Mr Crispin came through from the kitchen, tugging down his shirt sleeves. He was grinning at a memory. “Bugger me, you should have seen old Vera.”
“Vera?”
“Vera Scorpe. She looked like a lady deacon at a farting contest. Christ! If looks could kill.”
He moved behind Mrs Spain on his way across the room and with absent-minded affection squeezed one of her breasts while with his other hand he sorted out whisky from the half dozen bottles on the sideboard. She nudged away his grasp, but not immediately.
“What’s for tea, then?”
“Dinner,” corrected Mrs Spain. “Fish. Well, you can see I’ve set for fish. A nice piece of baked cod.”
Mr Crispin made his lips look as if he was going to say “fish” again but he remained silent. He poured quickly a very full glass of whisky, then sat down near the window.
“Let me guess,” said Mrs Spain, “who else was there.” She pondered a moment, while stroking gently the place lately invested by her employer’s hand. “I know—that awful Cadbury woman from the dogs’ home.”
“Right.”
“Yes, well, she’s easy. If she doesn’t keep to heel she doesn’t get Arnie Hatch’s subs. What about that fellow from the hotel in East Street, though—nervous man with glasses and a bossy wife—Maddox. I’ll bet they turned up.”
Mr Crispin chuckled. “Aye, they bloody well did. Of course, he’s still after the drinks contract at Arnie’s club. He’s wasting his bloody time, though; I know that for a fact.”
“I wonder,” said Mrs Spain, on her way into the kitchen, “that those two haven’t more pride. Of course, she was a Hatch herself before she was married. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Crispin grunted. He heard the sound of an oven opening and dishes being set down. He sniffed cautiously and with distaste, then thrust his nose into the sanctuary of whisky fumes.
“I remember all the trouble there was over her uncle’s will,” called Mrs Spain. “Amy Maddox was to have got that coin collection of his. They reckoned it was worth over £1000. But it never came to her. It went to Arnie in the end. They never forgave him, Amy and her husband. Yet there they go—sucking up to her.”
“Who?” Crispin tried to sound interested.
Mrs Spain’s big, gaunt face appeared in the doorway, wreathed in fishy steam from the casserole she carried.
“What do you mean, who? Her, of course. That awful wife of his. Sophie.” She set down the casserole as grimly as if it contained a human head. “And don’t sit there letting this get cold.”
Crispin obeyed the summons without demur. After a lifetime of what more conventionally domesticated residents of Flaxborough termed his “arsing around with anything in skirts”, he had found a sort of peace in the discipline imposed by the widow of butcher Spain. She was not strait-laced in any moral sense. Indeed, their relationship had begun with a tipsy seduction scene in the upstairs room of “Penny’s Pantry” only an hour after meeting each other at the wedding reception of a mutual friend. Millicent adopted much the same attitude to sex as her late husband had shown to meat: one of acceptance, appreciation and businesslike dispatch. Around the house, though, she zealously indulged a love of order, of routine, of propriety, that would have much irked any man already familiar with such matters. Crispin was not. Domestic disorder had always been for him the norm. Now life was crowded with niceties and conceits. Contrary to every expectation of himself and his friends, he found himself actually enjoying them. The transformation had cost him a lot, certainly. But he had made money in the last twenty years like a man shovelling gravel. There was enough to satisfy the social aspirations of ten Millicents. And what, he asked himself in response to her diligent tutelage, was money for if not to secure the benefits of gracious living?
He ate the fish quickly, although it proved more palatable than he had feared. For sweet, Mrs Spain produced an orange-flavoured mousse with whipped cream. Mr Crispin enjoyed it very much. He reflected that Mrs Spain was a treasure, and cast around in his mind for the sort of observation that would please her.
“They reckon,” he said at last, gazing reflectively at his well-licked spoon, “that old Arnie’s trying to sell back that bloody great water bed, or whatever it’s called.”
“But they only bought it in March.” Mrs Spain flipped out the information on the instant. “They had to have special girders fitted. And plumbing.”
“Aye, well, they’ll have to have them unfitted. Old Arnie’s had enough. Every time he and Sophie have some nutty he’s bloody sea-sick.”
“Harry! Don’t be so disgusting.”
Mr Crispin felt that small warm blow-back that rewards the giver of pleasure. He looked at Millicent’s face. It was set in a frown and she was eating with so little movement of muscle that she might merely have been nibbling a stray fish bone. She swallowed and said:
“If you ask me, they haven’t done anything of that kind for a very long while.”
“How would you know?” Crispin sounded genuinely interested.
“Ah.”
“Go on then, girl. Tell me.”
She unhurriedly gathered together their used dishes. “It’s not a subject I care to discuss.”
He shrugged and turned his chair at right-angles. There was a leather cigar case on a silkwood coffee table a few feet away. He stretched out a leg and hooked the table towards him. Mrs Spain rose and fetched an enormous ashtray from the end of the sideboard. It was a hollowed out quartz octagon, more than twelve inches across.
“If you must know,” said Mrs Spain, with studied casualness—Crispin smirked at the end of his cigar before suddenly biting it off—“Mrs Harper who used to do the cleaning at that so-called house of theirs, including the so-called bedroom, told me.”
“Told you what?” asked Crispin, confused less perhaps by the invoking of Mrs Harper than by the implications of “so-called”.
“Her son’s a policeman. Mrs Harper’s son, I mean. And she used to get her meat from us when we had the shop. She reckoned that the Hatches hadn’t, well, you know, all the time she’s been working for them.”
“Yes, but bloody hell, they wouldn’t have asked her to watch, would they?”
“Harry, you’re just pretending not to understand. I mean, when people—well, when they behave in a certain way, there are signs left. Usually, anyway. And people can tell when they look afterwards.”
“If they know what to look for.” Crispin drew flame into his cigar without taking his eyes off Mrs Spain’s face.
“I think we’ve said quite enough on the subject.”
Crispin extinguished his match with a great smoke-laden sigh. Gruffly, he cleared his throat. “Come here, girl.”