in a place like this? It was blighted, a black spot, an industrial no-manâs land. The fishing industry had gone. Tourists didnât come here. There were few, if any, natural resources.
How and where and under what circumstances had Susan come to know Benson? It was infuriating that such details were so vague in mypatchwork quilt of a mind. But shock treatment does that to you, robs you of essentials and leaves you with trivia. Perhaps it wasnât important â the tiresome details, the logistics â whether they had met by chance in the street, in the park, or even an instant naked glance of desire from car to car at the traffic lights. The fact was that they had met, and become lovers, and then Benson had been the cause of her death by âmisadventureâ, which in this case was another name for suicide.
Looking back, I now realised that I must have had my suspicions while this liaison was going on. But itâs very difficult to catch a woman out in this way, unless the evidence is there in front of your eyes. A man carries incriminating traces with him: lipstick smears, strange perfume in his hair, pins and odd bits of jewellery down the back seat of his car. With a woman, such clues are absent. She has her own female smell, far stronger than any lingering whiff of musk-ox aftershave. She leaves the house neat and groomed and comes back the same. She attends to the laundry, disposing of any soiled garment that might lead a husband to speculate. So the clues are absent, nonexistent. All that remains are discrepancies in times and dates and places. In a court of law none of it would stand up, not even as circumstantial evidence.
Yet I did know. More exactly, I had my doubts. It was, I suppose, what you might call her âattitudeâ. She was more attentive. She was jolly for no apparent reason. She performed little acts of kindness, went out of her way to be pleasant. In bed she was more, not less, eager. All these signs and portents I absorbed without really understanding what they meant: like a necromancer sifting through the ashes, stirring the dead bones, pondering the tale they had to tell.
It was only after her death that I fully realised the truth. Her unfaithfulness, as much as her death, caused my mental blackout. The world caved in, became thick with shadows, hung like cobwebs. Sometimes I couldnât even remember my own name. And neither, ridiculously, could I bring to mind Susanâs face. I could picture her walking towards me in sunlight, long straight dark hair framing a perfectly blank oval, like a badly developed photograph, as if my memory had chosen deliberately to obliterate this one spot.
Susan had suffered for her sins; I was still suffering, perhaps for sinsI didnât know I had committed. It was only natural justice, surely to God, that Benson should have his share. He had a business. He was a councillor. He probably had a wife, children perhaps. There were several ways he could be grievously hurt before the final blow.
For the first time in many, many months my mind began to clear, to see daylight instead of being stifled in the hot suffocating darkness of blind futility. Now my anger had cooled and hardened, become tempered into cold, tensile, unforgiving purpose. I would have my revenge.
2
There was a cold wind blowing from the sea. It was full of the raw, primordial smells, stinging to the nostrils, of ocean depths and the creatures that move in them. After the stale odours of closed overheated rooms and supine comatose bodies it was crude and invigorating, making me feel light-headed. I realised I was hungry.
Keeping to the backstreets and guided by the wind in my face I found a small pub down by the granite wall of the old harbour. I had done my best to make myself presentable, and was sure I had when the people in the saloon bar turned back to their conversations and drinks and the large woman behind the bar with rings and burnished blue hair
How and where and under what circumstances had Susan come to know Benson? It was infuriating that such details were so vague in mypatchwork quilt of a mind. But shock treatment does that to you, robs you of essentials and leaves you with trivia. Perhaps it wasnât important â the tiresome details, the logistics â whether they had met by chance in the street, in the park, or even an instant naked glance of desire from car to car at the traffic lights. The fact was that they had met, and become lovers, and then Benson had been the cause of her death by âmisadventureâ, which in this case was another name for suicide.
Looking back, I now realised that I must have had my suspicions while this liaison was going on. But itâs very difficult to catch a woman out in this way, unless the evidence is there in front of your eyes. A man carries incriminating traces with him: lipstick smears, strange perfume in his hair, pins and odd bits of jewellery down the back seat of his car. With a woman, such clues are absent. She has her own female smell, far stronger than any lingering whiff of musk-ox aftershave. She leaves the house neat and groomed and comes back the same. She attends to the laundry, disposing of any soiled garment that might lead a husband to speculate. So the clues are absent, nonexistent. All that remains are discrepancies in times and dates and places. In a court of law none of it would stand up, not even as circumstantial evidence.
Yet I did know. More exactly, I had my doubts. It was, I suppose, what you might call her âattitudeâ. She was more attentive. She was jolly for no apparent reason. She performed little acts of kindness, went out of her way to be pleasant. In bed she was more, not less, eager. All these signs and portents I absorbed without really understanding what they meant: like a necromancer sifting through the ashes, stirring the dead bones, pondering the tale they had to tell.
It was only after her death that I fully realised the truth. Her unfaithfulness, as much as her death, caused my mental blackout. The world caved in, became thick with shadows, hung like cobwebs. Sometimes I couldnât even remember my own name. And neither, ridiculously, could I bring to mind Susanâs face. I could picture her walking towards me in sunlight, long straight dark hair framing a perfectly blank oval, like a badly developed photograph, as if my memory had chosen deliberately to obliterate this one spot.
Susan had suffered for her sins; I was still suffering, perhaps for sinsI didnât know I had committed. It was only natural justice, surely to God, that Benson should have his share. He had a business. He was a councillor. He probably had a wife, children perhaps. There were several ways he could be grievously hurt before the final blow.
For the first time in many, many months my mind began to clear, to see daylight instead of being stifled in the hot suffocating darkness of blind futility. Now my anger had cooled and hardened, become tempered into cold, tensile, unforgiving purpose. I would have my revenge.
2
There was a cold wind blowing from the sea. It was full of the raw, primordial smells, stinging to the nostrils, of ocean depths and the creatures that move in them. After the stale odours of closed overheated rooms and supine comatose bodies it was crude and invigorating, making me feel light-headed. I realised I was hungry.
Keeping to the backstreets and guided by the wind in my face I found a small pub down by the granite wall of the old harbour. I had done my best to make myself presentable, and was sure I had when the people in the saloon bar turned back to their conversations and drinks and the large woman behind the bar with rings and burnished blue hair
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