Beatrice was speaking. ‘Patricia Highsmith always wrote about psychotic aesthetes and alternative lives, didn’t she? About people assuming different identities and doing all sorts of truly appalling things to other people, like – like smashing their skulls with ashtrays and forcing lethal doses of sleeping pills down their throats and – and holding their heads under water?’
‘There is much more to Patricia Highsmith than that, Bee,’ Ingrid said. ‘And when you say “psychotic aesthetes”, you mean Ripley, right? Well, he is the only one.’ ‘I am sure he isn’t the only one,’ Beatrice said stubbornly.
How intensely tedious this was becoming. Antonia stole a glance at her watch.
‘One must be very unhappy to want to be somebody else, don’t you think?’ Beatrice appealed to Antonia.
‘Well, yes – I suppose so.’
‘Or very disturbed.’ Ingrid gave a short laugh. She put her hand on Beatrice’s shoulder.
‘There are people apparently who suffer from a multiple personality disorder without being aware of it! Isn’t that fascinating? I have tried to imagine what it must be like -’
‘Shall we go, Bee?’
The way Ingrid kept saying ‘Bee’ – somehow it ceased to be a woman’s nickname or a diminutive; it didn’t bring to mind the insect either, rather it became an incantation – a sorceress’s formula. At once Antonia castigated herself for her fanciful thoughts. The lack of air, she decided. She wanted to leave the hall, stretch her legs, have tea, phone Hugh. She glanced towards her bag. She hadn’t left her mobile at home again, had she?
‘Now don’t laugh at me, but I thought about writing a story about someone who is in fact two people – I am sure it’s been done hundreds of times! Dear me. The way I go on. We have lived in such isolation, Miss Darcy – we have become a bit peculiar. A little – cracked?’ Beatrice Ardleigh laughed, a tinkling girlish laugh, as though to indicate this was not to be taken too seriously. ‘I realize it each time we go out and meet people. I do hope you aren’t finding us too objectionable? We have the silliest and pettiest of spats sometimes. I bet people think us quite mad!’
Antonia gave another polite smile. She was wondering what to do. Shouldn’t she simply rise, apologize and say she had an important engagement? ‘Where do you live?’ she heard herself ask instead.
‘Oxfordshire. Wallingford. It’s a pleasant enough place but quite dreary. It’s our first visit to Hay-on-Wye and I am loving every moment of it. I find the smell of new books intoxicating!’ Beatrice shut and opened her eyes in a show of ecstasy. Her bosom rose and fell. The finest perfumes of Arabia might have been paraded for her inspection. Everything about her was heightened, exaggerated – dress, words, gestures. ‘Is that Kinky Friedman? Over there – look!’ She pointed excitedly. ‘The tall man with the drooping moustache and the desert boots? Or is it one of the Village People? I heard they were here – they have written a joint memoir, haven’t they?’
‘I am afraid I have no idea,’ Antonia said.
‘Apparently -’ Beatrice went on in a loud whisper, choking with silent laughter, ‘Apparently, Kinky Friedman thought Hay-on-Wye a sandwich, when he first heard about it! I’ve read two of his books. Not my cup of tea at all, but I read all the time. I would read anything. I suppose I am what you’d call “chronically literary” – the kind of person who, when the rhododendrons are in bloom, will amble round Kew Gardens reading the labels on the trees!’ Suddenly she became serious. ‘Reading is my life. I used to feel quite apocalyptic about things, human existence in general, but books saved my life. My sanity. If I didn’t read, I might have turned into a monster. Honestly.’
For some reason Ingrid looked extremely tense now, very much on edge – just as a cat is supposed to be minutes before a devastating earthquake, Antonia thought. Was Ingrid afraid that Beatrice was saying too much – giving away too much? Beatrice was voluble in a way that suggested a degree of instability. Was her interest in multiple personality disorder of any significance? The two women seemed totally incompatible in terms of sociability, but then Beatrice hinted at things one shouldn’t really be talking about in front of total strangers.
Aloud Antonia said, ‘Yes. Reading is the most wonderful of panaceas.’
Did people think of their favourite authors as of close friends? Antonia admired a number of writers but, if she ever were to meet them, she wouldn’t dream of talking to them about, say, her failed first marriage and how she nearly suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, or how she left her librarian job at the Military Club to do full-time writing, or about her second husband selling his Sussex farm and moving in with her in Hampstead. Certainly not on first meeting them!
‘There’s a speculative glint in your eye.’ Beatrice leant forward. ‘Shall I tell you what I think? I think you are going to put us in your next book.’
‘I never do that kind of thing,’ Antonia said with a smile, not entirely truthfully, because, somewhere at the back of her mind, she had already been considering the two women from a writer’s point of view, as potential characters.
Beatrice, she had decided, looked like some rich man’s wife, spoilt, affected, annoyingly child-like, and yes, a little cracked, the result no doubt of long years spent in a wheelchair, but there was no evidence of a Mr Ardleigh – none of her rings was a wedding one. Ingrid too was peculiar, even a bit creepy, with her garb of woe, black gloves that brought to mind Victorian undertakers, and mother-hen solicitousness, yet, it was not taken separately, but collectively, as an ensemble piece, in relation to one another, that the two women became really interesting. They appealed to her sense of anomaly. They stimulated her Gothic imagination. (For some time Antonia had wanted to write a detective story with Gothic overtones.) Some kind of strange symbiosis seemed to have been at work. Les bonnes, or the maids – as Antonia whimsically dubbed them in her mind – couldn’t have been more different, yet there was an odd likeness between them – it was something subtle, elusive, indefinable – blink and it was gone. That was what happened when two people had lived together a long time. Antonia had observed the phenomenon with husbands and wives.
What was the nature of their relationship? Ingrid was more than a mere carer, of that Antonia was certain, but she didn’t think they were a ‘couple’, not in the Sapphic sense of the word. Somehow one could always tell if people were lovers. Ingrid was treating Beatrice as though she were her daughter – her little girl. Yes. That was where the oddity came from. The glances Ingrid cast upon Beatrice were a blend of intense devotion and concern. She had kept her hand on Beatrice’s shoulder. It was a possessive kind of gesture, but it also looked like a restraining one.
Antonia indulged in some lurid hypotheses. The two women shared a dark secret. They had committed murder together – in the manner perhaps of Genet’s Les Bonnes? They had killed Beatrice’s rich old aunt or rich old uncle. (That would explain Bee’s fascination with murder mysteries.) Could Bee’s paralysis be hysterical in origin? Guilt-induced? No – she had broken her back in an accident that had occurred as they had been trying to escape justice. It was Ingrid who had been driving. They had changed their identities – were leading alternative lives. Or it might be something completely different. Ageing actresses living in isolation – ancient rivalries rearing up their ugly heads – no, not another Baby Jane plot! She could do better than that, surely. Maybe there was a man at the back of it somewhere, for whose affections they fought – their family doctor perhaps – or the boy who did their garden?
‘It’s getting terribly late, Bee,’ Antonia heard Ingrid say.
‘Late for what, darling? I am not at all tempted to go outside. It’s hot and horrid and utter ghastly drears out-side,’ Beatrice said petulantly. ‘You don’t want me to get sunstroke, do you?’