Mrs. Lewis wasn’t waiting for her. Minty searched the house. She wasn’t anywhere and neither was Auntie. She’d still be on that seat, fumbling about in that holdall, planning something, laughing maybe because she’d managed to die before she had to pay that money.
Minty knew what she had to do. She patted the knife, opened the front door and closed it quietly behind her. The street was deserted, silent. The lamps were out. Only in the flat opposite was there a light, a gleam in one of the windows like a candle flame. It looked as if the Wilsons had gone straight to bed, for their bedroom light went out as Minty looked upward. She walked up to the corner, suddenly sure Mrs. Lewis would have gone and the seat be empty.
But she was still there. She’d decided to sleep there, Minty couldn’t think why. She’d put the battered holdall under her head for a pillow. What did a ghost want with a holdall? The flowers behind her had closed up for the night, their leaves faintly gleaming from among the crumpled cartons and polythene bags and cigarette packets. Mrs. Lewis would never give her back her money now, it was gone forever. Minty, drawing out the knife from its strapping, was suddenly consumed with righteous anger. This would show Auntie that she meant business, teach her to be more careful in future.
It was quite silent in the street now. Mrs. Lewis didn’t make a sound. If she’d been real Minty would have thought her heart had stopped the minute the point of the knife touched her.
Chapter 27
ALONE IN THE car, Jims escaped from Fredington Crucis House, pursued for several hundred yards down the lane by reporters and photographers. Leonardo he had left behind to fend for himself. They had had a row.
Half an hour had passed before he understood why the reporters and cameramen were there. During that time, having berated Leonardo for being such a fool as to put the light on, he had showered, shaved, and dressed, and braced himself to go outside and meet them. But that had to be postponed, for first he looked out of a window. The eyes and cameras of the crowd were turned to the front door and he was able to observe them for a moment or two without being seen. “Predators,” he said to himself, “vultures,” and, rather outmodedly, the legacy of a classical education, “harpies.”
Then, as one, they turned toward the gates. Mrs. Vincey was shutting them behind her and had started up the drive. The reporters closed in upon her, but not before Jims had seen she was carrying a newspaper, the only word of which he could read from this distance in the large-lettered headline was “MP.” Since he’d asked her not to come this morning, the idea was inescapable that the newspaper and curiosity had fetched her. He could see she was quite willing to talk to them and if they weren’t all that anxious to take her photograph this wasn’t for her want of readiness to pose for them. What was she saying? And what was it all about, anyway? He soon knew.
She let herself in, and herself alone, by the front door. Jims met her in the hall and found himself in a situation comparable to that Zillah had experienced with Maureen Peacock. Mrs. Vincey held up the newspaper’s front page in both hands and told him she’d never been so disgusted in all her life. For the first time, she didn’t call him Sir or Mr. Melcombe-Smith. In the words of Cleopatra when her power was waning, he might have asked, “What, no more ceremony?” Instead, he stood in silence, reading the headline over and over: THE GAY MP, TWO WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? A member of Parliament! I wonder what the queen thinks about you.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” said Jims, “and get out. Don’t come back.”
He went upstairs. At that moment, immediately, he couldn’t bring himself to read more. But he had seen the photographs on page three, notably the one of himself and Leonardo in the Maldives, and he blamed Leonardo for all of it. Leonardo had talked, gossiped perhaps, at any rate told someone, had given their picture to a gutter rag. He found him in the bedroom, sitting on the bed fully dressed but looking very hangdog and, to Jims’s mind, guilty as hell. Jims began to shout and rave at him, waving the newspaper, accusing him of treachery, perfidy, and barratrous betrayal-his once-successful career was in part due to his command of language-and not listening to his indignant defense.
Leonardo stood up. “I haven’t talked to anyone. You’re mad. I’ve got my career to think of as much as yours, remember. Let me see that.”
They struggled with the paper, pulling it this way and that until the front page was torn in half. Leonardo finally got possession of it. “If you’ll read it instead of ranting like a maniac you’ll see it’s your precious wife who’s been talking, not me. And talking, my God!”
Jims half believed him but he refused to look in his presence. He grabbed the paper, shouted, “You can get yourself back to London. Walk to bloody Casterbridge, it’s only six miles,” then ran downstairs.
Mrs. Vincey had gone. The pack was still outside. Jims put the newspaper in his briefcase, his wallet and car keys in his pocket, and, like General Gordon solitarily confronting the Mahdi’s soldiery at Khartoum, opened the door and stepped outside. The pack roared with pleasure and flashbulbs popped.
“Look this way, Jims!”
“Give us a smile, Jims!”
“I’d like just two words, Mr. Melcombe-Smith.”
“Is it true, Jims?”
“If you’d like to make a statement…”
Jims said in his patrician tones, “Of course it isn’t true. It’s all lies.” He embroidered, recalling Leonardo’s words, “My wife is having a mental breakdown.”
“Did you know you were a bigamist, Jims? Will your wife stand by you? Where’s Leonardo? Do you expect to lose your seat?”
This last, which they all seemed to take as some sort of ghastly and obscene pun, raised a roar of laughter. Jims, in what was nearly a reflex because he’d felt his face grow hot and therefore red, put up his briefcase to hide it. Bulbs flashed. One exploded almost in his face. He tried to grab the camera, failed, and plunged for his car. They were all over it, he thought, like monkeys in a safari park. He pushed a girl off and she fell over, shouting she’d get him for assault. He got the door open, squeezed in, and shut it, hoping to slam a man’s fingers in it but the hand was snatched back in the nick of time. As he drove down the drive he could see ahead of him that the gates were closed. That bitch Vincey had shut them after her on purpose, he thought, when nine times out of ten she left them open, in spite of his admonitions.
“Open the bloody gates!” He shouted it out of the window but they took no notice. Or rather, one of them stuck a camera in through it.
He got out and they clustered about him, plucking at his clothes, cameras in his face. Someone was actually sitting on the top bar of the left-hand gate.
“You off to London, Jims?”
“What’ll you say to Zillah when you get there?”
“Was it a contract killer who murdered Jeff Leach?”
“Will Zillah stick by you, Jims?”
Jims pulled open both gates, The reporter sitting on one of them tumbled off and lay on the ground, shouting that he’d broken his leg. He shook his fist and said he’d get Jims for that if it was the last thing he did. While they were trying to bar his exit Jims, resigned to sacrificing his expensive oak gates if necessary, drove straight at the pack and forced them to jump out of his way. Most of them pursued him into the village, only giving up when they saw that the Crux Arms was open. He drove through Long Fredington, eyeing with bitterness Willow Cottage, where his courtship, such as it was, had begun, and then with a glimmer of interest, for he saw it was up for sale. He was reminded of what Leonardo had said about his “precious wife” talking. There was nothing for it but to stop being a coward and read that newspaper. He pulled off the road at Mill Lane, where Zillah, on her way to Annie’s house, had once dreamed of her future with him, its affluence and its glamour, and read the story.