Gwen turned one of the neatly written pages. 'Oh, having a whale of a time, it appears. Dinner-parties every night, house never empty, weekends in the country. Country? What country?'
'It's quite a big place, actually, the size of here. She must still know a great many people locally, some of them pretty well off I shouldn't be surprised, even in these days of industrial havoc.'
'Muriel never kept up with them much as far as I heard.
Anyway, there she is. The theatre, what's she talking about? In Middlesbrough? It can't be the theatre as _civilized folk__ think of it. Racing? Is there a course somewhere in that region?'
'Sorry, no idea,' said Malcolm, smiling and spreading his hands. 'Not my department.'
'No, I realize that, no, I just thought you might happen to know. Whippet-racing perhaps she means.'
'Well, it's good to hear that she seems to be doing reasonably well.'
'It says something for her pride that she exerts herself to give that impression.'
'I'm afraid I'm not quite with you.'
'If you want my opinion, she's protesting too much.
Life's not turning out to be much fun, how could it in a hole like that, but she's buggered if she's going to let anyone think she's made a mistake. Very roughly.'
'Maybe, I suppose.' Malcolm tried to sound about half convinced. 'What does she say about Peter?'
'Nothing very much. She's surer than ever she was right to make the break when she did, exactly what she said before, er, oh and if you see Peter tell the lazy sod to drop her a line. Underplaying it there, you see.'
'She must miss him a lot in spite of everything.'
'It's not him she misses, for Christ's sake, it's having a husband as a social seal of quality. And then, well, she doesn't like him not being there in another way, because he still belongs to her really. Some women don't like parting with anything on their inventory even when they've no further use for same.'
'You're amazing, the way you see things. I'd never have been able to penetrate that far into her motives.' He missed the sharp look these remarks drew from Gwen and went tentatively on, 'But you don't visualize her coming back.'
She gave a restrained sigh and said, 'Peter's more likely to go there than she is to admit she was wrong in letters nine feet high, and that's it. Mind if I take first knock in the bathroom?'
'You go ahead.'
Left alone, Malcolm poured a last cup of tea and lit his daily cigarette. Putting aside the _Western Mail__ for later he noticed a section headed 'Welsh News', a mere quarter of a page or less, and that in the daily newspaper of the capital of the Principality. That, he considered, was coming out into the open with a vengeance. But it was hard to go on feeling indignant for very long, especially after having just spent a good ten minutes reading about a police scandal in South London and not much less on the prospects for England's cricketers on their Australian tour.
As strongly as ever before, the conversational dealings at his breakfast-table had reminded Malcolm of those at another, the one at 221B Baker Street. There, as here, the first party regularly offered well-meaning provisional explanations of bits of human behaviour and the second party exposed their naivety, ignorance, over- simplification, non-virtuous unworldliness. But there, unlike here, the exposures were sometimes softened with a favourite-pupil tolerance or even varied with an occasional cry of 'Excellent!' or 'One for you, Watson!' Nor was it recorded of Holmes that half of what he said came in aural italics or bold or sanserif. Had Gwen started piling this on recently? Or had she only started doing it so's-you'd-notice recently? Well, they had been married a long time.
He picked up Muriel's letter. The firm, spacious hand, which he could not remember having seen before, impressed him and made him wish, vaguely and momentarily, that she had made more of herself than she had. Scorning the small change of inquiries after health or other sociability, the text launched itself _in medias res__ with a fully dramatized but not very lucid account of some visit to somebody somewhere. The more factual stuff came later. Among it Malcolm noticed a piece of information, or supposed information, that Gwen had not passed on: in alliance with two friends and the daughter of one of them, Muriel proposed to open and run what she called a coffee-shop in a suburban shopping-centre. The way she talked about it sounded to him quite unlike part of a brave or overdone attempt to hide boredom and loneliness, whatever bloody Sherlock might say.
Malcolm cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and set it going. Of late the steady humming it made had been reinforced by an irregular drumming and it shuddered violently every few seconds. With no one repairing anything any more the best plan was probably to let it run until it blew itself up. _Western Mail__ in hand he strolled to the cloakroom. Some delay, but no real bother there, in fact all was well- as far as he knew. No, all was well. He had started telling people who asked him how he was keeping that he was all right as far as he knew, and then stopped when he realized that that was as much as was meant by just saying you were all right. As if it mattered.
Gwen had about finished at her dressing-table, squirting anti-static fluid on her tinted lenses and preparing to follow with the impregnated cloth. He thought the movements of her hands made them look slightly fat.
'All right if I take the car? You'll be looking in at the Bible, will you?'
'Might as well, I thought.'
'If Peter's there you could give him Muriel's message, perhaps.'
'Eh? Oh yes. Actually he hasn't been in for a week or two.'
'One can't help wondering... ' She sat facing him on the oblong padded stool, her spectacles held up to the light. 'Has he ever said if he hands over any cash for his bed and board? Makes any contribution to the household?'
'Well no. Nobody's asked him, not even Garth. Putting up at Rhiannon's for a bit is what it's called.'
'For quite a bit - what is it, three months? Fascinating.
