It was better to get it over. It always is.
The box felt heavier now, its rattle muffled. When I opened it I saw the jigsaw pieces were still there, but all huddled into one end. I noticed one printed with a milk-white hoof. The other end of the box was wedged tight with tissue paper. I picked it out and dropped it wad by wad on the carpet. Didn’t he see I’d much rather not have anything, least of all some expensive gewgaw? He might not love me, but I loved him. I didn’t need paying off, for God’s sake! By the time I came to the central package I’d worked myself into a muddled frenzy. On the surface, rage. Beneath, panic. With a swoop of relief I saw the envelope with his gift in it.
It was an ordinary long white envelope, the sort he used for his business letters. It had my name on it in his writing, and a short sentence heavily inked out. It had been sealed, opened again, and re-sealed with stamp paper. That was the point. If he’d been paying me off he might have bought the jigsaw and put his present in an unglamorous white envelope inside, but it would have been a new envelope. This was incredibly not like B. Messy. Dithering. Wrong. I forced my fingers to pull the envelope open.
It was the sapphires, of course. Somehow I knew they were the real ones, although until that instant I had assumed that he had sold them for me, and I should never see them again. I slid them through my hands until I found Mary’s stone and turned it over. The little double cross was there, just below the point of the setting. I had to squint through my tears to see it. But he’d given me that enormous cheque for them, and I’d immediately paid it back for him to send to Mummy. I stood for ages, running the jewels from hand to hand like a rosary, filled to the brim with doom. At last I came part of the way back to my senses. I’d have to do something with the vile object. I refused to sleep with it under my pillow, not that near.
The obvious place was the wall safe, where he let me keep the replica and my other bits of jewellery. It was hidden behind a row of encyclopaedias in the bookshelf. I knelt and lugged the volumes out. The wheels were already set at the combination and the door opened when I pulled it. It was almost empty, only my own various little boxes. Usually it was stuffed with documents, and a wad of five-pound notes, and a wash-leather bag full of sovereigns. My hands thought for me, automatically taking out the replica case. They were aware that if there was only one case then the real necklace must have it. But it was empty. This did not seem strange in the general daze of strangeness. My hands arranged the necklace into the velvet pits and grooves, put the case back in the safe, closed the door, spun the dials and shoved the volumes on to their shelf. I rose and returned to the table where I stood staring down at the muddle of pieces in the jigsaw box.
He was sending me home. He had given me back the sapphires. He did not need my love.
I went up to my own flat to try and sleep in that bed where I’d never slept before, strange, narrow, cold.
They gunned him down in Rio.[1] It was thirty-six hours before I knew. He had flown off on the Wednesday evening. He was killed late on Friday afternoon, the small hours of Saturday morning our time. I was presumably asleep, or more likely lying awake and wondering whether I would get back to sleep and trying not to start again on the useless chain of thoughts trudging round and round in my head like prisoners in an exercise yard, about going home, and coping with Mummy, and Cheadle, and what was left of my life.
Saturday morning I spent moving my things out of his flat, as far as possible wiping out any traces of my ever having lived there. I found the replica of my necklace, loose, among my nylons. This was as strange as anything in the whole business. I almost felt that somebody quite different must have been in the flat after he’d left, doing things he would never have done. Dithering, panicking, changing his mind. Not having the nerve to say a proper goodbye to me, to my face. He’d been going to take the replica with him, but then, while he’d been packing . . . And before that he’d been going to take the real necklace. It hadn’t been in the box when he gave it me. Only a message.
I went and got the envelope out of the waste-paper basket and for the umpteenth time tried to read the scratched-out sentence. No use. He didn’t mean me to. . . . one person in the world who trusted you? It’s still true. So is the reverse. My doped mind jiggled the words to and fro. You trusted one person in the world. Who?
Me.
B had left me a message because I was the only person in the world he trusted. He had told me so. And then he had changed his mind and left me the sapphires instead. And gone off in a panic.
I gave up thinking about it. There wasn’t any point any longer.
In the middle of Saturday afternoon I spilt the jigsaw pieces out on to my desk upstairs and began. It had to be done. Then I could give it away to a hospital or something. It was a fiend, all muddy shades of green with little flowers, the paler tree, and a fair amount of brown fence. I kept the unicorn pieces to the end. It was a sort of magic, I suppose, as though the unicorn stood for him and when I pieced it together, whole, in its proper place, that would bring him back safe. Though not to me. I’d got about half done when I went to bed on Saturday, after midnight. Pieces of jigsaw floated to and fro under my closed eyelids, but then for some reason I slept solidly till morning. It was noon on Sunday and I had almost finished when the telephone rang.
Jane.
‘Do you . . . Have you . . . Mabs, do you know?’
‘Know what ?’
‘Oh, darling!’
‘For God’s sake!’
‘Oh, it’s my . . . I can’t . . . Didn’t you get the papers?’
‘The newspapers?’
‘Yes, of course. The Sunday Times. Page One.’
I had no idea what she was talking about. It crossed my mind that Mummy might have gone mad and assaulted the architect. Something to do with Cheadle anyway. Something right outside me.
‘They’re downstairs, I suppose. I’ll go and look now. I take it it’s bad.’
‘Yes. Oh, Mabs!’
I rang off and hurried out, too tired and drained for worry. One of the Dolphin Square porters used to come round leaving the papers on tenants’ doormats, but naturally none were ordered for me upstairs and the other people on my floor had already taken theirs in. I took the lift down to B’s. He liked several. They lay folded in a thick wad, but with the Times outermost, its main headline showing. PEACE MOVE IN KOREA. I opened the wad out and saw it at once, two-thirds of the way down the page. BRITON GUNNED DOWN IN RIO. There was a photograph. Photographs always made him look hideous.
The world closed right in. It became a tight little cell holding nothing but me and the paper in my hands. The words joggled about as if I’d been trying to read them in a dream. It must be someone else with the same name and they’d got the wrong photograph. He wasn’t in Rio, he was in . . . ‘That general direction’. Of course he’d got enemies, but not the shooting kind, surely. Only when we’d said goodbye he hadn’t just been worried—he’d been frightened. Coming out of his hotel. Three men in a car. Sub-machine-guns. Stayed with us before, said the hotel manager, Sr Luis . . . No, he hadn’t. Not for a year, anyway. It must be someone else.
A man was asking me a question. I turned away but a hand gripped my elbow. Two men. Some sort of visiting card.
‘I don’t want anything. Can’t you see? Not now.’
He asked again. The question had B’s name in it.
‘He’s dead.’
They had a key. They took me into the flat and went on asking me questions. I stared at them and shook my head. They didn’t seem real. Then one of them asked me my name. I told them, without thinking. They looked at each other.