Fruitful Bodies (10 page)

‘How did you stop her? You banged your wife’s head against the wall to try to stop her leaving you? Your wife wanted to leave you and you tried to stop her, is that it? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘She is not leaving me. She is Japanese wife, I remind her. So she agrees she wants only to leave to have break, to have peaceful time alone. She is not disgraceful. This is what she says.’

Bridger’s jaw was now slack with disappointment. He would have to brazen it out with Frayling. Perhaps he could dress up the idea of Cruikshank as prime suspect as Poole’s idea, while he had been the one to put pressure on Takahashi.

Mr Takahashi was saying, ‘This is all very unfortunate. And I feel truly sorry that my wife go to Bath. I cannot follow her, I am specialist in Ascomycetes, you see. I am giving paper on hymenium in
Tuber aestivum, Claviceps purpurea
and
Bulgaria inquinans
. I must go and prepare, I have to get my slides ready.’

‘When did you last see your wife, Mr Takahashi?’

Mr Takahashi looked at his watch. ‘Already it is nine fifty-two, I am speaking at ten o’clock. My wife, she is in Bath, as I say. She telephones on Friday and she say she want to see me. She will not come back to Bristol but instead I should go to Bath to talk to her on Saturday, yesterday. This is very unfortunate, very inconvenient for me because then I am going to miss important visit by symposium delegates to International Mycological Institute at Kew Gardens, I am not pleased to go to Bath instead.’ His face had grown angry. ‘My wife does not think of this, she does not care, she is lacking in respect. I go to Bath because I wish to apologise humbly, but she makes me more angry instead.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened, if you would, when you arrived in Bath.’

‘I get on train arriving in Bath. I am meeting my wife at 12.30 at the Royal Photographic Society. I tell her we will have lunch but she does not agree. She will not have lunch, perhaps only a beverage, but will meet me to tell me something important, this is what she says. So I say yes to meet her at the Royal Photographic Society.’

Andrew drew in a breath silently and waited for Mr Takahashi’s confession that he had not been able to persuade his wife to come back to him, that when she had left to escape him he had followed her down the alleyway, lost
his temper, grabbed her by the hair, dragged her through the side entrance and into the pub passageway where he banged her head into the wall, strangled her and stuffed her body into the cupboard. Nobody had disturbed him: there were no customers because the pub was not open and none of the kitchen staff would have heard a thing above the permanently blaring radio. Was it going to be this easy?

‘But she is not there.’

‘But you hit her. You said so. You met your wife and you hit her.’

‘No. I unfortunately have difficulty in finding Royal Photographic Society and I am eight minutes late. I wait outside, but she did not come. I think she is very angry that I am late and she did not wait for me, even one minute. I wait until after one o’clock, but she did not come. So I came back to Bristol.’ Mr Takahashi scraped back his chair and stood up. ‘I am ready to be punished. My wife is right to complain that I strike her. It is most clear, she is angry that I am late, she think I do not care and do not keep appointment on Saturday so she has complained to the English police. But if she forgives me I too will forgive her for her behaviour to me. Please take me to my wife now, I wish to apologise to her and to forgive her.’

Andrew, knowing that he was a bastard to do it, also stood up. ‘Bridger, inform Mr Takahashi about his wife, for the record. And then arrest him. I’ll be outside.’

He turned, wove his way through the plastic-topped tables to the door and in the neutral air of the corridor outside Breakfast World, breathed in deeply. He had no stomach for the clapping-on of the handcuffs, metaphorically or actually, whereas Bridger clearly enjoyed his role
as instrument of the law, which he did with all the magisterial pomposity that he could summon in his polyester-tied, five-foot-eight, ginger-topped frame. But already Andrew was despising himself for his squeamishness over what was, in the end, a procedural necessity, and was composing in his mind a slightly altered version of events to tell Sara in which he would figure just a little more heroically. He was, he realised, already preparing to bask in the light of vindication, hoping that she would be not only impressed by the early arrest but ready now to understand the point of his sudden and hurtful preoccupation with the case. And Andrew had no doubt that Takahashi had killed his wife, but nonetheless he was beginning to construct, also for Sara, a slightly defensive set of reasons for being so certain.

J
OYCE HAD INSTIGATED
a daily routine for herself with more determination than was polite in a guest and had unpacked her bags and boxes a little too comprehensively for Sara’s peace of mind. After her nasty shock in Green Street and possibly, Sara thought, in order to soak away in sleep a couple of hours each day and so shorten the time available in which to crave a drink, Joyce had also announced that she would take a little nap in the afternoons. When she informed Sara of this decision on the Sunday, she had added that she would be grateful if Sara would wake her at around four o’clock with a cup of tea.

Sara had been grateful. She had spent a miserable morning trying to be bright and normal, taking the car down to Bathampton and going for her usual run along the towpath, getting the papers and pottering enjoyably in a Sunday-ish way in an effort to show, ostensibly to Joyce, that Andrew’s absence was a complete irrelevance. She was also showing Andrew, should he care to take an interest, that he was not the only one with people to look after. Joyce, declining the offer to be made comfortable and left with the papers, had for most of the morning followed her about, sitting or standing some distance off and watching
whatever she did with reproachful, judging eyes. Over lunch, at which Joyce picked daintily, she had announced her intention to lie down for forty winks. Sara was exhausted by the effort of cheerfulness and said something insincere about managing without her.

On Monday Sara stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom with the tea, and the pile of new clothes bought on Saturday which Joyce had until now declined even to try on. ‘Come on. They’re not really jeans, they’re black. And the sweatshirt’s a good colour for you,’ she said, briskly.

Joyce, too sleep-befuddled to comment, unfolded herself from under the eiderdown fully dressed, and took them obediently. Her lips taut with uncertainty, she began unpinning herself from the pink suit. It was a long process undoing the many safety pins which served in place of the broken skirt zip but Sara waited, determined to get the suit out of Joyce’s clutches and burn it, whatever the jeans and sweatshirt looked like. She had already taken away for washing every other garment that Joyce owned and had ended up binning most of them. When Joyce got down to her underskirt and vest she turned away, offering a view less of her buttocks than the place where her buttocks should have been. She was so thin that the grey petticoat, with a tattered hem of what once had been lace and was now a nylon cobweb, fell from the back of her waist to her scrawny knees like a flat dirty curtain. Sara, sensing Joyce’s embarrassment, looked conspicuously round the room.

‘I see you’ve unpacked, then,’ she said. Joyce had replaced Sara’s iron bedside lamps with her own, one with a lampshade depicting a coaching scene and the other with a peach nylon one that looked like a showercap recycled
from a pair of frilly trainer pants. She had displayed her books—a few novels, dark-spined school prizes and texts on music—in the small bookcase and stacked the overspill along the skirting board. Several ornaments of the Delft clog and brass dog variety covered the dressing table, along with a beautiful rectangular box of dark wood, inlaid with a Tree of Life design executed in soft pink mother-of-pearl and silver. That and the cello propped against the wall were the only items of beauty or value that Joyce seemed not to have been parted from.

‘I remember that box from your flat,’ Sara said, wanting to forget the dispiriting ugliness of everything else Joyce owned.

Joyce’s lips puckered up with satisfaction. She drew herself upright in her wretched underclothes, walked over to the box and lifted the lid. A strange, Eastern-sounding, modal melody came twanking out of it. ‘That’s the Egyptian national anthem,’ she announced. ‘And this box was a gift to me from’—she looked regally at Sara—‘the Queen of Egypt herself.’

‘Wow.’ Sara now remembered being told something of the sort years ago. She handed Joyce the green sweatshirt and Joyce’s head disappeared into it.

‘The Queen presented me with it when I left,’ she said as she reappeared, blinking like an emerging pot-holer.

With deliberate nonchalance she went on, as Sara offered her the trousers, ‘I was tutor to the Egyptian royal family, you know. After the war. I was sent to Cairo. I taught music to the princes and princesses for nearly two years.’ She was now holding the trousers the right way up and persuading her right foot into the leg. The twanking music box melody was starting over, slowing, each note
sounding with more
twwwww-
than -
aaank
, as the mechanism wound down.

‘You’d find it easier sitting down,’ Sara ventured, realising that Joyce was in danger of falling over. Suddenly it crossed her mind that Joyce had probably never worn trousers in her life, not so much as pyjama bottoms. She was a skirt and nightdress person, a lady, and had probably thought at one time, assuming she didn’t now, that women in trousers proclaimed the coming of the Antichrist. But Joyce had them on now, and was busy tucking her petticoat into the waistband, which was loose enough to allow it.

‘It’s a beautiful box,’ Sara said. ‘What was the Queen like? Did she speak English?’

‘The Queen? Oh, well.’ Joyce was still tucking herself in. ‘The Queen? Well, it was a while ago.’ There was a pause during which Joyce opened her mouth and then folded her lips, and decided not to lie. ‘Well now, I seem to remember now, yes, that’s right. I got the box from a lady-in-waiting. The Queen couldn’t be there herself. Affairs of state and so on, I suppose.’ Her voice trailed off, the shining, imagined memory of the grateful queen entreating her to accept her gift growing dim in the dismal light of the fact that she had received the standard leaving present for minor servants via a secretary, and had only once in nearly two years met the Queen, in a room containing at least thirty others. It was not how she liked to look back on it and, for fifty years, had not.

‘Well. But Cairo—that must have been fascinating. Here, don’t forget your tea.’

Joyce sat down on the edge of the bed and took the cup as the melody stopped. ‘Och well now, it was awfully
dusty. I remember that, hot and dusty. Not a clean city at all. I never saw the slums, of course.’ She blew delicately on her tea. ‘Filthy. There was some sort of epidemic, when I was there, I remember that. People died. Mass hysteria. Though that was in the countryside, not the city, come to think of it. Anyway, all gone now,’ Joyce said, with a dangerous wave of the free arm, stirring the silent air into which the last notes of the music box tune had lately vanished. ‘All gone.’ She sucked up some tea in her lips which, after sleep, were so loose they looked almost frilly. ‘Tone deaf too, the wee tykes,’ she added, after she had swallowed.

There was a silence save for Joyce’s slurps. Sara sat down in the chair by the dressing table, feeling the full extent of her entrapment. Joyce would be up and about again in a few minutes, haunting every step she took. How long was she going to stay? And where would she go? Joyce obviously had some sort of income, although Sara had been so far too squeamish to get out of her exactly how much. She had said she had no relatives or friends, which Sara guessed meant none whom she had not, in the course of her descent, estranged beyond any possibility of reconciliation. Was Joyce quietly banking on not quite ever getting round to arranging things so that she could move out again? Sara knew that she could never, ever actually throw her out. She also knew that she could never, ever tolerate her as a permanent fixture.

And there was Andrew to consider, although when she did, Sara felt only a quiet panic that he did not want to live with her in Medlar Cottage, closely followed by dismay because she could, when she was being honest with herself, see his point about territory. Would Andrew even
agree to come back as long as Joyce was here? And with Joyce as a sort of resident, half-malevolent, droopy-eyed house troll his reluctance was more than understandable; it was utterly reasonable.

‘Joyce, what happened? What happened to you that made you give everything up? Why did you start drinking?’

Joyce looked at her accusingly, as if the questions were in the worst possible taste. She shook her head. ‘Oh well. It was a while ago. Something upset me, that’s all. A person. Here, and what about your er … I can’t get his name. Where’s he?’

‘He’s at work,’ Sara explained patiently. ‘What upset you? Who? Who upset you? What did they do to you?’

‘Och, you know fine yourself how it is. You should know. Did you not have the same thing, with Matteo Becker? He died, didn’t he? I saw it in the paper. Well, same thing. Someone died.’ She swallowed some tea. ‘Nobody you know.’

‘I wish you would tell me. It might help.’

Joyce drank more tea as if Sara had not spoken. Sitting in the peaceful bedroom at that slightly head-swimming point in a summer afternoon when an old lady might decide that, as the day is all but gone, she will take the rest of it slowly, Sara realised that it would be cruel to displace the consoling effects of tea and warmth and quiet with unsettling conversations about the past and an insecure future. Joyce was so old, Sara noticed, that the drinking of her cup of tea was an activity which she carried out with care and concentration, without trying to do several other things at once. At what age, she wondered, does a cup of tea make us sit down? It was a trivial enough concession to
age, Sara thought, watching Joyce, to claim a few minutes in which to sit and sip a cup of tea, and a modest enough hope that there might occasionally be someone else around to make it. Could she and Andrew find a way to keep her, for as long as it took? Was it callous to calculate that her malnourished, alcohol-abused and elderly body would not be around to inconvenience any of them for long?