Alice didn’t immediately understand and when she did looked uncertainly around the cramped room. There was a black scurry underfoot when she went into the bathroom and Alice halted just inside the door. It was very thin and although Alice didn’t hear everything she heard enough to understand.
Jane was pregnant. What other reason was there for a woman to speak this long with her gynaecologist?
Twenty-Six
‘John loved me, very much.’
Alice said nothing. Jane being pregnant didn’t change anything. It wasn’t something they’d ever talked about – it would have been out of bounds – but of course John had made love to her: it was understood – accepted – without needing to be said.
‘And I loved him very much.’ She was smiling, as she’d been smiling when she’d called Alice from the bathroom after her conversation with Rosemary Pritchard.
Still Alice said nothing. What would her test show? She was anxious but at the same time reluctant to find out. Surely she had to be! What other reason was there for her being so sick, so often?
‘I saw the photograph, the one you tried to hide in the cabin. I saw it by the telephone and found where you’d hidden it, when you were in the bath.’ There was no anger in the flat tone.
Alice finally sat on the collapsing, hair-greased chair. ‘I know John loved you. Your marriage was never in any danger.’
‘That’s very generous of you! What did you and he do, just fuck?’
Alice winced. ‘Can I try to explain?’
‘I want you to. I want very much to have it explained to me. All of it.’
‘I loved John, too.’
‘And he loved you!’ There was a jeer in Jane’s voice.
‘Yes.’
Jane made a balancing gesture with both hands. ‘So that’s how it was, he loved us both, fifty-fifty.’
‘Yes, I guess. But you were his wife. Would always have been his wife.’
‘And you would have always been his mistress.’
‘For as long as he wanted me.’
‘Or until he didn’t want me any more!’
‘That would never have happened.’
‘Tell me you talked about it!’
‘We did! He told me he would never leave you, because he loved you, and I said I didn’t want or expect him to.’
‘I’m supposed to believe that?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘How often, once a week, twice a week? All the time when I was out of town?’
She had the right, Alice accepted, although she didn’t feel there was anything to defend herself against. ‘We were happy.’
‘How about the cabin? How often did you sneak away to the cabin?’ Jane’s face was set, rigid.
Everything she’d told Jane was the truth. There was no guilt. ‘Just three times. The photograph you saw was the first.’ It was back at the cabin, packed in her case, she abruptly realized. Whatever happened she had to go back to the cabin to get it.
Jane jerked her head towards the telephone, upon which she’d made two further calls after that to the gynaecologist. ‘Did he tell you why we were seeing Rosemary?’
Alice shook her head. ‘I didn’t know you were.’
‘Something he didn’t actually tell you?’ It was weak sarcasm.
‘No.’
‘We were going to have a baby.’
Alice felt a physical lurch at the confirmation but didn’t speak.
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘It will be wonderful…’ stumbled Alice. ‘John would have… you will be a wonderful parent…’
The rigid face creased slightly, then cleared. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if John was still alive? You’d have gone on sleeping together?’
‘Yes,’ said Alice at once, holding the other woman’s look. ‘I’m not ashamed. I know it’s difficult for you to believe… I guess you never will… but I was never a threat to you… and I’ve tried to save you, literally save your life, because you don’t know how bad things are.’ She knew that Geoffrey Davis, whom Jane had told in another of her calls to block any legal move against John’s bank, was the firm’s lawyer. Presumably Burt, whose surname Jane had never used and to whom she’d repeated the blocking instructions, was the personal attorney.
‘You’re right,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t know. So tell me about that, too. All of it, because I can’t be hurt or betrayed any more, any worse, than I already have been.’
But she was, her face twisting as if she were in genuine pain when Alice told her everything. Alice held nothing back but conscious of Jane’s stricken look said at the end: ‘I don’t believe… John didn’t believe… that your father did it willingly, in the beginning. John was sure he was tricked… cheated… and from then on was blackmailed into carrying on…’
‘And John tried to face them down… believing as he did that Dad and Janice had been murdered he still tried to face them down…?’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, knowing the other woman’s need. ‘That’s how brave John was.’
‘But he told you, not me,’ remembered Jane, stronger-voiced.
‘How could he have told you?’ pleaded Alice.
‘I didn’t believe you, not any of it, before. I actually thought you might be mad, although I didn’t think you were going to harm me. But I believe you now. All of it…’ Jane stopped, her voice catching. ‘I cried for Dad but I didn’t cry for John, not properly. The drugs. And now I don’t think I can cry, for either of them…’
She did though, so suddenly that Alice jumped at the wail and came forward in her ugly chair, watching helplessly as the sobs racked through Jane as they had racked through her, and finally Alice got up and went to the other woman. At the first touch Jane stiffened and went to pull away but didn’t and then she let herself come into Alice’s embracing arm and Alice began crying, too, and both women sat on the hard bed, holding each other, both weeping for the same man.
Initially there was an embarrassment at their holding each other, supporting each other, a few moments, once they recovered and stopped crying, of moving awkwardly around the room, neither knowing what to say, how to say it. So neither at first said anything.
Alice broke the impasse. ‘They’ll say I kidnapped you.’
‘You did.’
They both sniggered a laugh, although still awkwardly.
Alice said: ‘Don’t hate me.’
Jane said: ‘I don’t know what to feel – how to feel – right now. I don’t feel anything, about anyone. I don’t think I know how to hate.’
‘We both loved John. He loved both of us.’
‘I don’t know what to say to that, either. I don’t understand it. Maybe I never will.’
‘That’s how it is,’ Alice insisted, wishing it hadn’t sounded so flip.
‘I suppose I know that’s how it was. I still don’t understand it.’
‘Do you understand – accept – that we could both be killed, if we don’t get protection?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Jane, you can’t suppose so. You know so, surely!’
‘I…’ Jane began, then corrected herself. ‘Yes, I know.’
She had to get back to the cabin: get John’s picture, remembered Alice. ‘Why did you drive away like
