Written in Blood(86)
After Brian had left Sue made a quick call to his parents to say goodnight to her daughter, who was staying over. Mandy did this quite frequently, sleeping an exhausted sleep in her constantly redecorated room after staying up as long as she liked, watching whatever she liked on the box.
Mrs Clapton greeted Sue frigidly and called Amanda to the phone. There was a certain amount of wrangling to get her to do so. Mrs Clapton, who had not covered the mouthpiece as people usually do on such occasions, said happily:
‘We’re being a naughty girl, mummy, I’m afraid. A very naughty girl indeed. But we’re not going to be allowed to get away with it.’
The receiver was laid on its side and Mrs Clapton’s sensible Cuban heels stomped off. Sue heard the sound of jovial conversation and Amanda laughing. Now the heels were stomping, triumphantly unaccompanied, on their way back. Before Mrs Clapton had a chance to speak Sue hung up.
Unable to settle she wandered around tidying up after Brian. Clothes were strewn all over the bedroom floor and there was a jumble of sweaters on the bed. She untangled them and folded each one quickly in a beautifully precise way. She had had a weekend job in a haberdasher’s when she was fifteen and had never lost the knack.
Downstairs she mopped up the bathroom, which reeked of Brian’s Christmas cologne and aftershave, and flung three sopping towels in the washing machine. Then she swished the clippings from his beard down the plughole and cleaned the toothpaste-streaked spittle from the basin. A rub over the tiles and glass shelf, which were also liberally spattered with water, a quick squirt from the Toilet Duck, and Sue was back in the kitchen looking vaguely round for something else to do.
This was totally unlike her. Usually, whenever she had the house to herself, she whipped out her paints and portfolio and got to grips with Hector, but tonight she knew she would not be able to concentrate. The events of the day crowded her mind to the exclusion of all else.
It was at times like this that she missed Amy most, for there was no one else in the village whom she could really call a friend. True, she knew all the play-group mums fairly well but these relationships were purely of a domestic nature. There was not one that she could contact to discuss what was now weighing so heavily on her mind. They would think it most odd.
Momentarily Sue was tempted to ring up Amy anyway, on some pretext or other, and just pour it out. But that would be very unfair. She had done this once or twice just after they first met, but Honoria had either interrupted, demanding that Amy find or fetch something or other ‘at once’, or been coldly critical at great length when Sue had hung up.
But, sooner or later, the opportunity would arise and, to have her thoughts in order for when it did, Sue closed her eyes and went over the events of the afternoon, starting from the moment when she had gone flying back through Rex’s door on the end of Montcalm’s lead.
She found Rex in the kitchen, slumped wretchedly in exactly the same position as when she left. To her great distress, as she approached she realised he had been weeping. The thin, fragile skin on his face was wet through and looked about to dissolve. Before she had a chance to speak he cried out, ‘I killed him, Sue! It was me. I did it . . . I did it . . .’
Sue had sat down carefully and calmly. She knew, of course, just what he meant - knew that he was not describing an imaginary confrontation in one of his war games or re-running, in his disturbed fancy, an historically famous fight to the death.
It did not occur to her to be frightened, largely because she was quite sure there had been some barmy mistake. For this was Rex, who carried an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world’s most devastating weapons of destruction in his head and could not bring himself to swat a fly. But that he believed this wild declaration was obvious, for lines of agony were carved deeply across his brow and his eyes brimmed with hot, fresh tears.
‘I don’t understand, Rex,’ said Sue quietly. ‘Please tell me what all this is about.’
He told her, starting with Gerald’s visit and finishing with a description of his own shameful conduct.
Sue listened and found herself, despite the seriousness of the occasion, enthralled. Her imagination fleshed out the narrative. She saw Gerald, red-faced and awkward, perched on the study window-sill and Rex, alight with a willingness to help, waving his hands about in gestures of reassurance. She heard the wind in the dark trees at the death of the day and felt, crawling down her spine, the eyes of an unseen observer.
After a rather garbled conclusion, punitively laced with such phrases as ‘court martial’ and ‘shot at dawn’, there arose a miserable interval during which Rex gazed wretchedly at his shabby tartan slippers.