Eight Murders In the Suburbs (23 page)

“If you're sure you want to, Mr. Grantham, I do too! I'll do my best to make you happy.”

“You need have no anxiety on that score. The burden of adaptation will be exclusively mine. I will study your tastes. And—er—do
my
best to make
you
happy.”

It was, she decided, a rather nice kind of loopeyness.

“Do you think your friends will like me?” They would adore her, she hoped he would say, for her unspoilt charm—and possibly also for her taste in dress, in which the provinces were deemed to be deficient.

“That need concern you no more than it concerns me,” he said. “The essential point is that you have consented to marriage. You need not return to the office. I will telephone and make the necessary arrangements—your employers can easily replace a pool typist. Please write down your full name, age and address, and the names and occupation of your parents. I shall see my solicitors and we can be married in four days.”

“
Ooh
! I sha'n't have time to get any clothes together.”

“You can go from here to Harridges and order what you want. By the time you get there, I shall have opened an account.”

This was concrete. This was wonderful. She would have hugged him, but he held her off.

“Not again—not until after we're married!” he said.

Elsie had never scamped her work at the office—had never refused a kiss or two to a man who had paid for her evening's entertainment. There really was an eight-roomed house, detached, in Benchester and two servants and a car and credit in all the shops for anything, within the limits of commonsense, which might contribute to her comfort or her pleasure. Her purse, too, was always comfortably lined. She stuck to her own rules—she exerted herself in fulfilment of her promise to do her best to make him happy.

She knew that, in brief, ecstatic moments, she succeeded—and was therefore the more surprised when his strange shyness of her failed to disappear from their everyday life. Any casual endearment or familiarity on her part would freeze him up—make him look as if he were ashamed of himself. He did not like her to touch him—except when he lost his head—as he called it—and then he would burst out of his shell and reveal a normal, if somewhat excessively romantic, attitude.

The two servants, she had to admit, were not of the respectful kind. They were both older than Jeremy and exhibited no sign of admiring her clothes. Nor did they perceptibly obey her, though they were willing to accept her as the mouthpiece of Grantham's wishes. In other respects, the reality exceeded the dream.

With the single exception noted, Jeremy seemed to be cut in the pattern of an ideal husband. He was an almost incredibly good-tempered man. When small things went wrong—caused, perhaps, by her unpunctuality or forgetfulness—he never blamed her. With a patient smile, he would beg her not to blame herself. Patience, indeed, was the keynote of his domestic life—though she had heard him speak sharply and even angrily on the telephone to a subordinate at his warehouse.

He was very considerate, too. He ordered the picture papers for her. When he thought she did not understand the news of the day he put himself to the trouble of explaining. She was not interested in the kind of news that had to be explained, but she appreciated his desire to entertain her.

The second phase of the marriage began with the first formal dinner party. In Benchester, the social traditions of the middle class lingered. Elsie assumed that success would pivot on her dress and that Harridge's would carry her to triumph.

She did not suspect that there might be a ritual with which she was unfamiliar—such as being ‘taken into dinner.' For a moment she was angry with Jeremy for his thoughtlessness in not warning her. The knives and forks, too, were laid out on a system not employed in the restaurants which she had frequented. But she was quick as a town sparrow at that kind of thing and was soon able to feel that she was catching up, while standing by for surprises.

The conversation showed a lamentable tendency to run into blind alleys. There was, for instance, the weather which, to Elsie, was purely a problem of adjusting one's clothes. But Jeremy's friends talked about it as if it were a sort of business, making plans about it for months ahead. Another stumbling block was gardening—apparently, she was expected to know the names of all the flowers and how they grew. The worst humiliation of all was when she herself turned the conversation to London. These incredible provincials seemed to know London as well as they knew Benchester—more accurately, they knew a London which was as remote from Elsie as Budapest. Her dress held its own, but that was about all you could say for it.

“I was a flop! I've let you down to your friends, Jeremy. I'm ever so sorry about it.”

Perhaps she hoped he would tell her she was exaggerating—that a little strangeness on both sides must be expected at first—that her different way of looking at things was itself attractive to his friends. Unspoiled charm, you could call it, at a pinch. Anyhow, it would be nice if he were to say it.

“It's of no importance whatever, my dear. I assure you that you have not—as you put it—let me down. Get rid of that fear, if you have it, Elsie. In no circumstances—whatever might happen—could you let me down. I told you as much when I asked you to marry me.”

“Dear Jeremy! You are
so
kind to me!” she sobbed.

Lying awake that night she found his words repeating themselves in her memory. He was very kind to her. But he had a funny way of saying kind things. Sort of legal way. As if he didn't
want
to be kind to her but had to be. It was her first approach to the truth about her marriage, but she was slow in following it up.

The dinner parties, including those given at home, spread over three months, interspersed with callers whose, calls had to be returned. She rarely made the same gaffe twice, but carefulness was not enough. His friends showed no personal interest in her. Within the framework of tolerable behaviour, people tended to leave her out of the conversation.

The solitary exception was Millard, a go-ahead auctioneer who had been a senior Gas officer in the Kaiser's war. But the nature of his interest was soon obvious—and Elsie had snubbed him, with some enjoyment.

In six months, it all petered out and there followed a period of blessed, if monotonous, peacefulness, in which she no longer had to scan the picture papers for drawing-room topics. Nobody cut her: chance meetings always evoked a civil exchange. But invitations were neither given nor accepted. Eighteen months after their wedding, she faced the facts.

“All your friends have dropped off because of me!”

“If that does not distress me, why should it distress you?” The patient smile had come into action.

“Jeremy—did you know it was going to happen like this?”

She had found out that he would never tell the smallest lie, even in trivial things, to save his own or anyone else's face.

“In so far as I considered the matter at all, I was aware that your early circumstances had been so different from theirs that you would not be likely to have much in common. It will leave us more time together, Elsie. I am afraid you do not care for chess. We must get a little variety into our evenings. Perhaps you would like a radiogram?”

“That would be no good if nobody ever comes here to dance,” objected Elsie, who knew no other use for music.

She heard him take a long breath.

“I have an idea!” he exclaimed. The patient smile took on the semblance of a grin. “You teach me to dance!”

The idea of teaching the good sheriff to dance was too much for her. She laughed until she was crying bitterly and he was doing his best to soothe her.

“Don't cry, Elsie! Those are real tears.” He sounded almost frightened. “Elsie! When you cry, you accuse me of failure. You're robbing me of my right to make amends. Elsie, I'll do anything within the moral law to make you happy.”

He was so worked up that he lost his shyness, and by the next morning Elsie had forgotten how it all started. But his words echoed deep down in her subconsciousness, waiting, as it were, to swim up into her mind.

Dancing being barred, Grantham began to take her regularly to the better of the two local cinemas. He was honorary secretary of the Benchester annual fair, an institution of more than a thousand years standing and so of national interest. The rent paid by concessionaries for the three days alone covered more than half the rates of the sizeable town. Grantham's position entailed a good deal of confidential clerking. Elsie gladly agreed to help, preferring a little work to parlour games. As she had a neat, legible handwriting, everybody was pleased.

For another six months his inescapable kindness flowed over her. Then she bolted back to London with fifteen pounds and a couple of suitcases.

She put up at a hostel and applied unsuccessfully to have her old job back. She went to an agency, who submitted her to a test and told her that she was too slow and that her fingering was defective—which she acknowledged to be true. She would need a refresher course—and she could not afford one. There came to her the first suspicion that she had made a fool of herself in running away.

The hostel—which she had formerly thought good enough—she now discovered to be an abominable place. The bedroom was dirty and cold, and the food uneatable. Two years of well-fed indolence had changed her perspective. In a few days, restaurants and a few other such necessaries had made an alarming hole in her reserve.

Grantham picked her up through the agency, decided that it would be prudent to let her have a week of it. Then he buttonholed her as she returned wearily to the hostel in early evening.

“I have taken rooms for us at the Savoy,” he said. “We can go home when we've had a little holiday and we need never mention the last miserable week for the rest of our lives.”

“I'll pack my bags and join you in half an hour. You are very kind to me, Jeremy,” she said, and for the first time did not mean it.

Dimly she had begun to realise that he was not, in the accepted sense, kind to her. He had now revealed that he wanted her even more than she herself wanted a life of well-fed indolence. To this she was able to add that he did not want her as other men sometimes want wives who run away by themselves. She knew well that he never thought of her like that except when he ‘lost his head.' And he always tried not to lose his head.

She had tried to break away and had failed. She returned to Benchester with a feeling that she was being dragged back in chains, but that the chains, in some inexplicable way, weighed more heavily on Jeremy Grantham than on herself.

The patient smile had lost none of its impersonal benevolence. His kindness continued unabated. Her new, undefined resentment made her exploit it. Soon, she was running Millard on a string, occasionally allowing him to share her table when she took morning coffee while shopping. She invariably reported such incidents, endowing Millard with an attractiveness which he did not possess for her—in the vain hope of arousing her husband's protest.

In time, she was playing the game of seeing how far she could go. She submitted him to calculated interruptions. She indulged in tantrums. She was an hour late for dinner. But she never plumbed the depth of his tolerance, though she exhausted her energy and her cunning in the attempt to exasperate him at least into some angry rebuke.

Elsie was not consistent, any more than she was heroic. There were times when she was ashamed of her conduct.

“I'm sorry I've been so beastly. You must hate me sometimes.”

“Never!” he asserted. “You have done nothing for which you need apologise to me.”

“I'll try to behave better in future.”

“Please do nothing of the kind.” His tone gave his words the force of an earnest entreaty. Then came that other phrase she had heard so often before: “If it doesn't distress me, why should it distress you?”

She felt that she was on the brink of a discovery but lacked the ability to widen her investigation. Nevertheless, she became intuitively aware that he derived some kind of satisfaction out of being kind and forgiving when she was making an unreasonable nuisance of herself. He liked forgiving her. So he liked her to do something he could forgive. She lost her sense of power over him and stopped trying to irritate him.

Illumination came, indirectly, through a chance phrase which she overheard at the Fair. With another friend of Jeremy's was Millard, who had soured under her refusal to advance their relations. Both men greeted them as they were leaving a flower marquee. A moment later Elsie discovered that she had dropped a glove, probably in the marquee, and turned back. As she passed behind them Millard remarked to his companion:

“Poor old Grantham! Still wearing his hair shirt. Must be her looks.”

The phrase ‘hair shirt' eluded her. At home, the abridged dictionary failed to give enlightenment. She would find out from Jeremy himself. But she would go carefully about it, in case it meant something dangerous.

“There's something I wanted to ask you about—I read it in the paper yesterday—can't remember what it was.” She rang the changes on that, and then: “Oh, I remember! It was about somebody wearing a hair shirt. There isn't such a thing, is there? What does it mean?”

“It was a medieval form of torture. Monks would wear a hair shirt to atone for sin.” He added: “In modern English, it means something humiliating and painful which you've imposed on yourself as a punishment.”

So it did mean something dangerous! Elsie felt her cheeks burning, felt the heat spreading in a tidal wave over her whole body. Suddenly it had all added up. Jeremy was a sort of monk himself—he regarded that night at the Gulverbury as a deadly sin. Making amends! But not to her, to himself. He had married her as ‘something humiliating and painful' imposed on himself as a punishment for ‘losing his head.' She was precious to him because he hated every minute he spent with her.