Unfaithfully Yours (7 page)

All best and I mean that about writing again,

John Goldsmith

PS I think I may have heard somewhere that poor Pamela Larner died. Although I can’t recall who told me or when it happened. Is this true? Did you hear anything? I always thought, back in the old days, that Mike Larner was quite definitely one of those husbands who might one day lose it totally and run at her with a meat cleaver. Was it her you had in mind? And what were the suspicious circumstances? Or has someone else from the old villa circle finally got what is coming to us all? I’m afraid I’m dying to know more details. I hope it wasn’t Mike Larner. I was always rather fond of him. I’ve never seen a man get so worked up about fish! I always thought he was gay. But, then, I think every bloke I meet is gay. I went to an English public school, for God’s sake!

From:

Mary Dimmock

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

28 August

To:

Dr John Goldsmith MRCGP, DRCOG

101 Fellen Road

Putney

Dear, dear John,

You haven’t changed! Same sweet old thing you were back in Uzie-les-Trois-Chapelles (if that was its name.) Always ready to listen to people’s problems. I can still see you at the table at Puerto Banús, watching us all get drunk with that sad, noble face of yours that always reminded me – I hope you will not be offended by this – of a horse. I love horses. I always felt that wonderfully noble forehead of yours should have a white stripe down the middle of it, like Gentleman Billy who won the Derby in, I think, 1995. Your eyes were the beautiful pale blue I always associate with the jockey who rode Laughing Lady, who broke her leg at Sandown Park in 2003 and your determined chin was always the kind of chin I felt a prizewinning stallion might have.

And those wonderful, youthful blond curls! You looked like that marble statue of a Greek god in the British Museum.

You are, of course, quite right about Gerry. I should have had no more to do with him. I will stop seeing him. I will. I promise. It’s a fling, that’s all. I am drawn to him in a way I simply cannot control. Last week I put my hand down his trousers while we were having lunch in the La Mancha tapas bar on Putney High Street and the manager—

There I go again! I really must spare you these details!

Actually, I don’t want to talk about Gerry. Or, at least, not about my doings with him – although they seem to have slackened off a bit, perhaps because of the weather. It’s been raining non-stop, hasn’t it?

Gerry told me about Pamela Larner’s death. He was very strange when he talked about her. He just said ‘Pamela died, apparently’! Then he added, ‘The
on dit
seems to be she died in “suspicious circumstances”. Whatever that means.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it means she was murdered.’

He looked really thunderous at this. ‘Why on earth should you think she was murdered?’

‘ I – I don’t know …’ I stammered. I was a bit frightened suddenly.

‘Any man with red blood in his veins would want to top her,’ he said, with a really weird expression. ‘She was a class-A bitch!’

Then he got control of himself. He told me he had been doing a bit of sleuthing to try to find out how Pamela did actually die and what the ‘suspicious circumstances’ might be. He has been in contact with Mike Larner for precisely that reason. Which I thought strange. He never liked Mike, did he? I seem to remember him making some rather horrible jokes about him in Corsica.

At first, he said, he hadn’t had much luck finding out anything. It seems Mike Larner has become a bit of a hermit since Pamela died. He wouldn’t say anything about it to Gerry and would only communicate by letter! Gerry kept going round there as Mike pulled all his phones out of the wall a few months ago during some wildlife programme to which he took exception. My
liaison problematique
, if that is the correct phrase to describe G, finally had to sort of lie in wait for him as the poor chap was going out to get the milk.

Mike told him, when they finally met, that poor Pamela took sleeping pills. Quite a lot of them! Awful! And, for some reason I can’t quite fathom, Mike seems to think it might not have been suicide but something meant to look like suicide, i.e. murder. It seems she was smothered with a cushion as well! Or possibly even strangled!

Gerry said Mike was making all sorts of wild accusations and, when they met in Mike’s front garden, he started saying that it was all the fault of people like Gerry. Accused him of having an affair with her! They had a screaming row in the middle of the street, apparently, which was embarrassing as people were watching. Mike has also got some kind of obsession with David Attenborough, it seems. He thinks he’s in league with the devil. Which does suggest that poor Mike may have gone a bit potty. Everyone loves David Attenborough, don’t they?

But Gerry is very strange when he talks about Pamela. Something about his manner worries me. Do you think he did have an affair with her? I don’t want to think about Pamela, really. She wasn’t a very nice woman, was she? She once told me I had a big bottom. It was nearly thirty years ago but you don’t forget things like that, do you? Gerry seems to like my bottom a lot. A few days ago on Putney Heath he—

Sorry, darling John. I will heed your advice. I know it is the right thing to do. What should I do about this Pamela business?

Love,

Mary ‘Scarlet Woman’ Weston that was.

PS A funny little man who walked into one of our drama-club rehearsals a few weeks ago – and joined the Thesps as prompt boy and general dogsbody – has just enrolled as one of Sam’s patients, claiming to have gingivitis. He is called Gibbons, and if he has gingivitis I am a Dutch sea captain. From the kind of questions he asks me – which are nearly all about G – I have got it into my head that he is an undercover policeman investigating Pamela’s murder. If it was a murder.

PPS Do come to
Hamlet
. It is in the St Jude’s Church Hall on 24 October. G is fearfully good as the Great Dane and my Ophelia is getting some pretty good reviews from other cast members. Who says Ophelia wasn’t a fifty-eight-year-old woman with a big bum? We have a very long rehearsal period, as we are all too old to remember our lines!

PPPS I hope you and Barbara are all right. I was always terrified of her, actually. She is fearfully intelligent, isn’t she? And has actually published books as opposed to writing them – which is about all I seem to manage to do!

From:

Dr John Goldsmith MRCGP, DRCOG

101 Fellen Road

Putney

1 September

To:

Mary Dimmock

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

Dear Mary,

It was nice to get your letter. I shall certainly try and get to
Hamlet
and will bring Barbara – if she is back from teaching women how to write feminist history by then. I think she is actually just telling them how to be cruel to men – something about which she knows a very great deal. What is feminist history anyway? Is it history written by feminists or history written about feminists? In which case it has a rather limited field in which to operate. Boudicca, Elizabeth I and Florence Nightingale and you’ve about done it, haven’t you?

I do not mean to sound even more grumpy than I actually am. I spent this morning with three cases of depression, five malingerers and a bloke who had bleeding from the anus. As I got the old rubber glove on and shoved my finger up his bottom he said, in a deep voice, ‘I can cope with this, Doctor – but can you?’ Which was actually the high spot of my day.

I went into medicine to try to help people. If I had known I would spend my time arguing about drug budgets with thirtysomethings who seem to have gone into the field for the opportunities it affords to acquire expertise in management, I would have stopped before I started. Bit late now. I was trying to palpate some bloke’s abdomen the other day and found he was sending a text as I did so! What a job!

It sounds as if you’re cooling a little towards Gerald. I’m very happy to hear that, Mary. He really is a very destructive person who is only interested in himself. I can remember playing tennis with him once in Puerto Banús and forgetting, for some reason, to concede him a set. I had only just realized it was 6–4, 6–3, 6–2, 6–4 when his racket came hurtling over the net at me, followed, rapidly, by Gerald himself. He actually tried to bite me, puncturing the skin as he did so. He tried to laugh it off afterwards as part of his famous ‘Wild Beast’ impression – the one he used to practise on Pam Larner at the Larners’ parties, remember? – but he meant it all right.

And he was sweet on Pamela. No question. She tried it on with all the men, didn’t she, Mary? But with Gerry she didn’t need to try. There were times in that place in Corsica when I really thought they might actually be doing the deed of darkness on the property. It was always rather hard to tell who was where in the afternoon. I remember a lot of stuff about going off to look for mushrooms. I do not think it was mushrooms they were looking for. I felt really sorry for poor old Mike Larner.

I would imagine Pam could be very demanding. She always reminded me of one of those puppets we had as children. Either that or a rather sickeningly cheeky elf from some sentimental Christmas film. She had a button nose, button eyes and tiny little pointy breasts that she always thrust into your face when setting you right about Greenham Common – or whatever it was that was exercising the ladies back then. And the way she always carried on about going to Oxford when everyone knew she was at something like the polytechnic, as it was called in those days. Or maybe even a secretarial college. She seemed to resent the fact that poor old Mike had actually been to Balliol or something, even though he had ended up in some backwater of the Beeb being tortured by one of its many faceless managers. Head of Small Mammals or Controller of Regional Squid or whoever they were.

My God! I can just see her leaning too hard on Gerald and him losing his rag and getting those huge meaty hands of his round her neck and squeezing away for England. I think you should ask him some subtly probing questions about Mrs Larner and his relationship with her. Or maybe you shouldn’t. Let’s not even think about what happened to poor Pam. It doesn’t sound as if there’s much we can do about it – there wasn’t even a police case all those years ago. I expect the poor woman really did top herself.

There are plenty of reasons to top yourself in Putney. Looking out of your front door for starters. Trying to park in Sainsbury’s. Looking into any individual face on the high street. Trying to avoid the eyes of the Africans who want to wash your car in Putney Shopping Centre car park. Watching people eat in Wagamama. I could go on but I won’t.

Do let’s meet up one of these days. From the sound of it, involving either of our spouses sounds a bad idea. Do try to talk it through with Sam. I always thought he was such a nice bloke. I’m sure if you’re good friends you’ll find a way back to each other. Gerry Price is a very dangerous individual. I find it quite easy to believe he murdered Pam Larner – and got away with it too!

All my love, Mary,

John Goldsmith

From:

Mary Dimmock

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

3 September

To:

Dr John Goldsmith MRCGP, DRCOG

101 Fellen Road

Putney

Dear John,

I think it is all over with both the men in my life. The Gerald story is so truly awful I don’t think I can bear to tell it just yet. But there are other things. Things I can hardly bear to talk about. I am in fear of my life, John, and do wish I had listened to your sound advice earlier.

I think I may have mentioned that, just recently, I had the feeling I was being followed by a mysterious entity. I couldn’t exactly pin it down. It was just that – when walking home from rehearsals, for example – I often felt there was a mysterious figure somewhere in the shadows. And then, last night, I decided to take a route back along the towpath. It was late, about eleven o’clock, as we had been doing the scene in which I go mad and throw flowers at people while laughing in a high-pitched voice. Some of the cast are very enthusiastic about the way I do this but the others feel it is a little ‘over the top’ and Nasty Jean recently told Amanda Fluestatter (who told me) that I could not act my way out of a paper bag.

In my mad scene I do actually put a paper bag over my head, as it happens, and I think I act my way out of it rather powerfully. It is a modern-dress
Hamlet
set in a church hall in Putney where an amateur drama group are doing a production. I think it is a brilliant
mise-en-scenario
– if that is the right phrase.

Anyway, you will see all this on the night, John.

I was walking past some bushes, and remembering some of the exciting minutes that Gerald and I had spent inside them, when I thought I heard a rustling sound in the darkness over by the wire fence that separates the towpath from the playing fields on the other side. I called out but no one answered. I assumed it was an animal of some kind. Then, just as I was coming up to the Sea Scouts boathouse, I heard footsteps behind me. I thought at first they must be those of a jogger – they were coming towards me at quite a speed – and then something very heavy hit me on the side of the head and I fell forward on to the damp earth.

Whoever it was ran back the way they had come. They did not attempt to rob me or to interfere with me sexually, just hit me on the head and ran off. Who would do a thing like that? It seems so pointless. Why club a fifty-eight-year-old dental nurse over the head? As I listened to the footsteps pattering off through the summer night I could have sworn they were those of a woman!

I have been wondering if it was Amanda Fluestatter. She has had her eye on the part of Ophelia for some time, although the idea of someone of sixty-seven playing the part is patently ridiculous!

As if this was not bad enough, it may be, too, that my marriage is in even worse trouble than I had thought.

I opened a drawer in Sam’s office the other day and found several books containing pictures of naked men. They were doing gymnastics so at first I thought it was all about Sam’s fascination with sport. One of them showed some men playing football without any clothes on. He is keen on watching the game and it may well be that naked football is a thing, these days – really, when one looks at Channel 4 one sees things like men’s penises and women’s breasts and hears people using four-letter words almost every night. I really am sure the day is not far off when that man Peter Snow will grin out at one from the screen and say, ‘Here’s the fucking news!’