Back in the kitchen, Julia spread boots, tunic and breeches on a clear section of bench and with a slightly waxed cloth systematically rubbed the entire plasticised area and every button and piece of metal that might have retained finger-prints. She did not find the task in the least onerous: it was more like the first intriguing and satisfying trial in practice of some process learned on an arts and crafts course.
Still wearing gloves, she bundled the gear together with deliberate awkwardness and re-wrapped them in newspaper. She viewed the resulting package, and nodded, satisfied. An authentic Harton creation. She stuffed it into a floor level recess beneath the sink and pushed it as far back as it would go.
There remained the original paper and string. She could not remember if Mortimer had said anything about them. Never mind, she was capable of thinking for herself and of being thorough. She carried the wrappings to a corner of the garden where there was a wire basket which David, in a brief flirtation with horticulture, once had bought for the burning of fallen leaves. She made in it a bonfire of the paper and a couple of armfuls of the early sheddings of a big chestnut tree.
It was not yet half-past two. She tried to relax and listen to an orchestral concert on radio but gave up after a quarter of an hour.
Setting off to fetch a book from upstairs, she found herself wandering from room to room as if making an inventory of their contents and committing to memory the exact arrangement of furniture.
It was ridiculous, this restlessness. She was behaving like a nervous middle-aged woman embarking on her first shop-lifting expedition. There was nothing criminal in what she was doing. Nobody was going to cross-examine her. She had every justification for what she intended—to frighten a self-centred, brutish husband and to force him into making amends for his treatment of her.
Perhaps, Julia reasoned, a bath would help. At least it would pass some time.
She ran water to a slightly greater depth than usual, but made it a little cooler; it needed to be calming but not soporific.
Tossed among a mixture of toothbrushes, paste tubes, and razor and blades at the back of the wash basin bench was an unstoppered bottle, the latest addition, Julia supposed, to David’s assiduous gleanings from the field of male cosmetics. She picked it up. “Forestry Balm, a Skin-Toning Compound of Twenty-nine Costly Herbs from Finland.” She sent a couple of glugs into the bath water. They fizzed briefly, then spread in green whorls. There arose a steamy, obtrusive perfume. It reminded Julia of the smell of breath-sweeteners, whose use had been one of her husband’s earliest essays in the achievement of sexual irresistibility.
She undressed in the bedroom. The bruises on both legs that testified to the kicks David had delivered two days before were now starkly defined, their colour yellowish like tobacco stains. Julia stared at them for a long while in the mirror, her face showing no emotion save perhaps thoughtfulness, satisfaction even.
She turned away at last and moved about the room, lazily casual. At the window, she paused to look out upon the rowan trees, scarlet clustered, and the closely set beeches that formed now a flame-coloured wall of leaf guarding the privacy of the house and garden. Gently, she pressed her body against the glass. The chill tingled into her breasts and belly. She closed her eyes. Was this how it felt to be a nude painting? David would probably have preferred her to be a big erotic picture. He was great on peeping; had a special face to wear for it—his tolerant, I’ll-go-along-with-it intellectual face, that he kept for strip shows at the Masonic.
Julia opened her eyes again to look at the trees and sky. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she drew away from the window, as from an embrace. She left the room and went slowly downstairs. For five minutes or more, she wandered in and out of rooms. She had never before been naked in any of them. It was marvellous, this solitude, this freedom. And it was only a symbolic foretaste, after all. Soon she would be able to go where she liked, to do what she fancied, when she fancied. To the tune of twenty thousand pounds.
She ascended the stairs like a nude priestess and slid, tongue-tip in ecstatic communion with upper lip, into the green-tinged, gently steaming water.
The weather, which had been bright and warm during most of the day, grew more dull as the afternoon passed. At six o’clock some of the street lamps came on. Julia, making herself a pot of tea, saw the light from one of them through the trees, faint and red like a paper lantern. She frowned; fog would be an unwanted complication.
She drank her tea quickly and without enjoyment. Resisting a chronic inclination to check every room again to ensure that everything indicated a natural and unplanned departure, she left the house at ten minutes past six.
The Doggigrub plant lay on the northern outskirts of Flaxborough. It was set back from the Chalmsbury road, fenced within its own grounds. Broad concrete carriageways circled the factory buildings, some of which were linked by conveyors, big pipes slung overhead like aerial arteries. By the time Julia drove past the gate office and made her way towards the administrative block, most of the daytime production had ceased. A couple of trucks were being loaded with cases in the floodlit transport bay. Plumes of steam marked where a continuous sterilisation plant had been left on automatic setting until morning.
She listened to noises which, though ordinary enough in daylight, were strangely difficult to identify in the gathering dusk; the rolling of an empty can; a chain passing over a pulley; the clash of elevator gates.
Julia had been seen, recognised and respectfully greeted by the gatekeeper. No doubt he had conscientiously set down in his record of traffic the arrival at 18.29 hours of the wife of Doggigrub’s chairman and managing director. Still, it would do no harm to have a few more witnesses.
She left the car opposite the main entrance to Administration and walked back to the long, single-storeyed building that housed the dog food processing department.
A pair of men in Doggigrub green overalls were pushing a big scraper back and forth across an area of floor that had acquired a pinkish grey crust. They were the sole occupants of the building.
“Hi,” said Julia, from the doorway.
The men stopped pushing and looked towards her.
“Evening, Mrs Harton,” said the older. His companion nodded nervously. They waited.
“My husband promised me a bit of sight-seeing. He’s not about, though, is he?” She tried to grin cheerfully but it wasn’t easy. A familiar but loathed smell was beginning to insinuate itself through the masking deodoriser that was constantly being injected into the air supply. It was the unconquerable stink of carrion.
Promptly and eagerly, the men peered about, across, up and down. No, they admitted, Mr Harton was not about.
“Not to worry.” She gave them a nice smile and withdrew.
The younger man said to the older: “I’d rather be up her than up in Newcastle.” The older man jerked his head in indication of the shadowy shapes of machinery. “Sight-seeing? Bloody hell!”