One Good Turn

39

Gloria had intended the early-morning blaze in the garden brazier to be symbolic, a pyre for the past Gloria (Graham’s wife) and a signal for the future Gloria (Graham’s widow). She had imagined herself emerging from the flames like a phoenix, so it was rather disappointing that her wardrobe hadn’t made more of a show, even if it was only a couple of evening dresses-expensive designer things that she had worn for company dinner dances. Gloria had an uncomfortable vision of herself teetering into a succession of hotel ballrooms over the past thirty-nine years, mutton dressed as mutton, her body stuffed into the glittering carapace of a spangled dress, and her small feet (“pig’s trotters,” Graham called them) bound in unsuitable shoes.

Because he would soon be dead, she felt sure of it. Dead as a dodo. Dead as mutton. Dead as a doornail. Why a doornail? Why was a doornail deader than anything else? (The door itself, for example-equally dead, surely?) Did “dead” exist in the compara-tive? Could something be deader than something else? Dead, deader, deadest. Graham would be deader than Gloria. He would be superlatively dead. It had taken a lifetime for Gloria to realize how much she disliked Graham.

There was more smoke than fire, so she threw a firelighter into the brazier and watched the little tongues of green and blue flames as they began to lick at a rhinestone-encrusted bolero jacket by Jacques Vert. Mineral to mineral, dust to dust. The clothes hadn’t reduced to the soft, powdery ash she had imagined.

The electronic gates opened and closed several times. If Gloria hadn’t known that the man from the security company was down in the basement checking the system, she would have thought that a crowd of invisible people were being slowly filtered onto the property.

She watched a thrush pulling an elasticated worm from the lawn. Birds (apart from magpies) were Good Things. Even when they were killing other things. The birds ate the worms, the worms might soon be eating Graham. Graham had eaten birds (chicken, turkey, duck, pheasant, grouse, partridge), so the cycle of life would be complete. Since Graham’s authoritarian regime was suspended unexpectedly, Gloria hadn’t eaten anything that breathed. Graham always said he wanted to be burned, not buried, at the end, but Gloria thought it would be a shame to deprive all those small industrious creatures of a good meal.

Let the punishment fit the crime. She had attended a particu-larly rousing amateur production of The Mikado at the King’s last year. She was very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, at least the better-known ones. Some things were obvious-a man who kicked a dog to death, for example, should himself be kicked to death, preferably by dogs, but that wasn’t really possible, the anatomy of a dog didn’t lend itself to kicking. Which said a lot about dogs, if you thought about it. Gloria would be happy to undertake the kicking herself, if necessary. But as for Graham-what would be a suitable punishment for him?

Perhaps he should be forced to sit (or, better still, stand like a Victorian clerk) in an airless, windowless office all day, shuffling his way through endless sheaves of papers-insurance claims, VAT returns, tax returns, double accounting ledgers-all of which he would have to fill in accurately and truthfully by hand. Or, better still, he would have to stand all day and all night for the rest of time counting other people’s money without ever being allowed to pocket so much as a farthing for himself. Gloria missed far-things, the littlest coin with the littlest bird on it.

She gave the brazier one last poke. Perhaps she should cremate Graham after all, just to make absolutely sure that he couldn’t come back.

In the paper (she must cancel the newspapers, they weren’t healthy) there was an article about a court case-a teenager had broken into an old people’s home and stolen wallets and purses and watches from the rooms, and then he had taken an old woman’s pet budgerigar from its cage, wrapped Sellotape round and round its body, and then thrown it out the window-five floors up. And this was civilization! How satisfying it would be to wind that teenager in Sellotape and throw him out a fifth-floor window. Was there no one meting out justice in this world? Were the yobs and the magpies and the Grahams and the kitten-eating men and the budgie-taping teenagers just going to get away with it?

Upstairs in her bedroom, Gloria pushed aside the black plastic bag of twenty-pound notes in her wardrobe and retrieved a little-worn red velour “leisure suit” that had been stuffed in the back of the wardrobe after only one outing because Graham had despised it at first sight, saying it made her look like a giant tomato. She regarded the image reflected back to her by the vast mirrors of the built-in wardrobes. A touch of the tomato, it was true, and it made her arse look enormous, but it covered her matronly bosom and iguana belly, and it was comfortable and rather jaunty, the sort of thing a sporty Mother Christmas might have worn. Graham had never liked her using words such as “arse,” he said a woman should be “ladylike,” like his own mother, Beryl, who, before she acquired her sponge-brain syndrome, had always referred to her rear end as her “derrière,” possibly the only French word she knew.

“Arse, arse, arse,” Gloria said to her mirrored behind. The red velour suit felt soft and snug, she imagined this was how babies felt in their clothes. She put on the trainers she had bought for her “Nifty Fifties” class, still more or less box-white and unsullied. As she made her way downstairs, she felt lighter on her feet, as if she were ready for something. Ready to run.

Gloria sighed. She could hear Graham’s whiny secretary, Chris-tine Tennant, speaking to the answering machine again. “Graham, you’re really needed here!” Gloria picked up the phone and said, “Christine, what can I do for you?” adopting the efficient tones of a woman who had worn heels and little business suits instead of slipping off a bar stool and following her prospective husband like a dog.

“The Fraud Unit has been here again,” she said. “They want to question Graham. He’s not really in Thurso, is he?” she added, sounding sad rather than bitter. “He’s betrayed us all, hasn’t he? He’s run off and left everyone else to face the music.”

“I don’t know, Christine.” She replaced the receiver. She almost felt sorry for Christine, all those years of faithful service and nothing to show for it. Perhaps she could send her flowers or a fruit basket. A fruit basket was a nice thing to receive.

The man from the security company emerged unexpectedly and molelike from the basement. “There’s something wrong with the sensors on your gates,” he announced, with more histrionics than seemed strictly necessary to Gloria. “I’ve got your screens back up, and your panic buttons, but I’ll have to come back later with new parts. I don’t know what’s been going on down there.”

He was a short man, with many of the character problems of short men, Gloria noticed. He drew himself up to his full pompous height and said, “You haven’t let anyone suspicious in, have you?”

“Why would I let anyone suspicious in?” Gloria puzzled.

This didn’t appear to be a satisfactory answer to him, and with a promise that he would be back later, he strutted his way down the garden path like a cock of the walk. A robin hopped along the path in the opposite direction, man and bird ignoring each other. The path was edged with borders of summer bedding plants-an-tirrhinums and salvias, neither of which were to Gloria’s taste, but Bill had been an old-fashioned kind of gardener and she hadn’t liked to request of him anything more avant-garde in the way of horticulture. If she were to stay in this house, she would plant archways of roses and honeysuckle. Row after row of sweet peas. But she wasn’t staying.

The strong aroma of coffee hit Gloria’s nostrils, and she followed its vapor trail, like an addicted Bisto Kid, back inside the house. It led her to the kitchen, where Tatiana was sitting at the table, smoking and reading the newspaper. She tapped the head-line (MASSIVE MANHUNT SPARKED BY MURDER OF FRINGE COMIC) with a painted fingernail and said, “Lot of bad people about.”

Tatiana had slept and breakfasted in a serviceable pair of Gloria’s pajamas but had now changed into something more sophisti-cated. She wore a pair of dainty shoes, “Marc Jacobs,” she said, displaying her foot and admiring it, and was dressed in simple black trousers and a silk print top, “Prada,” she said, stroking it. “Prada is truth,” she added, blowing smoke up toward the ceiling. “I know many truths, Gloria.”

“Really?” Gloria said. “You’d better be careful, then.”

Gloria’s heart had nearly stopped when Tatiana walked into the basement last night. “I thought you were dead,” Gloria said to her, and Tatiana laughed and said, “Why would you think that? Front door isn’t locked,” she added. “Someone can kill you in your bed, Gloria.”

“I’m not in my bed,” Gloria said, following her up the stairs and into the kitchen, where she fumbled in a drawer for candles and matches. Before she could find either, the power came back on.

“It said in the newspaper that the police thought a girl who was wearing crucifix earrings might have drowned.”

“Ah, yes,”Tatiana said. “Wasn’t me.”

“Who was it?”

“You didn’t call me, Gloria,”Tatiana said, ignoring the question, her mouth making a little moue of disappointment.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“I gave you phone number.”

Gloria had given her phone number to a lot of people in her time and never expected any of them to call her back. Tatiana started raking through cupboards looking for something to eat, and Gloria had sat her down and fixed them both toasted sand-wiches. When she finished her sandwich, Tatiana lit a cigarette and tore into a satsuma. Gloria had never seen anyone eat fruit and smoke at the same time. She made smoking look so enjoyable that Gloria wondered now why she had ever given it up. Something to do with pregnancy, but, really, had that been a good enough reason?

“Graham has a mistress,” Gloria said.

“Ah, yes, Maggot,” Tatiana said. “Voddabitch. He’s going to leave you.”

“Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?” Not planning to kill her but to leave her, which was a relief. “He should live so long,” Gloria said.

Tatiana had lost interest in the conversation, she stretched and yawned and said, “I have to go to bed now,” so Gloria had put her in Emily’s old room, where she snored like a trooper most of the night before waking up and asking for bacon sandwiches “with pickles. You have pickles?”

“Just Branston,” Gloria said.

It wasn’t every day that a strange Russian dominatrix appeared out of nowhere and prowled around your house. Gloria followed Ta-tiana into the living room and watched her pick up and inspect several ornaments, the Moorcroft seemed to meet with her approval but not the Staffordshire figures, particularly the pair of 1850 creamers in the shape of a cow that she judged “vile.” She inspected the fabric of the curtains, sniffed the flowers, tested the chairs for comfort. Gloria wondered if she howled at the full moon.

Tatiana proceeded to play with the Bang and Olufsen remote control, particularly taken with the button that turned the lights on and off, before stopping her pacing to scrutinize herself in the mirror. Then she picked an apple from the fruit bowl, and while she ate it (very loudly) she went through every station on the radio, pausing only to turn the volume up for Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”And on and on and on. “This is great song,” she said.

Gloria was fascinated. It was like being stuck in a cage with a restless and opinionated animal. Tatiana seemed utterly foreign in all ways. If you had sliced into her with a knife (although it was more likely to be the other way round), Gloria suspected she would have tasted of raw reindeer meat and smoky black tea and the iron tang of blood. Someone else’s.

Finally, Tatiana threw herself on the sofa and blew air out of her mouth as if she were about to die of boredom. She scrutinized each of her fingernails in turn before giving Gloria a level gaze and saying, “Okay, Gloria. Shall we make a deal?”

Gloria had never made a deal in her life. She stood at the French windows and watched a huge wood pigeon, built like a cargo plane, waddling across the lawn. She turned back to look at Tatiana, another kind of wildlife, lying on the sofa and working her way through the channels on the television.

“A deal?” Gloria said. “What kind of a deal?”