The Wimbledon Poisoner (8 page)

Why had this Pakistani – if he was a Pakistani – got it in for him? Why did he take this extraordinarily negative attitude to the most important suburb in the Western world? Was it something to do with tennis? They played cricket in Pakistan, didn’t they? Was that the problem? And more importantly than that, what was a Pakistani doing in a position of power and influence in a publishing house? The man (if it was a man) was probably a fairly junior member of the firm; if only Henry could find a way of getting past him to the people really in the driving seat.

He mustn’t think about his book. Thinking about his book was almost worse than thinking about Elinor. He would think about what his mother always used to call ‘nice things’. ‘Think about nice things!’ she would say to Henry as she tucked him into bed at night. And, as he coasted towards Maple Drive through the suburb’s still deserted streets, Henry thought about nice things. He thought about thallium and the Guillain-Barré Syndrome and whether it was or wasn’t too late to have Elinor heavily insured.

Everything happened very quickly after he had got Maisie back to the house.

Elinor was still asleep. Before she should have a chance to wake and discover the edenwort, Henry got to work on the supper. Maisie sat in the corner of the kitchen with one chocolate bar in her mouth, another in her right hand, another in her lap and a fourth beside her on the draining board, in case anything should happen to the other three.

Henry paused over a half-dismembered edenwort. He had better catch up on Elinor’s latest batch of instructions.

She wrote him notes. Notes saying what to get for supper, notes telling him not to leave his shoes by the bed . . . sometimes she left him notes telling him how she felt. About life, about the world, and above all, about him. Since she had started going to therapy, these notes had got longer and more articulate. They didn’t start ‘Dear Henry’, or ‘My Dear Husband’, but simply began, picking up (as her therapist had taught her) at ‘the moment of rage’. There was one, now, lurking in the vegetable basket and Henry moved towards it as one might move towards an unexploded bomb.

Why do you not understand my needs as a woman? You do not commit to the home, do you, Henry? You are (I have to say) intensely judgemental. You block and deny my aspirations to creativity and permanence.

Elinor attended art classes at Wimbledon School of Art. She was particularly keen on pottery, a skill she had, in Henry’s view, even less hope of acquiring than her daughter.

You deal death to the need in me to grow and change and become myself. Like a huge wall that shields tender shoots from the light, you do not allow my passions and sensations their scope. I am afraid of you, Henry!

Not half as much as I am of you! thought Henry, as he ran his eyes down the rest of the manuscript (she must have written it before going to sleep).

I am afraid of the male violence that is in you. In a world run by men, for men . . .

Maybe, thought Henry, but, if so, run by other men for other men. I am not one of these men!

A world of cruel greed, rape, nuclear war, phallocentric control, where women are pushed to the sidelines, how can I not be afraid of you? With the fierce hatred that I know is in you? Like a mugger you leap out at me from the dark, and my rights as a woman are violated by your obscene masculinity!

Henry looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, as he crumpled up the other three pages of this latest missive and threw it in the swingbin. He looked, he had to admit, the very picture of obscene masculinity. Glumly, he began to pull out okra and edenwort. If she didn’t eat the vegetables, she was almost sure to eat the meat.

Elinor was a star pupil in her therapy class. Having been taught, first at an expensive public school and then at Oxford University, to express herself to order, she found the poor creatures who shambled along to 23 Dorman Road every Saturday, Thursday, Monday and Wednesday absolutely no competition at all. Most of these women had been in what they called ‘the therapy situation’ for years. Elinor’s difficulties were, at least from her description of the classes, bigger and better than those of her fellow therapees. She was a kind of Stakhanovite worker in the field of female suffering, setting new targets for pain, finding each week some new emotional cross to bear. The main topic on the agenda of the therapy class was, to start with anyway, Henry. They all sat around in a circle agreeing what a swine Henry was.

But as the therapy continued, Henry had observed, others were found to be guilty of the capital crime of blocking Elinor’s creativity. There were other saboteurs and wreckers, Trotskyists and double-dealing spies, who, sneakily and shamefully, crept about, blocking Elinor’s rightful place as an internationally acclaimed oil painter, star newspaper columnist or opera singer. Her mother for a start.

At first, Henry had not been able to believe that her therapist had got it so right. If anyone had prevented Elinor from being an oil executive, or a leading novelist and short-story writer, it was Elinor’s mother, a small, heavily built woman with a squint, who lived very near the Sellafield atomic reactor. Principally because Elinor’s mother was completely without talent for anything apart from giving men a hard time and had, presumably, passed on her genes to her daughter.

The therapist, apparently, while finding her mother guilty of the hideous and anti-state offence of blocking Elinor’s creativity, took the view that she had managed to do this by getting Elinor to love her too much. How she worked this out was a mystery to Henry, since her mother’s role in Elinor’s life was confined to twice-yearly visits in which she sat in their front room and listened to Elinor telling her how awful Henry was.

He put the chicken in a roasting bag and felt in his pocket for the vial of thallium.

‘Ugh!’ said Maisie. ‘Chicken.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Henry, ‘you can fill up on choc bars and then pretend to eat it and when she isn’t looking I’ll sling it in the bin.’

‘Good!’ said Maisie.

‘I wouldn’t touch a mouthful of it myself,’ said Henry, ‘it’s that healthy free-range chicken that she likes . . .’

‘Yuk!’ said Maisie.

While she was munching her way through her third chocolate bar, Henry took the chicken through to the scullery and carefully anointed its breast with the thallium. On top of the thallium he sprinkled salt, a very little pepper and a coating of tarragon leaves. It was six thirty.

Back in the kitchen, he cleaned the edenwort and the okra and chopped them up small enough to be unrecognizable. He whistled as he chopped and, as he tipped the vegetables into the frying pan, he sang, to the tune of ‘Candy Man Blues’, the following song:

Thallium
Thallium
Guillain-Barré
Thallium
Thallium Thallium
Thallium Guillain-Barré.

Underneath the frying pan was another note.

You hate women, don’t you? Why do you hate women? Why are you so frightened of them? Why do you seek to destroy them? To caricature them? Is it their creative potential that frightens you? Their menstrual power? Their child-bearing power? Is it their fund of womanliness you hate? Don’t you hate women, Henry?

Henry couldn’t think of a woman he disliked apart from Elinor. And, of course, Elinor’s mother.

How would Elinor’s mother react to her daughter’s death? Henry had a feeling that she would take it well. She had taken her husband’s brain tumour like a . . . well, like a man. ‘OK,’ her square jaw seemed to say, ‘Derek has a brain tumour. That happens. We can deal with it!’ And she and her daughter had dealt with it. They had coped. They had certainly coped a lot better than Elinor’s father, a man Henry had always liked. The news of his impending death had badly ruffled his composure. He had talked wildly about the meaning of life, the emptiness of it all, the lack of scope offered by the Guardian Building Society. Elinor and her mother had clearly found all this in bad taste.

‘Daddy is depressed,’ they would say, narrowing their eyes and tilting their square chins downward, ‘very, very depressed. About the fact that he is dying.’

They clearly felt he should have taken a more manly approach to the brain tumour. A man who had such a positive attitude towards Do It Yourself could surely have used some of that energy to combat the decay of his central nervous system. Henry thought about his father-in-law’s funeral, as he placed the Chicken Thallium in the oven, and then checked his watch again. He thought about the dignified posture of Elinor and Elinor’s mother, about how good they looked in black, about how they retained their composure even as the oblong box containing Derek slid off through a gap in the crematorium wall. About how, as Elinor and Elinor’s mother stood by the flowers in the rain at Putney Vale Crematorium, someone had said to him, ‘They’re taking it very well!’ Of course they were, thought Henry, they couldn’t give a toss about the poor bastard.

He would wear his black leather jacket at Elinor’s funeral. And the green socks. And the red shoes. He would deck himself out in the kind of clothes that would give most offence to her were she alive. And if Elinor’s mother should break down he would sob operatically and people would say to each other, as he stood by the flowers afterwards, ‘My, my. He is taking it badly.’

It was six forty-five. He turned the oven on to 250 and put the okra and the edenwort on to a low heat. In approximately one hour she would be getting her chops round the first succulent mouthful of Chicken Thallium. By midnight she would be experiencing severe abdominal discomfort.

Whistling to himself, Henry laid the table, while, in the corner of the kitchen, Maisie finished her last chocolate bar and got to work on a packet of crisps, a tube of Rolos, half a pound of jelly babies and a jumbo bar of Turkish delight. As she ate she cast worried glances up towards the cupboard by the stove, where lay a small sack of potato crisps, some Liquorice Allsorts and two packets of biscuits. Sometimes Henry wondered whether the junk food industry was going to be able to take the kind of demands Maisie was going to make on it in the years ahead.

Occasionally, for some obscure reason of her own, Elinor was pleasant. Henry could not quite work out why, since her pleasantness was not always followed by a request for money or some other favour; perhaps she was remembering something he had quite forgotten, an incident during their courtship perhaps (they must have had a courtship) or a Henry, now lost to Henry himself, who could have inspired feelings such as pleasure. Or perhaps this was part of some internal clock of hers and, at some moments, often weeks or months apart, Elinor was programmed to be briefly but definitely pleasant.

It always threw him.

‘Hullo, darling!’ she said, as she came round the kitchen door in her black trouser-suit, her black hair swept back under an Alice band. ‘I’ve had a lovely sleep!’

Henry looked at her suspiciously. Why is she saying this? he thought. What has she got in mind?

She crossed the kitchen floor and pecked him on the cheek.

‘Sorry I was cross!’ she said. Her voice was light, tremulous. Perhaps she was planning to murder him!

‘You’re making supper!’ she said.

‘That’s right!’

With just a hint of normal, workaday Elinor, she pointed a stubby finger at the vegetables.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s edenwort, darling,’ said Henry. ‘It’s a new vegetable!’

Elinor did not pick up the pan and hurl it across the room. She scooped up a little on her forefinger and nibbled at it.

‘It’s rather nice!’

‘And I’ve done chicken!’ said Henry. ‘Free-range chicken. How you like it. All crispy in the oven. Topped with . . .’

‘What’s it topped with?’ said Elinor suspiciously.

‘Lovely herbs!’ said Henry. ‘Lovely fresh herbs from the garden picked all fresh and with no chemicals on!’

‘Mmmm!’ she said.

And skipped off towards Maisie who, at the first sound of her mother’s footsteps, had concealed her cache of sweets under her jersey.

Perhaps, thought Henry, she was appealing to his better feelings. She was making herself difficult to kill on humanitarian grounds. He watched her as she danced a few larky steps with her daughter, singing in an effortfully pure soprano while Maisie shuffled along trying to keep the sweets safe under her jumper.

‘Love-lee chicken!’ she was singing. ‘Love-lee chicken!’

Still in a larky mood, she began to lift her daughter up off the floor. Maisie, like Henry, did not like being lifted. She held herself quite still, staring seriously at her mother, thinking, quite obviously, Henry thought, about Turkish delight. Elinor put her down.

‘You two,’ she said, ‘are so stiff!’

Henry looked across at Maisie. Was Elinor perhaps going to try and top her as well? Never mind. In a very short space of time she would have her feet under the table and those huge jaws would be munching their way into the breast.

And then the doorbell rang.

It was Donald.

Elinor was pleased to see him. She it was who opened the door and Henry heard a high-pitched giggle followed by a lengthy squawk of pleasure.

‘Donald,’ she said, ‘it’s Donald.’

Henry wondered whether she was having an affair with Donald.
WIMBLEDON DOCTOR IN POISON LOVE TRIANGLE,
he thought to himself. Or possibly,
DOCTOR IN LOVE PACT POISON DEATH WISH PATIENT HORROR.

No. Donald would never do it with a patient. His offence against those who came to him for medical help was less easy to punish. But he was certainly guilty, thought Henry, of liking Elinor and, as he came into the hall, nodding his big head as Elinor fussed round him, Henry wondered whether his wife might not be,
au fond
, quite a pleasant woman. Numbers of people seemed to like her. Neighbours, friends, colleagues. People bought her lunch and rang her up and sent her birthday cards; it seemed a particularly cruel joke that one of the few people who really did dislike her should be married to her.

‘You must stay to supper!’ Elinor was saying.

‘Oh, Elinor,’ Donald was saying, ‘I couldn’t . . .’ But he was saying it in a way that implied possible assent. Elinor went to the stove, singing in a high soprano voice ‘Donald’s coming to supper . . . Donald’s coming to supper . . .’ When this song failed to make the impact she clearly expected it to make, she turned to Henry as if she was addressing some Yugoslav peasant and did a lot of the kind of lip and tongue work she had used on Elke, their one and only au pair.