Chapter 17 Physique Pictorial
On Saturday morning, the entire household overslept. Unsurprisingly so; last night’s group effort had taken more time and energy than anyone had anticipated.
Once Jimmy was deposited in the Anderson shelter, they mopped and scrubbed the drawing room’s parquet floor, refilling buckets of hot water and bleach until squeezing the mop left the water barely pink.
In the end, the wood looked perfectly clean.
But whether an application of luminol might reveal vestiges of blood, no one was sure.
(Mina provided a lesson in this key tool in the detective’s arsenal, courtesy of thriller-film plots.) A replacement rug would be acquired, Honor promised.
Everyone insisted they’d chip in for the cost. It was bizarrely reassuring, thought Robbie, the feeling of cooperation that had enveloped them.
As in wartime, strife and fear made for unlikely collaborators.
A siege-like mood spilled into the weekend.
For the moment, it was agreed, no visitors would be admitted.
Since nobody felt much like going out, or being alone, they ate their meals together and passed the time playing cards and charades.
Mina even called in sick to the cinema. (She, who’d never been ill in her life.
Like most healthy people, she regarded the very idea of illness with skepticism.)
It was Robbie who, after lunch on Saturday, brought up the question of what to do with Jimmy.
His poor body, abandoned like rubbish in the freezing cold!
It was all Robbie could see, all he could think about.
“I know it’s still chilly out and everything,” he began, trying to sound reasonable, prudent, as though he were merely weighing the practicalities.
“But we can’t leave him in there indefinitely. ”
“You’re right,” said Honor. “Of course you’re right. There are some spades in the Anderson shelter, aren’t there?”
“You mean we…” said Saul in a scandalized whisper.
“Unless you’ve got any better ideas?” she said. “If we all pitch in, it oughtn’t take too long.”
“Fine,” said Saul. “But let’s wait until at least midnight.”
“I suppose,” said Robbie slowly, “it’ll be easier to move him after rigor mortis has begun to dissipate.”
“Mina, I’ll lend you some old rags to wear,” said George.
“I’m sure,” said Saul, “that we can manage without Mina’s help.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “In fact, I’m sure Robbie and I can manage it between us.”
Robbie looked startled, evidently not so sure.
“Greta will be here in the morning,” said Honor, smoothing out The Sunday Times women’s page in her lap. “We must decide whether to get rid of Jimmy’s things.”
Robbie put down the Observer section he was pretending to read.
The newsprint had been shimmering past his eyeline like ants on sugar.
He wondered when he’d be able to sleep again.
This morning, he’d finally drifted into a fitful drowse as the sun came up.
Then the sound of church bells had jerked him back into painful consciousness, his pajamas drenched in sweat.
He heard himself speak and was disturbed by the evenness of his tone.
“Let’s look at it from both sides. We could be proactive.
Wait a few days then report him missing, purport to be worried, as all his clothes et cetera are still here.
That’s what an innocent person should do, isn’t it?
Or might it look suspicious?” He bit his thumbnail and frowned. “God, I don’t know.”
George, curled up at one end of the sofa, had appeared to be snoozing, but she opened her eyes.
“No, I think you’re right. It would give the appearance of innocence, and the police won’t care anyway.
I knew a chap who vanished for three months, and his family were told a grown man can go missing anytime he likes, that it was none of their affair. ”
“Where was he?” asked Mina. She looked up from the game of solitaire she’d been playing, seemingly for hours, while tensely cross-legged on the rug.
“Oh, he’d taken up with some sort of loony religious order. Turned up like a bad penny.”
“But,” said Saul, “your friend probably wasn’t known to the police before, was he?”
Honor tapped the ash from her now perpetual cigarette. “Saul’s right. The police might be interested if we tell them Jimmy has disappeared. And having them sniffing around—well, I don’t know if my nerves can take it.”
“What, then?” said Robbie. “We dispose of his stuff, and afterward? If anybody ever asks, we say he moved out?”
“Who’s going to ask?” said Mina. The poor girl wasn’t looking well, thought Saul. Her eyes were puffy, her skin pale. “Because if someone decides to start wondering why…”
“No one’s going to ask,” said Honor. “But yes, let’s get rid of his things, then to all intents and purposes he’s moved out. I did tell him, at the pub on Friday, that he had to leave.”
“Seems simpler that way, certainly,” said George. “Tidier.”
Mina gathered all her playing cards in a heap and sighed shakily. “Doesn’t anyone else feel that maybe we’ve made a huge mistake? We could still go to the police. Tell them it was an accident. Why would they not believe us? After all—”
“Mina darling, come and sit next to me,” said George.
“Come on.” Mina clambered up from the floor, and George grasped her hand.
“No one is going to the police. Not now, not ever. Is that perfectly clear? Everything’s going to be fine.
Anyway, it’s too late. We’ve buried him.
What do you suggest, that we dig him back up? ”
“But…” Mina’s lower lip trembled.
Saul shot Honor an aghast look and said, “George is right, Mina dear. We must be sensible. Getting the police involved at this stage would be… would be…”
“Suicidal,” muttered Robbie, examining his chewed-to-the-quick thumbnail. “Utterly suicidal.”
“All right, then,” said Honor decisively. “I’ll sort out Jimmy’s room now. Saul, would you give me a hand?”
“We can’t go on like this,” said Honor, closing the bedroom door behind them. “Not talking about it. Even if you tell me you hate me, we must somehow clear the air.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Saul. “But I am awfully confused.” He sat on the end of the bed and looked up at her, dark-eyed and baleful.
“Why didn’t you come to me? When Jack arrived, why didn’t you tell me what was going on?
I take it he was threatening you with exposure, with telling people who you really are—but I knew all that anyway.
If you’d confided in me, I might have helped.
Instead, you let that monster live here while lying to me about it. ”
Honor waited to see if he’d finished. She wanted him to get it all off his chest. Then she sat down, too. How she wished that was Jack’s only bargaining chip! “You must think me pretty feeble,” she said, “if you imagine such a silly threat was all it took.”
“What, then? Tell me! What possible reason can there be to withhold anything now? He’s dead! Thank God, he’s dead! I’m sorry, I know he was your flesh and blood. But you can’t blame me for rejoicing.”
“No need to apologize,” she said. “And I can assure you, I’d have gone back to being Elsie Armstrong from Stepney if it meant seeing the back of Jack. I’d have done it like a shot.”
“Well, now you don’t have to.” Saul sighed with awful weariness. “Were you ever going to tell me about him?”
Honor smoothed the edge of the counterpane. “I thought I could pay him to go away. And then things would return to normal. I didn’t want to upset you needlessly. But he took nearly everything I had, and it wasn’t enough. I even asked the bank for a loan.”
Maybe I ought to tell Saul the truth, she reflected.
But she could hardly bear to think of it, let alone confess it.
Some truths slashed a rent in one’s existence when spoken out loud, a rent that could never be repaired.
Once, she’d thought that love could enact some sort of exoneration.
No, not exoneration, that was the wrong word.
She wasn’t only thinking of her conscience (and certainly not her eternal soul).
By sleeping with Saul, by trying to make him fall in love with her, she’d hoped for an exorcism.
A reprieve from being haunted by the past. She hadn’t realized that her lies, her guilt, would keep them disconnected, estranged, even when physically entwined.
And yet… She let herself think back to the first night they spent together, now more than five years ago.
She had sensed some mutual well of affection, a lovely unfamiliar brightness and security, a happiness both physical and emotional that remained, tantalizingly, just outside her grasp. Like something in a dream.
“Since we’re bringing everything out into the open,” said Saul, “I ought to tell you—Mina knows everything. I confided in her when I began to have my suspicions about Jimmy. A couple of weeks ago.”
Honor sat up straight. “Everything? You mean…”
“I mean she knows you were Elsie Armstrong, that Jimmy was really your younger brother, Jack, that he and your husband went to prison for what they did. I’m sorry, Honor. I had to talk to someone. Don’t worry, though, she knows I told her in confidence.”
“Well.” She was more lost for words than angry. “I suppose it hardly matters now.” After a long pause she said, “How did she react?”
“She doesn’t think badly of you. Not after I explained what happened to Naomi and her husband. Who wouldn’t want to put all that behind them?”
This seemed to bring them to a tentative accord. They began gathering Jack’s possessions and putting them in his cardboard suitcase. There wasn’t much: a few items of clothing, a shaving kit, some paperback novels.
“Surprisingly educated taste in reading,” remarked Saul, holding up The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene and The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to be surprised. He was your brother, after all.”