Chapter 19

ZILLAH RATHER SURPRISED herself by discovering how little she cared about Jerry’s death. Could she ever have loved him? It made the years she’d spent more or less with him seem a waste of time. Of course, she’d got the children out of them, there was that. Back into the routine of driving them to and from their schools, she felt a sublime indifference toward everyone but herself and them. With a free morning before her to do as she liked, she put the police out of her mind, she even forgot Jims and the difficulties he seemed deliberately to create for her, and reveled in just being alone for three hours. She celebrated by buying a Caroline Charles dress and a Philip Treacy hat to wear at a royal garden party.

Whenever she bought clothes, Zillah formed a picture in her mind of herself wearing the new garment in some particular, usually glamorous, scenario. Sometimes she would be accompanied by a man—up until she married him it was often Jims—and sometimes, very occasionally, by her children dressed in equally ravishing outfits. It was an innocent form of fantasizing that gave her a lot of pleasure. As she alighted from a taxi in Great College Street, the rosebud-sprigged dress in a bag in one hand, the pink straw hat in a bandbox, she was imagining herself on a sunny lawn with a glass of champagne in her hand. She had just curtsied with exceptional grace to the Queen and was listening to the admiring words of a young and handsome hereditary peer who was obviously deeply attracted to her. The events of the past few days had almost been erased from her mind.

It was twenty past eleven. She just had time to go up to flat seven, hang up the dress, put the hat away, and have a quick cup of coffee before driving off to fetch Jordan. She ran up the steps to the art nouveau double doors, pushed them open, and tripped into the foyer. There, sitting on one of the gilt and red velvet chairs, was the journalist who had been so rude to her and had written that horrible piece for the Telegraph magazine.

Zillah could hardly understand how a woman would choose to wear the same black suit on two consecutive visits to the same person. And not even vary her shoes or her jewelry. That same curiously shaped gold ring was on her right hand. “Were you waiting for me?” She barely paused in her rush to the lift. “I have to go out again immediately to fetch my son from school.”

“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. I’ll wait.”

Zillah went up in the lift. While she was hanging up the dress she thought maybe she ought to have asked the woman—Natalie Reckman was her name, how could she have forgotten even for a moment?—to come upstairs and wait for her. But journalists really weren’t the sort of people to leave alone in one’s home. They might do anything, pry into one’s private drawers, read one’s letters. They were worse than Malina Daz or, come to that, poor Jerry. She no longer fancied coffee. A brandy would have been more beneficial but she wasn’t going to start down that road. Instead of returning to the foyer, she went all the way down in the lift to the basement car park, and fifteen minutes later had picked up Jordan and brought him back.

It was now half an hour since she’d seen Natalie Reckman and she was tempted simply to carry on with her day as if she hadn’t seen her. She microwaved a couple of chicken nuggets for Jordan’s lunch, poured him a glass of orange juice, and sat him at the table. While she was making herself a sandwich the house phone rang. The porter’s voice said. “Shall I send Miss Reckman up, madam?”

“No—yes, I suppose so.”

The journalist might not have changed her outfit, but her manner had undergone a transformation. Gone was the cool intellectual approach and in its place a warm friendliness. “Zillah, if I may, I’m very anxious to have another chat with you. It’s so good of you to see me.”

Zillah thought she hadn’t had much choice. “I was just going to have my lunch.”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Natalie, as if she’d been asked. “But I wouldn’t say no to a glass of that delicious-looking orange juice. Is this your little boy?”

“That’s Jordan, yes.”

“He is so exactly like his father, the spitting image.”

Zillah tried to remember if there had been any photographs of Jerry in the papers, apart from the one she took of him with baby Eugenie, but she was sure there hadn’t been. He’d never allowed anyone to take his picture. “Did you know my—Jerry—that is, Jeff?”

“Very well indeed at one time.”

Natalie was sitting down now, nursing her orange juice. Her tone was subtly changing again and her manner sharpening. She gave Zillah one of the searching stares that had been so much a feature of her previous visit. “How otherwise do you think I knew you’d been married to him and had two children? You did read my article about you, Zillah?”

“Oh, yes, I read it.” Zillah took a hold on her courage. “If you want to know, I thought it very unkind.”

Natalie laughed. She drank the juice and set the glass on the table. It was rather too near Jordan for his taste and he pushed it out of his way with a petulant shove. The glass fell onto the floor and broke. He let out a howl of dismay and, picked up by his mother, beat his fists against her chest, shouting an emotional demand he hadn’t given expression to for weeks, “Jordan wants Daddy!”

Rather in the manner of a social worker, a children’s officer perhaps, Natalie shook her head sorrowfully. She got down on her knees and began picking up broken glass.

“Oh, leave it!”

Natalie shrugged. “As you like. I only read of your husband’s death yesterday. I’ve been in Rome, working.”

What did she care? She set Jordan down on the floor with a box of bricks and two miniature cars but he immediately got up and ran to her, embracing her knees with sticky hands. Then Zillah took in what Natalie had said. “He wasn’t my husband.”

“Are you sure?”

Zillah forgot the stickiness on her legs, the pool of orange juice on the floor, the mess on the table, the time, Jims, her new dress and hat— everything. A cold shiver, like an ice cube dropped on the back of her neck, ran down her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, Zillah, it’s a funny thing but I spent a long time yesterday, I and my assistant actually, looking through quite a lot of records. We were trying to trace your divorce from Jeff, and the extraordinary thing was that we couldn’t find it.”

“What business was it of yours, I’d like to know?”

“Goodness, your teeth are chattering—are you cold? It’s very warm in here.”

“I’m not cold. Oh, for God’s sake go and play with something, Jordan. Leave Mummy alone.” Zillah lifted up a white face in which frightened eyes glittered. “I asked you what business you had to go rooting through my private affairs?”

“Do you really think your affairs, as you quaintly call them, are so private? You’ve been in all the papers. Don’t you think your readers have a right to know what you get up to?”

“You journalists are all the same, you’ll do anything and say anything. Now I’d like you to go, please.”

“I shan’t be staying much longer, Zillah. I was just hoping you could help me, perhaps give me a firmer date for when your divorce actually took place. I—and, incidentally, the police—had the idea it was some time last spring but that doesn’t seem to be so.” Natalie had no idea whether the police were pursuing the same line of inquiry as her own and it was only by chance that she was correct. “Still, I’m sure you can set us right. Was it perhaps the year before?”

Jordan sat on the floor and began howling like a puppy. “I don’t remember the date.” Zillah was driven beyond exasperation now. She wanted to scream and afterward hardly knew how she’d controlled herself “You just have to accept it. What’s it to do with you, anyway?”

“It’s in the public interest. Hadn’t you thought of that? You’re—er, married to an MP, you know.”

“What do you mean, ‘er, married’? I am married. My first husband is dead.”

“Yes,” said Natalie, above Jordan’s squalling. “I’d noticed. I’ll get out of your hair now. There seems to be something wrong with your little boy. Isn’t he well? I’ll let myself out.”

Going down in the lift, she remembered how, a few years back, she’d been in some American city in the Midwest where she’d interviewed a police chief. She was talking to him about crime statistics, various kinds of crime, and she’d asked him about some woman she’d heard of who’d remarried without first being divorced.

“Lady, we have nine murders a week in this city,” he’d said, “and you’re asking me about bigamy.”

But would the police here take the same attitude? Hardly. Jeff had been murdered and his wife or whatever she was had married an MP. Natalie decided not to write anything yet, for she was very much alive to the risks involved in saying in print that Zillah wasn’t legally married, just in case it turned out that she was. Some day soon she’d write a magazine piece about all Jeff’s women; it would be quite sensational. But first she had to go and talk to the Violent Crimes Task Force and at the same time make sure she got in with her exclusive story before anyone else did. In a thoughtful frame of mind she took a cab home.

Zillah had always deplored and clicked her tongue over those people who were up in court for cruelty to children. They belonged, she’d believed, to a different breed from herself. Now, walking up and down with her heavy, screaming, damp child in her arms, as if he were three months rather than three years old, she began to understand. She’d have liked to throw him out of the window. Anything to stop that noise and stem those ever-ready tears.

As she paced, she told herself over and over that things would be all right, it was all right now, because Jerry was dead. You couldn’t be a bigamist if your husband was dead and you’d married again. It was really only a matter of having said she was single when in fact she was a widow, or was soon to be one. She’d never actually said she was divorced until today, she just hadn’t mentioned Jerry at all—had she? She didn’t have to be divorced if her husband was dead. Anyway, none of it was her fault. It was these journalists poking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. And the main thing was she was a widow now, or would have been if she hadn’t married Jims.

To her surprise, Zillah found that Jordan had fallen asleep. He looked lovely when he was asleep, pink-flushed rosebud skin, incredibly long dark eyelashes, damp curls clustering across his forehead. She laid him down on the sofa and eased his shoes off. He rolled away from her and stuck his thumb in his mouth. Peace. Silence. Why had she agreed to get married in that fancy crypt place? Why had she wanted to? She couldn’t remember. Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad if she and Jims had fixed it up in a hotel or a town hall. In a place like that she wouldn’t have had to hear those awful, or perhaps she should say awesome, words. Yet they hadn’t seemed awe-inspiring at the time, she hadn’t really taken them in, she’d been thinking about her dress and what the newspaper photographs would be like. . . . As ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, that if either of ye know any just cause or impediment why ye should not be so joined, ye are to declare it. And then there came a bit about as many as are married without declaring it weren’t really married at all, neither is their matrimony lawful. Jims would kill her if he found out his matrimony wasn’t lawful. But it must be lawful, Zillah thought, this unhappy merry-go-round circulating in her head, because her husband was dead and if he hadn’t been dead in the middle of March he soon was, only a few weeks later.

She had to wake Jordan to take him with her and meet Eugenie from school. He whimpered and whined. He was wet too. She took his jeans and underpants off. There was a big smelly stain on Jims’s cream silk sofa. It was terrible having to put a three-year-old into a diaper but she didn’t dare not to. On the way back she’d stop at a chemist and do something she’d sworn she never would do, buy a pacifier to stuff in his mouth. And then she must phone her mother.

For once she was early. The school was a big Georgian house in a lane off Victoria Street. The car parked on a yellow line—but a single line and she wouldn’t be there long—she got out and got Jordan out, and was leaning against its nearside in the sunshine, thinking once more about her marriage service and those words, when a man got out of the BMW behind and came up to her.

“Zillah Watling,” he said.

He was very attractive, tall and thin and fair, with a hooky nose and a nice wide mouth, and dressed in what Zillah thought the most flattering uniform a man could wear, blue jeans and a plain white shirt. The neck was open halfway down his chest and his sleeves were rolled up. She’d seen him somewhere before, long ago, but where she couldn’t remember. “I’m sure I know you but I can’t think . . .”

He reminded her. “Mark Fryer.” They’d been students together, he said. Then he’d left and Jerry had come . . . “Is this your boy? I’m here to pick up my daughter.”

“I’m here to pick up mine.”

They exchanged news. Mark Fryer didn’t appear to be a newspaper or magazine reader, for he knew nothing about her marriage to Jims. And he didn’t mention a wife, partner, girlfriend, or anyone that might be the mother of this child who, by a happy coincidence, came down the school steps with her arm round Eugenie.

“Look, we’ve got so much to say to each other, can’t we meet up again? How about tomorrow? Lunch tomorrow?”

Zillah shook her head and silently indicated Jordan.

“Then say Friday morning. We could have coffee somewhere.”

She’d love to. He pointed across the street. How about that place? Zillah thought it rather too near the school for comfort and he named another in Horseferry Road. He waved as she drove off, calling, “I’m so glad we ran into each other.”

Eugenie, in the passenger seat, was staring censoriously at her. “What does he mean, ran into each other? Did he hit our car?”

“It’s just an expression. It means ‘met by chance.’ ”

“He’s my friend Matilda’s father. Did you know that? She says he’s a womanizer and when I said, What does that mean, she said he chases after ladies. Did he chase you?”

“Of course not. You’re not to talk like that, Eugenie, do you hear me?”

But Zillah was already feeling better. It was wonderful what a little male admiration could do. As to the other thing that was always coming back to haunt her, No one can do anything to me, she said to herself, because I’m a widow.

Police officers were back again, talking to Fiona. Although they never came out and said so, she was sure they thought she couldn’t have been deeply affected by Jeff’s death because they hadn’t known each other for very long. It didn’t stop them expecting her to know all about his past, his family, his friends, and everywhere he’d lived since he left art school nine years before.

She’d told them everything she could think of but great gaps existed in her knowledge. His marriage, as she told them, was a closed book to her. She didn’t know where he’d lived with his wife, whether or not she’d ever been in Harvist Road, or the ages of the children. She thought it very hard on her that she couldn’t be left in peace to mourn quietly and by herself—or maybe with Michelle. As for the ex-wife, “I don’t even know where she lives.”

“That’s okay, Miss Harrington, we do. We’ll see to that.”

Did she imagine the flicker that crossed the man’s face at the word “ex-wife”? Perhaps. She didn’t know. She could never banish from her mind what they’d told her about Jeff not booking that hotel for their wedding on the appointed day or any other day. Why had he lied to her? Was it that he’d never meant to marry her? She’d tried to talk about it with Michelle, but her neighbor, usually so warm and affectionate, grew remote and impenetrable when expected to reassure her about Jeff’s shortcomings. Fiona wanted excuses made for him, not suggestions, however gently put, that she should try to look to the future instead of dwelling on a man who was—well, she’d never even hinted at this but Fiona knew the missing words were “after her money.”

“You’ve told us about friends and family, insofar as you can. Now, how about enemies? Did Jeff have any enemies?”

She didn’t like the way they referred to her as Miss Harrington but to him as Jeff, as if he were too much of a villain to be accorded the dignity of a surname. What do they say to each other about me when they get out of here, she often asked herself. “I don’t know that he had any,” she said wearily. “Do ordinary people have enemies?”

“They have people who don’t like them.”

“Yes, but that’s different. I mean, my neighbors, the Jarveys, didn’t like Jeff. Mrs. Jarvey admitted it. They both disliked him.”

“Why was that, Miss Harrington?”

“Jeff was—you have to understand he’d got an enormous lot of vitality. He was so full of life and energy . . .” Fiona couldn’t keep back a little sob when she said this.

“Don’t upset yourself, Miss Harrington.”

How could you help upsetting yourself when you were forced to talk about things you’d have liked to keep locked up inside you forever? She wiped her eyes carefully. “What I was going to say was, Jeff came out with things that—well, that sounded unkind, but he didn’t mean them, they just sort of brimmed over.”

“What kind of things?”

“He made digs, sort of jokes, at Michelle—Mrs. Jarvey. About her size. I mean, he called her husband and her Little and Large, things like that. She didn’t like it and her husband hated it. If it had been left to her I don’t think she’d ever have had anything more to do with Jeff.” Fiona realized what she was saying and tried to make a better impression. “I don’t mean they did anything about it, they didn’t even say anything. Michelle’s been an angel to me. It was just that they didn’t understand Jeff.” She made herself think from Michelle’s point of view, though she’d never faced up to it before. The lie Jeff had told about the hotel booking returned to her mind. “I suppose the truth is Michelle didn’t want me to marry Jeff, she thought he was bad for me. And—well, Michelle thinks of me as a daughter really, she told me so. My happiness is very important to her.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Harrington,” said the inspector. “I don’t think we’ll have to trouble you again. You won’t be needed at the inquest. Be sure to give us a call if you think of anything you haven’t told us.”

In the car he said to his sergeant, “The poor cow’s having a rude awakening.”

“D’you want me to keep on searching for that divorce decree?”

“There are some things you can search for, Malcolm, that you’re never going to find. Because they don’t exist, right?”

“So do we do her for bigamy?”

“I reckon we leave it to the DPP to sort out. We’ve got enough on our plate without that.”

“I shall be going down to the constituency this afternoon,” said Jims, “but I’ll delay it till after four so that you have time to fetch Eugenie from school first.”

Zillah gave him an aggrieved look. “Don’t bother. I’m not coming.” How could she? She was meeting Mark Fryer for coffee in Starbuck’s at eleven on Friday. “What made you think I’d be coming?”

Jims had forgotten that dream of himself as prime minister with Zillah as his consort. “I’ll tell you what made me think it, darling. We made a bargain, remember? So far you’ve got everything out of this marriage and I’ve got fuck-all. You’re my wife, at least you’re the ornament I chose to impress my constituents, and if I choose that you accompany me to Dorset, you do it. In case, as is more than likely, you never read a newspaper or watch anything on television above the level of a hospital soap, there’s a by-election in North Wessex next week and I intend to be there on Saturday to support our candidate. With you. Dressed in your best and looking lovely and gracious and devoted. With the kiddiwinks, trusting that little devil doesn’t bawl the place down.”

“You bastard.”

“The children are yours, not mine, but you’d be wiser not to use language like that in front of them.”

“What about you saying ‘fuck-all’ then?”

Jordan had taken the new pacifier out of his mouth and flung it across the room. “Fuck-all,” he said thoughtfully. It seemed a better panacea to stop him crying than the pacifier. “You bastard.”

“Anyway, I’m not coming. I never want to see Dorset again. I saw all I wanted to while I was living there. Take that Leonardo. I bet you were going to.”

“I hope I know something about discretion, Zillah, which is more than you do. By the by, have you remembered to inquire after your father?”

The next morning neither of them saw Natalie Reckman’s article, Jims because he woke up late and had to rush to get to his office in Toneborough on time, Zillah because she went off straight from dropping the children to have a facial and makeup done at the Army and Navy Stores. At just after eleven, a vision of loveliness in Mark Fryer’s words, which didn’t sound as if he meant to be sarcastic, she was drinking cappuccino with him in Horseferry Road, where he told her all about his broken marriage, recent divorce—a sensitive word to Zillah at the moment—and was disbelieving when she said she had to go and pick up Jordan.

“Let me come with you.”

Afterward Zillah could never imagine how she’d come to get out of the car with Jordan and Mark Fryer and, instead of going up to the flat in the lift, walked round to the front of the block. Could it have been because the building was beautiful from the front and a dingy concrete nightmare in the basement? Had she wanted to impress him? Perhaps. But there it was. They all walked along Millbank and turned the corner into Great College Street.

A crowd had gathered outside Abbey Gardens Mansions, made up mostly of press photographers and young women with notepads. They turned as one when they saw Zillah approaching and closed in upon her, strident voices bombarding her with questions and bulbs flashing. She tried to cover her face with her hands, then, she hoped, with Mark’s jacket which he’d been carrying over his shoulder.

He snatched it back, said hastily, “This is no place for me. See you,” and disappeared. Jordan began to scream.