Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale (2 page)

He turned the car left out of the High Street, and slowed as he approached the glittering frontage of what had once been Pearce’s Garage, long inhabited by three generations of passionate motor-maniacs without a grain of commercial acumen between them, but able to do just about anything with an engine. All its capital had been in the background then, and the forecourt and petrol sales had been a somewhat tedious chore, very modestly lit and little regarded. No advertising was needed for a first-class service to which every well-run car in the county knew its own way.

Within ten days of the sale things had changed radically. A long festoon of lights in four colours stretched all along the frontage, which was being torn back into a great arc to accommodate nine new pumps of the latest type. They looked more like something from outer space than mere petrol pumps. A large neon sign over a repainted office flaunted the name of the chain in the single word: FLEET.

Two large posters in fluorescent orange proclaimed apocryphally: “Double stamps’ week!”

“See?” said George, with bitter satisfaction.

“Oh, well,” sighed Bunty helplessly. “He was pushing retiring age anyhow, and the offer must have been monumental.”

“Still, if Tony hadn’t emigrated his dad would never have sold out,” observed George, drawing the Morris neatly into position by the nearest Super pump. He opened the door and slid out as a snub-nosed, shaggy-headed youngster came loping down from the office in answer to the bell. “Fill her up, Bobby.”

“Sure, Mr. Felse!” The sombre young face brightened faintly at the sight of them. Bobby had been on probation, an apparently incurable driver-away of unlocked cars, when George had followed a hunch and talked old Pearce into taking him on and giving him a gloriously legitimate interest in the machines he couldn’t resist. George found himself hoping that two years had been long enough to effect a cure, because he felt in his bones that this experiment wasn’t going to survive the change of ownership. Commercial garage chains have very little interest in the salvation of local problem children. In such a county as Mid-shire, however, there are still plenty of family businesses in the remoter areas, and a two-year apprenticeship with Pearce’s is a very sound recommendation.

“Well, how’s it coming along?” said George, avoiding any appearance of actual concern.

“Not sure it is, Mr. Felse.” Bobby frowned darkly over the purling petrol, watching the level with dubious eyes. “You know how it is, you get used to certain people’s ways. I don’t reckon this lot care all that much about cars.” He delivered this indictment of blasphemy with more sorrow than anger.

“Then you’ll be all the more likely to score a personal hit,” said George reasonably, “since you do.”

“Well, maybe—but they don’t really want you to. It’s the quick money they’re interested in.
You
know! Make it
look
good, and that’s it. The money’s out here, really, not back in the workshops. Not unless you can pick up a nice juicy insurance job,” said Bobby disdainfully, and withdrew the pipe accurately and dexterously at the crucial moment. He hung it up, and wiped the neck of the tank, though it was spotless. “I don’t reckon I shall be here long, Mr. Felse.”

“What’s the pinch?” asked George easily. “The new boss?”

Bobby shrugged and grinned. “
He
wouldn’t matter so much, we shan’t be seeing much of him, anyhow. Thirty-seven of these stations they say he’s got now, most of ’em in London and the south. We’re about the most northerly yet. No,
he
wouldn’t matter. It’s this new manager he’s put in. Proper thruster he looks like being—you know, town style, all flash and everything on the surface.” Bobby counted change expertly, with one eye on the new, large window of the office, festooned with pot plants. “That’s him now, just coming out on the concrete—the one who looks like a bruiser.”

Two men had emerged from the glass doorway, and were pacing the length of the concreted arc, studying the renovations with critical approval. The one in the white overall was large-chested and thick of feature, and had a peeled-down, aggressive confidence in his manner that would not have been out of place in either a boxing ring or a sales ring. The other was several inches taller, a long-striding, elegant figure in a pearl-grey suit.

“
Mister
Mostyn,” said Bobby, eyeing the distant white figure with eloquent dislike. “Don’t you never let him sell you a used car, Mr. Felse, that’s all!”

“Who’s the other?” asked George, pocketing his change.

“Oh, that’s the boss… that’s Fleet himself. Been looking his buy over and viewing the development plans. Mostyn had me working on
his
car this afternoon… believe me, that was
one
he wanted done properly.” He closed the door firmly upon George, and waved a hand. “See you, Mr. Felse!”

“So long, Bobby! Just give it a whirl before you make up your mind. But he’ll go,” George prophesied the next moment, for Bunty’s ear alone. “That’s not his kind of set-up now.”

The Morris wheeled back from the apron on to a dark, slimily gleaming street, and the long festoons of lights slithered away behind them. They re-entered the main street at the next corner, close to the southern edge of the town now, with the ordered glimmer of the new housing estate of Well Meadow terraced up the green slope in the darkness ahead. Across the street the six plate-glass windows of the Betterbuy supermarket glared steamily, plastered with bargain offers in poison green and electric orange.

“Not my kind, either,” Bunty sighed, and reached over into the back seat for her basket and handbag, as the car hissed to a standstill in the thin ooze alongside the kerb. “But if you’ll believe me, this is the only place in Comerford where I can buy whole black pepper!”

At this last moment it felt like tearing herself in two to get out of the car and leave him behind, but a kerbside stop affords no time for hesitation. She cast the usual quick glance behind, opened the door of the Morris, and slid her feet out to the greasy pavement, tilting her cheek back at the same moment for George’s customary kiss.

“Good luck, then, mate! I’ll expect you when I see you.”

“Just as soon as I can make it. ’Bye, darling, take care of yourself.”

“Listen who’s talking,” said Bunty derisively. “
I’m
not the one who goes hobnobbing with gunmen and such.”

She was on her feet in a light leap, the door slammed, the car gathered way and was gone, its rear lights dwindling to cigarette-ends just visible in the soiled, wet darkness, as it rounded the curve by the White Hart. And that, thought Bunty, is how it should be done, when it has to be done at all. She furled in the frayed cords of her personality that had been torn loose with George’s departure, but this time the ache did not dull, and the bleeding did not stop.

Any one of those separations in the past twenty years might have been the final one; even before the armed professionals arrived on the scene, a policeman’s hadn’t been the safest of careers. Is it only on the edge of middle age, she wondered, that you begin admitting the possibility? Or, more simply, do you never even notice it until then?

Overheated air closed round her like warm treacle as she pushed her way into the supermarket, and made for the dry goods’ shelves. Even husbands who take their cars out in the morning to drive tranquilly to work in banks and shops may be heading unawares for a pile-up at the first corner, or a hold-up and a shot over the counter. But life would be impossible if their wives spent every separated moment thinking so.

She sat in the empty, silent house, brushing her hair before the glass and watching her mirrored face as if the secret of this unforeseen and inescapable dismay lay there behind her own eyes. She had avoided the bus, after all, and walked all the way home through the thin, unclean rain, in the dim, amorphous colourings of evening and autumn, inexpressibly elegiac and sad. And where there should have been shelter, under her own roof, the other darkness had closed down appallingly on her spirit, the darkness you see when you look over your shoulder half-way through life.

How was it that she had turned forty without a chilling thought, and now at forty-one must run head-on into the skeleton in the way?

It happens to everyone, sooner or later, even the best balanced and happiest, that sudden hesitation and the long first look behind, the first qualm of wondering whether all has been well done, whether there is really anything there at all to record the course of a lif e suddenly seen to be half-over. October is a searching time even for the young, but for them it is only a seasonal disquiet, they have the renewal of Spring within them, they have good cause to believe in it. Bunty’s heart ached inconsolably for the beauty that was gone, for the youth that would not renew itself. She looked into her own eyes, and they were no longer unaware of passing time, and no longer innocent of the implications, age, infirmity and death.

She had turned out the main light in the room. Her brush crackled and sparkled through her thick brown hair in the dimness, and her eyes stared back at her unwaveringly from the glass, sometimes obscured by the swaying strands of hair, but always constant and naked in their questioning when the curtain parted again. What is the matter with you? she asked the image that fronted her. They were two, not one, there might even be an answer. You’re a lucky woman, a happy woman. You’ve always been aware of it. You have a husband you love, and a son you adore, you are equable and outgoing by temperament; in a modest way, which has always satisfied you up to now, you have every possible blessing. Even a sense of humour! Or have you? Or has it only been mislaid for a short testing time?

And that’s all? wondered the eyes confronting her. And that’s enough?

The clouds were breaking outside the window, but only in tormented shapes of scudding flight and bitter pursuit, driven by a sudden wailing wind. All the too static air was abruptly in motion. She felt time rushing away from under her feet, leaving her falling through space in a howling greyness. There had once been a certain Bunty Elliott who had known beyond question that she was going to be a great singer, and leave a treasury of recorded music that would make her immortal. But she had never put her gifts to any serious test, because she had met and married George Felse, and turned into a mere wife, a policeman’s wife. And what was she now but George’s wife—no, George’s grass widow at this moment, and this moment was her whole life in microcosm—and Dominic’s mother? Did she exist, except as a reflection of them? Was she condemned only to act, only to be anything at all through her husband and her son?

What had become of Bunty herself? Somewhere she had got lost between George and Dominic, and rediscovery would not be easy. George’s face looked up at her from the photograph on her dressing-table, ten years younger than now but essentially the same, grave, thin, thoughtful, with dark, steady eyes, and sensitive lines about his mouth. She could paint in for herself the new furrows that had grown deep into his flesh since the picture was taken, and they added to his worth and significance, which were not and never would be in question. She loved him so naturally that she had never had cause to stop and assess how much she loved him. He, nevertheless, had an identity of his own, and was in no danger of losing it. And she?

If you were here now, she thought, you would be enough to restore the balance; I should be over the crest and on my way home. Why aren’t you here? Why did you have to be somewhere else on this night of all nights?

And her son? Dominic was complicated, fascinating and absorbing, because he was half George and half herself. They had been devoted friends all his short life. She could even laugh at him, and not be excommunicated. But they grow up, and grow away. Dominic was at Oxford, with exams hanging over him, and Dominic had chosen a girl, and chosen her for life, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for all time and with all his heart. Maybe he himself didn’t yet know it, maybe he was too close to Tossa Barber to take in her full significance. But Bunty knew it. And approved it. He might have made so many mistakes, but in the event his instinct was true enough, and his choice sharp and sure. And she was glad. But where, now, was Bunty?

She had been prepared, insofar as any woman can be prepared, to be sloughed like an outworn skin. It presented no problem in her relationship with him, or even with his Tossa. But she was confronting the shell of Bunty Felse, and coming to terms with that gutted presence was not so easy.

What am I now? she thought. Am I anything? Yes, to George, certainly. I have a reason for going on being, I have a hollow to fill, maybe a bigger hollow than before. But whether I have enough substance to supply the vacuum, that’s another matter. And whether anything exists which is truly me, and not reflections of these two, God only knows!

The bed was smooth, sterile and cold. She lay in the panting, unquiet darkness, and did not sleep. And in the morning, which was her forty-first birthday, there was no letter from Dominic and no telephone call from George. The early light of Saturday was grey, chill and calm, and she was utterly alone for perhaps the first time in her life. In a life which was half over, and shrinking in upon her even as she dressed to face it.

She could have called up her friends, of course; she had plenty of friends. But with them she would simply have worn her normal face and manner, and kept her own counsel. You do not burden your friends with a sudden stranger half-way to the grave. You hide yourself while the darkness lasts—being, even at this crisis, reasonably secure that it will not last long—and emerge when you are yourself as they know you, and fit for their society again. No, at this moment what you need is a stranger in an express train, someone you need never see again, one of those accidental priests in the fleeting confessionals of this life where souls are often saved against the odds.

That was why she took herself for a long, solitary walk that Saturday evening in October, avoiding the places most familiar to her, and the haunts where her friends might be. The air was dove-coloured and still since noon, chilling by dusk to the edge of frost, but never quite touching it. The cloud was low and grey, but the atmosphere beneath it was clear. If it froze by morning, the crests of the roads, at least, would dry, and the film of slime would corrode away in pale dust.

The silence at home had helped to drive her out, but the silence here on the country roads two miles from Comerford was vaster and even more oppressive. She had never been afraid to walk alone in the night, not here; in a city she might have been warier. She met shadows, and, occasionally responsive to some alchemy of recognition in anonymity, exchanged good nights with shadows. She kept aloof from the roads that carried traffic, and the few cars she met passed mysteriously, absorbed in their own missions. And where she came at length to the main road again, she found herself before the broad car park and polished frontage of a modern roadhouse, the sort of place where none of her acquaintance could possibly be encountered.

“The Constellation Orion”; a beautifully imaginative name, at least. She remembered the place being opened, though she had never been inside it. Well, why not now? The building, twentieth-century metal box crossed with by-pass Georgian, didn’t live up to its name, but surely promised strangers as transitory as any to be met with in express trains. And she had plenty of time to walk home, all night if need be; she had nobody at home waiting for her.

Warmth and noise met her in the doorway. The saloon bar was so aggressively modern that it had almost reverted to the jazz-age angularity of the twenties, and its décor reminded her of fair-ground vases from her childhood. It was almost uncomfortably full. For some reason the same degree of actual discomfort in the bar itself seemed more acceptable. The lighting was mellower and milder there, and it was clearly the only room the locals, if they used this place at all, would dream of frequenting. Bunty edged her way to the bar-counter, bought herself a modest half of bitter, and carried it to a remote corner where a young couple had just vacated two chairs at a spindly table. Over the rim of her glass she surveyed the company, and let the confused roar of their many conversations drum in her ears without any effort to disentangle words. There was no one whom she knew, and no one who knew her. Nobody was interested, either; in twos, in threes, in shifting groups, they pursued their own preoccupations, and left her to hers. She had been sitting there in her corner for ten minutes or so before she noticed the only other person who seemed to be alone. She saw him first over the shoulders of two sporty types in mohair car coats, and from his position he might easily have been a part of their circle; but emphatically his face denied it. He looked at them out of another world, a world as private and closed as hers. Quite a young man, maybe somewhere in his late twenties, maybe even turned thirty. Tall, a light-weight but well enough made, rather brittle and nervous in his movements, his straight dark hair disordered. What she noticed first was the greyish pallor of his face, and its tight stillness, like a clay mask, so apparently rigid that the sudden nervous quiver of one cheek was shocking, as though the whole face might be shattered. The taut surfaces quaked and recomposed themselves into the same stony tension. Deep within this defensive earthwork dark eyes, alert and bright to fever-point, kept watch from ambush, glaring from bruised, blue-rimmed sockets. He looked as if he had been on the tiles for two or three nights in succession ; but she noted that the hand that held his glass was large, capable and perfectly steady.

He was getting too tightly hemmed in by the group at the bar. She saw him heave himself clear of them, edge back into the open, and look round for a more peaceful place. His ranging glance lit upon the single chair still vacant in her corner, and he started towards it.

Then he saw her. Really saw her, not as any unknown woman sitting there, but as this one particular woman, taken in entire in one flash of genuine concentration. It was the first time he had been fully aware of anyone in that room except himself and the personal devil with which he was surely at grips. He halted for a moment, poised quite still in the middle of the shifting, chattering, smoky bar, his eyes fixed on her. She thought that he almost drew back and turned away, that if she had lowered her eyes or looked through him he would have done it; but she looked back at him steadily and thoughtfully, neither inviting nor repulsing him, unless it was an invitation to show interest in him at all. One person under stress recognises another.

The moment of hesitation was gone; he came on with a quickened step. He had a whisky glass in one hand and a small bottle of ginger ale in the other. A long little finger touched tentatively at the back of the vacant chair.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” The voice was low-pitched but abrupt, as though he had to measure it out with care and constraint.

“Of course not, help yourself!”

She moved her glass to make room for his on the tiny table. It had a tray top of beaten brass that had never been nearer Benares than Birmingham. He looked at it for the fraction of an instant with disbelief, and then sat down carefully, and looked up at her.

“I agree,” said Bunty with detachment. “It’s rather nasty, but it’s somewhere to put things down.”

Something kindled in his face, no more than a momentary easing and warming of the haggard lines of his mouth, and a brisk spark that was burned out instantly in the intensity of his eyes.

“You didn’t
look
as if you belonged here,” he said. “Why
are
you here?”

Conversation came out of him without premeditation, and indeed with a famished urgency that ruled out premeditation, but in brief, jerky sentences, spurting from the muted violence that filled him. Violence was the word that first occurred to her, but she found it unacceptable on reflection; agitation might have been nearer the mark, or simply excitement. There was nothing impertinent in his manner, and whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t a pick-up.

“Because I was alone,” she said, with a directness equal to his own. “Why are you?”

“The same reason, I suppose. And I needed a drink.”

It appeared that this was no more than the truth. The whisky had brought a faint warmth of colour into his clay mask, its frozen lines were at least growing pliable now.

“You don’t mind my talking to you? I’ll shut up if you say so.”

She did not say so. What she did say, after a moment of deliberation, was: “I came out because it was too silent at home, and I came in here because it was even more silent outside.”

He uttered a short, harsh sound that might, if he had been less tense, have emerged as a laugh. “That won’t be our trouble here, anyhow. Or would you say this was a kind of silence, too? A howling silence?” The babel was reaching its climax, it was only half an hour to closing-time. The young man cast one brief glance round the room, and turned back to her, his eyes for a moment wide and dark with awareness of her, and strangely innocent of curiosity. “We’ve got something in common, then,” he said, emptying his glass without taking his eyes from Bunty’s face. “You weren’t expecting to be alone, either.”

“No,” she agreed, thinking how different a celebration this forty-first birthday might have been, “I wasn’t expecting to be alone.”

“Nor was I. I’m heading north,” he said jerkily, revolving the empty glass dangerously between his fingers, “for a long week-end. Not much to look forward to now, though. There should have been two of us, if everything hadn’t come to pieces.” The glass was suddenly still between his long hands; he stared at it blackly. “I suppose I ought to lay off, but I’ve got to have one more of these, I’m still twenty per cent short of human. May I get you the other half? Or would you prefer a short?”

“Thanks, the other half would be fine.”

She watched him worm his way to the bar with the empty glasses, and knew that she had done that deliberately. Why? Because if she had refused he would have taken it as a rebuff and been turned in again upon his own arid company? Or because she would have lost touch with him and been driven back upon hers? What she was courting was the loss of herself in another human creature, and that was what he wanted, too. Not that it would ever be much more than two parallel monologues, the passing of two trains on a double track, somewhere in the dark. But at least the sight of a human face at one of the flying windows would assure the watcher of companionship in his wakefulness. Their need was mutual, why pass up the opportunity of filling it?

So she waited for him, and watched him come back to her, balancing full glasses carefully as he wound his way between the jostling backs of the Saturday-night crowd.

“I’m sorry about your spoiled week-end,” she said. And with carefully measured detachment, since clearly this was no light matter to him at the moment: “Of course, there
are
other girls.”

He was just setting down his glass on the table, and for the first time his hand shook. She looked up in surprise, and met his eyes at close range, suddenly fallen blank in a frozen face, as grey and opaque as unlighted glass. He sat down slowly, every line of his body drawn so taut that the air between them quivered.

“
Who mentioned a girl
?”

“There are only two sorts,” she said patiently. “There was at least a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right first time about the companion who let you down.”

He drew in a long, cautious breath and relaxed a little. The slow fires came back distrustfully into his eyes. “Yes… I suppose it wasn’t difficult.” His voice groped through the words syllable by syllable, like feet in the dark feeling their way. “We fell out,” he said. “It’s finished. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, at least half a dozen of my friends must have told me she was playing me for a sucker, but I never believed it.”

“You could still be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”

“Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”

“There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”

“No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”

“Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there
are
other girls.”

He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.

“We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”

“It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”

“She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.

“She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”

So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.

“Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”

She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.

“It
is
the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”

The clock behind the bar began to chime with an unexpected, silvery sound.

“Time! ” called the barman, pitching his voice on the same mellifluous note. “Time, gentlemen, please!”

She spent an unnecessary few minutes in the cloakroom, tidying her hair and repairing her lipstick, not so much to escape from him as to give him every chance to escape from her if he wanted to. Men are much more likely than women to repent of having said too much and stripped themselves too naked, and it might well be that now, having unloaded the worst of his burden, he would prefer to make off into the darkness and never see or think of her again. But when she stepped out from the lighted doorway, under the silver stars of the sign, he was there waiting for her, a slender, tense shadow beside the low chain fence of the car park. She felt no surprise and no uneasiness.