Page 26 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
And it wasn’t like I hadn’t been through all this before, when I was struggling to resist Max. Being quietly pursued by a handsome professor may be flattering, but it was also scary to a young student, especially after I discovered that he was not only married, but his wife had been crippled in a skiing accident a couple of years before.
I was a habitualsinner, but if I hadn’t thought Rosemary accepted the situation I would never finally have agreed to it … and Maxdefinitelylet me think it wouldn’t be for long, I didn’t imagine that.
But I couldn’t blame Max for my sins. What on earth was I thinking of, waiting to step into a dead woman’s shoes?
And wherehadthe years gone while I was doing that? I was heading for middle age and I hadn’tdone anything. Well, maybe I had done things, but they were all the wrong things, and most of my life had been spent writing and waiting.
Waiting for Max, waiting for Rosemary to die, waiting for children, waiting for a damned bestseller. (Or even a Damned bestseller.)
Now I felt not so much mistress of the macabre, as macabre mistress.
At lunchtime (ham and pineapple pizza, large glass ofChilean Cabernet Sauvignon), a Jason, hangdog and most strangely marked about the lower lip, turned up to apologize.
‘That’s all right,’ I assured him. ‘At least when I bit you the fangs loosened, so they were quite easy to get out when I got home.’
By then I was so desperately in need of comfort that had he not been in Penitent Mode, the chances are that he could havehad from me what he wasso keen on having the previous night, because I would have been anyone’s for a good bear hug.
Just as well perhaps that he didn’t know that?
Still, we resumed our friendship as before, the only flaw in our entente being Tom, who apparently wanted to pop round later and tell me how much he’d enjoyed my last book.
Over my blood-spattered mortal remains, he would.
…clutching The Book he stoodover her blood-mired corpse, while flies admired themselves in the twin mirrors of her surprised eyes, and…
Jason seemed unable to see what Tom was up to, and I seemed unable to tell him, but at least I now knew to check who was at the door before I opened it that afternoon. Tom was larger, stronger and younger than Jason, but without the cuddle factor. Thank goodness he was going back to universitythe following day.
I gave Jason an edited version of Rosemary’s death, which depressed him still further, since he assumed it meant that Max and I would be marrying in the near future, even when I pointed out that we could hardly do so immediately after the funeral.
After Jason had gone I accidentally caught sight of myself in the mirror, and really it was a miracle thatanyonewanted me! Myface, naturally whiter than white, still had the remains of last night’s greenish make-up, my eye-liner was smeared into Alice Cooper streaks, and the crimson lipstick had rubbed off, leaving a ghastly stain. To add thecoup de grâce,my usually straight, dark red hair now stuck up on one side like a yard brush.
Roll up, roll up, see Max’s mistress of the macabre. You saw it here first, folks!
I scrubbed the exterior of the Whited Sepulchre then went to bed for a couple of hours, for, after all, I still had a haunted house to visit and a chapter to write that night.
Mental and physical exhaustion meant I fell asleep instantly, only to go straight into The Nightmare like somebody’d dropped me through a trapdoor into hell.
This time the somersaulting was so dizzyingly fast (and whydidmy forward motion always turn into back-flips?), and the cupboard door pulsed so ominously with greenish light, that I thought it would all be over and the door slammed behind me for ever in the time it usually took for the first backwards tumble.
But the pulsing quickly turned to throbbing and then a hard rattling tattoo that jarred me awake: someone was beating hell out of my front door.
I staggered down and threw it wide open, because at that moment I’d have welcomed even Tom for getting me out of that corridor. Could I perhaps survive for ever without sleep? (‘For ever’ being whatever miserly amount of years I’ve got left.)
But to my surprise it wasn’t Tom, only the small, portly and inoffensive figure of Jane’s husband, Gerald. He was the same vintage as Max, only looked it,and was nice in an unexciting way. I’d always got on fine with him providing I didn’t malign Sweet Baby Jane, but he’d never before crossed my threshold.
‘Come in,’ I said, staring at him. His blue Pringle jumper was on inside out and he appeared to be wearing odd socks, one Argyle patterned and the other plain maroon.
‘If it’s not inconvenient. Sorry to bother you. Were you working?’
Now,that’s the nice thing about Gerald, he appreciates that writing is working and not some little pastime you can fit in between shopping and cooking dinner for six. And what is more, he even recognizes horror writing as real writing.
‘No, that’s all right, I was sleeping: but I’m glad you woke me up because I was having my nightmare.’
‘Your nightmare?’ he echoed, looking round him in some surprise.‘This is all very light and open, isn’t it? I expected something more—’
‘Dark? Sinister?’
‘I was going to say cottagey, actually.’
