Dangerous to Know Page 3

  But how could you prove it? There would be only your word for it, and she was conditioned to obedience. Perhaps, if she got both, or even one of the cleaning jobs, it would give her enough courage to quote the law at him and refuse him what he said were his rights.

  But did you have rights over other people? Had she none over him? Why was it one way? Surely you had duties and responsibilities? She did her best to discharge those – her domestic ones, at least, and those towards her daughters which were their due. You could have expectations: she had expected affection from her husband, a wish to see her happy, but she had been disappointed. Perhaps you had a right to such expectations, but you had no right to exploit another person for your own satisfaction.

  With the girls gone, could she go too?

  Her mind churning with these thoughts, Hermione found it difficult to sleep, and her pretence did not deceive Walter when he returned from his meeting.

  She lied, though. When he seized her by the shoulder, turning him towards her in their bed, she told him she thought she was getting a cold and perhaps he should not come too close. It made no difference.

  Walter’s hands, circling her throat, clenched. He was imagining that they held great masses of dark silky hair. Once, Hermione’s hair had been long enough to twine around her neck, but she had cut it off.

  4

  Hermione felt excited as she waited for the bus which would take her to her first interview. The single decker trundled through Freston, stopping near the market square to let off shopping passengers. Then it continued through the edge of town, passing near the station, along the country roads.

  In different circumstances, in another family, she could have looked for work in one of the shops in Freston. She would not have been too proud; serving at the till in the supermarket, if she could learn to work it, would have suited her as well as helping sell antiques. She could not type, much less operate a word processor, so an office job would have been beyond her capabilities. But Walter would find out if she worked openly in Freston.

  Theresa Cowper, Hermione’s prospective employer, had taken time off from work to see her, since Hermione had said that she could not come in the evening. She was waiting as Hermione, damp and tousled because it was raining, walked from the bus stop, as directed, past some shops and into a close near the church at the top of the hill. Orchard House was separated from its neighbours by high stone walls. Wrought-iron gates opened on to a front garden with a lawn bordered by rose beds. A blue Renault stood parked outside the front door, which opened as soon as Hermione pressed the bell.

  Theresa Cowper was in her late forties; she had dark curly hair which cascaded around her head, falling to her shoulders. She was well made up, with defined brows over brown eyes, and had a wide mouth covered in bright lipstick. Hermione found her alarming and was glad she would be out during her hours of employment if she got the job. Intimidated before a word was uttered, Hermione’s demeanour was even humbler than was normal for her. Ms Cowper showed her swiftly round the house, which was well furnished with modern pieces, and where curtains in abstract prints hung at the windows. There was pale carpeting almost everywhere, and a study equipped with tubular steel chairs, a glass-topped table and a huge black leather sofa. Two of the bedrooms seemed designed for teenagers, with small portable television sets in each, and bright duvet covers on the beds. In one, some stuffed animals were arranged on a window seat; in the other, poster-sized pictures of notable football players lined the walls.

  ‘I live with Jeremy Davis,’ Theresa told her. ‘His children come most weekends and then the house turns into a bit of a tip.’ She smiled, saying this, and suddenly seemed less formidable. Hermione could not know that the previous evening she had stormed round sweeping and tidying so that the potential domestic saviour would not be frightened off.

  She then offered Hermione more money than she would ever have dared to ask for herself.

  ‘I’ve got to beat supermarket wages, haven’t I?’ she said. ‘And if I employed a cleaning firm, it would cost me an arm and a leg. Besides, I’d rather have someone I know.’

  But you don’t know me, thought Hermione, who had said that her name was Mary Brown. Now she waited to be asked for references. She could not give them; to do so would betray her secret. Even the vicar could not be trusted with such a confidence, especially if required to collude. The Brown part was correct, of course, and it was a very ordinary name, but there were not too many Hermiones around. Ms Cowper, however, did not mention references, and it was arranged that Hermione would come on Tuesdays at two o’clock. She had decided that she could not manage Mondays, because she always had so much to do herself after the weekend, and because she could not guarantee to arrive early on Tuesdays, it seemed best to settle for the afternoon. Hermione had expected difficulties over this, but Ms Cowper said that as she and Jeremy were out all day, it made no difference to them. Hermione offered no explanation for her problems; ‘never explain’, someone had once said, and in this instance certainly it seemed to be good advice.

  Theresa said she would be there to let her in on her first day’s work and would then give her her own key. How trusting, thought Hermione, walking away with twice as much money as her fare had cost. She had no idea that her grave manner, her obvious superiority and her suitably dowdy but respectable appearance in her baggy tweed skirt and much-washed Marks and Spencer’s sweater, had so impressed Theresa that she thought herself the most fortunate of women to have secured a perfect treasure.

  She was to go on thinking so for some time.

  * * *

  Hermione was happy as she set off down the hill towards the bus stop. She had just missed one bus and there would not be another for nearly an hour so, as she had cash in hand, she went into a café which she had seen among the row of shops. She might even have a bun with her coffee.

  She entered Brenda’s, saw a free table near the window and sat down. Soon a waitress in a pink flowered overall brought her a cup of coffee, and she chose a sticky Bath bun from among those on offer. She was cutting it to bits, enjoying the scrunchy sugar on the top, when through the window she saw an old lady walking along the pavement; she approached the café, came in, and peered round in the warm atmosphere. Hermione recognised her at once; she was the woman with the unfriendly daughter – Hermione tried not to think of her as hideous – whom she had met in Primmy’s not long before. Moments later, Mrs Fisher was sharing Hermione’s table once again, though she had had to be reminded of their earlier meeting.

  ‘When your daughter arrived, I’d just finished my lunch,’ said Hermione, with a tactful readjustment of the facts.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Emily Fisher. ‘Wendy doesn’t like to talk when she’s eating,’ she added, in token apology.

  ‘Do you live near here?’ asked Hermione. Primmy’s, after all, was only a mile or so along the road, two stops on the bus.

  Mrs Fisher said that they did and supplied her name and address – Sycamore Lodge, in a turning half-way up the hill.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again,’ said Hermione, and, made expansive by her unusual sense of freedom, recklessly added, ‘I’m starting a new job in the neighbourhood.’

  When Mrs Fisher asked her what it was, she told her the truth.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Mrs Fisher warmly. ‘I don’t know Theresa Cowper, but you’ll change her life for her, I’m sure. She’s lucky.’ She wished Wendy would agree to employ a cleaner instead of herself turning the place upside down on Saturdays and emerging exhausted from the fray. There had been Mrs Noakes once, now long retired and moved to Weymouth, where she lived near her son.

  ‘It’s going to change mine, too,’ said Hermione. ‘Do you come here every day?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘It depends on the weather and how stiff my hip is. I’ve got a touch of arthritis, you see. But I try to get out most days when Wendy’s at work.’

  She looked guilty, saying this, and both of them suddenly giggled, like schoolgirls.
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  ‘Does she go to work on Tuesdays?’ asked Hermione in a casual tone, as if the answer did not really matter.

  ‘Yes. Almost always. She has a white Peugeot car,’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘If it’s parked outside the house, then she’s at home.’ The garage had gone, in the renovation scheme.

  Hermione had had her invitation.

  Each morning, now, Walter looked up when the train stopped at Stappenford, hoping that the woman with the long black hair would get in, and would be in his part of the train. He looked out for her in London, too, for if he saw her there he could follow her, sit near her on the journey home, begin a conversation. When this did not happen, he began putting his head out at Stappenford in the mornings, though she might be so far up the platform that it would be impossible for him to identify her before she boarded the train. After a few days of this he earned suprised glances from his fellow passengers, many of whom were regular travellers like himself, so he abandoned the practice and instead began moving about the train, sitting in different coaches instead of always in the fourth from the front which had been his custom hitherto.

  He had not been back to the King’s Cross area since he had seen her. The first time he had picked up a woman there had been on impulse, when he had come up to town by car and had driven, by chance, down a street patrolled by prostitutes. It was dark, he was on his way home, and he stopped, brusquely beckoning over a girl he had noticed who wore her hair in a long plait drawn forward over her shoulder. She was very young. He liked them young. After this, he always hunted on foot. The savagery he kept banked down most of the time sometimes surfaced, and one woman protested, but she had met other rough customers and he had done no more than bruise her. Subsequently, he had been in many cheap hotels and tawdry rooms, and he had tried out various things he had read about in magazines.

  As he sat in the train going home, in his dark suit and with his raincoat on the overhead rack, no fellow traveller would have suspected what scenes were being played through Walter’s mind. Many of the regular commuters slept between stations, their inner clocks warning them when to wake so that they did not miss their stops. Walter did not need to do this. He exercised for five minutes each morning before the mirror, and at weekends and on occasional evenings he jogged, in a grey track suit, and expensive shoes because it was folly to risk injury through being inadequately shod. He was physically fit and his job was not demanding enough to exhaust him, requiring only accuracy and application and, as he was fond of telling his colleagues, organisation. He allowed no emotion to enter into his relationships with them. Walter told others what to do, and he was efficient; one thing he had learned in his brief military career was how to delegate and how to accept his own role in the hierarchy. He considered the charity had been lucky to secure his services, but at his age he was the fortunate one. While there was no liking between him and Simon, the director, there was respect. Walter suppressed his fascination with blonde Belinda Arbuthnot, who smelled of lavender or roses; he caught wafts from her when he passed behind her desk on the way to his small office, a tiny cubicle partitioned from the main office by walls ending two feet from the ceiling. She and another woman, Rosemary Kent, worked irregular hours to suit themselves, but at busy times came in most days. Walter found Rosemary unattractive; she was thin and elegant, and she designed the appeal literature. All women alarmed him, but they intrigued him, too; he spent much time fantasising about close encounters with their faceless bodies. He was even afraid of Hermione, whose expression of resignation when he moved towards her had to be instantly obliterated from his vision. She, however, was his: as much his as his car, his house, the clothes he wore; his to do with as he wished, officially handed over in the marriage ceremony all those years ago in return for being housed and fed for life. That was how things had always been; all this feminist rebellion was responsible for many of today’s ills. Look at his own daughters, both off doing what they called their own thing, heedless of filial duty. Why, they had wanted for nothing, not even during the worrying spell when he was made redundant, before he secured his present position. The fact that he had come into some money from a seldom-seen childless uncle had been fortuitous and had made possible the move to Merbury, which Walter had seen as socially desirable. He now had some investments, and in spite of his salary being modest, could afford the ever increasing fares to and from London.

  Hermione, in a fit of courage, had suggested that he might use the legacy to set up his own business, but he told her she did not know what she was talking about and the matter was his to decide. He had made a few moderately successful deals on the stock exchange, but was not venturesome, and he paid into a pension fund for himself.

  Fortunately Hermione had never been extravagant. When he met her, he recognised an unformed malleable girl. He gave her fair but minimal housekeeping money and required her to render a strict account of how it was spent. If she needed clothes or chemist’s goods, she had only to justify the cost and the money was provided. Never mentioned now was the fact of the small capital sum she had inherited from her father which, with the proceeds from the sale of his house, had been put into the purchase of theirs. When Walter’s uncle died, Hermione had asked if she might have it back – it was three thousand pounds – but Walter had pointed out that she had received this many times over in benefits accruing from her life with him.

  Walter had not forgotten his own first hard months as a private soldier. Like dogs and horses, people had to be broken before they would come to heel. This process had almost disappeared from contemporary life and hence there was now no discipline. Take those louts on the train that night, for instance, with their insulting comments to the woman with the long dark hair: some square-bashing would soon knock them into shape; so would a good thrashing. He had been beaten often enough as a child and it had not harmed him.

  Walter’s failure to intervene, to rescue the victim, still made him smart. A man of his experience should have been able to sort out the drunks almost with a glance. Next time, he would not be found wanting.

  A few nights after he had followed the woman when she left the train, Walter again got off at Stappenford and went to the house she had entered. A light burned in the downstairs window, and he walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He would pretend to be selling something, he planned, and when she came to the door he would show surprise at recognising her, refer to the incident and make his apology.

  But no one answered the bell. The light must simply be a decoy to warn off burglars.

  He went away, but he did not abandon the plan he had been forced to discard; he could always try again.

  The next night he returned to the dark streets behind King’s Cross, and for a time he forgot about the woman, except that he dreamed one night that Hermione had hair like hers and he was winding it round her throat to strangle her.

  5

  Hermione’s second prospective employer could be reached by bicycle. Full of confidence after securing her first position, she pedalled up the hill and out of Merbury, turned right before she met the main road and set off past the pig farm for Prendsmere. It was a dull day, cold but dry, and a sharp wind blew in her face as she pedalled along the lane, over a small bridge spanning the river, past a timbered barn and there, a hundred yards further on, was the entrance to Downs Farm. There were no downs around; perhaps it had been named after a previous owner, thought Hermione, freewheeling over the tarmacked drive to a grey stone farmhouse with a tiled roof. A child’s swing hung from the branch of an apple tree.

  A tall, thin man with very straight dark hair which fell forward to collide with the frames of his spectacles, led her into a drawing-room with flowered linen covers on the chairs and sofa. Ash was piled high in the open hearth and a film of dust lay on every surface.

  ‘I’m the househusband,’ he told her. ‘Nigel Wilson. I’m a free-lance journalist and I write in between looking after the children and minding the washing-machine. The children are both at school now, in Pren
dsmere village which is further on down the lane, as you know, I’m sure. My wife’s a dentist. She spends the weekends putting right all the things I’ve failed to do. I can’t manage.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Hermione drily, looking round.

  ‘We had someone who came twice a week,’ he told her. ‘She got pregnant and had to leave. We had a nanny for a while before that, but we don’t need one now.’

  ‘How old are the children?’ asked Hermione. She had expected to meet Mrs Wilson and was trying to adjust her ideas. Why shouldn’t the man stay at home if it was easier for his work? Maybe the wife earned more.

  ‘Fiona is seven and James is five,’ said their father. ‘Let me show you round.’

  The house was very untidy, but it had a more comfortable feeling to it than Theresa Cowper’s; perhaps it was just because it was older and was set in such lovely surroundings, thought Hermione, longing to get busy putting things away. It was obvious that he was going to offer her the job, and, primed now by her earlier experience, she firmly requested the same sum, saying it was what she was paid in her other position. Theresa was going to pay her bus fare too, but Hermione could cycle here – it was not on a bus route – so that did not apply.

  Again, she gave her name as Mary Brown and agreed to come on Thursday mornings.

  ‘Could you stay now?’ asked Nigel, for it was Thursday. ‘I’ll put your bike in the car and run you home.’

  She stayed, borrowing a plastic apron patterned with various sorts of gourds which she found on a peg in the kitchen. Like Theresa’s, this was fitted with every modern aid, and was much cleaner than the rest of the house. Nigel had to show her how to operate the expensive vacuum cleaner with its built-in tools, and when it was time for her to go, he poured her a glass of white wine from a bottle that was in the fridge.