Page 44 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
I began to open the rest of my mail, and from one big manila envelope pulled a bundle of papers and loose photographs.
The top one was of Max: tall, curly-haired and becomingly greying, with his arm around me as we stood looking out at a vista. My hair was whipping out around my face asusual, but apart from the Gypsy Queen impression we looked like an oldmarried couple.
I remembered that day clearly, because later we had one of our arguments about trying for a baby before it was too late andthatwas a few years ago.
The ticking of the biological clock goes manic after forty.
There were lots of other photos, all taken without my knowledge … and a letter from Rosemary, to be forwarded with the package by her solicitor after her death.
Rosemaryfor remembrance: she’d come back to haunt me.
She wrote with a pen dipped into such pure vitriol that when I’d finished reading it my hands were shaking. Somehow, I’d always thought of her as a bloodless creature like Jane; though now even Jane had disconcertingly proved to have something other than milk in her veins.
I’d believed Max when he told me Rosemary had never cared much for the physicalside of marriage even before the accident, didn’t even mind if he had a mistress, as long as he didn’t ever leave her. But this letter was written by a woman eaten with a deep and passionate jealousy, who had obsessively charted every detail of our liaison.
No wonder she never asked Max questions: her detective spies kept her fully informed. I think she knew more about my relationship with Maxthan I did.
She wrote to me to say that she knew Max was incapable of being faithful, but that he would never leave her, so sooner with me than a string of other women.
She said quite a lot of other things about Max, bitter, horrible things that I hoped weren’t true, tortured outpourings of hatred and jealousy.
I read it through twice, feeling horribly guilty and quite besmirched. Having compartmentalizedand rationalizedwhat I was doing over the years, I now felt like a complete tart again.
A haunted, heartless tart, for this was a message from beyond the grave in no uncertain terms.
Had Max also had a copy of this whole package? If so, no wonder he was worried about my going over there and getting the police thinking again!
‘What is it?’ Jane said eagerly, snatching the letter out of my numbfingers and reading it avidly. I’d have grabbed it back if my limbs had been functioning.
‘Rosemary – Max’s wife? Oh God, did she know all about you? And she never said? And … oh, that’s interesting. That explains a lot.’
‘What does?’
‘Didn’t you read that bit over the page, where she says: “Don’t think you can step into my shoes: you’ll always be just a mistress at best. I’m the one with allthe money, and I’ve left it to Max on condition that he never marries you.” You know, I wondered how they could afford that palatial house, and the cars and all the rest of it, as well as all the help for Rosemary,’ Jane said. ‘I know he gets a good salary, but he has expensive tastes. So that’s why he never left her.’
‘He was fond of her,’ I protested weakly, since the thought had from timeto time occurred to me, too. ‘And he couldn’t just abandon her when she was an invalid. With her injuries, we never imagined … I mean, Max said she would—’
‘Die? But you can go on for ever with a broken back as long as you can afford the right health care,’ Jane said blithely. ‘I could have told you that.’
‘I found it out myself later, thanks. She says … she says when she found out she couldn’thave children, she made him swear that he wouldn’t have them with anyone else until after she was gone! But he didn’t tellmethat. He always saidhe’d rather have my undivided attention, and also that I’d never cope alone with a baby, so he’d rather wait until we could marry.’
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? You’d never be able to marry, so that took care of that.’
‘I feel so dreadfully sorryfor Rosemary. But Max can’t have known how she felt, Jane, and surely the money alone wouldn’t have kept him tied to her?’
‘Clearly, when she found out he’d fallen for you she wasn’t happy about it,’ Jane said. ‘But she wanted to keep him, and he wanted to keep her money and you. Though if it wasn’t you, it would probably have been a string of other gullible students, so she should have beengrateful.’
‘He’s not like that,’ I said sharply. ‘He isn’t calculating and mercenary.’
‘Then after a decent interval he will marry you anyway, and to hell with the money – but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I was you.’
‘Of course Max will marry me,’ I said, although doubts were seeping in even while I said the words. Things had not been as they seemed … and even how they seemed had been difficultenough to square with my uneasy conscience.
And Maxdidlike the material things in life.
Suddenly I was starting to see a Max I didn’t know emerging – a manipulative, selfish stranger.
Had he really thought Rosemary accepted the situation? Or had he coerced her into it at the start, like she said, with threats of leaving her? Had he been sometimes unfaithful to both of us, or was that justspite talking?
