Possession (8 page)

I think it was this last sentiment—this complacent assumption that “everything” was the sum of such
component
parts as these—this it was that made me lose my temper.

“What are you insinuating?” I cried. “What business is it of yours—and after all these years, too? If the verdict at the time was suicide—then it
was
suicide! The police don’t just laugh that sort of thing off, you know! If a person is found hanged, there’s bound to be the most terrific enquiry made. They sift the evidence; examine the scene of the crime; question everyone for miles round. They
couldn’t
be wrong. Naturally, there’d also be a lot of ignorant chatter and gossip going around—especially in a girls’ school. I can see that you kids would have been all agog with the drama of it, and would have swallowed whole any bit of gossip or rumour that came your way. But you’re not a kid now. You’re a grown woman. Think about it. Do you really imagine that a pack of ignorant schoolgirls were more likely to hit on the truth than the police? The police, with all their experience, their skill, their special equipment—”

“And with Mr Redmayne himself a policeman?” Sonja interrupted sweetly. “You know, of course, don’t you, Mrs Erskine, that Mr Redmayne was quite high up in the police force of the district? It was he who was in charge of the enquiry into the girl’s death. Though not into his own, of course—” she gave a weird little laugh. “That’s what made
it so complicated; somebody else must have wangled the verdict on
him.
But of course,” she added graciously. “I’m sure you must know all this already. I’m sure Mervyn must have told you all about it. Well, naturally he would. It’s the sort of thing that prospective parents-in-law ought to be told.”

I
SUPPOSE THAT
when I got home that day I might have sat down and worked it all out on squared paper: who could have murdered who, and for what motive: all the permutations and combinations. But what would have been the use? Of all the wide circle of people who must have been in one way or another involved in the life and career of the deceased Mr Redmayne, I knew precisely three: his wife, his son, and now an old school-mate of the unfortunate girl with whom he seemed to have been involved. Why should these three, just because they were the ones I happened to know of, be reckoned the chief suspects? In Mr Redmayne’s life there could not fail to have been enmities, jealousies, involvements of all kinds of which I could guess nothing. Especially would this be the case with a man in his position: there would be professional rivalries among his colleagues; there would be all the resentments of all the people whose convictions he had helped to secure; the resentments, too, of their parents, wives, companions. And doubtless—since he was only human—there must have been occasions when his judgement had been at fault, leaving in its wake the burning, implacable resentment of injured innocence. And if, in addition to all this, Sonja had been right in her
conjecture
that he was given to seducing young girls, then there was no end to the troubles he might have brought upon himself. The revenge of fathers and boyfriends: blackmail by the girl herself: the possibilities were limitless.

Blackmail? I thought about this for a moment. Could this girl Avril have been blackmailing her elderly lover? She seemed—from Sonja’s account, anyway—to have been a precocious and unprincipled young woman, with a
knowledge
of the world’s wickedness far beyond her years.
Brought up by foster-parents too; they could not have been very affectionate or attentive ones, or they would never have allowed her to lead such a life. Or was I misjudging them? Had they started out full of kindness and good intentions, and then been bludgeoned by her teenage wildness into a sort of baffled, numb hostility, abandoning in despair any further attempts at understanding or control? I have seen this happen even with real parents, when the pressures become too agonising to be borne.

There was no way of knowing. Probably, now, no one would ever know the truth about the tragedy—the double tragedy. All one could do now was to accept the official verdicts. True or false, if the whole massed machinery of the law hadn’t been able to overthrow them at the time, it was very certain that the idle suspicions of an ordinary citizen weren’t going to make much of a dent in them now. There was absolutely nothing that anybody could, or should, do to question or throw doubt on any of it.

But unfortunately this fact didn’t quite free me from
all
responsibility. There was still one decision which I had to make, and make quickly, before Sarah came home for the weekend. Should I tell her—should I even give her any inkling—of the uncomfortable questions that Sonja had raised by her revelations? I say I had to make this decision, but I think I am being a little dishonest in putting it in this way: the decision was already made, before I even began thinking about it. The mental process which I described to myself at the time as “deciding” was really, I see now, merely a marshalling of support for the decision which I had, in my heart, already reached.

I wasn’t going to tell her. Why upset her with a piece of spiteful gossip whose truth there was no way of checking? It wasn’t as if there was the faintest chance that she would change any of her plans as a result of hearing it. No girl of spirit—certainly not Sarah—would dream of letting her trust in the man she loved be shaken by such a tangle of insubstantial gossip. The most it would do would be to make
her angry—with Sonja for starting the rumours, and with me for taking any notice of them. It would be a sort of treachery, I told myself, to our whole relationship. There were lots of maxims supporting my decision, and in my mind I ran through the lot of them. “Never repeat unkind gossip.” “Never interfere between husband and wife.” (Well, Sarah and Mervyn weren’t husband and wife yet, but the principle was the same.) “Let your children make their own mistakes.” “Speech is silver, silence is golden”—Oh, lots of them. By telling Sarah of my conversation with Sonja, I would be transgressing the lot. And in a particularly nasty, underhand sort of way, too, just like all those mothers-in-law you read about in the magazine articles. Not the direct attack on the prospective son-in-law, but the spiteful innuendo. That’s what it would look like: that’s what—God help me!—it might
be
?
Is this how it starts, this possessive mother thing? Does it start, in utter benevolence, from a desperate, loving need to protect your child from hurt? From
real
hurt, I mean; from the real, irreversible hurts that belong to adult status? Was this simple terror about a beloved daughter’s future the beginning of the slippery slope at the bottom of which lies Possessiveness? After a series of such terrors, each worse than the last, do we wake up one morning, we mothers, to find that it has all added up to being an Interfering
Mother-in
-Law, with all our enlightened friends pointing and jeering? Was this how it had been for Mervyn’s mother, in the beginning? Had she unwittingly let her natural anxieties take a hold, become an obsession, so that by now every movement her son made was fraught with terror for her, lest it should lead him into suffering? For the first time I felt a flicker of something other than scorn towards her; and with it an absolute, rock-like determination never to be like her. Never, ever. How could I, with my long-held principles? And with my emancipated friends all watching?

And as it turned out, all this spiritual struggle—if struggle it had really been—was by the next day rendered
superfluous
by a sudden total change in the whole situation. Or what
we thought at the time was a total change. Anyway, let me describe to you the events of the next day, exactly as they fell out, so that you can draw your own conclusions, just as we, at the time, had to draw ours.

It was Sunday, one of those warm, winter days that always fill me with an obscure uneasiness. There you are, settled comfortably into your thickest woollies, the kitchen boiler glowing, and the fire in the sitting room blazing brightly—and then, suddenly, there is this unseasonable sunshine, pouring in at every window, dimming the bright flames, rendering your cosy preparations ridiculous. And yet you can’t at a moment’s notice replace those glowing coals with dried ornamental grass in the grates. It is
really
winter still, and you go out of your over-heated house into the strange, damp warmth: the still, golden air closes in on you; the lawn is suddenly greener than you ever remember it, like a lawn in fairyland: and in the flower beds the tiny tips of crocuses are already visible, too soon, making a mistake down there in the dark, damp earth that should be asleep. No, I don’t like those mornings, when the year seems to have lost its way, and to be heading back into spring without ever having plunged down into the frost, and the snow, and the long dark nights: and this is just how it was that Sunday morning when Mervyn arrived, in his little red car, to take Sarah for a trip into the country.

Nothing extraordinary about this, of course. It wasn’t even unexpected. Sarah had told me, as soon as she got home yesterday, that Mervyn would be taking her out for the day today. The winter sun glistened on his sparse hair as he walked jauntily up to our front door; he looked eager, bird-like somehow, with his long nose and the scissor
movements
of his long legs as he strode up the path.

“Lovely day, isn’t it, Mrs Erskine?” he called to me—I was leaning out of our bedroom window as he arrived; and of course I had to agree. You can’t—especially out of a top floor window—answer a cheery conventional greeting by explaining exactly how you feel about unseasonable
sunshine
;
so I smiled to him, and waved, and soon I heard him talking to Sarah in the hall. Their voices rose and fell amicably; I imagine they were discussing where to go, where to stop for lunch and so on. I thought they would be setting off any minute; but the voices went on and on, and after a bit I began to feel I had better go down. Janice, I knew, was lurking in her room waiting for them to go—her dislike of Mervyn was still unabated, and she manoeuvred constantly to avoid meeting him. For me to appear to be lurking out of sight as well would be too ridiculous. I had just resolved to go down and make a pot of coffee for everyone when the telephone rang, and I heard Sarah go and answer it. Expecting the summons to be for me—it would be Liz, I thought, wailing some more about the Scouts’ Jumble, and trying to involve me in some terrible network of telephone messages about whose fault it was that the van hadn’t arrived yesterday—I went out onto the landing.

“Why—yes, of course we will,” Sarah was saying. She sounded anxious and a little puzzled. And then: “No, we’re not in any special hurry. But what is it? Has something happened?” A pause. Then: “Oh. Oh, I
am
sorry. Would you like to talk to Mervyn himself, though? He’s right here beside me. Perhaps he could meet you at the bus stop, or something?” Another pause. I could imagine Mrs
Redmayne’s
breathy gabbling voice coming down the wire, and I tried to guess what sort of pretext she had thought up this time for preventing the innocent Sunday outing. Or was she not planning to prevent it, but only to spoil it—to ensure that the young couple should set off late, with Mervyn already irritable, and the best of the sunshine over? Yes, it must be this sunshine that had been the last straw to her. She must have pulled aside her bedroom curtains and stared, bleary and incredulous, into the stunning radiance of the winter morning. It must have struck her like a blow. As well as youth and love, they were to have
this
!
The
contemplation
of such happiness would be intolerable to her; it must have hurt her shadowed little spirit just as the light was
hurting her sleep-filled eyes. So she had dropped back the curtains, and in the safety of her once-more sunless room had scuttled across to the telephone, making up her story as she went.

Thus I reconstructed the scene at the other end of the line. It was difficult to verify, for Sarah was now answering in anxious monosyllables, with long pauses in between. Presently she rang off, and came slowly up the stairs.

“Mummy,” she said. “Is it all right? Mother (she already called Mrs Redmayne ‘Mother’, to my deep but secret disgust) wants to come round and see you for a few minutes this morning. She’s on her way now. I’ll go and make some coffee, shall I?”

“Of course. That would be very nice,” I said guardedly; and then, testing out the situation: “But don’t
you
bother with the coffee, dear. You and Mervyn want to get off while the weather’s so lovely. Daddy and I will look after Mrs Redmayne. It’s time we old ones got to know each other better.”

Sarah hesitated. She looked uncomfortable.

“Thank you, Mummy, but I think Mervyn and I had better wait. She asked us to specially, you see. I think something’s happened to upset her.”

You bet it has, I thought. The thing that’s happened is that her precious son is going ahead with his plan to spend the whole of Sunday in the company of another woman. He has managed to resist all the nagging and pleading at home, so now she intends to come and make a scene
here
.

I went back into the bedroom to finish dressing. If I was to confront this relentless little nuisance of a woman with the coolness and dignity that the situation was going to demand, I must do it in something other than my old woollen housecoat. Ralph was still in bed, reading the Sunday papers. He laid down the colour supplement and regarded me uneasily.

“You’re
dressing
,”
he accused. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

Briefly, I told him, and he groaned.

“Too much happens in this house,” he complained. “On Sunday morning, too: why on earth can’t they all stay in bed?” His face darkened as a new and terrible thought struck him. “
I
don’t have to get up, do I?
I
haven’t got to come down and talk to the woman?”

“Well …” I had been going to point out to him his duties as host and prospective father-in-law; and then it occurred to me how much simpler it would all be if he
did
stay out of the way. There was going to be a scene, obviously, and men are usually as out of place in scenes as women usually are at football matches: they don’t know the rules; they can’t understand the system of scoring, and they are as likely as not to cheer the wrong side. So: “No, of course you needn’t,” I amended. “If there’s any coffee going I’ll try to smuggle some up to you; but it may be just plate-throwing. If so, I’ll let you know who wins.”

Pointing out that he didn’t care who won, he just wanted them not to do it here, and not on a Sunday morning, Ralph settled contentedly back among the papers; and a moment later the doorbell pealed through the house, loud and urgent.

It was obvious that Mrs Redmayne had been crying; obvious, too,—at least that’s how it seemed to me—that she had done nothing whatever to conceal the fact. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks blotchy, and no slightest trace of either rouge or powder suggested that she had made the smallest effort to improve her ravaged appearance. The fact that she was neatly, even meticulously, dressed in a
dove-grey
suit and freshly-laundered white blouse, only served to enhance the harrowing effect of her neglected face. Personally, I found her appearance utterly repellant; I could hardly bring myself to greet her civilly: but on my kind-hearted Sarah the spectacle had its intended (I imagine) effect. With a little cry of distress, she ran to her future mother-in-law, flung her arms round her neck, and begged her to tell us what was wrong.

At once Mrs Redmayne went into the brave-little-woman act. She gulped, swallowed back a sob, and smiled a brave little smile.

“It’s all right, dear; don’t worry. Don’t worry about me. I’m just a silly old woman, that’s all.”