The Wimbledon Poisoner (12 page)

‘Why were you depressed?’ she said.

‘Because,’ said Henry, ‘my pig wife was going to be made into bacon.’

‘Why was she going to be made into bacon?’

‘Because,’ said Henry, ‘she had caught a very serious disease.’

‘What disease?’

‘It’s called feminism,’ said Henry, ‘and I hope you never get it, because it is absolutely awful and it makes you swell up to an enormous size and when you have it really badly you go round bonking men on the head and blaming them for everything. And your arms grow all hairy and muscly like a man’s and you get very keen on boxing and tossing the caber.’

Maisie showed worrying signs of interest in feminism.

‘It sounds fun!’ she said. Then she looked at Henry suspiciously. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I know what feminism is. It’s thinking girls and women are good. What’s so wrong with that?’

Henry’s stories quite often developed into debates of this kind. In fact, on many occasions, Maisie talked more than Henry.

‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ said Henry, ‘and some feminists are quite nice. But some of them are bad-tempered ratbags who should be locked away in a cellar with a lot of other feminists. I’m not saying that women and girls are bad. I think they’re nice. I just don’t like being told that boys and men are bad. I think it’s stupid and unfair.’

Maisie thought about this. Then she said, ‘Well. Boys and men are all right, I suppose. Anyway. Go on with the story.’

‘So,’ said Henry, ‘my pig wife . . .’

It was curious. Here he was, as usual, telling Maisie her story. And a few streets away, Donald was probably in his death agony. Or if not actually in it, well on the way to it. What was so attractive about poison (and Henry had, with some regret, more or less reconciled himself to Donald’s death) was that it acted so independently. It was like a good secretary. The sort of secretary you couldn’t get hold of at Harris, Harris and Overdene. ‘Thallium,’ you said, ‘job for you!’ and thallium picked up the papers, simpered, and went out into the world to do your bidding.

Strangling was not like that.

‘You’re squeezing again!’ said Maisie. ‘Why are you squeezing?’

‘Because I love you,’ said Henry.

‘Go on about the pig now!’ said Maisie.

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘my pig wife—’

‘What was her name?’

‘Her name,’ said Henry, ‘was Elinor.’

‘Oh,’ said Maisie, ‘like Mummy.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but my pig wife wasn’t like Mummy. Mummy is sweet and good and kind. But this pig was odious and conceited and impossible to live with.’

‘Because it was a feminist!’ said Maisie, with a touch of satire.

‘That’s right!’ said Henry. ‘Which is not to say that it was odious and conceited because it was a feminist. I repeat. Not all feminists are odious and conceited. But they are not automatically right about everything. And the ones who see life purely as a battle between men and women – which, of course, it is, I suppose, are . . .’

He stopped. Maisie was looking at him doubtfully. He wasn’t getting the story right. It was infected with doubt. Somehow the outside world had intruded and broken up the fabric of the tale. What were usually asides, about life, religion, art, politics, had come to dominate the story. He saw himself suddenly, a fat man on a bed, haranguing his daughter about feminism. Was that what he was? Did he, perhaps, really hate women? Maybe Elinor was right. And if she was, perhaps he ought not be trying to murder her?

No. It was just a difficult, demanding task to perform. That was all. It interfered with your peace of mind. From the outside, murder looked like a quiet, sensible alternative to divorce. When you were actually involved in it, when you were down there at the murder coal-face, it could be as complicated and unsatisfactory as marriage.

He had better get Maisie to sleep, though. He didn’t really want her to hear her mother being strangled.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘this story is really about this pig’s father.’

‘Oh,’ said Maisie.

‘In fact,’ said Henry, ‘it’s about my father. Who was, of course, in the story, a pig. And although I didn’t like my pig wife or my pig mother come to that – I was very fond of my pig father. Because he, like me, was a male chauvinist pig. We all lived in this sty, just off Wimbledon Hill. It was a very expensive sty and like all the other pigs in the street we were very heavily mortgaged—’

He saw Maisie start to open her mouth and, before she had time to ask the inevitable question, said, ‘We had borrowed money from the pig bank. Anyway, one day the farmer who owned the street knocked on the door and told us that my pig father was due to be made into
bacon.
There was no way to avoid it. The next day we had to report to the huge, ugly, frightening, hideous abattoir man who, in case you didn’t know, lives, actually
lives
three streets away from us! He is tall and cold and sometimes he doesn’t only come for pigs he comes for greedy little girls who make pigs of themselves, with too many sweets!’

Maisie was now bug-eyed with fright. Henry leaned across and tapped her on the chest.

‘But,’ he said, ‘my pig wife, Elinor, decided to save my pig father. She decided he was one fat pig in Wimbledon who was not, could not, should not be brought under the knife of the evil abattoir man who lives, in case you need to know, in Clifton Road just off the common, and the story of how she fought off his terrible friend Farmer Dune, and rallied all the pigs of Wimbledon is the greatest story ever told. You will hear how Farmer Dune was himself eaten by a group of pigs. You will hear how pigs decided to own their own houses, and how pigs like me who worked for Harris, Harris and Overdene openly ate legal documents in the street. And you will hear most of all about the abattoir man, the evil, cold-hearted villain who knows no pity!’

Maisie was still bug-eyed. Her chin trembled with anxiety and her big, blue eyes looked far beyond Henry and the bright patterned curtains, at something only children see. He hugged her tightly, unburdened of some inner horror, suddenly carefree.

‘I’ll tell you the rest,’ he said, ‘tomorrow night!’

When we will be a single-parent family.

Henry liked the idea of being a single-parent family. There would be programmes about him on the television. Support groups would flash their telephone number at him late at night on Channel 4. He would, he realized, for the first time in his life have a socially acceptable problem. Being fat and forty and hating one’s wife and job were none of them socially acceptable. Murder was to make him something he had always suspected he might be, but had never dreamed of becoming – interesting.

For a moment, he wished he could tell Elinor these things. To talk to her, reason with her, confide in her, as people are wont to do when confronting their victims with loaded guns. ‘You see, Inspector, you have to die because—’ ‘Elinor,’ he could see her white anxious face now, ‘you have to let me strangle you. I need to grow and change and develop as a person in my own terms. My therapist, Elinor, a man called Graham Young, suspects that the only way forward for me emotionally is to fasten my fingers round your windpipe and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until your face turns black . . .’

He was squeezing. But not Maisie. This time he was squeezing the bedhead. And his daughter, her big head lolling across his chest, was fast asleep.

Down below, the front door opened and then closed quietly. Henry loosened his fingers from his daughter’s shoulder, tucked her under her duvet and, walking lightly on the balls of his feet, moved with a new precision on to the darkened landing. He smiled to himself at the head of the stairs. Not long now. Not long.

‘Donald is desperately ill!’ was the first thing she said, as he met her in the hall. As soon as she had announced this fact, she pushed past him roughly, on her way to the kitchen. This wasn’t as bad, Henry thought, as post-therapy hostility. It was more like plain, straightforward dislike. He felt able to deal with this. One just had to be manly about it.

It was a shame. Strangling really needed a more co-operative partner than Elinor. One of those kittenish creatures he remembered from the films of his childhood in the fifties, clad in waist-high, baby-doll nightdresses, women who seemed to enjoy nothing more than lying back among the yellow nylon sheets and allowing themselves to be strangled.

It was feminism that was to blame. Nowadays women carried everything short of CS gas; all of them – at least, all of the women Elinor knew – were fairly well up on the martial arts. He followed her through to the kitchen where, as far as he could see, she was still in operatic mode.

‘Desperately, desperately ill!’ she said, over her shoulder, then swooped down to the dishwasher, picked up a handful of plates, and marched off towards a cupboard. As she marched she threw remarks over her shoulder, as if in some climactic race with a large orchestra. ‘He is in a very critical state, Henry. He is in the throes of this awful thing, can’t you see?’ Then – ‘Chest pains! Dry skin! Pulse slow! Headache!’ and finally, ‘Poor, poor Donald!’

Well, it was his own fault, thought Henry. If he would go around pinching other people’s food! If only he had managed to force down a little more dynercaprol and potassium chloride! Elinor turned to him.

‘We’ve called in Roger From the Practice!’

Roger From the Practice, eh? thought Henry. Well, that should finish him off in no time.

‘Poor old Donald!’ he said, limply.

‘I don’t think you care about Donald!’ she said, pushing off from the cupboard, like someone striking out in a swimming bath.

Henry felt this was unfair. He liked Donald a great deal; and the prospect of the man’s imminent death did nothing to dispel this feeling, since he was the person directly responsible for this state of affairs. Well, perhaps not directly responsible. This business of being responsible for people had to stop somewhere, didn’t it? All Henry had done was poison a chicken which the berk had then insisted on eating. There was no way this made Henry ‘directly responsible’ was there? We had, thought Henry, gone beyond such primitive notions of morality.

‘You don’t care about anyone! You don’t care about anyone but yourself and your narrow little world.’

‘Well, what do you care for?’ said Henry.

Elinor thrust her square jaw at him. ‘Art!’ she said, ‘Feelings! People! The world around me!’

She didn’t, of course, thought Henry, mean the world around her. The world around her was largely made up of Wimbledon. She meant quite a different world. A world of giving women and strong but equally giving men, a world of Bengali dancing, passionately held ideas and seventeen different kinds of psychoanalysis. A world that existed only in her head.

Henry thrust his hands deep into his pockets, glumly. He wondered which row to select from the library of disputes available to him. It was going to be an important row. He could see it now, tucked up in a cassette case.
Last Row Before Strangulation.
Was it going to be the You Are Cold and Unfeeling Row, the Why Are You So Feeble Row, the Fat Row, the Racist Row, the Right-Wing Row, the Left-Wing Row, the Merits of Jane Austen Row, the Driving Row, the Looking After Maisie Row or the Why Are You so Bitter and Twisted Row. After some moments’ thought, Henry selected the Sex Row. The Sex Row was always the best. It was so beautifully, predictably ugly. It followed the track it had followed for so many years, awakened the parties to rage, apathy and contempt in precisely the usual places and ended, as it always did, in a drawn game. Henry stuck his lower lip out and in an uncouth voice, said: ‘How about a bit of sex?’

Elinor looked at him, blankly.

‘A bit of sex,’ said Henry, ‘you know. We take our clothes off and I stick my penis into you and pull it in and out for a few minutes and white stuff comes out and you say “Is that it?” And I say “There isn’t any more where that came from.” And you say “Why can’t you be more tender?” And I say “Search me, squire.” You know. A fuck. You must remember. We had a fuck, didn’t we once? A few years back.’

Elinor’s mouth had dropped open. She looked now like some domestic cleaning device, mouth open for household filth. Henry gave her some more.

‘Or buggery,’ he said, yawning, ‘that buggery sounds good. I read about it in
Knave
magazine. And that magazine
Hot Bitch
. You have to go to Holland to get it but it’s well worth the trip. It’s very informative. Or oral. You could suck my cock if you liked. We could turn on the artificial gas fire!’

Here he leered in a conspiratorial fashion. By way of answer Elinor’s mouth dropped another few notches.

‘Or spanking!’ went on Henry brightly. ‘I fancy spanking.’

Elinor gave a choking sound. For a moment he thought she was going to hit him, and then her face turned crimson, her mouth started to bang to and fro like a door in a gale force wind and a sound came down her nose that suggested she had just swallowed a quart of White’s Cream Soda. Elinor was laughing. It was primarily a Display Laugh, something to indicate that she could rise above Henry, but (this disturbed him somewhat) at the back of her he caught a glimpse of something that could only be genuine amusement.

‘Oh, Henry,’ said Elinor, now blocking her mouth with the palm of her hand and moaning elaborately, ‘you’re trying to be funny! Aren’t you? Is that the idea?’

Her laughter dropped away suddenly. It was obviously a ploy. She said then, very quickly, like a trick question to someone in the Yes/No interlude on the Michael Miles quiz show: ‘Marriage Guidance didn’t do much for your need to dump, did it?’

Henry was beginning to enjoy this. ‘Marriage Guidance,’ he said, ‘didn’t understand my need for brutally climaxing into tight white bottoms.’

Marriage Guidance had been a bloke called Kevin who, in Henry’s view, had had designs on Elinor. She, skilled in the ways of therapy, had after the first few sessions begun dissecting his own motives for him and Kevin, like an obedient dog, ended up nodding slowly as she told him clearly, fully, frankly what he meant when he said what he thought about what she or Henry felt, and how what he thought he thought about what they felt, or said they felt, probably wasn’t what he really felt any more than what they said they felt was really deep down what they really felt. Except of course, in her case. Because what she thought she felt was what she actually did feel and she said it, loud and clear and everyone else could go and fuck themselves. This was called ‘being in touch with your feelings’.