Peter Corris - The Washington Club

We went into the kitchen without speaking and I perched on a stool while she made coffee in a plug-in machine. She spooned the coffee into the filter paper and poured in the water. The suspicious, sceptical Hardy waited for her to speak. An old ploy-first remarks after a dramatic statement can be very revealing.

‘Nothing wrong with your prostate.’

I was totally surprised. I’d had no idea of what she might say and I burst out laughing, totally thrown.

‘What?’

‘You’ve gone about five hours without a piss. A whisky, a couple of glasses of wine, some water. Your prostate’s okay. I’m talking as a woman who knows about older men.’

Well, what do you deduce from that, Cliff? I could feel her taking control. I couldn’t mention age difference, but she could. She’d made me laugh and anyone who makes you laugh is on your side, aren’t they? She leaned back against the bench while the coffee maker bubbled and took her cigarettes from a pocket in the kimono. She lit up, took two deep drags and put the cigarette out in the sink. Then she ran a glass of water and rinsed her mouth, turning away from me to spit the water out.

‘I know it stinks,’ she said. ‘I want you to kiss me but I needed it.’

I went across the smooth quarry tiles in three strides and grabbed her. She seemed to flow towards me and I could feel the need in her, or thought I could. If she was faking this she was a loss to the acting profession. I didn’t care. We kissed fiercely and the coffee maker hissed as the last of the water passed through.

She pressed her head against my shoulder and gripped my ribs in a strong hold. ‘I’ve told a lot of lies,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can… untell them. Can you do that, Cliff?’

Her perfume was overlaid with the smell of sex and smoke and coffee. I rubbed the top of her head with my chin and felt the whiskers snag in her hair. ‘You can do anything,’ I said.

‘I was never in love with Julius, whatever that means. I liked and respected him though. You see, I loved my parents very deeply, too deeply. I thought they were both wonderful. They adored each other and me. It was all a bit unhealthy really.’

We were in the sitting room with our coffee and Claudia was fiddling with a cigarette. She looked at me directly.

‘I don’t mean there was anything wrong,’ she said quickly. ‘No molestation or abuse or anything like that. It was just that we were too exclusive of other people. I measured everyone against them, all relationships against theirs and found them wanting. The couple of boys I went out with and went to bed with in my student days I found pretty pathetic compared with my father. That’s not healthy.’

‘I see.’

‘They didn’t have any family here. The people who’d taken them originally had died or were far away. Like me, they didn’t have many friends either, hardly any. But Julius was one, or at least I thought he was. I had a flat close to my parents’ house and I saw them a lot, so I saw Julius quite often as well. When they were killed he was the one who gave me the news. Losing them knocked the guts out of me for a long time. Julius was there. He was a sort of replacement figure, I suppose. He was kind and strong and he wanted me, so I married him. It was a terrible mistake. He desperately wanted a son. I’m not interested in children and that caused lots of problems. Have you got any children, Cliff?’

I shook my head.

‘Why not?’

I pondered the question while I finished my coffee. The whisky bottle wasn’t far away and I was beginning to feel I’d have to bring it closer soon. ‘It sounds lame,’ I said, ‘but I can quite honestly say that the matter never came up. I was married for a while but she was a career woman and the marriage went bad pretty early. The women I’ve known since then have either had children of their own or not wanted them. My childlessness is circumstantial.’

‘Do you want a drink?’

Observant of her. My eyes must have been straying. ‘Yes.’

‘Help yourself.’

I poured some whisky into the glass I’d used before and added a little of the water produced by the melted ice. She held out her coffee mug and I gave her a healthy slug.

She sipped, then spoke very slowly. ‘I can’t prove any of this, but I believe that Julius had some kind of hold over my parents. I believe that he told them he wanted to marry me and they opposed him. I believe that he worried them to death.’

I was glad I had the Scotch. I drank some and felt it slide down, warm and comforting. I wished that we weren’t talking this way. I wished we were discussing driving up to Medlow Bath to stay in the Hydo Majestic for the weekend, or flying to the Barrier Reef for the snorkelling and sun-bathing and gins and tonic.

‘You think I’m mad, paranoid or something.’

She’d pulled her hair back and caught it behind with a clip of some kind, all except for those strands and wisps that were doing their own thing again. I’ve seen and dealt with a lot of disturbed and delusional people and usually you can spot them. It’s not that the eyes glitter or the lips twitch, it’s more a sense you get that they are not really talking to you at all, that they’re engaged in an ever-lasting, ever-circling dialogue with themselves. I felt nothing of that about Claudia Fleischman.

Against that, she’d lied pretty comprehensively to the police and to Sackville and to me, by omission. If I was going to accept what she told me now I’d have to start from scratch with her story, clear away all the undergrowth and get to what was left standing. I drank some more Scotch and forced myself to think of the latest turn of events. Women fifteen years younger than me are not generally falling at my feet. I had to consider that Claudia had put on her little black dress and her perfume the way tennis players put on their sneakers and sweatbands-the better to do a job they know how to do. There was no way to come at it gently.

‘Two questions,’ I said. ‘Why did you have these suspicions about your husband and why did you lie about Van Kep?’

‘And if I satisfy you on those two points you’ll fuck me again?’

‘Claudia…’

‘I know how all this must look to you.’

‘No, you don’t. I’ve spent twenty years dealing with things that sometimes weren’t what they seemed and sometimes were exactly that. For better or for worse. I’m sorry if I’m starting to sound to you like a professional investigator and not… something else. I’m a bit confused. Bear with me.’

She lit the cigarette, which looked a bit tired after the work she’d already put in on it. She tried to puff but she’d made a hole in the paper and it wouldn’t draw. She put it out in the glass ashtray and it lay there like a long white worm with its back broken. ‘I inherited the house in Edgecliff. I just let it stand empty for ages and didn’t do anything about it until after I was married. Julius told me to put a professional on the job but I wanted to tidy things up myself. The house turned out to have a big mortgage on it. That didn’t surprise me too much. They’d always lived well, taken trips overseas and they were big donors to various causes-Amnesty International, things like that.

‘But even to a non-accountant like me it was obvious that they’d let the practice dwindle in recent years and my mother had virtually retired. At first I suspected that Dad had stopped charging his patients or something. It wouldn’t have surprised me. But it was more than that. He’d virtually had a nervous breakdown. I found some of the medical stuff. All hidden from me, of course. He was taking lots of pills to keep going, so was she. It was as if something had knocked the stuffing out of them. There were barbiturates and other things in Dad’s bloodstream when he died. I found that out later. The coroner more or less hushed that up. I thought it was a professional courtesy. The doctor who did the autopsy didn’t make much of it.’