The Marx Sisters

22

They were sitting in the darkened motel room, Terry in the armchair and Geraldine on the floor at his feet, her arms wrapped round his legs, her head resting on his knee. He felt stiff and uncomfortable-and a little ridiculous, as if she’d just brought him down with a flying rugby tackle. His brain was unnaturally active, too terrified to feel tired.

When the word had gone round the salons the previous day that Terry had been taken to Scotland Yard and the police had searched his Peckham office, Geraldine had not known what to do. Then she remembered that Terry had mentioned a solicitor in Jerusalem Lane who had been helping him. She found the name in the Yellow Pages and, even though the number was now disconnected, managed to get the firm’s other number in Croydon, and so eventually made contact with Mr Hepple.

At first Hepple had said he was unable to help, but she was so insistent, so distressed, that he asked for a little time to see what he could do. And at that point his famous sense of mischief and wit inspired him with a brilliant idea. How wonderful if Martin Connell, who as Upper North’s solicitor had been all over the papers as the adversary of the famous Chief Inspector Brock, could now be persuaded to take on the great man once more in the service of Mrs Winterbottom’s unworthy little boy! Hepple was surprised and delighted to find Connell more than willing to consider the proposition, even although he had to make it clear that it might be some time before Winter would be in a position to pay anything like Mr Connell’s usual fee-although the lady who had contacted him had assured him that she would meet any obligation.

And so it was that, when Winter was finally charged at 4.20 a.m. the next day, he found-to his great surprise and the police’s-both Mr Hepple and Martin Connell waiting for him. Geraldine turned up at the court hearing in the afternoon and guaranteed his bail, which the magistrate granted despite the opposition of the police.

She had rescued him. She smiled to herself and tightened her grip around his legs, a grip which, it occurred to Terry, was a far stronger restraint than any to be found in Her Majesty’s prisons. He put out his hand and stroked her hair, hoping to placate her need for him. She snuggled against his leg and clung to him even more tightly.

It was really very difficult to believe that not so long ago he would have gone to so much trouble to get this close to her. How desirable those shoulders, that hair had seemed then! Now he saw only the lines around her eyes, and was irritated that someone in their sort of business didn’t make more of herself. It was a source of continual wonder to him how this happened, time after time, this ebb and flow of desire, from craving to indifference, so that the same woman could seem so completely irresistible one week, and so embarrassingly unappealing the next.

He looked around the cheap furniture of the motel room, lit by the table lamp, and remembered Geraldine’s miserable little flat. How threadbare it was compared to what he had left behind in Chislehurst! He had a vivid recollection of the carpet frayed by the door, the clutter of cheap plastic toys left in a corner by her two little brats, the Woolworth’s crockery, the smell of the homemade soup which always clung to the place. How would he be able to stand it?

Into his mind came a picture of a plastic bag enveloping this head upon his knee, of a hammer thudding into its skull. He shuddered and closed his eyes, and the nausea which had been with him now since the police arrived yesterday morning, returned, welling up in his stomach.

‘Darling?’ She was looking up into his face, concerned. She reached up with one hand and took his, gripping it tight. ‘Don’t worry! Everything will be all right now.’

He groaned. ‘How can you say that?’

‘Because it’s true! Look. You’ll admit the things you did to frighten your aunts. You’ll say how stupid it was, how sorry you are, but you were driven to it by your financial worries. It all got out of hand. But at least you didn’t physically hurt anyone. And you’ll make a clean breast of it with your Aunt Peg, and tell her how awful you feel and beg her forgiveness. And she will forgive you, because she’s always been fond of you. And then she’ll tell the court how she’s forgiven you, and no harm’s done, and they won’t be able to punish you. You’ve never been in trouble before.

‘As long as they don’t think you had anything to do with the death of your mother and Eleanor-and they can’t if I can tell them that you were with me at the time your mother must have died. And you know’-her voice became a whisper, intense and intimate, and her hand slipped out of his and gripped his thigh uncomfortably tight-‘you know I will say that, don’t you, darling, that I won’t mention the hour you were away

…’

‘It was hardly an hour,’ he said weakly, ‘and it was to check the salon, you know that.’

‘Of course, but we didn’t tell them last time, so we can’t bring it up now, can we?’

He shook his head obediently. It wasn’t she who was going to suffocate; it was he, and not in the folds of a plastic bag but in the smothering embrace of her love. Perhaps after all it was inevitable. He had always felt that his freedom with women was illusory. When it came to the big decisions, it was his mother, his wife and now Geraldine who took the reins. Men, after all, were putty. A woman might leave her husband because she wanted something better, whereas a man would fool around, pathetically hoping for the best of both worlds, and finally make a move only when his wife or his mistress forced him to jump. For a short time in the inevitable transition from Caroline to Geraldine he had managed to slip the leash, to become a single man again, but he had messed it up, as he inevitably must.

Geraldine saw the worry in his eyes. Yet, terrible as this was, it would be the thing which would save them both. She would lead him out of this tragedy, and their relationship would thenceforth be unique, not the outcome of one of his affairs, but a new contract, a new bond. She would have saved him and would have put herself beyond betrayal. But first he must sink to the very bottom. Already two salons had gone, and Caroline would take as much of the rest as she could. And his experience with the police through last night and today must have been terrifying.

She had never doubted that he would come to her in the end. At first she had pretended that, like him, she wanted a casual, enjoyable affair. But her heart, frozen hard through eight bitter years of her husband’s indifference, of watching him being stolen away by another woman, of divorce, and of steeling herself to lonely independence, this heart, being melted at last by Terry’s confidence and passion, did not want a passing romance. So fast that she hardly realized it was happening, she found herself in the grip of what in her childhood her mother had described to her with dread in her voice, as a ‘grand passion’, the kind of passion that takes over your life, and, like some exotic tropical disease in the blood, never ever leaves you.

She would lead him out of his present despair, and when things had settled down she would speak to Peg, and they would agree on a way to sell the house to the developer. And then she and Terry would start again, from the bottom, building together. They might have a baby-she wasn’t too old. He would come to regard her boys as his own. And they would start a little business together. But not hairdressing. No more girls, no more temptation. He was a mess now, falling apart at the seams. But like an unruly plant which had been neglected and left to grow wild, he could be pruned and shaped and nurtured, and in a season or two he would be transformed.

Terry felt the strain across his shoulderblades. He breathed deeply, trying to relax. Perhaps, after all, she was right. Perhaps things weren’t so hopeless. He would just have to face the music over the stupid games he’d played, if they would only leave it at that. And afterwards, who knew? Geraldine’s little flat wasn’t so bad a place to shelter from the storm, and at least she was a much better cook than that bitch Caroline had ever been, for all her German kitchens. Two salons had gone, and a third on the way, but at least one of the other two might be saved, and he could build up again, learning from his past experience. In a year or two he would be back on his feet again, hiring girls. He smiled to himself. There was that pretty young black girl who had started just two weeks ago at New Cross. He’d never been to bed with a black girl.