The meal dragged on. It was far too heavy and elaborate for lunch. Marina served it in the French way, with salad after the main course, and then cheese before the pudding. So pretentious. What was wrong with our way of doing things?
When at last it was time to go, Marina came into the hall and helped me on with my coat. Then she bent forward and kissed my cheek.
“I have enjoyed this,” she said. “Let’s do it again soon. I’m running up to town for a night or two but I’ll be in touch as soon as I get back.”
I walked home through the park and down Victoria Road. The rat was still lying on the path between the house and the stable. After I had taken off my hat and changed, I went outside and manoeuvred its stiff body into a bucket with the help of a spade. The ice had melted now, so the fur gleamed with moisture. I carried the bucket into the stable. I looked at the various places where the rat-catcher had left the poison. All of it had gone. I wondered if there were more rats. It was then that the idea came into my mind. I remembered the Kipling story.
Nigel and Charles thought Kipling was the greatest writer of the century. They were particularly fond of the Stalky stories, which are about schoolboys at a boarding school near the sea. I had read them in our early days, when I’d been friends with Charles and Nigel, just before Charles and I became engaged. A wife should try to like the things the husband likes. But I hadn’t liked these stories.
In one of them, the boys kill a cat with an air gun. They push its dead body under the floorboards of a rival dormitory. The cat decomposes, and gradually its smell fills the dormitory, growing stronger and stronger, and more and more loathsome. If a cat could do it, so could a rat.
It was just a silly idea — childish, undignified and in any case impossible to carry out. I left the rat in the stable and went inside for a cup of tea. During the rest of the day, however, I could not help thinking about the rat. And about Marina.
Marina was going to London. I had a key to her flat, which she did not know I possessed. If I went there tomorrow evening, after darkness, there would be very little risk of my being seen as I went to or from the flat. There was a little gate from the park to the communal garden of the flats — I could go that way. People kept to themselves at Raglan Court so with luck I would not be noticed. In any case, I could take the precaution of wearing a rather bright headscarf, a pre-war present which I had never used, and an old mackintosh which had belonged to Charles.
As the evening slipped past, the idea seemed more and more attractive. Well, why not? It wouldn’t harm Marina to have another smell in that evil-smelling flat. And it was a way of making a point about her beastly behaviour. There was no excuse for adultery. There was no excuse for stealing my husband. The following evening, I decided to act.
I put the rat, wrapped in brown paper, in my shopping bag, slipped a torch into my pocket, walked up to Raglan Court and let myself into the flat. I was not afraid. Indeed, I had the oddest sensation that it could not be me, Anne Butter, doing this. I felt as if I were watching rather than doing.
I went straight into the kitchen. This was where the nasty smells came from — so this was the place for the rat. I did not turn on the light, but used the torch sparingly. I unwrapped the rat and let it fall to the linoleum.
The gas cooker was raised on legs a few inches above the floor. I found a floor mop and used it to push the body under the cooker to the wall. The torch proved to be a blessing. With its help I was able to see that there was a gap between the wall and the back of the cupboard beside the cooker. With a little manoeuvring of the broom, I managed to push the rat into the gap. Even if Marina looked under the cooker she would not be able to see anything. I did not think it would be long before the rat began to smelclass="underline" the flat was centrally heated, and the kitchen would be the warmest room.
I went home. Then it was simply a matter of waiting. Waiting for Nigel and waiting for the rat.
A few days after I had left the rat at her flat, Marina arrived on my doorstep with a small parcel in her hand.
“For you,” she said, smiling. “Just a little something.”
I asked her in for coffee. The parcel contained a copy of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food.
“The lovely thing about cooking is that when the pleasure’s shared it’s somehow doubled,” Marina said. “You won’t be able to get a lot of the ingredients in Lydmouth. Perhaps I can find what you need in London.”
During the next two weeks, I saw Marina regularly. I even asked her to lunch. Many of Elizabeth David’s recipes were really very simple. I found one — tarte à l’oignon et aux oeufs — which turned out to be very like the flans I used to cook Charles. Marina said my tarte was quite marvellous.
Why did she do all this? Why was she such a hypocrite? There were two possible explanations: either she felt guilty about stealing my husband, or she was doing it because she derived a malicious pleasure from pretending to be my friend. On the whole I thought the latter explanation was more likely.
On the second occasion I had lunch with her, I was sure I could smell something in the living room. It was a faint blueness in the air, an uneasy hint that lingered in the nostrils. After the meal, I helped Marina carry the plates into the kitchen.
I sniffed.
“Can you smell something?” Marina asked.
“Well...”
“I keep thinking I can. Something rather unpleasant. I really must turn out the cupboards soon. And the larder.”
No more was said about it until a day or two later, when Marina drove me up to Cheltenham for a matinée at the Everyman. In the interval she brought up the subject again.
“Do you remember that smell in the kitchen? I think it might be the drains.”
“Have there been complaints from the other flats?”
“Not as far as I know. I’ve got someone coming to have a look.”
Two days later, she came to tea and gave me the next instalment. Unfortunately the plumber had turned out to be rather good at his job. He soon realized that the smell was not from the drains. He pulled out the cooker and found the decaying body of the rat squeezed between the cupboard and the wall.
“It was quite disgusting,” Marina said. “It looked as it smelled, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the plumber was marvellous. He got the wretched thing out of the flat and now things are beginning to return to normal.”
“Isn’t it odd having a rat in a modern block of flats?”
“Unusual, I suppose. But apparently they are very agile creatures, and you never know where they are going to turn up. The plumber suggested that I get the rat-catcher.” Marina shivered, rather theatrically. “Just in case there are any more.”
“We had rats in the stable,” I said. “The rat-catcher soon sorted them out. I’ve got his address if you’d like it.”
Marina took out a little leather-bound diary and made a note of the details. As she jotted them down, the brooch gleamed on her cardigan. Platinum and unlucky opals.
The rat man came and left poison under the cooker and in the larder. Marina told me all about his reluctance to leave the poison in the kitchen, about the strictness of his instructions to her. This was just before she went up to London for the weekend. She was going to a party, she said, where she hoped Elizabeth David might be present.