In The Presence Of The Enemy (51 page)

ALEXANDER STONE
saw Mrs. Maguire out of the corner of his eye. He was staring into the clothes cupboard in Charlotte’s bedroom when the housekeeper came to the door. She had a plastic bucket in one hand while the other hand clutched a limp bouquet of rags.

She’d been washing windows for the past two hours, her lips moving soundlessly and cease-lessly in prayer, her eyes dribbling tears as she scrubbed away dirt and polished the glass.

“If I’m not disturbing you, Mr. Alex.” Her chin dimpled when she looked round the room where Charlotte’s belongings were just as she’d left them nearly a week ago.

Alex said past the dull ache in his throat,

“No. Go ahead. It’s all right.” He reached into the cupboard and fingered a dress, red velvet with an ivory lace collar and matching cuffs.

Charlie’s Christmas dress.

Mrs. Maguire shambled into the room. The water in the bucket sloshed about like the insides of a boozer’s stomach. Like his own stomach, in fact, although it wasn’t drink this time that was acting upon him.

He reached for a child-sized tartan. As he did so, he heard behind him the sound of the curtains being drawn back, followed by the sound of Charlie’s stuffed animals being moved from the window seat to the bed. He squeezed his eyes shut at the thought of the bed, where last night in this very room he had fucked his wife, riding her frantically to Destination Orgasm as if nothing had happened to change their lives forever. What had he been thinking of?

“Mr. Alex?” Mrs. Maguire had dipped one of her rags into the bucket. She had squeezed it out and now she held it in her reddened hands, twisted into a shape like a rope. “I’m not wishing to cause you further grief. But I know the police phoned an hour ago. And as I didn’t have the heart to intrude on Miss Eve’s sorrow, I’m wondering if you might find a way to tell me that won’t cause your dear soul more torment….” Her eyes became liquid.

“What is it?” He sounded abrupt although he didn’t intend that. It was only that the last thing he wanted was to be the object of anyone’s compassion.

“Can you tell me, then, how it was with Charlie? I’ve read only the newspapers and, like I said, I haven’t wanted to ask Miss Eve.

I’m not intending to be ghoulish, Mr. Alex.

It’s just that I can pray more from the heart for her repose if I know how it was with her.”

How it was with Charlie, Alex thought.

Having her take that rapid skip at his side so that she could keep up with him when they walked together; teaching her to cook chicken with lime sauce, the first dish he himself had learned; tracking down the hedgehog hospital with her and watching her wander delighted—

small fists clutched to her bony little chest—

among the cages. That’s how it was with Charlie, he thought. But he knew what information the housekeeper wanted. And it wasn’t about how Charlie had lived.

“She drowned.”

“In that place they showed on the telly?”

“They don’t know where. Wiltshire CID

say she was drugged with tranquillisers fi rst.

Then drowned.”

“Sweet blood of Jesus.” Numbly, Mrs.

Maguire turned to the windows. She rubbed her wet rag against one of the panes, saying,

“Holy Mother of God,” and Alex heard the catch in her breath. She picked up a dry rag and applied it to the wet pane. She gave careful attention to the corners where grime collected and was most easily overlooked. But he heard her snuffling and he knew she’d begun to weep again.

“Mrs. Maguire,” he said, “you’ve no need to keep coming here every day.”

She turned. She looked stricken as she said,

“You’re not telling me you want me out of here?”

“God no. I only meant that if you want some time off—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll want no time off.” She went back to the windows, wetting her rag for the second pane. She washed it as thoroughly as she had done the fi rst, before she said hesitantly and in an even lower voice,

“She wasn’t…Mr. Alex, forgive me, but Charlie wasn’t interfered with, was she? She wasn’t…Before she died, he didn’t use her ill, did he?”

“No,” Alex told her. “There’s no evidence of that.”

“God’s mercy,” Mrs. Maguire responded.

Alex wanted to ask her how it was merciful on the part of her God to allow the child’s life to be taken in the first place. What was the point of kindly sparing her the preliminary terror and torture of rape, sodomy, or some other form of molestation, when she was going to end up discarded like someone’s disappointed hopes, floating dead in the Kennet and Avon Canal? But instead, he woodenly went back to the clothing and tried to complete the mission Eve had sent him on.

“They’re releasing the body,” she had said to him. “We need to give the mortuary something for her to wear in the coffin. Will you see to that for me, Alex? I don’t think I could bear to go through her things just yet. Will you do it? Please?”

She’d been colouring her hair in the bathroom. She was standing at the basin, a towel round her shoulders. She was sectioning off her hair in perfectly straight rows with the tail end of a comb and squeezing dye from a bottle onto her scalp. She even had what looked like a small paintbrush, which she employed with precision to cover all the hairs at their roots.

He’d watched her in the mirror. He hadn’t slept the previous night once they’d fi nished with each other. She’d urged the sedatives on him and gone to bed herself, but he’d wanted nothing more to do with drugs and he’d told her so. So he’d wandered the house—from their bedroom to Charlie’s room, from Charlie’s room to the sitting room, from the sitting room to the dining room where he’d sat and looked out at the garden where, until dawn, he could see nothing but shapes and shadows—and then he’d ended up watching her calmly colouring her hair, with fatigue dragging at his limbs and a growing despair pulling at his heart. “What do you want her to wear?” he’d asked.

“Thank you, darling.” She applied the dye in a streak from forehead to crown. She daubed the paintbrush through it. “We’ll have a viewing, so it should be something that works for that.”

“A viewing?” He hadn’t thought—

“I want a viewing, Alex. If we don’t have one, it’s going to appear that we have something to hide from the public. We don’t. So we need to have a viewing and she needs to be dressed in something appropriate for it.”

“Something appropriate.” He felt like her echo, unwilling to think because he was afraid of where thinking might take him. He forced himself to add, “What do you suggest?”

“Her velvet dress. The one from last Christmas. She wouldn’t have outgrown it yet.” Eve slid the tail end of the comb into her hair and picked up another section to be dyed. “You’ll need to find her black shoes as well. And there are socks in the drawer. A pair with lace round the ankles would be good, but make sure you don’t choose one with a hole in the heel. We can probably do without any underthings.

And a ribbon for her hair would be nice if you can find one somewhere that matches the dress. Ask Mrs. Maguire to choose one for you.”

He’d watched her hands, moving so profi -

ciently. They wielded the bottle, the comb, the paintbrush without a shake or a quiver.

“What is it?” she’d finally said to his refl ection when he hadn’t moved to see to the task she’d given him. “Why are you watching me like that, Alex?”

“They have no leads?” He knew the answer already but he needed to ask her something because asking a question and listening to the answer seemed the only way he would be able to reach a point of understanding who and what she actually was. “There’s nothing? Just the grease under her fi ngernails?”

“I’ve withheld nothing. You know exactly what I know.” She watched him watching her and for a moment she ceased the work on her hair. He thought about how she always claimed to envy the fact that despite his forty-nine years, his hair had not yet begun to grey while hers had started the metamorphosis when she was thirty-one. He thought about how many times he had responded to that envy, saying,

“Why dye it at all? Who cares about your hair colour? I sure as hell don’t,” and how she had replied, “Thank you, darling, but I don’t like the grey, so while I can still do something that looks remotely natural to get rid of it, I intend to.” All those times, he’d thought with a mental shrug that it was a woman’s inherent vanity that prompted Eve to seek out the dye bottle, not very much different to her act of growing an overlong fringe to cover the scar cutting through her eyebrow. But he saw now that the key words he could have used to understand her had always been the same:
something that
looks remotely natural
. And failing to hear them for what they were, he had also failed to understand her. Until this moment, it seemed. And even now he wasn’t certain that he knew her.

“Alex, why are you staring at me?” she’d asked him.

He’d brought himself round, saying, “Was I? Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Dyeing hair.”

He saw the f licker of her eyelids. In her competent fashion, she was making a quick assessment of the direction in which any response of hers would lead their conversation. He’d seen her do it countless times before when talking to constituents, to journalists, to adversaries.

She placed the bottle, the paintbrush, and the comb on the top of the cistern. Then she turned to face him. “Alex.” Her face was composed, her voice was gentle. “You know as well as I that we must find a way to go on.”

“Is that what last night was about?”

“I’m sorry you weren’t able to sleep. I only got through last night myself because I took a sedative. You could have done as well. I asked you to take one. It doesn’t seem fair of you to decide that simply because I was able to sleep and you weren’t—”

“I’m not talking about the fact that you were able to sleep, Eve.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“What happened before that. In Charlie’s room.”

A movement of her head gave the impression that she was withdrawing from his words, but she stated simply, “We made love in Charlotte’s room.”

“On her bed. Yes. Was that part of going on with our lives? Or was it part of something else?”

“What are you getting at, Alex?”

“I was just wondering why you wanted me to fuck you last night.”

She let the words hang in the air between them while her mouth formed the word
fuck
as if she would echo it much the way he’d been echoing her. A muscle quivered beneath her right eye. “I didn’t want you to fuck me,” she said quietly. “I wanted you to make love to me.

It seemed—” She turned from him. She picked up the comb and the bottle of dye, but she didn’t lift them to her head. She didn’t raise her head, in fact, so all he could see of her was the reflection in the mirror of the neat corn-rows of dye lining her scalp. “I needed you. It was a way—even for only thirty minutes—it was a way to forget. I didn’t think about our being in Charlotte’s room. You were there, and you were holding me. That’s what mattered at the moment. I’d been dodging the press, I’d been meeting with the police, I’d been trying—God, I’d been
trying—
to forget what Charlotte looked like when we identifi ed her body. So when you lay next to me and put your arms round me and told me it was all right to do what I’d been avoiding—to feel, Alex—I thought…” She raised her head then. He saw how her mouth pulled down spasmodically at the sides. “I’m sorry if it was wrong to want sex then, in her room. But I needed you.”

They looked at each other in the mirror. He realised how much and how badly he wanted to believe that she was telling the truth. “For what?” he asked.

“To let me be how I needed to be. To hold me. To help me forget for a moment. Which is what I’m doing now, with this.” She indicated the dye, the comb, the paintbrush. “Because, it’s the only way…” She swallowed. The muscles strained in her neck. Her voice broke on

“Alex, it’s the only way I seem to be able to hold on to—”

“Oh Jesus, Eve.” He turned her to him and pressed her against him, mindless of the dye that transferred from her hair to his hands and his clothes. “I’m sorry. I’m exhausted and not thinking and…I can’t help myself. She’s everywhere I look.”

“You need to get some rest,” she said against his chest. “Promise me that you’ll use those pills tonight. You can’t collapse on me. I need you to be strong because I don’t know how much longer I can be strong myself. So promise me. Tell me you’ll take those pills.”

It was little enough to promise. And he needed sleep. So he agreed and went on his way to Charlie’s room. But his hands were stained with the dye of Eve’s hair, and when he lifted them to the hangers in the clothes cupboard and saw the brown streaks that hid the colour of his fl esh, he knew that there was very little chance that one sedative or five would be able to allay the unresolved misgivings that kept him from sleep.

Mrs. Maguire was speaking to him from the windows of Charlie’s room. He caught the last words “…little mule when it came to her clothes, wasn’t she?”

He roused himself, blinking against the pain behind his eyes. “I was thinking. Sorry.”

“Your mind’s as full as your heart, Mr.

Alex,” the housekeeper murmured. “You have no need to apologise to me. I was just yammering anyway. God forgive me, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes it feels better to talk to another human being than to talk to Our Lord.”

She abandoned her bucket, her rags, and her windows, and came to stand next to him.

She took a small white blouse from Charlie’s cupboard. It had long sleeves and tiny white buttons down the front, and its rounded collar was frayed at the neck.

“Charlie hated these school blouses,” she said. “The good Sisters mean well, but God knows what gets into their heads at times.

They told the girls they had to keep these blouses buttoned right up to the top for reasons of purity. If they didn’t, a black mark was put against them in the deportment book. Our Charlie didn’t want black marks, but she couldn’t abide the blouses being closed so tight round her neck. So she worried the top of every one of them. You see how loose she’s made this top button? And how the threads are unravelling? She did that to all of them, squirming her fi ngers between the blouse and her neck. She hated these blouses like they were sent from the devil, our Charlie.”