Something to Hide (24 page)

THE MEMORIAL IS
held in the Swan Hotel, Marlborough. This is Jeremy's home town, a place as alien to me as Africa. I've entered a time-warp. It's hard to believe that these UKIP matrons and puce-faced colonels are actually my age; did they really live through the seventies so hilariously unaltered? There is, however, a hint of Jeremy about some of these old buffers. Not my Jeremy, but the Jeremy I first knew in the Triumph Stag days. This makes him feel disconnected from me – he
is
disconnected, this day is nothing to do with the two of us.

I have, however, had a hand in organizing it. Bev has loaded countless albums onto my lap and sat on the arm of the chair, snuggled against me, pointing out various photos as she turns the pages. Some albums belong to his mother and show Jeremy as a child. These touch my heart but they're not daggers in the way the later ones are daggers – the photos of his marriage to Bev, which she has recorded in exhausting detail, first as photos and later on her computer. She says she finds this therapeutic, part of the grieving process.

The weird thing is that she seems to have forgotten that he's a cunt – an elephant-murderer who's betrayed her and their marriage. I've long ago realized that Beverley's a fantasist but this self-deception is breathtaking. She seems to have reinvented herself as an impresario in widow's weeds, preparing a show for the public – a show, she says, that will have laughter and tears and some great music, the soundtrack of their life together. She's told nobody the truth and has sworn me to secrecy. This is Jeremy's day and she's going to give him a memorable send-off. In other words, her round-robins are about to hit the stage.

Six months have passed since we flew back to England. To be perfectly frank, Beverley needn't have told me to keep my mouth shut. I've done it anyway, out of shame. My children and the few friends who know about my love affair have commiserated with me about my loss and I don't want to admit the truth. It would be too humiliating, to confess to such a spectacular disaster and cope with their reactions. So, yet again, Beverley and I have been weirdly bound together. Jeremy is our dirty little secret.

I haven't seen much of her, anyway, these past months. I've been working hard, setting up an online picture library. Days pass when I don't think about her at all. Apart from the memorial arrangements, the catering and guest list and so on, we've reverted to our separate lives. I suspect that she's as sick of me as I am of her. But there's something else lurking underneath: a thrumming resentment – even hostility – that arises when people have exposed too much of themselves to each other. It doesn't just happen with sex.

I've also been ill. At first it was some sort of bug which laid me low with vomiting and stomach-ache. They ran tests at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases but could find nothing specific. Then I started getting pains in my knees. My eyesight worsened and I had to get stronger glasses. It was as if my body held itself together for Jeremy, its last hurrah, but now he has gone it has succumbed to a
coup d'âge
. I've started to feel truly old.

And I've been missing him so terribly. At best it's a chronic ache, like arthritis. At worst it's a howling void. I have to drink myself into a stupor, swallow two diazepam and crawl under the duvet, sobbing with misery and curled in a foetal position.

During these months a curious change has taken place. I've managed to detach my love for him from his crime. Maybe this happens to all gangsters' molls. I even try to make excuses for what he's done. He was desperate for money, to bail out his charity. He was just supporting the Kikanda, though he loathed what they were doing. He was caught up in it unwillingly, and was trying to stop it.

Pathetic, isn't it? And I've been calling
Bev
self-deluded.

So now I'm here, in Marlborough, on a blazing August day, joining 150 other people in saying our goodbyes. I'm amazed there are so many of them, considering Jeremy lived abroad for much of his life, but people have flown in from all parts, illustrating the curious fact that folk will only cross the world to celebrate a friend when that friend is no longer there. But Jeremy was a popular guy.
Larger than life,
I hear somebody murmuring. I'm all but invisible in the crowd that mills around the lobby. After all, I was just his wife's flatmate, from long ago.

Bev's mother is here, an old battleaxe with lung cancer. She was what my parents would have called a charlady and adored Jeremy because he was posh. Jeremy's mother, on the other hand, despised Bev because she was common; she's here in a wheelchair, her head lolling, pushed by a stout Filipina and accompanied by Jeremy's brother, a dessicated solicitor from Fife. He, too, dislikes Bev, though now he's leaning down to peck her cheek.

Bev, of course, is the centre of attention. I keep losing sight of her as she's submerged in hugs. This is her moment and she's milking it. I know this sounds harsh but there's an air of unreality about her behaviour. She's spent the morning in the beauty parlour having her hair and make-up done; she's also been freshly Botoxed. The result is eerily doll-like and dated, her hair the shiny chestnut bob it used to be in the Pimlico days. But it's her dress that's the most startling. It's a riot of red and orange swirls, with puff sleeves – much too young for her, too Debbie Reynolds.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've been watching her closely. Though she clutches a hanky she doesn't look bereaved; in fact, quite the opposite. She looks excited – wired – as she raises her face to be kissed. Memorials, of course, can be surprisingly upbeat affairs but there's something beady and triumphalist in her eye, as if she alone is in possession of a secret that would astonish her guests. I know that look from the past. We were blood-sisters then and we're blood-sisters again today, because I'm the only one who knows the nature of this secret. I must admit I'm looking forward to her speech. How good an actress is she? Or has she, over the past months, managed to airbrush out her husband's crime and restore her marriage to its former glory? The marriage of her blogs – themselves, as I've discovered, a work of semi-fiction.

I know I sound sour but I feel physically sick. I expected this event to be painful, but not to feel so excluded. Pathetically, I want to reclaim Jeremy from his own history. Our brief connection is being engulfed by these hordes of unknown people whose relationships with him, in the eyes of the world, seem so much more substantial than what happened between the two of us.

Suddenly I have a mad urge to punish them. As I watch them filing into the Lilac Room, clutching their service sheets, I imagine pushing my way to the podium and proclaiming
I'm Petra Samson, Jeremy's mistress, the love of his life!
Fuck it, I'll go the whole hog.
We're here to celebrate Jeremy's life and achievements. I'll kick things off by celebrating his contribution to the imminent extinction of the African elephant.

In the crowd, Bev catches my eye. Something flashes between us. Complicity? Fear? Ridiculously, I give her a thumbs-up sign. Why on earth did I do that? People are still arriving. I catch sight of Madeleine, who was in our class at school. Good God, she's an old woman, leaning on a walking stick! Maybe she's had a hip replacement. Maybe, looking at me, she's thinking the same thing.
Surely that's not Petra? That haggard crone, pale as a ghost
?

Jeremy's favourite song is playing, ‘Let's Face the Music and Dance'. But he didn't, did he? He stepped out and closed the door. It's up to us to carry on living.

It's fine to cry. Nobody stares at me; once things get started they'll all be at it. Fumbling for a Kleenex, I stumble out of the lobby and down a corridor, where a sign points to the Ladies'.

The place is empty, thank God. I step into a cubicle, bolt the door and sit down on the loo. I don't think I can face this. When I've stopped crying I'll bail out and drive home. Nobody will miss me.

The door creaks and somebody comes in. I stop howling and hold my breath. Whoever it is doesn't enter a cubicle, however. There's a silence. Maybe they're standing in front of the mirror, doing their make-up.

Then I hear Beverley's voice. For a moment I think she's talking to me, and then I realize she's on her mobile.

‘Hi, just checking we're still on for tonight … Great, Pizza Express, eight o'clock … You'll recognize me from my photo, I'll be wearing a stripey green dress, what about you? … Wow, I like a man in a biker's jacket, in fact I used to have a bike, a Honda 125, I used to whizz around in it to auditions … What? No, only small parts, back in my misspent youth.' She laughs, her voice relaxed and cheerful. ‘What? No, I'm in Birmingham, at a conference, but I'll be back tonight. See you then … Byeee!'

There's a silence. She's not moving.

Nor am I.

‘Who's there?' she asks, her voice casual. She must have noticed the closed door.

I remain sitting. The blood drains from my face.

Oh my God. My God. How stupid I've been. How very, very stupid.

‘Hello?' she says. She's not leaving until I open the door. ‘Hello?'

It all makes sense. Only now do I realize the truth. Six months, it's taken me; that's how slow I've been. Oh, I've always known she was a liar, this phone call doesn't surprise me.

It's the other lie. The big one. The lie about Jeremy.

It all falls into place. There's a hideous, sinking inevitability to it. How could I not have seen it, when it was so very obvious? I must have been blind.

I hear the clack of her high heels on the marble floor. She's standing close now; I can hear her breathing.

I get up and open the door.

‘Ah,' she says. ‘It's you.'

If she's uneasy, she's not showing it. She gives me a big smile and crooks out her elbow, indicating I should slip my arm into hers.

‘Shall we go in?' she asks.

I don't move. ‘How did you do it?'

‘Do what, petal?'

‘Kill him.'

For a moment she doesn't reply. She looks up at me, head tilted, eyebrows raised. A tap drips,
plink-plonk
, into the washbasin.

‘I killed him?'

‘I'm not surprised,' I say. ‘Seeing your passion for animals.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean, it must have been the most terrible thing – Christ, I practically wanted to kill him myself. But for you, finding out what he did. It must have been the worst crime one can possibly think of.'

Bev's eyes widen in astonishment. She bursts out laughing, a high, hysterical laugh. ‘You think it was because of that?'

‘Of course. Because of the elephants.'

Bev's helpless with laughter. She slumps against the washbasin, tears running down her face.

‘I don't give a fuck about the elephants!' she shouts.

There's a silence. I have no idea what she's talking about.

She looks at me, her head cocked sideways. Her laughter stops as suddenly as it began. Far off, I hear the faint murmur of voices. She wipes her eyes; her mascara has smeared.

‘It's you, dum-dum,' she says. ‘I killed him because of you.'

I stare at her.

She says: ‘Think I was going to let
you
have him?'

The door opens and a woman rushes in. It's Janet, her sister-in-law.

‘There you are!' she says. ‘Come on, darling, they're all waiting.'

She grabs Bev's hand and leads her out. As Bev goes, she glances back at me and raises her eyebrows.

The Lilac Room is packed. On the screen, photos of Jeremy flicker past in jerky succession, a returning loop. Jeremy in scuba-diving gear, as round and shiny as a seal … Jeremy and his brother Malcolm, tiny tots on a beach … Jeremy and Bev on their wedding day, a slimmer Jeremy in velvet suit and frilled shirt, like a cruise compère.

Standing at the podium, a sixty-fags-a-day salesman, kippered in the sun, is telling us about his friendship with Jeremy when they were working in Hong Kong.
He was a man in a million, God bless
, he says.
Life and soul of the party, big man, big heart. They broke the mould when they made him.
He talks about Jeremy's love of fast cars and ends on a risqué story about a stag night which is greeted with silence.

A young woman takes the stage and has problems with the microphone. Her voice booms and then dies to a crackling whine. Apparently she helped with the charity in its early days.
He was so kind and generous
, she says.
He was like a father to me.
She talks about his fundraising, how he could charm money out of a stone, and makes a joke about the job-lot of unsuitable books that arrived from Philadelphia Central Library, via some tick-boxing grant, before succumbing to sobs.

The stories float past me. I'm sitting way behind Bev, who occupies the front row. Her shiny chestnut head is bowed, as if in prayer, as her husband's warmth and general wonderfulness is shared by a succession of speakers. I'm poleaxed with shock but I can't begin to think about it now, not with all these people around me. I sit rigid, holding myself together, waiting for Bev to speak.

She's the last. Some man jumps up and fiddles with the microphone, yanking it down to her height. She shoots him a flirtatious smile as he returns to his seat; then she turns to us, her face suddenly serious.

‘Thank you so much for being here today,' she says. ‘I know some of you have come a long way, but it means so much to me and Jeremy's family. We're still trying to come to terms with our loss.' Her voice falters. She lowers her eyes for a moment, then takes a breath and looks up. ‘I can't believe he's not here – my husband, my soulmate, my lover, my best friend. We were together for thirty-five years and I can honestly say that our love had grown deeper and stronger with every passing day. We made each other laugh, you see. Living with Jem was like one long party.' She smiles. ‘Plus, we'd always fancied each other rotten.' A murmur of amusement. ‘My dear friend Petra, who's here today – where are you, Pet?' She spots me and points; heads turn. ‘She remembers that first day when I came back from the surgery, walking on cloud nine.
I've met the man I'm going to marry,
I said, didn't I sweetie?'