City of Dreadful Night

EPILOGUE

June 1934

H e was sitting in his suit in a corner of the room when she came home. City of Dreadful Night lay open in his lap. His father, a sunless man, had given him the bleak Victorian poem for his twelfth birthday. The gas jets were lit and the one behind his head cast his elongated shadow across the room.

‘You startled me,’ she said, her mouth somewhere between a smile and something more nervous. ‘I didn’t expect to see you today.’

He was sitting, left leg crossed over right, trousers on the left leg pulled up to avoid bagging at the knees, a narrow band of lardy, hairless leg between turn-up and sock.

‘Where have you been?’ he said.

‘To Hove – to that doctor we heard about. It’s all set for next week.’

He knew his temper scared her. He saw she was avoiding looking at his face, her eyes fixed instead on that narrow band of bare leg. Her eyes were still focused there when he stood. She looked up and saw his face. He moved towards her.

He felt he was in a cathedral or some vast building where the silence buzzed. That strange susurrus of sound that pressed on his ears. Then he realized the dim roar was inside, not outside, his ears. His blood pumped through him in sharp surges. He checked his pulse with a finger on his wrist. His heart was beating quickly but not as rapidly as he expected.

He looked around him. Everything neat and in its place. He glanced down at his suit. He saw a dark spot on his waistcoat. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed at the spot. It didn’t budge, although there was a blossom of pink on the white cloth.

He needed to still his ears. He walked to the radiogram and turned it on. The bulb glowed red. He recognized the music that grew louder as the radio warmed up. Ketelbey’s In a Monastery Garden.

He picked up the packet of Rothmans on the table beside the sofa. He smoked two cigarettes, listening to the music, looking everywhere but at her. She lay face down on the floor, blood in a spreading halo around her head.

He should have felt regret. He knew that. But long ago, in Flanders, his emotions had been cauterized. He had returned unable to feel. Besides, the carcass lying splayed on the carpet was not the woman he had desired and, in his way, loved.

For him the life had gone out of her weeks before he’d killed her. It had drained away the day she said:

‘There’s something I have to tell you. It will come as a surprise to you – as it did to me.’

He knew she didn’t know about him. How could she? And so when she told him, she saw the immediate change in him but misunderstood the cause.

He’d explained the rules right at the start of their relationship. It was just a bit of fun. He would never leave his wife. He said things, of course. The things women liked to hear. But she knew – she must have known – that was just pillow talk.

He had been intoxicated by her. In bed there was nothing she wouldn’t do. Things his wife would never contemplate. Soiling things. He was shocked by some of her suggestions – she could be coarse, using phrases he’d never heard before – but he had enjoyed what she did with him, there was no doubt about that.

He tolerated her wish to be seen in public with him. In the best places, places he would never take his wife. A part of him liked being seen with her – she was as beautiful as a movie star – whilst another part worried about being seen. Especially as she laughed in a ribald way. She was loud and vulgar. In private, he accepted it. In public, he was faintly embarrassed.

When she told him she was pregnant, his heart had hardened. She sensed it. She thought he was worried about a scandal. She promised to get rid of it but he could see she hoped to keep it.

It wasn’t the scandal. She didn’t know the reason. How could she? An abortion would make no difference.

He went to the kitchen and took her apron from behind the door. He put it on. He bent and opened the cupboard beneath the sink. He took out the toolbox. Removed the short saw.

He crossed to the window. He had a coppery taste in his mouth. All he’d asked of her in return for this flat, the money, the expensive meals was fidelity.

He knew the baby wasn’t his. It couldn’t be. His inability to give his wife a child had been a heavy burden for many years. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the deed. It was that nothing ever came of it.

The day outside went on, unconcerned. Nothing in the street had changed. In a Monastery Garden was drawing to a close. It reminded him of the beautiful ruined frescoes he’d visited some months earlier in the churches on the South Downs whilst they were staying in Brighton.

He moved from the window to stand over her, the saw in his hand. The music stopped and there was silence. For a moment.