The Wimbledon Poisoner (17 page)

He had said fuck again. He had said fuck, twice, at a funeral. He glanced down at his notes and caught sight of the words ‘Death is Nature’s way.’

‘Death,’ said Henry, ‘is Nature’s way!’

Nature’s way of what? The rest of the quotation was obscured by a fold in the paper. He looked along the row of faces in front of him. They were now devoid of any clue that might guide him. If he could think of a way to stop this he would. But like a man at a party who simply cannot leave, he could not think of a reason why he should step back into the congregation. Was this his punishment? thought Henry.

‘I used to drink with Donald,’ he said, ‘in a pub called the Rose and Thorn. Not a bad pub. A place where you could go to get away from the wife, the “old rat” as it were, although of course Billykins . . .’

Billykins! That was her name! Of course!

‘Billykins and he were as devoted a couple as you will find anywhere and Donald loved her with an almost childlike devotion, could not bear to be parted from her, followed her almost everywhere, almost to the extent of hampering her freedom of movement—’

Elinor was looking at him. She seemed to be trying to say something. Stop, presumably. This was all very well. But how did you stop? Once you’d started how did you stop?

‘Look,’ said Henry, making one last, desperate effort to get this speech airborne, ‘look. Donald was my mate. And if Donald was here today, which in a sense he is, although he’s . . . er . . . in that box . . .’

Billykins gave the kind of wail familiar to connoisseurs of Greek tragedy. ‘Ay ay ay ay!’ she said, and then, ‘Aieee-ou!!’ It was, thought Henry, a primal grief that seemed to have no place in Wimbledon. His speech, ragged and confused though it obviously was, was having some effect. Christ, he was in the box and Henry was talking about him, a man talking about a man. It was simple.

‘Look, he’s in the box and here I am talking about him as a man, which I am and Donald was, if you hadn’t noticed. A man. Yes, one of those phallic monsters, one of those patriarchal blokes that feminism – and Donald of course was no feminist – yes, an ordinary English, forty-year-old male. And what did he want? Really. With his outdated attitudes and his, well, frankly, penis, what did he want? With his mortgage and his little horizons and his contempt for all the fucking rubbish that gets talked these days?’

He had said fuck three times. But they were listening to him. They were actually listening to him. They were leaning forward in their seats, mouths open, hanging on his every word. Henry didn’t care any more.

‘He wanted,’ he said, ‘what any man wants anywhere on the globe. A loyal wife, a bit of land to call his, a job that put food on the table, a child that would grow up to love him and that he would raise properly. He didn’t want to go to prison or be involved in a war, although I’m sure if it had come to that he would have been on the right side, although, as I should make clear, you never fucking know what the right side is until a long time after. Right? It isn’t Tehran though, is it? It might be, it might just be that life in Wimbledon has developed to a higher pitch than anywhere else in the globe. What I am trying to say—’

What was he trying to say? Whatever it was he felt they wanted him to say it. To say it and then leave the platform.

‘What I am trying to say is that no human life form, not even Donald Templeton, is completely beneath contempt!’

He realized, as he said this, that it sounded incredibly rude. He did not mean it to be.

‘Look mate,’ said Donald, ‘go on through. Tell it like it is. Go on.’

‘I mean by that,’ said Henry, ‘that I sometimes feel beneath contempt. I’m the sort of ordinary husband and father with not very many views about the world who’s led a very simple quiet life and wanted to do good and brave and dangerous things but just never got the chance. And Donald was like that, I think. He was a romantic, you know? He was a wild fucking romantic. He was a man who dared, who wanted more. And I think that’s why I liked him, because like him I look up at the sky above Wimbledon and I say “Oh my God. Oh my God, you bastard, I love you!” ’

Henry found he was pointing, dramatically at the coffin. They’re with me, he thought, they’re getting my drift at last.

‘That’s me and you in there,’ he said, in a kind of shriek, ‘that’s us. That’s the next day of our lives. Let’s try, shall we, and let that bit that lurked in Donald Templeton out of us. Let’s be wild and ridiculous and free, shall we, in memory of him? Let’s do it for Donald. Let’s go for it. Because he’s dead and we’ll be dead soon and I think we owe him something, ladies and gentlemen. I am speaking the truth of my heart here because underneath this rather boring exterior I care. I’m not quite sure what I care about but I care. And one of the things I care about that isn’t Nicaragua or Poland or anywhere else but right here and part of the country I love and that I am afraid I don’t want to see change too much is people like Donald Templeton. Because Donald Templeton is me! I’m in that box with him, feeling what he’s feeling, going through what he’s fucking going through, man. Thanks, Donald! Thanks for everything.’

Here Henry raised his arm in a kind of quasi-Fascist salute in the direction of the coffin and said, voice husky with emotion, ‘It’s your round, old son!’

Suddenly his eyes were blinded with tears. Convulsed with sobs, he made his way back to his seat where, to his surprise, Elinor, instead of hitting him in the face, put her arms round him. Other people in the chapel were sobbing too. Dave Sprott was leaning forward, his hands over his face, wailing like a child who had walked into his surgery for the first time. Even Sam Baker QC (almost) was white and nervous-looking and his professionally immobile upper lip was dangerously near to quivering.

It was not what Henry had meant to say. Or rather, it was not what he had meant to say at Donald’s funeral. But it was, he felt, as he rose to his feet and the strains of ‘Now Thank We All Our God’ began to filter through to the chapel, something that needed saying.

‘Come and get it!’ murmured Henry under his breath as he carried the bowl of punch into Donald’s house. ‘Finish ’Em! This should help you forget your troubles!’

To give it some more go, he had added some milk and a carton of orange juice as well as a small plastic container of something called Kleeneezee. It was now the colour of strong tea.

No one actually mentioned his speech, but Dave Sprott grasped his hand and said: ‘I know how you feel.’

Billykins just stared at him as if he was a creature from another planet. Only Elinor, when he had put the punch next to the glasses in the hall, barked,
sotto voce:
‘How could you do that, Henry?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Henry, ‘I was just very upset.’

‘It was embarrassing,’ went on Elinor.

‘Have a drink!’ said Henry.

‘No,’ said Elinor, ‘I couldn’t.’

‘I’m having one!’ said Henry.

She set her jaw at him. Over in the corner, Billykins, her head still between her knees, was moaning something. Henry caught the words ‘. . . awful . . .’ and ‘. . . end the nightmare . . .’ but whether she was talking about him or the vicar or Donald was unclear.

‘You said you would have a drink!’ said Henry.

‘I won’t!’ hissed Elinor. ‘I couldn’t!’

Then she scuffed her foot on the carpet. An expression appeared on her face that at first Henry could not identify. As she spoke he realized with some surprise, that it was doubt.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘at least you spoke out.’

‘Yes!’ said Henry.

Why is she saying this? What does she want?

‘Grief,’ said Elinor, ‘is so buried with us, isn’t it?’

‘Yes!’ said Henry.

She gave him a searching glance. ‘We repress our feelings, we bundle up into a ball and don’t talk about how we really feel. Deep down you probably do care, as you were saying today. Deep down you do care about the environment. About what we’re doing to whales and dolphins and the North Sea and the inner cities, and the whole unleaded petrol thing.’

Why bring unleaded petrol into this? thought Henry. I have not formulated a view on unleaded petrol.

‘What matters,’ said Elinor, ‘in anyone, is a spark of caring. Just something that tells you they’re still alive. That they’re still there. That other people can, well . . . touch them. Don’t you think?’

Henry narrowed his eyes. He felt more than usually trapped.

‘You feel threatened by my feminism, for example. You feel frightened by my growth as a woman. You feel . . .’

‘I feel . . .’

Elinor stiffened with attention.

‘I feel . . . frightened by you!’

‘What about me frightens you, Henry?’ said Elinor, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Is it me, my physical presence as a woman, my needs and powers as a mother? Or are you frightened of me as an intellectual?’

‘I’m frightened of you as a . . . thing,’ said Henry, ‘by the way you look at me, by the space you take up. By you. When I hear your step on the path I . . . I just cower!’

Elinor threw back her head and gave a braying, mannish laugh.

‘Oh, Henry,’ she said, ‘you are funny!’

And she cuffed him, amiably, about the shoulder. Henry found this curiously erotic.

He looked around for Maisie. She had been very quiet during the service, although a few days before she had been heard asking what people usually ate at funerals and if there was usually a lot of it. Eventually he saw her in the garden with a whole bowl of rice salad and what looked like a new garden trowel. Black did not seem to have its customary slimming effect on Maisie’s figure. She looked, if anything, bigger.

Over in the corner Dave Sprott was, to use his own words, ‘settling in’ to the punch. Next to him, Inspector Rush stood, glass in hand, peering at it suspiciously. But then Inspector Rush peered at everything suspiciously. Even small children on tricycles. Sprott took a sip, shook his head violently and started to bang himself on the back of the head.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Wowza! Got a kick to it, eh?’ Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet, a thin, girlish, fluffy woman, in an even fluffier mood than usual, grinned up at Henry girlishly. ‘What have you put in this, Henry?’ she said. ‘Paint-stripper?’

Henry was beginning to have second thoughts about the punch. What had possessed him? He didn’t want to poison the entire population of Maple Drive, did he? Well, at least not in a way that would lead so directly to him. He wasn’t even sure any more that he wanted to poison anyone. But as so often in the murdering game, it was a bit late for doubts.

‘Let me try it,’ said Henry. ‘I left it out in the front garden this morning. I hope no one’s interfered with it!’

He sounded, he thought, like a character in a Victorian melodrama. Several people, including, he was concerned to note, Inspector Rush, were looking at him oddly. He sipped a glass.

It tasted of almost nothing but bleach.

‘I think,’ Sprott was saying, ‘it has quite a resonant, flinty finish!’

Sam Baker QC (almost) was rolling the punch around his glass and wincing at it. He introduced a minute amount into his mouth and rinsed it around his gums.

‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘A very positive nose and plenty of body. It reminds me of a New World wine, aged in the barrel. With a hint of . . .’

‘Bleach!’ said Dave Sprott.

Everybody laughed.

‘Actually,’ said Henry, ‘if there is anything wrong with it I don’t think we should drink it. I left it out in the garden.’

‘And put a rat in it!’ said Sam Baker QC (almost), accenting as he always did the concrete noun in the sentence. Did he do this, thought Henry, because he favoured anything that might possibly be regarded as evidence? Was it a tic, acquired through long afternoons in the Court of Chancery, where the only way of enlivening sentences might be to stress the wrong word? Or was it simply that Sam Baker QC (almost) was (as usual) trying to make you feel awkward?

‘Elinor, love,’ said Henry, ‘you try it!’

‘No no no,’ said Elinor, ‘it tastes like bleach!’

Sprott drained his glass and smacked his lips. ‘It goes down a treat after a while,’ he said, in his carefully preserved northern accent. ‘It has a nicely balanced quality of well-orchestrated fruit. What have you put in it, Henry?’

‘Bleach!’ said Sam Baker QC (almost). Everyone (apart from Henry) laughed again. Detective Inspector Rush, who had been rocking to and fro on his heels, started to peer into the bowl.

‘I’m a bit worried about this!’ said Henry. ‘I think we should take a look at—’

‘No no no!’ said Sprott, dipping his glass in the mixture and taking a deep draught of Yugoslav Riesling, brown sugar and assorted domestic cleaners. ‘It’s good. It’s a bit on the aggressive side. But basically it’s good. Has it got Slivovitz in it? Or is it some form of regional tequila?’

‘I think,’ said Henry, who was starting to sweat with the enormity of his offence, ‘that someone may have . . . I don’t think we should drink . . .’

But, as so often, people were ignoring him.

‘What do you think?’ Sprott was asking Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet. Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet made nervous little movements with his hands. He sipped a little, smiled prettily and, casting a nervous glance out to the street towards the Mitsubishi, said: ‘It’s not unpleasant!’

‘Can’t we—’ Henry began.

But now everyone wanted to get at the punch. Even Elinor consented to have half a glassful. Henry tried to scrape the ladle along the bottom of the bowl when he served her, reasoning that Impact and Start and Finish ’Em would probably sink through the wine, milk and orange juice, but he was not sure that half a glass would be enough. He was not, to be honest, sure that the solution was going to have any effect whatsoever. The only person who did not accept any of the punch was Detective Inspector Rush who, whenever Henry caught sight of him, was looking down into his glass, suspiciously.

‘I’m a little cautious about taking drinks I’m not sure about,’ he said to Henry.

‘Is that right,’ said Henry.

‘One never knows,’ said Rush, smiling thinly, ‘you can’t be too careful.’

As the friends, relatives and neighbours of Donald Templeton MD crowded round the punch-bowl licking their lips and holding out their glasses like children in a lunch queue, Henry, who took a couple of glasses himself, peered anxiously round the gathering looking for signs of collapse. There seemed, as far as he could tell, to be a fair amount of that. But then, people in Maple Drive were usually in that kind of state at parties. Part of the trouble was that the subtle blend of Yugoslav Riesling and assorted domestic cleaners was proving astonishingly popular. People said they had never had such a punch. It took a couple of glasses to get you going, they said, but when you got going, they said, you went. Vera ‘Got All The Things There Then?’ Loomis, the ninety-two-year-old from 92, had to be rescued from tipping the bowl up to her lips with her third glass, and Henry and several others remarked that they had never seen such animation among mourners.