Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Celia Fremlin Dangerous Sport

“Darling, I’d just love to be able to stay. You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But—”

But.

But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered bitterly. Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his repertoire by heart.

But I have to help Wendy with the weekend shopping. But the man is coming to fix the hot-water boiler. But I have to fetch Carol from the Brownies. But Simon is away from school with a temperature. But I have to meet Aunt Esmé at the airport.

This last had been the funniest “but” of all; and though in fact it had happened quite near the beginning of her relationship with Gerald, it still made Stella laugh, and grind her teeth, when she thought about it. For it had come so soon after that golden September day when, lying in the long grass by the river outside Marlowe, Gerald had been confiding in her, as married men will, about his loneliness. Even as a child he’d been lonely, he told her.

“No brothers and sisters. Not even any uncles or aunts,” he’d explained sadly. “I used to long sometimes for one of those big, close, quarrelsome families, all weddings and funerals and eating roast chicken and bread sauce at each other’s tables, and running down each other’s in-laws. I yearned for a group larger than just myself and my two parents — I wanted my own tribe, and that wonderful feeling of belonging. Particularly at Christmas I used to feel...”

Stella couldn’t remember, at this distance of time, what it was that Gerald used to feel at Christmas — something about tangerines, and somebody else’s grandfather out in the snow sawing apple logs — or something; it was of no importance, and that’s why she’d forgotten it. What was important was the discrepancy she’d instantly spotted between these maudlin reminiscences and the cock-and-bull story about meeting “Aunt Esmé” at the airport.

She’d given him every chance. Why couldn’t Wendy be the one to meet the woman, she’d asked, watching him intently while she spoke. After all, she was Wendy’s aunt, not his — “Oh, no, darling, no, whatever gave you that idea? She’s my aunt. She was awfully good to me as a kid, and so I feel this is the least I can do. It’s an awful bore, but — you do understand, don’t you, darling?”

Of course she’d understood. That’s what mistresses are for.

“Of course, darling!” she’d said, not batting an eyelid; and afterward, how she’d laughed about it — when she’d finished crying!

She had to be so very careful, that was the thing: call Gerald’s bluff even once, and the whole relationship could have been wrecked forever. He had made it quite, quite clear to her, very early, that suspicion, jealousy, and possessiveness were the prerogatives of the wife, and of the wife alone. It was in the nature of things (Gerald seemed to feel) that Wendy should cross-examine him about his business trips, ring up the office to check that he really was working late, go through his pockets for letters and for incriminating theater-ticket stubs; for Stella to do these things struck him as an outrage, an insult to the natural order of things.

“Look, darling,” he’d said (and the cold savagery of his tone had seemed to Stella quite out of proportion to her very minor misdemeanor a single tentative little phone call to his secretary asking, just simply asking, what time he was expected back from Wolverhampton), “Look, darling, when a married man starts an affair, it’s because he wants to get away from that sort of thing, not because he wants more of it! He has enough trouble getting a few hours’ freedom as it is, without having his mistress waiting for him like a cat at a mousehole every time he steps outside his front door!”

A speech both cruel and uncalled-for, and Stella had been dreadfully upset. But being upset never got her anywhere with Gerald, it just made him avoid answering the telephone; and so after a while she’d stopped being upset, and had resolved to watch her step even more carefully in the future. And so that was why, when the Aunt Esmé “bit” cropped up, she’d let it pass without a flicker of protest. Dumber than the dumbest blonde she’d been, as she sleeked back her wings of black burnished hair and listened, her dark eyes wide and trusting, while he flounced deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and evasions from which he would never (unless she, Stella, chose to assist him) be able to extricate himself.

For the lies hadn’t ended with the meeting of “Aunt Esmé,” at the airport; they had gone on for weeks. Because that hypothetical lady’s visit had proved to be a long one, and packed with incident. She had to be taken to the theater on just the night when Gerald usually went out with Stella; she caught the flu on the exact weekend when Gerald and Stella had planned a trip to the country; and when Stella herself caught the flu, she had to have it alone because it just so happened that Aunt Esmé had to be taken on a visit to an old school friend in Bournemouth at just that time.

And Stella had taken it all smiling. Smiling, smiling endlessly down the telephone, making understanding noises, and never questioning, never protesting. It had been over a year later (surely a year is long enough, surely no one could accuse her of checking up after a year?) before Stella had ventured, warily, and with lowered eyelashes, to ask after Aunt Esmé. Had they seen her lately, or had a card from her, she’d asked innocently, one late December day when Gerald, preoccupied, filled and brimming over with family life, had driven over hastily with Stella’s present. Jewelry again, and expensive — Gerald was good at that sort of thing.

Stella thanked him prettily, even warmly; and then, still prettily, she tossed her bombshell into his face. “Have you heard from Aunt Esmé lately?” she asked, and enjoyed, as she only rarely enjoyed his lovemaking, the look of blank uncomplicated bewilderment that spread over his pink, self-absorbed features. Not even any wariness, so completely had he forgotten the whole thing.

“Aunt Esmé? Who’s Aunt Esmé?” he asked curiously, quite unsuspicious.

Stella had intended it to stop there, to brush it off with a light “Oh, well, I must be mixing it up with some other family”; to leave him unscathed, untouched by guilt, and to savour her triumph in secret. But the temptation to go on, to spring the trap, was irresistible.

“Aunt Esmé, darling! You know — the one you had staying with you for all that time last winter” — and as she spoke Stella watched, with terror and with glee, the dawning of guilt and alarm in his plump lazy features. Fear, calculation, and panic darted like fishes back and forth across his countenance; and then he recovered himself.

Of course! How stupid! Dear old Esmé, she must mean! Not an aunt at all, but the old family governess from Wendy’s mother’s old home — the children had been taught to call her “aunt” because, you know...

And of course Stella did know, smiling and lying and letting him off the hook. She, too, had had an “aunt” like that in her childhood. An Aunt Polly (she quickly improvised) who had made gingerbread animals. Smiling, inventing, chattering, breathlessly easing the embarrassment, Stella was nevertheless already making her plans. In a year’s time — or maybe two years — “How’s your mother-in-law’s old governess getting on?” she’d ask, all innocence, watching his face while he blundered into the trap. “Governess? But Wendy’s mother never had—” And while his words stuttered into silence, she would be watching his face, never taking her eyes off it as it disintegrated into terror, bewilderment, and guilt.

Guilt, that was the important thing. Guilt so richly deserved and so long outstanding, like an unpaid debt. Such a sense of power it gave her to be able to call him to account like this, just now and again — a sense of power which compensated, in some measure, for the awful weakness of her actual position, the terrible uncertainty of her hold on him. To be able to make him squirm like this every so often was a sort of redressing of some desperate balance — a long-merited turning of the tables without which Stella sometimes felt she could not have gone on.

Oh, but it was fun too! A sort of game of catch-me-if-you-can, a fun game. Not quite as much fun, though, as it used to be, because of late Gerald had been growing more wary, less easily trapped. He was more evasive now, less buoyantly ready to come out with giveaway remarks like “What trip to Manchester, darling?” or “But they’ve never had measles.” Now, before he spoke, you could see him checking through the lies he had told recently, his gray-green eyes remote and sly.

And as Gerald grew more wary, so did Stella grow more cunning. The questions by which she trapped him were never direct ones now, but infinitely subtle and devious. It was a dangerous sport, and, like all dangerous sports, it demanded skill and judgment, a sure eye and perfect timing. Push Gerald too far, and she would have a terrible, terrifying row on her hands. “Possessive! Demanding!” and all the other age-old accusations hurtling round her head.

Push him not far enough, however, and the opposite set of mishaps would be set in motion. He would start thinking he could get away with anything, leaving her for days on end without so much as a phone call, and then turning up all smiles, as if nothing had happened, and expecting her to cook him steak and collect his shoes from the repairers. Taking her for granted, just as if she was a wife — and what sensible woman is going to put up with all the disadvantages of being married as well as all the disadvantages of not being?

It was a cliff-hanger business, though, getting the push exactly right. Only a few months ago Gerald had actually threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop spying on him — though surely “spying” was an unduly harsh term to apply to Stella’s innocent little show of interest in the details of the business conference he’d pretended to attend the previous weekend?

“But darling, Lord Berners wasn’t at the dinner!” she’d pointed out, with a placating little laugh, just to save Gerald the trouble of inventing any more humorous quotes from a nonexistent speech. “I read in The Times the next morning that” — and at this, quite suddenly, he had gone berserk, and had turned on her like an animal at bay. His rage, his dreadful, unwarranted accusations, were like nothing she had ever heard before, and they threw her into such terror that she scarcely knew what she was doing or saying.

In the end he had flung himself out of the flat, slamming the door on her tears and screams, and vowing never to set foot in the place again. It had taken an undated suicide note, no less, to bring him back again. It was just about as generous a suicide note as any woman has ever penned to a recalcitrant lover, and Stella still remembered it with a certain measure of satisfaction.

“You mustn’t blame yourself, darling,” she’d written. “It is my decision, and mine alone. If I cannot face life without you, that is my problem, not yours. So don’t, my love, feel that you have to come rushing round when you get this letter. The very last thing I want — or have ever wanted — is to inconvenience you in anyway, or make you feel guilty. By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead...”

The posts must have been slow that week, because it was nearly three days before she at last heard his feet pounding up the stairs, and had started taking the pills, stuffing them into her mouth in handfuls as he burst into the room.

It had been worth it, though. He’d been sweet to her for days afterward, visiting her often in the hospital; and even after she got home, he’d continued to shower her with presents, calling every day, and displaying in full measure all the remorse, the tenderness, the self-recrimination that such a situation demands of a man.

Until, of course, he got bored with it. First bored, then resentful, and finally-beginning to throw the thing up to her in their arguments. “Blackmail,” he called it now whenever Stella tried to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do; and Stella began to realize, gradually, that she was right back at square one — having to be careful, careful, knowing all the time that the only way she could hold him now was by avoiding quarrels and by being infinitely tolerant and understanding — in short, by letting him get away with every bloody thing.

And this was why, this summer Saturday afternoon, Stella, her teeth set in a smile, was making herself listen without a murmur to what Gerald was saying. She had known, of course, the kind of thing it would be; married men always have such righteous reasons for letting you down. Sick wives, kids on holiday, family visits — all perfectly uncheckable, and all revealing what a kind, compassionate, virtuous, dutiful creature the lying, treacherous creature really is.

So what was it this time?

Simon’s Sports Day. Gerald was potty about that son of his.

“You do understand, don’t you, darling,” he was pleading; and of course she understood very well, she understood that he preferred the prospect of watching a nine-year-old running across a field in gym shoes to the prospect of spending the whole long afternoon with his mistress, cool and mysterious in her darkened fiat, the sunlight flickering across the bed through the slatted blinds.

“You see, darling, the thing is, he might win! Only nine and he might actually win the under-eleven two hundred and fifty yards! He’s a marvelous little runner, Mr. Foulkes tells me — a real athlete’s body!”

A real athlete’s body. The light shining in Gerald’s eyes was something Stella had never seen before. For a few seconds she tried to imagine what it would be like to be the mother of that athlete’s body, to have produced it jointly with Gerald, to have a right, now, to a share in that idiotic pride. At the sight of those heavy, self-indulgent features thus irradiated, Stella felt a great darkness coming around her. It came like a black monstrous wave, engulfing her, leaving her bereft of speech.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds!” she heard him saying, from somewhere outside the swirling blackness. “To hear his name called — Simon Graves — my own son! And then the clapping, the cheers! And him only nine! The others are all over ten, darling, all of them! He’s the only nine-year-old who managed to...”

She preferred his lies, preferred them a thousand times. How could she have guessed that the truth, when she finally heard it from those evasive, prevaricating lips, would hurt as much as this?

The school gates were propped wide-open and welcoming, and through them, in the blazing sunshine, trooped the mothers and the fathers, the sisters and the girl friends, the aunts and the uncles. With their white sandals, their bright cotton dresses or pale freshly ironed slacks, women just like Stella, in their early thirties. Among so many, who was going to give her a second glance? Unless of course, she gave herself away somehow — walking too fast maybe, or letting her eyes flit too anxiously from side to side?

The fathers were less numerous than their womenfolk, which made Stella’s task that much easier; they stuck out among the bright dresses like the dark stumps of trees. Stella’s eyes darted from one to another of them ceaselessly, for he might be anywhere; and supposing — just supposing he were to catch sight of her before she’d managed to locate him?

Not a big risk, really. For she had the advantage that the hunter always has over the prey — she knew what she was looking for, and what she meant to do when she found it; whereas Gerald not only wasn’t on the watch for her, he hadn’t the slightest suspicion she could possibly be here at all. On top of which she had, after a fashion, disguised herself with a pair of large round sunglasses, and a white silk bandanna wound tightly round her black shining hair.

Across the lawn, up under the avenue of limes, the slow procession wound, chattering, exclaiming, exchanging greetings; some were already fanning themselves against the heat. Slowly, likewise, but with her heart hammering, Stella matched her pace with the rest; and it was not until she had settled herself on the grass at the far end of a long line of deck chairs facing the sports field that Stella began to breathe more easily. Hemmed in by all these chairs, she could scarcely be seen from more than a yard or two away, and yet by craning her neck she could get a good view of the crowd still winding up from the school buildings. Here and there a dark head, taller than the rest, would make her catch her breath; but always, it was a false alarm.

And now, here was the junior master walking up and down with his loudspeaker, announcing the order of events. Already the crowd was falling into an expectant silence, the thousand voices dying away in wave after wave, fading away like the twitter of birds at twilight. And still Gerald hadn’t arrived.

Had he been lying to her after all? Had his afternoon’s truancy nothing to do with Simon’s Sports Day, in spite of all those passionate declarations of paternal pride? The swine! The double-crossing, treacherous swine! All that emotion wasted — not to mention having let herself in for a long hot afternoon of boredom, all for nothing!

I’ll tell you, Gerald Graves! I’ll teach you to lie to me, make a fool of me! Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you? — I’ll show you!

Already she could feel a line of sweat gathering under the bandanna, along her hairline; she’d never worn such a thing before, and by the Lord, she thought, I never will again! I’ll show him!

“Under sixteen hurdles...”

“Quarter mile, under fourteen...”

The sheer tedium of it was beginning to make Stella feel quite ill; her back ached, her eyes burned, and her brain felt half addled with heat and boredom.

Long jump. High jump... on and on the thing droned; whistles blew, shouts exploded into the shimmering air and died away again; the clapping and the cheering rose, and fell, and rose again. Cup for this, prize for that. The sun beat down, the voices swelled and receded, and then, just when Stella was on the verge of sleep, she heard it.

“Simon Graves! Winner of the under-eleven two hundred and fifty yards! Simon Graves!”

Stella was sitting bolt upright now, peering past the forest of chairs to get a glimpse of the sports field; but before she had time to locate the dark-haired little boy scuttling proudly toward the sidelines, she became aware of a little commotion going on in front of her and a few yards to the right.

“Simon! Our Simon! He’s done it, Mummy! Daddy said he would! Oh, Simon — Si-i-i-mon!”

“Hush, darling, hush, Carol, you must sit down.” A plumpish smiling woman was pulling at the sleeve of a wildly gesticulating little girl of about seven, urging her back into her seat. “Hush, Carol darling, not so loud. Simon’ll be embarrassed. Oh, but won’t Daddy be pleased!”

“Daddy will say,” “Daddy will think” — and where the hell was Daddy, if one might inquire? “Wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds,” he’d said. Someone, somewhere, worth more than a million this bright afternoon?

Peering between the lines of chairs, Stella could see that the exultant mother and little sister were about to receive their hero. Pounding up the bank he came, wiry and brown and all lit up with triumph, hurling himself on his mother and sister amid a babel of congratulations.

Past the chairs, past the stirring smiling people, Stella watched, and kept very still. What right had the three of them to such joy, such total undiluted happiness? Didn’t they know that the foundations of it were rotten, that their cosy little family life was based on a rotting, disintegrating substructure of lies and cheating? “Daddy” this and “Daddy” that — it made her feel quite sick to listen to the shrill little voices filled with such baseless adoration.

Quietly, unobtrusively, Stella got to her feet, and worked her way between the rows of chairs. She reached the little girl just when her mother and brother had turned away for a moment, receiving further congratulations. Quickly Stella dropped on her knees in front of the child, bringing their faces level.

“Do you know why your Daddy isn’t here?” she said softly. “It’s because he’s spent the afternoon with me! In bed. Do you understand?”

The blank, almost stupid look on the child’s face maddened her, and the blank look remained on the child’s face. But Stella had the satisfaction, after she had squeezed back past row after row of chairs and had almost escaped from the enclosure, of hearing Carol, at last, burst into loud sobbing.

It was nearly ten o’clock when, at long last, she heard Gerald’s step on the stairs; and even after all these hours she still could not have said if she had been expecting him to come, or to stay away.

He’d be angry, of course. But also, surely, relieved? Five years of secrecy was too much; it would be a relief to both of them to have it out in the open.

“Don’t you agree, darling, that it is high time we had it out in the open?” she was asking, for the fourth or fifth time, of the silent slumped figure in the armchair. She’d been trying ever since his arrival to extract some sort of response from him. She’d tried everything, even congratulating him on his son’s success.

“Pity you weren’t there to see it,” she’d been unable to resist adding; but even this had provoked from Gerald nothing more than the bald factual statement that he had seen it, thank you, from the Pavilion, where some of the fathers were helping to organize the boys.

Then more silence. She tried again.

“I’m sorry, Gerald darling, if Carol — if the little girl — was upset. I didn’t mean to upset her, I just thought that the children should know about us. I don’t believe in lies and deceit with children. I think they are entitled to the truth. Oh, darling, please don’t look at me like that! It’s been a shock. I know, but I’m sure that when you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll see it’s been for the best. The best for us — and for Wendy too. She can’t have liked all this lying and deception all these years. I’m sure she’d rather know where she stands, and be able to start making sensible plans for the future.

“I mean, Wendy looks quite a nice sort of person. I don’t think she’ll make any trouble once she understands that we love each other. Oh, darling, what is it? Why don’t you say something? Look, let’s have a drink, and relax, and think what we’re going to do when the unpleasantness is all over. This flat is a bit small for the two of us, but assuming that you’ll be getting half of the value of your house, then between us we could—”

And now, at last, he did make a move. He rose stiffly, as if he suffered from rheumatism, and went to pour them each a large glass of whiskey. He handed her a glass in silence, and then, swallowing his at a gulp, he walked over to the table in the window where Stella’s typewriter stood, open. Laboriously, with one finger, he began to type.

Stella waited a minute, two minutes, then walked over to look.

The long manila envelope stared up at her from the typewriter carriage; she watched, stupefied, while he finished the last few letters of the address. Then—

“Whatever are you doing, darling?” she asked, with an uneasy little laugh. “Are you writing a letter to yourself?”

And then she saw it, just by his right hand. Her own suicide note of last autumn — “By the time you get this, darling, I shall he dead...”

“The handwriting will be unquestionably yours,” he observed conversationally, “and the address will have been typed on your typewriter. The postmark will also be right, as I shall post it myself, on my way out. It should reach me at breakfast time the day after tomorrow, just in time to show to the police. And now, my dear, just one more little job, and we shall be finished.”

And as he stood up and turned toward her, the light from the lamp fell full onto his face, and she saw the look in his eyes.

“No! No!” she gasped, took a step backward, and shrank, whimpering, against the wall.

“I intend it to look like suicide,” he said, as if reassuring her; and as he moved across the carpet toward her, Stella’s last coherent thought was: he will too! He’ll get away with it, he’ll lie his way out of it, just as he’s always lied his way out of everything!

How accomplished a liar he was, she knew better than anyone, for it was she who had trained him — trained him, like a circus animal, over five long years.