Mermaids on the Golf Course (14 page)

The dawn was coming when he fell into bed.

The
Stuff of Madness

W
hen Christopher Waggoner, just out of law school, had married Penelope, he had known of her fondness for pets, and her family’s fondness too. That was normal, to love a cat or dog that was part of the household. Christopher had not even thought much about the stuffed little Pixie, a white Pomeranian with shiny black artificial eyes, which stood in a corner of her father’s study on a wooden base with her dates of birth and death, nor of the fluffy orange and white cat called Marmy, also preserved, which sat on the floor in another corner. A live cat and dog had lived in the Marshalls’ house during his courting days, Christopher recalled, but long ago they had fallen into the taxidermist’s hands, and now stood and sat respectively on an outcrop of rock in his and Penny’s Suffolk garden. These were not the only animals that peopled, if the word could be used, the garden at Willow Close.

There was Smelty, a feisty little black Scotch terrier with one foot raised and an aggressive muzzle extended with bared teeth, and Jeff the Irish sheep dog, whose coat stood up the best against the elements. Some relics had been in the garden for twenty and more years. An Abyssinian cat called Riba, a name Penny had derived from some mystic experiment, stared with greenish yellow eyes from a tree branch, crouched as if to pounce on anyone walking in the path below. Christopher had seen guests catch a glimpse of the cat and recoil in alarm.

All in all, there were seventeen or eighteen preserved cats and dogs and one rabbit, Petekin, placed about the garden. The Waggoners’ two children, Philip and Marjorie, long grown up and married, smiled indulgently at the garden, but Christopher could remember when they winced, when Marjorie didn’t want her boyfriends to see the garden and there’d been fewer dead pets then, and when Philip at twelve had tried to burn Pixie on a bonfire, and had been caught by Penny and given the severest scolding of his life.

Now a crisis had come up, attentively listened to by their present dog and cat, Jupiter, an old red setter, and Flora, a docile black cat with white feet. These two were not used to a tense atmosphere in the calm of Willow Close. Little did they understand, Christopher thought, that he was taking a step to protect them from an eternal life after death in the form of being stuffed and made to stand outdoors in all weathers. Wouldn’t any animal, if it were capable of choosing, prefer to be a few feet under the ground, dissolving like all flesh, when his time had come? Christopher had used this argument several times to no avail.

The present altercation, however, was over the possible visit of some journalists who would photograph the stuffed animals and write up Penelope’s lifelong hobby.

“My old darlings in the newspaper,” Penny said in a beseeching way. “I think it’s a lovely tribute to them, Christopher, and the
Times
might reprint some of it with
one
photograph from the Ipswich paper anyway. And what’s the harm in it?”

“The harm,” Christopher began calmly but trying to make every word tell, “is that it’s an invasion of privacy for me and for you too. I’m a respected solicitor—still going up to London once or twice a week. I don’t want my private address to be bruited about. My clients and colleagues for the most part know my London whereabouts, only. Would you like the telephone ringing here twenty times a day?”

“Oh, Christopher! Anyone who wants your home address can get it, and you know that.”

Christopher was standing in the brick-floored kitchen with some typewritten pages of a brief in his hand, wearing house slippers, comfortable trousers and a coat sweater. He had come in from his study, because he had thought the last telephone call, which Penny had made a few moments ago, might have been to give the green light to the journalists. But Penny told him she had been ringing her hairdresser in Ipswich for an appointment on Wednesday.

Christopher tried again. “Two days ago, you seemed to see my point of view. Quite frankly, I don’t want my London associates to think I dwell in a place so—so whimsical.” He had sought for a word, abandoned the word “macabre,” but maybe macabre would have been better. “You see the garden a bit differently, dear. For most people, including me sometimes, it’s a trifle depressing.”

He saw he had hurt her. But he felt he had to take a stand now before it was too late. “I know you love all those memories in the garden, Penny, but to be honest Philip and Marjorie find our old pets a bit spooky. And Marjorie’s two children, they giggle now, but—”

“You’re saying it’s only
my
pleasure.”

He took a breath. “All I’m saying is that I don’t want the garden publicized. If you think of Pixie and old Marmy,” Christopher continued with a smile, “seeing themselves as they look now, in a newspaper, they might not like it either. It’s an invasion of their privacy too.”

Penny tugged her jumper down nervously over the top of her slacks. “I’ve already agreed to the journalists—just two, I think, the writer and the photographer—and they’re coming Thursday morning.”

Oh, my God, Christopher thought. He looked at his wife’s round, innocent blue eyes. She really didn’t understand. Since she had no occupation, her collection of taxidermy had become her chief interest, apart from knitting, at which she was quite skilled and in which she gave lessons at the Women’s Institute. The journalists’ arrival meant a show of her own achievement, in a way, not that she did any taxidermy herself, the expert they engaged was in London. Christopher felt angry and speechless. How could he turn the journalists off without appearing to be at odds with his wife, or without both of them (if Penny acquiesced to him) seeming full-blown cranks to hold their defunct pets so sacred, they wouldn’t allow photographs of them? “It’s going to damage my career—most gravely.”

“But your career is made, dear. You’re not struggling. And you’re in semi-retirement anyway, you often say that.” Her high, clear voice pleaded pitiably, like that of a little girl wanting something.

“I’m only sixty-one.” Christopher pulled his abdomen in. “Hawkins’s doing the same thing I am, commuting from Kent at sixty-nine.”

Christopher returned to his study, his favorite room and his bedroom for the last couple of years, as he preferred it to the upstairs bedroom and the spare room. He was aware that tears had come to his eyes, but he told himself that they were tears of frustration and rage. He loved the house, an old two-story manse of red brick, the corners of its overhanging roof softened by Virginia creeper. They had an interesting catalpa in the back garden—on one of whose limbs unfortunately Riba the Abyssinian cat sat glowering—and a lovely design of well-worn paths whose every inch Christopher knew, along which he had strolled countless times, working out legal problems or relaxing from work by paying close attention to a rosebush or a hydrangea. He had acquired the habit of not noticing the macabre—yes, macabre—exteriors of pets he and Penny had known and loved in the past. Now all this was to be invaded, exposed to the public to wonder at, very likely to chuckle at too. In fact, had Penny a clue as to how the journalists intended to treat the article, which was probably going to be one of their full-page spreads, since the stuffed animals were in their way so photogenic? Who had put the idea into the heads of the
Chronicle
journalists?

One source of his anguish, Christopher knew, was that he hadn’t put his foot down long ago, before Penny had turned the garden into a necropolis. Penny had always been a good wife, in the best sense of that term. She’d been a good mother to their children, she’d done nothing wrong, and she’d been quite pretty in her youth, and still took care of her appearance. It was he who had done something wrong, he had to admit. He didn’t care to dwell on that period, which had been when Penny had been pregnant with Marjorie. Well, he had given Louise up, hadn’t he? And Louise would have been with him now, if he had parted from Penny. How different his life would have been, how infinitely happier! Christopher imagined a more interesting, more richly fulfilled life, though he’d have gone on with his law career, of course. Louise had passion and imagination. She had been a graduate student of child psychiatry when Christopher met her. Now she had a high position in an institution for children in America, Christopher had read in a magazine, and years before that he had seen in a newspaper that she had married an American doctor.

Christopher suddenly saw Louise distinctly as she had looked when they’d had their first rendezvous at the Gare du Nord, she having been at the station to meet him, because she’d got to Paris a few hours before. He remembered her young, happy eyes of paler blue than Penny’s, her soft, smiling lips, her voice, the round hat she wore with a beige crown and a black fur rim. He could recall the scent of her perfume. Penny had found out about that affair, and persuaded him to end it. How had she persuaded him? Christopher could not remember Penny’s words, they certainly had not been threatening or blackmailing in any way. But he had agreed to give up Louise, and he had written as much to Louise, and then he had collapsed for two days in bed, exhausted as well as depressed, and so miserable, he had wanted to die. With the wisdom of years, Christopher realized that collapsing had been symbolic of a suicide, and that he was rather glad, after all, that he had merely spent two days in bed and not shot himself.

That evening at dinner, Penny remarked on his lack of appetite.

“Yes. Sorry,” Christopher said, toying with his lamb chop. “I suppose old Jupiter may as well have this.”

Christopher watched the dog carry the chop to his eating place in the corner of the kitchen, and Christopher thought: another year or so and Jupiter will be standing in the garden, perhaps on three legs, in a running position for ever. Christopher firmly hoped he wouldn’t be alive to see it. He set his jaw and stared at the foot of his wine glass whose stem he twisted. Not even the wine cheered him.

“Christopher, I am sorry about the journalists. They looked
me
up, and begged me. I had no idea you’d be so upset.”

Christopher had a feeling that what she said was not true. On the other hand, Penny wasn’t malicious. He decided to chance it. “You could still cancel it, couldn’t you? Tell them you’ve changed your mind. You won’t have to mention me, I trust.”

Penny hesitated, then shook her head. “I simply don’t want to cancel it. I love my garden. This is a way of sharing it—with friends and with people I don’t even know.”

She probably envisaged letters from strangers saying they were going to take up the same method of preserving their pets in their houses or gardens—God forbid—and what was the name of their taxidermist? And so Christopher’s will hardened. He would have to endure it, and endure it he would, like a man. He wouldn’t even quit the house while the journalists were here, because that would be cowardly, but he was going to take care not to be in any photograph.

Wednesday, a pleasant and sunny day, he did not set foot in the garden. It was ruined for him. The blossoming roses, the softly bending willow, chartreuse-colored in the sunlight, seemed a stage set waiting for the accursed journalists. His work, a lot of it, making that garden so beautiful, and now the vulgarians were going to trample over the primroses, the pansies, backing up and stepping sideways for their silly photographs.

Something was building up inside Christopher, a desire to hit back at both the journalists and at Penny. He felt like bombing the garden, but that would destroy the growing things as well as part of the house, possibly. Absurd! But an insufferable wrath boiled in him. The white coat of Pixie showed left of the catalpa even from the kitchen window. A brown and white collie called Doggo was even more visible on a stone base near the garden wall. Christopher had been able to cut these out of his vision somehow—until today.

When Penny went to the hairdresser’s on Wednesday afternoon, fetched by her friend Beatrice who went to the same hairdresser, Christopher took the car and drove rather aimlessly northward. He’d never done such a thing before. Waste of petrol, he’d have thought under usual circumstances, since he hadn’t even a shopping list with him. His mind dwelt on Louise.
Louise—
a name he’d avoided saying to himself for years, because it pained him so. Now he relished the pain, as if it had a cleansing and clarifying power.
Louise
in the garden, that was what Penny needed to bring back to her what the past was all about. Louise, worthy of being preserved if any living creature ever had been. Penny had met her once at a cocktail party in London, while the affair was still going on, and had sensed something and later made a remark to Christopher. Months later, Penny had discovered his three photographs of Louise—though to give Penny credit, she had not been snooping, but looking for a cuff link that Christopher said he had lost in the chest of drawers. Penny had said, “Well, Christopher—this is the girl who was at that party, is it not?” and then it had come out, that he was still seeing her. With Penny pregnant, Christopher had not been able to fight for Louise. For that he reproached himself too.

Christopher turned the car towards Bury St. Edmunds, to a large department store, and found a parking place nearby. He was full of an unusual confidence that he would have his way, that everything would be easy. He looked in the windows of the store as he walked towards the entrance: summer clothing on tall mannequins with flesh-colored legs, wearing silly smiles or equally silly pouts, flamboyant with hands and arms flung out as if to say, “Look at me!” That wasn’t quite what he wanted. Then he saw her—a blonde girl seated at a little white round table, in a crisp navy blue blouse rather like a sailor’s middy, navy blue skirt and black patent leather pumps. An empty stemmed glass stood on the table before her, and around her dummy men reared back barefoot in white dungarees, either topless or wearing striped blue and white jumpers.

“Where might I find the manager?” Christopher asked, but received such a vague answer from a salesgirl, he decided to push on more directly. He barged into a stockroom near the window where the girl was.