Death of a Sunday Writer (2 page)

From the very beginning of their marriage he had discouraged her from having any other interests but him. At first his attitude seemed to be that the two of them were self-sufficient, that outsiders were a nuisance, and that he paid such close attention to her, calling her several times a day from his office, and arranging outings and “treats,” like weekends in Vermont, that she had assumed that marriage was like that. When Jill came along, the child became an extra reason why they were too busy to bother having people to dinner, or go to parties. In a few years she had no friends and almost no outside interests, but she did not realise then that that was the condition he had been working towards.

The daughter, Jill, might have created the spark of revolt, but she was timid by nature and encouraged in her timidity by the fence that her father built around the family. What saved her was her failure to get a place in a dental hygiene program close enough to home so that she could continue living with her parents. Her father tried to make her change her choice of career to one that she could train for in a local community college, but the suggestion was a mistake because it allowed Jill a first clear glimpse of where her father's advice was coming from — his need to keep her locked in the tower. She grew up on the spot, insisting on following the career of her choice.

She came home once a year, and on her last visit had quarrelled with her father. The quarrel began with a fairly harmless comment from her about family relationships, some small psychological commonplace she had picked up on the west coast, which sent her father into a towering rage, a rage which once would have silenced her, but now had her shouting back at him. She went back to Victoria a day early. Since then, mother and daughter had talked on the telephone, and several times Jill had hinted she would be glad to see her mother, alone, in Victoria, for a visit. It was no more than a suggestion; the two had never had a chance to become allies, and Jill could have no idea how close to a crisis her mother was. Jill felt rather than thought, and after the quarrel she felt sorry for her mother. But Lucy, bred to be loyal to her spouse, did not yet encourage her.

After Jill had gone, when there was both the time and the need to enlarge her space, and she began to look about for something to do, something to study, or just to know about, Geoffrey brought a noisy mockery to bear on all her attempts to rediscover the world, and she saw finally that she was married to someone whose need to keep her dependent on him would close every window. He had become her jailer.

She avoided seeking professional help at first because, she guessed, if Geoffrey found out, he would respond negatively and violently to this, too, suspecting a criticism of their relationship and thus of him (like Jill, she had begun to get an idea that Geoffrey's attitude grew out of some psychological deformity in himself that he was refusing to know), but she read in a newspaper of a profession called “lay therapist” or “counsellor” for emotional problems, and decided that would do. Geoffrey was no more in touch with contemporary
trends than she was and if he asked she could tell him she was getting treatment for her back.

So she took the first step — small, but in her case, momentous — the step of finding someone to talk to. In half-a-dozen conversations during which the therapist said hardly a word, she came quickly to the truth, and she began to look for the means of escape. Looking back later, she realised that her misery had ended as soon as she had made the decision to leave him, and in the final stages of her marriage she was nearly content in the knowledge that at the right moment she would go.

Thus there was nothing unusual about Lucy's situation, except that Geoffrey had been so successful in keeping the world away from her that she was late in waking up. Eventually the means of escape arrived, in the form of a legacy from her mother, enough money to buy a house, and she began to plan. On a hint from her therapist, she put the money in the hands of a respectable lawyer (in the teeth of Geoffrey's assumption that he was the proper person to manage it), and waited. She stayed another year, propped up by the knowledge of her nest-egg, seeing Geoffrey increasingly more clearly. Then one afternoon the moment came and she packed a bag and called a cab.

She never went back. A week later, she had a part-time job in the library in Longborough, a town half way between Kingston and Toronto, and two months after that she opened a guesthouse offering bed and breakfast, an enterprise from which she earned enough with her parttime job to make her feel secure. She had been living in Longborough for two years now, steadily getting stronger, preparing herself, though she hardly knew it, for the next move in her progress away from being Mrs. Brenner. By way of a hobby, she had suggested herself as the editor of
the library bulletin, and even wrote one or two paragraphs of library news for the Longborough
Examiner.
There were still many times, especially on Sundays, when she felt very lonely; sometimes, she felt that she had not only left Geoffrey behind but a whole other life, as if she had emigrated to a country where she knew no one, but the mood was more of a luxurious melancholy than the nagging misery she had felt in Kingston. Like many emigrants, she had exchanged the despair she had felt at home, more acute because she was at home and therefore trapped in it, for a much more bearable loneliness — more bearable because it was only to be expected under the circumstance, not really her fault. By suppertime it was gone, dissolved in the anticipation of Miss Marple, or better yet, Morse. Even on the rainiest Sunday afternoon, she never doubted that she had made the right move, finally.

Packing for an overnight trip confronted her with some problems with her wardrobe that she had long been avoiding. After she moved to Longborough, Lucy had made a determined effort to remain open to experiences in every area of her life, to say yes to anything short of shop-lifting. She tried to dress less sensibly; she wanted strangers to wonder who she was, and what she did for a living. She bought herself a pair of athletic walking shoes, like Minnie Mouse boots made of rubber, and then, for the same reason — because she no longer had to defend her choice to her husband — she came home from a shopping expedition with some khaki culottes, a yellow waistcoat, and a white silk blouse with gigantic sleeves. She might have managed each item separately, but she made the mistake of putting them all on together, along with the walking
shoes, and felt like a middle-aged clown, and wondered if it wasn't all too late for her. Next she toyed with an image of herself in a huge skirt and with purple, cable-stitched stockings and flat shoes, a costume that would have given her an intellectual air and allowed her to wear her hair in its natural condition, a fuzzy tangle of almost-grey, but she decided that such outfits looked best on thin women, and while Lucy wasn't fat, she certainly wasn't ethereal.

She tried the L.L. Bean look — loafers, corduroy pants and a checked shirt, and this worked at the library but not in the evenings, even in Longborough, and so she stayed with her old wardrobe until she could acquire some clothes education. She did buy a trench coat that made her feel independent and was fine, as long as it looked like rain, but underneath she had not yet found a solution.

Now she assembled a grey flannel pleated skirt and two blouses that she would wear with the top button undone and a necklace of pieces of blue lapis-type rock. Some progress was made: in the course of sifting through her jewelry she did finally throw out her wooden beads and the stainless steel clip in the shape of a giraffe, items she occasionally put on in despair, but which always made her feel glum by the time she got to work. Looking at her wardrobe, she felt she ought to have made more progress with it — away from the Kingston she had fled nearly two years before — and she determined to look around the shops in Toronto.

The trip marked the first time that Lucy had driven to Toronto alone. Always before, even when she had been the driver, she had an acquaintance, usually another librarian, riding shotgun, as it were, someone who had grown up making the trip to the metropolis whenever something major had to be bought, or to see one of the extravagant musicals that had taken over Toronto in the last few years. Now, for the first time, she was her own navigator and she had worked out a route very carefully, writing out the directions in block letters on a sheet of paper she put on the passenger seat so that she could read it at any pause in traffic. Along the 401 to the Yonge Street exit, then south to Canadian Tire, left along Davenport to Church Street, then south all the way to Colbert Street. She arrived in a light sweat from trying to read the names of cross streets while navigating the closely-bunched traffic, but when she braked, finally, and switched off, she felt that another small hurdle had been jumped.

The legal firm of Buncombe and Hart occupied offices in a small warehouse that had been scraped back to its original brick and converted into professional suites. A tiny freight elevator took Lucy up to the third floor, where she walked around a corridor full of graphic design consultants until she came to the lawyers' sign. She introduced herself to a girl behind the counter who shouted “Wally!” then pointed over her shoulder for Lucy to go into a back room. Buncombe opened his door and waved her in, a telephone receiver clamped under his chin. Lucy shook the dry old hand that Buncombe was holding out, and sat down.

“There'll be a counter-claim if you try that,” Buncombe said, and put the phone down. He studied Lucy for a few moments, then said, “He wasn't a fine man,” crouching down with the air of someone about to attack, making his statement sound like a password, requiring a specific response.

Lucy tried to remember if there was any context for the statement in their telephone conversation of the day before. Buncombe remained crouched, but he now had on a little smile. She looked appropriately puzzled, and Buncombe roared with laughter and stood up. “I was just getting rid of the preliminaries. You didn't know him, did you? Not for years, you said.”

“Wasn't he a fine man? He is dead.” Her cousin, having named her his heir, made her want to defend him.

Buncombe was unabashed. “He was a scamp.”

“He was a crook?” This was interesting.

“David Trimble was bad. Just legally and morally. Wouldn't hurt a fly unless the fly had pockets.”

“A thief?”

“Not that.” Buncombe smiled, looked at her under thick white eyebrows, rolled his eyes round the room,
doing a “guess-again” routine, and waited. He made a silent word with his lips.

“What?”

He shook his head, then uttered the word. “Horses,” he whispered, and winked.

“He was a gambler?”

“And he knew bad people. Took chances.”

“He was a crook.”

“Never caught.”

“Was he a thief, a gangster, an arsonist? What?”

“No, no. Just gee-gees.”

“But he didn't win much, according to you.”

“About six hundred in the bank. He didn't even own a car.”

“A good thing he left himself to the hospital. Where is he now?”

“The morgue.”

Lucy began to wonder if all of Buncombe's clients suffered, as she was suffering now, from his conversational style and, if so, whether he charged by the minute. He seemed to say nothing naturally; everything was delivered for effect, as if it was profound or hilarious. Lucy occupied the time in the dramatic pauses and the explosions of mirth by wondering why his wife didn't make him trim the hair that sprouted, uncontrolled, from his ears and nostrils.

It took some time for him to tell her that her cousin had died of a massive heart attack. Someone across the street had seen him lying on the floor of his office. The body was still warm when the police arrived. A routine autopsy had followed and the pathologist reported that Trimble's heart was in a dilapidated condition. He was lucky to have lived so long. There was no need for any further investigation.

“Nothing else? No insurance?”

“Nothing else. Just his furniture and a little computer.”

“What about the business? Is there any goodwill? What was his business?”

Buncombe started as if he had been lightly pricked. “Didn't you know?” He paused. “Didn't I explain?” Another pause. “Surely I mentioned it?” An even longer pause. “No?”

Lucy was tempted to say, “That's right. You did. I forgot,” and walk out, but she wanted to know. She shook her head.

“Gumshoe!” Buncombe said, doubled up, in hysterics. “Gumshoe! Private detective! Not a very good one, though, judging by his bank account. He spent more time with the gee-gees than he did working.”

But Lucy wasn't listening. Gumshoe. To one who had found her escape from the world of Geoffrey Brenner in the world of mystery novels for the last twenty years, the very word was like a spell. She would have guessed that David Trimble imported string, or registered trademarks. This was worth any trouble her cousin would cause her, just in terms of the story she would be able to take back to Longborough. And perhaps there was more to this than just a good story.

“What kind of gumshoeing did he do?” she asked.

“Watching.” Buncombe threw himself below the level of the desk until only his eyes were visible, moving from side to side, acting out the word.

Lucy's irritation, her need for a bit of plain speaking, drifted across the desk.

Buncombe stood up, sad at the lack of applause. Now the tone of his voice suggested incredulity that she should require any amplification. “He watched people. I gave him
one or two jobs and referred him to clients who had simple jobs they needed done. Sometimes someone is needed to watch someone's comings and goings. If you think your husband is having an affair with a friend of yours, you might have someone like David watch the house, her house, for a few nights.”

“Did he tail people?”