Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
he said, getting to his feet, working hard to control his temper, frightened of the craziness he’d started to hear in her voice. There were still pins that he hadn’t got, ones that had rolled out of reach under the dresser. But they’d have to wait. He’d get them later, when Ava wasn’t standing over him, looking as though she might kick him or throw something on his head. He wanted to get away from her.
‘No, I won’t feel better,’ she said, spitting out the words. ‘I’ll feel worse – watching you spending my father’s money, paying off all those debts that you don’t want me to know about.’
‘What debts? I – I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Bertram stammered, looking away, wondering how much she knew.
‘Oh yes, you do. Do you think I’m blind? Do you think I haven’t seen the letters that have been coming here these last few months?’
‘You’ve got no right to look at them. They’re mine; they’re addressed to me.’
Instinctively, he turned to look through the open door of the kitchen over to the locked bureau in the corner of the sitting room where he kept his papers, and at the same time he unconsciously fingered the keys in his pocket. Ava smiled; she could read her husband like a book.
‘Shame on you – running up debts when I haven’t had a new dress since the war started; when I haven’t had any fun in as long as I can remember; when I haven’t left this bloody flat except to go and dance attendance on that old man whom you’ve been so busy buttering up. What did you spend the money on, Bertie?’ she demanded, her voice rising with each accusation as she moved towards her husband with her fists clenched in anger. ‘Some other woman, was it? Some damned Soho whore so you could feel like a man for five or ten minutes?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said, putting his hands over his ears to shut out her voice. ‘You know how I hate it when you talk like that.’
‘Tell me!’ she shouted, stamping her foot.
‘I made some bad investments. That’s all. I didn’t know there was going to be a war, did I? It wasn’t my fault.’
‘Of course not,’ she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘It never is, is it? Just like it’s not your fault your name’s in my father’s will when you know damned well you got him to put it there, going round there every day, ministering to his every whim, while you let all the rest of your patients go to hell because you couldn’t be bothered. You stole my inheritance,’ she said, looking him in the eye. ‘It’s just the same as if you walked into one of the banks up on the High Street and took the money out of the till.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I did no such thing. Albert left us both his money because we’re married. What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine. You know that.’
‘Which would be fine, except that you’ve got nothing – nothing except my father’s money and a mountain of debts. Pretty convenient he died when he did, isn’t it?’
There! She’d said it. It was as though she and Bertram could pretend that the suspicion wasn’t there as long as she didn’t voice it, but once the accusation had been spoken, she knew she couldn’t take it back. It was between them now, opening up like a chasm that neither of them could bridge.
‘I had nothing to do with your father’s death,’ said Bertram, speaking slowly, almost as if he were taking an oath in a court of law. ‘How could you even think such a thing, Ava?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think,’ said Ava, suppressing a cry and putting her hands over her face so she wouldn’t have to see her husband, wouldn’t have to deal with him or even think about him. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that he’d killed her father. He might have a motive, but she felt he was too weak, too law-abiding, to be capable of such an act. Her cry was more a scream of frustration because she wanted to escape from her thoughts but couldn’t. The flat was too small and there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to run away to, except out into the cold, friendless streets, windswept and full of rain.
She ran blindly into the bedroom and shut and locked the door. Her hands were wet, soaked with tears that she hadn’t felt as they’d streamed down, emptying her of emotion. She lay face down on the brown satin eiderdown, buried her head in the lumpy pillow, and fell asleep, then woke up in the small hours ravenously hungry.
She unlocked the door and found Bertram asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, curled up under a blanket in the foetal position. He’d undressed to his underwear, and she noticed how he’d folded his clothes carefully and left them on a chair, with his bow tie sitting ridiculously on top. She watched him for a moment in the half-light, listening to his snoring, unable to understand how she could be married to this stranger with whom she had so little in common. Nothing in her life made sense to her any more; nothing added up.
Shaking her head, she turned away and went into the kitchen and spread a thin layer of jam across the crust of a half-stale national loaf she’d bought at the bakery the day before. There was nothing else left in the pantry. She ate standing up, listening to the rain beating on the roof and running down in torrents from the guttering outside the blacked-out window. In all her life, she’d never felt more alone.
They drove to the funeral, following the horse-drawn hearse as it made its way slowly across the river. As a doctor, Bertram was entitled to use a car, but he rarely availed himself of the privilege, and Ava was surprised that he hadn’t sold his Austin 7 to help pay his debts. Now, of course, that wouldn’t be necessary.
Ava felt as if she were riding through a ghost town. The incessant rain was only now beginning to ease and the streets were deserted. She glanced over at her husband, watching the careful, over-precise way he held the steering wheel and manoeuvred the gear stick up and down in his leather-gloved hand. It struck her that he was the most repressed person she’d ever met. How ironic, she thought, that a woman who so yearned for life and love should have tied herself to a man so utterly unable to provide her with either.
It was a half-world she was living in. It always had been. She’d lived her life on other people’s terms, never her own. When she looked in the mirror, she saw Albert Morrison’s daughter or Bertram Brive’s wife, never Ava. Yet she knew it didn’t have to be this way. The country was crying out for women to join the Wrens, to work on the land or in the munitions factories. Every time she went out, posters of beautiful female warriors in tin hats and starched khaki uniforms beckoned to her from the sides of buses or the walls of the underground, their far-seeing eyes gazing into a brave future. Yet up to now she’d done nothing to heed their call. She’d stayed at home, inert and isolated amid the turmoil.
And it wasn’t just the war she was missing. There was the music too. She listened to it on the radio when Bertram wasn’t there. Jazz and swing; Charleston and tango – infectious rhythms that made her want to kick off her shoes and dance. And sometimes she did, letting go for a moment as she spun around amongst the dreary furniture with her light brown hair thrown up in a whirl about her head.
On weekend afternoons, she’d seen the shop girls coming out of the Empire ballroom on the King’s Road – starry-eyed, flushed, and laughing. Why couldn’t she have that too? Life was passing her by, leaving her behind. She glanced over at her husband and felt crushed by the weight of him, as though she couldn’t breathe. She wound down the window and leant her head out of the car into the cold air. She could hear Bertram objecting, shouting at her to stop, but she ignored him. The bite of the wind on her face made her feel alive, separate from her dead father, laid out on his back inside his pale brown wooden coffin, bumping along the potholed road in the back of the hearse up ahead.
A throng of people all dressed in black was milling around on the pavement, but for a moment she was alone. Bertram was bustling about, shaking hands; clearing a path for the pallbearers to bring the coffin into the church; talking to the vicar, whose cassock kept blowing up incongruously in the wind, revealing a pair of long black socks that he was wearing underneath. Neither she nor Bertram was a churchgoer, yet Bertram seemed to be treating the vicar like an old friend. He was clearly enjoying himself.