Last Writes (4 page)

‘But not ours,’ said the assistant chief constable, suddenly jovial. ‘Candida should just put this back where she found it and say no more. I’ll tell her.’

‘And the rest,’ misquoted Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘should be silence.’

‘Tickets, please.’ The call resounded down the rocking railway carriage. ‘Have your tickets ready … tickets, please.’

Alice Osgathorp reached for her handbag and got out two rail tickets. As she handed them over to the ticket collector she pointed further down the train and said, ‘My husband’s in the buffet car. You can’t miss him. He’s a little short man.’

The ticket collector nodded, punched both tickets and continued on his way. Alice settled back in her seat and began to relax and enjoy the passing scenery. It was a very real relief to be on her own now and she relished the peace. Nobody could have ever called home-life in Acacia Avenue, Berebury, peaceful. Not when Frank was around and constantly berating her for this or that – it didn’t seem to matter what she did, he always found fault with it.

When, much later on that day, she proffered two tickets
from Calais to Corbeaux, via Avignon, to the ticket collector on the French train she had much the same exchange with him as she had had on the English one.

But in French.

‘
Mon mari est dans le wagon-restaurant, monsieur. C’est un homme peu grand
.’ She realised too late that she should have said ‘
de petite taille
’ – of small stature – rather than ‘
peu grand
’, not that the French conductor seemed to have noticed. On reflection, though, she thought that although ‘
peu grand
’ was a bit negative it described him much better than ‘
of small stature
’. Frank was a little man in every respect, but especially in the way in which he behaved. Small-minded, too.

She sighed and supposed she should have been more tolerant than she had been. The trouble was, like a lot of short men, he was always throwing his weight about, making her feel lower than a pig’s trotter. And forever being critical about her lack of attention to detail. Well, he wasn’t going to be able to say that again. She was pretty sure she’d thought of everything, absolutely everything.

As the train pulled out of Lille station she decided that ‘Little Corporal’ described him best of all. But small-minded, as well, she reminded herself as she settled comfortably back in her seat, prepared to enjoy the views of the French countryside and the unaccustomed pleasure of being on her own.

There was no doubt about the small-mindedness, or that her husband took a perverse pleasure in drawing attention to her shortcomings in public. That was what she found hardest to bear – and to forgive. She knew she wasn’t as clever as he was even though she had held a job down all
these years – but it didn’t need trumpeting to all and sundry on every possible occasion.

It was his retirement that had driven her to take action: the thought of having him in the house whenever she came in was more than she could bear. ‘I married him for better or worse,’ she quoted to herself, ‘but not for lunch.’

This long-planned French holiday had been to celebrate the beginning of that retirement of his. Well, in a way it was going to. She, of course, would have to go on working. Not that she minded. She quite enjoyed the companionship of her fellow workers and work was somewhere where she was properly appreciated.

At the Hotel Coq d’Or in the Rue Dr Jacques Colliard in Corbeaux she signed the register for Frank and herself and said he would be along in a minute with the rest of the luggage. And, yes, please, she – they – would prefer to have their breakfast in their room every morning. It had been a very long journey. ‘Dinner? No, I mean –
merci, madame
,’ she said to the patronne, ‘we will be eating out in the town tonight.’

Actually she didn’t go out at all that evening but instead ate a picnic she had brought with her in her room. A light supper would help her eat two breakfasts the next morning. She spent the next day exploring the little town, having a cup of coffee here and a light lunch there, going into one church here and a
lanterne des morts
there and the little shops all the time.

In the late afternoon she came across a group of men playing pétanque in the shade of some lime trees. There was a seat for spectators set alongside the piste and she sat there as long as the play lasted, fascinated first by the
glint of the steel balls and the balletic movements of the players, and then quite taken by the intricacies of the game itself.

The men taking part were not tall, either, but, unlike Frank, didn’t seem to be given to cutting others down to size. It was the game that did that, of course, getting their boule nearer to the jack –
le cochonnet
, they called it – than anyone else’s being no easy matter.

For the first week this became the pattern of her days and very agreeable she found it, too. A trip to the street market for fresh fruit, followed by a quiet sit alone by the piste, watching the games, suited her very well.

She could mull over the past without Frank standing over her, being critical, eternally finding fault. The name Hector would have suited him better than Frank but, oddly enough, she always thought of him as a latter-day Ahasuerus, the king who put his wife, Vashti, away because she would not display herself for the aggrandisement of himself and his court.

Most people, she thought idly, were all too ready to praise the king’s second queen, Esther, for her good work, but Alice had always admired Vashti, Ahasuerus’s first wife, all the more for refusing to bow to her husband’s will. It was something that she, Alice Osgathorp, had always found difficult.

Until now, that is. At least Frank had never been able to fault her knowledge of the Old Testament and he hadn’t known anything at all about her careful studies of plant poisons. Or of her purchase in the faraway town of Luston of the largest dog kennel she could find.

Only once was her reverie at the piste disturbed: this
was when she had been joined by another Englishwoman, also on holiday.

‘My husband says it’s better than bowls,’ Alice said to her, waving vaguely at the crowd of middle-aged men playing there. ‘He always said he was going to take up bowls when he retired and now he has. French bowls.’ She gave a light laugh. ‘He’s even taken to wearing a beret.’

‘You’re lucky,’ said the other woman sourly. ‘I can’t get mine out of the bars, not nohow.’

‘I must say my Frank likes his wine, too,’ she said moderately. ‘Especially the local ones – the ones that don’t travel well. He says their Vin de Laboureur here is the best and we never ever see that in England.’

‘I’ve always thought that they kept the best wines for themselves,’ sniffed the other woman before taking herself off in search of her bibulous husband.

Actually Frank, Alice had to concede in his favour, wasn’t a real drinker. Come to that he wasn’t a real anything. Just as some men were just a bag of tools, so he was only a bag of grumbles for whom nothing was right – not ever. Unless, she amended the thought judiciously, he’d thought of it himself first. And then, of course, there was nothing ever wrong with it at all – ever. It was just as well that he’d been self-employed …

Alice had planned to stay at the Hotel Coq d’Or for at least another week but then luck provided an agreeable touch of verisimilitude. She had located the village cemetery and went there one morning with her camera. There must have been a recent death in Corbeaux because two men were digging a grave there.

Rightly deciding that any French workmen worthy of
their salt would have an extended luncheon at midday, she stayed in the vicinity until they downed tools. Then she went back there with her camera and took some shots of the open grave.

She had a nasty moment when she got back to the hotel that evening and asked for the key of their bedroom.

The patronne gave her a keen look as she handed it over. ‘Madame and monsieur are enjoying their
vacances
, I hope?’ she said.

‘Indeed, we are,’ said Alice warmly. She patted her camera. ‘It is so pretty here and I have taken many pictures already and as for my husband …’ She let her voice trail away.

‘Yes, madame?’

She gave a light laugh. ‘He is enjoying playing pétanque and …’ She hesitated and then said delicately, ‘And what comes afterwards. You have so many bars here to choose from that he doesn’t get back to the hotel as early as I would like. I have to stay awake to let him in our room.’

‘I understand,’ the woman flashed her teeth, a symphony of gold fillings, and smiled in quick sympathy. ‘In the winter we call it
l’après-ski
but in the summer it is just the thirst from the heat of the day.’

‘I do hope he doesn’t disturb anyone when he gets back late,’ she said.

‘Nobody has complained, madame,’ said the patronne, that being her measure of most things.

‘That’s a relief.’ Alice looked suitably sorrowful as she added, ‘I’m afraid he’s got quite fond of drinking something here you can’t get so easily in England.’

The hotel-keeper lifted her head in silent query.

‘Pastis,’ said Alice in a lowered voice. ‘
Sans eau
.’ Édouard Manet’s famous painting
Absinthe Drinker
was what had come to her mind but she didn’t know if you could buy absinthe now. It had been different in 1858.

‘Ah.’ The woman drew in her breath in a sharp hiss. ‘Pastis
sans eau
.’

‘But,’ said Alice bravely, ‘I’m so enjoying exploring your lovely little town on my own.’

Actually there were one or two more pictures on her agenda still to be taken and she proposed to make her way to the cemetery to do so the very next day. It was strange, she noted subconsciously, how stilted her English became when talking to the French. ‘We shall have many happy mementoes of our visit,’ she added, again patting her camera. ‘
Très joli
.’

‘It is indeed
très
pittoresque
here,’ said the patronne, flashing the improbable teeth again. ‘Corbeaux is a famous old bastide town, you know.’

Alice returned to the cemetery the next morning and took several general views of the ornate gravestones there. The polished marble should come up very well in the photograph, she decided, before adding a couple of pictures of the views towards the mountains, taking care to include several cypress trees. ‘Sad cypresses,’ she murmured to herself, although she didn’t feel sad. Only surprisingly exhilarated.

In the afternoon she found the local undertaker’s shop and bought a couple of funeral vases – stout stone things – and an ornate creation of artificial flowers under glass known to the French as
éternelles
, but no longer permitted in an English graveyard. These she took to the cemetery, added some flowers, and photographed them on
the base of a black marble tomb of a couple, long dead, called Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie, taking care, though, not include the headstone in her picture. She spent the rest of the day back at the pétanque piste, debating whether forging someone’s death could be considered pseudocide: or, if not, what then?

Alice Osgathorp checked out of the hotel four days later. She did it in the middle of the afternoon – that secure hour when the little
femme de chambre
was taking the place of the patronne while the latter was, as usual, enjoying her postprandial doze.

‘Monsieur will be bringing the luggage down soon,’ she lied to the uninterested girl at the desk as she paid the bill for Frank and herself. At least money wasn’t going to be one of her worries in future. Not only was everything in their joint names, but Frank had never believed in life assurance for the self-employed. She didn’t suppose any government would mind if he didn’t collect his old-age pension. ‘Nothing to beat cash in hand,’ he used to say, salting large notes away in biscuit boxes. ‘The rats can’t get at that and it always buys what you want.’

Two days after that, back home again, she telephoned the Berebury Pet Cemetery.

‘I’ve just lost my dear old dog,’ she quavered, ‘and I would so like to have him buried properly.’

‘No problem, madam,’ the owner of Berebury’s Pet Cemetery assured her. ‘Here at what we like to think of the Elysian Fields we do everything properly.’

‘The trouble is,’ went on Alice tremulously, ‘he was a very big dog.’

‘That’s not a problem,’ said the man, adding rather too
quickly, ‘although it might cost a little bit more.’

‘Of course, I quite understand that,’ she hastened on, saying anxiously, ‘but there is just one thing …’

‘Yes?’ said the cemetery owner. Nothing – but nothing – about the requests made by bereaved pet-owners had the power to surprise him any longer.

‘I’d like him to be buried in his own kennel – at least,’ she corrected herself swiftly, ‘in a coffin made from the wood of his kennel. We thought he’d like that.’

‘I’m sure he would,’ said the man immediately, only glad she wasn’t asking as some of his customers did for the canine equivalent of
pompe funèbre
. ‘That’s not a problem either, madam, although if it means a lot more digging that might come out a little more expensive, too.’

‘Nothing’s too good for him,’ said Alice brokenly. ‘Besides with a Great Dane you have to get used to everything costing a bit more than you would with a Pekinese.’

The man, who had known owners almost bankrupt themselves over Pekes, said he quite understood, trying to work out the while how much he could charge for the burial – and then adding a bit. ‘Would next Tuesday afternoon do you?’ he asked. ‘That’ll give us time to dig the gr … get everything ready.’

‘Tuesday will be fine,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll arrange the minivan now.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You won’t think me silly if I bring some flowers?’

‘You can bring whatever you like, lady,’ he said, mentally adding a little more still to the bill. They liked sentimental owners at the Berebury Pet Cemetery.

On the Tuesday, Alice wore black with touches of grey. She’d been doing that ever since she got home to
lend a touch of mourning to her tale of Frank’s sudden death abroad. The photographic views of the cemetery at Corbeaux had been shared with her friends at work and a generous employer had given her some compassionate leave ‘while she sorted everything out’.