The Wimbledon Poisoner (7 page)

Henry’s memory, of course, seemed only defective in matters that immediately concerned him. Who he had had dinner with the night before, and what, if anything, he thought about them. But he was starting to lose track of the things that had made him what he was as well. Where he had been to school, what kind of degree he had got at university. Once upon a time he had read a quite terrifying number of books and accumulated an equally terrifying number of opinions about them. But now his intellectual horizons had shrunk to debates about motorways or endless conversations about the right school for one’s child, it was as if he didn’t want to remember the Henry who had once promised a little more than that.

To his surprise, Donald was talking about disease. Perhaps he was drunk. Henry felt rather drunk.

‘Tell me . . .’ Donald was saying, ‘this . . . polyneuritis of Elinor’s . . .’

‘Yes . . .’ said Henry.

‘Was that when I was treating her?’

‘I should think,’ said Henry, ‘you would have noticed if a patient of yours was diagnosed as having polyneuritis. I mean, I should think you would have something to do with it, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Donald gloomily. ‘I might not have noticed it. I might have said . . . “pains in the legs sort yourself out sort of thing”. I sometimes do. And she might have gone to a specialist to have it diagnosed. Or perhaps I did diagnose it but I’ve forgotten. These days I forget what I prescribe and what people have got when they walk out of the surgery. It just goes. I forget everything. I forget where I’m supposed to be and what I’ve done the day before and whose round it is . . .’

‘It’s yours!’ said Henry quickly.

‘You see?’ said Donald, with an air of triumph, ‘you see? The old brain is cardboard. Complete and utter cardboard these days.’

He got to his feet and walked stiffly to the bar.

Perhaps you only forgot things you didn’t want to be there in the first place. That was certainly how Donald felt about his patients. And maybe that was how Henry felt about himself. And Maltby. Why should he not want to remember Maltby, though? Back to the matter in hand. Come on. Come on. Elinor.

Elinor. All this stuff about polyneuritis was handy, thought Henry, but perhaps a little too neat. One minute, there they were talking about polyneuritis, next minute, there she was dying of it. But Donald’s first remark, when he returned with the drinks, was even more eerily appropriate to what Henry had in mind.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll pop up and have a look at her, shall I?’

Henry gulped. Donald drank.

‘Most likely,’ he said, ‘it’s stress. She’s feeling stressed. She has what we doctors call . . . stress. She’s probably in a . . . stressful situation. And so she imagines she has . . . this . . .’

‘Polyneuritis,’ said Henry.

‘That’s the one. Well . . .’ Donald went on, ‘who knows what polyneuritis is? Really? Really? Medicine makes a lot of claims, you know, but basically all of us doctors are pretty well in the dark on most things medical . . .’

Donald was about the nearest he was likely to find to a Murderer’s Doctor. But he wasn’t too keen on the idea of Donald arriving just as Elinor was wiping the last traces of Chicken Thallium off her lips. One of the chief requirements of a poisoner was a quiet domestic life. One needed few visitors, an oppressive routine, long silences, broken only by the tick of the clock and the groans of one’s victim. It was not a public crime. Everett Maltby had . . . But no. Henry didn’t want to think about Maltby any more.

‘Are you with me?’ Donald was saying.

‘Sure,’ Henry was saying.

‘So I’ll pop up about half nine,’ went on Donald. ‘I’m very fond of old Elinor. I think she’s a sweet, no nonsense, old-fashioned girl. She’s such a gentle person!’

Henry goggled at him. This remark, it seemed to him, was on a par with ‘Stalin was quite a nice guy, basically’. And what had he agreed to anyway?

There was no chance that Donald would diagnose thallium poisoning. Donald couldn’t diagnose a common cold. Having him there at the beginning was simply a stroke of luck so colossal that Henry’s natural pessimism was trying to turn it into a disaster.

‘Make it half ten!’ he said.

They ate supper at eight. By half past ten the thallium would be creeping round Elinor’s bloodstream. She would be suffering from pins and needles. Stomach cramps perhaps.

She would be pleased to see a doctor.

When he got back the house looked empty. The autumn afternoon was paling and the ivy that covered the façade of number 63 dripped with yellows and browns. Opposite, number 47 in huge green wellingtons and baseball cap was talking to number 60. Number 60’s wife was shouting something at number 60’s children. Or were they number 58’s children? Henry pulled the plastic bags out of the boot of the Passat, and lowered his eyes. Number 47 looked as if he were in a conversational mood.

As Henry got through the front gate, number 60 went back up the street towards his wife and number 47 dropped, suddenly and dramatically, on to his knees in front of the red Mitsubishi. For a moment Henry thought that this might be a genuine act of worship, a public act of love towards the vehicle (
I am not ashamed of what I feel about this car! It’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me!
). But, somewhat to Henry’s disappointment, number 47 did not start necking with the bodywork. He started to spray the hubcaps with what looked like toothpaste. Henry was safe anyway. Number 47 was either talking to you or the car; he was incapable of vocalizing what he felt about the Mitsubishi.

Henry was rather drunk.

How had he got back? Had he gone via Windlesham Avenue and the comprehensive? Or up Abacus Road, where the only black man in their part of Wimbledon lived? Had he gone down to the bottom of the hill and worked his way up to Belvedere Road from the south-east? The suburb was beginning to play tricks on him, to lie about itself. He should never have started making up stuff about Everett Maltby. Few things were sacred to Henry, but local history was one of them.

As he stowed the edenwort and the kohlrabi at the back of the cupboard, he saw his mother’s strained, pale face as she boasted, unconvincingly, of her son’s prowess to a neighbour. ‘Henry’s got a real gift for history!’ she would say. After he got his lower second at the University of Loughborough, she told Mrs Freeman at 82 that Henry was ‘on course for a Nobel Prize’. Could it be, thought Henry, as a shower of yams, bottled gherkins and packets of pastrami disgorged themselves on to the red-tiled floor of the kitchen, that his present bouts of cultural amnesia were a response to his mother’s extravagant hopes for him?

‘Why have you gone into the law?’ she used to say to him. ‘You’re better than that, aren’t you?’ In fact, Henry’s real problem with the law was that he wasn’t quite up to it. Even after eighteen years at Harris, Harris and Overdene he was, he reflected, about as much in the dark on legal questions as Donald was on medical issues. Which was saying something. Henry’s mother had, he recalled bitterly, thought that he could ‘do better’ than Elinor as well. ‘It all depends,’ Henry had said, ‘what you are looking for in a relationship!’ In those days Henry had talked like that. Well, if you were looking for the qualities Elinor had displayed in their years together, you could probably only have done better by marrying a man-eating tiger.

But of course, once Mrs Farr Senior had expressed doubts about a woman, it meant Henry was almost duty bound to marry her, just as, as soon as she expressed a political or aesthetic opinion, he immediately experienced a passionate surge of enthusiasm for the view most directly opposed to it. He was almost as hostile to his own mother as he was to Elinor’s, even though the politesse observed by his family meant he had not yet worked out a way of expressing it. In the thirty-six years of which he had conscious memory of Mrs Farr Senior, their relationship had never developed beyond the ‘isn’t it a nice day?’ stage. They had never had an argument, apart from one occasion in 1956, when Henry refused to wear a pair of short trousers. Henry’s mother still referred to this argument.

‘You remember . . .’ she would say coquettishly, ‘when you made that awful fuss about the trousers . . .’

Thinking about his mother brought Henry back to the matter in hand and, grim faced, he went out to the car to retrieve the chicken. He had left it on the passenger seat, where it lay, legs in the air, headless rump deep in the upholstery. It was only when he was reaching across for it that he remembered. Those three stolen sheets from Donald’s prescription pad. All it needed was someone to go looking for the jack, find their hands curling round them and start asking
why
. . .

You couldn’t be too careful. Everything had to be very, very carefully done indeed.

Henry yanked out the jack, groped for the papers and stuffed them into his pocket. Just as he did so, a voice behind him said, ‘I’ve got an awful headache!’

Elinor. Headache. How to respond. Henry tried out a little gasp of sympathy. ‘Oh no!’ he said. He sounded, he thought, almost openly satirical. ‘One of your headaches again!’

This was supposed to be said in the tone of one dealing with news of some immense natural disaster. It came out as positively offensive disbelief. Henry turned to her and held up the jack. Appealing for clemency.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I found the jack!’

She sniffed.

‘Put it in the shed!’ she said.

Henry leered at her.

‘And I got a chicken,’ he said, ‘the kind you like!’

And kohlrabi and okra and chilli and pastrami and
thallium
!

She frowned at the pavement.

‘When you’ve put the jack away,’ she said, ‘could you get in the car and go and get Maisie from ballet?’

‘Yes!’ said Henry.

She thrust her white face towards him. She looked as if she was in pain. Her eyebrows, Henry noted, were curiously thick. Black and bushy. Like a gorilla’s, he thought.

‘You block me,’ she said. ‘You block my creativity!’

‘Sorry!’ said Henry.

She swung her bottom south-south-west and steered herself off up the path. As Henry watched her retreating buttocks, grinding out yet another dismissal, he tried to remember if there had ever been a time, years ago, when he had desired her. Or had she just seen him one day, walking around the suburb where he had been born, and said to him, in that sharp voice she used for all commands: ‘Marry me!’

There was probably a man, somewhere, who could cope with Elinor. Ten feet tall and eight feet wide. With no nerves.

Henry went to the front hall, put the chicken and the jack on the table by the front door and trudged back out to the Passat. It looked smug, Henry thought, about the fact that he was going to have to drive it again. As he drove off down the street he saw the curtains of the front bedroom close. Elinor was going to have her sleep. She always needed a sleep after therapy. An hour or so spent talking with other women about how weak, cruel, uncaring, lazy and insensitive their husbands were always made her tired.

‘Oh Maisie,’ thought Henry, ‘you who are, even now, longing to get your fat little feet out of the ballet pumps that you will never wear gracefully, soon we will be free of her. Soon we will not have to go to ballet or piano or junior aerobics. We can go wherever we like.’

Actually, if he were offered the choice of going wherever he liked in the world, he would probably choose Wimbledon. The tribal customs of Wimbledon were, in Henry’s view, as worthy of study as the totems and taboos of the Aborigines of the Northern Territory. The stories of the suburb, the tales that gave number 24, 59, 30 or 47 their right to their homes, these were, in their way, as substantial as the creation myths of the Eskimos. Passats, BMWs, dormer windows, back extensions, wooden garden sheds, all meant something more than at first appeared – white wooden railings, gold name-plates on doors, stained-glass windows in bathrooms, net curtains, numbered dustbins, unnumbered dustbins, sash windows, plate-glass windows, windows with double glazing, windows without double glazing, walls painted white, all of this was part of a body of myth as strange and mysterious as the
Epic of Gilgamesh
. What was the relationship between new roofs and marital discord? Why did people who put adverts for local fêtes in their windows so often neglect the paint on their woodwork? The codes of Wimbledon were too strange and complex to be understood by its inhabitants. It needed some stranger to unlock it, to explain it to itself, to see behind that apparent silence and quietness.

Wimbledon. Its architecture compared favourably with that of northern France (bar one or two cathedrals). Its cuisine was as varied as Hong Kong or Bangkok (you could eat as well at the Mai Thai restaurant, Wimbledon Broadway, as in anywhere around the Gulf of Thailand). Its history, if you skipped a thousand years, was as violent as Phnom Penh’s or Smolensk’s. The things the Vikings had done in Raynes Park were, let’s face it, unspeakable.

Why, Henry wondered, was he getting defensive about Wimbledon? Who was attacking it? Perhaps it was that letter from that bastard up in town. That—

Dear Mr Farr,

Thank you for your letter and thank you for letting us see your nine-volume
Complete History of Wimbledon.
It’s a massive work and has obviously taken a great deal of your time and trouble.

I fear, however, that a detailed analysis of a suburb, especially a not particularly well-known one like Wimbledon, would not ‘travel’ well in our terms. I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean when I say that a reader in, for example, Moscow would find your book very difficult to relate to. For a book to have truly international appeal, it must have, well, truly international appeal!

We all loved the chapter about Victorian Wimbledon though. Might not this make a pamphlet of some kind? Perhaps for your local historical society?

Best wishes,

Karim Jackson.

Henry’s hands tightened on the wheel as he thought about Karim Jackson’s letter. There were people in Moscow, New York, Rome, Paris, Oslo and Naples who were absolutely dying to find out about Wimbledon. Wimbledon was as much a mystery to them as was the Orinoco to Henry. All he had to do, he knew, was get the thing in print.