Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

He went upstairs. At that moment, immediately, he couldn’t bring himself to read more. But he had seen the photographs on page three, notably the one of himself and Leonardo in the Maldives, and he blamed Leonardo for all of it. Leonardo had talked, gossiped perhaps, at any rate told someone, had given their picture to a gutter rag. He found him in the bedroom, sitting on the bed fully dressed but looking very hangdog and, to Jims’s mind, guilty as hell. Jims began to shout and rave at him, waving the newspaper, accusing him of treachery, perfidy, and barratrous betrayal-his once-successful career was in part due to his command of language-and not listening to his indignant defense.

Leonardo stood up. “I haven’t talked to anyone. You’re mad. I’ve got my career to think of as much as yours, remember. Let me see that.”

They struggled with the paper, pulling it this way and that until the front page was torn in half. Leonardo finally got possession of it. “If you’ll read it instead of ranting like a maniac you’ll see it’s your precious wife who’s been talking, not me. And talking, my God!”

Jims half believed him but he refused to look in his presence. He grabbed the paper, shouted, “You can get yourself back to London. Walk to bloody Casterbridge, it’s only six miles,” then ran downstairs.

Mrs. Vincey had gone. The pack was still outside. Jims put the newspaper in his briefcase, his wallet and car keys in his pocket, and, like General Gordon solitarily confronting the Mahdi’s soldiery at Khartoum, opened the door and stepped outside. The pack roared with pleasure and flashbulbs popped.

“Look this way, Jims!”

“Give us a smile, Jims!”

“I’d like just two words, Mr. Melcombe-Smith.”

“Is it true, Jims?”

“If you’d like to make a statement…”

Jims said in his patrician tones, “Of course it isn’t true. It’s all lies.” He embroidered, recalling Leonardo’s words, “My wife is having a mental breakdown.”

“Did you know you were a bigamist, Jims? Will your wife stand by you? Where’s Leonardo? Do you expect to lose your seat?”

This last, which they all seemed to take as some sort of ghastly and obscene pun, raised a roar of laughter. Jims, in what was nearly a reflex because he’d felt his face grow hot and therefore red, put up his briefcase to hide it. Bulbs flashed. One exploded almost in his face. He tried to grab the camera, failed, and plunged for his car. They were all over it, he thought, like monkeys in a safari park. He pushed a girl off and she fell over, shouting she’d get him for assault. He got the door open, squeezed in, and shut it, hoping to slam a man’s fingers in it but the hand was snatched back in the nick of time. As he drove down the drive he could see ahead of him that the gates were closed. That bitch Vincey had shut them after her on purpose, he thought, when nine times out of ten she left them open, in spite of his admonitions.

“Open the bloody gates!” He shouted it out of the window but they took no notice. Or rather, one of them stuck a camera in through it.

He got out and they clustered about him, plucking at his clothes, cameras in his face. Someone was actually sitting on the top bar of the left-hand gate.

“You off to London, Jims?”

“What’ll you say to Zillah when you get there?”

“Was it a contract killer who murdered Jeff Leach?”

“Will Zillah stick by you, Jims?”

Jims pulled open both gates, The reporter sitting on one of them tumbled off and lay on the ground, shouting that he’d broken his leg. He shook his fist and said he’d get Jims for that if it was the last thing he did. While they were trying to bar his exit Jims, resigned to sacrificing his expensive oak gates if necessary, drove straight at the pack and forced them to jump out of his way. Most of them pursued him into the village, only giving up when they saw that the Crux Arms was open. He drove through Long Fredington, eyeing with bitterness Willow Cottage, where his courtship, such as it was, had begun, and then with a glimmer of interest, for he saw it was up for sale. He was reminded of what Leonardo had said about his “precious wife” talking. There was nothing for it but to stop being a coward and read that newspaper. He pulled off the road at Mill Lane, where Zillah, on her way to Annie’s house, had once dreamed of her future with him, its affluence and its glamour, and read the story.

It was even worse than he’d expected, but now, after making his getaway from the pack and, thanks to them, becoming somewhat inured to a rain of onslaughts on his privacy, his proclivities, and his reputation, he was more able to take it. Plainly, Zillah was entirely responsible. He had underrated her, had treated her in a way he thought she would tolerate but had not. This was her revenge. There were imponderables in the story, though, things for which she could surely not be blamed. He turned back to page one and saw Natalie Reckman’s byline. It was she who’d done that snide article about Zillah in the early days of their marriage! Jims could easily imagine her watching Leonardo’s house, spying on his arrival, probably bribing the neighbors. Ah, the world was a wicked place, and those caught in the fierce light that beats upon its high shore, exposed to perpetual threat and peril.

For all that, everything was over between Leonardo and him. If he’d fancied himself in love for a few short weeks, all that had vanished in the blink of an eye. He never wanted to see Leonardo again. Jims was nothing if not a snob and he asked himself what sort of a fool would walk about a gentleman’s house wearing only a pair of vulgar underpants from Cecil Gee. And not have the sense to know a light in an uncurtained room showed up the occupants clearly to anyone outside? He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Leonardo’s mother lived on a council estate. That it was in (or more probably well outside) Cheltenham meant nothing. Congratulating himself on his escape, both from Fredington Crucis and Leonardo, Jims drove eastward and left the road to mount the steep escarpment that rises out of the Vale of Blackmoor and on which Shaston stands. Even today the view from Castle Green over “three counties of verdant pasture” is almost unchanged from Hardy’s time and still a sudden surprise to the unexpectant traveler, but Jims didn’t linger to look at it. He put the car in Shaston’s pay-and-display car park and walked along Palladour Street to an estate agent’s. The woman seated behind the desk was probably the only person in the United Kingdom, thought Jims, who hadn’t read the story in the newspaper and who didn’t recognize his name when he gave it. That was all to the good. His business transacted, he returned to the car and headed back to the London road.

On the journey he turned over the facts in his mind and saw that, come what might, his career was in ruins. There was nothing left to salvage from the wreck. He was branded a bigamist, which he could perhaps feebly deny, and a practicing homosexual, which he couldn’t deny and no longer wanted to. And he had been questioned as a suspect in a murder case. All those years of campaigning, accepting the offer of a hopeless candidature in the industrial Midlands before getting at last a safe seat, all those Fridays or Saturdays spent in appointments, all that rattling about the county in a Winnebago, all that speech-making and fête-opening and baby-cuddling-how he disliked children!-and lying to pensioners and huntsmen and pro-vivisectionists and hospital patients and schoolteachers, all of it an utter waste of time. The Party would probably expel him, take away the whip, send him to Coventry. There was no possibility of his ever making his way back. He was done for. He could only be thankful that he had an unbreakable alibi for the Friday afternoon when that miscreant Jerry Leach was killed. And that, whatever she might think, he’d pulled a fast one on Zillah.