Unfaithfully Yours (33 page)

The rooms at the front of the house were dark, but there was a light on in the upper front bedroom. I stood there, looking up at the window, expecting, at any moment, the familiar shape of Gerald to walk, in silhouette, against the linen blinds. Perhaps, I thought, I would see them kissing. Perhaps the light would simply be switched off suddenly, and I would know he was up there, with her, making love. None of those things happened. A dog barked in an empty house next door. A car roared up the street, screeched to a stop and two young people got out. They started kissing, and I imagined what it must be like to be young and kissing in the street without a care in the world.

I waited for what I now realize was about an hour but, at the time, seemed longer. I was walking away, in the direction of the river, when I heard the door of Mike and Pamela’s house shut with a bang. I turned and saw him at once. I am surprised he didn’t see me. I can’t have been more than thirty yards away from him.

I don’t think he was in the mood for seeing anything, though. He stood there for a moment, at the front gate. He was twisting his hands together, trying to control his fury. He turned away from me and, as he walked back towards the Upper Richmond Road, I could tell, from the angle of his shoulders, that he was in the grip of a rage that was not going to go away easily. Whatever he had been doing in that house, it wasn’t kissing.

For a moment I really thought he might have killed her. He is quite capable of that.

It was that, rather than a desire to tell her what I thought of her, that prompted me to ring the bell. I leaned on it, hard, like a policeman. She didn’t answer the first time. The next time I rang there was another long pause and then the sound of footsteps in the hall.

‘Who’s there?’ I heard her voice say. She sounded drunk. I didn’t see any point in lying.

‘It’s Elizabeth!’ I said. ‘Elizabeth Price!’

Another long silence. Then, ‘Go away!’

I was about to do just that. In fact I was already making my way down the path when I heard her voice again. She sounded different. She sounded desperate now, like someone who has just been told that a person they have loved very much has died.

‘Please don’t go!’ she said.

She didn’t open the door, though, so I went to the side door and climbed over it. She was by the french windows when I came in from the garden. She was wearing jeans that were too tight, and one of her red chiffon blouses with ruffles. Her face was white and she looked as if she had been crying. Her hair, usually as immaculate as the cloth at one of her dinner parties, was ragged and out of place. She looked, I thought, pretty drunk. She stood there, swaying slightly, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something unpleasant. She was good at that. In the end all she said was ‘Your husband was here!’ Then she turned and swayed off back inside. I followed her.

She staggered to the sofa and sat heavily. Red wine spilled on the pale carpet as she slumped back among the cushions. She stared at me as if she had never seen me before.

‘He’s a bastard!’ she said thickly. ‘An absolute fucking bastard!’

‘I am sure he is!’ I said, trying to keep my voice as level as possible. I moved to the armchair, next to the coffee-table. There was a half-filled glass on it. For Gerald presumably. I sat and looked at her, hard. She didn’t look right. It wasn’t just the paleness of her skin or the visible twitch in her cheek. It was her eyes. I’ve seen that look in the faces of people in hospital waiting rooms. They have caught a glimpse of that thing none of us really wants to think about. That thing you see when they tell you there is no hope.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry!’

‘For what?’ I said, although I knew perfectly well what she was sorry for.

‘Oh, about Gerald,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that – so there was another silence in the room. There was only one lamp, in the far corner, so it was uncomfortably dark. The french windows were open and, though it was warm, a slight breeze idled in from the garden and made me wonder if I should get up and close them; but I didn’t. I knew something very serious was happening, but did not, yet, know what it was.

‘I’ve taken forty temazepam,’ she said, in casual, matter-of-fact sort of way.

‘Oh!’ I said. I sounded, I thought, curiously bright and cheerful. I knew I was supposed to do something about this. I could not for the life of me think what it might be. Make her sick. Pump her stomach. Call the police and the ambulance. ‘I’d better call someone,’ I said, after what seemed like hours and hours. I was getting up to do just that when she leaned across and grabbed my wrist, hard.

‘I don’t want you to do that!’ she said. ‘You mustn’t do that!’

I sat back in my armchair. ‘He’s not worth killing yourself over!’ I said – although that was not what I felt at all. In fact, one of the first things I had thought when she had told me she had taken pills was that I might ask her if there were any left in the bottle.

‘I want to die!’ she said, in a low voice.

I started to say something. She still had hold of my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. I didn’t say anything. I waited for her.

‘It’s nothing to do with Gerald,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s nothing to do with anyone or anything. It’s the way I feel. It’s what I want to do. I’ve felt like this for so long. It seems like it’s been going on all my life. I want to die.’

That was when I suppose I should have said something to make her feel that life was worth living. The sun would come up tomorrow. The birds would sing eventually. There were her children. I think I might have started to say something about her children. I don’t think I mentioned her husband.

‘Look,’ I said, trying gently to disengage my arm from her grip, ‘I think we should ring someone. It’s not too late to do something.’

‘I don’t want you to call the ambulance or the police,’ she said. ‘I want you to sit there for a while.’

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to sit there and watch her die. Calling in an emergency was, I saw, with horrible clarity, simply a way of avoiding this, but she still had hold of my arm. I tried to loosen her grip once more but she dug her fingers into my flesh even more tightly.

‘I just want to talk to someone,’ she said. ‘Someone nice.’

I didn’t know how to answer this. I have never thought of myself as a nice person. I have never liked the word much and, in the context of the terrible thing that was happening in front of my eyes, it seemed even more of a weak, hopeless way of trying to describe such an important quality.

‘You’re a decent person,’ she said. ‘You’re about the only decent person among the whole lot of them. You’re the only one I like. And I go and have an affair with your husband.’

‘How long ago,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm, ‘did you take the pills?’

She had been drinking. Had she taken them before Gerald came in to see her? Had she really taken forty of them? She seemed very lucid. Except for those eyes, which were already looking beyond me at something we must all one day face.

She did not answer this question. Neither did she loosen her grip on my arm. ‘I don’t want you to call anyone,’ she said again. ‘I want to die.’

That was when I started to disengage her fingers. She fought me over this. I did not give way. In the end, she loosened her grip. All this time, her eyes never left my face. I still had it in mind to get over to the phone and call 999, but I couldn’t get up. Not when she was looking at me like that. Not when she had said the things she had said. I had no idea how much time I had but I didn’t think I had long.

‘I want you to hold a cushion over my face,’ she said. ‘I want you to do that. I want you to do it now.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘That’s murder. I can’t do that.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it isn’t murder. People get killed every day. People drop bombs and blow up buildings and get drunk and stab people.’

She had grabbed my arm again. I couldn’t bear the idea of prising her fingers off my flesh for a second time. More than anything else, I did not want to be sitting so close to her, smelling the alcohol on her breath, looking into those empty eyes and listening to her voice, repeating the same simple urge over and over again. I want to die. I want to die.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll get up and get a cushion. OK? Is that OK?’

‘That is what I want,’ she said. ‘That is what I want you to do.’

She seemed easier in herself now. Her words, I noticed, were definitely slurred. I thought she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Very soon she would be unconscious. Then I could get to the phone, call in the emergency and leave. I would have done the thing you are supposed to do if you are a nice person. That word again. Only a voice in my head kept saying, ‘Whatever gave you the idea that you are nice person, Elizabeth? You are not a nice person.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m doing it. Look.’

There didn’t seem much point in trying to talk about all the things that made life worth living. I didn’t think she had the right to do this. Not when I was in the room. I didn’t want it to be anything to do with me. If she wanted to kill herself, let her do it in some hotel where no one would see. I simply did not want to look at her misery any longer. That was why I got up from the chair.

There was a cushion on the other sofa. She let me get up and watched me as I walked over to it. I picked it up. She really wasn’t focusing very well any more. I did not have much time. I could walk over to the phone now and put in the call. That was what I was going to do. Her eyes, in that horrible, snake-like way she’d always had, found mine and stared deep into me.

‘Thank you, Elizabeth,’ she said, her voice definitely slurring now. ‘Thank you.’

For a moment she looked so like Barnaby. He was the saddest of all her children; and they were a pretty sad bunch. She was always shouting at him, from the window as he tottered towards the school gates, as he trudged up the path to the front door or fell behind the others on one of those long, grim walks she was always insisting they take. She was not a good mother. She was not a nice person, and now she was looking at me like a dog about to be put down, grateful for any kind of attention, even if it was a bullet in the head.

I don’t know how it happened. I found myself on top of her, forcing the cushion into her face. It wasn’t for long. At the time I thought it was no more than a gesture. I would have said I had held it over those pathetic, dishevelled features for less than a minute, but maybe it was longer than that. I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I would swear, too, that when I lifted it from her, although her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily, she was still breathing. I would swear to that but I am not certain of it. I believe it, for the reason we believe most things. Because I want to believe it. I flung the cushion away across the floor. I picked up the glass. I drained the last of the wine. For some reason I found myself thinking, There was wine in that when I came into the room. I am drinking some of what Gerald was drinking.

It became very important to get rid of any traces of him from the room. I had lost all interest in her now. She was just sleeping, I decided. That thing they write on gravestones, ‘At peace at last.’ I wasn’t aware of myself either. It was as if I had never walked in on her, as if I had never listened to those things she had said.

I took the glass, washed it carefully in the kitchen sink and put it back in the cabinet. Then I walked out into the street, closing the front door behind me as carefully and quietly as if there was a baby asleep upstairs. I didn’t ever think about Pamela Larner again. She simply disappeared from the face of the earth. We had lost touch with Mike, of course, years before that night. I tried not to think about what had happened.

But, of course, I did. That was really why I wrote to you. After finding out about Pamela, in that particularly horrible way, I could never stop thinking about what Gerry might or might not be doing. I was ashamed of how I felt – but I could not stop myself. Hence you, the private detective I did not really want to acknowledge I was hiring. Maybe that was why I wrote to you in what was not really my voice, almost a parody of the schoolmistress; and yet, of course, by pretending to be that crusty, slightly prurient character, I was brought face to face with what may be my true self. It is certainly how Gerry sees me.

I think about it over and over again. I know I did not do the right thing, but it is what I did. I have told no one any of this and I will never tell anyone else. I am telling you now because I know you, too, will never tell anyone. No, I don’t
know
– but I am reasonably sure. I feel easier that I have told you, anyway, and am prepared to accept the risk.

I am not a risk-taker usually. I try to plan things carefully, and if I have had a dream, it was probably always for a quiet life. In which case, I hear you ask, why on earth did you marry Gerald Price? The answer to that is – I simply do not know. We do things for love and we do not know why we do them and so often they are the wrong things but it is what we do.

I know we will see each other later today. We will meet, too, I am sure, in the suburb again and again, and smile and exchange news, but we will never speak of any of this. It’s all too sad. And we have not much time left ourselves, so it is, perhaps, better not to think about it all.

Ever your friend

Elizabeth Price

¹
Interviews with Mike Larner, Elizabeth Price, Mary Dimmock and telephone interview with Barbara Sharpe/Goldsmith. Mr Price refused formal interviews.

²
I have been unable to verify the actual name of this establishment, which seems to have specialized in giving education in secretarial skills to girls from well-off families who could then claim to ‘have been at Oxford’. Which Mrs Larner did – almost constantly, according to some respondents.

³
Dr Goldsmith told me that this was the first time he had revealed this fact and did not want it publicly known. I have consulted him before mentioning it here and he has given his permission. He told me, in the Duke’s Head, Putney, on 3 December, that ‘that cunt Gerry Price may try to make something of it but I do not care’.