The Water's Lovely (33 page)

Her days with him had been a kind of honeymoon. Or, rather, to create a honeymoon atmosphere was obviously his intention. She felt mean and base when she responded with less than her old delight – she feared she gave the impression of loving him less – because her worries oppressed her. She might be in his arms, she might be making love, when the thought came to her in spite of herself that she was being blackmailed, followed closely by the everlasting anxiety of her doubts about Heather. The substance of her stress she might hide from Andrew but she couldn't pretend the stress wasn't there, only tell herself that once Heather and Edmund were gone, things would be a little easier. Meanwhile she prepared herself for another phone call and for parting with twice what she had paid to Marion Melville last time.

Michael Fenster had been due to bring Pamela home on Thursday lunchtime. Ismay and Andrew would both be at work. Because he worked shifts, Edmund would be at home to receive them. Things happened differently, though not at first disastrously. Michael arrived on Wednesday evening, letting himself into the house with Pamela's key. It was just after seven and Ismay and Andrew were going out, first to dinner and then to a club where they were meeting Seb Miller and his girlfriend. For Ismay it wasn't a particularly happy arrangement. True, she would be with Andrew, this new adoring devoted Andrew, but she couldn't forget how she had humiliated herself to Seb, phoning him and begging him to tell her where his flatmate could be found. Still, once she had faced him, things would be easier next time.

Hearing someone come into the hall, she thought at first it was Edmund, though she had believed him
home already. She prepared herself to detain Andrew until he had gone upstairs but then she heard Pamela's voice and she went out to her. Andrew followed. Pamela looked pale and thin but she could walk, though with a slight limp.

‘We're a day early, Issy. I should have let you know but I couldn't wait to get home.'

Ismay kissed her, introduced her and Michael Fenster to Andrew. Smiling, looking a little shy, Michael shook hands and said, ‘Pleased to meet you.' Ismay saw what no one but she would notice, the faint curl of Andrew's upper lip, his invariable reaction to a solecism.

Then Pamela asked the question, the question Ismay hadn't allowed for in all her anxious predictions and fraught fantasies. ‘Are Edmund and Heather in, Issy?'

She felt a deep thick flush burn her face. Beside her, Andrew's intake of breath was almost silent. ‘I don't know,' she said.

‘Well, you're obviously going out so we won't keep you,' Michael said. ‘I'll fetch Pam's case in a tick,' and, in a way which would once have won Ismay's admiration, he lifted Pamela in his arms and carried her up the flight of stairs. She heard Heather's voice as he reached the top.

Andrew opened the front door. Their taxi had drawn up outside behind Michael's car. Andrew went outside, told the driver he wouldn't be needed, came back, ushered Ismay into the flat and shut the door behind them. She thought, I won't say I can explain. I won't. I will not sink to that. He won't leave me for this. She said nothing.

‘Sit down.'

She thought he would ask her what she had to say for herself. He didn't. ‘What is it with you, Ismay? Are you really so committed to those two, so
in love
with that
pair, that you lie to me, deceive me, go to all sorts of lengths to keep from me the truth that they have been living upstairs all the time I've been here? Why? What is it about this dull, plebeian, lower-middle-class couple, these
chavs
, that has so enslaved you?'

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘You're sorry. Those words should carry with them an implicit promise of amendment but in your case they don't. You've done it before. No doubt you think you can do it again.'

‘It will never happen again, Andrew. They're going tomorrow. They take over their new flat tomorrow.'

The phone rang. The voice of Marion Melville said, ‘Hello?' This is the ultimate, my Apocalypse, my hell, thought Ismay. This is where I lie down and scream. Of course she didn't. ‘I can't talk now. Can you call back?' She put the phone down.

‘Was that your sister?'

‘No.'

‘I find it hard to believe anything you say. Let me just say to you, I'm going out now. Alone. I don't know when I'll be back if ever. I can't live under the same roof with those people.'

Last time he had gone she had cried. She had wept uncontrollably, sobbed through the night, lain on the floor crying bitterly. For some reason it was different now. She said aloud to the empty room, I can't bear it, and then she began to bear it, dry-eyed, still, staring at his roses, the fresh, the dead and the dying, all in one vase, kept like that because she couldn't bring herself to throw away those that had faded.

For the first time for years, Beatrix showed a flicker of emotion when her sister came into the room. She held out her hand to Pamela who, uncertain whether to take
it in a handshake or clutch it, lifted it instead to her lips. Beatrix looked at her hand, frowning, and touched the spot where Pamela's lips had rested. Then she offered her a chocolate.

‘Well, I've never known you do that before,' Pamela said.

Beatrix nodded to Michael in a moderately friendly fashion.

‘This must be your doing, Edmund,' Pamela said. ‘I hope you're not thinking of going.'

‘Tomorrow,' said Edmund. ‘We must. We've waited to get into our flat for nearly nine months.'

Heather brought them a bottle of champagne and four glasses. ‘To celebrate your homecoming.' She glanced at Pamela in a meaningful way, said, ‘Perhaps something … ?'

‘Not exactly,' Pamela said. ‘Michael has asked me to marry him. He says he'll live here with me and Beatrix or we can live in his house and bring Beatrix, but I won't do that.'

‘She says she won't put that burden on me. It wouldn't be a burden. I've always been fond of Bea.'

‘I hope he'll stay with me. I hope he'll be my – I won't say boyfriend – my lover. And for ever or whatever we mean by that.'

Edmund raised his glass. ‘To you. I was going to recommend marriage. I like it. But I know when I'm beaten.'

The mail order dressing gown and the picture of the sultan with his bride were received by Barry with a gratitude that exceeded Marion's expectations. He insisted on putting on the dressing gown over his shirt and trousers and only removed it to change before they went out. Marion had a good look round the living
room while he was upstairs. The books, which she had never examined before, were mostly histories of India and biographies of British and Indian luminaries. But there were also a number of works on forensics, a couple of accounts of pathologists' investigations and quite a lot of true crime, especially wife murder. Having a suspicious mind and, in common with her brother Fowler, unsuppressed criminal tendencies, she wondered for the first time how Mrs Fenix had met her death. It might be prudent to ask. Come to that, what had Barry done before he retired? She fancied Irene had told her he had been a civil servant.

Barry came out and drove her to St John's Wood to the new Indian restaurant called Pushkar. He wore a white jacket over his pinstriped trousers and a white cap, which Marion could have accepted without embarrassment but for the presence of so many authentic Indian diners. It seemed to her that two or three of them exchanged amused smiles. He was rather taken aback when she asked him about his wife's death, said, ‘Heart,' and reverted to the subject of the mail order dressing gown. She thought he ought to take his hat off while they ate but relaxed a little when she saw that no one else had done so.

In spite of its auspicious beginning, it wasn't turning out one of their more successful evenings. Barry had only once called her kitten, he was strangely silent and seemed nervous. As they ate beef madras and sag gosht she racked her brains for something to say, asked him how he liked the lilac cashmere sweater, got a smile and the response ‘Smashing', and once more had to cope with the unusual silence.

‘There's something I want to ask you, Barry,' she said.

The look he gave her was preoccupied.

‘It's – well, what sort of work did you used to do when you …' She had got muddled and tried again. ‘I mean, what was your … ?'

Barry cut her short. ‘There's something I want to ask
you,'
he said and his voice was low and serious.

He must have somehow found out about her demands for money from Ismay Sealand or even her attempts with the morphine. If he had it was all up with her. She said nothing. She just looked at him with the winsome timid eyes of the small animal with whom he identified her.

He swallowed and his face reddened. He picked up a fork from the table and set it down again. ‘Marion,' he said and paused, looking away.

‘Yes?' She knew what it meant to feel her heart was in her mouth.

It was coming now. She waited, breathless. ‘I love you,' he said. ‘Will you marry me?'

She was forty-two and it was her first proposal. She had been working towards this end but had no idea what to do now she had got there. Her instinct was to scream with joy but she managed to restrain herself. Slowly, trembling, she nodded her head. She nodded in a quite uncharacteristic way, almost shyly, as if she were awestruck. What might have happened next she later speculated but before Barry could speak or act an Indian man had come up to their table and was addressing her. It was Mr Hussein.

‘Good evening, Miss Melville.'

Collecting herself, Marion was pretty sure he hadn't come up to them with simply greeting her in view. Until now he had generally been rude to her. He had been about to reprove Barry for some incorrectness of dress but seeing her there had deterred him.

‘Won't you introduce me to your friend?'

‘Not a friend, sir,' said Barry. ‘No longer that. Her future husband. Miss Melville has just done me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage.'

In the manner of his son, Mr Hussein looked as if he was suppressing an almost uncontrollable mirth. Marion didn't know why. She thought Barry's little speech quite moving. He and Mr Hussein chatted for a few moments about the name of the restaurant, which appeared to be a place in India. Barry had of course never been to Pushkar but he knew quite a lot about it.

‘Beautiful lake,' he said, ‘and the Snake Mountain.'

Mr Hussein's lips twitched. ‘Not forgetting the internationally renowned Camel Fair.'

‘Miss Melville and I may go there for our honeymoon.'

‘Ideal,' said Mr Hussein with a broad smile. ‘Of course you're aware that, as it is a holy place to the Hindus, alcohol, meat and even eggs are banned there. Unlike', he added before strolling back to Mrs Iqbal, ‘this restaurant.'

Knowing it was an imprudent thing to do, a mad thing to do, Ismay had walked about on Clapham Common half the night. Nothing happened. The people she encountered took no notice of her. One of them was Fowler Melville, in unfamiliar waters, but he didn't know her and she didn't know him and they walked in opposite directions to each other like a white-sailed frigatoon and a dirty British coaster passing in the night.

She went to work in the morning, more dead than alive, afraid to phone Andrew on his mobile, even more afraid to phone Seb Miller in Fulham and ask him yet again where Andrew was. When she got home
a message awaited her. It must be from Andrew, it had to be – please, God. It was from Marion Melville, a jauntier than usual, confident voice.

‘OK, two hundred this week, please. Same time, same place tomorrow. Mind you call me to confirm.'

Suppose Andrew had been there and had taken the call or listened to the message? But even if he had been there and taken it, that would be better than his not being there at all. Anything would be better than being without him. Late in the evening she remembered that this was the day Heather and Edmund were moving out. They would be in their own home now. With their two keys each, their new things and their new phone. She had written down the number and she ought to phone them. For a long time she sat by the phone, doing nothing. Pam must be upstairs but she didn't phone her either. At nine she walked down the road to take two hundred pounds out of the cash machine. A foolish act after dark but she no longer cared about things like that.

In bed but unlikely to sleep, she began wondering if he had another girl somewhere, a girl kept in reserve for times like this. Someone he could phone, after weeks of absence, and say, ‘Hi, it's me. Can I come over?' Since he came back things were different from what they had been before he went away. He had been sweeter to her and more autocratic, while she had been less able to stand up for herself. She was more in love with him than ever. She finally slept, only to dream he was back, that he had come into the room to tell her Heather was dead.

She took the tube to Waterloo and walked on to Hungerford Bridge from the South Bank. Marion also took the tube but for her it was a free ride as she used
the Freedom Pass she had picked up at Embankment station. Having employed the ‘oyster' card to get through the barrier at Finchley Road, she began to worry once she was in the train that inspectors might get on. Then it would be all up with her, as she plainly wasn't Hilary Cutts, aged sixty-three. Of course, inspectors seldom did get on, she could remember it happening only once. What bothered her more than this precise anxiety was that she was worrying at all. She never worried. Perhaps it was because she had read in Fowler's
Big Issue
that all oyster card details were now kept on a data base. Well, getting out at Baker Street where she had to change lines would be the solution. That and not getting into the Bakerloo Line train.

It came in and she got into it. No inspectors did but she jumped out at Charing Cross just the same to be on the safe side. Remember the data base. She skipped along the Strand and dropped the Freedom Pass into a waste bin. A pity, but using it was too risky. What a funny thing it would be if Fowler found it. He'd be bound to bring it to her. He always did, like a cat bringing home a mouse to its owner. She was still laughing to herself when she met Ismay on the bridge.