Did I think of Matthew as a murderer? I don’t think I did, though there was undoubted evidence of this at my feet. In a strange way, I also saw Gloria as my partner in wanting to protect Matthew from further cruelty and suffering. She wouldn’t want him to go to jail, I told myself; she wouldn’t want him put away in a lunatic asylum. She had sacrificed so much to protect him. His comfort and ease were all she had lived for after his return; he was her penance, after all, and that was why she would never leave him; that was why she was dead. Gloria wanted me to do this.
I offer no more excuses. The blackout cloth was still rolled up below the windows in the living room, where it had been left after I helped Gloria take it down a couple of months ago. I carried it into the kitchen and gently rolled Gloria onto it, then I wrapped it around her tightly as a shroud. Before I had finished I bent over, kissed her gently on the forehead and said, “Good-bye, sweet Gloria. Good-bye, my love.” She was still warm.
Where could I hide her? The only place I could think of was the old outbuilding they never used. In the light of a small oil lamp I started to dig the hole. I wanted to make it deeper, but I couldn’t manage more than about three or four feet before exhaustion overcame me. I went back to the house, where Matthew hadn’t moved, and managed to find the energy to drag out the roll of blackout cloth and drop it in the hole. There was no one around. The cottage next door was empty and there was neither a light nor a sound out back. Only the black night sky with its uncaring stars.
With tears running down my cheeks, I shoveled back the earth. Some heavy stone slabs stood propped against the wall and I levered them down on top of the makeshift grave. It was the best I could do.
That left only the inside of the house. First, I swept up the broken glass, the spilled tea leaves and cocoa powder, and put the tins back in the cupboard. As I said, there was very little blood and I managed to scrub that off the floor easily enough. There might have been minute traces left but nobody would be able to tell what they were. If things went according to plan, nobody would even look.
I say “plan” now, but it was just something I had come up with while burying Gloria. I had to explain where she had gone.
After I had managed to lead Matthew upstairs and wash and undress him, I put him to bed. I packed his bloody shirt and trousers in a small suitcase and added as many of Gloria’s favorite clothes as I could fit in. Then I went and picked up her personal odds and ends and put them in the suitcase too.
After checking the kitchen carefully to make sure that I had collected everything of importance and cleaned up to the best of my ability, I wrote a note on the same paper I had got out for Matthew earlier. Gloria’s childlike handwriting and style were easy to imitate. After that, carrying the suitcase, I took the back way to the shop. I didn’t want to leave Matthew, God knows, but what else could I do? Things had to appear more or less normal. He didn’t seem aware of what was happening and I had no idea how he would face the next day, whether he would remember what he had done, feel remorse or guilt. Would he even notice she was gone?
Early the next day I went to Bridge Cottage, found Matthew still in bed, “found” the note and proceeded to tell everyone we knew, including Mother, that Gloria had run away during the night because she couldn’t bear her life with Matthew anymore. She said she loved him, and she always would, but she couldn’t be responsible for her actions if she stayed. Then I showed them the note, which said exactly that. She ended by saying that we shouldn’t go looking for her because we would never be able to find her.
There was no reason to call in the police. Everyone believed the note without question. Hadn’t Gloria already told me she had heard people predicting that she would run off with a Yank at the first opportunity? Of course, she hadn’t gone off with a Yank, and Brad, for one, would know that, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it.
I gave up Bridge Cottage, sold the contents, including the radiogram and the records Gloria loved so much, and brought Matthew back to live with us above the shop.
One evening when Mother was at Joyce Maddingley’s, I took Matthew’s blood-stained clothes and Gloria’s dresses and burned them in the grate. I cried as I watched all those beautiful dresses catch fire. The black-red-and-white-checked Dorville dress she had bought in London; the black velvet V-neck dress with the puff sleeves, wide, padded shoulders and red felt rose that she had worn to our first dance with the Americans at Rowan Woods; her fine underwear. I watched it all flare and twist, then collapse into ashes. I disposed of her trinkets in Leeds the next time I went there on shop business. I just stood on Leeds Bridge at the bottom of Briggate and dropped them one by one into the river Aire.
As I had expected, it was Brad who gave me the most trouble. On his last day at Rowan Woods, he came to the shop and pestered me with questions. He just couldn’t believe that Gloria had simply left. If she wanted to go, he argued, then why didn’t she go with him? He had asked her often enough. I told him I thought she wanted to escape from everyone; she needed a completely new start. He said she could have had that in California. Again, I argued that living with him in Los Angeles would always have felt tainted to her because of the circumstances in which it came about. No matter what, she would still have been Matthew’s wife.
It hurt him deeply, which I hated to do, but he had to accept what I said in the end. After all, she had told him she didn’t want to see him anymore after VE-Day. Absolutely no one suspected anything like the truth. The 448th Bomber Group moved out of Rowan Woods and I heard nothing more from Brad. It was all over.
Michael Stanhope expressed sorrow that such a beautiful spirit had left the community. He said something about Hobb’s End having glimmered briefly, then turned dark again. He was free to sell the nude now, not that I ever saw or heard anything of it again. Perhaps it wasn’t as good as he thought it was.
As for Matthew, he never really showed any sign that anything was different. He was a little more withdrawn, perhaps, but he went on with the same drinking and staring into space as before. I had to stop the visits to Dr. Jennings, of course. Who knew what narcosynthesis might draw out of Matthew, should it work? Though the doctor protested, I think he was quite relieved. Doctors don’t like failures and Dr. Jennings had been getting nowhere with Matthew.
Soon, we were hearing rumors that the village was to be sold as a reservoir site, and when I looked around, it didn’t surprise me.
Hobb’s End had turned into a ghost village.
I hadn’t noticed it happening because of other matters, but hardly anyone lived there anymore. Those who had come back from the war had a taste of more interesting locales or had been trained for jobs they could only get in the cities. Even the women, who had perhaps gained the most in terms of employment, were heading off for factory jobs in Leeds and Bradford. The mill closed. Buildings fell into disrepair. Old people died. Finally, there was nobody left.
A strange incident occurred before we left for Leeds, though Gloria had, in a way, predicted it. One day, a man in a brown demob suit came into the shop with a little boy of about eight or nine and asked to see Gloria. I knew immediately who they were, though I didn’t want to admit it to them.
“Are you a relative?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that. Just an old friend, that’s all. I was passing this way, so I thought I’d look her up.” He sounded rather sad, and I noticed he had a Cockney accent, just as Gloria did when she let her guard slip. And, of course, nobody just passes Hobb’s End way.