A Sleeping Life

Chapter 14

It was like a winter’s evening. Except at night, the french windows had not been closed since the end of July and now it was August twenty third. Tonight they were not only closed, but the long velvet curtains were drawn across them.

‘I thought of lighting a coal fire,’ said Dora who had switched on one bar of the electric heater.

‘You’ve got quite enough to do without that.’ Child-minding, Wexford thought, cooking meals for five instead of two. ‘Where’s Sylvia gone?’ he snapped.

‘To see Neil, I think. She said something earlier about presenting him with a final ultimatum.’

Wexford made an impatient gesture. He began to walk about the room, then sat down again because pacing can only provoke irritation in one’s companion. Dora said: ‘What is it, darling? I hate to see you like this.’

He shrugged. ‘I ought to rise above it. There’s a story told about St Ignatius of Loyola. Someone asked him what he would do if the Pope decided to dissolve the Society of Jesus on the morrow, and he said, “Ten minutes at my orisons and it would be all the same to me.” I wish I could be like that.’

She smiled. ‘I won’t ask you if you want to talk about it.’

‘Wouldn’t do any good. I’ve talked about it to the point of exhaustion – the Comfrey case, that is. As for Sylvia, is there anything we haven’t said? I suppose there’ll be a divorce and she’ll live here with the boys. I told her this was her home and of course I meant it. I read somewhere the other day that one in three marriages now come to grief, and hers is going to be one of them. That’s all. It just doesn’t make me feel very happy.’

The phone rang, and with a sigh Dora got up to answer it. ‘I’ll get it,’ Wexford said, almost pouncing oh the receiver.

The voice of Dora’s sister calling from Wales as she mostly did on a mid-week evening. He said, yes, there had been a storm and, yes, it was still raining, and then he handed the phone to Dora, deflated. Two weeks before, just a bit earlier than this, he had received the call that told him of the discovery of Rhoda Comfrey’s body. He had been confident then, full of hope, it had seemed simple. Through layers of irrelevant facts, information about people he would never see again and whom he need not have troubled to question, through a mind-clogging jumble of trivia, a gaunt harsh face looked up at him out of his memory, the eyes still holding that indefinable expression.

She had been fifty and ugly and shapeless and ill-dressed, but someone had killed her from passion and in revenge. Some man who loved her had believed her to be coming here to meet another man. It was inconceivable but it must be so. Stabbing in those circumstances is always a crime of passion, the culmination of a jealousy or a rage or an anguish that suddenly explodes. No one kills in that way because he expects to inherit by his victim’s death, or thereby to achieve some other practical advantage…

‘They had the storm in Pembroke this morning,’ said Dora, coming back.

‘Fantastic,’ said her husband, and then quickly, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t snipe at you. Is there anything on the television?’

She consulted the paper. ‘I think I know your tastes by now. If I suggested any of this lot I might get that vase chucked at me. Why don’t you read something?’

‘What is there?’

‘Library books. Sylvia’s and mine. They’re all down there by your chair.’

He humped the stack of them on to his lap. It was easy to sort out which were Sylvia’s. Apart from Woman and the Sexist Plot, there was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Dora’s were a detective story, a biography of Marie Antoinette and Grenville West’s Apes in Hell. His reaction was to repudiate this last, for it reminded him too forcibly of his first mistake. Women’s Lib as seen through the eyes of Shelley’s mother-in-law would almost have been preferable. But that sort of behaviour was what Burden called hysterical.

‘What’s this like?’

‘Not bad,’ said Dora. ‘I’m sure it’s very well researched. As far as I’m concerned, the title’s way-out, quite meaningless.’

‘It probably refers to an idea the Elizabethans had about unmarried women. According to them, they were destined to lead apes in hell.’

‘How very odd. You’d better read it. It’s based on some play called The Maid’s Tragedy.’

But Wexford, having looked at the portrait of its author, pipe in mouth, on the back of the jacket, turned to Marie Antoinette. For the next hour he tried to concentrate on the childhood and youth of the doomed Queen of France, but it was too real for him, too factual. These events had taken place, they were history. What he needed tonight was total escape. A detective story, however bizarre, however removed from the actualities of detection, was the last thing to give it to him. By the time Dora had brought in the tray with the coffee things, he had again picked up Apes in Hell.

Grenville West’s biography was no longer of interest to him, but he was one of those people who, before reading a novel, like to acquaint themselves with that short summary of the plot publishers generally display on the front flap of the jacket and sometimes in the preliminary pages. After all, if this precis presents too awful an augury one need read no further. But in this instance the jacket flap had been obscured by the library’s own covering of the book, so he turned the first few pages.

Apparently, it was West’s third novel, having been preceded by Her Grace of Amalfi and Arden’s Wife. The plot summary informed him that the author’s source had been Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, a Jacobean drama set in classical Rhodes. West, however, had shifted the setting to the England of his favourite half-timbering and knot gardens, and with an author’s omnipotent conjuring trick – his publisher’s panegyric, this – had transformed kings and princes into a seventeenth-century aristocracy. Not a bad idea, Wexford thought, and one which Beaumont and Fletcher might themselves have latched on to if writing about one’s contemporaries and fellow nationals had been more in favour at the time. Might as well see what it was like. He turned the page, and his fingers rested on the open pages, his breath held. Then he gave a gasp.

‘What on earth is it?’ said Dora.

He made her no answer. He was looking at two lines of type in italics on an otherwise blank sheet. The dedication. For Rhoda Comfrey, without whom this book could never have been written.