The knots that love ties

What Clarissa wanted

"Clarissa," he called, "I'm off."  Michael smoothed his brown hair, slightly distinguished grey at the temples. He seemed satisfied with the image he admired in the mirror. He put on his leather jacket over the brown zipped-up cardigan. It could be cold outside. "Cheerio, darling." It had become mundane, his continuing weekly infidelity with her. He bent over the shapeless mound beneath the bed-clothes, and kissed the top of her head as it showed above the sheets. “See you anon,” he called as he always did, and closed the front door of her flat, leaving her to feel the lesser woman in his life, as she always did. Despite its regular routine, their precise replay each week recharged him again. It renewed his sense of being alive and took him more enthusiastically back to the other life, the one where Clarissa did not belong.

            She had stirred, heard his light tread on the stairs, and fell back inert again beneath the warm blankets. The encounter with Michael always sickened her afterwards. It placed her on the second-hand, used-goods shelf. By next week, she knew, she would be avid for him, his complacent greeting, his energy in bed, inside her. This weekly hunger became a sad misery for her, a weekly numbing of life and hope.

            Later, pedalling her bicycle heavily to work, the sharp tears that were nearly in her eyes began to recede. The crisp morning was bright, inviting a view into the future. Closing off the musty dark of her feverish night, it was always a new beginning to her sense of independence again, alone but it was her own future. She was not just Michael’s 

            If she had an abscess of dirt and guilt deep in her belly, between her legs, she also had a shining, pert brilliance to show the world outside, to charm and to entertain. It was what the Gallery paid for - her engagement with customers, with the necessary critics, though the artists never gave her much time.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Some weeks later, Michael waited for a train home, a light bright evening. It seemed like many others in that summer. But a cloud hung inside him. This morning,  Clarissa, her small, tight face staring intently into his, had told him they must finish. She had been anxious, intense and solicitous of him. Her fresh English composure made her concern seem like tentacles drowning him in a fierce pity. As he sat in the bare waiting room glowered into a book, others would have thought him seriously studying; but inside, he chased a desperate revenge from corner to corner of his mind trying to wrench it out, expunge it, and calm his prickling eyes, smooth the tension from his neck, from his face, from the short breathing of his lungs. Revenge, how? But he forced himself towards a new memory of Clarissa which would be empty, hollow and sterile, simply a sepia photograph for the mantelshelf of his mind. He hated everyone on the station concourse whoever they were as they imagined their active, laughing lives. His train trundled metallically over the hard steel rails. He hardened his feelings equally, to face the family atmosphere at home. Leafy west London suburbs slid anonymously by. He was suddenly hit by the distant view of trees he remembered from the dormitory windows long ago on a similarly bright day in late summer when he was thirteen. He was hit again in a place he had not guarded – the timeless loneliness of childhood. Why had it returned just now?  He could not go straight home after all – full, like this, with emptiness.

            He strolled to the river, very slowly going over the familiar reassuring route. He was more steady now. His schooldays in the country returned to their proper place, the burning anger of betrayal was tied down. He knew his mother had meant for the best, his father had provided properly and as he should. Those days, those school days away from home, whatever else they were, had also been the happiest days of his life. The outdoors, the sports, the comradeship, the pungent challenge of learning in the ancient schoolrooms, being indeed a part of the very history he was learning. It had formed the character he now had, hewn out of the nervous small boy who constantly lost his socks, his squash balls, his pencil leads. He became an accomplished historian, an eloquent barrister, a master of his own feelings, a defender of right-thinking and defender of a world that badly needed such right-minded people. He had not shirked from the world. His legal career took him deeply into the shadowy side of society.

            The towpath beside the river eventually began to empty. He stayed there a long time. The day flourished and waned as he say contemplatively. The evening fishermen and the boys on bicycles defiantly staying out late with nothing to do, began to drift reluctantly home. He looked into the thick Thames water. In the dusk, the river seemed deep with its own despondency too.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Gabriella, his Italian wife, was accustomed to his irregular times. She had expected him back as was usual early on Friday, this week sometime in the course of the morning, after his trip to whichever of his clients it was, incarcerated in a faraway prison. She did not worry too much about his absence for another night, though more often than not he would have let her know. She knew about those one-night stands he only hinted at. She knew about the London flat she had never seen, about his irregularity in recharging his phone so there was no way make to be sure of contacting him. Or, rather, she knew that such a flat did not exist, only a fiction, an excuse, and that he needed this active nightlife with girls he picked up. After all it was England itself that she had been in love with, and now it was her English children she loved. The essential English suburban life had taken her over with a joy she had always hungered for. She had known it from the early childhood years which her family had spent in Brighton, walking to school with the salt winter wind in her face. The sun could still surprise her, punching clear blue patches in the covering cloud, and the fresh spring vegetation that could throw so much green across the world like theatre lighting. The gentle advance of regularity and seemliness was what she had always hankered for, and what she would put up with anything for. She loved what Michael had given her, what she had always loved and looked for. Suburban tinsel and gossip in no way diminished her bubbling charm. She could chat with pious and prurient neighbours as if it was innocent, as if it were the charm of toddlers in the playground discovering each other for the first time.

            Her parents move to the university campus in middle America, and her adolescence back in Rome had dimmd it all – but not taken away her taste for the clear blue and green Englishness. Her three young children were her English side. She had returned ‘home’ here, to her  England when she had married Michael and settled into their Thames Valley village of individual bungalows with practical lofts.

            Properly turning a blind eye, and a stiff upper lip, she knew these were the sensible English ways of dealing with his succession of one-night stands. What she did not know about was Clarissa. She did not know that Clarissa was a true love, a cherished space in his heart, a needed source of energy for his life.

            It was when the third night of absence began to approach that a spasm of un-English panic flooded deep inside her. She remembered her mother so-often yelling and wailing at her father, the coruscating stream of abuse and accusation that lashed across his shoulders. She had always wanted to stroke those emotional wheals better for him. But he had shrugged those shoulders with eloquent contempt and left his two women to glare at each other as he went off to his office in the University for the night to occupy his mind with the higher things in the library.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

She battled with herself for the third night, resisting at all costs the out-of-the-ordinary, resisting with tortured strength her panicking outbursts. She phoned the one friend of Michael's who might tell her something. Richard and Michael had been in the same house at school, different universities but re-joined each other in the same legal practice. Only such old friends might know those things about each other which Gabriella now needed to know; those things which no man of their kind would tell a wife. It seemed a betrayal to make this venture into that world, but Gabriella knew her judgement was solid and sensible.

            Richard had been alarmed. He had known of Clarissa and had met her but could not divulge that to Gabriella at this stage. He told her to leave it to him and he would have news within the day. It was not reassuring to Gabriella. She waited sensibly; her propriety, solidity, and balanced judgement clutched carefully round her unwelcome panic, which flicked on and off like a faulty florescent tube as the day went on.

            Richard found Clarissa's phone number from the Gallery, but had repeatedly got her answering machine. He stayed on at the office in the evening persistently poking the number into the telephone every half-hour and listening bemused to the solemn apology of the machine he now knew by heart. Eventually he had resigned himself to going on all night but returned to his apartment in Pimlico to continue. A note had been left in his box. The unfamiliar writing turned out to be Clarissa's. She wanted him to know, as he was Michael's best friend, that if anyone enquired where she was, she had taken three weeks off work, to go away for a while.

            Clarissa had known that Michael would not take her finishing with him quietly, and if she truly meant it, she must make herself inaccessible. She bought the longest package holiday she could find to the most anonymous resort in Spain.

            Richard, however, construed this note in his own way, misconstrued if that’s more apt. It was a matter of slight to him that Michael had not told him personally that Clarissa and he were going away together, Michael should not have left it to his girl to send the message round; he should not have left his wife in the dark. It was simply as if Michael had done a warp and ricocheted in an incomprehensible direction. And that was a poor show. He decided to confide something to Gabriella. It was overwork, he told her; it was Michael's devotion to her and to the children that had made him overstrain. He had reason he told her guardedly to suppose Michael would be away for three weeks though he could not say where. It was best, he reassured her stolidly, that Michael should get this rest, even if he had gone about it in this wretched way. Richard would support her, he said, and they would confront Michael together when he returned. She should not worry as Richard had known Michael for so long that he knew Michael would come through it. Someone of his background, and schooling, would come through in the end. The school motto had been 'Loyalty and service will prevail'. And he knew Michael would too; he simply needed the patient, strong support of his best friend and of his wife to help him through. It was what friends and family were for.

            Gabriella was heartened. The strong sensible voice of Richard's understanding made all the difference. She went to bed confident she could sleep this fourth night.

            It was therefore especially rude and devastating to be woken half-an-hour later by the police with the news that Michael's body had been found in a weir some miles further down the Thames. He was now in a mortuary in a place she had never heard of.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

At the funeral Richard shook hands with her stiffly. His dark overcoat was open on this bright, late autumn morning, and the beginnings of a middle-aged paunch was showing early on his slender body. Gabriella's unsleeping eyes were red and stained, but the tears that should have come, remained stubbornly unshed, as she thanked him for the very large wreath from the office. He looked into those deep strong eyes to see if he could gauge if she knew yet about Clarissa, and what Clarissa must have done. Richard was quite clear, in spite of the result of the inquest how death had occurred. He had not disclosed the incriminating note he had received from Clarissa. The verdict at the inquest, on the basis of the moderate quantity of alcohol in the blood was that, in fact, death was accidental, tragic in the fullness of his burgeoning career and wrenching a wound in the perfect harmony of the family. The funeral service droned on over the small clump of people.

            So, the inquest had decided; and so, Gabriella chose to believe.

            She spent the evening after the funeral sorting through Michael's personal papers, throwing out all those letters which were in handwriting that was not her own. She tore them up unread. There was no point in upsetting herself unnecessarily.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Richard took the train back, trundling over the same tracks that had carried Michael’s last journey home. The tightness of Gabriella's waist, the stiff smoothness of her black dress around the curve of her bosom kept flicking into his mind, torturing his desire on this inappropriate occasion. He glued his eyes to the racing scenery outside the window. He thought of the folders on the desk he was going back to. But, he painfully thought too of those young schooldays with Michael, their frantic theories about girls; their holiday together down through Italy, the camping site in Sicily; the haunting evenings strolling nervously through a dock area looking at the prostitutes, and the joint fumbling with the one they clubbed together to pay for. She too had a black dress; it had unbuttoned down the front and each lad had taken a breast in his clutching hands. Michael had been the first to get on top of her as if he had suddenly found what to do between her legs. She had turned her face to one side and her cigarette smoke puffed into Richard's face until Michael had finished. Richard felt sick and both boys quickly dressed, leaving the woman to clean her legs, button her black dress and count her money. It came back unbidden to his mind as he raked through he friendship. Gabriella in her distant black dress brought back all the impossible conflict of childhood so long ago.

            He sickened himself with these thoughts and opened his folder again in his mind; how had Clarissa managed to drown Michael?  Why had he let her do it?  Had he been so very drunk? 

            No answers came to Richard’s bemused mind; or perhaps so many answers he could not decide. He stepped agitatedly down from the train and walked absent-mindedly through the concourse of the railway terminus. This formally dressed, meek-looking London lawyer was seen to let out a wild kick at a litter bin, which grazed the perfect polished shine of his shoe. He chose a swear word to utter silently to himself. It had been so much simpler at a boys school when so young.

            But back to the grown-up present, what should he do about this awful business?  He knew some justice should be sought, and he was the only one in a position to be able to do it. He could not break it to Gabriella – it just would not do – the poor widow. Should he tackle Clarissa?  Would she attack him in some way as she must have done Michael?  Would she seduce him and control him, even – typically, in his moments of greatest doubts, his mind had turned his thoughts towards bodies. Clarissa, on the several occasions when he had met her, had seemed to possess an empowered electric physical presence. And her bright large eyes had always seemed to take in, both hungrily and scoldingly, his furtive glances at her shape. There were very few young women of his acquaintance who did not put up the temperature of his feverish imagination, make him terrified at some intensity in himself, and make him reduce them to indifference, as recompense for disturbing him so. There were more suitable people to concourse with, other than women.

            He cast desperately around with his eyes to find a solid stabilising world to cling to. The station bar presented itself and he went for a gin-and-tonic. He fought off the temptation to study the cheap-looking barmaid, as the sickening feeling tightened in his stomach.

            The gin stiffened him a little and he returned in a taxi to the office, resolved that, whatever it cost him, he had to see that justice and right was done. Michael had been his best friend; if Clarissa had killed him, then Richard must see that something was done. It was a matter of principle. It is what his breeding and his background were for. He turned up the number of the agency the firm used for private investigators. Their report a couple of days later revealed little: Clarissa was clearly still away from her flat; the photographs of her personal letters showed that only those from Michael were love letters; there was a travel agent who had sold her a three-week package in Benidorm; she had left the day before the body had been washed up. He wrote briefly and angrily to her at the hotel:

            Clarissa, 

I can hardly believe what you have done. I know you caused Michael's death. His wife does not know. I suggest you stay out of the country for good. If you return, I shall make sure you stand trial.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Mayhew-Smith

He felt distinctly stronger. He walked to the pillar box on the corner of the street and posted the devastating letter. All the tensions and hurts of his life went with it, a distant revenge. The tight nausea in his stomach drained away. With great relief he put his hands in his overcoat pocket and positively slouched back along the street, a complacent and decisive man again.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Clarissa, her large blue eyes, the long blonde hair and her clear, satin-blue bikini, clicked in from the hotel swimming pool on her high-heel beach shoes. The two barmen eyed her mechanically as she passed through the bar, a ritual they knew these northern women expected. She was extremely surprised to find a letter from England waiting for her at reception. No-one knew she was here – and her premonitions raised panicky heartbeats. Putting her sun-glasses and towel on the counter she opened it there. Michael's death was suddenly like a hammer beating on every bone in her body at once. She collapsed clumsily into a low armchair by the entrance to the hotel. The smart reception manager, in his crisp white shirt and black bow-tie, looked up quickly wondering if this was a performance he was expected to play a part in; but instantly he recognised she was completely drawn into herself, her self-conscious beauty forgotten. 

            He came round his counter,  "Senora," he looked down at her crumpled state, her breathing becoming increasingly heavy and frantic, "are you ill?" 

            She shook her head and turned away from him – "Bad news, that's all" she murmured. 

            "Que?" he said uncomprehendingly but understood perfectly her distress; and he went to the bar to fetch a glass of iced water. The barmen were approvingly jealous of the receptionist's good fortune with this bright but now needy English woman. But she, slumped in the chair, felt her body to be dead flesh, her brain fused in her mind. The drips of iced water on her skin gave points of shaper cold in the hot heavy weather but they did not make her jump.

            Later in the evening she let the dapper receptionist come to her room and screw her till he was exhausted; but her body did not come alive. He left and she lay in the dried juices till morning. Her eyes were not asleep, nor were they awake. Towards noon she cleaned herself in her shower and dressed and prepared to take the day steadily and cautiously.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

It was lunchtime when she had got herself ready to emerge from her room, from her collapsed state of mind. Sitting alone in the far corner of the dining room she looked small and unusually grey. 

            She was, pretty soon, approached by Mrs Ambidge, whose dark steely hair was drawn up in a tight bun, "My dear!  We heard you had been ill. I'm so sorry. If there is anything I can do, or my son can do, do ask, please."  Across the room, Mrs Ambidge's son sat at their table, a short, stout asthmatic chemistry teacher; he was shyly watching his mother and Clarissa. 

            "Thank you very much. I'm perfectly alright now" she replied. There was something that was just slightly too curt, that she did not control fully. 

            Mrs Ambidge's tall, angular frame drew itself up as if to protect her dignity, "Well do ask, my dear" she persisted, her loose watery mouth forming an English smile high above Clarissa's table; and she turned back towards her son, her stiff back expressing both a slight rebuff and her determined concern. Clarissa's headache pounded, and the tiredness that filled her eyes was prickling up. The tears just did not come before Mrs Ambidge had turned away; and Clarissa relaxed again into her corner. She had found a clean white blouse, but her crumpled, baggy trousers seemed as shapeless as she felt herself. She would have liked at that moment, for her corner of the room to be bricked off for ever.

            Suddenly Mrs Ambidge's son was beside her table to reinforce his mother's persistence, "Would you like to join us at our table?" he invited in a surprisingly gruff voice. 

            At that moment, with the surprise of his sudden arrival beside her, the tension in her broke and the tears flooded her eyes and dripped slowly from her completely motionless face as she stared blankly back at him. He was so taken aback by his effect upon her that he stuttered, "I'm so sorry" and hurried back to his mother. 

            Clarissa found herself aimlessly recalling, as she watched his retreating back, that he was called Roland, a name which his mother pronounced more like ‘roll-on’, and these aimless thoughts connected stupidly with the deodorant stick of that name which poor Roland Ambidge significantly resembled. This cruel humour cleared her mind of her tears for a moment, and briefly the gaping ache for Michael came back, no less painful but, just in this instant, less crushing of her spirit. Really, she found herself wondering, people like the Ambidges are much more worthy than herself and Michael. They were actually concerned about her distress. She could feel her heart touched by them – from their careful distance.

            She spent the rest of the day sitting in a bar on the beach, a book on her lap, and staring at the sea, its shimmering blue was evanescent and eternal. She felt her soul protected by her sun-glasses. Her dowdiness today screened her from the shy guttural approaches of the young German men, and from the insolent invitation in the stares of the young Spaniards. It was no good, as she had been telling herself, to keep wanting Michael still.

            When she returned to the hotel, the aloof Spaniard behind the reception desk handed her key to her in his proudly professional way, as if both acknowledging and at the same time being calmly aloof from the memory of their encounter in the night. He waited, attentively inquiring as she hesitated. She took off her sun-glasses with one hand. He took in the long cool look her sad eyes gave him, and the slow movement of her breast as it slid along the far side of his desk. So, later in the evening when he finished his duty, he rang up to her room. She was ready for him. Her letter to Richard had been written; and the other letter too. She was resolved and strong. She told her Spaniard to meet her at the bar along the road; she wanted, she said, to drink and to dance, to be entertained and to be excited.

            He did this for her. And when they returned to the hotel late in the night she gave him, in return, her body, activating all its responses to his desire, to feed him her creamy white northern flesh. He left her before his morning duty began and when she saw him later in the day, he was freshly calm, and coolly working at his duties behind the reception desk. He took her key briskly and professionally from her with courtesy. She knew she had used him and been used. But it was a relief to notice that his proud Spanish bearing and her strong English resolve could join in putting their encounter behind them now.

            She hired a car for the day and drove into the mountains, parked and walked and walked and walked. Her tears came unceasingly; dripping from her cheeks they spotted the pale blue cotton of her trousers and left tiny damp patches in the dry, burning soil where, in the heat of the afternoon sun, they evaporated almost instantly.

            She crouched, at length, on a stone with a view through a gap in the hills to the distant sea still everlastingly shimmering in the sun; a glimpse of the town on the shore, its buildings white-washed and infinitesimal like the coating on crystalline fruit. Her tears seemed to stem with the sense of distance. Her body felt dirty, despoiled by her encounters; a church pillaged by invaders, and Michael inside her was a broken crucifix helplessly felled beside the upturned altar. She hated the rapacious Spaniard now.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

She recalled, as she sat in the sinking sunshine, of her convent school, the silent gliding forms of the grey-habited nuns. For her first years there she had spent all her spare time kneeling in the chapel, that innermost homeliness of this welcoming school. And Sister Priscilla, one of the older nuns, had taken to sitting with her, and on her eighth birthday Sister Priscilla had whispered special Latin prayers, kneeling together, the nun's shrunken arm around little Clarissa's fresh young shoulders. Afterwards Clarissa had, with love, sought out Sister Priscilla with a piece of her elaborate birthday cake, sent by her loving father from his base in Cyprus. It was, for Clarissa, a special cake, and a piece for a special nun. Sister Priscilla was solemnly grateful but explained the importance of her own penitent's diet and together they took the slice of cake as an offering to Mary, placing it carefully on the altar in the chapel. Next day the cake had gone, and she could remember how, in her mind's eye then, she imagined Jesus, who remarkably resembled her soldier father, had come to this very church to take her piece of cake to Mary.

            Clarissa became very close to Sister Priscilla for a number of years and was gradually involved as a helper in the nun's duties around the chapel, cleaning, tidying, arranging flowers. Until - one day it changed. They were both busy settling the altar pieces in order when Clarissa clumsily knocked the central crucifix, and it tumbled off the altar crashing against the wooden platform and onto the hard stone floor. The terrific echoing crash in the chapel was like thunder to the pale thirteen-year-old girl, like the announcement of the end of the world. And, in a way, it had been. Sister Priscilla's gaunt old face was ashen with shock and outrage as they both stared at the crucifix on the floor. As Clarissa went to pick it up, the nun brushed her aside with surprising strength and violence in her frail body, and she caught up the precious object. They looked at it carefully and it was not broken but there was a definite change to acorner of the gold metal where it had hit the stone. She set it back on the altar and then led Clarissa mutely out of the chapel. Nothing was said. Clarissa never helped Sister Priscilla again in the chapel. And a few months afterwards, Sister Priscilla silently died without any further words with Clarissa. Clarissa had finally poured it all out in a letter to her mother, her badness, her humiliation, her sadness, her rage and her guilt. But her mother never mentioned it in her letters, nor on the next visit to the school some weeks later.

            Clarissa remained seated on her stone until these experiences had unpacked all of their emotional contents which stayed strewn around the ground. And when she slowly moved from this spot it was like sadly leaving behind an old friend. But her step felt lighter as she retraced her path.

            She arrived back late in the evening, and after a night on her own for the first time since she had heard about Michael's death, she felt cleaner. The sadness and the ache had returned, although now it felt much closer to that familiar old loneliness and emptiness she was used to and knew how to deal with. At lunchtime she asked the Ambidges if she could sit at their table with them.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

A week after Clarissa had posted her letter to Richard, she supposed he would have received it. In fact, it had not arrived. He had carefully slotted the whole affair away in a space in his mind and pigeon-holed it for future attention if necessary. So, when she rang him in London to follow up her letter, they were both taken unawares.

            Richard was confronted in his mind with a conflict; on one hand the image he had of her body and the open friendliness he always remembered in her large pale eyes, and on the other hand the stern duty he felt towards his dead friend. Clarissa on her part was flummoxed to find he had not received the letter. The strength which she had gathered together all week, suddenly abandoned her.

            "Is that Richard Mayhew-Smith?  Did you get my letter?"

            "No," he said flatly trying to gather his thoughts, "no letter."

            "Oh!" she swung her legs off the bed in her room, and sat up with a rising tension, staring down the room to where the late morning sun was scorching the tiles just inside the window. "I got a letter from you, Richard."  As he said nothing at the other end, she tried to keep up the flow. "I don't know who had my address here."  As he still said nothing, she asked, "How did you know my address?"  She was not really interested as there had been so many other things, but she needed to feel a conversation going on with another person before she could steady herself to come to the point about the death.

            But Richard felt on the spot. He could not tell her what he had done, how he had found out, had hired the private investigator. He made a noise as if clearing his throat on the point of speaking. She waited. 

            "Well,..." he said weakly, "well what answer do you have?" he asked more demandingly than he intended.

            "You didn't ask a question."  She protested, not knowing how to deal with his blunt demand. The hurt of his accusation still cut her. How could anyone think she could have done that to Michael. She went on rapidly and anxiously, "Youv'e got it wrong. It's not me. It would not be like me at all."

            "Who was it then?" he asked confused.

            "Oh, don't ask such questions."  She struggled, aghast at the agony in her. She simply could not discuss such a dreadful question.

            But Richard persisted, "What do you know about it? Where did you take him. You left a message for me to pass on to his wife. You went away together. What happened?"

            "No, Richard."  Already her tears were interrupting her coherence, "I told you I was going away; I, me, just me. Not him and me."

            "You didn't say so" he said. He could not remember what her note had said exactly, only what he thought it had said. "You were going away for three weeks together."

            "No, Richard, no. I've got to come home and explain it to you. I thought I put it in my letter."  she exclaimed wildly.

            "What letter," he complained. "I haven't had your letter. I told you", he said pedantically trying to take root in facts against the flood of her protest.

            "Let me come home Richard. I must explain to you, to someone. I'll go away again if I must. Let me come back now. Please."

            Richard hesitated. He knew he would not stand his ground face to face with her. He started to say something without knowing what was going to come out. But she had put down the phone. She was packed her things in her panicked state. Her receptionist was courteous formality – almost insolently so – as she booked out and raced for the airport.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Richard phoned his home where his cleaning lady could tell him if a letter had come from Spain. He rushed back to read it. He stood in his dark overcoat, the restless alarm rising up inside him as he felt a storm closing in on him:

Dear Richard Mayhew-Smith,

            Whatever you do don't think I caused it. I loved him but he used me. Yes, I used him. We should never have done it. But it was love between us. You must know. I told him to finish it. Perhaps he loved me more than I realised. You are so angry with me, I cannot write what I want to. You simply have to believe me, he killed himself. He couldn't live without me. I don't know what I shall do if you don't believe me. And you must tell his wife that I am innocent. You know I wouldn’t do that,

Clarrissa Arden

Ps – I’m writing to his wife

It had not been coherent, but accurately she represented her surging panic in her thoughts at the time, the tortured condemnation of her conscience. She could not grapple with it. Had he loved her, had he? Had she destroyed him, not just his love? But destroyed him. Or was he destroying her. She knew she had been incoherent. She was in fragments, and no Ambidge, nor anyone, no receptionist could have held her together at that exploding moment.

            She had also written her other letter – to Gabriella – to protest her innocence. It was important that both of them, Gabriella and Richard, knew it. She had not wanted to take Gabriella's husband away from her – neither by loving him nor by killing him.

            Well, Richard thought, what a silly woman Clarissa is, as he tried to swallow the dryness in his throat; what a silly woman. It is a further unholy mess. He chose another swear word carefully. In the midst of trembling with fury at Clarissa, he was impressed at how clearly he was thinking. If Clarissa had really written to Gabriella about murdering Michael, even if only to deny it, Gabriella would be upset all over again. Gabriella would have to be rung; he would have to do it. She at least would be a sensible woman, he reassured himself hopefully. He went to his cupboard of drinks and busied himself with a gin-and-tonic until his cleaning lady had finished, put her things away, got methodically into her street clothes and left for the day.

            He rested the telephone beside him on the arm of the chair, settled his mind on sensible words he could reach for easily to use, and dialled her number. Totally unexpectedly, Gabriella was not impressed by his loyalty and thoughtfulness towards her in ringing up about the matter. "I rang. Last night. At your office." She set off excitedly, "You weren't in. They couldn't find you." She was protesting in a high-pitched tone.

            Richard was taken aback as if a large dog had aggressively greeted him by leaping up with its full weight against him. "I rang you," he said as calmly as he could "because I wanted to discuss something with you."  A couple of his school friends had gone into the diplomatic service; he knew how they approached difficult things.

            But Gabriella was not going to be delicately approached. "Discuss something!" she exclaimed, "I know exactly what you've rung me about," she shouted into the phone, "don't I?"  She yelled even louder. "It's one of Michael's tarts isn't it?"  Richard winced and made unseen calming movements with his hands to the voice on the phone. "I've had a letter from one of his tarts; someone in Spain. You've been writing to her about us."  She ended shrilly and with a final twist of unarguable protest.

            Richard felt the knife slice into his confidence. He was without words. Even his breathe seemed to have left him. he was silent.

            "Well?" Gabriella enquired, challengingly and angry, "What ‘something’ did you want to talk about!"  Her sarcasm could not reduce Richard any further. This violent woman seemed completely triumphant over him. After a moment, "What is this about suicide?" she demanded, "It's nonsense." She demanded his agreement. Her fear brought to mind the enormous insurance that might be at stake – suddenly denied her. It was the one thing she had consoled herself with in this tragedy, that Michael had left her provided with the money to keep her house, her children, her life exactly as before. The ongoing stability meant everything, everything. "Why is she talking about suicide?  It's not true. You know it, don't you?” Clearly, she was knowledgeable and knew the insurance company would not pay out for a suicide. Clearly, she was being crushed by more than the loss  of her husband.

            "I thought she had killed him." Richard felt not in control of the conversation.

            "Killed him!  Of course she didn't. Why should she?"  Gabriella's scorn peaked, "Why should she?  She was probably making a good living out of Michael. Wasn't she? - you would know."  She was suddenly hurt that Richard would know more than her, Michael's wife. The wound once opened, rapidly gaped, and her rage began to spurt like arterial blood. "Where are you?  I'm coming to London. Don't go out. I'm going to talk to you. I'll get the train straight after the children are back from school."  The receiver went down. Richard went to the cupboard and toyed with the gin bottle. he looked at his watch in indecision. Three hours perhaps before this hysterical woman descended on him. He had no idea what she was going to demand. He put the bottle back on top of the cupboard and eased himself down into his armchair. His stack of tapes was on one side of him, and a rack of magazines and newspapers tidied by his cleaner on the other. He felt himself vaguely the guardian of Michael's posthumous honour, a duty to support Michael's wife and family. The question was: what was for the best for them all now? Ironically, Michael would have been the one to know. Richard had no idea what he should say to Gabriella.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

When Gabriella turned up at Richard's flat, flustered and tired, her eyes grey and lifeless, she stumbled in clumsily. Richard took her arm gently, guiding her to the small living room. She stood looking around nervously. Richard hesitated. He offered the chair opposite his. She turned to face him. She seemed frail. "Oh, Richard, don't let her spoil things."

            He did not know what she meant. She was clearly overwrought. "Don't worry at all my dear. What can she do?"

            His week silvery voice comforted her. She was relieved he was not angry with her earlier outbursts. "Richard, we must destroy the letters. You had one from her, and I had one. We must stop her writing to people."

            Richard nodded gravely. He thought it best to agree with this unpredictable woman, however irrational. But more than that it was indeed best to stop these letters, stop her writing to everyone else. But how could Clarissa be stopped. What would stop her?  He did not like to explain to Gabriella that he was the one who had provoked it. She might easily have another outburst. You could not predict what would happen with a woman like this. Women became so emotional, unless they had had a proper background; and this one had lived all over the world. Michael, it seemed had liked it all; he had called it liveliness. He had known how to handle Gabriella's temperament. "I'll talk to her if you like," he said reassuringly, "I'm sure she'll be sensible."

            "Do you know her?" Gabriella asked suddenly, as suspicion darted into her eyes, "She doesn't seem sensible to me. Have you met her Richard?" she asked darkly.

            "Yes," he said, honestly, but immediately wondered if that was an unwise admission.

            "Have you?" she hardly asked it, more a heavy beat in her heart, "Have you?"  And they were both aware of her deep burning anger again, a further betrayal. "What is she like then?"

            "I shall go and make us some tea," he said determinedly, taking a command of this situation before he was out of his depth again. He moved carefully out of the room. When he returned with the ordered tray of tea, she was seated and more composed. Richard felt relieved again, and hopeful that she could control herself.

            "Now, Richard," she settled herself comfortably into the chair with her warming cup of tea and started off matter-of-factly as if planning together some nice arrangement, a buffet lunch party, a trip for the church congregation to Ascot this year.... "We must stop this meddling girl from spreading stories."  It seemed so incongruous that this apparently innocent suburban lady could be intriguing and revengeful, "Let's destroy the letters she's sent. Let's do it now. Go and get yours."  Richard obediently picked it from some papers on his small Queen Anne desk. As if in a ritual they both tore the paper to pieces. "Now," she said satisfied, "we must keep her mouth shut. Will money do it? What do you think.? You know her."

            Richard had not the slightest idea; but he felt he was being told what to think, "We can but see," he said seriously and cautiously. "Girls like this can be unpredictable, you know. Sometimes they can be vindictive."

            "But is she so?  Richard, you know her," again her imploring kind of question which was really telling him what to agree to.

            "I've met her, my dear. Don't you worry. There are always ways of getting people to be sensible."

            "If it's money, we could both contribute. Half and half. What do you say?" she enquired with her anxious pleading. Richard had not considered this possibility. "How much do you think she'll want?"

            "We shall see," he said calmingly. The more insistent she became the more he needed to calm himself by calming her. He supposed that Clarissa would be perfectly amenable so long as he removed the ridiculous threat he'd made. But he could not tell Gabriella about that. "I don't suppose it needs money. She'll be reasonable, I'm sure."

            Gabriella looked at him curiously. It struck her he must know something, "Why do you say that?  Do you know something?  What is it?"

            He realised his soothing had already been excessive. He still did not want to admit how he had meddled in this hornet's nest. He put his cup of tea to his lips for a moment to consider his position again with this explosive woman.

            At that point the doorbell rang.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....   

 

Richard climbed slowly to his feet, putting down the cup, "Excuse me," he said politely, "I'd better just deal with this."  He felt relieved to be given a moment away from having to admit what he had done. It was only as he was treading down the passage to the door-phone machine that it dawned on him who this unexpected caller might be. His heart suddenly pounded, for all sorts of reasons. Could she have got a flight and be back from Spain already!  No, he told himself forlornly as he realised the frightful situation that he was about to open the door to. He picked up the door-phone. Her voice crackled and was distorted, but it was undoubtedly her. He could do nothing but let her in. He pressed the button to release the front door. It was like having to press the button on the electric chair at his own execution. He went out heavily onto the landing and waited for the whirring of the lift to bring her up. She came out of the lift, struggling with her luggage and he helped her into the passageway of his flat. Gabriella had risen from her chair and watched this scene from the other end of the passage, dark suspicion in her flashing eyes.

            Clarissa, in contrast, was flushed and fair and still in her thin dress from the Mediterranean. She stared uncertainly at Gabriella, both women guessing who the other one was. Richard started, rather hopefully, to make formal introductions of these two women at either end of the passage, sandwiching him on either side.

            "Oh, stop it, Richard," Gabriella said in a most imperious English voice she had practiced for years. Her worst fears confirmed, she waited, glowering and reddening, as Clarissa advanced slowly down the passage offering her hand submissively to shake. Gabriella turned on her heel and retreated into the living room, leaving Richard with the words stuck stationery in his mouth, and Clarissa's hand still offering but empty.

            And when they were all standing awkwardly in the comfortable living room, she continued sarcastically, "So this is her. This is who we were just talking about."  Her eyelids were lowered as she looked at Clarissa. "What do you want from us?  We were just discussing how much money you would want."  Her insults included Richard in her ‘we’ as a solid opposition to this lone girl.

            Clarissa looked blank and glanced at Richard, to see if she was completely on her own and faced by the combined hatred of these two. She saw nothing in Richard, who was staring at the polish on his shoes. She felt like the schoolgirl, whose crime had brought her the ultimate disgrace. Her insides clutched at the familiar emptiness of her being. She had heard from Michael about Gabriella's vindictiveness.

            "So, this is the tart."  Gabriella continued insultingly and provokingly. She looked at Clarissa's thin dress, "You don't wear much, do you?" Gabriella was being driven in a direction she had no control over. Her impropriety was a pain to some saddened part of herself as well as a shrill alarm to the others. Richard winced as each of the insults drew blood. He looked at Clarissa standing helplessly there wondering if she would descend to comparable depths and retaliate all over his living room. Clarissa glanced at Richard again, so that their eyes met. Richard looked away, but Clarissa had already noted his disgust at the monstrous state of the woman they were both confronted with. Gabriela noticed this embarrassed contact and was suddenly driven to a new pain and a deeper viciousness. She sought what she could say, "Well, well, Richard. Do you fancy her. I think maybe you do!  It's what men like you want, isn't it?  Have you tried this one?  Did you and Michael share her."  Her withering challenges escalated, all the time knowing that she was giving these careful English people the victory they could silently claim. Richard said a dignified nothing. And Gabriella continued, remembering the scene of Richard helping the girl in with her bags, "Moving her in with you, Richard? That's a nice happy little household."  Her fury was stopping the bitterness and failure from turning to tears. "Perhaps you have both arranged this from the beginning. That's a bit beneath you, isn't it?" she flung at Richard, no longer really knowing what she was trying to say.

            "Please be quiet," Clarissa suddenly said in a low voice and with quite chilling undertones. "I don't know what you are trying to do, but you seem totally to have lost your reason. Perhaps we all need to calm down."  The iciness in her voice increased as she spoke, and as it did so, the darkening rage in Gabriella's face darkened further.

            "Reason... calm down...!" she spluttered and suddenly turned her back to try to control herself. Shame and fury struggled together.

            Clarissa's sense of utter collapse inside her made her feel there was nothing to lose. She turned to Richard, "Well, what are you going to do?" she demanded of him. The challenge which would have normally seemed so reckless had she been able to feel anything inside her, took over as the only way she could deal with the threats he had made, "What are you going to do now that I am here?"  That desperateness felt like her last resort, powering him to settle it all. To Richard her loud challenge seemed almost like a strength, a magnificence. He was impressed. "Will you call the police?" she challenged.

            "I don't think we need to do that," he soothed. "Perhaps you can forgive me; forgive me for upsetting you." He used his smooth words as if trying to caress her, placate her. "We can agree, perhaps, to forget, er, forget what has been happening."  He was careful enough not to say anything so specific that Gabriella would grasp what he had done with his threats to Clarissa. Richard's soft placating tone was magical to Clarissa, water to a thirsty throat in the desert.

            Gabriella, however, was attentive to Clarissa's statuesque defiance and Richard's accomplished soothing strokes. It was too much for her in her unsuccessful struggle with her own temperament. She was fired and flaming, and these English were giving a lesson in measured propriety and sensible conduct. "What," Gabriella, spun back to face them, "what is supposed to have been happening?"  Neither Clarissa nor Richard moved. She was finally broken by the presence of these two who had the presence of mind not to respond to her uncontrolled fury.

            At that moment, Clarissa brought her stiffened body to its height and said austerely and with a rightful superiority "I don't think your attitude is helping, Mrs Lavenham. I am quite willing to leave you alone. I have no wish to do more than offer my condolences again for your bereavement; provided all accusations and threats are withdrawn" she glanced at Richard, "We can all leave here without any fears."

            Richard nodded gravely and significantly. He looked at her. The solemn strength he saw in her confrontation of this ridiculous widow caught his breath. She was magnificent. Clarissa felt how she carried Richard with her. Her coolness and stature heightened in every moment of Gabriella's fury; Gabriella crumbled into shapeless pieces.

            It was too much. Gabriella saw this exhibition of smooth, impeccable assurance in Clarissa as the trigger: "Get out of my way." She dashed at Clarissa, grabbing her dress at the shoulder and throwing her across the room. It was the final gesture she could think of, to physically hurt and humiliate. But she also looked aghast at what she had done, had been provoked to; yet still furiously vindictive at the dress she had torn, at the white shoulder she had scratched, and the triumphantly calm English scorn on the now smooth unperturbable faces.

            Gabriella hesitated at the spectacle. "Forget it," she spat, in her morass of defeat. "Forget all of it." And she stumbled hectically out of the flat.

            Richard reached gently towards Clarissa to set her on her feet. Her shoulder was bleeding where the nails had scored lines. He pointed to them and, in attempting to normalise the moment by being practical, offered to bathe the wound, as if it were not more than a child's simple graze.

            "Hold me," she said desperately and stood up to press her pained body into his arms. And he allowed his needed arms to move around her. Her tears flooded as the emotional tension broke out in her limp body. "I need to be held," she said earnestly, a serious frown on her face. And, indeed she did, but she knew where she was going. Her body was trembling with shock and the violence. But also, she knew, though she did not say it, that with such a baby as Richard (like Michael) she never need again to be provided and protected as properly intended.

            She knew Michael would live on inside her, but suddenly and swiftly perhaps Richard could give her the new life she had so recently started to search for. She might already have bridged that terrifyingly lonely gap into the future. Richard was the class and the temperament she could handle.

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