Chain Reaction (26 page)

‘You didn’t visit home?’

‘Not for a whole nine months.’ Miss Benson’s voice was choked with shame. You could tell she hadn’t shared this knowledge with many people, and it was obviously too great a burden to carry alone for long, festering in her mind. Frankie was glad that the shy young woman felt she could confide in her.

‘I had an affair, you see.’ Miss Benson smiled sadly. ‘Oh, it was nothing, but I thought that it was. He filled my whole life. My every waking hour was given entirely to him, if I wasn’t with him I was thinking of him, if I was asleep I was dreaming of him, and I really believed we would marry one day and I’d have him beside me for ever.’ She looked away and closed her eyes, ‘And there was Mother all alone and going mad with fear. And she never wrote, and she never said, and I never knew. You see, she believed that I ought to be independent, too, and she knew I’d come straight home at once if I realised what was happening. I rang her up every night, you know, I never missed, not once, but she thought that her phone was bugged.’

Frankie, such a practical person, found it hard to understand. ‘Couldn’t she have moved house?’ she enquired bluntly.

Miss Benson seemed amazed to have to go on to explain. ‘She couldn’t cope with that sort of thing, not without my help. And anyway, the problem was all in her mind. If she’d moved house it would have moved with her.’

What a sad tale. And how guilty Miss Benson must feel. ‘It’s easy, when you’re in love, to forget there’s anything else in life.’

Miss Benson turned away. ‘It wasn’t just love, it was an obsession. I was a woman possessed and in the end it was my obsessive behaviour that mined the whole relationship. Martin found somebody else. That was more absorbing even than the love had been. I nearly took my own life: I never realised such pain could exist.’ She lifted her head and breathed in deeply through her pinched-looking nose. ‘If I’d only visited my mother I would, have known instantly that something was going very wrong and I would have moved back to the cottage with her, and taken care of her, and protected her. Mother used to love that village. She’d lived there all her life.’ She lowered her voice to a sad murmur, her breath catching on the edge of her tears. ‘She was found by the police, driven almost witless and suffering from hypothermia, hiding in a copse on the ridge above the village. It was winter, you see. She didn’t know me when I arrived to see her. She never recognised me again, not before she died. And I blame myself. It just shows you what can happen when a frightened, impressionable old woman is left all alone with only the TV for company. And how easy it is to become a victim if you’re alone and afraid.’

‘It must have been a living nightmare.’ Frankie looked down at Miss Benson’s bowed head and fancied that she could see pieces of broken shell lying around her feet. ‘Where were the Social Services, where were the neighbours, the church, the charities?’

‘It’s no good, I can’t blame anyone else. It was my fault and it is me who should suffer the consequences,’ said the undemonstrative Miss Benson. ‘It’s a crime, of course, but some would call it society’s crime, the way we treat elderly people today.’

‘I know I would want revenge on someone,’ said Frankie. ‘I couldn’t rest until someone was punished for what was clearly a case of neglect.’ She thought of Michael and how, for so long, she had wished for revenge, the bastard. After all she had done for him, cared for him, made love to him, worked and shared the family expenses, feeding him, respecting him, and then what does the swine go and do? Takes off with a sly little
whore with breasts too large for her body and nothing between the ears but acne, someone so moronic it would be easy to impress her. And that’s what Michael craved more than anything, the appropriate awe for his gigantic brain.

Revenge. Once it was the only emotion which allowed her to sleep at nights, and the sweet dreams of accomplishing it. How utterly weary she was in those first awful weeks after he left her. And for months her conversation was nothing short of a monologue of venom. Her friends grew weary of hearing it. They started to leave their answerphones on when she knew damn well they were in.

Eventually, of course, the rage burned down enough to live with, especially when tempered by juicy gossip about their present plight… The bitch is never in, apparently, and Michael has to do the cooking! According to welcome reports, their flat looks like a Persian slum, hung with ethnic curtains and beads and hairy mats coming unwoven.

Oh yes, revenge, when it comes, is a sweet soothing balm, but hers came a little late, unfortunately, for total satisfaction.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Benson piously, back to her old gentle self again. ‘It is a question of values. I not only blame myself but this callous world we live in.’ The strain showed in her face and in the muscles of her neck and her rigid bearing. There was something alarming in anguish so carefully checked, as if, under that mild and gentle exterior, whatever festered there was intensified to the utmost.

And Miss Benson is a woman of action, Mother told Frankie that. She demonstrates and protests quite fiercely over live animal exports and vivisection. So is Miss Benson really the best person to befriend Frankie’s angry, bewildered mother?

Because of Mother’s improved behaviour Matron is more amenable to her outings with Miss Benson. She is always back at Greylands before nine o’clock, in time for her bath and bed. She is less frosty with the staff and even exchanges little jokes, helps to lay the tables, to dust the mantelpiece, things like that.

‘She is settling in at last, Mrs Rendell,’ Matron told her when last she visited. ‘It does take some more time than others. In your mother’s case it was longer than usual but I’m sure the drugs are helping. They invariably do, you know.’

‘Is there any chance my mother could be taken off them now?’

‘Best not,’ said Miss Blennerhasset, with a professional smile. ‘Not yet.’

‘And she seems to have accepted the sale of her flat. She doesn’t talk about it much, of course, not to me. I wondered if she had mentioned anything…?’

‘I think that’s where Miss Benson comes in,’ said Matron confidentially. ‘Mrs Peacock seems to have taken to sharing her little problems with her young friend, and that’s no reflection on you, Mrs Rendell. We all know how much easier it often is to confide in those who are uninvolved. And Miss Benson does seem to have a wonderful way with the elderly. I did wonder if she might be interested in working in that capacity, there are so few people around these days with the patience. I myself find it hard to attract the right kind of staff. Old people in general are not particularly appealing.’

‘Miss Benson works with sick animals.’

‘Aha,’ said Miss Blennerhasset profoundly. ‘That would explain it, then.’

There’s an underlying smell of gin in the room but Frankie decides to ignore it. ‘You seem much happier, Mother, though I hesitate to say it. You’re bound to contradict me.’

To Frankie’s disgust Mother lights another of Miss Benson’s cigarettes. ‘Oh no, Frankie dear, you are quite right, I
do
feel more relaxed. It is probably the medication Matron gives me. It seems to suit me. I feel much better.’

Do Mother’s eyes look slightly shifty as she sits here so much more perky than usual on the chair by the bed in her day clothes? Is she up to something?

‘And you are enjoying your little outings with Miss Benson?’

‘I certainly am,’ says Mother, prodding the floor with her stick.

‘Angus and Poppy asked when you were next coming to have tea with us.’ This is a lie. Angus and Poppy rarely, if ever, ask about their grandmother. She has never been their favourite person. But there’s no harm in pretending if it might make Mother feel better, and once the flat is gone Frankie feels she owes her mother more consideration, more attention. ‘I told them I’d ask you.’

‘Well, when would be convenient with you, dear?’

Frankie crosses her arms and her legs. ‘Not this week, this week is out because of the German student staying with Poppy. We feel we ought to take her out somewhere new and interesting every day, you know. Next week would be better, but not Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays because that’s when I do the Play Reading Society.’ Frankie frowns when she suddenly realises just how absurd her invitation sounds. ‘The week after that, say two weeks’ time on a Tuesday would be easier. Do you think you could make it then?’ She will force the children to stay in despite their groans and protestations. After all, this is their own grandmother.

‘I should think so, my diary is not especially full these days,’ said Mother, puffing out a mouthful of smoke, but apparently without irony. She doesn’t seem at all upset by Frankie’s unintentional slight. She considers Frankie thoughtless anyhow. When Michael left home Frankie knew that Mother thought she was lucky to have kept him so long. ‘You youngsters think that you can just go your own ways, but it’s give and take that make a marriage, Frankie.’

‘Give and take?
What, you mean one gives, like you did, and one takes, like Dad. That’s one way of living your life, I suppose.’

Mother’s frail hand gripped the hound’s head handle. ‘The difference is, Frankie, that I enjoyed looking after your father. Doing things for him didn’t feel like a chore to me. The more I could do for him the more pleased I was. And I had no idea how much you, as a child, resented that.’

‘Well, it’s not like that these days, Mum.’

‘Then it’s no wonder there’s so many drift apart through lack of trying.’

‘What did Dad ever do for you? Even when you were ill the neighbours came in to change your sheets and make your dinner. He never put himself out one iota. He never washed up, I doubt if he even knew how to butter a slice of bread, let alone boil an egg.’

‘He had no need to because I was there to do it for him.’

‘Yes, but Mum, what sort of a life is that, merely being a servant for somebody else? I had to work, remember. It was different for me.’

‘But I kept William till the end,’ said Mother severely.

‘You make it sound as if he was a trophy awarded annually for good behaviour!’

‘We will always disagree over this, Frankie, so there’s absolutely no point in talking about it any further.’

But you could see Mother was gratified when Michael walked out. She didn’t say so, of course, but her face closed up in that satisfied way as if she had finally proved her point.

And is Frankie satisfied, in some disgraceful way, to see her mother here like this? Is this Frankie’s revenge? Surely not. No, that’s an absurd suggestion, right out of the question.

So they decide upon tea on Tuesday the week after next. ‘I am going to Miss Benson’s again tomorrow,’ says Mother with pleasure, changing the subject. ‘It’s become quite a regular little outing.’

‘Miss Benson is very good to bother like this,’ says Frankie, unthinkingly because it is just so hard to see Mother as a pleasant and chatty companion.

‘I think it might be because she likes me,’ says Mother smoothly, that old closed look filming her eyes once again. The effect of the drugs? Probably.

‘Well, yes, of course, she must do.’

‘It is possible, Frankie, you know. I am not a waste product. William liked me too, when he was alive. He loved me till the day he died, if you remember.’

She sounds quite triumphant, not herself at all!
What is Mother up to?
Frankie leaves Greylands this evening slightly perturbed and properly chastened.

I
T TOOK A WHILE
for the thundery crashes to cease vibrating inside Vernon’s head. What staggered him most was the speed of his violence, when he was normally a man of such a gentle and serious demeanour. He looked down at his feet, at what he had done. There, on Joy’s ultra-clean kitchen floor, the scarlet had splashed on the new yellow tiles, keeping colour with the window begonias and a streak of the bloody gore had stuck to the shining photograph, the smiling childhood of Tom and Suzie.

He stood with the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other, both trembling. Sometimes they jerked spasmodically as if they wanted to carry on wielding the weapon and bringing it down and down again.
He is one of those men who kill their wives.
You read about them. You wonder about them. You imagine they’ve been beating their spouses up every night for years. Not cherishing them, protecting them, as it says you must in the marriage service; with my body, I thee worship…
with my body I thee bludgeon to death with a steam iron.
God help me.

It was the pressure, of course, and the unendurable stress Vernon had been under for the last two years, struggling to keep Marsh Electronics afloat and to make sure that Joy was looked after according to the standards she craved. The last straw, that last flash of horror, was the phone call from Norman Mycroft and the discovery of Joy’s enormous deceits—rail upon rail of them in her wardrobe, pile upon pile in her chest of drawers—and all so useless, so unnecessary, so
pathetic,
those needs that had driven her to the shops on that fatal Tuesday to spend spend spend as if there was no tomorrow.

What sort of tomorrow will there be now? Vernon gazed down at his wife’s battered head with dropped jaw and beaten eyes. How she would hate to be seen like this, with that expensive haircut all over the place—literally, as half of it had seemed to travel of its own accord and lodge like a sleeping cat under the kitchen table. She was wearing an expensive top and smart summer sandals. They couldn’t be ordinary sandals, the sort some people pick up from beach shops—oh no, Joy’s were expensive thonged white leather, Italian, from her last London excursion. One of them has come off and is waiting there by the bit bin.

And Vernon is a peaceable man.

Vernon sat down heavily at the kitchen table, removed his glasses and wept, and trembled, and longed for time to go back just ten minutes. Let her make her entrance again, let him be reasonable this time, reasonable as he had been for twenty-three years over Joy’s little idiosyncrasies, knowing them to add up to the sum of the woman he loved, still loves, will always love. With shaking hands he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Had she gone yet? Or was her spirit hovering somewhere in this room even now, beside the vases on top of the dresser? And what would she say to him now if her mouth was still a mouth and not just a gash of brutalised flesh in a face white, staring and horrified?
Vernon, how could you do such a thing. What will people say? Clean it up, clean it up straight away and use the Dettol in the left-hand cupboard because there’s nothing worse than decomposition for germs, and flies will soon be laying their nasty eggs. And don’t just put the cloth back after you, throw it away when you’ve finished.