She saw him. The focus of her eyes changed and she smiled and he went in.
Sunshine or not, it was only January, and the gathering darkness as they drove back to London affected their mood, dampening
their lightness with the realisation of their problems. Slider voiced it unwillingly as he drew up outside her house.
‘I mustn’t be too late back tonight.’ She made a small turning-away movement of her head, and he recognised it as hurt, which
hurt him. ‘We could go out for a quick bite to eat, if you like,’ he said tentatively.
She turned back to look at him clearly. ‘No, that would waste time. Let’s have a drink here, and a snack if you like. I’ll
light the fire.’
‘I’ll have to make some phone calls,’ he said, and then added hastily, ‘to Atherton, and the station. I haven’t called in
all day.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You must do what you have to.’
But when they went in the phone began instantly to ring, and she sprinted for it and picked it up before the answering-machine
could intercept. Slider felt a chill of foreboding even
before she made polite responses into the receiver and then turned to offer it to him.
‘For you,’ she said. It was too dark in the hall to see the expression of her face, but her voice said clearly enough that
she knew the day was over for them.
It was O’Flaherty. ‘Izzat you Billy? Christ, we been trying to get yez all day. Atherton said y’ might be there. Jaysus, are
you at that owl caper, now?’
‘What is it, Pat?’ Slider forbore to rise to the bait.
‘Ah, the world’s a wheel o’ fortune, so it is,’ O’Flaherty remarked cryptically. ‘Well, I’m sorry to spoil your shenanigans,
but you’d better come in here straight away, me fine Billy, and thank God and Little Boy Blue that we never phoned your owl
lady to ask where y’ were.’ Little Boy Blue was what O’Flaherty called Atherton. They had a robust but not unfriendly contempt
for each other.
A complex blend of relief, disappointment and apprehension was having its effect on Slider’s bowels, and he said impatiently,
‘For Christ’s sake, Pat, what’s happened?’
‘The owl woman, Mrs Gostyn. They been trying to raise her all day, and getting anxious as time went on and she never showed
up. So Boy Blue goes in troo the winder and finds her dead on the floor.’
The receiver suddenly felt slippery and cold in his grasp. In the darkness of the unlit hall he sought Joanna’s eyes, and
her face seemed to swim unattached in the shadows. Then she reached out and switched on the light, and everything was ordinary
again, and he only felt very tired.
‘How did it happen?’ he asked.
‘Well, she might’ve slipped and banged her head on the fender,’ O’Flaherty said with an emphasis on the word ‘might’ that
told Slider all he needed to know.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said. Joanna turned away and went into the kitchen, which he recognised as her way of relieving him of
responsibility for her. Their day was over; but under the surface of churning reactions there was still a peaceful-ness, because
she was there, and they felt what they felt about each other, which meant that they couldn’t
not
go on being together in some way or another, and so everything was all right really, wasn’t it?
Atherton had set his alarm to get him up with the birds, but what he was in fact up with was a disgusting crunching and slurping
noise from under the bed, where Oedipus had retired to eat a mouse. Atherton got out of bed with a curse, and on his hands
and knees cautiously lifted the corner of the counterpane. In the fluffy twilight the cat looked at him over its shoulder
with yellow headlamp eyes and a tail hanging out of the corner of its mouth.
‘Just be sure you eat it all,’ Atherton said, remembering the time he had found four abandoned feet on his pillow, and headed
for the bathroom. He had a hot shower, shaved under it, washed his hair, and then stood under the streaming, steaming water
and thought about Slider.
It was really the most extraordinary thing to have happened. He hadn’t met the Marshall woman, of course, but even if she
combined all the feminine charms, it was hard to see how she could have got Slider off the rails of a lifetime in a matter
of hours. To have slept with her – and really slept — the first evening of their acquaintance, and then to have taken her
with him when he went out on police business, was so far out of character for his superior that Atherton, who believed in
Love only as a theoretical possibility – as something that hadn’t been definitely disproved – could only think that Slider
was heading for some kind of a breakdown.
There was no fool like an unpractised fool, he thought, turning off the water and stepping into a very large, thick bath sheet
– Atherton took washing very seriously – and to
his knowledge Slider had never been unfaithful to Irene before, probably not even in thought. He was one of those rarities,
a truly virtuous man, and Atherton, who was all for Slider’s getting out from under Irene’s thumb on principle, didn’t know
whether the poor sap could handle it. If he was going to go off the rails, he’d probably do it in a spectacular way, and to
be heading for that kind of crisis in the middle of a murder investigation was catastrophic.
There were plenty of people in the department, he thought as he wielded the hairdryer, who would be happy to clamber a step
higher up the ladder by treading on the head of anyone else, however much they liked them, who seemed not to have his entire
mind on his job. And Slider, as Atherton was aware, had been passed over for promotion before because of department politics.
All in all, it behoved Atherton to get his head down and produce something to show up at the next meeting, because so far
they seemed to have got precisely nowhere.
He dressed, checked quickly under the bed – Oedipus had departed, leaving only a forlorn scrap of grey fur – and went off
to St Thomas’s to try to intercept Helen Morris as she came off duty.
Slider was woken by Kate spilling tea onto his chest as she climbed onto the bed balancing a mug.
‘Time to get up, Daddy,’ she said, her bubblegum-sweet breath stertorous with the effort of retaining at least some of the
tea within the mug. Slider elbowed himself sufficiently upright to field it before she scalded him again.
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ he said dopily, and tried for the sake of her feelings to sip. It had been one hell of a session
last night. He felt as though he had only just gone to sleep. He felt as though he had been beaten all over, and he had a
smoke-headache and a dire feeling of oppression in his sinuses. He abandoned the attempt at creative parenthood, put the mug
on the bedside table and flopped back onto the pillows with a groan.
‘You mustn’t go back to sleep, Daddy – you’ve got to get up,’ Kate said severely. She eyed him curiously like a bird
eyeing a wormhole. ‘Were you drunk last night?’
‘Of course not,’ Slider mumbled. ‘Why d’you say that?’
‘Mummy thought you were.’
He opened one eye. ‘She didn’t say that,’ he said with some assurance. Kate shrugged her birdlike shoulders.
‘She didn’t say so, but I bet that’s what she thought anyway. She’s cross about something, and she said you were very late
coming home, and when Chantal’s Dad comes home late
he’s
usually drunk.’
‘You think too much,’ Slider said. ‘Anyway, I was working, not drinking. You know, don’t you, that I have to work funny hours
sometimes?’ She shrugged, unconvinced, and opened her mouth to deliver more opinions. Desperate to deflect her, Slider said
unguardedly, ‘What are you going to do today?’
The already opened mouth dropped still further in amazement at his stupidity. ‘But it’s the school
fair
today,’ she said with huge and patient emphasis, like a nurse in a home for the senile. ‘I’m going to be on a
stall
I’m going to be a
Mister Man.
Mummy’s made me a costume and
everything]’
‘Oh, is that today?’ Slider said feebly.
Kate sighed heavily, blowing a strand of sticky, light-brown hair across her face. ‘Of course it’s today. You
know
it is,’ she said inexorably.
‘I thought it was next week,’ Slider said with a growing sense of doom.
‘Well it isn’t.’ She eyes him suspiciously. ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’
‘Darling, I can’t. I’ve got to go to work.’
Violent despair contorted her features. ‘But Daddy, you promised!’ she wailed.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t help it. I’ve got an important case on at the moment, and I just have to go in to work.
It’s a murder case – you know what that is, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do. I’m not stupid,’ she said crossly. ‘But you don’t really have to go, do you? Not all day?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Is that why Mummy’s cross?’
‘I don’t think she knows yet,’ Slider said weakly. ‘Get off the bed, darling, I have to go to the bathroom.’
‘I
bet
she doesn’t know,’ Kate said with relish, bounced off the bed and hared off downstairs, a delighted harbinger of doom. Blast
the child, Slider thought as he plodded what felt like uphill to the bathroom. He urinated, stood for a pleasurable moment
or two scratching himself, and then started to run a bath. The running water made so much noise he didn’t hear Irene behind
him until she spoke.
‘Is it true?’
‘Is what true?’ he temporised.
‘Kate says you’ve got to work today.’ Her voice was icy, and he turned to see how bad it was. It was bad. Her lips were thin
and white, which made her look five years older than her true age. It was an unlovely expression, he thought, on any woman.
He felt around in his mind for a moment for guilt, and could find nothing new there, only the familiar old sorts with which
he was almost comfortable. Joanna was there, but as a loosely woven, shining net of pleasure, and the glow coming off the
thoughts of her seemed to be protecting him from feeling anything bad about it.
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, and drew breath to add some extenuating detail, but she was in first.
‘I’m surprised you bothered to come home at all,’ she said bitterly. ‘It hardly seems worth it. Why don’t you move in with
Atherton? At least you won’t disturb him coming in all hours of the night – especially if it’s him you’re sitting up drinking
with.’
Slider allowed himself a touch of impatience. ‘Oh come on! I wasn’t drinking last night, as you know perfectly well. I was
working. I told you the old lady, the only witness in this blasted case, was found dead. You know how much work that means.
And,’ he added, managing to work up a bit of momentum. ‘I think it’s a bit much for you to go telling Kate I came in drunk.’
He thought the false accusation would sidetrack her, but she only said with deep irony, ‘And now I suppose you’ve got to go
in again?’
‘Yes, I’ve got to,’ he returned her words defiantly.
‘And you couldn’t possibly have told me earlier, of course?’
‘No, of course I couldn’t. I didn’t know earlier, did I?’
‘You realise that it’s Kate’s fair today. Of course, she’s only been looking forward to it for weeks.’
‘Well, I can’t see that that -’
‘And that Matthew’s playing in the match today. His first chance in the school team. Which you said you were so proud of.’
‘Oh God, is that today as well? I’d forgotten -’
‘Yes, you’re good at forgetting things like that, aren’t you? Things to do with your home and family. Unimportant things –
like the fact that you were supposed to take Kate and me to the fair and then take Matthew on to the match. You forgot that
you were supposed to be
here
for a change.’
‘Well I can’t help it, can I?’ he defended himself automatically. ‘What do you want me to do, tell Division I’m busy?’
Irene never answered inconvenient questions. ‘One day,’ she said bitterly. ‘Just one day. Is that so much to ask? Of course
I wouldn’t expect you to do anything for me, but I would have thought you could spare a few hours for your children, when
they’ve been looking forward to it so much. But you’re much too busy. I should have expected it.’
‘It’s my job, for God’s sake!’ he cried, goaded.
‘Your job,’ she said in tones of withering scorn.
‘It’s an important case -’
‘So you say. But I’ll bet you one thing – it won’t get you anywhere. It won’t get you promoted. And shall I tell you why?
Because you run around like their little dog, working all the hours God sends, at their beck and call, and they don’t respect
you for it, oh no! They’re going to keep you down because you’re too useful for them to promote you!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Irene, do you think I’d do it if it wasn’t necessary? Do you think I like going to work on a Saturday?’
Suddenly things changed. Her face, taut with anger, seemed to loosen. She was no longer playing a part in her own personal
soap opera: she looked at him for once as though she really saw him; she looked at him with a sadness of disillusion which
hurt him unbearably.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you do. I think you prefer working at any time to being with us.’
It was too close to the truth. He stared at her helplessly, wanting to reach out his hands to her, but it was too long since
they had touched habitually for the gesture to be possible without intolerable exposure. If he reached out and she rejected
him, it would hurt both of them too much. The distance they had established between them was the optimum for being able to
continue living together, and this was not the moment to change the parameters.
‘Oh Irene,’ was all he managed to say from the depths of his pity.
‘Don’t,’ she said abruptly, and went away.
Slider sat down on the rim of the bath and stared at his hands, and longed suddenly and fiercely for Joanna, for someone not
filled to the brim with obscure and irremediable hurt. He remembered Atherton once saying that the best thing you could give
to someone you loved was the ability to please you. He didn’t know where Atherton got it from, but it was true. He loved Joanna
not least because he could so easily give her pleasure; but he was not so naive that he didn’t know that might easily be true
of the beginning of any affair.