It was now half an hour since she’d seen Natalie Reckman and she was tempted simply to carry on with her day as if she hadn’t seen her. She microwaved a couple of chicken nuggets for Jordan’s lunch, poured him a glass of orange juice, and sat him at the table. While she was making herself a sandwich the house phone rang. The porter’s voice said. “Shall I send Miss Reckman up, madam?”
“No-yes, I suppose so.”
The journalist might not have changed her outfit, but her manner had undergone a transformation. Gone was the cool intellectual approach and in its place a warm friendliness. “Zillah, if I may, I’m very anxious to have another chat with you. It’s so good of you to see me.”
Zillah thought she hadn’t had much choice. “I was just going to have my lunch.”
“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Natalie, as if she’d been asked. “But I wouldn’t say no to a glass of that delicious-looking orange juice. Is this your little boy?”
“That’s Jordan, yes.”
“He is so exactly like his father, the spitting image.”
Zillah tried to remember if there had been any photographs of Jerry in the papers, apart from the one she took of him with baby Eugenie, but she was sure there hadn’t been. He’d never allowed anyone to take his picture. “Did you know my-Jerry-that is, Jeff?”
“Very well indeed at one time.”
Natalie was sitting down now, nursing her orange juice. Her tone was subtly changing again and her manner sharpening. She gave Zillah one of the searching stares that had been so much a feature of her previous visit. “How otherwise do you think I knew you’d been married to him and had two children? You did read my article about you, Zillah?”
“Oh, yes, I read it.” Zillah took a hold on her courage. “If you want to know, I thought it very unkind.”
Natalie laughed. She drank the juice and set the glass on the table. It was rather too near Jordan for his taste and he pushed it out of his way with a petulant shove. The glass fell onto the floor and broke. He let out a howl of dismay and, picked up by his mother, beat his fists against her chest, shouting an emotional demand he hadn’t given expression to for weeks, “Jordan wants Daddy!”
Rather in the manner of a social worker, a children’s officer perhaps, Natalie shook her head sorrowfully. She got down on her knees and began picking up broken glass.
“Oh, leave it!”
Natalie shrugged. “As you like. I only read of your husband’s death yesterday. I’ve been in Rome, working.”
What did she care? She set Jordan down on the floor with a box of bricks and two miniature cars but he immediately got up and ran to her, embracing her knees with sticky hands. Then Zillah took in what Natalie had said. “He wasn’t my husband.”
“Are you sure?”
Zillah forgot the stickiness on her legs, the pool of orange juice on the floor, the mess on the table, the time, Jims, her new dress and hat-everything. A cold shiver, like an ice cube dropped on the back of her neck, ran down her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, Zillah, it’s a funny thing but I spent a long time yesterday, I and my assistant actually, looking through quite a lot of records. We were trying to trace your divorce from Jeff, and the extraordinary thing was that we couldn’t find it.”
“What business was it of yours, I’d like to know?”
“Goodness, your teeth are chattering-are you cold? It’s very warm in here.”
“I’m not cold. Oh, for God’s sake go and play with something, Jordan. Leave Mummy alone.” Zillah lifted up a white face in which frightened eyes glittered. “I asked you what business you had to go rooting through my private affairs?”
“Do you really think your affairs, as you quaintly call them, are so private? You’ve been in all the papers. Don’t you think your readers have a right to know what you get up to?”
“You journalists are all the same, you’ll do anything and say anything. Now I’d like you to go, please.”
“I shan’t be staying much longer, Zillah. I was just hoping you could help me, perhaps give me a firmer date for when your divorce actually took place. I-and, incidentally, the police-had the idea it was some time last spring but that doesn’t seem to be so.” Natalie had no idea whether the police were pursuing the same line of inquiry as her own and it was only by chance that she was correct. “Still, I’m sure you can set us right. Was it perhaps the year before?”
Jordan sat on the floor and began howling like a puppy. “I don’t remember the date.” Zillah was driven beyond exasperation now. She wanted to scream and afterward hardly knew how she’d controlled herself “You just have to accept it. What’s it to do with you, anyway?”
“It’s in the public interest. Hadn’t you thought of that? You’re-er, married to an MP, you know.”
“What do you mean, ‘er, married’? I am married. My first husband is dead.”
“Yes,” said Natalie, above Jordan’s squalling. “I’d noticed. I’ll get out of your hair now. There seems to be something wrong with your little boy. Isn’t he well? I’ll let myself out.”
Going down in the lift, she remembered how, a few years back, she’d been in some American city in the Midwest where she’d interviewed a police chief. She was talking to him about crime statistics, various kinds of crime, and she’d asked him about some woman she’d heard of who’d remarried without first being divorced.
“Lady, we have nine murders a week in this city,” he’d said, “and you’re asking me about bigamy.”
But would the police here take the same attitude? Hardly. Jeff had been murdered and his wife or whatever she was had married an MP. Natalie decided not to write anything yet, for she was very much alive to the risks involved in saying in print that Zillah wasn’t legally married, just in case it turned out that she was. Some day soon she’d write a magazine piece about all Jeff’s women; it would be quite sensational. But first she had to go and talk to the Violent Crimes Task Force and at the same time make sure she got in with her exclusive story before anyone else did. In a thoughtful frame of mind she took a cab home.
Zillah had always deplored and clicked her tongue over those people who were up in court for cruelty to children. They belonged, she’d believed, to a different breed from herself. Now, walking up and down with her heavy, screaming, damp child in her arms, as if he were three months rather than three years old, she began to understand. She’d have liked to throw him out of the window. Anything to stop that noise and stem those ever-ready tears.
As she paced, she told herself over and over that things would be all right, it was all right now, because Jerry was dead. You couldn’t be a bigamist if your husband was dead and you’d married again. It was really only a matter of having said she was single when in fact she was a widow, or was soon to be one. She’d never actually said she was divorced until today, she just hadn’t mentioned Jerry at all-had she? She didn’t have to be divorced if her husband was dead. Anyway, none of it was her fault. It was these journalists poking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. And the main thing was she was a widow now, or would have been if she hadn’t married Jims.
To her surprise, Zillah found that Jordan had fallen asleep. He looked lovely when he was asleep, pink-flushed rosebud skin, incredibly long dark eyelashes, damp curls clustering across his forehead. She laid him down on the sofa and eased his shoes off. He rolled away from her and stuck his thumb in his mouth. Peace. Silence. Why had she agreed to get married in that fancy crypt place? Why had she wanted to? She couldn’t remember. Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad if she and Jims had fixed it up in a hotel or a town hall. In a place like that she wouldn’t have had to hear those awful, or perhaps she should say awesome, words. Yet they hadn’t seemed awe-inspiring at the time, she hadn’t really taken them in, she’d been thinking about her dress and what the newspaper photographs would be like… As ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, that if either of ye know any just cause or impediment why ye should not be so joined, ye are to declare it. And then there came a bit about as many as are married without declaring it weren’t really married at all, neither is their matrimony lawful. Jims would kill her if he found out his matrimony wasn’t lawful. But it must be lawful, Zillah thought, this unhappy merry-go-round circulating in her head, because her husband was dead and if he hadn’t been dead in the middle of March he soon was, only a few weeks later.