“Ginny,” she says again, weakly, “are you there?”
So she’s guessing. Silently I shift backwards, towards the landing’s double doors, out of sight of the toad. I’m going to leave her. I don’t want to confront her. I’m going to creep away quietly and she’ll never know for sure that I was really here.
“I know you’re there,” she whispers. She’s bluffing, of course….
“Ginny, I know you’re just outside my door. Ginny?” I’m caught. I can’t expose myself now or it would be admitting that I’ve been hiding from her for the past few minutes. But I can’t bring myself to walk away either because now I know she knows I’m here. I lean my head against the landing wall, the other side of her room, defeated. Trapped.
“Look, you don’t have to come in. Stay there and listen if you want,” she continues, as if she knows my every thought and fear. “But please listen. This is very important.”
I am very still. I am very listening.
“Ginny, I’m ill. I think I’m dying. I need you to get me a doctor.”
Oh, my God, she did drink the milk, or, rather, she could have drunk the milk. But, equally, she could be genuinely ill, a torturous coincidence that no one would ever need know about.
No, I can’t get a doctor. I can have someone find her dead, but not ill. Dead old ladies are commended for their contribution in life, laid to rest and, along with their secrets, swallowed forever by the earth. But ill old ladies are investigated until the poison coursing through their bodies is hunted down. And that, as you can imagine, would get me into a lot of trouble. My head is spinning. I want to sit down and tabulate my options. I can’t control them flying about in my head: I need to pull them together on a page and consider them methodically, one by one, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve been leaning my head against the wall of the landing as I listened, and now I put the palm of my right hand up—flat—just a couple of inches in front of my face so I can stare at it. I find that sometimes this helps me focus my concentration, helps draw it back to me rather than flying off, spiraling out of control.
“Ginny, I know this isn’t easy for you. I understand that.” A few days ago I would have taken comfort in the way she seems to know me inside out, but now I hate it. “But if you go to Eileen’s she will…” I can hear the struggle in her voice as she tries to summon energy. “Ginny, for me…please,” she begs finally.
I am looking at the multitude of crisscrossing lines on the palm of my right hand and the dry calluses on the knobbles at the base of my fingers. As I begin to close the hand, bending it in the middle and curling my deformed fingers, I can see the lines fold in on themselves, making deeper and deeper crevices, until my hand is a fist. Then I notice lines that have not grown out of any folds of a fist—like the ones that run lengthways along the fingers—but have simply matured from a gradual desiccation of the skin.
I want to tell you something now, while we’re in this awful predicament outside Vivien’s room: all my life, it seems, I have sacrificed my own will for those around me. Not that I’ve offered much resistance and not that I haven’t wanted to. But I think you’ll agree that I fall into that category of people who prefer to give than to get, who feel better about themselves when they’ve been helping others and derive satisfaction from knowing that some of their own suffering has directly aided someone else’s, indeed someone they love’s, happiness. But I think even people like us have to believe that, just once or twice in our lives, our love is appreciated, perhaps even reciprocated.
“A doctor…Ginny?”
I open my fist sharply, decisively, last night’s new persona coming to the fore. The range of movement in my knuckles is impressive now. It’s good to exercise arthritic joints, keep them loose so they don’t seize up. I look at Vivien’s door through the gap between my fingers.
“Okay,” I say gently.
I leave the landing, go downstairs and open the front door. I have been forced, for what seems like the first time in my entire life, to make an active decision, a choice. A choice that will have an irreversible impact on the future.
I give myself time for one deep breath of honeysuckle, then close the front door, loudly, so Vivien will hear it upstairs. I go into the library, open the drinks cabinet and find the black tin of potassium cyanide, KCN, behind a sticky bottle of vermouth, where I hid it last night. I’m half surprised to find it there, to have confirmation of my actions during the moonlit hours. I reach to the shelf above for a glass and measure in half a teaspoon of the powder, snapping closed the lid and replacing it behind the vermouth. I suppose this is what is meant by premeditated—the calm and considered preparation of death. But I feel released, unshackled. For the first time ever I am not only in control of my life, I am taking control of the future. For once I am causing an event to happen. Yet at the same time another force is thrusting me forward, an overwhelming one that, to my surprise, makes each action follow the last as if I am paralyzed and looking down on myself with horror.
I am impassive and incurious as I continue. It’s the scientist in me, I know. You learn early on, as a scientist, not to trust your feelings and to rise above any unqualified instinct or emotion. All calculations must be backed up with undeniable evidence and absolute qualified conclusions.
It feels no different from making the tea, an everyday practical occurrence. Murder. I take no pleasure in it, yet feel no shame, no anxiety. But this time there is no pretending that I am leaving it up to chance. I accept fully what I am doing. This time it is no different from loading a gun and shooting someone between the eyes, or cracking a lead weight across their skull, and rather than being appalled by myself, I’m feeling strangely empowered, released from the forces that I have, so far, allowed to dictate my life. This time it is me, it is my will. I am in control.
I think I’m in control and yet, perhaps, I have no choice. I cannot help the way the events of my life and those of the past three days have worked on my inherent and coded characteristics to bring me to this unpleasant outcome. As you must know, once a domino is pushed, the motion is started and, as long as the others are lined up one after another with the correct spacing, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the consequence of my lifetime experiences on the character that I was given. From that viewpoint, it cannot be called premeditated. It is as strictly governed as a mathematical equation. It is the result of
me + Vivi falling off the bell tower + taunting at school + Maud’s sherry drinking + the existence of poison in the house…
I feel like the caterpillar that we think is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in actual fact, is not. He’s completely ruled by molecular forms of influence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological makeup. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it’s all out of my hands.
I like to think that, for once, I am in control of my actions, but I also like to know that I am not.
I carry the glass to the front door. Once again I open and close the door loudly, as if I’ve just returned to the house. Then I go to the kitchen and turn on the tap. The cold water pipes start up their chorus of banging and thudding, shaking awake the rest of the house. I fill the glass halfway with water, swirling it gently to dissolve the poison, and I am reminded of the faint aroma it releases, a bitter tinge of almond. I carry it through the hall, past Jake the pig, up the stairs, past the huge stained-glass window, slow and steady, missing the second from last stair, which squeaks, and reach the landing.