Fete Fatale (23 page)

‘Quite apart from the fact that, having lived abroad for so long, you had trouble giving the right change, didn't you?'

‘Yes, I . . . I can't imagine what makes you think I've lived abroad.'

There was silence in the room, and I let it tick on. Suddenly, seated deep in her capacious leather chair of Scandinavian design, she looked very small. I noticed her fingers were tearing away at a little lace handkerchief in her lap. When she spoke I sensed defeat already in her voice.

‘I come from down South. My husband was a doctor . . . a hospital doctor down South.'

‘No doubt the police could check that quite easily. For myself, I'm quite sure without checking that it's not true. The first time I spoke to you properly, you had just given Mr Hussein at the delicatessen the wrong money. As Marcus stood with me that last time, people were coming away from your stall complaining that you'd given them the wrong change. Yet you give the impression of
being a very competent person generally—capable, very much in control. There have been a lot of changes in the currency over the last decade or so, haven't there? Decimalization, the new coins. But we've all caught up with them by now, those of us who've lived through the changes. The only people who get it wrong nowadays are the very old, and people who've been out of the country for a long time.'

‘I never was any good at mathematics.'

‘You don't need to be good these days. It's a perfectly simple currency. And you did a bit of sample mathematics perfectly competently while we were sitting outside having our lunch on the day of the fête. It was not mathematics that defeated you, it was the new coins. You were making the sort of mistakes that we all made in the early days of decimal coinage: the old two-shilling piece became ten pence, but we made it
twenty
, because we had the
two
firmly in our minds. Then there are all the completely new coins that have come in recently, too. And there were other things . . . '

I was interrupted by a crescendo of barking from the back garden.

‘The second policeman taking up position,' I said significantly.

She started up from her lethargy.

‘You can't think I'd—?'

‘Why not? You've done it before.'

Slowly, miserably, knowing its significance, she said:

‘It's because I have done it before that I could never do it again. You can't know the feeling—'

‘I don't want to know the feeling,' I interrupted. ‘Let's keep feelings out of this. I don't think I'm likely to feel sympathy.'

She drew back as it stung. I looked at her, crouched there, unutterably miserable and defeated, like a worn-out dish-rag. This was the confident, capable woman who had come to Hexton. I could not feel pity, however, only a horrible curiosity. I went on inexorably:

‘There were other things which, when I thought about it, set you apart. Little things, all of them, but when I put them together in my mind they added up: they suggested to me that you had been out of the country for some time. You always, whenever you spoke of them, referred to Father Battersby and Walter Primp as
“priests”. Perfectly all right, of course, but a middle-class person from the South, like you or me, almost always refers to his Church of England minister as a “clergyman” or a “vicar”. There is something ever-so-slightly Catholic about priest, and something Mary Morse said reminded me of that. Yet you never once used those other words. I thought at first that you must have lived in a Catholic country, but that wasn't what your name suggested. It's perfectly common in England, of course, but it reminded me of Birgit Nilsson, the singer. I wondered if you hadn't simply Anglicized your real name. And I went to a Swedish dictionary in the library and found out that a clergyman is a
präst
in Swedish. So it was a natural thing to do, if you were used to talking Swedish. If the police were to ask to see any official documents about you—your driving licence, or whatever—I think they would find that your name really is Mrs Nilsson.'

‘The miserable object in the chair nodded.

‘Similarly with Hexton. We might, in England, think of some kind of spell when we hear the word “hex”, but we don't use it for a witch. When you said you thought Hexton meant “town of the witches” you were very embarrassed, not because you'd made a
faux pas
, but because you'd revealed special knowledge:
häxa
is the Swedish for “witch”. And the final thing—the thing that might have given me a clue earlier—was the little boy.'

‘Yes. I made a fool of myself there.'

‘He was lost and crying, and you comforted him, and I assumed you were talking nonsense language to him. But of course, if you've lived abroad, I imagine that, whatever language you talk to adults, you
have
to speak the native language to small children. It would come to be instinctive. You were talking to him in Swedish.'

She nodded.

‘And Marcus was by, was nearer you, and could hear better. Nonsense language for a toddler never really sounds like an actual language. And Marcus, I suspect, had noticed something before?'

She made no reply. Then suddenly she got up, went out to the kitchen, and let Gustave in by the back door. When she came back, Gustave jumped up into her lap, and she crooned over him.

‘There, my precious. It's all right. Nothing to worry his clever little head about. Have a snooze on Mummy's lap . . . Yes, Marcus had been behind me one day in the tobacconist's. I asked for
two packets of Benson and Hedges. He shot me a look, one that I just didn't understand. I started to listen to people, and they all asked for “twenty” or “forty” of whatever they smoked. If I had been a nonsmoker, Marcus possibly wouldn't have been surprised: I just wasn't used to asking for cigarettes. But he'd seen me smoking at your party for Father Battersby. In fact, I took up smoking after I went to Sweden, when my marriage started to go wrong, so naturally I asked for them in the Swedish way . . .
There
, my lovely boy. Mother's all right. Calm down, there's a lovely boy.'

‘There's another thing I should have noticed,' I said, harshly. ‘People who talk soppy to their dogs almost always do it in public as well as in private. As a vet's wife I'd registered that. But you did it in private, and adopted a brisk, no-nonsense approach in public. It just didn't come together. I should have realized that this all came back to Gustave.'

‘Gustaf. After the king.'

‘To Gustaf. And to Marcus not as churchwarden, but as vet.'

She continued crooning over him, lovingly, weeping as she stroked him, and then wiped her eyes with the torn handkerchief she had been clutching in her fist.

‘I married twenty-five years ago. His name was Erik, and he was studying medicine here. Quite a lot of Scandinavians do. He was tall and fair and slim, and had the most beautiful light blue eyes I had ever seen. I didn't see that they were cold. Perhaps they weren't, then. When he graduated, we went back to Sweden, to Umeå, in the North. Lovely in summer—cold beyond belief in winter, the long, long winters. Erik got a post in the hospital. Eventually, when no children came, I went to work in the hospital too. I had trained as a nurse here, that was how we met. We talked about adopting children: there were Korean ones, and Vietnamese that were available. But he always said it would not be the same. I think at heart he was a racist. Many Scandinavians are. He let me have a dog, though. He did let me have a dog.'

She stroked Gustave, as he slept the sleep of the ignorant in her lap.

‘Erik was ambitious. He wanted to get on. Umeå was just a starting-place for him. He wanted to move down to Stockholm, or Göteborg. But he didn't get on. I think perhaps he wasn't as good as he thought he was. That was why he'd had to come to England
for his training. He hadn't quite managed to get the right grades in Sweden. And he put people's backs up too. He was very cold, bitter, sarcastic—and this grew and grew. Because he thought he wasn't appreciated. I didn't have much to do with him at the hospital, but I had to cope with him at home. He got colder and colder, more and more withdrawn. Eventually there was—nothing. You know?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't.'

She glanced up at me, and then looked hurriedly down.

‘When my old dog died, I mourned her, but she was nearly fifteen, and she died naturally, and I'd loved her and given her a good life. After my people died, I never used even to come back to Britain on holiday, because I couldn't take her with me. Erik said we shouldn't have another dog. He said he was fed up with the noise and the smell, and the problems when she was on heat . . . By then things were pretty bad between us . . . I just went out and bought Gustaf . . . He was the only thing I had—the only company. You'll never have known what it's like when an animal's the
only
thing one has. He was everything to me. Erik, you see, became . . . manic. It's the only way to describe it. In the end he dimly saw it himself. He went into an institution, voluntarily. I visited him there, but he was like someone I'd never known . . . Then one night he . . . took something.'

In the silence she added drearily:

‘I was very glad.'

She bent to whisper secret nothings in Gustaf's ear.

‘There was nothing to keep me in Sweden. I wanted to get away from that cold place. My widow's pension was very good, because of Erik's job. It would go even further in England. But there was Gustaf, and those
cruel
quarantine laws. Six months! Six months in a kennel!' Her face lit up with a momentary passion, as it had not done when she told me about her marriage. ‘I do think it's cruel!
And
silly! No other nation thinks it necessary. They all accept the anti-rabies injection. Why can't Britain do the same? And even if it's necessary for animals from Italy or Portugal and places like that, it
can't
be necessary for Swedish ones. The country's a damned sight cleaner and more health-conscious than Britain!'

‘Marcus thought it necessary,' I said. ‘He felt strongly about
keeping out rabies. He used often to marvel at the silliness of people who tried to evade the quarantine regulations.'

‘Yes. Yes, I found out he felt like that . . . Anyway, there was this boy, this boy who lived next door. He was a bit rough, but nice, and rather in rebellion against all those dour, formal Swedes. You've no idea how punctilious Swedes can be, and he was a relief, and he came and talked often, when he was home. He was a sailor—he'd been in everything: merchant shipping, cruise ships, fishing-boats, the lot. One day he was round in my kitchen, and we were talking and laughing, and I was saying how I wanted,
how
I wanted, to get away, but that I couldn't bear the thought of putting Gustaf in a kennel for six months. It would have been like a betrayal—after all he'd been to me in those terrible last years of marriage. I knew people who'd had their animals in quarantine, you see. One of them said to me: “You get a dog back at the end, but it's not the same dog. Not your dog.” I couldn't have borne it.'

‘I think that's nonsense,' I said briskly. ‘Animals adapt much more readily than we imagine.'

‘Not all animals,' she said, almost fiercely.'
You
wouldn't have, would you, my precious? My angel . . . So that's what we did. He had all the necessary contacts, of course. I sold the house, and arranged to have the furniture sent into storage in England. Then I took Gustaf across into Norway, to Bodø, and this boy had arranged with a Norwegian fishing-boat skipper to smuggle him on board. Then I flew to England, bought a car, and drove up to the West coast of Scotland, where I was to pick him up. It all went so wonderfully smoothly. It was worth every penny I paid. Then Gustaf and I drove down into Yorkshire, looking for somewhere to live. Yorkshire was nice, and far from Dorset, where I was brought up. It had always been one of my favourite counties. After Umeå even the Shetlands wouldn't have seemed bleak. I looked for a house I could move into almost immediately, and we found one here. I couldn't believe everything could have gone so well.'

‘But you still had to be very careful,' I said. ‘I looked through the records this morning. I notice that you never used Marcus as a vet, though you pretended to me that you had.'

‘No, I didn't. Just to be on the safe side. The only time Gustaf needed one, I went into Darlington. There was just the possibility of awkward questions. Of course I should have told people here
that I was from Sweden, but that I'd been in the country for more than six months—staying with relatives, for example. But I was afraid to bring the idea of abroad into things at all. Then I soon found I was making mistakes—the sort of mistakes that people do make who've been out of the country for a long time. Not big, vital mistakes, as a rule, but silly little mistakes that mount up and give them away, like crossing the figure seven. Often I didn't even know I'd made them—as with “priest”, or asking for “packets” of cigarettes. And that was even more frightening than if I'd realized what I'd done. I should never have accepted the invitation to your place, since Marcus was really the main danger to me. I tried to withdraw from the fête, saying I wanted to go on holiday, but you know what a frightful bully Franchita is. My instinct, when I realized I was making mistakes, was to lie as low as possible till I'd been in the country six months—then I thought nobody would worry too much. They would punish
me
, but they wouldn't . . . do anything to Gustaf. But I had to do the fête. Normally I'm quite a cool person on the surface. I've been a ward sister in a hospital, after all, so I've had to be. But sometimes the calm, efficient surface covers . . . panic! Flap! It was like that with Marcus, standing there by your stall as he did, watching everything. I started giving wrong change. That poor child was crying its heart out—I love children—and I spoke to him in
Swedish!
It was so natural. But with Marcus there!'