Those scratches, as if from a woman’s nails in desperation. Mrs Wiggs washing his bloodstained shirts in the bath. The scurrying and hiding in the attic, the repeated disappearances. Then coming home covered in blood the very same night as the next murder. I clutched my chest.
*
Once I had calmed myself down, I dismissed my conspiracy theories as the product of a bored and lonely mind; my imagination, encouraged to run a riot, had run away with itself. I had no more of my drops, and without those to dull my senses I was close to peeling wallpaper off with my teeth. There was too much room in my head and it was full of fog. I was invested in this marriage; I had no choice but to make it a functional relationship, at the very least. There was no trail of breadcrumbs leading back to my old life.
We slipped back into routine, and no one batted an eyelid. It was as if nothing had ever happened, but things had changed between us now.
The things I had read and the mystery of those two nights were like flea bites; I could ignore them most of the time, but occasionally they drove me mad with itching. At breakfast he would smile at me, at dinner he would ask if I’d had a good day, and I would hear the clock tick or see a fly landing on an apple and be reminded of the scratches, the blood, the crack of the mirror, the dent in the bedroom wall from the candlestick, the fat veins on his chest. There were the other things he said to me within the bedroom on the nights he did come home: that I was as good as fucking a corpse, how strange I was, how old I was beginning to look, how he could have done so much better, how I should be very grateful for my luck. And when daylight came we must pretend as if we were Chelsea’s Adam and Eve.
15
My puppyish schoolboy of April had grown into a debonair gentleman in June, but come September he was the middle-aged grump. Everything irritated him and he had little patience. I avoided him whenever I could, and approached with care when I could not, because he would hiss like a snake at any voice in earshot. Even Mrs Wiggs skirted around him.
Since Polly’s murder, he had become agitated and restless. He started to bite his fingernails, a habit I would never have associated with him. His jaw clenched and in the mornings he brushed his teeth too hard and spat blood in the basin. He overgroomed his whiskers and asked me, for the first time, if they were symmetrical. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve stared at them for so long, I cannot tell any more.’
This was not the Thomas who had made light of his burns and was confident about his place in the world. To see him nervous rattled my own nerves. I had married him for protection, traded my independence and freewill so that I would not have to hold down a job or bear the anxieties of the outside world.
His fermenting anger choked the air out of the house. The walls practically breathed a sigh of relief when he left for work or for one of his mystery night-time jaunts. I know I did. I had assumed that men were warriors, brave and fearless, but now I had experience of one so intimately, I understood them to be as weak as any woman. Weaker, perhaps, because Thomas still clung to the delusion that he was the strong and rational one. It could not be a strength to ignore one’s own flaws.
If I asked what was troubling him, he would talk casually of hospital politics or troublesome patients, or tell me it was the burden of his other work. He had been asked to assist a select group of prominent doctors in some pioneering sponsored study. They were all far more experienced than him, the potential for progression was huge, and the business was profitable, but it was undertaken at night. I knew his private practice was still lacking patients, but he seemed to think this other employment more worthy of his attention and energy.
He was further antagonised by some letters he’d received from his twin sister, Helen. She had apparently adopted an altogether inappropriate tone, was showing a distinct lack of respect and really did think herself queen of the castle. He complained that she was unrealistic about the amount of money required to live to a decent standard in London and how long it took to build up a private practice. She had accused him, he said, of not having a strong enough work ethic. That in particular set him ranting for hours.
‘As if Helen has ever understood what it is to work! Someone should tell her that barking orders at people is neither difficult nor tiring. How I should like to rub her nose in it, tell her all about my other job and how profitable it will be and who I am socialising with, but I won’t. She wouldn’t understand, and I certainly will not be explaining myself to her,’ he said.
His twin sister, once so highly spoken of was now referred to as a ‘vicious little bitch’ or the ‘bat-faced dumpling’.
He would not let me read those letters but rather shouted his commentaries at me. On one occasion I dared share an idea about how he might gain more patients at his private practice. I suggested he consider simply filling his books rather than acquiring prominent names, which I knew was his inclination. The look he gave me was as if I’d
