Morag Joss - The Night Following

27 Cardigan Avenue

Tuesday

Dear Ruth

On entering spare bedroom couple of days ago, saw someone had been in. Whole place ransacked. Got a bit of a shock, I got straight on the phone.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t in a panic. Didn’t even ring 999. The policeman that’s been before left his card by phone and he told me I could ring him anytime I needed updating. So I did. When did the police start getting business cards?

For that matter, when did they start talking about “needing updating”? Made me sound like a 5-year-old car.

He wasn’t in, of course. I got some girl. She wanted to know all kinds of stuff. When had I last left the house unattended, did I find the property secure on my return, any signs of forced entry, etc.

In the course of trying to accommodate her, I cast my mind back. I hadn’t been out since I don’t remember when. Had to get rid of her, so I said someone was at the door and put phone down.

Realized it was me, you see! A while back, searching for pressure cooker-not sure when-I must’ve upset all the packing. In haste to find it, I suppose I hadn’t noticed stuff falling all over the place. Or maybe I was just too frustrated by wild goose chase after pressure cooker to care, because I STILL haven’t found it. Everything from the cases is now scattered everywhere, sorry to say, including a great deal of your paper. Was surprised you’d decided to take so much of that gobbledygook (your word for it!) of yours with you, given how heavy paper weighs.

It’s all very colourful isn’t it, cruise wear. I can’t see either one of us in those colours now. I wonder I ever could.

Got to go.

After midnight or thereabouts

Got a bit upset there. To continue: on day after said phone call (see above), my policeman came again. No headway on your case-if you ask me they’ve given up. But can’t fault them on promptness this time. Just follow-up, he said. That girl I spoke to had left a few loose ends, obviously. I let him check the spare room window but he didn’t say much, only gave me more advice on locks.

Later on comes yet another, the woman from Victim Support. I’ve a feeling she’s been before. I don’t register faces much these days. She was the last straw-I let rip. Left her in no doubt what I thought of the hit-and-run bastard. She was quite shaken, I believe, didn’t stay. Good riddance.

They’re all co-ordinators of something, these visitors. Units, networks, support groups, you name it, they coordinate it. Must mean I’m getting the top people. Anyway I’m inundated. Keeping curtains closed doesn’t do a lot to deter.

Especially not Mrs. Marsden across the road. She pops over with alarming frequency. Is she a Mary or a Rosemary, I’ve forgotten. No, I never did know, never had cause. No good asking you now.

I can’t think what else to say so I will close now.

Bye , Arthur

After the smoke died away, my first thought was incongruously, and in the circumstances I felt unforgivably, exactly what Jeremy’s would have been. Although perhaps it wasn’t altogether strange; perhaps it was at least explicable, after more than twenty years’ assimilation of his honed, palliative urges, that suddenly I very badly wanted a cup of tea. I walked slowly from the garage, rubbing my eyes.

I entered the kitchen and was at once surrounded by the smell of clean house, mildly leafy with an undertow of carpet and new bread and paint. It was as pervasive as a sound; it was the layered, burnished scent of a house not merely recently cleaned but kept, on principle, piously and improvingly stainless, as if every day I sprayed some attar of the domestic virtues-Order, Constancy, Thoroughness-into all the corners and then went round with a cloth. The worktops were wiped and shining, oranges and lemons (more than I needed, acquired for the look of them) glared from a bowl sitting next to a stack of green tins. I could see my obedient herbs flourishing in their terracotta containers on the decking outside the kitchen window; I could see sparrows and finches swinging at the birdfeeder. Above the slow tack-tack of the kitchen clock and the rising purr of the kettle I could hear a mower growling a few lawns away.

It was no good. I knew how smug and how fugitive it all was: the arranging of fruit in a display of bogus generosity, the offhand cherishing of little wild birds, the taming of gardens. It amounted to no more than the application of an unimaginative respect for hygiene, habit, sentiment and surface. And I knew now the dangers of the fatal absence of spirit that that concealed, and how flimsy it was as armour against it; I felt afraid and nauseated, and I began to shake again. Glass will splinter as easily as it will send back a polished shine. Bodies tear, blood spills. I had just wielded a metal bar as lightly as I would flick a duster. I rushed to the back door and got myself outside just in time to be copiously sick into a pot of marjoram.

When I was calm once more, I wandered through the house. I think I was memorizing it as it was, because as soon as Jeremy came home everything would change again, though it had changed already, and I couldn’t detect what it was in the silence now that prevented it from being peaceful. What was it I couldn’t touch or see or smell or taste or hear that charged the air in every room with aggression? There had always been something about our house that made it difficult even to raise a voice. I had always kept loud noises at bay, along with dust, upsetting odours, and objects challenging to the eye. The very walls and carpets and furniture seemed to be in on it, contributing their so co-ordinated, so understated solidity and hush to the solidity and hush of our marriage and its traditional patterns, its established and exquisitely intimidating courtesies. It was as if the house itself knew that Jeremy disapproved of shouting. Did I? I approved of his disapproval, certainly. Shouting meant being not just too loud, but in the wrong. Solid, hushed people such as we were did not resort to shouting. Until today, shouting was the worst thing I had ever had to apologize to Jeremy for.

It was nearly seven o’clock when I heard the Renault turn in to the drive. I sat waiting in the sitting room. He came in from the garage and stood in the doorway, staring. He was holding the condom wrapper. We were both horribly embarrassed. I tried to say something, but whatever it might have been came out in a voice that I hadn’t used all day and was no more than a whisper. Jeremy’s mouth opened and closed. Then he burst into tears and turned away from me. I heard his sobs juddering as he rushed upstairs. A few minutes later came the unmistakable bumping and scraping of drawers and cupboards being emptied, and then all was quiet. About half an hour after that another vehicle, one of those scaled-down, tarted-up versions of a jeep, drew up and parked outside. The driver didn’t get out.

Jeremy struggled downstairs with our two biggest suitcases and left them in the hall. Then he marched into the sitting room and placed my car keys on the mantelpiece. Though his eyes were red, his face was again smooth, fixed with a look of aloof regret that I imagined he used for the relatives of dead patients. A heart might have stopped forever while Jeremy was in charge of keeping it beating, but that rueful, authoritative half-smile avowed that his part in any such death would always be blameless. He looked as if he knew he wasn’t in danger of shouting at me, and was proud of it.