Shallow Grave (27 page)

When it was over there was a storm of applause, not entirely ironic. Then the hangers-on drifted away, and the night team went to their desks to wait for the first telephone calls. Atherton stood up and stretched, brushed down his trousers, and said, ‘Well, I’m off.’

‘Oh, yes, you’ve got a date, haven’t you?’ Slider said absently.

‘Yup. How do I look?’

Slider examined him. ‘Too excited.’

‘Somewhere at this moment a woman is preparing for an evening of bliss with me,’ Atherton said, ‘and there isn’t a thing she can do to me that I don’t deserve. If she plays her cards right, she could be staring at my bedroom ceiling till dawn.’

‘Who is this thrice-blessed female?’

But Atherton only smiled enigmatically and sloped out like a cat on the prowl. And the first phone rang.

He half thought that Irene would be out on a Friday night, but when he had called her to suggest the meeting she had grudgingly agreed.

‘Matthew won’t be here, you know,’ she said. ‘Friday’s Scouts night.’

Slider tried not to sound disappointed. ‘It’s you I want to see.’

Perhaps his choice of words touched her, for she became defensive. ‘What time d’you expect to get here? Though knowing you that’s a silly question.’

‘I’ll try and get away by seven, so I should be with you before half past.’

‘Half past seven? You don’t expect me to cook for you?’

‘I can pick up a sandwich or something and eat it in the car,’ he said, already resigned.

But she said, ‘Oh, I can make you a sandwich. I can do
that,’
as if some other and outrageous personal attention had been in question.

So when the Syrup’s broadcast was over he detached himself from the tentacles of the department and hurried down to the car before anyone could think up any more urgent questions for him.

It was a fine summer evening; the air was heavy with the baleful stench of barbecue. Everywhere flesh was being scorched by flames, and a pall of oily smoke hung over London. It was like living in the sixteenth century, he thought. Funny how willing people were to eat burnt sausages and limp lettuce, provided you put them on a paper plate and made them do it in discomfort out of doors. At least he could be sure Irene wouldn’t do that
to him. Barbecuing was men’s work: she was a very traditional woman.

When he reached the house he thought for a minute there was someone else there: he’d forgotten she’d changed her car since she’d been with Ernie. She had a Toyota Celica – what Porson would call a Cecilia, of course. A bit posh for Irene. He assumed Ernie had put some money towards it, if he hadn’t bought it entirely, and wasn’t sure how he felt about that; then told himself it was damn well time he stopped feeling like anything about Irene and Ernie, if he really intended her to be his wife
quondam
but not
futurus.

He had a key, but tactfully rang the bell, and stood on the doorstep of what he had called home with many painful feelings, which were only sharpened when she opened the door to him and stood looking at him nervously and with an inadequately hidden expectancy.

‘Hello,’ he said, since she didn’t seem to be going to.

‘I thought you’d be late.’ She didn’t move to let him in.

‘Shall I go away again?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, and stepped back at last. She was nervous, and she had too much scent on: it hung in the hall like a cloud of insecticide and made his eyes burn. She closed the front door, and he suddenly felt nervous too, trapped in this small space with her, not knowing what she was feeling or what she might say. It was absurd not to know how to behave with his own wife of so many years; and he looked at her back as she shut the door and thought,
She’s been to bed with Ernie Newman,
and it completely threw him. Horrid images flashed up in his mind without his volition: her with Ernie; her with Ernie in the nude; her doing with someone else what she had only ever done with him before. Sex was such an absurd stroke revolting thing when it was someone other than oneself doing it.

‘Are you all right?’ Her voice brought him back to reality.

‘What? Yes – yes, of course.’

‘You looked as if you had a pain, or something.’

‘No, I’m all right. You look very nice,’ he said almost at random, but found that, indeed, she did. She had always been neat and pretty; tonight her smooth short dark hair was curling slightly with the heat, so that it looked like duckling feathers, and the descent from severity suited her. Her makeup was carefully
done, and her pale mauve cotton dress left bare her slender arms, which were lightly tanned. ‘Is that a new frock?’

‘This old thing? I’ve had it years.’ But she seemed pleased, almost fluttered. ‘No-one says “frock” any more,’ she went on, her eyes scanning his face on a mission of their own.

‘Bishops do.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said again, automatically; and then grew brisk. ‘Well, don’t stand about in the hall like a visitor. Come into the lounge.’

Everything was perilously the same: the three-piece suite, the carpet, the television tuned to some appalling sitcom which, to judge from the
Beano
jokes and weirdly 1950s stereotypes, had been written as a school project by a team of bright fifth-formers.

No, one thing was different. There was no little button nose pressed against the screen. ‘No Kate?’ he asked.

Irene’s eyes slid away. ‘I arranged for her to go to Flora’s for the night.’

‘Oh.’ Slider wondered why she was embarrassed. Did she feel guilty for depriving him of his daughter? Or was it something else? What? Her guilt made him feel wary. Was there trouble here for him?

‘I thought it would be better for us,’ she went on with elaborate casualness, ‘to be on our own so we could – talk freely.’

‘Oh,’ said Slider again. A horrid thought was struggling to be born, and he was reluctant to be its mother.

‘Well, sit down, then. Would you like a drink?’

‘Have you got any beer?’ he asked – a
num
question if ever there was one. But she was full of surprises tonight.

‘I’ve got a can of lager in the fridge. I thought you might like one.’

He smiled. ‘Just one?’

‘Well, it’s a four-pack, actually. They don’t sell single cans in Sainsbury’s. No, stay there, I’ll get it.’

She went out, and he got up and turned off the television, having lost his immunity to it since living with Joanna. Into the sudden quiet, sounds jumped from the open french windows: children’s voices – next door’s, playing in the garden – and a clatter of cutlery from somewhere, a distant lawnmower, a car in the street accelerating past and changing up a gear, a
dog barking with the monotonous rhythm of one who knows no-one’s coming. He walked to the window to look out. The square of garden was neglected: the grass needed cutting, and the borders between the dull shrubs had gone all Isadora Duncan with gracefully unfettered weeds, where once there would have been a Coldstream Guard of annuals. Neither of them had been here to do anything, of course.

Burnt-sausage smoke rose up from the garden to the left, spiced with a whiff of paraffin; the sky was hazy and quivering with it. As he stood brooding, there was a characteristic thump-and-scrabble sound as a black cat came over the fence from next door and trotted by fast with its ears out sideways and the cunning-gormless look of a cat with prey. It had a barbecued spare rib clenched in its teeth, and only glanced at Slider as it passed, intent on escape. It reached the opposite fence, crouched and sprang up, and disappeared to crunch in peace in the empty garden beyond.

‘Oh, there you are.’ He turned back at Irene’s voice, and seeing her with a tray in her hands hurried to relieve her of it; but she said, ‘No, it’s all right, just take the
Radio Times
off the table, will you?’

She put the tray down on the coffee table, which was drawn up to the sofa, and sat, evidently expecting him to sit beside her. On the tray was a tumbler of lager with the can beside it – the glass was too small to take the whole fifteen ounces – and another tumbler of what looked like gin and tonic. There was a plate on which stood a pork pie flanked with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, slices of cucumber and a teaspoonful of Branston pickle, a knife and fork, a paper napkin, and a jar of mustard.

‘I thought you’d prefer it to a sandwich,’ she said.

His heart hurt him. Cans of lager, and now a pork pie. She didn’t approve of pork pies, she thought them common, but she knew he liked them, and there was a little tremor in her voice when she said, ‘I thought you’d prefer it,’ which told him she had deliberately arranged this treat for him and was waiting to feed off his pleasure and surprise. And she’d laid it out so nicely, with traditional pub garnish; and remembered the mustard. He wanted to howl and bite the furniture. ‘This all looks very nice. Thank you,’ he heard himself say. It sounded falsely avuncular to him, but she seemed satisfied.

‘Dig in, then. I know you must be hungry. I had something with Matthew before he went out.’

He cut the pie and loaded his fork with Dead Sea fruit – or was it coals of fire? She waited until his mouth was full and then asked him brightly, ‘How is your case going?’

He chewed and swallowed with painful haste. ‘I didn’t know you knew about my case.’

‘I didn’t. I don’t. But you’ve always got one on, haven’t you?’

‘It’s a murder, actually – a domestic. Bit of a puzzler,’ he said telegraphically.

‘Oh, then I’m surprised you’ve got time to come and see me,’ she said. ‘When you’ve had a murder before you’ve hardly had time to come home to sleep.’

Ah, a hint of acid: this was more like the old days. But he couldn’t afford to revel in comforts like that.

‘I wanted to talk to you properly,’ he said evenly. ‘Can we be civilised and talk without recriminations on either side? I think this is too important for quarrelling.’

She looked away from him for a moment at the blank television screen. He was close enough to see the fine lines around her eyes under the makeup, the sad, tired droop of her mouth. He knew her so well, and discovered now that he didn’t know her at all, as though she were a character in a new drama played by a very familiar actor. He felt no
attachment
to her. At some point all his belonging feelings had redirected themselves towards Joanna. It made things easier; but harder, too, in a way, because it meant he didn’t know what Irene was thinking. His domestic thoughts moved to Joanna’s rhythm now; framed themselves in her idiom.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry I blew up at you on the phone the other day. I was a bit tense.’

‘I know. Nothing about this is easy, for any of us. But we’ve got to sort it out, and it’s better that we do it between us, just you and I, without any third parties getting in on the act.’

‘What does your
mistress
think of that?’ she said, with a flash of the old spirit.

‘What’s decided between you and me has nothing to do with her,’ he said steadily.

She said nothing, reaching out for her glass, drinking at it straight, like a poker-player, without looking at him.

‘Irene,’ he said gently, ‘what’s happening between you and Ernie? Don’t you really want to live with him any more?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and put her glass down. She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know what I want any more. It all seemed clear once. I was fed up with you never being home, being stuck here alone with the kids all the time, no proper social life. I used to think sometimes, what was the point of being married at all? And then Ernie was so kind to me, and – everything,’ she concluded, hopeless of defining her former bridge-partner’s charms. Slider thought he knew – some of it, at least. Irene had always been a sucker for the trappings of middle-class advancement. It was what she had always thought she wanted. And everyone wanted attention. God, he knew that! It was the origin of so much crime.

She seemed to have got stuck, and he tried to help her along. ‘So when he asked you to come and live with him …’

She made a strange little noise, like a snort of amusement, except that she didn’t look very amused. ‘Oh,
he
didn’t ask
me.
He’s much too shy. Well, not shy exactly, but he doesn’t value himself highly enough. He’d never have thought he was good enough for me. No, I had to ask him.’ She flicked a glance at him. ‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’

Oh, far, far from it, he thought. ‘I never had anything against Ernie,’ he said.

‘You could have fooled me. You’ve always been so rude about him.’

‘Defence mechanism. I was jealous,’ he said thoughtlessly.

‘Were you?’ she said, turning to him fully as though she had only been waiting for that. The fearful eagerness in her eyes warned him, too late, to look where he was treading. He
had
been jealous of Ernie, but it was mostly on account of his children, and a bit of atavistic resentment of another man taking his possessions. It was not the sexual jealousy that Irene was wanting him to mean. But how could he explain that to her? While he was not explaining, she carried on, stupidly brave, ‘Ernie’s been good to me, but it hasn’t all been roses. The children haven’t really taken to him, and it’s strange living in his house. You’d laugh, but I miss this house in a way, and
now I’m back here – well …’ She paused, gathering her words. ‘I only told him I wanted to think things out for a bit, but what I think is – what it seems to me—’ She swallowed. ‘I think I’m still a bit in love with you.’