Peter Robinson - In A Dry Season

I walked down the dark, deserted High Street to Bridge Cottage. Over the river I could hear music and laughter from the Duke of Wellington, where, it seemed, the VE-Day celebrations were still going on over a week after the day itself. Moonlight silvered the flowing water and made it look like some sort of sleek, slinking animal.

There was light showing between the curtains in Bridge Cottage. New curtains, I noticed, now we didn’t have to worry about the blackout, or even the dim-out, anymore. I knocked at the door but no one answered. I knocked again.

I didn’t think Gloria would be out; she rarely went out in the evenings except to the pictures with me. She certainly wouldn’t go out and leave the lights on. Besides, Matthew should be there. Where else would he have gone after being ejected from the Shoulder of Mutton?

I knocked again.

Still nothing.

I put my key in the lock, turned it and entered, calling out Gloria’s name.

There was no one in the living room but I noticed a strong smell of whiskey. I called out Gloria’s name again, then thought I heard a movement in the kitchen. Puzzled, I walked over and when I got to the doorway I saw her.

Gloria lay on the flagstone floor, legs and arms splayed at awkward angles like a rag doll a sulking child has tossed aside. One of her little fists was curled tight, as if she were about to hit someone, except for the little finger, which stuck out.

There wasn’t a lot of blood; I remember being surprised at how little blood there was. She was wearing her royal-blue dress with the white lace collar, and the stains on the material looked like rust. They were all over the place: breast, stomach, ribs, loins. Everywhere the royal blue dress was stained with blood, yet very little of it had flowed to the floor.

Not far from her body lay a broken whiskey bottle, the source of the smell I had noticed earlier. Bourbon. An unopened carton of Lucky Strikes sat on the countertop. Above it, the cupboard was open and tea and cocoa had spilled all over the counter and the floor nearby, along with knives and forks from the cutlery drawer.

Beside her, holding a bloody kitchen knife, Matthew knelt in a small pool of blood. I went over to him, took the knife gently out of his hand and led him through to his armchair. He accompanied me as meekly as a weary, defeated soldier goes with his captors and flopped back in the chair like a man who hasn’t slept for months.

“Matthew, what happened?” I asked him. “What have you done? You’ve got to tell me. Why did you do it?”

I gave him pencil and paper, but he just drew in on himself and I could tell I would get nothing out of him. I put my hands on his shoulders and shook him lightly, but he seemed to shrink away, blood-stained thumb in his mouth. I noticed more blood on the cuffs of his white shirt.

I don’t know how long I tried to get him to communicate something, but in the end I gave up and went back to the kitchen. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I suppose if I assumed anything at all, it was that someone must have told him there was nasty gossip going around about what his wife got up to while he was out. I already knew that he had had a tantrum in the Shoulder of Mutton and I guessed that one way or the other, it had set off the explosion that had been building in him the way pressure builds in a boiler; now Gloria was dead and Matthew was empty of his rage.

As I stared down at poor Gloria’s body, still half unable to believe what had happened, I knew I had to do something. If anyone found out about this, Matthew might be hanged, or, more likely, found insane and put in the lunatic asylum for the rest of his days. However difficult his life was right now, I knew he wouldn’t be able to bear that; it would be purgatory for him. Or worse. I would have to care for him from now on.

As for Gloria, my heart wept for her; I had come to love her almost as much as I loved Matthew. But she was dead. There was nothing I could do for her. She had no other family; I was the only one who knew her story; it didn’t matter now what happened to her. Or so I told myself.

I still had some vestiges of religion in me back then, though most of it had disappeared during the war, especially after Matthew’s death and resurrection, which seemed to me a very cruel parody of Easter, but I didn’t particularly give any thoughts to Gloria’s immortal soul, a proper burial or things like that. The church didn’t come into it. I didn’t think of what I was doing in terms of right or wrong; nor did I really consider that I would be breaking the law. All I could think about was what to do to protect Matthew from all the prying policemen and doctors who would torment him if word of this got out.

Did I think of Matthew as a murderer? I don’t think I did, though there was undoubted evidence of this at my feet. In a strange way, I also saw Gloria as my partner in wanting to protect Matthew from further cruelty and suffering. She wouldn’t want him to go to jail, I told myself; she wouldn’t want him put away in a lunatic asylum. She had sacrificed so much to protect him. His comfort and ease were all she had lived for after his return; he was her penance, after all, and that was why she would never leave him; that was why she was dead. Gloria wanted me to do this .

I offer no more excuses. The blackout cloth was still rolled up below the windows in the living room, where it had been left after I helped Gloria take it down a couple of months ago. I carried it into the kitchen and gently rolled Gloria onto it, then I wrapped it around her tightly as a shroud. Before I had finished I bent over, kissed her gently on the forehead and said, “Good-bye, sweet Gloria. Good-bye, my love.” She was still warm.

Where could I hide her? The only place I could think of was the old outbuilding they never used. In the light of a small oil lamp I started to dig the hole. I wanted to make it deeper, but I couldn’t manage more than about three or four feet before exhaustion overcame me. I went back to the house, where Matthew hadn’t moved, and managed to find the energy to drag out the roll of blackout cloth and drop it in the hole. There was no one around. The cottage next door was empty and there was neither a light nor a sound out back. Only the black night sky with its uncaring stars.

With tears running down my cheeks, I shoveled back the earth. Some heavy stone slabs stood propped against the wall and I levered them down on top of the makeshift grave. It was the best I could do.

That left only the inside of the house. First, I swept up the broken glass, the spilled tea leaves and cocoa powder, and put the tins back in the cupboard. As I said, there was very little blood and I managed to scrub that off the floor easily enough. There might have been minute traces left but nobody would be able to tell what they were. If things went according to plan, nobody would even look.

I say “plan” now, but it was just something I had come up with while burying Gloria. I had to explain where she had gone.

After I had managed to lead Matthew upstairs and wash and undress him, I put him to bed. I packed his bloody shirt and trousers in a small suitcase and added as many of Gloria’s favorite clothes as I could fit in. Then I went and picked up her personal odds and ends and put them in the suitcase too.

After checking the kitchen carefully to make sure that I had collected everything of importance and cleaned up to the best of my ability, I wrote a note on the same paper I had got out for Matthew earlier. Gloria’s childlike handwriting and style were easy to imitate. After that, carrying the suitcase, I took the back way to the shop. I didn’t want to leave Matthew, God knows, but what else could I do? Things had to appear more or less normal. He didn’t seem aware of what was happening and I had no idea how he would face the next day, whether he would remember what he had done, feel remorse or guilt. Would he even notice she was gone?