The Remorseful Day

Chapter nineteen

With increasing impatience and with incipient disquiet, lighting one cigarette from another, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee, Deborah Richardson had been watching from the front-room window, on and off from 10:30 A.M., on and off from 11:30 A.M., and virtually on and on from midday and thereafter — at first with that curiously pleasing expectation of happy events which Jane Austen would have swapped for happiness itself. Not that Debbie had ever read Jane Austen. Heard of her, though, most recently from that elderly Oxford don (well, wasn’t fifty-eight elderly?) with whom she’d spent the night at the Cotswold Hotel in Burford...

It wasn’t that she was keenly anticipating any renewal of sexual congress with her newly liberated partner. Although she felt gratified that physically he’d always been so demanding of her, it had often occurred to her that he was probably enjoying the sex more for its own sake than because he was having it with her. And perhaps that was why only occasionally did she experience that “intercrural effusion” of which she’d read in one of the women’s magazines...

Nor was she looking forward to the regular resumption of cooking and washing and ironing that had monopolized her time in the years prior to his arrest...

Nor — she ought to be honest with herself! — was she at all anxious to witness his eating habits again, especially at breakfast, when he would regularly offer some trite and ill-informed commentary on whatever article he was reading in the Sun, and openly displaying thereby a semimasticated mouthful of whatever...

And — oh, most definitely! — she would never never ever tolerate again the demands his erstwhile criminal dealings had made upon the space, her space, in the quite unpleasantly appointed little semi he’d bought three years earlier at rock-bottom price during the slump in the housing market. After which, at almost any given time, every conceivable square foot of space had been jam-packed with crates of gin and whiskey, cartons of cigarettes, car radios, video recorders, cameras, computers, and hi-fi equipment. No! There’d have to be an end to all that stolen-property lark; and surely (now!) there’d be little further risk of Harry himself taking part in any of the actual burglaries. For he had taken part occasionally, Debbie knew that, although the police hadn’t seemed to know, or perhaps just couldn’t find sufficient evidence to prosecute. Certainly Harry had never asked for any further offenses to be taken into consideration. He’d made only the one plea in mitigation of his sentence: he might have known the possible provenance of the miscellaneous merchandise he’d acquired; might have known, if only he’d asked — but he’d just never asked. He was in business, that was all. He knew a few clients who wanted to buy things at less than market price. Who didn’t? “Just like yer duty-frees, innit? Everybody’s always looking round for a bargain, officer”...

So?

So why was she still standing there at the window, staring up and down the quiet road? The answer was simple: she just wanted a man around the place. Without Harry she felt isolated, lonely, unshared. She’d lost her man; and there was no man there to talk to, to talk to others about, to grumble at, to argue with, even to walk out on — because you couldn’t walk out on a man who wasn’t there to start with, now could you?

Where was he? What had happened?...

Not that her grass-widowhood had been entirely minus men. There’d been that nice little affair with the young plasterer who’d come in to patch up a crack in the kitchen wall. And that civilized little liaison with the Oxford don (so undemanding, so appreciative) she’d met in a Burford pub. But in each case, and on every occasion, she’d been so very, very careful...

Only once had she had that dreadful worry, after buying a Home Pregnancy Kit from Boots, when she’d just had to tell Harry, and when he’d been surprisingly sympathetic. If they did have a kid, it’d be good for him (him!) to have a mum and a dad. Yeah! He’d hated both his mum and his dad — but he’d hated his mum less, and it was proper to have a choice. Something else too: you know, when the poor little bugger went to school and one of the other kids said what’s your name or what’s your dad do — well, it was probably old-fashioned to think like that but, yeah! better to have two of them, two parents. So she ought to change her name to his, but no need for any of all that nuptial stuff! Just for the kid’s sake, mind — nothing to do with any social worker!

But she’d be “Debbie Repp,” then; and that would be too close to “demirep” (a word she’d met in the “intercrural” article), which she’d looked up in the biggest dictionary she could find in the Burford Public Library: “a person, esp. a woman, of dubious and libidinous disposition.” Her name, she’d decided, would henceforth remain “Richardson.” And in any case the subsequent messy miscarriage had settled that domestic crisis.

At 12:50 P.M. she left her vigil for the kitchen, where she felt the neck of the champagne bottle, standing beside two glasses on the table there. Inappropriately chambré she decided (another recent addition to her vocabulary), and she put it back in the fridge. Not Premier Division stuff: £8.99 from the supermarket, although in truth she’d begrudged even that. Money! God, how important that was in life! They had enough money — what’s more, money temporarily held in her own name. But that was Harry’s money, and she would never dare to touch more of it than the reasonably generous allowance he’d authorized.

She’d taken some occasional office-cleaning jobs in Burford, usually from 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. But £4.75 per hour was hardly the rate of remuneration to support any reasonable lifestyle; certainly not the style she’d begun to get accustomed to with Harry. So did she find herself almost hoping that he might pick up again on some of those very shady but very profitable activities?

No! No! No!

At 1:15 P.M. she rang Bullingdon Prison, learning that Harry Repp had left on schedule that morning with a bus warrant for Oxford. Nothing further they could tell her: no longer their responsibility, was he? She could ring the Probation Office in Oxford — that might have been his first port-of-call. Which number she was about to dial when she noticed a car pulling up outside — an R-Reg., dark blue, expensive-looking model; and a man she’d never seen before getting out of it, and walking toward her up the narrow, amateurishly cemented front path.