Imaginative Experience by Mary Wesley

sure you are not a journalist? I thought for a moment you might be Police, plain clothes, but you don’t look—’
    ‘No, no,’ Maurice said. ‘Just a friend. I was hoping to get in touch with Julia; there was something Giles had asked me to do.’ Less risky, since he was dead, to claim friendship with Giles than acquaintance with Julia. ‘It was to do with her interest in sheep,’ he said.
    ‘Sheep?’ The woman gaped. ‘Sheep? What would Julia want with sheep?’
    Maurice fumbled, ‘Giles suggested I—’
    ‘That girl wouldn’t know anything about sheep. She’s a murderess. Giles must have been pulling your leg.’ She stared, unfocused by whisky, at her visitor. ‘I will give you her telephone number. You can tell her from her mother, and from me if you like, that she is a murderess. We don’t talk, of course; it would be wrong.’ She got up and, moving to a bureau, began rummaging into pigeonholes. ‘I know I have it somewhere,’ she said.
    Maurice, too, rose and studied the photographs, the girl’s mother, husband and child, searching for some likeness to the figure seen fleetingly from the train. ‘I was out of the country,’ he improvised. ‘What was the reason for the divorce?’ The pub had provided snide hints of something other than mere adultery and violence.
    Madge spoke with her back to him. ‘It was a put-up job. The real reason, the reason she gave her mother, was too piffling for words.’
    Encouragingly, Maurice said, ‘Oh?’
    Madge said, ‘I know I have put that number somewhere, I refuse to be defeated. Do smoke if you want and help yourself to whisky, and do please sit down. You are making me nervous.’
    Maurice sat. ‘I’m a bird-watcher,’ he said. ‘You have to keep very still watching birds.’ He reached for his cigarettes and lit up, then poured a tot of whisky into his empty cup. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the piffling comes close to the truth.’
    ‘Well, if you must know,’ said his hostess, still searching, ‘when pressed by her mother, Julia said Giles’s feet smelled, his pits smelled, and his breath reeked of tobacco. Her words.’
    Maurice, inhaling, felt sympathy for Giles. ‘She must have known he smoked when she married him,’ he suggested.
    ‘He had given it up but he took to it again, and I dare say before they married he did not take off his socks.’ Madge let out a harsh laugh. ‘Eureka!’ she exclaimed. ‘Here we are, I’ve found it. I’ll write it down for you. Then,’ she said, ‘I’ll join you in a cigarette, mention of Julia brings on the urge. And you,’ she said, writing, ‘can tell me what brings you to these parts, besides friendship with Giles. Here’s the number,’ she said. ‘I wonder what you are really after?’
    Maurice pocketed the piece of paper. Her tone was growing suspicious; the whisky was at work. It was inconceivable that he should tell this woman that the sight of Julia from the train window had briefly roused in him an erotic twinge; stubbing out his cigarette, he was conscious that like the defunct Giles he, too, smelled of stale tobacco. The woman’s remark put a damper on lust, yet reminded him irritatingly of the fellow in the First Glass carriage who had recoiled from him and snubbed his friendly overture. Would it be possible to get back at him through the girl? Maurice drained the last of the whisky and lit another cigarette. ‘You have been very kind,’ he said. ‘I should be on my way. I suppose,’ he said casually, ‘that she had another chap handy when she divorced.’
    ‘Absolutely not,’ said Madge. ‘Nobody who had been married to Giles would want anyone else.’
    Maurice savoured this ambiguous statement and rose to leave. ‘When Julia left home at sixteen, as you say, what did she do?’ he asked.
    ‘She moved out of Clodagh’s orbit.’
    ‘Oh.’
    Madge lowered her voice. ‘Out of Clodagh’s class.’
    Maurice again said, ‘Oh,’ and then, ‘How was that?’
    ‘She