Unfaithfully Yours (26 page)

That isn’t right, is it? What I do is not right, Mary, if you are Mary. I am, as you insinuated in that first fateful exchange of letters back at the end of the summer, a grubby little man in a ‘mac’. Or, at the moment, actually a grubby little man
on
a Mac. And yet, if you are you, which you may be, and probably a far sicker and more complex person than I had imagined, there may be a sense in which you can see that even if I have masturbated over an image of you being beaten on the bottom by Gerald Price, that is, in a way, a compliment to the love I have for you. There is nothing ugly or sordid about it – even though some people might find it offensive, it is not something I am proposing to do in front of ‘some people’. It is something I do in the privacy of my room in Keswick Avenue, making sure that I close the doors and windows, draw the blinds and disconnect the telephone in case anyone should see or hear the revolting thing I am about to embark on.

And yet is it ‘revolting’? I fail to see why yanking one’s penis in front of a secret video recording (obtained without her consent) of the woman one loves is ‘revolting’. Why do we use such words so easily about things like that?

It is revolting, Mary. I am sorry. It is revolting and wrong, and yet I love you in my own twisted way. Even if you are a murderer and an impostor and a pervert in your own right, as it were, I love you and want to be with you. Let us be perverted together! Let us murder together, if necessary! I love the way you eat langoustines, for example. I love the way you look at a menu with such care and intensity. I love the way you speak. I love your poetry – such of it as I have heard. I especially like the one about the tsunami, the Shakespearian sonnet about Shakespeare and the very powerful prose poem inspired by your finding the pictures of naked men in Sam’s drawer.

This murder, in my view, has all the hallmarks of a ‘
crime passionelle
’ committed by ‘
une femme extrêmement passionelle
’, which you undoubtedly are as I found out last Wednesday when we had that bath together. Maybe you were so disgusted with yourself and with Gerald that you decided to alert his wife, by a complicated route, to what was going on. It might seem improbable that you would impersonate Mrs Price and send a private detective to spy on you and her husband having sex but, believe me, stranger things have happened in my business! And one thing is certain: if I had not been employed to spy on your illicit affair I would not have fallen in love with you so utterly and completely.

I am hoping against hope, though, Mary, that this letter is not addressed to you.

It may well be that I am addressing the only one of these women whom I do not really know – although I hope to remedy that state of affairs very soon. I am talking, of course, about Barbara Goldsmith.

I have only seen you once, Barbara, across that crowded church hall. As a published author who has been on television interviewed by Kirsty Wark – although I hear she was not very nice about your book – you looked as if you thought ordinary people in Putney were beneath your attention. I have to say I once tried to read one of your books and was not impressed. I did not like the descriptions of the weather and I was not convinced by your thinly disguised portrait of the bus depot outside the Green Man.

And, while we are on the subject, who are you to go on about the ‘oppression of women’? From what I hear, you live very nicely off the earnings of your very hard-working GP husband while you swan around talking conceitedly about your ‘novels’, which hardly anyone reads.

You are a mystery, Barbara. I do not know what is going on in your mind but I do know, from my now extensive knowledge of the Puerto Banús Eight that you disliked Pamela Larner as much as any of them – and, indeed, more than some. You are, Mary Dimmock tells me, a very malicious person indeed. I have seen the letter you wrote. It is, in my view, the work of a psychopath. Many of the ‘literary set’ have distorted ideas of morality and think it is perfectly acceptable to go around having intercourse with anyone they fancy, irrespective of marital status. If Jonathan Cape says it’s all right – then it’s all right!

I am not built like that, Barbara. I know, as you will realize from this letter, that I have done things that are wrong. I do not mind admitting them. But I know what is right and what is wrong; and I am not sure that you do. So it may well be, Miss Famous Novelist, that you are the one for whom I am looking.

There is a very good reason for my writing this letter and for my being so convinced that one of you – and
not
my prime suspect Gerald Price – is the guilty party. Yesterday I went to visit the woman known locally as KGB Katharine. She really is a world expert on what goes on in and around the patch of pavement immediately opposite 24 Lawson Crescent. I do not think she has moved for the last ten years (apart from a few snatched hours of necessary sleep) and, as far as I can see, she has been taking notes for much of that time.

She was certainly very excited indeed to learn that I was investigating the events of 3 November 2000, the night that Mrs Larner met her unfortunate end. ‘She took pills, didn’t she?’ she said, with unmistakable relish. ‘Serves her right! Her garden was filthy!’ After I had listened to her account of the crimes committed by young Barnaby Larner (in this case, if even half of what she said was true, she may have had a point) and a ten-minute tirade on the subject of the late Mrs Larner’s inability to reverse her ‘show-off car’ when parking, she did tell me a fact of vital importance.

I know from Mike exactly when Mrs Larner died and I will confirm the precise hour (22.14) at which Gerald Price left the house; and I now know that
an as yet unidentified woman
left the house at least half an hour after he did. I am going back there very soon to show her photographs of all three of you, and if she identifies one of you, I am coming for you, madam. I may be weak. I may be corrupt. I may be a despicable human being. But I believe in justice and I will do proper service to my profession before the month is out.

Orlando (formerly Roland O.) Gibbons

From:

Gerry Price – who is

Somewhere in Norfolk

On or Around 25 November

To:

His Wife

In the Ancestral Home

Château Heathland and All That

Dear Elizabeth,

This is not an easy letter to write, old thing. We have been married an awfully long time. I know I keep forgetting the date and, because of my damned lawyer’s habit of always having to be right, frequently have forced you to celebrate on what we both have realized to be the wrong day, but I am aware that it is something of an achievement to have been spliced for forty years even if most of them, from my point of view anyway, were absolute fucking torment.

I think it’s forty years anyway. It might be forty-one. It feels like three hundred and forty-five, actually.

I am, I know, a bit of an oaf. People have often called me that to my face, although if and when they do I tend to wind back the old right arm and give them a bunch of fives right smack in the gob; so it is not something normally sized people do frequently.

I am trying, Elizabeth, to be a better person. Have you noticed that when people want you to think they are being sincere they lob in your Christian name at a totally inappropriate point of the sentence in hand? Ironically, although that use of the name bestowed on you by the pompous bastard who was so inexplicably proud of being your father might seem to be another example of Gerald being a total cunt, the fact is that, in this letter, I am trying, for the first time in our marriage, to be completely honest.

All headmasters are pompous – it goes with the territory – but George was a world-class pompous git. I know we were all supposed to feel sorry for him. I know Haflinger’s Syndrome is not a nice disease to have, especially in the form in which he acquired it. I know terrible things happened to his arsehole but, admit it, Lizzie, he was a world-class jerk.

As a result, of being honest, of course, I realize I will come over as a bit of a cunt. I mean, no one is totally honest for that very reason, but the time has come to make the attempt. I do appreciate that I haven’t said this before. There have been many occasions when I have let you know how I was feeling – most notably the night I made a half-hearted attempt to strangle you in that hotel in Bordeaux – but I feel I do now need to clue you in on the whole emotional thing between us as tactfully as I can. I want to get it off the old chest in a way that doesn’t make this one of those ‘dump the old rat’ sort of letters because you haven’t got the guts to do it face to face.

It seems a bit hurtful to say this to you directly, however, so perhaps a letter is better, and I think I owe it to you to say, having thought it over quite carefully, that I really dislike you.

It has happened gradually. There must have been a time when I found you bearable, although I really cannot remember when that might have been. We did manage to produce two children, although I really cannot remember how or why that happened. I have it in my head, for some reason, that Conrad was conceived in the Lake District. I think both of us agreed that Julia was, in all senses of the word, a mistake. I seem to remember you saying it publicly quite a lot. Another of those things that got you your undeserved reputation as a wit. Putney dinner parties were never complete without your looking down your nose, puffing on a fag and saying something clever-sounding about Catullus or Lucretius or some other complete wanker ending in -us.

Everyone was terrified of you, weren’t they?

Do you know? I think I was terrified of you. I think that was why I hung on for so long. You somehow managed to convince me that, without you, I would be an even bigger mess than I already was. Like all the best forms of advertising, your self-publicity managed to subtly undermine its target audience. You also managed to be savagely dismissive of almost everything I ever tried to do in public or in private for the entire time we have known each other, which, if you count the time we spent in Oxford and the wretched few years immediately after it when you somehow managed to convince me that marriage might be a good idea, comes to forty-two fucking years.

Forty-two fucking years, ‘Mrs Price’. Having twisted my arm to get yourself that title, you then decided you didn’t want it, didn’t you? And, after a swift stroke of the pen on your birth certificate, you became Ms Smaillie. I have to say I thought the original spelling was much more to the point.

We have been constantly in each other’s company, Elizabeth, for more than five hundred months or fourteen thousand one hundred and twelve days. And when I took five minutes out to ask myself, ‘Why?’ I could not come up with a satisfactory answer. You have probably told me I am a selfish bastard nearly thirty thousand times – given that that is something you usually manage to say to me at least twice in every day. Well, if I am, isn’t it about time I started living up to my stereotype and began to make some moves towards self-protection?

Protection from you – which is what I am talking about – is not easily achieved. What is really required is some kind of FBI witness programme where I could be relocated, permanently, to Omaha or Duluth, Minnesota, but long-suffering husbands are not offered this kind of support. Thousands of women who have only been thumped a few times, by men who have been driven past the point of endurance with their whining at them about leaving things on the lavatory floor, are spirited away by dedicated teams of lesbians to ‘battered refuges’ up and down the country. For us men, who have been given the female version of the Chinese water torture for fourteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-five days, there is no such service available. Which is why I am reduced to hiding out in Norfolk for a short period. No, I am not going to tell you where I am. No, I do not want a conversation. No, I do not want to see you. I do not want to see you ever again, which is why I am writing this letter and am not obliged to listen to your hideously unpleasant silence over the phone or look at your face, twitching with fury, while you tell me what a despicable little cunt I am.

How do I not love you? Let me count the ways.

I do not love the way you do not want sex. I do not love the way you manage to make me feel as if this lack of libido on your part is, somehow, my fault. I think the most favoured phrase over the years of our long stalemate is probably ‘the way you make me feel’. How about taking some responsibility for the way you feel? Is it my fault you never managed to finish the definitive edition of Vindictivius, or whatever he was called? Is it my fault your sister stole your first three boyfriends? Is it my fault you have legs that look as if they have been severed from a large Victorian dining-room table? Is it my fault your hair is falling out and mine isn’t?

I do not like the way you look at me – out of the corner of your eye. I do not like the way you ignore me when you come into the house, instead of saying ‘Hello, dear, I’m home!’ like normal people. I do not like the way you pretend to offer me the TV remote and pretend to ask me what I want to watch, while we both know that what you really want to do is to blame me for the fact there is nothing on the television. I do not like the way you put your hands over your face when you laugh.

I do not like the things you say – and I have heard almost all of them, at least twice, by now. ‘I’m rather against football!’ for example – which was something your mother used to say and now, to make up for the fact that the old bat is no longer here to give me a hard time, you repeat it at least twice a week. ‘I want Elgar’s
Dream of Gerontius
played at my funeral!’ That, apart from coming into the category of Remarks You Make About Your Funeral and therefore, by definition, managing to be attention-seeking, offensive and dull all at the same time, is also meaningless. I have never bothered to ask you this before but now seems an appropriate moment for discussing What We Do When You Are Dead. Do you mean
all
of
The Dream of Gerontius
? It’s about three hours long. If the congregation aren’t already dropping in their seats after an endless line of speakers have droned on about your classical scholarship, your endless compassion for the daughters of fee-paying parents and the grace and charm you brought to the task of mothering two totally inadequate children, this might well tip them into open revolt. If you mean a
bit
of
The Dream of Gerontius
– which bit?