The Execution
She was lying on a trolley, with two white sheets draped over her. There was a morgue assistant there, a young guy with tied-back hair and a goatee beard, perhaps a student. We’d interrupted a game of solitaire he’d been playing at a desk on the far side of the room. He wheeled the body over to us, then removed the sheets from her face with great delicacy, as if he were a beautician about to give someone a facial. I stared. I’d never actually seen a dead body before. Alex once told me he’d been so anxious the first time he was confronted with a corpse in anatomy class that he’d gone to the toilet afterwards and thrown up. Staring at the face, I didn’t feel anything in particular. A long, faint scratch mark crossed her high forehead diagonally from left to right, like a line drawn across a page to strike it out.
It was her all right. It was Susan Tedeschi. Or perhaps she called herself Susan Smith. I hadn’t even remembered that her first name was Susan until the doctor reminded me. And I’d thought I might not recognise her face, but I did. It transfixed me momentarily. I probably only looked for a few seconds, but it seemed much longer. They must have hosed down the body or something because her hair was all wet and combed back. It made her look more lifelike, as if she’d only just this minute stepped out of the shower. In other ways too she appeared much as she’d been in life, but there were subtle differences. Her skin was grey rather than pink, although that might also have been the effect of the fluorescent lights, which seemed to drain the colour out of everything else in the morgue. Another difference was the expression on her face. On the two or three occasions I’d seen her previously, she’d seemed quite meek. About the only thing Christian had ever told me about his wife was that once he’d arranged to meet her at a party, but she’d never turned up. Then on leaving, he’d spotted their car in the street opposite the house where the party was being held, with his wife sitting inside. Apparently she’d had some kind of panic attack.
In death, though, she looked anything but meek. Her face wore a stern, implacable expression and she seemed almost powerful.
I turned to the doctor: ‘Yes, that’s her.’ She seemed visibly relieved. The morgue assistant flicked the two sheets perfectly back into place in one smooth action, which reminded me of Christian’s skill in rolling cigarettes. Then he wheeled the body away.
‘Wait here a moment please,’ the doctor said, ‘I’ll be back in a second.’ She disappeared and I was left alone with the morgue assistant. He stood around uneasily, obviously not wanting to go back to his game of solitaire while I was still in the room. It was difficult to know what kind of small talk to make to a morgue assistant, though.
‘So what happens now? To the body I mean.’
‘Umm, they’ll probably do an autopsy.’
‘Really? How do they decide that? I mean, how do they decide which bodies they’re going to do an autopsy on?’
‘Well there’s all these categories. I can’t remember offhand. Accidents, suicides, deaths in custody …’
‘That’s interesting. I mean I never thought about what happens to the bodies. It’s strange.’
I waved my hand vaguely to encompass the morgue, the morgue assistant and the enormous fridges with metal doors like prison cells.
‘Well it’s pretty weird at first, yeah. But then you get used to it.’
I thought he’d stopped and I was about to say something else when he abruptly continued: ‘It’s the babies that are the hardest. They haven’t been given a chance. You’re holding it in your arms, you know it’s dead but you can’t resist the impulse to support its head, not to let it drop back.’
I stared at him, momentarily lost for words. Just then the doctor appeared at the door. Sorry to leave you waiting like that, she said, without explaining where she’d been or what she’d been up to. She hustled me out of the morgue and we made our way back through the maze of corridors to the lift. Upstairs, I had to sign a declaration and then I was free to go. What with Christian under sedation, there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around any longer.
I made it back to London in fifty minutes. At first I thought I’d go straight home, then I changed my mind and went into the West End and parked the car in the underground car park at work. I thought I might find Jo and get going on the Jarawa campaign, we could at least rough out an initial press release for the London papers. But as I waited for the lift, it occurred to me that if I went into the office I’d have to talk about Christian and I didn’t want to do that. So I left the car park on foot by the car exit and started to walk aimlessly towards Covent Garden. I wasn’t really thinking about Christian. But his wife’s face was still in front of me, in a way, with its single scratch on the forehead. Eventually I decided to go for a swim. The private swimming pool where I’m a member was five minutes’ walk away, just off Shaftesbury Avenue.
It was an odd pleasure to open my locker and see my swimming and shower gear there, just as I’d left it last time. I changed quickly: I wanted to get into the pool as fast as possible. It was still only five fifteen, which meant that there was hardly anyone around yet – the pool doesn’t usually fill up until six or six thirty, when people start knocking off work. There was one old man who was swimming extremely slowly, doing one lap to my three or four. He was very hairy, his body and prominent breasts were covered in fine silver hair like some aquatic animal, and it seemed a big struggle for him to keep his head above water. Finally he got out – taking ages to climb up the little ladder – and collapsed breathlessly onto a poolside bench. The afternoon light splashed in through the skylights overhead.
I felt much better after my swim. I felt cleansed. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt reassured by the healthy young man that stared back at me. In the changing room I bumped into Phil. He was looking for someone to play a few games of squash with, but I told him I’d just swum fifteen hundred metres and was feeling pretty whacked.
I walked back to the car park and picked up the car. As I drove, I noticed for the first time since the morning what a beautiful day it was, or had been. Soft blue sky, Dutch wisps of cloud, a hazy warmth. It felt more like July than May. I opened up the sunroof, partly to let the sun stream in, partly to rid the car of the smell from Christian’s cigarette. An old Golf convertible stood beside me at the lights, pumping out music. The three young guys inside were wearing sunglasses and had taken their shirts off. The driver looked my way and smiled at me. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator when the lights changed but the Golf was too quick. As the car sped off, the driver honked his horn at me and I honked back.
I passed by an art gallery in Mayfair and suddenly remembered Marianne’s opening at Joseph Kimberly. She’d been nervous about it all week. But I’d completely forgotten – this whole business with Christian’s wife had driven it from my mind. Now it occurred to me that there was no point in going back to Camberwell if I had to be at Primrose Hill by half past seven. As I passed Hyde Park I noticed a parking spot and pulled up without thinking about it too much. I just wanted to make the most of the vestiges of the warm afternoon. So I got out and wandered around on the south side of the park for a while near Rotten Row then sat down under a tree. Despite the hot weather, the grass still had that Astroturf sheen the spring rain had given it. It looked unripe, is what Marianne might have said.
There were quite a few people around, for a Monday evening. Rollerbladers criss-crossed the paths. A black guy came round selling drinks on ice. I bought a can of beer from him and knocked it back quickly. Then I moved out of the shade and lay down, with my eyes shut, to feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I could hear a riot of evening bird song, the good-humoured shouts of guys playing football, and the hum of traffic. The grass was prickly and smelt sweet.
It was about then that I first felt a surging sense of well-being, or perhaps contentment. It mystified me at first but what it was, it soon struck me, was that Christian’s wife had left me. She’d accompanied me all the way from Oxford but my long swim had slowly washed her all away. I was back to how I had been before the events of the day, only more so. I felt the grass under me and the sun above me and it seemed to me that I was exactly where I wanted to be in my life. I was with the woman I wanted to be with, doing what I wanted to do. There was the Jarawa campaign, which presented itself to me like a puzzle to be solved.
I thought about my first day at Africa Action, eighteen months ago. Oliver, the guy I was replacing, had spent the afternoon showing me the ropes and had taken me out for a drink after work. We’d discussed his last campaign – it was for a Syrian dissident who’d been sentenced to death for treason. Oliver had arranged a last-minute meeting with Syrian and European Union officials to secure the guy’s release. I remembered him saying to me: ‘It’s a strange feeling when you’ve played a part in saving someone’s life. Almost like you’ve saved your own.’
I felt angry with Christian for saying that the Jarawa campaign was a waste of time. I felt angry that he’d said this to me after his wife’s death, and not before, during the morning’s department meeting. But in any case, he was quite wrong about it. He was wrong about many things. The pieces seemed to slot into place: I would save Jarawa’s life, I decided. His existence would depend on me. Of course I was making wild claims for myself, but it was the way I felt momentarily, like a minor god.
The sun was setting and I dragged myself to my feet, a little drugged with this feeling that was washing through and out of me.
II
The gallery was already starting to fill up as I got there. Marianne had brought Jessica along as well, because Jane’s away and Marianne’s fussy about other babysitters. Jessica was in an unmanageable state of excitement and was shouting and pulling at the dresses and trouser legs of the people who’d already arrived. She’s going through a really hyperactive phase at the moment. I was wondering what to do with her when all of a sudden she sat down, curled up, and went straight to sleep, in the middle of the gallery space, right under everyone’s feet. I tried to wake her up and get her to come with me but she wouldn’t – you can’t wake a child that wants to sleep. But she couldn’t stay there so I picked her up, took her into the office, and laid her down on the couch. She curled up again then started snoring, very gently. I sat down beside her for a moment and put my arm across her. Messily stacked up against the office walls were paintings, twenty or thirty of them. Opposite the couch was an enormous piece of slate which must have weighed a ton. On it had been painted a picture of a naked woman, in a primitive style. She was asleep on the ground.
I went back into the gallery and had a beer, then another. After an hour or so the place started to get pretty crowded and it was getting difficult to move around. I lost track of Marianne, and for a while I just stood in a corner and watched the other people. Broadly speaking they divided into two categories. There were older, conservatively elegant white couples or single men, who stood around talking in slightly tired voices, drinking white wine and generally not smoking. Then there was a younger crowd in their twenties who drank beer and smoked and were louder. Some of these were artists, some were students, others were friends of Marianne and a few were all three. I knew only one or two of them – I keep clear of that side of Marianne’s life – but they all seemed to know each other. Fragments of conversation strayed my way … to my left, a couple discussed a mutual acquaintance, dumped by her husband for a younger woman. She was in hospital now after a last-ditch facelift gone wrong. To my right, I heard someone remark of one of Marianne’s larger works: ‘There’s something very extreme about it.’ I glanced over to the painting in question. It was very colourful. I couldn’t see what was extreme about it but I wondered nonetheless if the person had a point. It’s not something Marianne and I ever talk about.
A woman in her early thirties came up to me: ‘Remember me?’ I said no, I’m sorry I don’t. ‘You don’t remember a big argument about South Africa at a dinner party? Ages ago, at Nick Tate’s place.’ Then I remembered. Her name’s Charlotte Fisher. She’s South African and she used to go out with Nick. She’s quite pushy and good-looking in an American sitcom kind of way. I remembered the dinner party – it was a long time ago, maybe even before Marianne. She’d taken violent exception to some comment of mine. She’d launched into a great polemic about how her mother’s maid back in Johannesburg was like part of the family and if she wasn’t working for them she’d be on the streets and her children wouldn’t have enough to eat. And how could I possibly know what it’s like when I’d never been to South Africa, how did I dare comment?
I didn’t particularly want to talk to her but since it didn’t look like I had an option I asked her what she was up to nowadays. She said she’d gone back to South Africa for a while, but had recently come back to set up her own PR business, promoting artists. She dropped a few names of artists she’d recently signed up, including one I’d vaguely heard of, a German woman who’s been getting a lot of publicity lately for her blown-up photos of dead people. I said I thought the photos were pretty sensationalist. That’s more or less the point, replied Charlotte. We chatted and jousted about that for a while. I looked around for Marianne, but she seemed to be involved in a very earnest conversation with a middle-aged man. So Charlotte and I continued drinking and talking. She asked me how I met Marianne and I told her about the beach in Portugal. Then she asked me about Marianne’s work. French artists are very in vogue at the moment, she said. She seemed very interested in Marianne.
I asked if she was still with Nick. She laughed sourly: ‘God no, we split up a couple of years ago.’ She didn’t seem embarrassed I’d asked though, just as she hadn’t been embarrassed that I’d initially forgotten who she was. Then she recounted the story of her break-up – telling it as if it were a funny joke, with climaxes, anticlimaxes and a punch line. She’d gone home late one evening, when Nick thought she was out of town, and she’d literally found him in bed with another woman. She immediately moved out – it was Nick’s house after all. She thought she’d get over the relationship quickly but found herself doing obsessive things like taking time off work to spy on Nick. To make matters worse, the other woman had moved straight in with Nick. So she decided that what she really wanted was revenge. But it had to be the right kind: ‘Nasty, but not too nasty’. Eventually she hit upon the solution. One day she happened on a newspaper article about a private detective who used call-girls to entrap wayward husbands. So she went to see him, posing as a worried wife, and ended up paying him a lot of money to get a call-girl to entice Nick up to a hotel room. The whole encounter was captured on video, which she then sent to Nick’s new girlfriend. Later she’d found out through a mutual friend that the couple had split up not long after.
‘And you didn’t feel guilty about it afterwards?’
‘Well, he might have lost his girlfriend, but at least I gave him a good time!’
I laughed for quite a while. We laughed together. I was reasonably drunk by this stage. There were a lot of people in the gallery and we had to stand very close to each other with our shoulders almost touching. I wondered whether the story Charlotte had just told me was true or whether it was a sort of party piece. In the end I decided it didn’t matter much. She was wearing a black dress made of a light gauze-like material, and I noticed that her breasts were almost visible beneath it. As I looked up from her décolleté I caught her eyes. She smiled at me and said nothing.
We continued talking for another ten minutes and then finally she spotted someone else she knew and drifted off. I thought of catching up with Marianne and looked about for her, but she was still talking to the middle-aged man. I watched them for a moment. The man seemed somehow out of place at a gallery opening. He looked more earnest than elegant. He and Marianne seemed to be staring at each other quite intensely as they spoke, and at one moment I thought I saw the man’s hand slip down and gently brush Marianne’s buttocks. I might have been wrong, of course, or maybe in the crush his hand had been pushed that way. It annoyed me anyway.
Then at some point, fairly late on in the evening I think, when quite a few people had already left, Jessica came out. She looked terrified. I supposed that she’d simply woken up disorientated, not recognising where she was, and that’s what had frightened her. She ran up to me immediately, which was strange, because normally if anything’s the matter she goes straight to Marianne and not me. Anyway she hugged my legs and I picked her up and asked her what was wrong.
‘Daddy, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course there isn’t!’
But she just kept on repeating: ‘Yes there is, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’
Eventually I said: ‘Well, let’s go and have a look then,’ but she buried her head in my shoulder and started to whimper. Just then I spotted Marianne: she was talking to somebody else now and her eyes were sort of glazed over which meant she was drunk and happy. I offloaded Jessica onto her because I wanted to go and have a look in the office. What I thought might have happened was that perhaps some woman had drunk too much and had crawled off to the office and fallen asleep on the floor.
But there was no one in the office. Jessica must have been making it all up after all. She makes things up sometimes, as a way of attracting attention. Kids do. Nonetheless, something about this ‘dead lady’ business disturbed me, and I sat down on the couch for a few minutes. That was when I noticed the huge slate slab again, with the picture of the sleeping woman painted on it. It’s what must have frightened her. I felt momentarily relieved, but still perplexed.
It had seemed a little odd to hear Jessica say the word ‘dead’. In fact I’d never heard her say it before. I wondered what exactly she’d meant by it. Maybe she meant the same as sleeping. Then again, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she’d seen Marianne asleep often enough, and that didn’t scare her. I sat on the couch for about ten minutes, thinking about that. Then my mind switched to Jarawa and the campaign: there was his appeal to plan and I started thinking through the details. We needed someone else to liaise with people on the ground, now that Christian was out of action.
For some reason I’d closed the door to the office. Now it opened. It was Charlotte, the South African woman. She’d been looking for me to say goodbye. Well here I am, I said, and got up off the couch. She was quite red-faced. She said she was glad to have bumped into me again and maybe we could have lunch sometime – maybe she, Marianne and I could all get together. I said I’d like that and got out one of the cards I’d just had printed up, while she rummaged about in her handbag for one of hers. I leaned down to kiss her goodbye, because she’s quite a bit shorter than me. Then I put my hand round her waist and she put hers under my shirt and we started kissing again. We stayed like that for a moment, then we sort of collapsed onto the couch and she slipped her arms out of her dress and we continued to kiss. She was stretched out on top of me, I could feel her breathing and trembling. The rumbling noise from the gallery came and went in waves, punctuated by bursts of laughter. The door was open now and there was a real danger of someone coming in – in a way that merely heightened the sense of pleasure. I hooked my arms round her but she seemed to be in her own world and quite unaware of anything, almost unaware of me as well.
Then at one point I heard a male voice, I don’t know whose, and it seemed almost next to me, quite separate from the indistinct hum of conversation from beyond the door. It was enough to snap me out of my mesmeric state. I sat up abruptly, put one hand over Charlotte’s mouth, the other over her breasts – I don’t know why – and looked around. But there was no one there; the voice must have been some kind of acoustic trick. Charlotte smiled at me and started kissing me again. She wanted to have sex right there in the office but I said no, we couldn’t. I said I’d give her a ring tomorrow though, if she wanted, and she nodded as I helped her put her bra and dress back on. She got a little mirror out of her bag and mouthed: ‘Oh God.’ It was true her make-up was a bit of a mess now. Instead of fixing it up though, she just wiped it all off with a tissue. Then she wiped the lipstick off my lips and cheeks with another tissue and that felt intimate, more so than our kisses. She reapplied her lipstick, combed her hair back into place, and asked me: ‘Do I look all right?’ I said she looked great. I meant it, because she’d been wearing too much make-up before and somehow looked more real now. She looked quite a bit like Susan Tedeschi, it occurred to me. Physically they’re the same type, in any case. They have the same long, streaky blonde hair, the same high forehead, they’re the same height. This disturbed me for a moment or two, but I dismissed it easily enough.
Charlotte left. I went out into the gallery about five minutes later. The crowd of people had thinned out considerably. I looked about for Jessica. She’d climbed out of Marianne’s arms and had captured the attention of a young woman in a smart emerald dress. The woman had crouched down to her level, and Jessica was carefully explaining something to her. Then the woman laughed, and Jessica giggled as well. The strange terror had gone from her face.
We ended up taking a cab home around eleven, since we were both too drunk to drive – although I might have driven anyway, if we hadn’t had Jessica with us. Marianne was flushed with excitement, because the evening had gone really well and she’d sold nine paintings, which is the most she’s ever sold. In the cab, I surprised myself by saying: ‘Who was that guy you were talking to? The middle-aged looking guy. You talked to him for ages.’ I hadn’t realised I was so annoyed by that. ‘Oh him,’ she said, ‘I think he’s a don or a professor or something. He’s just moved to London.’ I said: ‘He certainly seemed very interested in you. I saw him rub against you in a pretty indiscreet way.’ Marianne replied: ‘Really? I don’t think so. He’s more the gentleman type.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say on the matter, so I let it drop. Marianne hadn’t seemed to notice my annoyance; her exuberance bubbled over into a stream of talk and gossip.
We got home and while I was putting Jessica to bed, Marianne poured herself a glass of wine, although she was pretty drunk already. She got some cheese and salad stuff out of the fridge for us as well, because we hadn’t had dinner but it was too late to cook now. Then when we’d finished eating, she took off all her clothes and started wandering about the house with her glass of wine, vaguely tidying up, reading bits of newspaper or letters that were lying about, readying herself for bed, taking make-up off, humming, all at the same time. She quite often goes through this routine when she’s drunk. I watched her as she wandered about. I found her beautiful and told her so. She smiled with pleasure and went into the bedroom, while I turned on the TV and watched mindless pop videos. I could hear Jessica talking in her sleep but she seemed quite calm, for a change – lately she’s been assailed by a dream monster most nights. Then finally I went to bed. Marianne was awake and started massaging my back. She was still drunk and excited by the evening’s success and wanted to make love. But I didn’t feel like it for some reason. Jarawa and Jessica’s dead lady kept wandering in and out of my thoughts, which were gradually, seamlessly metamorphosing into dreams.