CHAPTER FOUR

But there was nobody in the flat. If anything, it was emptier than ever. I cooked lunch without mishap, nothing exploded or boiled over, and ate it at the table. Soon, I thought, I’d be eating in the kitchen, standing up, out of the pots and pans. That was how people got when they lived alone. I felt I should try to establish some sort of routine.

After lunch I counted my money, some in cash, some in traveler’s checks. There was less than I’d thought, as always; I’d have to get down to business and earn some more. I went over to the bureau, pulled open the underwear drawer, and dug among the contents, wondering what had inspired me to buy a pair of red bikini briefs with Sunday embroidered on them in black. It was the Royal Porcupine, of course; among other things, he was an underwear freak. It had been part of a Weekend Set; I had Friday and Saturday too, all bilingual. I took them out of the cellophane package and the Royal Porcupine said, “Put on Sunday/Dimanche”; he liked creating images of virtue violated. I did. “Dynamite,” said the Royal Porcupine. “Now turn around.” He prowled towards me and we ended up in a lustful tangle on his mattress. There was a flesh-colored brassiere too, with a front closing. For lovers only, the ad said, so I bought it to go with my lover. I was a sucker for ads, especially those that promised happiness.

I’d brought this incriminating underwear with me because I was afraid Arthur would discover it after my death and realize he’d never seen it before. During my life he never would have looked into that particular drawer; he shied away from underwear, he liked to think his mind was on higher things, which, to give him credit, it was, most of the time. So I used my underwear drawer as a hiding place, and from force of habit I was still doing this.

I took out Fraser Buchanan’s black notebook. Under it, at the bottom, wrapped in a slip, was the manuscript I’d been working on at the time of my death.

Charlotte stood in the room where he had left her, her hands still unconsciously clasping the casket of jewels. A fire was crackling in the spacious fireplace, its reflections gleaming warmly on the marble family crests that adorned the richly carved mantel, yet she felt quite cold. At the same time, her cheeks were burning. She could still see the curl of his lip, the tilt of the cynical eyebrows in that dark but compelling face, his hard mouth, thin-lipped and rapacious.… She remembered the way his eyes had moved over her, appraising the curves of her firm young body, which were only partially concealed by her cheap, badly fitting black crepe dress. She had sufficient experience with the nobility to know how they looked upon women like herself, who through no fault of their own were forced to earn their own livings. He would be no different from the rest. Her breasts moved tumultuously beneath the black crepe as she thought of the humiliations she had suffered. Liars and hypocrites, all of them! Already she had begun to hate him.

She would finish resetting the emeralds and leave Redmond Grange as quickly as possible. There was menace lurking somewhere in the vast house, she could almost smell it. She remembered the puzzling words of the coachman, Tom, as he handed her none too graciously out of the coach. “Don’t go near the maze, Miss, is my advice to you,” he had said. He was a sinister, ratlike man with bad teeth and a furtive manner.

“What maze?” Charlotte had asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he had replied with a snigger. “Many a young girl afore you has come to grief in the maze.” But he had refused to explain further.

From outside the French windows came a trail of silvery laughter, a woman’s voice.… At this hour, and in November, who could be walking on the terrace? Charlotte shivered, remembering those other footsteps she had heard in the same place the night before; but when she had looked down onto the terrace from her bedroom window, she could see nothing but moonlight and the shadows of the shrubberies moving in the wind.

She went towards the door, intending to mount the stairs to her own small room, which was on the same floor as the maids’ quarters. That was how highly Redmond valued her, she thought with scorn. She might as well have been a governess, one step above a parlor maid or a cook but definitely not a lady. Yet she was as well-bred as he was, if the truth were known.

Outside the drawing-room door Charlotte paused in amazement. At the foot of the stairs, blocking her way, stood a tall woman in a sable traveling cloak. The hood was thrown back, revealing flame-red hair; the bodice of her scarlet dress was cut low, displaying the swell of her white breasts. It was evident that the skill of Bond Street’s most fashionable and expensive dressmakers had been lavished on her costume; yet beneath this veneer of civilized sophistication, her body moved with the sensuousness of a predatory animal. She was ravishingly beautiful.

She glared at Charlotte, her green eyes gleaming in the light from the silver candelabrum, decorated with cupids and festoons of grapes, which she was holding in her left hand. “Who are you and what are you doing in this house?” she demanded in an imperious voice. Before Charlotte could answer, the woman’s glance fell upon the casket she was carrying. “My jewels!” she cried. She struck Charlotte across the face with her gloved hand.

“Softly, Felicia,” said Redmond’s voice. He emerged from the shadows. “I had intended the restoration of your jewels as a surprise, to welcome you home. But it is I who am surprised, as you have come before expected.” He laughed, a dry, mocking laugh.

The woman called Felicia turned to him, her smoldering eyes possessive, her provocative smile revealing small white teeth of a perfect uniformity. Redmond lifted her gloved hand gallantly to his lips.

Eight pages were missing, the first eight pages. For a moment I thought I’d left them behind, in the apartment, where Arthur would be sure to find them. But I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have been that sloppy. Fraser Buchanan must’ve taken them, slipped them up his jacket sleeve, folded them and stuffed them into a pocket when he was in the bedroom, before I could get to him. I had his black notebook though, and my hostage was better.

It wouldn’t be too difficult to reconstruct the opening pages. Charlotte would round the curve of the spacious lime-tree-bordered driveway in the Redmond carriage, the second-best one, which had been sent to the station to fetch her. She’d be clutching her inadequate shawl around her, worrying about the shabbiness of her clothes and her battered trunk in the boot: would the servants sneer? Then she would glimpse the Grange itself, with its feminine bulk and its masculine turrets and its air of pervasive evil. She’d be ushered by a contemptuous butler into the Library, where, after keeping her waiting in an inconsiderate manner, the master of the house would interview her. He would express surprise that the jewel restorers had sent a woman, and would imply that she wasn’t up to the job. She would answer him firmly, even a little defiantly. He would notice the challenge in her lustrous blue eyes, and remark that she was perhaps a little too independent for her own good.

“In my position, Sir,” she would reply with a tinge of bitterness, “one is forced to be independent.” Charlotte of course was an orphan. Her father had been the younger son of a noble house, disowned by his family for marrying her mother, a sweet-natured woman who danced in an Opera-house. Charlotte’s parents had died in a smallpox epidemic. She herself had escaped with only a few pockmarks, which lent piquancy to her expression. She was brought up by her uncle, her mother’s brother, who was rich but a miser, and who’d forced her to learn her present trade before he’d perished of yellow fever. He’d left her nothing, he’d always hated her, and her father’s noble family would have nothing to do with her. She wished Redmond to know that she was not in his house, in his power, by choice but from necessity. Everyone had to eat.

I’d need a working title. The Lord of Redmond Grange, I thought, or, better still, Terror at Redmond Grange. Terror was one of my specialties; that and historical detail. Or perhaps something with the word Love in it: love was a big seller. For years I’d been trying to get love and terror into the same title, but it was difficult. Love and Terror at Redmond Grange would be far too long, and it sounded too much like The Bobbsey Twins at Sunset Beach. My Love Was Terror … too Mickey Spillane. Stalked by Love, that would do in a pinch.

I’d also need a typewriter. I touch-typed everything; it was faster, and in my business speed was important. I was a good typist; at my high school typing was regarded as a female secondary sex characteristic, like breasts. Perhaps I could buy a secondhand typewriter in Rome. Then I could fill in the opening pages, write another eight or nine chapters, and send them to Hermes Books with a covering letter explaining that I’d moved to Italy on account of my health. They’d never seen me, they knew me only by my other name. They thought I was a middle-aged ex-librarian, overweight and shy. Practically a recluse, in fact, and allergic to dust, wool, fish, cigarette smoke and alcohol, as I’d explained to them when declining lunches. I’d always tried to keep my two names and identities as separate as possible.

Arthur never found out that I wrote Costume Gothics. At first I worked on them only when he was out. Later I would go into the bedroom, close the door, and tell him I was studying for some university extension course or other: Chinese Pottery, Comparative Religion, courses I never managed to complete for the simple reason that I never really took them.

Why did I never tell him? It was fear, mostly. When I first met him he talked a lot about wanting a woman whose mind he could respect, and I knew that if he found out I’d written The Secret of Morgrave Manor he wouldn’t respect mine. I wanted very much to have a respectable mind. Arthur’s friends and the books he read, which always had footnotes, and the causes he took up made me feel deficient and somehow absurd, a sort of intellectual village idiot, and revealing my profession would certainly have made it worse. These books, with their covers featuring gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns, hair streaming in the wind, eyes bulging like those of a goiter victim, toes poised for flight, would be considered trash of the lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” Arthur would have said. He always said this before an exposition of some failing of mine, but also he really believed it. His exasperation with me was like that of a father with smart kids who got bad report cards.

He wouldn’t have understood. He wouldn’t have been able to understand in the least the desire, the pure quintessential need of my readers for escape, a thing I myself understood only too well. Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers. They could be taken in capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during those moments when the hair-dryer was stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers or the bath oil in the bath was turning their skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which would make their hands smell like a hospital and cause their husbands to remark that they were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they would mourn their lack of beauty, their departing youth.… I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it.

The heroines of my books were mere stand-ins: their features were never clearly defined, their faces were putty which each reader could reshape into her own, adding a little beauty. In hundreds of thousands of houses these hidden selves rose at night from the mundane beds of their owners to go forth on adventures so complicated and enticing that they couldn’t be confessed to anyone, least of all to the husbands who lay snoring their enchanted snores and dabbling with nothing more recondite than a Playboy Bunny. I knew my readers well, I went to school with them, I was the good sport, I volunteered for committees, I decorated the high-school gym with signs that read HOWDY HOP and SNOWBALL STOMP and then went home and ate peanut butter sandwiches and read paperback novels while everyone else was dancing. I was Miss Personality, confidante and true friend. They told me all.

Now I could play fairy godmother to them, despite their obvious defects, their calves which were too skinny, those disfiguring hairs on their upper lips, much deplored in cramped ads at the backs of movie magazines, their elbows knobby as chickens’ knees. I had the power to turn them from pumpkins to pure gold. War, politics and explorations up the Amazon, those other great escapes, were by and large denied them, and they weren’t much interested in hockey or football, games they couldn’t play Why refuse them their castles, their persecutors and their princes, and come to think of it, who the hell was Arthur to talk about social relevance? Sometimes his goddamned theories and ideologies made me puke. The truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a better world, however preposterous. Was that so terrible? I couldn’t see that it was much different from the visions Arthur and his friends offered, and it was just as realistic. So you’re interested in the people, the workers, I would say to him during my solitary midnight justifications. Well, that’s what the people and the workers read, the female ones anyway, when they have time to read at all and they can’t face the social realism of True Confessions. They read my books. Figure that out.

But that would have been going too far, that would have been treading on Arthur’s most sensitive and sacred toe. It would be better to approach it from a materialist-determinist angle: “Arthur, this happens to be something I’m good at and suited for. I discovered it by accident but then I became hooked, I turned professional and now it’s the only way I know of earning a living. As the whores say, why the hell should I be a waitress? You’re always telling me women should become whole people through meaningful work and you’ve been nagging at me to get some. Well, this is my work and I find it meaningful. And I’m hardly an idle drone, I’ve written fifteen of these things.”

Arthur wouldn’t have bought this, however. Marlene the paragon had worked as a typesetter for three months (“You can’t really understand the workers until you’ve been on the inside with them”), and for Arthur, the snob, nothing less would do.

Poor Arthur. I thought about him, all alone in our apartment, surrounded by the rubble of our marriage. What was he doing at that instant? Was he stuffing my red and orange gowns into a Crippled Civilians bag, emptying my makeup drawer into the garbage? Was he leafing through the scrapbook I’d started to keep in those first weeks of childish excitement after Lady Oracle had appeared? How naive to have thought they would all finally respect me.… The scrapbook would go into the trash, along with all the other scraps of me that were left on the other side. What would he keep, a glove, a shoe?

Perhaps he was regretting. This was a new thought: he was feeling melancholy, bereaved even, as I was. It struck me that I might have misjudged him. Suppose he no longer hated me, suppose he had given up revenge. Perhaps I’d done something terrible to him, something final. Should I send him an anonymous postcard from Rome – Joan is not dead, signed, A Friend – to cheer him up?

I should have trusted him more. I should have been honest from the beginning, expressed my feelings, told him everything. (But if he’d known what I was really like, would he still have loved me?) The trouble was that I wanted to maintain his illusions for him intact, and it was easy to do, all it needed was a little restraint: I simply never told him anything important.

But it wasn’t more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.