Unfaithfully Yours (21 page)

‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is very difficult to talk about but it is someone who has been . . . er . . . claiming . . . that …’

Then, as I sat there, wondering how best to continue, she burst into tears.

I did not know quite where to look: she was shaken by sobs and, burying her head in her hands, she must have cried for nearly a minute. Eventually I said, ‘Mrs Price? Are you all right?’

In the end she looked up. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, still with her head in her hands. ‘My husband has just left me and I thought I could cope with it but I can’t and it just all got too much at that moment. I don’t know why.’

She lifted up her face to me, then, and, in a reasonably steady voice, said, ‘I loved him. I loved Gerald. I don’t know why. In many ways he was an absolutely appalling person.’

I think I was sure from that moment that this was not the woman who had hired me to spy on Mr Price. I think I had known it as soon as she opened the door. This was absolutely not someone who had paid a private detective to spy on her husband. It was clear that his leaving her had come as a horrible surprise.

I waited for quite some time, watching her very carefully, before I said, ‘Is there anyone else involved?’

‘He says not!’ said Mrs Price. ‘But there is. There always is.’

Indeed, I thought, there usually is, and in your case there certainly has been. I suppose at that point I should have told her the whole story, but I honestly could not face doing so. This was a woman in genuine distress. She was clearly not my client. If she was, she was an actress of world-class stature with a very weird way of keeping herself amused.

At that moment a rather good-looking young man in his early thirties walked into the room, carrying a very large wodge of A4 paper. I recognized him from the party after the opening night of
Hamlet
as Conrad, Mrs Price’s son. He is a tall, open-faced lad with blond hair, worn longer than is usual in young people nowadays, and a large walrus moustache, an unusual and not completely successful fashion decision. The rest of him, however, looked absolutely nothing like his father’s negative descriptions. ‘Bit of a weasel’, ‘hopelessly unemployed tosser’ and ‘cider-sodden loser’ are some of the phrases he has applied to his son when in conversation with me.

In fact, young Conrad, apart from looking like a member of a west coast rock group in the late sixties, was a very personable young man indeed. It was also clear that he and his mother have a very intense and satisfying relationship. Mrs Price’s face suddenly lit up and, as he waved his wodge of A4, she beamed proudly at me. ‘Conrad,’ she said, ‘has just sold his novel for a six-figure sum. It is about the Spanish Civil War!’

‘This is it!’ said the young author, with a charming, slightly sheepish grin. ‘I’m afraid it’s about two hundred and fifty thousand words long. It may need cutting!’ Then he announced he was out tonight and would his mother be all right? She said she was fine. He said he knew she wasn’t fine. Then she asked him if Elaine was fine and he said Elaine was very fine, although Hanif might well be coming after him with a knife. That made his mother laugh. I wondered, for a moment, whether they were talking about Mrs Dimmock’s daughter – but I didn’t like to ask. I suppose I felt I ought to go but it looked to me as if Mrs Price wanted me to stay. When Conrad had gone she offered me another drink and this time I accepted.

‘Have you any idea where he is?’ I asked, as she poured me a glass of white wine.

‘There was just a message on the machine,’ she said. ‘About two weeks ago. He said he was leaving me. He sounded quite upset about it and not nearly as horrible as he can be sometimes. He’s very good at being horrible. He said he was going away somewhere to “think” and he would write to me. Write to me! Isn’t that how we used to dump people when we were twenty? We have been married for over forty years, Mr Gibbons.’

Then she started crying again. I went over to the sofa and, very quietly and gently, I put my arm around her. ‘Have you no idea where he might be?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, crying even harder now. ‘I have no idea at all. He has just disappeared. Apparently he took three weeks off from work. They thought he was going on holiday. With me.’

This set her off again. I found myself wondering how it could be that someone so obviously odious as Gerald Price could inspire this kind of uncomplicated affection. The woman really does love him. Unlike you, ‘Mrs Price’, who, whoever you are, seem to have got the little bastard about bang to rights. Love really is blind, isn’t it?

‘I don’t quite understand,’ she said, when she was a little calmer, ‘why you thought I might have been writing to you. Did this person use this address? What did they want?’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘there has been some mistake. I really do not want to bother you with it.’

I decided to introduce the subject of Pamela Larner. ‘Tell me,’ I said, as casually as I could, ‘did you know Pamela Larner well?’

For the first time in our conversation she looked troubled. I had the impression, too, that she might be concealing something from me. I could not say quite why I thought that. ‘Detective instinct’, I suppose. She looked away and started to twist her fingers to and fro. She has rather lovely hands. Very fine white fingers, with black ink staining her nails. From marking I suppose. It was only then I noticed that, although we were indoors and it was a mild day, she was still wearing the beret she had worn to the première of
Hamlet
. It was the first trace of affectation I had found in her. I felt it was rather touching.

‘Pamela Larner . . . I hadn’t thought about her for years,’ she said, in a puzzled voice. ‘And then . . . suddenly . . . it seems . . .’ Her voice died away. ‘Why,’ she went on, ‘are you asking about her?’

What was the expression on her face? If I hadn’t thought she had no reason whatsoever to feel guilty about Mrs Larner, I would have said she looked guilty. I could not think why that should be the case. I was not even sure, at this stage, whether she knew the woman was dead.

‘There seems to be something not quite right about the way she died,’ I said. ‘The police said it was suicide, but Mr Larner seems to think it might have been murder. I’m not sure yet.’

She continued to look shocked but, for the first time since I had come into the house, I wasn’t sure I trusted her completely. I was still absolutely sure she was not the woman who had been writing to me. If there was a doubt in my mind, it was connected to the Pamela Larner business.

We had both drunk a glass of wine. She offered me another one, which I accepted. New Zealand Sauvignon, I think, with that fresh, lemony flavour. I always think the Enzedders do it better than the French. She sat, in silence, for some minutes, staring out at her garden, as if it was all she had left in the world.

‘I was faithful to him,’ she said, ‘for all of my life. I met him at Oxford and I fell in love with him and I thought he fell in love with me. A few people have tried it on over the years, but I was never interested. I’m a one-man woman sort of thing. He is a very unhappy person. His father was quite horrible. Because, I suppose, Gerry’s grandfather was horrible to him. He was a very bad-tempered judge. And so the misery is handed on, Mr Gibbons. I suppose you see a lot of it in your business.’

I presumed she must know I was a private detective. I wasn’t sure how she knew this. I didn’t think I had told her. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I do quite a bit of divorce.’

She turned and looked me full in the face then. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m sure it’s not always easy to outwit the locals when it comes to marital deception. Although you may think you are adept at snooping, Mr Gibbons, you have no idea of the talents of the women of Putney in this area. Very little escapes their notice.’

She smiled slightly as she said this, keeping her eyes on my face. I recognized the sentence immediately. It is in the first paragraph of your letter to me of 17 June. For a moment I was, suddenly, convinced that I might have made a mistake. That this might actually be the woman who had been writing to me. That everything she had said was a lie. That it was her (you) who had first approached me about Gerald Price. I was almost tempted to tell her about the letters, then decided that would be foolish. If you are ‘Mrs Price’ as well as Mrs Price, I shouldn’t even be telling you I suspect you, should I?

And, anyway, I was still, without quite knowing why, assured of her innocence. Maybe you – whoever you are – slipped in that phrase because you knew it was the kind of thing she often said. People repeat themselves, especially when they’re over sixty. Maybe it was the beret – the one piece of vanity in a woman who had, otherwise, lost all confidence in her power to attract.

I went out into the street. I thought I could still hear her crying as I made for my car. I know I couldn’t, of course, but, because it’s only in my imagination, I still think I hear her tears, as I sit here, writing this to you, my unknown reader.

Roland O. Gibbons

From:

John Goldsmith

c/o Hôtel du Levant

Rue Gobineau

Béziers

France

14 November

To:

Elizabeth Price

112 Heathland Avenue

Putney, SW15 3LE

Dear Elizabeth,

You will probably be very surprised to get this letter from me; and even more so when you see where I seem to be staying. The Languedoc is not a number-one destination in November. And this hotel is the sort of place most people avoid, even in high season. One of those French hotels with hard, sausage-like bolsters under the pillows, and locks on the room doors that are wound slowly backwards and forwards on a ratchet that looks like something from a piece of Victorian machinery.

Wi-Fi is not a word they know or understand. There are no telephones by your bedside. I have not seen a television anywhere on the property. It is just what I need. I have not brought a mobile, laptop, iPad, iPhone or i-anything with me and am, therefore, very well placed to say that none of these devices has added anything to the sum of human happiness.

What I have brought with me is something probably only the sixtysomething bothers with at all. An address book. I have had it more than twenty years. It is a green-leather affair with pages that you are supposed to take out and put in at will and, in order to make this sort of thing easier, there are holes in the pages and two rings that bind your contacts together.

So old am I, darling Elizabeth, that I do not think I can remember the word we used to describe these things when they were new all those years ago. Filofax. That’s it. I’m not dead yet. I can still find the words. Just. It isn’t a Filofax but it’s like a Filofax and, instead of pulling out pages and adding new ones, I have just allowed certain pages to fray and wander or disappear altogether so, for example, absolutely no one at all is listed under K. I must have known someone whose name began with K. Surely.

As I leaf through it, the first thing I cannot help but notice is that quite a few of people listed in my Time Organizer, that is how it describes itself on the inside front cover, are dead. There is absolutely no point in my calling Polly Jackson whose number, like almost everyone else’s, has the now defunct London prefix of 0171. I happen to know she committed suicide nine years ago. I never went to her funeral. I never sent a letter of condolence. I didn’t really know her very well. If I had known her better, I’m not sure I would have liked her. She liked a man I thought I liked and then realized I didn’t.

Your name is there. You are not listed under P for Price but under E for Elizabeth. You do not even have an 0181 prefix to your number so that suggests you have been there well before April 2000. I wondered, with a touch of sentimental nostalgia for the old codes, whether I ever knew you when London exchanges were MACaulay (Nine Elms) or HILlside (Finchley.) There is just the one number there. Some people, with whom I have quarrelled or for whom I never really cared seem to have about ten numbers. Mobiles crossed out, new ones added, new addresses put in next to the new numbers. Your number seems always to have been there. Your address in Heathland Avenue, too, is a reminder of the old days. There is no postcode.

It is to that address I am writing. What I want to say to you cannot be said in a phone call – even assuming I can find a phone in this very strange hotel. I am not even quite sure what it is I want to say. I am groping my way towards it as I write. I have been going back over my life, trying to make sense of the things I did, and failing, of course, as we all do, but what has become clear to me is that whenever I try to summon up the times when I have been happy, you are always in the picture.

We met first, if you remember, in the playground of St Jude’s Primary School. We had worked out, along with the other middle-class people in the area, that it was a seriously good place, run by a very strict Welshwoman called Myfanwy Jones. Do you remember the day the improbably named Lucy Lockett went crazy and ran across Putney Common to the school in her nightgown? Once there, she started pulling all the plugs out of the walls, because, she said, she thought the electricity would harm the children. ‘It was a bit of a shock!’ Myfanwy lilted, at a few concerned parents later. ‘She is a very well set-up woman!’

Later, Mrs Lockett became convinced that tiny little Stephen Lockett was Jesus Christ and threw him into the deep end of Putney Swimming Pool to see if he would walk on water. He only just escaped with his life.

When I met you, though, none of us knew how crazy the other parents were. We were new parents, standing by the wire fence around the school, as very small children wobbled their way towards the door still marked with the stone letters that read ‘INFANTS’. It was the first day and, before they were all taken away, each mummy or daddy or, in the case of the Dimmocks, both Mummy and Daddy, leaned over their charges and whispered words of solace.

Afterwards some of the mummies looked as if they needed solace. I think Mary Dimmock burst into floods of tears while Pamela Larner was heard to mutter, ‘Pull yourself together, woman!’ but you and I were of the stoical ‘Let them get on with it’ breed, were we not?