gave a little wiggle, 'and then he chats up Margaret.' Remembered consternation puckered her face and she shook her head in disbelief.
Jennifer's remarks seemed bare of conceit in the usual sense; it was more as if her universe had simply stopped behaving in its expected way. Men looked at Jennifer- men did not look at Margaret, and you didn't mess about with the laws of physics.
'Just as well, as it turned out,' said Carla. 'Our Roger didn't turn out to be such a great prize.'
'Why ever not?' asked Gemma.
This time Carla looked at her friend for encouragement, and Jennifer gave a tiny nod. Carla looked down at her lap, still hesitant, and stretched her skirt down a bit over her thighs. 'Oh… he never takes her anywhere, never spends any money on her. He just goes to her bedsitter and… you know.' Color flooded up to the roots of Carla's frizzy hair and she didn't meet Gemma's eyes.
'How do you know?' Gemma asked softly. She shifted her behind a little where it had gone numb against the filing cabinet. 'Does Margaret confide in you?'
'No,' Carla answered, the blush not receding. 'Some days you can just… tell. Look, I shouldn't have said-'
'Never mind.' Gemma cut her off, not wanting to let her dwell on what would feel to her like disloyalty. 'About Miss Dent. Were she and Margaret special friends at work?'
Carla answered after a moment, when Jennifer didn't speak. 'Not really. Miss Dent was always fair-not like some I could name,' she shot a black look in the direction of Mrs. Washburn's office, 'and friendly in a distant sort of way, but she didn't take her tea breaks with us or anything like that. It was only after she left,' Carla said slowly, thinking about it, 'that Margaret started to visit her. 'I saw Jasmine yesterday,' she'd say, all puffed up about it, like calling Miss Dent 'Jasmine' made her better than us.'
'Was this before she met Roger, or after?'
The girls looked at each other, concentrating. 'Before,' said Jennifer, and Carla nodded.
'Yeah. That's right, 'cause Miss Dent left just before August Bank Holiday, and it wasn't long-'
The door opened and Carla stopped dead, flushing again. Jennifer merely assumed a blank expression and went back to her typing.
A woman stumbled breathlessly into the room, her fair skin pink with exertion, her fine, brown hair awry and the tail of her blouse slipping out of her skirt. 'Sorry I'm late. I didn't mean-' The sheaf of papers she clutched in her hand slipped to the floor as she became aware of Gemma. Squatting, she shuffled the papers awkwardly into a stack, and kept her eyes cast down.
'You're Margaret,' Gemma said, making it a statement. A flash of pale blue eyes through pale lashes, then Margaret bent her head again to her papers. The skin on the back of Gemma's neck tightened as she realized that Margaret Bellamy was very frightened indeed. 'I'm a friend of Duncan Kincaid's. Is there somewhere we could go and have a cup of tea?'
'Mrs. Washburn'll kill me. I'll lose my job.' Margaret twisted nervously in the red plastic booth.
'It'll be all right. I'll square it with her, I promise.' Gemma leaned across the table and touched Margaret's hand. A sturdy hand, Gemma saw, with short fingers, and nails bitten to the quick. It was also ice-cold and damp, and Gemma felt a faint trembling under her fingers.
A harried waitress slammed cups of industrial-strength tea on the Formica table, sloshing it into the saucers. Gemma had remembered passing the busy cafe around the corner from the planning office. The atmosphere was not exactly soothing, but Margaret seemed unaware of the noise and the sharp smell of hot grease drifting from the kitchen.
'Margaret-'
'I'm really in trouble, aren't I?' Margaret said, the words so near a whisper that Gemma had to lean forward again to catch them. 'Roger says I could go to prison. And it's all my fault. I should never have said anything to your friend…'
'I think,' Gemma paused, stirring generous helpings of milk and sugar into her tea in an effort to make it taste less like cleaning fluid, 'that if you told the truth, you did exactly the right thing. Duncan just wants to be sure that it really was Jasmine's choice.'
Margaret shook her head slowly from side to side, tracing her finger through the puddle of tea on the table. 'I still can't believe she lied to me. I thought I'd accepted it, but I hadn't. That day… I was so relieved when she said she'd changed her mind-' She looked up at Gemma. 'Do you think I fooled myself into thinking she really meant it, just because that's what I wanted to hear?'
Out of the corner of her eye Gemma saw the waitress approaching with a couple of tattered plastic menus. Gemma raised her hand and waved the woman away without ever taking her eyes from Margaret's face. 'If you were so frightened, why did you ever agree to help her?'
'Oh, it was different at first. I felt so special.' Margaret sat up a bit straighter in the booth and smiled for the first time. 'For someone to want to spend their last minutes on this earth with you, to trust you that much- especially Jasmine. She didn't get close to people very easily. Nobody had ever felt that way about me, you know?'
Gemma nodded but didn't speak.
'And it was exciting. Planning, organizing. Having a secret that nobody knew. Life and death.' Margaret smiled again, remembering. 'Sometimes I imagined telling everyone at work, but I knew I couldn't. It was too personal, just between Jasmine and me.' She took a sip of the tea, then made a face as the tannic acid bit into her tongue and she looked into the cup for the first time.
'Then what happened?'
Margaret shrugged. 'It got closer. And I got scared.' She gave Gemma a look of entreaty. 'She looked so good at first. Her hair had grown again from the treatments. I knew she tired easily, but she didn't really seem ill. Then her flesh just started to melt away from her bones. And every day she grew a little weaker, every day she'd ask me to do some little thing she'd been able to do for herself the day before. The chest catheter went in. She started liquid morphine, even though she never talked about the pain.'
This time Gemma caught the waitress's eye and mouthed 'hot water.' The cafe was beginning to empty and the noise level had dropped enough that she could hear Margaret's soft voice without straining. When the steaming, tin pot arrived, Gemma poured hot water into Margaret's half-empty cup without asking, then settled back to wait.
'She never set a time,' Margaret continued as if there'd been no interruption, eyes focused on the circle her hands made around the hot cup. 'I started to dread it-every day when I'd visit her I'd think 'Is this the day?' Is she going to say 'I'm ready, Meg, let's do it now'? My stomach knotted up. I felt sick all the time. I started to think about having to put the plastic bag over her head if the morphine didn't work.
'One day she seemed very calm, less restless than usual. I wondered if she'd increased the morphine. Then 'I'll not see fifty, Meg,' she says. 'There's no point.' And I knew she'd made up her mind.'
Gemma sipped her watered-down tea and waited. When Margaret didn't speak again, she asked gently, 'Did she give you an exact date?'
'The day before her birthday. I'd lie awake nights and think about watching her die. How would she look? How would I know when it was over? I couldn't bear it. And I couldn't tell her.'
When Margaret looked up, Gemma saw that her eyes looked bruised and swollen, as if she'd been weeping for days. 'Did you tell her?'
'I thought that was the most terrible day I'd ever spent. I didn't know it could get worse.' Margaret rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. 'Most of the day at work I spent throwing up in the loo. I worked myself up to tell her as soon as I walked in.' Her lips twisted in a smile at the irony of it. 'She didn't even let me finish. 'Don't worry, Meg,' she said. 'I don't know if I've found my courage or if I've lost it, but I'm going to stick it out.' '
'What made you believe her?' asked Gemma. 'Why didn't you think she was just trying to let you off the hook?'
Margaret's wide brow creased as she thought about it. 'I don't know if I can explain, exactly. There wasn't any… tension in her. No screwing herself up for something, no excitement. Do you see?'
Gemma considered. 'Yes, I think I do. She didn't ask you to stay?'
'Just for a bit. I did all the things I usually did for her- fed the cat, tidied up. Then I walked down to the Indian take-away and got a curry for her supper. She couldn't eat much, really, but she still made the effort.'
