“You’ve thought of everything.” Her tears long gone, were replaced with a wide smile of accomplishment at having put her well-oiled plan into motion. It was admirable, the way she had schemed to get away from a husband she clearly loathed. “I suppose it serves him right,” I put in, hoping for further explanation, “for not having treated you properly.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that. He never laid a finger on me.”
I could only wonder what he had laid on her. “How was it, then, that you took this radical step?”
“He was the best husband in the world. He worshipped the ground I walked on, waiting on me hand and foot whenever he was in the house and not out of it earning money to keep me in the style he thought I craved. The only trouble was, I couldn’t stand him.”
I was utterly knocked about by her confession. “Why was that?”
“He was stifling me with his constant consideration.”
“You mean he wanted to own you?”
“Not even that. That would have been something to his credit. He gave me all the liberty I wanted, though I never had an affair. How could I?”
“He sounds a clever chap.”
“He was, but not clever enough to guess that I was going to leave him.”
I wanted to burst the hot air in her cocksure balloon. “What will you do when your money’s gone? Ten thousand isn’t that much these days.”
I’d like to say she gave a smile, but it was closer to a smirk. “By then my life will have altered. Something will have happened.”
“How can you be sure?” I thought of a notion to torment her with. “Would you like me to come with you?”
Not even that inane question discomposed her. “Not if you treat me as my husband did.”
“No fear of that.” I didn’t altogether like her, but she was a woman, so I had to. “I’d treat you like a dog.”
Her smile became interesting. “That at least would be a change, but you won’t get the chance.”
“Well, I can’t say I’d really want it.” There was no way into her armour of conceit, which riled me, though I was glad of the entertainment. “What’s your name?”
“Doris,” she said, and when we shook hands I told her mine. “Nobody would want to come where I’m going, anyway. From now on I’m an independent woman.”
“Good luck to you. I’m all for it, but I hope you realise that you might not be so for long, if a man gets his hand on that ten grand in your briefcase. If I was you I’d be nervous, schlepping it around like that.”
Her laugh cooled the notion of my snatching such wealth and throwing her off the train. Maybe she was a police decoy set to catch bag snatchers who purloined passengers’ luggage. She clicked the briefcase open, showing a black-handled flick knife on the neatly folded cash. “I’ll have no trouble on that score.”
I had an impulse to leap off the train. “You certainly won’t.”
“I’m not afraid to be on my own. I’ll get on all right. I’ve thought of everything, except where I’m going. But wherever it is my husband will never find me.”
“I suppose he’d be angry should he ever do so.”
From the poise of her lips I had to believe her: “He won’t. Not that I’d care. I’ve lived all my life knowing I’d do this one day, and thinking that by the time he caught up with me I’d be a different woman and he’d no longer want to know me. So now I’m off, and I hardly care what happens, as long as I can be myself.”
“I hope all goes well, then,” and I did.
“That’s very kind. It’s been so reassuring talking to you. I feel quite well now. At Liverpool Street I wondered whether it wouldn’t be best to go into the Underground and throw myself under a train, but you’ve convinced me I’ve done the right thing.”
I prayed for her husband to forgive me, thinking I should have been a social worker, the way people open up to me, though hoped I hadn’t provided her with too much encouragement to do a runner, while passing her suitcase, onto the platform. “Take care. The best laid plans can go awry. Perhaps we shall meet again some day.”
“I guarantee we won’t.” She set off like a girl of fifteen just out of school, and my shout was almost a shriek: “You’ve forgotten your briefcase!”
She had. Did she or didn’t she want to escape? Was she so glad to be shut of her husband it didn’t matter whether she had money or not? Or was it simply an oversight? If I told Blaskin about it, to pad out one of his dull novels, he might tap his forehead: ‘But what was her subconscious trying to say in making such a foolish mistake?’ To which I’d reply that actions spoke louder than words. ‘And in any case writers like you have no business with the subconscious,’ leaving him no option but to pick up an old style pen and throw it with the intention of sticking me to the door like James Cagney did with the fly in ‘G-Men’. Subconscious my arse, I said to myself, shouting even louder after the daft already fleeing woman.
I held the case high when she came back. “Don’t do that again, or your husband will catch you sooner than you think, and serve you right.”
She took it with a worryingly neutral smile as the train pulled away. If I hadn’t called, or noticed the case till she’d gone, what then? Not to shout while it was possible to bring her back didn’t occur to me, and I was glad it hadn’t, for it proved that what I instinctively did reflected my natural good natured self. On the other hand it made me anxious, because I couldn’t afford to have any sign of a generous character destroying my best interests at some future time. To convince myself that I could be in little danger of that I lit a cigar.
A taxi took me across the Fens to Upper Mayhem. Dismal at the gate, now in his prime of about four years old, licked my boots as if they’d been polished with meat paste, a greeting returned by a smack at his well-fed flank. “What do you feed him on?” I asked Clegg who’d come out on hearing the taxi.
“He lays in the fields for hours like a heap of mud, till he gets a rabbit. He brought one back for the pot last week.”
I took half an hour, over mugs of tea, describing my run to Greece, and then I gave him a cheque for five hundred pounds. “Spend it on expenses, if you think it’s too much for yourself.”
“It’ll come in handy.”
I put other cheques for phone, electricity, and local tax into their envelopes, throwing the rest of the mail away except for a plain brown envelope with only my name on it, a short typed message inside saying: “You’re a marked man Cullen. You fucked us around, but we’ll get you.”
I handed it to Clegg. “How did this come?”
“It must have been dropped in while I was out walking with Dismal. I assumed it was a thank you note for the ten quid you sent to the village hall fund.” He adjusted his false teeth to make a smile. “Look’s like shit’s creek again. You’re always in the wars.” He washed mugs at the sink. “You’ll have to lie low for a bit.”
But how? Where? And did I want to? Could I? How possible was it to hide from the inevitable? But whatever in my previous life had been inevitable? I was alive, wasn’t I? Chance and coincidence had willingly guided my survival so far. Even so, it would be idle and careless, as well as stupid, not to go through the possibilities, even if only to know what not to do. I opened the map, to look up the deepest hiding place, of which, I decided, there were seven.
First, I could stay on with Clegg (and Dismal) and thumb my nose at whatever would come to get me, but that notion was too obvious, so I scrubbed it.
Second, why not go on bended knees and ask for sanctuary from Frances? For a start, she might not believe the story I’d have to spin. Most of all, I wouldn’t want to put her in danger.