Simeon's Bride (21 page)

Chiding herself for being untruthful as well as spiteful, Emma told the twins that another serving of fish and chips would worsen their spots, and that her casserole was their only choice, boring though it might be. As each girl examined the other’s face for eruptions of acne, Emma said millions of people all over the world starved every day, and would be grateful for such a meal. One of the twins, meeting fire with fire, said, ‘Why don’t you put your horrible stew in a parcel and send it to the Red Cross, then?’ Sulking in the kitchen, Emma stirred the thickening mess in her big copper stew pan: rightly a stew, she admitted, but less so than it might have been without the benefit of a bottle of red wine.

Tea was a quiet meal, not pleasantly so, but sullenly, with explosive potential. Jack paused every so often in the act of spooning food into his mouth to give her puzzled looks brimming with questions to which he could not give shape.

‘Done anything interesting today, Em?’ he asked at one point.

‘No. Have you?’

‘Not much.’ He finished his casserole, wiping the plate with a hunk of bread. ‘You must have done something.’

‘Depends what you call interesting.’ Emma countered. ‘I changed the beds and cleaned upstairs this morning. Then I went to Safeways for the groceries. Then I came back and peeled the vegetables and cut up the meat and put it all on to cook. Then I did some of the ironing. Oh, and I’ve had a sandwich and a few cups of tea.’

‘Mummy could’ve saved herself all that trouble if she’d let us have fish and chips like we wanted.’

‘Mummy’s in a bad mood,’ the other twin told Jack. ‘She said we’ve got spotty faces, and it’s not true.’

Jack surveyed his daughters’ peachy luminous skin. ‘Why say that to the girls, Em? It’s not fair to upset them.’

‘I didn’t say they’ve got spots.’

‘Yes you did, Mummy.’

‘Well,’ Jack said, looking from his wife to the children, ‘maybe you got hold of the wrong end of the stick. You haven’t got spots, so it doesn’t matter.’

‘Mummy’s pre-menstrual again,’ one of the girls said with authority. ‘You know how she always gets crabby and spiteful.’

‘Maybe she’s menopausal,’ the other observed. ‘Are you, Mummy? Are you having hot flushes?’

Face reddened with anger, Emma lurched to her feet, snatched plates from the table, and stormed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

‘Oh, God!’ Jack moaned. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

‘Mummy started it when we came home from school.’

‘Well, there’s no need for you two to keep it going, is there? Clear the table, and go and offer to wash up. Both of you.’

‘We haven’t had our pudding yet.’

‘And she’ll only shout if we go in there. We don’t see why we should be nice to her when she’s horrible to us!’ The other twin folded her arms, her sister following suit. Both stared at their father, mutiny blossoming in pretty brown eyes.

Jack followed his wife. He found her leaning against the kitchen sink, staring on to the misty rain-soaked garden. ‘What’s the matter, Em?’ he asked. She kept her back to him. ‘Nothing.’

‘Oh, come on, Em. This isn’t like you.’

As he approached, she swerved away towards the counter, and began moving plates around. ‘Leave me be. And stop calling me Em. My name is Emma.’

Jack left the room, once again at the mercy of the female psyche and its climatic changes, once again with no alternative than to weather the tempest as best he could. As he sat alone in front of the television, sound turned down and people cavorting through a game show, the worm of doubt began to wriggle towards the heart of the rose he believed his
marriage to be, carrying decay and destruction.

Jamie tossed and turned in his narrow bunk, kept from sleep by the strident silence of the countryside at night eating into his nerves. The inside of the thin caravan shell was stale and unaired, the musty scent of sodden earth beneath seeping upwards and into the back of his throat.

Prosser remained unconscious, for which Jamie would have thanked God if he thought God remotely interested in his gratitude or otherwise. Prosser was the weak link, which might snap and send the taut chain leaping and writhing into a stranglehold around their throats. Christopher Stott was weak too, a weakness of spirit as well as of flesh recognized and held in check by his wife. She and Jamie were the temper in the steel, without which it became brittle and useless, each with their own reasons for staying true to bargains struck and obligations accepted. Chilled and restless, Jamie crawled from the bunk and opened one of the precious packets taped to its underside. He rolled a cigarette, opened a can of lager, and lay back on the pillow, sipping his drink until the can was drained, watching the glowing end of the cigarette spark and fade and spark and fade in the blackness around him until the cigarette was a small mound of scented ash. His body drifted into a languor, his mind into a haze, and thence to sleep.

Emma placed a mug of black coffee on the table beside Denise, wrinkling her nose at the acrid smell of cigarette smoke despoiling the clean air of her front room. Denise panted slightly, in short little puffs tainted with the heady scents of spicy food and cheap wine.

‘I’ve no sympathy for you,’ Emma announced. ‘So don’t bother whining to me. People choke to death on their own vomit when they get as drunk as that. You should count yourself lucky you’ve only got a hangover. Even if you’ve no respect for yourself, you should have more consideration for Michael. He’s a reputation to consider, and I’m sure he won’t take kindly to having a drunk for a wife.’

Denise picked up the coffee, her hands shaky. Watery sunshine flowed through the window, washing her face and figure with clear cruel light.

‘And don’t spill anything,’ Emma instructed. ‘God! You’re like a spoilt brat! You didn’t know when you were well off, did you?’ Emma surveyed the woman crouched on the edge of the sofa in dishevelment and despair. All her gloss stained and dull with tarnish, Denise was like a piece of jewellery, cast from base metal and gilded to fool the eye. The roots of her sweat-stained hair showed dark, her skin blotched and goose-bumped, her expensive clothes like rags about a scarecrow, the fine wool of her skirt embroidered with a mosaic of creases and rucks. ‘You know, Denise,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘Skid Row is just around the corner from Easy Street. But you’ve never realized that before, have you? You thought it was all right to sneer and make bitchy remarks about other women when their husbands walked out, didn’t you? All right to blame them for it, all right to say they deserved it. I mean,’ she added mercilessly, ‘you’ve been quite eloquent about women getting thrown back on the muck-heap of dirt and desperation where they belong, dying from the incurable diseases of poverty and loneliness. Haven’t you? I’ve seen you cross the street rather than say hello to women who used to be your friends until their husbands legged it. Well,’ she went on, ‘you must’ve caught whatever it was they had, because it looks to me as if you’re going the same way. You’ll end up dragging from day to day on
Valium and sleeping pills and dragging yourself from man to man for a bit of company or a free drink. And each man you take up with will be more of a slob than the last, and they’ll all toss you back on that muck-heap, and nobody’ll want to soil their hands on you in the end. I shouldn’t think Michael will come charging to the rescue, because he’s got his own life to lead, hasn’t he? It’s up to you what you do with yours, like it is for all of us. You can swim or you can sink, and right now, I’d say you’re not far off drowning in self-pity.’

Jack and Dewi stood among their colleagues on the pavement outside the Bible Gardens, watching the men of this great congregation of gipsies make their own assessment of the lines and groups of police officers surrounding them like so many dogs herding a flock of sheep. Hard black eyes, small within sockets perpetually narrowed to read the distances, threatened with no more than a glance. Rough-looking people, Dewi thought, their straight black hair chopped rather than trimmed, brown hands large and calloused with labour, their women no more refined and no less intimidating.

Brilliant sunshine of an April afternoon left Jack unwarmed, his spirit overshadowed by stormclouds gathered in great swags and swathes about his family, as if they waited like some mighty tree for a shard of lightning to split asunder its rotted trunk. He sighed, drawing a questioning look from Dewi, who said, ‘I’m glad it stopped raining. Aren’t you, sir? Nobody wants their wedding rained off.’

‘They got married in church,’ Jack said. ‘Not likely to get rained off there unless the priest can’t afford to get his roof fixed, are they?’

‘I don’t see the man from Salem village. Do you, sir?’

‘How could I if I don’t know what he looks like?’ Jack snapped. ‘You don’t either, so I don’t know why you come out with such stupid remarks!’

‘Just trying to be civil, sir.’

‘You shouldn’t need to “try” to be civil with senior officers, Prys. It should come naturally.’ Jack glared. ‘What are you grinning at?’

‘I wasn’t grinning as such,’ Dewi said equably. ‘Just smiling, sir. It’s a lovely day, and gippos or not, they make a good show, don’t they?’

Sunlight gilded the great ranks of horse chestnut trees, filtering through fresh green leaves and pink and cream candles blossoming into light, stippling faces and finery and the bright white bustled gowns of the two brides. A huge white Rolls Royce was parked at the kerb by the gates of the Gardens, a bouquet of creamy silk roses tossed on to the back seat. Two young bridesmaids broke away from the crowd, rushing past Dewi towards the car, their faces garishly enamelled, eyes too shadowed, lips too bloodied, dressed in snow-white satin, with roses of blood-red silk stitched into the folds of skirt and around fichu neck; colours symbolic of the fate in ambush for a virgin bride. He stared after them, entranced by their foreignness, the alien tongue in which they chattered. Jack’s elbow dug hard into his ribs.

‘Look over there,’ he said. ‘By the Town Hall. That’s Christopher Stott.’

Tall and frail as a sapling, his face pasty-white behind the little beard, Stott leaned against a wall, watching the crowd. Beside him stood a woman, much shorter than he, much more real, dumpy and solid, as if her flesh was constrained from some rampage only by the tightness of the clothes it wore. Dewi walked slowly towards the couple, stopping when he had a clear view of her. Body half-turned, left hand resting on the rough tweed of Stott’s jacket, as if to keep him constrained from a different rampage of the flesh, she seemed of that indeterminate age which afflicts those women whose looks are unremarkable, whose hair is neither grey nor brown, whose eyes neither blue nor green, whose form neither grossly fat nor frighteningly thin. She wore a suit of some fawn-coloured fabric, the skirt exposing the back of lumpy knees, the jacket so tight he saw the bunchiness of blouse and flesh and underclothing beneath. In her right hand she held a white plastic carrier bag, Debenhams’ pastel-coloured logo on its side, and he suddenly pictured her clad in grey, skirt plain, jacket pretty with leafy strands amid roses faded and soft, not bloody crimson like those bedecking the bridesmaids’ gowns. He wondered if the rich heavy scent of carnation would come to him if he moved closer.

‘Have you forgotten?’ Jack demanded. ‘The investigation’s closed.’

‘That’s not what the superintendent actually said,’ Dewi countered, noting the peevish set to Jack’s mouth. ‘We’re supposed to follow up anything that comes along.’

‘You wittering on about how that suit Wil Jones found would look a treat on a woman who may or may not be shacked up with Stott is not something coming along. It’s your imagination running away with you again.’

‘I still say there’s no harm in asking. And something might come back on the car in the photograph.’

‘Asking who? Who d’you propose to ask? And you can shut up about the photograph. We shouldn’t’ve done that.’

‘Mrs Stott, sir.’

‘Oh, yes? You intend to go knocking on her door, do you, with the suit all nicely folded up in a carrier bag? Then I suppose you drag it out, like a rabbit out of a bloody hat, and say: “we have reason to believe Romy Cheney bought you this suit, and you stuffed it under the floorboards at Gallows Cottage because somebody saw you wearing it when you bumped her off”. You’re going to say that to her, are you, Prys?’

‘Well, you never know, sir. What her reaction might be, I mean.’

‘Shall I tell you what her reaction would be? She’ll invite you in, then she’ll pick up the phone, and she’ll call Councillor bloody Williams, then he’ll call the chief constable, then you’ll be sailing nice and fast up shit creek, and I’ll be in the boat with you! No, Prys, you are not going anywhere. Do you understand?’

Dewi shrugged. ‘If you say so, sir.’

‘I do say so. And let that be the end of it!’

Under the warm and careful ministrations of doctors and nurses, Trefor Prosser’s unconsciousness began to evaporate, as a morning mist over Menai Straits burnt away by the heat of the sun. Light broke through the clouds in his brain, poking prying fingers into dark corners, teasing out, from the shadows where he had hidden them, fearful secrets and secret fears. He fought to remain in darkness, to huddle beneath its safe canopy, the bleeps and blips and lines on the monitors telling of that monumental struggle. His eyes fluttered open, and he saw the face of the neurological registrar smiling gravely and assessingly down at him. He closed his eyes again, but found himself unable to close his ears to the voices and sounds which had teased like wind at the canopy of cloud long before light made the final breach.

‘About time,’ the registrar said, watching quivering eyelids betray the glint of iris beneath. ‘Never known anyone so anxious to stay asleep!’

He walked away, deep in conversation with a nurse. ‘Keep him hooked up to the monitors for tonight. There’s really no need, but I don’t want him thinking he’s well enough to get out of bed. You never know what his sort is likely to do.’

‘The police want to talk to him. We’re supposed to call the minute he comes round.’

‘They can wait. I want the psychiatrist to see him first. Prosser’s a suicide risk, and I don’t intend to put my job on the line by letting the police put the frighteners on him so much he takes off and finishes what he started.’

Jack telephoned Emma, testing the waters.

‘What time are you coming home?’ she asked.

‘Not too late. I don’t expect any problems. The gipsies seem very well behaved.’

Emma laughed. ‘They might not be with a few drinks inside them.’

Laughter could not precede a storm warning, he thought. ‘What are you cooking for tea?’

‘Nothing! I’m sick of cooking.’ Her voice was sharp.

‘Shall I get a takeaway, then?’

‘Do what you want. The girls are having fish and chips.’

‘What about us?’

‘I’m going out.’

‘Out? Where to?’

‘Out! Eating out. You’ll have to see to yourself.’

‘Who with?’

‘Somebody who wants to talk about things other than teenagers and police work and cooking.’ Jack heard the receiver placed on its cradle, then the buzzing of an empty line, and felt great cold draughts of terror sweeping over him.

McKenna did not answer the doorbell to Jack’s persistent summons. Jack searched along the terrace front for a way around its rear, so that he might sneak a view through McKenna’s parlour window, to see if
McKenna was the thief of his imagination, stealing Emma from the intellectual tedium of her marriage and robbing her husband of the love of his life.

Standing once more on the slate doorstep, finger again on the bell, he heard the front door of the house opposite drag open. ‘You looking for Mr M?’ an old voice quavered.

‘D’you know where he is?’ Jack asked of the crone framed in the rotting doorway.

‘He went out a while back.’ The woman smiled a toothless smile, lips stretched over withered gums. ‘That lady came in her car.’

‘What lady?’

‘The one what’s always coming,’ she said. The door was returned to its frame, he left to pace the silence of the street, his footsteps echoing from the house walls. He took one last look through McKenna’s front door and saw the cat, rakish face distorted by reeded glass, staring back at him.