Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Read online

  She paused. ‘Not from the Welfare?’ she asked sharply. ‘Housing? Social Services? Not one of those little-Miss-Nosey-Parker-social-workers come to see if I’m dying in my bed, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said steadily. ‘Just a friend of Michael’s from the university.’

  ‘Don’t drink the tea,’ Michael said in a whisper too soft to be heard by anyone but his own quivering ears and feeble conscience.

  Aunty Sarah puckered up her dry pale lips, readying herself to drink. ‘Not a neighbourhood watch scheme?’ she said with sudden suspicion. ‘Not come to befriend me? Not Friends of the Aged? Not want to understand me?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said, her voice no less patient.

  ‘Senile Dementia Support Group!’ Aunty Sarah screeched. She pointed a quivering bony finger accusingly. ‘You’ve come to talk through my confusions with me!’

  ‘Not at all,’ Alice said. She gleamed at the old lady. ‘I’ve come to poison you with herbal tea so that Michael can inherit this house and he and I can live here forever.’

  ‘Noommmiiimmmmpppp!’ Michael moaned.

  Aunty Sarah cackled like an old witch. ‘That’s good!’ she said delightedly. ‘I love a good joke. I like you!’ She took a deep swig of tea. ‘I like you, Heidi! You’ve got spirit!’ She gulped swiftly.

  ‘DON’T DRINK THE TEA!’ Michael said clearly. He stepped into the centre of the room, from behind Alice’s cascade of skirts. He snatched the cup from Aunty Sarah’s hands with all the power of a young man who has found the deep secret source of potency inside himself. Michael had read D. H. Lawrence and he recognized the feeling welling up inside him. He was as male and as powerful as a bull in a meadow. He was strong like the dark primeval soil. He was thrusting like an oak tree reaching towards light. He was free of the pathetic chains of bourgeois society, his face glowed, he breathed deeply into his pouter-pigeon chest. He was a man who has faced a very great temptation and managed to spurn it. Hearing Alice speak of murder and hearing poor old Aunty Sarah laugh so trustingly had broken Michael’s reserve. His innocence had gone. In its place was strength.

  ‘Aunty Sarah, I Forbid You To Drink That Tea,’ he said. Then he looked from the perfectly empty cup to the little old lady. ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll leave you to have a little rest now,’ Alice said sweetly. She picked up the tray again and put it in Michael’s nerveless hands. ‘If you want anything, just call. I shall stay in earshot, for the next few minutes.’

  ‘Mmmmnnnniiiiinnnn?’ said Michael.

  ‘Just ten minutes,’ Alice confirmed. She took Michael gently by the shoulders and propelled him gently from the room. ‘Ten minutes, and so peaceful, Michael. And the death certificate already made out to natural causes, and the doctor been.’

  At the word ‘death’ Michael’s feet entangled themselves and he came to an abrupt standstill on the top step.

  Alice took his little head in her hands and turned his face towards hers. Her dark eyes were luminous, her lips moist. When she spoke he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face.

  ‘Michael,’ she said softly, ‘I really do hope you are At One with your destiny?’

  Under the shimmery kaftan her breasts were rounded and warm. Michael knew this to be a fact and it did not help his breathing.

  His knuckles whitened as his grip tightened on the handles of the tray and the milk jug went ‘chink chink chink chink’ against the teapot.

  ‘Mmmmmiiiinnnn!’ he said.

  ‘I am At One with my destiny, Michael,’ she said. ‘I believe my destiny is you. We met only last night yet already we have thoughts in common, we have our minds attuned, we have made passionate, abandoned love, and we have killed a boring old lady and gained a substantial property ideal for Family Home or conversion to Small Business Premises, in a highly desirable village within Easy Commuting Distance of London or Brighton.’

  She took the tray from his slackened grip and put it down softly on the parquet floor of the landing.

  ‘Touch me, Michael!’ she urged. Michael stuck out both his hands feebly, like PC Plod directing Toytown traffic. His flat hands thumped comfortingly on her rounded breasts. Michael revolved them stiffly in a clockwise motion. Alice moaned and dropped to the floor, sitting warmly and heavily on his feet, clasping her arms around his knees which meant that her head pressed, pressed, pressed …

  Blinkie, who had been quiescent since his fright in the kitchen, pressed with increasing urgency in reply. For one demented moment Michael wanted to take him out and give him a good talking to. He was in league with Mrs Hartley and had been since they had first met. Now she was pressing … and he was pressing … and … Michael moaned softly and as his knees buckled beneath him tumbled on the stairs beside Mrs Hartley.

  ‘Every modern convenience,’ she said softly as she unzipped his trousers with casual skill, one hand only. Michael cried out softly, and scrabbled for purchase on the uncarpeted stairs like a mountaineer who has forgotten his crampons. He entered her at last with a grunt of triumph, and a tight grip on the uprights of the banister.

  ‘With all traditional features retained, only in need of sympathetic redecoration,’ Mrs Hartley murmured as her eyelids fluttered shut in ecstasy.

  Michael’s Aunty may have called him. She may have called upon her Maker, she may have called on the Angel Gabriel and he may have replied with a chorus of heavenly hallelujahs! Michael, for one, was deaf to everything for long moments. When he came to himself the ten minutes which Alice had predicted had passed. Michael and Alice lay on the stairs still and silent. Aunty in her bedroom was pretty quiet too.

  ‘Is she …?’ Michael asked as he came to and noted the unearthly stillness of the house.

  Alice nodded solemnly. She stood up, brushed down her gown and went towards the bedroom. ‘Hummmmm …’ she started.

  Michael, fascinated, aghast, followed her into the bedroom. Aunty Sarah was propped up on the pillows as usual. A slight smile curved her mouth, her eyes were shut. The bedroom was quiet and sunny.

  ‘There,’ Alice said with an air of quiet satisfaction. ‘That’s done. Now we must get the things out of the removal van. You said you had to get it back at midday.’

  Michael gulped and nodded. He had a strong suspicion, compounded by lack of food and excessive sexual pleasure, that his brain had exploded and was whirling in outer space. He followed Alice downstairs without a murmur and once more took the other end of Professor Hartley’s wardrobe and then his bed and then his chest of drawers, the crated box of his nick-nacks, the mirror in its heavy gilt frame, the coat-stand which would look nice in the hall, the Afghan rugs.

  In the middle of it all Alice pounced on her diary which was poking out from a tea chest filled with peasant woodwork.

  ‘There it is!’ she said, pleased. ‘Now I can really start! You carry on, darling, I shan’t be a mo!’

  She vanished then, into the sitting-room, and Michael could hear her, every time he staggered through the hall with another box, or with another dining-room chair, dialling and talking, dialling and talking. Once he caught a snippet of the conversation: ‘Oh dahling!’ she said in a voice he had not heard before. ‘We had it all wrong! All! All wrong! All that dreary trouble trying to understand them! All those seminars about Empty Nest Syndrome, and the Academic Wife, and What Tenure Means to Your Man, and the impact of stress on male libido. All wrong!’ She was silent for a moment and then she chuckled richly and warmly. ‘Miranda Bloomfeather?’ she said. ‘All that means nothing to me now. I am free. I have liberated myself.’ The telephone crackled urgently. Alice chuckled again. ‘I won’t tell you over the phone, it’s too exciting,’ she said. ‘Come around this evening and I’ll tell all of you then. Bring everyone! Everyone!’

  Then Michael heard her hang up and dial again.

  Michael carried on humping furniture while Alice’s voice went on in the sitting-room until the pantechnicon was empty. Then, as he heaved the last thing – a well-padded footstool �
�� into the sitting-room, she broke off from the phone.

  ‘Why darling, you look quite pale,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

  Michael sat down heavily on one of Professor Hartley’s chesterfield armchairs. ‘Ummmmlummmph,’ he said.

  Alice frowned very slightly looking at Michael’s white sweaty face. She smothered a sigh of irritation waiting for him to speak. Michael looked silently back at her. Aunty Sarah, upstairs, looked nowhere at nothing. Michael was not absolutely sure that he was having a good time.

  Alice stepped back a pace to see him more fully. She absorbed once more his fluffy halo of curly hair, his innocent moon-like round spectacles, the endearing shape of his mouth, his slight, nervous body, and his delicious youth.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said lovingly. ‘You must be exhausted. Why don’t you stay right there while I make us some lunch?’

  ‘There’s no food in the house, I looked,’ Michael said sulkily.

  Alice gave a rippling, joyful laugh. ‘Silly boy! There’s all the food in my freezer, and in my fridge! Cakes, soups, stews, roasts, all sorts. I’ll have a good meal on the table in thirty minutes! You’ll see!’

  Michael’s downward pout turned upwards into a smile. Alice darted into the kitchen and he could hear the hum of Professor Hartley’s deluxe microwave as it switched on to defrost Professor Hartley’s nut casserole. Alice came out into the hall again with a little glass in her hand half filled with a pale, golden-brown liquid.

  She smiled at Michael with a strange detached smile. ‘Have this, darling,’ she said encouragingly. ‘You’ll feel ever so much better.’

  Michael let out a shriek of pure terror and bunched up foetus-like into the furthest corner of the chair. ‘Not a herbal tea!’ he stammered. ‘Please, Mrs Hartley! Not a herbal tea! I feel fine! I feel great! Yeah! My life force is really strong, Mrs Hartley! I am full of positive energy! My aura is … is … is bristling, Mrs Hartley! Really it is! Look!’ Michael vaulted over the back of the armchair and jumped up and down on the spot waving his arms in frantic wind-milling motions. ‘I just needed a quick breather!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Just a moment to restore the life force and now it’s great. Gosh! Yes! I really feel full of positive energy, I’m not draining you! Gosh no! I’m really full of life force. Really positive life force!’

  Alice stared in bewilderment, as Michael dropped to the floor and started doing feverish press-ups. ‘Oh, I feel great!’ he puffed. ‘Just great! Watch me go! Hey! Mrs Hartley? Hey! Hey! Hey! Mrs Hartley!’

  Alice smiled vaguely and nodded. When Michael subsided gasping to the floor, his face flushed, she silently handed him the glass. Michael knew he was going to have to take it.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked in a tiny voice. His face puckered. ‘Why do I have to drink it?’

  ‘It’s Harvey’s Luncheon Dry sherry,’ Alice said. ‘I’m having one in the kitchen, I thought you might like a glass.’

  Thursday Afternoon

  The undertakers came after lunch to measure up Aunty Sarah for her coffin. Alice let them in and took them upstairs, Michael stayed in the kitchen brooding over a glass of Professor Hartley’s best Cabernet Sauvignon. He heard ominous sounds of moving furniture from upstairs but he felt incapable of action. Whatever was happening would probably be finished by the time he got there, and anyway Alice knew best. The nut casserole lay in a comforting indigestible weight in his stomach. Professor Hartley would have been irritable with wind, but Michael was a young man and the weight of indigestible carbohydrate in his gut reminded him comfortingly of his mother. He dozed.

  ‘All done,’ Alice said brightly. She handed him a cup of tea (Brooke Bond) and Michael drank it trustingly, without sniffing. ‘They measured her up and they’ve gone. I didn’t want to disturb you so I ordered a pine coffin with brass handles. I get very good resonances from pine. I thought she’d like it.’

  Michael nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I had them move her,’ Alice said. ‘I had them move her across the landing to the spare bedroom, that was the noise. I wanted us to have the master bedroom and I thought you might not like to use her bed.’

  Michael nodded emphatically. He would not have liked to use her bed.

  ‘So we’re in the master bedroom with my bed and furniture, and she’s in her bed in the spare room,’ Alice said. ‘They couldn’t say when they could collect her. She looks very peaceful.’ She tapped her teeth with the tip of one rosy nail. ‘Much better than before,’ she said. ‘That doctor isn’t up to much. I hate a professional man who leaves a job unfinished.’

  Michael nodded. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

  Alice glanced at Professor Hartley’s expensive brass clock, a present from his colleagues in the Psychology Association to mark his year as Chairman.

  ‘Half two,’ she said.

  ‘Gosh,’ Michael said. ‘I have to get that van back.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Alice said. ‘We could get my car at the same time. We’ll need a car out here.’

  For the first time that day Michael glowed with a sense of things coming right.

  ‘All right,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘What sort of car is it?’

  ‘Only an old Jaguar,’ Alice said dismissively. ‘But it’s very reliable.’

  Michael’s temporary glow of confidence cooled abruptly. ‘A silver-grey one?’ he asked.

  Alice was winding a couple of scarves around her head; she nodded.

  ‘I think I’ve seen it,’ Michael said miserably.

  He had indeed seen it. He had seen it parked in the staff car park at Suffix University. He had seen Professor Hartley parking it and then dusting it off after the exertion of the half-mile drive from home to car park. It was Professor Hartley’s pride and joy. He took it to Jaguar car shows and exhibitions. He won prizes with it. He had his picture in the Jaguar car owners’ magazine lovingly smiling at it, like a mother whose baby has won the Bonny Baby Contest against keen competition. When he was teaching a seminar of more than an hour he could be seen wrapping it in its own, initialled, little blue tent so that no passing birds could take advantage of his absence and defile it.

  ‘It’s got a burglar alarm,’ he said. Every student at the university knew that if they heard the expensive hooting which indicated that someone had brushed past Professor Hartley’s car and activated the alarm, they were to run at once, at once, to Psych II and tell the Professor that his car was crying for him.

  Alice smiled. ‘I know the code,’ she said smugly.

  Despite a lingering anxiety about the Professor’s Jaguar car and a tendency to stand up in order to steer the furniture van around corners, Michael enjoyed the drive into Brighton. He had a sense of adventure, of freedom, and a dawning realization that he had gained in the past twenty-four hours: a large and beautiful house, a woman (ditto), and a great deal of tasteful and expensive furniture.

  ‘I don’t see why I should finish my degree,’ he said. ‘It hardly seems worthwhile now.’

  Alice was the wife of an academic and had a third-class degree herself. ‘Of course you must finish it,’ she said firmly.

  ‘But …’ Michael said.

  Alice glanced at him, smiling. ‘I’ll help you, darling,’ she said sweetly. ‘And it’s so nice to have letters after your name when you’re writing to people to complain about things which break down when they’re out of guarantee.’

  ‘It’s just that I’m not sure about English Literature,’ Michael said weakly.

  Alice’s own degree had been in Biology so she nodded understandingly. She knew that Arts people often had these uncertainties. ‘You’re not supposed to be sure,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to question. That’s how you come to your understanding of the Arts. It’s not like doing it with frogs.’

  ‘Doing it with what?’ Michael puzzled. He stood up for a corner, and sat down again. Sometimes he could not understand Alice at all.

  ‘Doing it with frogs,’ she repeated simply.
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br />   ‘Oh … frogs!’ Michael said, as if that explained anything. He still had no idea that she had taken her degree in Biology.

  He braked, and turned cautiously into the university car park. Behind them some fool careered on to the hard shoulder, fighting for control of his car in an effort to avoid the van.

  ‘I said I’d leave the van at the drama centre,’ Michael said glancing, too late, at the rear-view mirror. The road behind them was empty, the crash had occurred on their nearside where Michael would never see it. Like many drivers, Michael was completely indifferent to his wing mirrors, using them only as guiding points as to the width of the vehicle.

  Alice gathered up her skirts and shawls as they drove past the faculty car park. ‘Drop me off here then,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick up the car and come around to collect you.’

  Michael lost his brief moment of confidence. ‘Won’t he be rather … rather … upset?’ he asked. His voice came out slight and high. He cleared his throat and tried again. This time he bellowed like a bull moose in the rutting season. ‘Won’t he be angry?’

  Alice smiled, showing her white even teeth. ‘He’ll be epileptic,’ she said contentedly. ‘But he won’t know anything about it until we have gone. Now run along, Michael, I’ll meet you outside the drama centre in five minutes.’

  She slammed the door. Michael hesitated for one indecisive moment. Then he let in the clutch and pulled away. He saw her turn and stride towards the car park where the hummocky blue canvas shroud of Professor Hartley’s concourse-condition Jaguar billowed in the light summer breeze. Michael braked and paused for a moment, watching Alice in the clear distancing frame of his rear-view mirror. He watched the way she approached the car with her confident swaying stride, the way she untied the straps of the cover from the shining bumpers, skinning the car as easily as a gourmet popping prawns.

  A movement in front of Michael made him jump and look forward. It was Professor Hartley like a scarecrow of doom in his dark academic gown, walking slowly and purposefully with his heavy grown-up tread towards his errant wife who, intent on her task, did not even look up.