Make Death Love Me (6 page)

They began their survey by walking along the lane at the back of the Anglian-Victoria sub-branch. They saw the gap in the flint walls that led to the little yard, and in the yard they saw Alan Groombridge's car. One one side of the yard was what looked like a disused barn and on the other a small apple orchard. Marty, on his own, walked round to the front. The nearest of the twelve shops was a good hundred yards away. Opposite the bank was a Methodist chapel and next to that nothing but fields. Marty went into the bank.

The girl at the till labelled Miss J. M. Culver was weighing coin into little plastic bags and chatting to the customer about what lovely weather they were having. The other till was opened and marked Mr A. J. Groombridge, and though there was no one behind it, Marty went and stood there, looking at the little office an open door disclosed. In that office a man was bending over the desk. Marty wondered where the safe was. Through that office, presumably, behind that other, closed, door. There was no upstairs. Once there had been, but the original ceiling had been removed and now the inside of the steeply sloping roof could be seen, painted white and with its beams exposed and stripped. Marty decided he had seen as much as he was likely to and was about to turn away, when the man in the office seemed at last to be aware of him. He straightened up, turned round, came out to the metal grille, and he did this without really looking at Marty at all. Nor did he look at him when he murmured a good morning, but kept his eyes on the counter top. Marty had to think of something to say so he asked for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound note, wanted them for parking meters, he said, and Groombridge counted them out, first pushing them across the counter in two stacks, then thinking better of this and slipping them into a little bag like the ones the girl had been using. Marty said thanks and took the bag of coins and left.

He was dying for a drink and tried to get Nigel to go with him into the Childon Arms. But Nigel wasn't having any.

‘You can have a drink in Stantwich,' he said. ‘We don't want all the locals giving us the once-over.'

So they hung about until five to one. Then Nigel went into the bank, timing his arrival for a minute to. A middle-aged woman came out and Nigel went in. The girl was alone. She looked at him and spoke to him quite politely but also indifferently, and Nigel was aware of a certain indignation, a resentment, at seeing no admiration register on her large plain face. He said he wanted to open an account, and the girl said the manager was just going out to lunch and would he call back at two?

She followed him to the door and locked it behind him. In the lane at the back he met Marty who was quite excited because he had seen Alan Groombridge come out of the back door of the bank and drive away in his car.

‘I reckon they go out alternate days. That means the bird'll go out tomorrow and he'll go out Monday. We'll do the job on Monday.'

Nigel nodded, thinking of that girl all alone, of how easy it would be. There seemed nothing more to do. They caught the bus back to Stantwich where Marty spent the twenty five-pences on whisky and then set about wheedling some of Mrs Thaxby's loan out of Nigel.

Fiction had taught Alan Groombridge that there is such a thing as being in love. Some say that this, indirectly, is how everyone gets to know about it. Alan had read that it had been invented in the middle ages by someone called Chrétien de Troyes, and that this constituted a change in human nature.

He had never experienced it himself. And when he considered it, he didn't know anyone else who had either. Not any of those couples, the Heyshams and the Kitsons and the Maynards, who came in to drink the duty-free Bristol Cream. Not Wilfred Summitt or Constable Rogers or Mrs Surridge or P. Richardson. He knew that because he was sure that if it was a change in human nature their natures would have been changed by it. And they had not been. They were as dull as he and as unredeemed.

With Pam there had never been any question of being in love. She was the girl he took to a couple of dances in Stantwich, and one evening took more irrevocably in a field on the way home. It was the first time for both of them. It had been quite enjoyable, though nothing special, and he hadn't intended to repeat it. In that field Christopher was conceived. Everyone took it for granted he and Pam would marry before she began to ‘show', and he had never thought to protest. He accepted it as his lot in life to marry Pam and have a child and keep at a steady job. Pam wanted an engagement ring, though they were never really engaged, so he bought her one with twenty-five pounds borrowed from his father.

Christopher was born, and four years later Pam said they ought to ‘go in for' another baby. At that time Alan had not yet begun to notice words and what they mean and how they should be used and how badly most people use them, so he had not thought that phrase funny. When he was older and had read a lot, he looked back on that time and wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who knew it was funny too and to whom he could say it as a tender ribaldry; to whom he could say as he began to make love with that purpose in view, that now he was going in for a baby. If he had said it to Pam in those circumstances she would have slapped his face.

When they had two children they never went out in the evenings. They couldn't have afforded to even if they had known anyone who would baby-sit for nothing. Wilfred Summitt's wife was alive then, but both Mr and Mrs Summitt believed, like Joyce, that young married people should face up to their responsibilities, which meant never enjoying themselves and never leaving their children in the care of anyone else. Alan began to read. He had never read much before he was married because his father had said it was a waste of time in someone who was going to work with figures. In his mid-twenties he joined the public library in Stantwich and read every thriller and detective story and adventure book he could lay his hands on. In this way he lived vicariously quite happily. But around his thirtieth birthday something rather peculiar happened.

He read a thriller in which a piece of poetry was quoted. Until then he had despised poetry as above his head and something which people wrote and read to ‘show off'. But he liked this poem, which was Shakespeare's sonnet about fortune and men's eyes, and lines from it kept going round and round in his head. The next time he went to the library he got Shakespeare's Sonnets out and he liked them, which made him read more poetry and, gradually, the greater novels that people call (for some unapparent reason) classics, and plays and more verse, and books that critics had written about books – and he was a lost man. For his wits were sharpened, his powers of perception heightened, and he became discontented with his lot. In this world there were other things apart from Pam and the children and the bank and the Heyshams and the Kitsons, and shopping on Saturdays and watching television and taking a caravan in the Isle of Wight for the summer holidays. Unless, all these authors were liars, there was an inner life and an outer experience, an infinite number of things to be seen and done, and there was passion.

He had come late in life to the heady intoxication of literature and it had poisoned him for what he had.

It was adolescent to want to be in love, but he wanted to be. He wanted to live on his own too, and go and look at things and explore and discover and understand. All these things were equally impracticable for a married man with children and a father-in-law and a job in the Anglian-Victoria Bank. And to fall in love would be immoral, especially if he did anything about it. Besides, there was no one to fall in love with.

He imagined going round to the Heyshams' one Saturday morning and finding Wendy alone, and suddenly, although, like the people in the Somerset Maugham story, they had known and not much liked each other for years, they fell violently in love. They were stricken with love as Lancelot and Guinevere were for each other, or Tristram and Isolde. He had even considered Joyce for this role. How if she were to come into his office after they had closed, and he were to take her in his arms and . . . He knew he couldn't. Mostly he just imagined a girl, slender with long black hair, who made an appointment to see him about an overdraft. They exchanged one glance and immediately they both knew they were irrevocably bound to each other.

It would never happen to him. It didn't seem to happen to anyone much any more. Those magazines Pam read were full of articles telling women how to have orgasms and men how to make them have them, but never was there one telling people how to find and be in love.

Sometimes he felt that the possession of the three thousand pounds would enable him, among other things, to be in love. He took it out and handled it again on Thursday, resolving that that would be the last time. He would be firm about his obsession and about that other one too. After this week there would be no more reading of Yeats and Forster and Conrad, those seducers of a man's mind, but memoirs and biography as suitable to a practical working bank manager.

Alan Groombridge wondered about and thought and fantasized about a lot of odd and unexpected things. But, apart from playing with banknotes which didn't belong to him, he only did one thing that was unconventional.

The Anglian-Victoria had no objection to its Childon staff leaving the branch at lunchtime, providing all the money was in the safe and the doors locked. But, in fact, they were never both absent at the same time. Joyce stayed in on Mondays and Thursdays when her Stephen wasn't working in Childon and there was no one with whom to go to the Childon Arms. On those days she took sandwiches to the bank with her. Alan took sandwiches with him every day because he couldn't afford to eat out. But on Monday and Thursday lunchtimes he did leave the bank, though only Joyce knew of this and even she didn't know where he went. He drove off, and in winter ate his sandwiches in the car in a lay-by, in the spring and summer in a field. He did this to secure for himself two hours a week of peace and total solitude.

That Friday, 1 March, Joyce went as usual to the Childon Arms with Stephen for a ploughman's lunch and a half of lager, and Alan stuck to his resolve of not taking the three thousand pounds out of the safe. Friday was their busiest day and that helped to keep temptation at bay.

The weekend began with shopping in Stantwich. He went into the library where he got out the memoirs of a playwright (ease it off gradually) and a history book. Pam didn't bother to look at these. Years ago she had told him he was a real bookworm, and it couldn't be good for his eyes which he needed to keep in good condition in a job like his. They had sausages and tinned peaches for lunch, just the two of them and Wilfred Summitt. Christopher never came in for lunch on Saturdays. He got up at ten, polished his car, perquisite of the estate agents, and took the seventeen-year-old trainee hairdresser he called his fiancée to London where he spent a lot of money on gin and tonics, prawn cocktails and steak, circle seats in cinemas, long-playing records and odds and ends like
Playboy
magazine and bottles of wine and after-shave and cassettes. Jillian sometimes came in when she had nothing better to do. This Saturday she had something better to do, though what it was she hadn't bothered to inform her parents.

In the afternoon Alan pulled weeds out of the garden, Pam turned up the hem of an evening skirt and Wilfred Summitt took a nap. The nap freshened him up, and while they were having tea, which was sardines and lettuce and bread and butter and madeira cake, he said he had seen a newsflash on television and the Glasgow bank robbers had been caught.

‘What we want here is the electric chair.'

‘Something like that,' said Pam.

‘What we want is the army to take over this country. See a bit of discipline then, we would. The army to take over, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty, and some general at the head of it. Some big pot who means business. The Forces, that's the thing. We knew what discipline was when I was in the Forces.' Pop always spoke of his time at Catterick Camp in the nineteen-forties as ‘being in the Forces' as if he had been in the navy and air force and marines as well. ‘Flog 'em, is what I say. Give 'em something to remember across their backsides.' He paused and swigged tea. ‘What's wrong with the cat?' he said, so that anyone coming in at that moment, Alan thought, would have supposed him to be enquiring after the health of the family pet.

Alan went back into the garden. Passing the window of Pop's bed-sit, he noticed that the gas fire was full on. Pop kept his gas fire on all day and, no doubt, half the night from September till May whether he was in his room or not. Pam had told him about it very politely, but he only said his circulation was bad because he had hardening of the arteries. He contributed nothing to the gas bill or the electricity bill either, and Pam said it wasn't fair to ask anything from an old man who only had his pension. Alan dared to say, How about the ten thousand he got from selling his own house? That, said Pam, was for a rainy day.

Back in the house, having put the garden tools away, he found his daughter. His reading had taught him that the young got on better with the old than with the middle-aged, but that didn't seem to be so in the case of his children and Pop. Here, as perhaps in other respects, the authors had been wrong.

Jillian ignored Pop, never speaking to him at all, and Pam, though sometimes flaring and raving at her while Jillian flared and raved back, was generally too frightened of her to reprove her when reproof was called for. On the face of it, mother and daughter had a good relationship, always chatting to each other about clothes and things they had read in magazines, and when they went shopping together they always linked arms. But there was no real communication. Jillian was a subtle little hypocrite, Alan thought, who ingratiated herself with Pam by presenting her with the kind of image Pam would think a fifteen-year-old girl ought to have. He was sure that most of the extra-domestic activities she told her mother she went in for were pure invention, but they were all of the right kind: dramatic society, dressmaking class, evenings spent with Sharon whose mother was a teacher and who was alleged to be helping Jillian with her French homework. Jillian always got home by ten-thirty because she knew her mother thought sexual intercourse invariably took place after ten-thirty. She said she came home on the last bus, which sometimes she did, though not alone, and Alan had once seen her get off the pillion of a boy's motor-bike at the end of Martyr's Mead.