Page 68 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
14
Mad Max
…and we knew Dante was no good.
Samuel Butler:Notebooks
Found myself idly thumbing through theDictionary of Quotations, where there were lots of good Dante ones but, I was extremely aggrieved to find, no Cassandra ones.
Maybe there are male and female versions of the Dictionary and I’ve got the wrong one? I mean, it wasn’t like she didn’t have an interesting life:someonemusthave mentioned her.
Mind you, she was a striking example of what can happen to a woman when she reneged on a promise. Keturah should bear it in mind, although in her case it wasn’t a lot of petulant gods who were about to become the thingummy in the machine.
Tried to discuss this with Jason when he popped in at lunchtime to share a pizza, for he was not unintelligent, although he had stoppedthinking deeply about anything much since he settled here.
All he said was that I was cute when I talked mythological, and thenIsaid I hoped he choked on his black olive.
Such childish depths are, I’m afraid, our usual comfortable mode of conversation when he is not fancying himself in love with me.
Later I popped into the Haunted Well B&B, where Orla was fully occupied with a party of Australianfamily-tree researchers. The house seemed to be covered in people poring over vast photocopies, and Orla was quite distracted.
She said the only Cassandra she’d ever come across before me was Mama Cass, who was a striking example to us all.
I agreed, but afterwards wondered quite what sort of example.
An almost incoherent phone call from Max, who had been ‘taken in for questioning’ by the Americanpolice the moment he stepped off the plane in sunny California.
‘Incompetence!’ he spluttered. ‘They already know I’m innocent of anything to do with Rosemary’s death, and whatever Kyra says she did had nothing to do with me!’
‘Kyra, as in your personal trainer?’ I asked, my heart sinking. ‘Whatdidshe do?’
‘Only confessed that she was responsible for Rosemary’s death! They had an argumentwhich ended with Kyra giving the wheelchair an almighty shove and walking off. Afterwards, she realized Rosemary hadn’t been able to stop it and gone over the edge, but she was too frightened to say anything even though it was an accident.’
‘So why is she saying anything now?’
‘Goodness knows!’
‘And why did the police want to question you again, if you weren’t there at the time?’ I ponderedaloud.
‘Some busybody – that home-help we had to fire for incompetence, probably – told them that Kyra was getting a bit … well, frankly, she had a crush on me,’ he hedged. ‘Rosemary told me the day before she died that she’d had enough of Kyra trying to flirt with me under her nose and she would have to go, so that’s probably what the argument was about.’
‘You were having an affair with her,weren’t you?’ I asked bluntly, a lot of long-suppressed suspicions bobbing up to the surface, all thanks to Rosemary.
‘How can you even suggest that, Cassy, when you know how I feel about you?’ he said, sounding deeply wounded. ‘Of course I wasn’t, and in the end the police just let me go home, because clearly I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Only now the university has asked me not goin until further notice, and I feel I’m being unfairly punished and harassed for poor Rosemary’s tragic death, which was little more than an accident anyway, as it turns out.’
I think Rosemary might have described it a little differently – and there was definitely some subplot there that he wasn’t telling me about.
‘So what will happen to Kyra?’
He didn’t sound too concerned: ‘There were nowitnesses, but with any luck it will be brought in as an unfortunate accident. It certainly wasn’t premeditated – she had no reason to want her dead, as she told the police – and everyone knows Rosemary was a quarrelsome woman.’
‘Was she? I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned that.’ It was strange how I was getting to know Rosemary after her death.
‘There’s no one else I can talk to about thewhole sorry affair except you, Cassy – you understand me like no one else does.’
I think he meant that I’d been blind to all his faults, but hadn’t realized Rosemary had ripped the blinkers off, leaving me squirming in the light of day.
‘And I’m sorry if I was unreasonable when I came to see you, and that we argued, but I really wasn’t myself after the funeral and everything. I’ll make it upto you when I get back, darling: marriage, babies – anything you want.’
