But he was terrified.
He had never been so scared in his life. As a boy he had been frightened of Pop and the devil, but since then nothing had really petrified him. Now he was helpless and rigid with fear. He felt paralyzed: for a moment he could not even move from where he stood.
He thought of the police.
He was in goddamn England. There was no point in talking to their bicycling local cops. But he could try to put a telephone call through to the county sheriff back home, or the Maine State Police, or even the F.B.I., and get them to start searching for an isolated house that had recently been rented by a man—
Don’t call the police. It won’t do you any good, the voice on the phone had said. But if you do call them, I’ll fuck her just to be mean.
Eddie believed him. There had been a note of longing in the spiteful voice, as if the man was half hoping for an excuse to rape her. With her rounded, belly and swollen breasts she had a lush, ripe look that—
He clenched his fist, but there was nothing to punch but the wall. With a groan of despair he stumbled out through the front door. Not looking where he was going, he crossed the lawn. He came to a stand of trees, stopped and leaned his forehead against the furrowed bark of an oak.
Eddie was a simple man. He had been born in a farmhouse a few miles out of Bangor. His father was a poor farmer, with a few acres of potato fields, some chickens, a cow and a vegetable patch. New England was a bad place to be poor: the winters were long and bitterly cold. Mom and Pop believed that everything was the will of God. Even when Eddie’s baby sister caught pneumonia and died, Pop said God had a purpose in it “too deep for us to comprehend.” In those days Eddie daydreamed about finding buried treasure in the woods: a brass-bound pirate’s chest full of gold and precious gems, like in the stories. In his fantasy he took a gold coin into Bangor and bought big soft beds, a truckload of firewood, pretty china for his mother, sheepskin coats for all the family, thick steaks and an icebox full of ice cream and a pineapple. The dismal, ramshackle farmhouse was transformed into a place of warmth, comfort and happiness.
He never found buried treasure, but he got an education, walking the six miles to school every day. He liked it because the schoolroom was warmer than his home; and Mrs. Maple liked him because he always asked how things worked.
Years later it was Mrs. Maple who wrote to the congressman who got Eddie a chance to take the entrance examination for Annapolis.
He thought the Naval Academy was paradise. There were blankets and good clothes and all the food you could eat: he had never imagined such luxury. The tough physical regimen was easy to him; the bullshit was no worse than he had listened to in chapel all his life; and the hazing was petty harassment by comparison with the beatings his father handed out.
It was at Annapolis that he first became aware of how he appeared to other people. He learned that he was earnest, dogged, inflexible and hardworking. Even though he was skinny, bullies rarely picked on him: there was a look in his eye that scared them off. People liked him because they could rely on him to do what he promised, but nobody ever cried on his shoulder.
He was surprised to be praised as a hard worker. Both Pop and Mrs. Maple had taught him that you could get what you wanted by working for it, and Eddie had never conceived any other way. All the same the compliment pleased him. His father’s highest term of praise had been to call someone a “driver,” the Maine dialect word for a hard worker.
He was commissioned an ensign and assigned to aviation training on flying boats. Annapolis had been comfortable, by comparison with his home; but the U.S. Navy was positively luxurious. He was able to send money home to his parents, for them to fix the farmhouse roof and buy a new stove.
He had been four years in the navy when Mom died, and Pop went just five months later. Their few acres were absorbed into the neighboring farm, but Eddie was able to buy the house and the woodland for a song. He resigned from the navy and got a well-paid job with Pan American Airways System.
In between flights he worked on the old house, installing plumbing and electricity and a water heater, doing the work himself, paying for the materials out of his engineer’s wages. He got electric heaters for the bedrooms, a radio and even a telephone. Then he found Carol-Ann. Soon, he had thought, the house would be filled with the laughter of children, and then his dream would have come true.
Instead it had turned into a nightmare.
The first words Mark Alder said to Diana Lovesey were: “My goodness, you’re the nicest thing I’ve seen all day.”
People said that sort of thing to her all the time. She was pretty and vivacious, and she loved to dress well. That night she was wearing a long turquoise dress, with little lapels, a shirred bodice and short sleeves gathered at the elbow; and she knew she looked wonderful.
She was at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, attending a dinner dance. She was not sure whether it was the Chamber of Commerce, the Freemasons’ Ladies’ Night, or the Red Cross fund-raiser: the same people were at all such functions. She had danced with most of her husband, Mervyn’s, business associates, who had held her too close and trodden on her toes; and all of their wives had glared daggers at her. It was strange, Diana thought, that when a man made a bit of a fool of himself over a pretty girl, his wife always hated the girl for it, not the man. It was not as if Diana had designs on any of their pompous, whiskey-soaked husbands.
She had scandalized them all and embarrassed her husband by teaching the deputy mayor to jitterbug. Now, feeling the need of a break, she had slipped into the hotel bar, on the pretense of buying cigarettes.
He was there alone, sipping a small cognac, and he looked up at her as though she had brought sunshine into the room. He was a small, neat man with a boyish smile and an American accent. His remark seemed spontaneous, and he had a charming manner, so she smiled radiantly at him, but she did not speak. She bought cigarettes and drank a glass of iced water, then returned to the dance.
He must have asked the barman who she was, and found her address somehow, for the next day she got a note from him, on Midland Hotel writing paper.
Actually, it was a poem.
It began:Fixed in my heart, the picture of your smile
Engraven, ever present to mind’s eye
Not pain, nor years, nor sorrow can defile
It made her cry.
She cried because of everything she had hoped for and never achieved. She cried because she lived in a grimy industrial city with a husband who hated to take holidays. She cried because the poem was the only gracious, romantic thing that had happened to her for five years. And she cried because she was no longer in love with Mervyn.
After that it happened very quickly.
The next day was Sunday. She went into town on the Monday. Normally she would have gone first to Boots to change her book at the circulating library, then bought a combined lunch-and-matinee ticket for two shillings and sixpence at the Paramount Cinema in Oxford Street. After the film she would have walked around Lewis’s department store and Finnigan’s, and bought ribbons, or napkins, or gifts for her sister’s children. She might have gone to one of the little shops in The Shambles to buy some exotic cheese or special ham for Mervyn. Then she would have taken the train back to Altrincham, the suburb where she lived, in time to get the supper.
This time, she had coffee in the bar of the Midland Hotel, lunch in the German restaurant in the basement of the Midland Hotel, and afternoon tea in the lounge of the Midland Hotel. But she did not see the charming man with the American accent.
