She turned the dial on the radio to Terry Wogan. Wogan was a Good Thing. The phone rang. The phone had been ringing at reg-ular intervals since Gloria had woken at five. She had already phoned the hospital to ascertain Graham’s unchanged condition, and she really wasn’t interested in speaking to all the people who wanted to know why Graham had disappeared off the face of the planet in the middle of the working day and wasn’t answering his mobile. She let them talk to the answering machine, it was less taxing than lying.
While she stood in the hallway, listening to the latest message (“Graham, you old bugger, where are you? I thought we were playing golf today”), the morning newspapers clattered through the letter box.
What kind of person bites the head off a kitten? What kind of person walks into the back garden of a complete stranger, picks up a three-week-old kitten, and bites its head off? And doesn’t get pros-ecuted! Gloria dropped the newspaper to the floor in disgust.
What would be the correct punishment for a person (a man, naturally) who bites the head off a three-week-old kitten? Death, obviously, but surely not a swift and painless one? That would be like an undeserved gift. Gloria believed in the punishment fitting the crime, eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Heads for heads. How would you go about biting a person’s head off? Unless you could somehow employ a shark or a crocodile to do the job for you, Gloria supposed, you would have to settle for simple decapitation.
The man who bit the head off the kitten was, according to the newspaper, high on drugs. That was not an excuse! Gloria had once smoked a joint during her brief period at university (but more from politeness than anything) and had imbibed a consider-able quantity of alcohol in her time, but she was sure that she could have consumed any amount of illegal substances and not felt the urge to bite the head off an innocent household pet. A little basket of kittens-Gloria imagined long-haired tabbies with ribbons round their necks, like something you would find on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Tiny, helpless. Innocent. Did chocolate boxes still have those pictures? She had bought a lovely painting on eBay, two kittens, basket, balls of wool, ribbons-the works- but she still hadn’t found the right place to hang it. And, of course, Graham said it was “twee,” being more of an about-to-be-murdered-stag connoisseur himself.
There was a barbecue, “a family barbecue,” in progress and the man strode in, uninvited, unannounced, and picked up one of the kittens from the basket and bit its head off as if it were a lollipop. Had the man eaten the kitten’s head? Or just bitten it off and spat it out?
You could put the man who bit the head off the kitten into a cage of tigers and say, “Go on, then, let’s see you bite the head off one of those.” But then it would be wrong to put the tigers in a cage. There was a Blake poem about that, wasn’t there? Or was it robins?
Bill, the gardener, announced himself with the muffled clanking and thudding of tools in the shed, as if he wanted Gloria to know he was there but didn’t want to actually talk to her. His surname was Tiffany, like the jewelers. Graham had bought her a Tiffany watch for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. It had a red leather strap and little diamonds all round its face. She dropped it in the fishpond yesterday. All the fish in the pond except for one-a big golden orfe-had been gradually picked off by the neighborhood heron. Gloria wondered if the watch was still keeping time, ticking away quietly in the mud and green slime at the bottom of the pond, marking off the days left to both the big orange fish and Graham.
Gloria made more coffee, buttered a scone, switched her computer on. Gloria was good with computers. She had learned way back when it was the old Amstrads, with their black-and-green screens and infuriating habits. In those days she used to help keep the accounts for Hatter Homes. That was before the firm took off, when Graham was still following in his father’s cautious footsteps, building small developments, the profits of one venture funding the building of the next. He was cooking the books even then, but the sums were still relatively small. Hatter Homes had remained a family business, owned by Graham and Gloria. It had never been floated on the stock exchange, never subject to rigorous external scrutiny. The auditing was done by his own accountants. There was a web of complicity stretching as far as the eye couldn’t see, accountants, lawyers, secretaries, sales force (sales-force-cum-mistresses). Gloria herself had signed anything put in front of her for years-papers, documents, contracts. She hadn’t questioned anything, and now she seemed to do nothing but question. Inno-cence was not ignorance.
Gloria had a nice little laptop of her own, hooked up to a broadband connection in the kitchen-which was where she spent most of her time, after all, so why not? Graham never used her computer, he did all his dirty business in the office. She could imagine him going on pornography sites, watching one of those webcams where a woman in a room somewhere (anywhere) in the world performed for him.
The only messages Gloria tended to get-apart from the odd missive from her children-were invitations to enlarge her penis or special offers from Boots.com. She would have liked to have checked Graham’s e-mail, but it was password protected. Gloria had been worrying away at it long before the events of yesterday, but she hadn’t yet come up with the open sesame-she had tried that too, along with every other word and combination of words she could think of. “Kinloch,” “Hartford,” “Braecroft,” “Hopetoun,” “Villiers,” and “Waverley.” Nothing. They were the names of the six basic models of Hatter Homes-the “Kinloch” was the cheapest, the “Waverley” the most expensive. The “Hart-ford” and the “Braecroft” were semidetached. Nowadays Graham built a lot more detached houses than he used to. People like de-tached no matter how small, the “Kinloch” was so tiny it reminded Gloria of a Monopoly house.
Next month Gloria would be sixty. She had heard someone on the radio say that “sixty was the new forty.” She had never heard anything so stupid in her life. Sixty was sixty, there was no point in pretending otherwise. Who was going to provide for her in her old age? Whether Graham was dead or alive wasn’t going to make any difference to the police and the courts, they were going to de-stroy Hatter Homes. Quite rightly, in Gloria’s opinion, but it would have been nice if she could have salvaged a little pension for herself before they did. She imagined that somewhere there was a big black book that contained all of Graham’s secrets, all of his money. The Magus’s book. As with capitalism, it was too late to ask him about it now.
She gave up on the password and checked her online bank account. They had a joint account that was mainly for day-to-day bills and housekeeping. Gloria was entirely dependent on Graham for money, a shocking realization that had taken several decades to sink in. One minute you’re sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-orange, worrying about whether or not you look pretty, the next minute you’re a year away from a bus pass, staring bankruptcy and public humiliation in the face. And sixty was the same old sixty as it ever was.
The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria’s day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn’t a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.