A Lovely Day to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

improvised, who had made gingerbread animals … Smiling, inventing, chattering, easing the thing, Stella was nevertheless already making her plans. In a year’s time—or maybe two years—“How’s your mother-in-law’s old governess getting on?” she’d ask, all innocence, watching his face while he blundered into the trap: “ Gover ness ? But Wendy’s mother never had …” And while his words stuttered into silence, she would be watching his face, never taking her eyes off it as it disintegrated into terror, bewilderment and guilt.
    Guilt, that was the important thing. Guilt so richly deserved and so long outstanding, like an unpaid debt. Such a sense of power it gave her to be able to call him to account like this, just now and again; a sense of power which compensated, in some measure, for the awful weakness of her actual position, the terrible uncertainty about her hold on him. To be able to make him squirm like this, every so often, was a sort of redressing of some desperate balance: a long-merited turning of the tables without which Stella sometimes felt she could not have gone on.
    Oh, but it was fun, too! A sort of game of Catch-me-if-you-can, a fun game. Not quite so much fun, though, as it used to be, because of late Gerald had been growing more wary, less easily trapped. He was more evasive now, less buoyantly ready to come out with give-away remarks like “ What trip to Manchester, darling?” or, “But they’ve never had measles …” Now, before he spoke, you could see him checking through the lies he had told recently, his grey-green eyes remote and sly.
    And as Gerald grew more wary, so did Stella grow more cunning. The questions by which she trapped him were never direct ones now, but infinitely subtle and devious. It was a dangerous sport, and like all dangerous sports, it demanded skill and judgment, a sure eye and perfect timing. Push Gerald too far, and she would have a terrible, terrifying row on her hands—“Possessive!” “Demanding!” and all the other age-old accusations hurtling round her head. Push him not far enough, however, and the opposite set of mishaps would be set in train. He would start thinking he could get away with anything … leaving her for days on end without so much as a phone-call, and then turning up all smiles, as if nothing had happened, and expecting her to cook him steak and collect his shoes from the repairers. Taking her for granted, just as if she was a wife: and what sensible woman is going to put up with all the disadvantages of being married as well as all the disadvantages of not being?
    It was a cliff-hanger business, getting the thing exactly right. Only a few months ago, Gerald had actually threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop spying on him—though surely “spying” wasunduly harsh a term to apply to Stella’s innocent little show of interest in the details of the business conference he’d pretended he’d been to the previous weekend?
    “But, darling, Lord Berners wasn’t at the dinner!” she’d pointed out, with a placating little laugh, just to save Gerald the trouble of inventing any more humorous quotes from a non-existent speech, “I read in The Times the next morning that …”—and at this, quite suddenly, he had gone berserk, and had turned on her like an animal at bay. His rage, his dreadful, unwarrantable accusations, were like nothing she had ever heard before, and they threw her into such terror that she scarcely knew what she was doing or saying. In the end, he had flung himself out of the flat, slamming the door on her tears and screams, and vowing never to set foot in the place again.
    It had taken a suicide note, no less, to bring him to heel again. It was just about as generous a suicide note as any woman has ever penned to a recalcitrant lover, and Stella still remembered it with a certain measure of satisfaction, despite the misery appertaining to its composition. She’d written,
    You mustn’t blame