A Clubbable Woman

At the car park they formed little groups before dispersing. Dalziel convened with three or four elder statesmen of the Club, his face and manner serious. He produced a cigarette-case and passed it round.

Black Russian perhaps, thought Pascoe. That would amuse Dalziel if I could tell him. Do I want to amuse Dalziel? And if I do, is it to keep him sweet so I can manipulate him, like I pretend? Or is it because he puts the fear of God into me? Just how good is he anyway? Or is he just a ruthless sucker of other men’s blood? ‘Don’t get bloody metaphysical with me!’ But said quite nicely really. Like a jocular uncle. Uncle Andrew. You had to laugh. But not here. It’s colder now. Christ, I’m holding conversations with myself about the weather, the mental Englishman, that’s me. Now there’s something to warm us all up, that woman getting into the back seat, back seat’s the place for you, dear, are you sitting comfortably, now get them off. Don’t be shocked, love, that’s what all the detectives are thinking this year, you’ll be giving yourself a scratch in a minute Andrew, you randy old devil. Randy Andy. Now if she’d been killed, her, Gwen, wasn’t it? Evans, that would have been easy. Jealous husband, spurned lover, or one of those tumescent young men who’d been hanging around her from the moment she set foot in the bar, yes, one of those provoked just that bit too far, just over the edge where playing starts to be for real. But not Mary Connon, not that parcel of middle-aged lumber they’d just stored away. Though why not? She’d been built on the same lines, streamlines, take a hundred lines, so they said. Forty-five. Inches. Years. Was forty-five too old? No kind of age at all these days.

And she wasn’t looking her best when I saw her, was she? There’s something about a hole in the head …

So who knows? But I don’t quite see the young men … more like one of these old fogies Randy Andy’s chatting up, best prop-forward the Old Sodomites ever had, don’t you know; or perhaps the best fly-half who never played for England, himself perhaps, selling us all a dummy as he stands there remembering how he smashed her head in so he could look for it inside, for the years lost, the place out in the glow of the crowd at Twickenham, could a man love a game that much? And smashed her with what, for God’s sake? Where was it? I’d like a look round that house. Whatever it is could be lying at the bottom of his wardrobe. He’d get used to it after a while, like an egg-stain on a waistcoat, you get used to anything after a while. Lying there for someone to find, a friend, Felstead, Marcus, what’s he got to look so sick about? And what’d he be doing in Connon’s wardrobe anyway? Homosexual jealousy, that’s the answer, I’ll try it on Dalziel for a giggle. More likely his daughter, she’ll find anything there is. Christ, what a thing to find out about your father, she’d do all right in the back seat too, I wouldn’t mind carrying her away at a student riot. Here they come. And there goes fat Marcus, I come to bury Mary not to, he’s taken his time about extending heartfelt sympathy though there’s always the phone. Still, for a nearest and dearest friend …

‘Hello, Connie, Jenny.’

‘Marcus.’

‘Hello, Uncle Marcus.’

Marcus had invited her to stop calling him ‘Uncle’ about three years earlier when she had flourished into young womanhood. ‘It makes me feel old and you sound young.’ So he had become plain Marcus.

Till now.

I have reverted to my old role, thought Marcus.

‘I would have called round,’ he said apologetically, addressing himself to Jenny rather than Connon. ‘But you know how things … how are you both?’

‘Well,’ said Connon. He did not look as if he was really listening, but glanced back to the grave.

‘What will you do now, Jenny? Is your term over?’

‘No, there’s another couple of weeks yet, but I’ve got leave of absence. I needn’t go back till after Christmas.’

‘How is it? Are you liking the life?’

‘It’s not bad. A bit crowded. There’s more students than space. I can sympathize a bit more with these people who write indignantly to the Express about “smelly students”.’

Thank God for the resilience of youth, thought Marcus. No damage there, or not that’s going to show. But you, Connie, out of the cage at last, you look as if another sniff of free air will shrivel your lungs. No bloody wonder, the shock, the strain of investigation. There’s a new life waiting, if only you’ll believe that, I must make him believe it before it’s too late …

Jenny made a move down the path towards the car park. Marcus touched her arm.

‘I’ll stay here and chat to your father a bit till the others have thinned out. We’ll catch you up. You’d better go and sit in the car out of the cold.’

Jenny was surprised to find herself resenting Marcus slightly as she moved away.

She was my mother after all, and he’s my father. Why should he be treated like the sensitive plant and me chucked down to face this lot?

Because you can think like this at a moment like this, she admonished herself humorously and the shadow of a smile must have run over her face for she caught ‘Bruiser’ Dalziel eyeing her sharply as she stepped on to the car park.

Standing a little behind Dalziel she saw a tall young man, elegantly dressed, with a thin intelligent face – the kind of actor-type who played ambitious young Foreign Office men on the telly. She thought momentarily of Antony. She hadn’t had time to see him before she left, everything had happened in such a hurry. But no doubt Helen would have passed on the news to him. Perhaps even made a come-back in her original starring role.

Definitely her last appearance, thought Jenny, but didn’t find it particularly funny. She intended to make straight for the car and shut the door firmly on all condolences, sympathetic noises, keen-edged questionings probing for vicarious pain. But her arm was taken firmly and she was brought to a halt.

‘I just wanted to say that I shall miss your mother, Jenny,’ said Alice Fernie.

The annoyance that had tightened her lips for a moment eased away. She could not remember anyone else saying this. They were all ‘dreadfully sorry’, it had come as a terrible shock to them, but no one had really suggested that Mary Connon would be missed.

‘Yes, I shall too,’ she replied, then feeling this was a bit too cold she squeezed the gloved hand which still rested on her arm and went on, ‘I know how much she relied on you.’

This was nothing more than the simple truth, she realized, as the words came out. Mary Connon had rarely mentioned Alice Fernie to her except in faintly disparaging or patronizing terms. Her lack of taste; the unfairly large wage her husband earned on the factory floor; the excessive subsidization by the ratepayers of council-house rents. She was capable of blaming the Fernies (‘and all those like them,’ she would say inclusively) for the very existence of the Woodfield estate. It had only been a very few years previously that Jenny had realized that the council estate had been there already when her parents bought the house. She had come to accept a picture of rolling countryside being savaged before her mother’s eyes as the bulldozers rolled in, prompted by the Fernies and ‘all those like them’. But Alice Fernie had been, perhaps by the mere accident of proximity, the nearest thing to a real friend she had. And now Jenny felt real gratitude that this large handsome woman who could only be in her early thirties had thought enough of her mother to accept the condescension of manner and get closer to her.

Closer than me perhaps, she thought.

‘How did you get here, Mrs Fernie?’ she asked. ‘Can we give you a lift back?’

There were no funeral cars other than the hearse. ‘I will judge what is fitting,’ she had heard her father say to the oblique remonstrances of the man from the undertakers.

‘No, thank you, dear. You’ll want to be with your dad. And I’m not going straight back anyway. ’Bye now.’

‘Goodbye. Please call round, won’t you? I shan’t be going back to college till next month.’

I’ll have to watch myself there, she thought as she watched Alice move away with long confident strides, I could become as patronizing as Mum.

As she got into the car, she glanced back and caught the eye of the young man who could have been from the Foreign Office. He took a step forward. She thought he was going to come across and talk to her. But a rumbling, phlegmy cough from Fat Dalziel caught both their attentions and the young man turned away.

Policemen, she thought, angry at her disappointment, and slammed the car door.

Connon watched Marcus walk away from him down the path through the rank and file of headstones.

The car park was nearly empty now. The Evanses’ car was just pulling away. He looked after it thoughtfully. Gwendoline. He formed the syllables deliberately in his mind and smiled. All those youngsters competing to provoke the loudest laugh, craning forward to get the deepest view of bosom, pressing close to feel the warmth of calf or thigh, and imagining a returned pressure. Tales to be blown up into triumphs over a couple of pints. But the real triumphs were never boasted of, but remembered in secret; first with reminiscent delight, but soon with fear and cold panic.

Dalziel was gone, he observed, and his puppy-dog, Pascoe. Mentally he corrected himself. He had no reason for thinking Pascoe was merely that, though he was sure Dalziel would make him that if he got the chance.

And me, what would he make of me if he got the chance? he thought.

A parcel for the lawyers. Strongly wrapped, neatly labelled.

Samuel Connon. Wife-killer. There must be some long Latin word for a man who killed his wife. Dalziel might know it, though he probably wouldn’t admit to it if he did. Pascoe would know. He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit. Or … leave school at sixteen, start as office boy. You can be assistant personnel manager by the time you’re forty. If you’re lucky. And if the general manager is a big rugby fan.

I’d better be getting down to Jenny. Poor Jenny. I wish I knew how hard this has hit her. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we should get away for a bit. Where? What on? There’s not all that much spare in the account. All this costs a bit. Even if you haggled over headstones. Now if I’d gone first, Mary’d have been sitting pretty. But what kind of man insures against his wife’s death?

At least they can’t say I killed her for profit. But it’d be nice to get away. Soon. When things had quietened down. It’d be nice to get far, far away. To somewhere as unlike this as possible.

Back to the desert.

Over twenty years earlier, Connon had been sent to join his unit in Egypt at the start of his National Service. He had only been out there a couple of months when the regiment returned home, and at the time the few weeks he spent there seemed to consist of nothing but endless liquid motions of the bowels. He had been as delighted as the rest to return to England and it was this period that saw the blossoming of his rugby career. He had played only a couple of times since leaving school but now he became quickly aware of the advantages traditionally enjoyed by the athlete in His Majesty’s forces. His natural talent exploded into consummate artistry in these conditions and only the simultaneous service, as officer, of the current Welsh stand-off kept him out of the Army XV.

But something of his brief acquaintance with the desert did not easily die. It remained with him as dreams of luxury hotels in the remote Bermudas haunt some men. He read anything he could get hold of on the desert. Any desert. He collected colour brochures and handouts from the travel agents. Fifteen days in Morocco. Three weeks in Tunisia. Amazing value. But always too much for him.

In any case the desert Connon really wanted to visit was not in any of the brochures, not even the most expensive. He recognized it by its absence, that is, he knew what he wanted was something out of the reach of a camera; something untranslatable into colour photography and glossy paper. He wanted rock that had absorbed terrible, endless heat for a million years, that had writhed in infinitely slow violence till its raw bowels lay on the surface, yet without a single movement noticed by man. He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.

It was a vision he confided to no one. Least of all Mary, who had found his collection of travel brochures nuisance enough.

Perhaps Jenny …