Purbright found rather touching his sergeant’s attitude to what he regarded as the symbols of social eminence. Love was quite without envy and it would never have occurred to him to concede, in the course of his job, any privilege to the wealthy. Rather was he, Purbright thought, a sort of amateur anthropologist, ready always to be happily surprised by discovery of such gewgaws of trivial chieftainship as a white telephone or a leopardskin lavatory seat cover.
“Dinner gongs?” the inspector had echoed, intrigued despite himself.
Love had flushed boyishly and added: “Just little ones. On sideboards. I don’t think they ring them any more.”
“Ah, vestigial gongs.”
David and Julia Harton, of Number Six Oakland, did not own a dinner gong, vestigial or otherwise, but they occupied single beds and had done for nearly two years.
It was the morning following the first stage of the inquest on Robert Digby Tring. Julia Harton had risen from her single bed and stood now, yawning, scratching her right knee, and looking out of the window, from which she had raised a flower-patterned yellow linen blind. David Harton lay in his single bed, with one arm behind his head. He regarded his wife’s back with a lazy smile. By shifting his gaze very slightly, he was able to check on the smile in a mirror that covered half the wall opposite. The smile was his wry one. He nodded amiably to his reflection and looked again towards his wife.
Julia’s head was bowed. She was frowning down at her hands. With one thumbnail she chiselled off little flakes of varnish from the nails of the other hand. The light from the window outlined the body within the thin nightdress, which was rumpled and caught up on one hip. It was a small body, sturdy at neck and wrist and ankle, but narrow chested and with fine arms and shoulders. The only evidence of fat was a puffiness at the very top of her thighs. Even her belly, distended by her attitude of sulky abstraction, had nothing pendulous about it.
“You’re a pretty gross bitch,” David Harton remarked. “Look, why don’t you get a decent girdle or something?”
She glanced about her at the floor. It was littered with pieces of clothing: his, not hers. She reached forth one foot and hooked a pair of orange and green striped briefs on her toe. With a frown of distaste she tossed the briefs into a corner.
David followed the performance with his eyes, his smile unchanged.
Julia avoided looking at him directly, but she noticed that he had unbuttoned the jacket of his pyjamas. The froth of his chest hair was a dark blur in the outfield of her vision.
Without haste, she went about assembling her own outfit in readiness for dressing. She put everything neatly upon a white satin stool, then crossed to the chest of drawers where towels were kept. As usual, she would need a fresh one: David’s final act at night invariably was to leave the bathroom and all its contents waterlogged.
She stooped to a drawer, easing it forth with alternating tugs and pushes. Its emergence was a reluctant waltz.
“Couldn’t you even manage to fix a simple thing like this?” The question was quiet, weary, self-addressed. David pretended to consider it challenging. “Christ, I told you, didn’t I? Give Sandersons a ring. They’ll see to it.”
“David, one does not call in a firm of building contractors to rub a bit of wax along a drawer runner.”
“Wax? Where does one get wax, for God’s sake? What is the use of specialisation if fat-arsed women are too bloody stupid to make use of services that people have spent a lot of money and effort to provide?”
She took a towel from the drawer and put it on the floor beside her, then began unhurriedly to coax the drawer shut, using not her hands but her knees. The action imparted a sway to her body that would have seemed sexually provoking in other circumstances.
“Did you know,” David asked, sounding suddenly friendly and interested, “that you can get a bra with a hole in each cup exactly seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and fringed with mongoose hair. It’s supposed to be so stimulating that the nipples stand out permanently like nutmegs.”
Julia picked up the towel and straightened. She walked to the dressing table and gazed listlessly into its glass. In one corner of it she caught the reflection from the wall mirror of her husband. He had taken off his pyjamas and lay regarding his body with interest and approval.
She turned up her eyes in mock piety.
David spoke again. The tone continued to be light, conversational.
“They’re starting these tactile expansion sessions at the Kissinger. Did you know?”
The Klub Kissinger, formerly the Floradora Club, on the outskirts of Flaxborough, offered health and psychiatric therapy service.
Julia said nothing.
“They might do you good. Why don’t you go along?”
She paused, frowning. “Tactile expansion?” Behind the scepticism and contempt was simple curiosity.
“You can be really dim, can’t you?” He stroked one brown hairy thigh appreciatively. “Expand—grow wider. Simple dictionary definition. Widen experience and knowledge. Tactile—by touch. Christ, didn’t you go to school?”
On the dressing table was a jumble of jars, bottles and aerosol cans. Idly she picked out one of the cans. APPLE LOFT. Brings a Tang of the Country to the Man About Town.
“You mean it’s a free-feel-for-all party?”
“You smug, middle-class cow.”
Julia smiled briefly at APPLE LOFT. “You’ll have to take your Bobby-May along, then, won’t you?”
“It’s you who need the therapy, love. It’s your sex hang-up, not ours.”
At that “ours” there was a slight stiffening of the woman’s shoulders.
David noticed. He went on: “You don’t seem to realise how tiresome people find this small-town moral posturing of yours.”
“People? What people?” She had unscrewed a bottle of nail lacquer and was ruminatively withdrawing the little brush attached to its stopper. Her back was still towards him.
“People who matter. Who happen to be important. You know perfectly bloody well.”
“Business mates.” She pronounced “mates” with a kind of sardonic jauntiness.
Her husband raised himself suddenly on one elbow. “Right,” he said emphatically. “Business mates. Fine. And they make money, lots of money. Isn’t that incredibly vulgar of them?”
Julia put a neat dab of nail lacquer on the nozzle of the APPLE LOFT can. Then she turned, collected her towel and clothing, and left without giving him another word or glance.
He remained still and listened to the slow, rustling drag of her slippers across the landing carpet. A door closed and was locked. The rest of the house was so silent that he could hear and identify the click of a dress button against wooden door panels, the brushing of chain across enamel, the creak of a tap.
David Harton’s smile was no longer wry, as he could see in the mirror that he had had fitted in the days of higher nuptial expectation. It now bespoke pain, philosophically borne.