employment, beyond looking after children and household. A cleaner comes Monday to Friday mornings, 9 am to 1 pm, stays Tuesdays an Thursdays until 4 pm, also baby- sits whenever asked. (I had to make two visits to Mrs U. On the first occasion she had been crying and wouldn't talk. On the second she was cooperative.)
The daughters' school is at the other end of Maidenhead. Mrs U. shares the school-run with a family nearby; Mrs U.'s mornings are Tuesday and Thursday; afternoons Mon., Wed. and Fri. Mrs U.'s car is a cream Austin. Clean.
On the Friday of the attack on Mr Pembroke, the daughters were invited to tea by the other school-run family (the mother corroborates). Mrs U. left the daughters there after school (4 pm). Picked them up about 6.30.
On the following Tuesday, Mrs U. arranged for the cleaner to stay and give the daughters their tea as she wanted a day out in London. The cleaner told me Mrs U. did the school run, came back and changed, and drove away to the station to catch the train. She (Mrs U.) said she would be back late as she would go to the cinema after she'd done her shopping. Mrs U. has done this several times lately. She returned at 10 pm. Cleaner went home. (Mrs U. gave me permission to consult the cleaner.) Mrs U. says she didn't go to the cinema, she didn't like the look of the films, she just had dinner in a steak house. She also said she had been into a church to pray. She hadn't bought anything (nothing fitted).
Mrs U. nervous and evasive about trip to London. Did she go to Newmarket? Possible (my opinion) that she goes to London to meet someone, doesn't want cleaner or husband to know. Who? Lover? Not possible, she hasn't the air, they can't hide that inner excitement. Priest? Friend unacceptable to Mr G.? Doctor? Some sort of solace, I would say.
Mrs U. unhappy woman but wouldn't unbutton. Loyal. Any wife of Mr G. liable to be unhappy (my opinion). Mrs U. doesn't like having the cleaner around for so long. Mr G. insists on cleanliness. Mrs U. gets tired of the cleaner's incessant chatter. All adds to Mrs U.'s stress. Mrs U. would like a job or to do voluntary work. Mr G. won't have it. 'The children come first.' (Mrs U. obviously very fond of the children.)
Mrs U. wishes Mr Pembroke would give all the family a lot of money now so that they would stop griping about it. She sees nothing wrong in Mr Ian, but her husband won't let her talk to him. She could like Mr Pembroke, she thinks he's funny and generous, but her husband ditto. She can't go against her husband. She has no money of her own, I'd say. She's in a trap. (Can't support children herself, couldn't leave without them.)
Does she believe killing Mr Pembroke could solve her problems? Does she believe if Mr G. becomes richer it will make things right? I could tell her it won't. End of enquiry.
Poor Mrs U. Poor Ursula. Could she have blown up Quantum? Perhaps, if she'd wanted to. She sounded desperate enough for anything, but if she had any sense, her desperation should drive her to beg from Malcolm, not to kill him. I clipped Ursula behind Gervase: forever in his shadow.
I wondered why she'd married him, but then I'd attended their wedding also, and if one hadn't in the past been on the wrong end of his glowing cigarette, one could have taken him as he seemed on the surface, confident, good looking, positive and strong. A rising young stockbroker. A catch.
I put Gervase and Ursula back in the envelope but they wouldn't stay there, they stuck like burrs in my mind.
There must be thousands, hundreds of thousands of sad marriages like that, I thought, where the unhappiness came from inside. Probably one could more easily withstand disasters that came from without, survive wars, poverty, illness, grief. Much harder to find any good way forward when personality disintegrated. Each of them was disintegrating, Ursula because of Gervase, Gervase because of…
Because of Malcolm? Because of Malcolm's boredom with Vivien, his affair with Alicia, his quick marriage to Joyce? Because of illegitimacy? But Ferdinand had been a product of the same process, and Ferdinand was whole.
There were questions without answers. The most likely answers were often wrong. I didn't know why Gervase was disintegrating. I thought only that the process had already begun when we both lived at Quantum; had maybe begun in the womb.
I slept with troubled dreams and went to ride the next morning as if for therapy and release. Solace, Norman West's word, met the case.
The raw morning, the moving horses, the filthy language and the crude jokes, a daily fix of the sort of reality I'd chosen at eighteen. I didn't know why I'd liked horses so much. Choice sprang from deep needs, but where did the needs come from?
I wasn't accustomed to thinking in that way. I usually coasted along, not worrying much, doing my job, enjoying riding in races, making love without strings. Lazy in many respects, I dared say, but uncomplicated. An opt-out that had come to an abrupt end with meeting Malcolm at Newmarket.
It was Tuesday.
Ursula's cleaner, I thought, driving back to Cookham, would currently be chatting away with no respite for Ursula until the girls got back from school. I wondered if Ursula was quietly going bananas at 14 Grant St., Maidenhead. I changed into ordinary clothes and went along there to find out.
The cleaner came to the door; middle-aged, in a flowered overall, with an inquisitive face. Mrs Pembroke was lying down with a headache, she said, and yes, perhaps she could go upstairs and ask her if her brother-in-law might take her out to lunch. Perhaps I would like to wait in the hall.
I waited, and presently Ursula came downstairs looking wan and wearing a coat and gloves.
'Oh!' she said faintly when she saw me. 'I thought it was Ferdinand.'
I'd hoped she would. I said, 'Where would you best like to go?'
Oh. 'She was irresolute. She looked back up the stairs and saw the cleaner watching interestedly from the landing. If she didn't come out with me, she'd be stuck with explaining.
'Come on,' I said persuasively. 'The car's warm.'
It sounded a silly thing to say, but I suppose she listened to the intention, not the words. She continued across the hall and came with me out of the front door, closing it behind US.
'Gervase won't like this,' she said.
'Why should he know?'
'She'll find a way of telling him.' She gestured back to the house, to the cleaner. 'She likes to make trouble. It brightens up her life.'
'Why do you keep her?'
She shrugged. 'I hate housework. If I sack her, I'd have to do It. Gervase thinks she's thorough, and he pays her. He said he wouldn't pay anyone else.'
She spoke matter-of-factly, but I was startled by the picture of domestic tyranny. We got into the car and I drove out of the town and towards the village of Bray, and twice more on the way she said, 'Gervase won't like this.' We stopped at a small roadside restaurant and she chose homemade soup and moussaka, several times looking over her shoulder as if her husband would materialise and pounce. I ordered a carafe of red wine. Not for her, she protested, but when it came she drank it almost absentmindedly. She had removed the coat and gloves to reveal a well-worn grey skirt topped by a blue sweater with a cream shirt underneath. She wore a string of pearls. Her dark hair was held back at one side by a tortoise shell slide, and there was no lipstick on her pale mouth. The sort of appearance, I supposed, that Gervase demanded.
When the soup came, she said, 'Ferdinand phoned last night and told Gervase that Malcolm had made a new will, according to you.'
'Yes, he made one,' I agreed. 'He showed it to me.'
'Gervase didn't tell me,' she said. 'He phoned Alicia and told her, and I listened. That's what usually happens. He doesn't tell me things, he tells his mother.'
'How do you get on with Alicia?' I asked.
She very carefully drank the soup already in her spoon. She spoke as if picking her way through a minefield.
'My mother-in-law,' she said intensely, 'has caused more trouble than anyone since Eve. I can't talk about her. Drink your soup.'
I had the impression that if she once started talking about Alicia, she would never stop. I wondered how to start her, but when I tentatively asked what she meant about trouble, she shook her head vehemently.
'Not here,' she said.
I left it. She talked about her children, which she could do without strain, looking almost animated, which saw
