Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

You didn’t use so much water under a shower but you got cleaner. It would be easy having two showers a day and washing her hair at the same time. And it wasn’t a hosepipe on the taps she had in mind but a real shower cabinet you walked into with a glass door and tiled walls. She’d never have it now, or not for years and years.

When Jock appeared again, sitting in the kitchen chair, she wasn’t as frightened as she’d been the first time. Maybe that was because he was vague and misty, almost transparent. You could see the green-painted bars on the back of the chair through his chest. She stood in front of him and asked him why he’d let his mother have her money. He didn’t answer-he never did-and he soon went away, doing his genie-vanishing-into-a-bottle act, disappearing like melting snow.

But in the night he spoke to her. Or he spoke. It might not have been to her or to anyone. His voice woke her out of deep sleep, saying, “She’s dead, she’s dead…” That soft, sweet, brown voice. It didn’t sound sad, but then it never did. Whom did he mean by “she”? Not his ex-wife, she’d be too young. Minty lay in bed, thinking. The darkness was impenetrable when the curtains were drawn and the street lamps out. She looked for his ghost in vain, peering into the blind empty corners.

It must have been his mother he meant. And he wouldn’t have been sad because old Mrs. Lewis would be joining him wherever he was. Minty closed her eyes again but it was a long time before she went back to sleep.

Chapter 4

IN ZILLAH’S EXPERIENCE, men didn’t propose except in old-time novels. They just talked about “one day” when you and they got married or even “making a commitment,” or, more likely, as an unwelcome duty because you were pregnant. They never said, as Jims had just said, “Will you marry me?” It made her hesitate about taking him seriously. Besides, there was another reason why he couldn’t possibly be asking her to marry him. “Did you really say what I think you did?” asked Zillah.

“Yes, I really did, darling. Let me explain. I want to marry you, I want to live with you, and I want it to be for the rest of our lives. I like you. I think we’d get on.”

Zillah, who had been driven by poverty to stop smoking a week before, took a cigarette out of the packet he had put on the table. Jims lit it for her. “But you’re gay,” she said.

“That’s the point. I am also the Conservative member of Parliament for South Wessex and between you and me I think I shall be outed some time in the next six months if I don’t do something to stop it.”

“Yes, okay, but everyone gets outed these days or comes out. I mean, I know you haven’t been, but it was always only a matter of time.”

“No, it wasn’t. What makes you say that? I take the greatest care to be seen about with women. I’ve been talking about that ghastly model, Icon, for weeks. Just think about my constituency. You live in it, you ought to know what it’s like. Not only have they never returned anyone but a Conservative, they have never, until me, returned an unmarried man. They are the most right-wing bunch in the United Kingdom. They loathe queers. In his speech at the annual dinner last week the chair of the North Wessex Conservative Association compared what he calls ‘inverts’ to necrophiliacs, practitioners of bestiality, pedophiles, and satanists. There’ll be a general election in less than a year. I don’t want to lose my seat. Besides…” Jims put on that mysterious look his handsome face often wore when he made reference to the corridors of power. “Besides, a little bird told me I have the weeniest chance of a post in the next reshuffle if I keep my tiny paws clean.”

Zillah, who had known James Isambard Melcombe-Smith since her parents moved into the tied cottage on his parents’ estate as land agent and housekeeper twenty-five years before, sat back in her chair and looked at him with new eyes. He was probably the best-looking man she had ever seen: tall, dark, film star-ish in the way film stars were when beauty was a Hollywood prerequisite, slim, elegant, too handsome, she sometimes thought, to be hetero, and far too handsome to sit in the House of Commons. It amazed her that those people like this chairman and the chief whip hadn’t rumbled him years ago. She’d even have fancied him herself if she hadn’t known since she was sixteen that it was hopeless. “What do I get out of it?” she asked. “No sex, that’s for sure.”

“Well, no. Best to call a spade a spade, darling. It would be, as you might say, a mariage blanc but also an open marriage, only that part would be our little secret. As to what you get out of it, that will not be cat’s meat, not in anyone’s estimation. I have quite a lot of dosh, as you must know. And I’m not talking about the weeny pittance I get from the Mother of Parliaments. Plus my charming home in Fredington Crucis and my very up-market apartment within the sound of the division bell-valued, I may add, at one million smackers only last week. You get my name, freedom from care, lots of lovely clothes, the car of your choice, foreign trips, decent schools for the kids…”

“Yes, Jims, how about the kids?”

“I love children, you know that. Don’t I love yours? I’ll never have any of my own unless I set up home in a same-sex stable relationship and contrive to adopt one. Whereas I’d have yours ready- made, lovely little pigeon pair with blond curls and Dorset accents.”

“They have not got Dorset accents.”

“Oh, yes, they have, my darling. But we’ll soon change that. So how about it?”

“I’ll have to think it through, Jims,” said Zillah.

“Okey-dokey, only don’t take too long over it. I’ll give you a bell tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow, Jims. Thursday. I’ll have decided by Thursday.”

“You’ll decide in my favor, won’t you, sweet? I’ll say I love you if you like, it’s almost true. Oh, and about the open marriage aspect, you’d understand, wouldn’t you, if I draw the line at that ex-husband of yours? I’m sure you know what I mean.”

After he’d gone, in the Range Rover, not the Ferrari, Zillah put on her duffel coat, a scarf that had been her mother’s, and a pair of over-large wellies some man had left behind after a one-night stand. She walked down the village street, thinking about herself and her situation, about Jerry and the future, about Jims and her relations with her parents, but mostly about herself. She had been christened Sarah, as had six other girls in her class at primary school, but discovering by means of a blood test in her teens that her group was B, a fairly rare blood group in all but Gypsies, and that Zillah was a favored Romany name, she rechristened herself. Now she tested it out with a new double-barreled surname. Zillah Melcombe-Smith sounded a lot better than Zillah Leach. But then almost anything would.

Fancy Jims knowing about Jerry. That is, knowing about the sort of unwritten arrangement she had with Jerry. Or had. Of course, she didn’t believe the letter she’d had, that was an insult to anyone’s intelligence. He didn’t own a computer. Some new woman must have written it. “Ex-husband” was the term Jims had used. Naturally he would, everyone did, though she and Jerry weren’t actually divorced; they’d never got round to it. And now if Jerry wasn’t dead, he wanted her to think he was, which amounted to the same thing. It meant he wouldn’t come back; the “arrangement” was over and the kids had lost their dad. Not that he’d ever been much of a father to them, more of a here-today-gone-tomorrow dropper-in. If she accepted Jims-how romantic and old- fashioned that sounded-would she be able to describe herself as a widow, or would it be safer to call herself single? If she accepted him it would be one in the eye for her mother and might stop her being so insufferably patronizing.

The village of Long Fredington was so called for the length of its main street, a full half-mile from Burton’s Farm in the cast to Thomas Hardy Close in the west. It was the largest of the Fredingtons, the others being Fredington St. Michael, Fredington Episcopi, Fredington Crucis, and Little Fredington. All were picturesque, the stuff of postcards, every house, even the newest, every barn, the church, the mill, the pub (now a private house), the school, and the shop (also now private houses) built of the same golden gray stone. If you were well-off, especially if you were well-off and retired, it was a charming place to live. If you had a car or two and a job in Casterbridge or Markton, a husband, and a nanny, it wasn’t so bad. For someone in Zillah’s position it was hell. Eugenie went to school on the bus, that was all right, but there was no nursery or preschool for Jordan and he was at home with her all day. She had no car, she hadn’t even got a bike. Once a week, if they hadn’t anything better to do, Annie at the Old Mill House or Lynn at La Vieille Ecole drove her ten miles to the Tesco to pick up supplies. Much less often, someone asked her round for a meal, but these were rare outings. They had husbands and she was a very good- looking unattached female. Anyway, she couldn’t get a babysitter.