Death of a Perfect Mother (6 page)

‘Perhaps you'd better go to him for your car,' said Corby, with unexpected quickness of mind. As a ploy for arousing jealousy, Guy Fawcett's indecent proposal seemed less than a total success. She began collecting herself together.

‘Of course, he's a very attractive man,' she said, persistent. ‘Tremendous shoulders. And what I'd call a really sensitive face. You never know when you'll get that sort of proposition again . . .' She shook her head meaningfully.

‘See you Thursday, Lill?'

‘Shouldn't wonder. Same time.' At the study door she gave him a tremendous passionate kiss five seconds long, and after tiptoeing through the hall another at the front door.

‘Don't you worry about Fawcett,' she whispered, as if he had; ‘I can put him in his place any time.'

‘Don't take any nonsense from him, Lill,' said Corby, playing along.

‘Not more than I want to. Keep your pecker up. It can't last for ever, you know. If she was gone, I'd marry you like a shot.'

Hamilton Corby, who knew he could do very much better if marriage were in question, said: ‘What about Fred?'

‘Oh, I'd soon get rid of
Fred,'
returned Lill, her whisper more urgent. ‘Never you mind how. Ta-ta for now.'

Above them on the first floor a door closed. On the step, taking a last genteel peck, they heard nothing. Then Lill set off at her usual brisk pace down Balaclava Road and turned into the enveloping shadows of Snoggers Alley. She was not altogether satisfied with her evening, but still, a seed had been planted. And if the worst came
to the worst, a Mini would be better than nothing. So when she got home, at nine-forty prompt, she was quite her normal cheery self.

‘That's my good turn for the day done!'

‘How was she?' asked Fred, who was in the same half-asleep state he had been in when she went out, this time in front of a TV Western.

Lill shook her head gloomily. ‘It's a terrible disease. She's in purgery the whole time. The doctors can't even put a name to it.'

Fred nodded. He never showed any greater curiosity than this about her twice-weekly visits. His store of curiosity was tiny at the best of times. The rest of the family, sprawled around the television in various attitudes of inattention, kept tactfully silent.

‘Do you know,' said Lill, who could never keep quiet about anything that was on her mind. ‘I think it's time we bought a car.' Gordon looked at Brian and Brian looked at Gordon, but neither of them said anything. Debbie sniffed and left the room. ‘We'd've had one years ago if it hadn't been for buying Gordon out of the army. I think I know where we could pick one up dirt cheap. I've always said, it's what you boys need. Get you out so's you can have a good time. Meet a few girls.'

‘I thought I was supposed to be marked down for Mrs Watson,' said Gordon. ‘I don't need a car to go courting her—she just lives up the road.'

‘Mrs Watson! That stuck-up little tailor's dummy! Christ! Whatever gave you that idea? You're a sight too good to take up with other men's leavings.'

Lill always let her family know when she changed her mind.

• • •

‘She's screwing a car out of him now,' said Gordon to Brian, when at last they had escaped from rusks and Ovalmix and had reached the womblike safety of their
bedroom. ‘God, what a cheek she's got!'

‘Would you have the nerve to drive round in a car that was the price of your mother's shame?' demanded Brian with a melodramatic gesture of the arms.

‘Frankly, I wouldn't give it a second thought. Only I don't think I'll be getting the chance. Lill's next ride is going to be in the back of a hearse.'

Brian shivered when it was put that bluntly. ‘Funny to think about it. Free, after all these years of . . . of being her doormats. I wish I felt better.'

Gordon looked at him keenly. ‘What do you mean, better? What's the matter?'

‘Just this ruddy cough. It's the climate. “Bronchial isle, all isles excelling”, as the poet said. They shouldn't have put people down in this climate.'

‘It's not the climate does things to you. It's Lill. It's just some nervous thing. Remember last year—you weren't any better in Tunisia.'

Brian, lying on his bed with an unread book, shifted uneasily at the mention of Tunisia, as he always did. ‘Christ, no wonder I didn't feel up to much,' he muttered. ‘What with Lill and all. Remember Lill on the plane?'

The two heads on their pillows—Gordon's dark and purposeful, Brian's fair and distressed—lay for a moment in silence as last year's holiday in Tunisia came back to them. It had been explained to Lill that the firm they were travelling with was ‘up market', and, when she expressed bewilderment, the term had been spelled out in words of one syllable. But she never quite understood that the people on this trip were a different sort from the mob they had been with to Benidorm three years before. Just in those early moments, when everyone was settling into their seats, swapping with each other at most a murmured comment on the rate of exchange or the price of Glenfiddich, Lill showed she misjudged the prevailing mood by shrieking across the plane to Gordon, six rows in
front: ‘Soon be there now, Gord! How long will it be, d'you think, before some sheikh snatches me up in his passionate arms and takes me off to his harem, eh?' And as soon as the ‘Fasten Seat Belts' sign was switched off she was swaying along the aisle to the loo singing ‘The Sheikh of Arabee-ee' with special smiles at all the more desirably distinguished men on the trip. One frozen air hostess at the back of the plane raised a plucked eyebrow at the other frozen air hostess at the front; the up-market travellers glanced sideways at each other and coughed in the backs of their throats. Still over the Channel, and everyone had got Lill's number. None of them exchanged a word with Lill for the rest of the fortnight. ‘They're a stuffy lot,' Lill kept saying. ‘I prefer the wogs. Don't understand what they're going on about, but at least they're friendly.'

At last Brian, deep in memories, said: ‘No, it's not the climate. It's Lill.'

‘And it's Lill,' said Gordon, ‘makes us the laughing-stocks of the town. Disgraces us every time we try to climb out of the mud. You know what people say about you and me?'

‘Yes,' said Brian. ‘I know. Still, when all's said and done—'

‘Anyway,' said Gordon quickly, ‘your role is to be my alibi. Your health doesn't matter. You haven't got to do anything.'

‘It sounds a bit feeble,' complained Brian.

‘What's the point of all this training I do if I can't even kill off my own mother? It's got to be one of us, not both, and obviously I'm the fit one.' He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I'm even giving up smoking tomorrow—for the duration. Yours is the brainy bit. You've got to convince the police I was in the pub the whole evening, except for the odd minute in the bog. You've got to have it off pat, the whole story.'

‘What about if Lill opens her big mouth and draws attention to it, like she did on Saturday?'

‘We've got to make damn sure she doesn't.' Gordon lay on his back, looking darkly at the ceiling. ‘I've been thinking about it. I think we could work it like this: if I slip off a couple of minutes before Lill's due to go, and say “I'm just nipping over to have a word with John” or Chris or whoever happens to be in the pub that night —“see you at supper”, then she won't comment on my not being there. And I'll make sure I do have a word with them some time in the evening, in case anyone asks. Either just before or just after.'

‘You've got to be careful just after,' said Brian. ‘I've read about the physical effects of murdering someone. It makes you want to—'

‘I know it makes you want to—well, that's what Lill's done to me all her life.'

‘Just be careful. Even if you're only a bit jittery, people notice things. You'd better just come back to the table and talk to me . . . What are you going to do it with? Not your hands?'

‘No,' said Gordon. ‘Though I could. But it's too risky. I'll use rope. I can get a short bit from work.'

‘They'd be able to trace the type.'

‘It's common stuff. You can buy it anywhere.'

‘Why not just hit her on the head?'

‘It might not kill her, not with that thick skull. If I hit her several times, there'd probably be blood. That's one thing I can't risk, blood . . . Anyway,' he added slowly, ‘I don't think it would give me the same pleasure.' A smile was on his full lips.

‘You're really looking forward to this, aren't you?'

‘Yeah, baby brother, I'm looking forward to it.' He looked mockingly at Brian across the bare length of their room. ‘Aren't you? Touch of the cold feet?'

‘No,' said Brian carefully. ‘No. But if I was actually
doing
it . . . The alibi business, that's a piece of cake. I'll enjoy that. The other, the . . . strangling, I don't know if I could. She's our mother.' He swallowed. ‘When it comes down to it, I don't suppose she's meant any harm.'

‘Christ, you bloody intellectuals,' hissed Gordon through his teeth. ‘You never go straight at a thing, do you? Never meant any harm? What else has she ever meant? In twenty years you'll be toasting her on the anniversary of all this with tears in your eyes: “To the finest Mum a man ever had!” '

‘Don't be daft . . .'

‘And in twenty years, I'll join you.'

Lill's life changed course somewhat on Tuesday, though by no means as drastically as it was to later in the week. The day began in the usual way, with the family crawling reluctantly out of their beds, quarrelling over the bathroom and loo, slouching down to breakfast half asleep (a good job, really, because the poached eggs were hard as stones), and gradually dispersing themselves in their various directions. Once that was over, the day opened up with manifold possibilities for Lill. Now she could dispose of her hours as she would, captain of her fate, mistress of her soul; meaning, in fact, that she could plan any manner of mischief she set her heart on.

Lill wondered whether Guy Fawcett would be home next door during the day.

The thought stayed with her as she performed in her slapdash way her various early morning chores. The cat—black with white paws and whiskers, and knowing
eyes that saw through Lill all right—demanded breakfast, and Lill reached down a tin. As she opened it she noticed a By Appointment sign on the label, and said to herself: Blimey, you'd have thought she could afford something better than this! She washed up the breakfast things, and slapped a greasy cloth over the kitchen table. Then she put some coke on the kitchen stove and emptied the ashes from underneath. Throughout she kept half an eye on the kitchen window and the gardens outside.

At nine-fifteen Guy Fawcett appeared beyond the next-door fence, large and visible, and carrying a spade which he showed no inclination to use.

Didn't do to seem too eager. Lill knew the moves in the game as well as anyone alive. She went upstairs to make the beds, opened the bedroom windows wide, and carrolled in her crow-scaring singing voice the first two lines or so of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning', over and over. She knew the ropes. It gave him an opening. ‘You sound happy today,' he could say when she finally emerged into the back garden. As she made Brian and Gordon's beds her eyes strayed to the figure of Guy Fawcett, wandering around his back lawn in the pallid April sunshine. His heart doesn't seem to be in it, she thought. Better give him something to keep his pecker up. So when she went downstairs, she took out the sink-tidy, with the rubbish from breakfast, and slapped the contents into the dustbin, humming cheerily the while a healthy Cliff Richard number.

‘You sound happy this fine morning,' said Guy Fawcett from over the garden fence. ‘Come into a fortune?'

‘That's right,' said Lill, not pausing in her trot back to the kitchen. ‘I come into the pools. Just like that woman said, it's going to be “Spend, Spend, Spend” with me.'

‘It would be too with you, Lill,' said Fawcett, his bass baritone throbbing with admiration. Lill laughed all the way down the scale, threw him a sideways look that could
mean whatever he chose it to, and charged through the back door. The first move had been made. The gunfighters were circling warily round the dusty town square, waiting for the moment when they would come out into the open, all cylinders blazing.

Lill hurried through the rest of her chores. After all, though it doesn't do to seem too anxious, still—Fred and Gordon would be back at five past one. Another little bout of teasing would be strictly within the rules of the game, but it would take time. She finished her scanty Hoovering, decided not to dust the bits of brass, china dogs, cheap African pots and other ornaments dotted around her mantelpiece and window ledges, then fetched her handbag and put on a bit of make-up lovingly in front of the mirror: not too much—didn't want to make it too obvious; not too little—have to give him an excuse for mentioning it. She smirked at herself when she had finished: she could still show the young 'uns a thing or two! This done, she armed herself with a fearsome pair of secateurs from Fred's gardening drawer, and sallied out into the fresh air.

The garden was Fred's responsibility. When not tending the parish parks he came back to dig his own potato patch, and it would never have occurred to him to complain at this. Now and then Lill acted in a supervisory capacity, told him what she wanted, where, and so on; but basically she took no interest in it. Flowers, like cats, were too involved in their own intricate magnificence to minister to her self-love. So beyond demanding great clumps of gladioli, peonies, or any other slightly monstrous bloom that caught her eye in other gardens, she left it to Fred. And it looked like it. Fred had his successes, mainly turnips and chrysanthemums, but he could not be said to run to a green finger. The Hodsdens' back garden was a dull little patch of earth.