Sunday Best (15 page)

‘Mrs Verrey Smith?'

It was the headmaster again. She was terrified. Did he have information she knew nothing of?

‘Mrs Verrey Smith?' he said again. ‘The most terrible thing has happened.'

‘Oh my God,' she said, ‘has anything happened to George?'

‘George?' he said. ‘How should I know, my good woman, if anything has happened to your husband? He's in bed at home, isn't he, or so you said.'

‘I'm sorry, headmaster, I'm just a little confused. I'm
worried about George, that's all. I'm running up and down the stairs all the time. He's not a good patient as you can imagine. I'm a little confused, that's all.' She knew she had to stop being chatty. It was the chat that liars used as cover, and the headmaster, thick as he was, was bound to see through it.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I'm sorry about that, but I've got to talk to him.' She hesitated. ‘He's sleeping at the moment,' was all she could say, wondering how this fact could tally with all the running up and down stairs she was doing after him. ‘I'd rather not wake him. But I could give him a message,' she said, willing to help, ‘and he could ring you back.'

‘Well, it's confidential of course, but I can tell you, since you're his wife, and it is a matter in which he is most urgently concerned. The most dreadful thing has happened. I have just been informed that Mr Parsons – you heard about the Parsons affair, I suppose – but that's of no consequence at the moment, well I've just been informed that poor Mr Parsons's body has been found behind the maintenance shed. He was found there early this morning, murdered. Now the police are investigating of course – a terrible interruption of the curriculum – and they are bound to interview all members of the staff. Now I'm not for one moment suggesting that your husband has anything to do with the matter. In fact it seems he has a better alibi than most of us. Ha ha. At least his doctor, who as you said visited him last night, can confirm his whereabouts, for the police seem to think that Parsons had been dead for at least twelve hours. But the police must see him. If he is not well enough to come to the school, then the police will insist on coming to the house. This is a dreadful business,' he went on, ‘and I'm sorry to upset you, but if it will help, I'll come along with the police to soothe matters.'

‘Yes, do,' she said, as if she were inviting him for a cup of tea. ‘I'm sure George will help all he can.'

She replaced the receiver, because the Cloth had rung off, and she sat at the table, no longer considering George as an adulterer, nor even as a monk manqué, seeking refuge in a monastery, but as a murderer, and she shuddered at the terrible implications for both him and for herself, and how this sudden unaccountable disappearance would single him out as the prime suspect. ‘George,' she screamed into the lonely empty house, ‘for God's sake, come home, get into bed, have
'flu, be ill, be dying, honestly and decently in your bed, anything, anything but a murderer.' She had never known Parsons and had no idea of what the headmaster had meant by the Parsons affair. If only she could find out, it might shed some light on George's disappearance. But whom could she ask? Whom could she tell? There was little point now in going to the police. They would be here soon enough on other matters, and then it would all be out under an open dark cloud.

She went over to the window again, and stared out into the empty street. She saw the Johnson door open, and she wondered who could be taking the air from that house of mourning. It was Tommy, and he seemed to steal out of the house, looking back at the front door to make sure he was not seen. He crept down the side of the path, brushing his legs against the low privet hedge, and once out of the gate, he made a dive for the Verrey Smith front door, bounding up the path, knocking loudly for immediate entry. She knew that he must have news of George. Tommy never came to call on her. As his form teacher's wife, she was strictly out of visiting bounds. And his news was urgent too. He had left a house of mourning to tell it. It had to be about George.

And indeed it was. He stood panting at the door. ‘Mrs Verrey Smith,' he said. ‘Your 'usband's my Dad. My Mum told me.'

He was gone before she could digest his news. As she closed the door, the impact of this new piece of information prickled her flesh. It could not be a joke. The boy was in no mood to be funny. He had been desperately serious. That much was clear. So George had kept her childless for seventeen years, and had gone next door to sire. But she did not hate him for it. It was Mrs Johnson she hated, and now she understood why her neighbour had shed no tears at the funeral. But George had gone. He had left her, and presumably also a son, and – she dared not think of it – perhaps he had left behind a corpse as well. She went into the kitchen, and leaning against the door, she sobbed aloud, ‘Come home, George. For God's sake, come home.'

When Emily Price, recently widowed, alighted from the train at Brighton station, she put down her suitcase and wondered what to do. Throughout the hour or so's journey from London, she had been too intent on being Emily Price to give much thought as to what Emily Price was going to do on arrival. People passed her by, rushing along the platform, anxious to get home, to suppers, to television sets, to recaps of the day, and in spite of her new identity which should have been company enough, Emily Price had a sinking feeling of loneliness. A young man, passing by in less of a hurry than the others, stopped by her side. ‘Can I help you?' he said. ‘You seem very lost.'

She hesitated before speaking. Not since her change only a few hours ago, though it seemed a lifetime, had she been directly encountered in speech. She trembled and the man took it for shyness and placed his hand on her arm. Thus encouraged, she whispered, ‘Do you know of a quiet hotel? I've nowhere to stay.'

He smiled at her, and she wondered how he saw her. Like his own mother perhaps, a trifle younger, but not young enough, she prayed to God, to warrant any more than his gentlemanly attentions. Although such an eventuality had occurred to her on viewing older men on the train, a possibility both exciting and frightening, she was not prepared to deal with it so soon. She gave him back a smile, a motherly one she hoped, and he took her arm as if he would look after her. Yes, he did know of a small hotel and he would take her there. His car was outside the station. He always left it there in the morning when he came up on the London train. He was in insurance, he told her without being asked. She was, in any case, still too unsure of her speech to invite any dialogue. She wondered at his forthcoming manner, and whether he was like this with everyone. She hoped
that he wasn't that lonely that he would have to pick up friendships on station platforms. Yet there was something quite desperate about him for one so young, a need to be totally known by a perfect stranger. They had reached the car by the time he'd touched the subject of his family. His father had died of a thrombosis three years ago, though he assured her that a heart condition was not conspicuous in his family tree. His mother lived alone in a little house on the Hove end, but he himself had moved into a small flat nearer the station. Yes, she was a wonderful woman, his mother, a little eccentric, you know, leaning over the passenger seat and locking the door from the inside. His mother had her little quirks, but then, women alone, he generalized, often fell into odd little habits. Emily was curious as to what form these strange habits took, and she hoped that with this subject, as with all others, he would elaborate. But he left them as ‘quirks' and nothing more, and it was clear that he did not want to go into them. He turned the car into a main shopping street, firing a direct question on the turn.

‘Have you got a job in Brighton?'

‘No, not yet,' she said slowly and quietly. ‘I shall be looking for one.'

‘D'you do any special kind of work?'

‘I thought I'd look for a job as a lady's companion. That would solve my accommodation problem as well.' She gave a deep sigh. She had uttered a long, long sentence, her first serious communication as a woman, and he was totally convinced by her.

‘You must meet my mother,' he said. ‘She often talks of having someone to live with her. The house is so big and she gets a bit lonely.' He had turned into a side street and pulled up outside a tall Victorian house in a terraced row. An ‘Apartments to Let' sign hung in the front window. From the look of the house, the young man had understood Emily's pocket, and she was grateful to him. Without thinking she put a hand on his arm and thanked him.

The young man seemed to know the hotel owner, and Emily was settled in with no difficulty. He carried her bag to the door, and took out his card and wrote his mother's name and telephone number on the back. ‘I'll tell her about you,' he said. ‘Please get in touch. You never know. You might be happy to stay with her.' He shrugged his shoulders as if this were a very doubtful possibility. She thanked him again.

‘You have been very kind,' she said. ‘I hope it's not been too much out of your way.' She patted his cheek to confirm the generation gap, but she realized her mistake, as he in turn, patted hers. In panic, she wondered whether he felt the stubble, and she felt herself blushing. He smiled at what he took to be her shyness. ‘I'll see you again,' he said. ‘I'm sure of that.'

Emily went to her room and straight to the dressing-table mirror. No stubble was visible and she felt her cheek. It was possible that he hadn't noticed. She hadn't shaved for four days. In her old life, once a week had always been her shaving pattern. So little hair grew, that even that sometimes was not necessary, and she was grateful for her hairlessness now.

She sat on the bed and examined the room. The dressing-table top delighted her. It held many glass bowls and jars, and one bowl even held a powder puff. It was very much a woman's room, with lace and chintz curtains, and a flowered candlewick bedspread. On the bedside table was a small lamp with a crocheted cover with a cluster of china roses as its base. She put her case on the bed, and on opening it, remembered she had nothing to change into. Neither could she unpack. A wardrobe of men's clothing would betray her to the proprietor. She dared not wash her face, for she had no make-up replacement. She counted out her money. There was enough for a week's stay at the hotel together with food, and the bare essentials of make-up. She would have meantime to find a post and accommodation. She closed her case again and put it under the bed. She would have to get a job pretty soon in order to accumulate enough money to buy the essentials to prolong her deception.

She decided to take a walk along the promenade, with perhaps a cup of tea somewhere, before retiring. She locked the door and took the key. Outside she crossed over the main road and leaned over the barrier to look at the sea. The enormity of the change that had taken place in her, and the complicated machinations of that change, suddenly depressed her. For a moment she thought of returning to the hotel, to her trousers and jacket in the suitcase, and of going back to London. But having tasted the joys of being a woman, she was loath now to go back to a life of fiction. She thought of her wife with remorse. It was a sensation that was totally new to her and opened up possibilities of a wider pattern of feeling than she had ever known before. It was frightening. Her new commitment
needed more courage than her old. It was the lack of money and the solitude of it all, she told herself. She felt a tear on her cheek and shivered at a sudden unaccountable thought of her mother. She had surrendered her old life and the greatest compensation of that surrender was the destruction of its eternal travelling companion, her father. Had she wrought such a change in herself, only to pick up yet another familiar one even more unaccommodating than the last? It did not bear thinking about. She looked back at the sea, and its enormity and its faint suggestions of God and eternity had a depressing effect on her. She went back to her hotel and ordered tea in her room.

She wanted very much to cry but, mindful of her purse, crying was impractical. She needed to hold on to her make-up until replacement was available. And so she cried inside herself. It would be easy to go home, she thought. Joy would be lost without her, and the boys in her class; they would miss her too, she hoped. She could still get the late train back to London, and change into George in the lavatory. She would think up some excuse for the evening's absence. But in the end, the thought sickened her. The name of George Verrey Smith was not yet alien enough to unruffle her, and when she recalled it, it was with nausea. No, a going back was now impossible. She had buried her father once and for all, and that burial had given her birth. And now she could not stem the tears, knowing that she could never go home again, because Emily Price had overtaken her.

It was five o'clock in the evening, and Joy Verrey Smith had not seen her husband for thirty-two hours. During the day she had smoked endlessly, and drunk tea, moving between the kitchen table and the net curtains in the front room. Now she sat down, shrivelled in anguish, recapping the terrifying items of information that had punctured her day. Her husband had disappeared. Mr Parsons had been murdered. Tommy next door was her stepson. She tried to think of each item separately, because in her heart she refused them any connection. She did not think of what she would tell the police when they came, as come they must, sooner or later. But she knew what she would not tell them. There would be no mention of Tommy, nor of George's little hobby. That much respect she had for him, and now, as the hours of his absence lengthened, that much love.

She got up again to go to the curtain, and as she crossed the hall the bell rang. Through the frosted window pane, she could discern the Cloth's unbroken collar. He was alone. There were no shadows around him. She would have to tell him the truth. George had simply disappeared and he could infer what he liked from it. She opened the door.