, I could see him doing it. How could he know that the last thing that I would do before going to bed would be to vacuum the carpet?

The trouble about thinking is that you cannot always stop when you want to. I shut my eyes and pressed my knuckles against them.

I thought, “My father was right all along. Garry and Alec, they had it all planned from the beginning. A convenient marriage to a lonely, unwanted woman who would be rich when her sick old father died. A simple murder. And now… I wonder what they’ve got planned for me.”

I opened my eyes again and gazed at the little heap of cigarette ash.

It was so small that the first policeman who came into the room might easily put his foot on it and tread it into the carpet.

Hesitantly my hand went out to the silver cigarette box near the telephone. I took out a cigarette, put it between my lips and lit it. It made me cough and the smoke got into my eyes and brought tears to them. I had smoked only one cigarette before in my whole life. That was when I was sixteen and had wanted not to be left out among the other schoolgirls. But I had not liked it and had never smoked again. I did not like it now. But I smoked that cigarette from beginning to end, adding to the little heap of ash on the carpet and scattering the rest of the ash carelessly about, some on the sofa, some actually in an ashtray, and finally taking the stub to the lavatory and flushing it down the drain, in case it had fingerprints, or traces of my saliva, or something like that on it, which would show that it had not been Garry who had smoked it.

Then I dialled 999.

I told the police, when they questioned me later, about having vacuumed the carpet in the evening, but I never said anything about the ash. But of course they saw it and worked out for themselves what it meant, and once their suspicions were aroused, it did not take them long to break down Garry’s alibi. They explained it all to me after they had proved that he had not been in the theatre with Alec, and that neither of them had been in the public house where Garry had said that they had gone for a drink, and that someone had seen him in a café on the road to London, where he had been stupid enough to stop for a snack in the early morning. He had not in fact been in London at all the day before. He had actually stayed hidden in our garage, where he had known that I had no reason to go, as he had the car. Then when he had seen the light in our bedroom go on and had known that I had gone to bed at last, he had let himself quietly into the house and gone into the sitting-room to wait for Alec’s call. It had been made specially late on purpose so that he and Alec could be sure that I should be waiting for it in bed and not downstairs. And after Garry had talked to me, he had gone to my father’s room and smothered him.

Smothering can sometimes be mistaken for a natural death, particularly with someone as old and ill as my father. Of course it had been intended to look like a natural death. But the pillow had burst and the feathers had floated all over the room, so there had been no hope of disguising the fact that it was murder. So then Garry had smashed the window, to make it Look like a case of breaking and entering, and had taken my father’s wallet and his gold watch and chain. But he had thrown them over some hedge on the way to London, where he had gone straight after the murder, and where, by the time I discovered it, he had been in bed, asleep.

In those days they still had hanging.

It was not long before I was a widow and a rich widow too. I sold the house and moved away, and I reassumed the name of Greenbank, though I stuck to the tide of Mrs. I had some bad times at first, because I had no friends or outside interests, and sometimes I used to drink too much by myself and take too many barbiturates. Then one day I bought myself that mink coat I mentioned.

It was a gesture of liberation. After it I began to find it easier to spend money on myself and to start doing things that I had only had dreams of before. It was about a year after my father’s death that I went to a travel agent and made arrangements to take a trip round the world. I bought a lot of new clothes for it, all totally different from anything that I had ever worn before, and I had my hair cut short and tinted. I was feeling like an exciting stranger to myself when I set off, with my mind full of all the new sights that I was going to see, and the new people that I should meet, and the friends I should make.

What actually happened is that before we had even reached Madeira I met the man who later became my second husband. We were drawn to each other from the start, and spent a great deal of time in each other’s company throughout the voyage. There was no question of falling in love. I suppose there never has been. But we have a great deal of affection for one another, we trust each other and enjoy being together. He is twenty years older than I am, has more money than I have and suffers from rather poor health, which makes him require a good deal of looking after. But with my experience, that is not too much of an effort. He was a widower when we met, whose first wife, whom he had worshipped, had recently died. So in some ways, I suppose, you could say I am almost back to where I started.

The difference is that my husband, compared with my father, is a kind and considerate man, who makes me feel that he likes me and values what I do for him. I consider myself, on the whole, a very lucky woman. We have spent almost eighteen years together. It is only occasionally, on a day like today, about this time of year, that I feel all sorts of disturbing emotions stirring inside me, and a kind of wildness threatens to do strange things to my brain.

The real tragedy, of course, is that it was all so unnecessary. If Garry had ever loved me, as he pretended he did, if he had relied on me instead of on Alec, if he had trusted me, he need never have tried to deceive me. We could have worked together. Among my daydreams there had often been one of getting rid of my father and being finally free to be myself, and with Garry’s initiative and forcefulness behind me, I might really have done something about it. And I should never have blundered as he did. I am a more capable woman than people realise. At least, if I had used a pillow, it would not have been one that would burst, spilling those horrible feathers everywhere. The death would really have looked like a natural death. Or natural enough to deceive that silly old doctor of ours, who thought that my father ought to be dead anyway of six different diseases. There would have been no difficulty about a death certificate. Everything would have gone smoothly and we could have been so happy…

But Garry never loved me. That is the thought that I have to concentrate on when my mind starts to run on in this way and a sort of grinding pain starts up in my heart. Everything he said to me, everything we did together, was founded on lies. All our happiness was only something he let me imagine for a little. My father was right about him from the start. Garry himself proved it to me. He showed me up to myself as everything my father had always said I was. I suppose that was why I had to destroy him.