‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Jones in a very small voice. ‘Yes. So he has!’ She thought it all over in her own cool little way. ‘That day,’ she said. ‘It was raining. I had my umbrella up and my head down—I suppose I never looked at my taxi driver at all. Not to recognise him if I saw him—well, in some different situation.’
‘In a mirror, for example,’ said Smith. ‘That black marble, you know—when it’s wet, it does get a shine on it. You could see your face in it, really you could.’
‘Or somebody else’s. I saw my own taxi driver, didn’t I?’ said Mrs. Jones, humbly. ‘He’d be sitting a bit ahead of me like you are now. And, through the window of the car drawn up beside me, I’d see him in the mirror of black marble and he’d look as though he were sitting in that car!’
‘That’s the way I’d worked it out,’ said Smith. ‘Last time I drove past here on a rainy day. I daresay when the police were here, it happened always to be fine.’
‘Yes. Well. I suppose one ought to whizz off this minute and confess to them?’ She didn’t seem too much delighted at the prospect.
‘Perhaps one should. On the other hand,’ said Smith, ‘you never saw those girls like I did, Madam, when His Excellency had done with them. Crying all the way home in the car, poor little devils. And that chap, the commissionaire—his girl, she’s dead. Died in hospital, he said.’
‘So if everyone just goes on believing in the rough looking man….I really do think on the whole that I ought to keep quiet about it. Don’t you, Smith?’ said Mrs. Dorinda Jones, hopefully. She added: ‘Upon reflection.’
From the Balcony…
FROM THE BALCONY UP there, they could see right down into her house. And she knew that they talked about her. The old woman sat out on every fine day in her wheel-chair, peering down through the railings with nothing else to do, but watch.
‘I knew it,’ said the old woman. ‘There she goes again! Dipping a great hunk of bread into the curry sauce.’
‘ “Tasting it,” ’ said her daughter, with a sneer.
‘Gobbling it,’ said the old woman. ‘Then she’ll sit down to her supper and eat a great dob of it on a mound of rice. No wonder she’s fat.’ She herself, long ailing, was very thin.
‘Fat!’ said the daughter. ‘She’s disgusting.’ She was not thin but slim. She ate sensibly, carefully, keeping herself slim. Her husband loved and admired her for her beautiful figure. ‘What can the husband think, married to such a mountain of flesh?’
Mrs. Jennings was not a mountain of flesh but she was over-weight and it was true that her husband found her unlovely in consequence. ‘Aren’t you having any curry?’
‘No, I picked when I was cooking. I must pay for it.’
‘Well, that makes a change,’ he said, finishing up her share.
‘I thought you’d rather admire me,’ she said, trying a little joke. ‘It’s a long time since I did that,’ he said.
They were out there again, next day, the old woman in her chair, the rest popping in and out, waiting on her—the old grandfather, the daughter and her husband, a couple of teen-age kids. The Family, Mrs. Jennings called them to herself, with a capital F. They could see everything. They could see into the kitchen, all the front rooms, upstairs and down; even part of the garden at the back of the house. Mrs. Jennings’ garden had a tiny swimming pool. ‘Don’t tell me she’s going in!’ said the boy, coming out with a glass of nice cold milk for Gran’ma. ‘What’ll the displacement be?’
‘Flood the garden,’ said his sister, sniggering.
‘That I would like to see,’ said the old woman. ‘Her in one of them bikinis.’
Mrs. Jennings in fact did not venture into the pool. ‘Those people would have been watching me,’ she said, excusing herself to her husband when he came home. ‘Saying things about me.’
‘Some old trout in a wheel-chair,’ he said. ‘What the hell does she matter?’ The Family were a frequent source of disagreement; sometimes, she thought, the original cause of it all. Was it not her complaints about them that had first drawn his attention to her increase in over-weight, so gradual a process that he had hitherto been blind to it?
‘So you didn’t go for a wallow?’ he said. ‘Pity. It might tone up that flab of yours.’
‘Yes, I know. So I came in and did some hard housework instead.’
‘Well, she’s given that up. Now we’ll begin on some housework,’ said the old woman to her granddaughter, looking down into the drawing room. ‘You wait!—twenty minutes and she’ll be on the sofa, gorging biscuits.’