Reginald Hill - Death of a Dormouse

Janet had exaggerated when she said she got Trudi her job. School over, Trudi had found employment as a copy typist in a council office at Staines. Janet had sought the lusher pastures of the West End, but after a couple of years, she had returned to Staines to train as an air hostess at nearby Heathrow. And it was now that, hearing of a well-paid secretarial opening in her company’s airport office, she urged Trudi to apply. How much the full beam of Janet’s charm influenced the office manager was hard to say, but Trudi got the job.

A few weeks later, Janet came into the office just as she was preparing to leave.

‘All right, girl,’ she said. ‘Glad rags on, colour in your cheeks, I’ll pick you up at eight. Be ready.’

‘What? Jan, no, I mean, what …’

‘Don’t play hard to get! I’ve got two lovely men lined up but my other lovely girl’s gone down with flu, silly cow. I need you, lovey, so don’t say no.’

‘But I can’t …’ said Trudi, panic-stricken.

‘Can’t what? You can drink orange juice, eat a chop, and laugh politely when I kick you under the table, can’t you? Trudi, I don’t ask much, do I? So, please! ’

Trudi had given in. The men had been Trent Adamson and Alan Cummings. Cummings, who worked for Customs and Excise, was the younger and livelier of the two, but it was Trent that Janet had in her sights. An airline captain with the wit and the will to move profitably from air to chair when the time came, he was in Heathrow terms a great catch. It was only to be expected that he would take Jan home.

‘But all he wanted to do was talk about you!’ said Janet the next day in mock pique. ‘Perhaps he’s a secret mouse-fancier!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Trudi, flustered. She had no desire to be fancied by Trent or any man. The previous night Alan Cummings had made a token pass and she had literally run away from him. It had not been her father’s intention that his distrust of authority and uniform should have been communicated so strongly to and extended so comprehensively by his daughter, but bringing her up single-handed had made his influence paramount and given his over-anxious warnings, both political and sexual, the force of divine law.

A week later Trudi was dumbfounded when Trent came into the office and gravely asked her for a date. She refused. He wasn’t put off. Janet’s pique soon ceased to be mock, but her sense of realism eventually prevailed and she started urging her friend to grab her chance with both hands.

Trudi was simply bewildered. She did not feel she had anything to offer a man like Trent. More importantly, he had nothing to offer her. She was happy to contemplate a life living at home, looking after her father.

And then one evening everything changed. Walking home from school in the November fog, her father was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. She sat at his bedside for twenty-four hours and would not believe them when they told her he was dead. She had refused to leave the house after that, even to attend the funeral. There was talk of forcible removal to hospital, but Janet squashed that, moving in with her friend. Then Trent started calling round and it was in his company that Trudi first stepped into the open once more. Few people thought of this as courtship, attributing it to some hitherto unsuspected vein of human kindness in Trent. The question, which only Janet dared put to him direct, was what would happen if and when he withdrew his protective shadow from the little dormouse? Trent’s only reply was a faint smile.

Two months later, he and Trudi got married.

And three months after that, to further amazement, Trent gave up his prestigious job and secure future, and went to work for a Swiss-based charter company trading out of Zürich. The Adamsons moved to Switzerland, the first step in a twenty-five-year separation from England which was to see them living in some of the most glamorous cities in Europe. Not that it mattered to Trudi, not in those early years anyway. Home was where Trent said it was. That was all that mattered.

Janet, meanwhile, lovely, lively Janet for whom the sky always seemed the limit, married Alan Cummings, had a couple of quick kids, and when promotion took her husband up to Manchester’s fast-developing international airport, she settled down stoically to a life of middle-class obscurity in the depths of Cheadle Hume.

‘I think it’s time I moved out,’ said Trudi.

‘Good Lord. Why?’

A month had passed. Slowly Trudi had returned to normality. The bad dreams persisted, but she had begun to feel perfectly safe in the day. Then that same morning, lying in bed enjoying the pale gold of the autumn sunlight on her window, she had suddenly recalled in its entirety that overheard conversation of her first day here. Savage resentment of Janet’s condescending interference had rapidly cooled to a general embarrassment that required instant action.

‘I’ve been here ages. I can’t impose on you for ever.’

‘Impose! We love having you, really.’ She sounded persuasively sincere.

‘You’ve both been marvellous,’ said Trudi. ‘But when Frank married you, he didn’t expect to get landed with another fat old widow.’

‘ Another? ’

‘Oh God, Jan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

But Janet was just laughing with the confidence of one who knows that all a few extra pounds have done to her figure is add a certain sensuous roundness to its always attractive contours.

‘Forget old , girl!’ she commanded. ‘We’re in our prime, you’d better believe it. As for fat, well, I can tell what you mean by the size of those clothes of yours. But have you taken a look at yourself lately? You haven’t been eating enough to keep a dormouse healthy! Take that blouse off. It’s like a surplus parachute anyway. Now take a good look in that mirror. Not much fat there, is there?’

Trudi didn’t reply. She was regarding with fascinated horror what she must surely have seen but somehow not managed to register. Her shoulder bones stood out like a fashion model’s and against her louvred ribs hung tiny breasts like deflated balloons left over from some long-forgotten party. This was how she had looked at nineteen. A quarter of a century of crème patisserie had been stripped off her in a month.

‘Oh God, Jan, what a mess I look!’

‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say. Right, here’s what we do. You want to leave? OK. As soon as we get you looking like a human being again, you can go. That includes getting you back on a decent diet. We don’t want you putting up two stone overweight again, but we don’t want you anorexic either! Deal?’

‘Deal,’ said Trudi, still staring at herself. For some unfathomable reason, it occurred to her she was now as slim as Astrid Fischer.

It took another three weeks. Frank, with an end in view and perhaps some guilt in mind, was kindness itself, and when the time came Trudi hugged him tearfully in farewell.

‘It’s high time you were going,’ said Janet grimly as they drove away in her Ford Escort. ‘Another week and you’d have been giving that randy old devil ideas.’

Trudi looked down with undiminished surprise and pleasure at her new, slim body clad now in tight-fitting cords and sweater.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve been right so far, Jan. I’m not fat, and I’m not old, well, not so very, but …’

She felt her brief mood of happiness already slipping from her and when Janet prompted her with a ‘but what?’ she burst out, ‘Yes, that’s it. But what? But what am I? I need a new me inside as well as outside. Inside, I’m just lost. Bewildered. I feel useless . Jan, help me to stop feeling useless, then you’ll really have done me some good!’