The High Price of Perfection

The High Price of Perfection

By

Doug Hilditch

The sky was completely overcast and had been all day, the iron black clouds moving slowly overhead. There had always been the hint of rain in the air but nothing had materialised so far.

          Charles sat looking out of the window at the view across the open fields to the church spire that rose out of the small huddle of buildings which made up the tiny village of La Faouët to the south. The hauntingly beautiful strains of the third movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 drifted out of the open door and into the garden.

          Despite the impending storm it was very warm and it was necessary to open all the doors and windows to enable what little breeze there was to pass through the house in the hope of cooling the room to a more comfortable level.

          He had put the record on to help him think. It had a sobering effect on his thought processing. He had always come up with his best ideas and decisions whilst listening to Bruckner.

          He listened to it now because he had a lot of thinking to do and some big decisions to make.

          Sitting for a long time, thinking and listening, his thoughts were broken by the loud buzzing of a small group of flies which kept settling on the floor by the door.

          He had cleared up most of the blood but some must have soaked into the grouting between the floor tiles and it was this that attracted the flies.

          Charles got up and moved a small rug over the area where the blood had been. This prevented the flies from getting to the source of their excitement but caused them instead to fly around the room in an increasing mood of frustration.

He walked out to the front door step and stood there for a few moments before, returning to the lounge long enough to retrieve his whisky. He wandered into the garden and lowered himself into a deckchair on the patio.

          Alice had been a good wife on the whole, he mused, as he sipped his Famous Grouse. They had been reasonably happy together in the ten years they had been married, although he could not say that he actually loved her. It was more a companionship as far as he was concerned. Alice, however, loved him dearly.

          She was his third wife but he was her second husband. He was fifty when they married and she, far from being a blushing bride, had been forty-eight. She had two children by her first marriage, both of whom were married with children of their own. This did not stop either of them from resenting Alice’s marriage to him and both had tried hard, though unsuccessfully, to talk their mother out of it.

          Both of her offspring attended the small Registry Office affair and made all the right congratulatory noises, but Charles could tell that they were not really meant and he had always felt that Alice had too, though she made no mention of it.

          Seven years ago they had bought this small farm house in northern Brittany and three years later, after many alterations and improvements they had sold Alice’s house in Somerset and chosen early retirement in the peace and tranquillity of rural France.

          The house was in Alice’s name, it was easier that way. The fact that Charles was a declared bankrupt would only have made things more complicated.

          Charles’s first wife Ruby, was the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker. When she died of cancer after only three years of marriage, Charles inherited a substantial amount of money. Her father had tried to contest the Will but, as her husband, the law was on Charles’s side.  With his new-found freedom and bulging bank account Charles took to working the casinos. He had always gambled on the horses but never had the means to indulge in any really serious gambling.

          It was in one of these casinos that he met Madeline, the woman who was to later become his second wife. Vivacious and beautiful with a passion for fast cars, she too came from a very well-heeled family and Charles’s charm and wit soon won her over. After just two short years their marriage was on the rocks. However, she was tragically killed in a car crash before they could divorce. The brakes on the sports car she was driving, failed as she descended a very step hill. The car’s speed increased and she was unable to steer the vehicle around a bend at the bottom of the hill. The car smashed into the wall of a house and virtually disintegrated.   Poor Madeline was killed instantly. Police crash investigators concluded that the connection on one of the front brake pipes was undone allowing brake fluid to escape every time the brake pedal was depressed. The car had recently been serviced and it was assumed that the coupling had not been tightened properly. The garage concerned continued to insist that they had never had reason to touch the brake pipe.

          Three months later Charles had moved to Somerset, once again a single man and once again with his bank balance suitably enhanced. It didn’t take him long to work his way though his fortune and within two years, after a couple of particularly bad business ventures, he was declared bankrupt. It was not long after this that he met Alice.

It was the fact that the French house was in Alice’s name which complicated things now however, which was why he had to think.

          Except in circumstances where the deceased had no immediate living relatives, under French laws it is not possible to dictate, by means of a Will, to whom any property was to be left. Instead, the properties had to be divided up equally between the surviving dependents of the named property owner, who in this case was Alice.

          As she was now dead that meant that the property in France legally belonged to Alice’s two obnoxious off-spring and poor Charles would be out on his ear in no time. Alice had made a Will in England which would provide him with a small amount of money but nowhere near enough to live on. Their financial security, in France, was maintained by the monthly cheques from the MOD. Alice’s first husband had been a Major in the British Army and had died in service. This entitled her to a sizeable income from his pension and her widow’s allowance. All that, of course, would stop as soon as it became known she had died.

          By the time the fourth movement of the symphony had begun he had come to his decision. Alice’s children must not know that their mother was dead, that was for certain. In fact, no one must know. If they could not prove she was dead then no one but he had any claim to the property. He must therefore make it look as though she had taken her things and left.

          He had decided to throw her body and her belongings down the well. The well had never been used as they were on mains water and they considered it to be dangerous, especially when the grandchildren came to stay. They had talked for some time about filling it in and making a floral feature of it instead.

          He got up slowly and walked back into the house. The small knot of flies had worked out that the smell they were looking for was emanating from under the rug and were pacing up and down over the spot.

          Charles stopped in the doorway, looking at the rug. His mind wandered back to the events only an hour ago.

          He had been sawing wood for the fire. He didn’t want to, he hated it in fact, but it was their best method of heating the house and the evenings had started to get chilly. His head still pounded because of the exercise, he was not used to it. Also the best part of a bottle of Bordeaux he had consumed with his lunch had not helped. Alice kept telling him he drank too much.

          “I’ll drink what I like,” he told her, “I’ll know when I’ve had too much.”

He was angry with her. As he sawed the logs his anger increased with his pounding head.

He had taken a great armful of logs back into the house and was in the process of stacking them next to the fire when he lost his balance and stumbled into the sideboard, causing the bottles on the drinks tray to jangle together alarmingly.

“Now will you believe me you’ve had too much to drink?” Alice stood in the doorway glaring at him.

Charles had said nothing, just turned and hit her hard, four times with the piece of wood he had in his hand. He didn’t know why he had done it and he felt no guilt. He continued to stack the wood and, once finished, poured himself a large scotch.

Crossing the room again, he knelt beside his stricken wife and lifted one limp hand. After several minutes he had still not located her pulse and decided she must be dead. She had a long open wound on the side of her head and it had bled profusely, pooling on the stone tiles around her body.

He struggled to pick her up and carried her out to the small barn, next to the well, where he laid her gently on the cold concrete floor. He had to clean up the mess first and then decide what to do with Alice’s body. The effort of carrying his wife’s body had caused his head to throb even worse.

After cleaning the floor, he had lit the fire using the bloodstained log and cloth and, after choosing his favourite Bruckner symphony, sat down with his whisky to think things out.

A fly buzzing close to his face brought him suddenly out of his reverie and back to reality. Turning, he noticed Alice’s handbag hanging on a coat hook in the hallway. Lifting it off the hook he opened it and took out her purse. Helping himself to all the money he stuffed the notes and coins into his pocket and dropped the purse back into the handbag. He then wandered out into the garden again and stood looking down the well for a moment before dropping the bag into the blackness. It fell the twenty feet or so in silence and a few seconds later he heard the reassuring splash.

He would get Alice’s body next and drop her down, then pack most of her clothes and her most precious items into a couple of bags and throw them down too. Tomorrow he would start the job of filling in the well.

He walked slowly over to the barn. The door stood slightly ajar so he pushed it gently and stepped into the dim light. A gasp caught in his throat and he staggered backwards.

She had gone! Alice’s body was no longer lying on the floor where he had left it. It was impossible, she was dead. She couldn’t possibly be alive, so someone must have carried her away.

He staggered back out into the yard. The enormity of his predicament suddenly hit him. If someone had found her he was in big trouble. If she was still alive, he must find her before someone else did.

Before he could take a single step, however, he became aware of a sharp pain in his chest. In only a few seconds it increased to the point where he cried out in pain. The ache in his head had paled to insignificance as his whole being was wracked with this new agony.

He was aware that the pain had spread down his left arm. It was only possible to take small, shallow breaths but even these increased the pain ten-fold.

He felt a warm, wetness spreading rapidly down his lower limbs as his bladder voided itself. It occurred to him that this hadn’t happened to him since he was a small child. Several large, cold raindrops landed on his head and arms announcing the prelude of the day’s promised storm.

This was his last conscious thought before he collapsed to the ground.

Alice was found the following morning by a local farmer. She was lying in a field, half a mile from the house, surrounded by a very curious herd of dairy cattle.

She had a broken jaw, a fractured skull and a deep savage gash above her left temple, but was very much alive.

The police found Charles’s body later that day, where he had fallen, in front of the house.

Alice’s injuries had completely erased any recollection of the previous few days, including the attack itself. She was blissfully unaware of anything that had happened.

A prolonged investigation by the police established that Alice’s handbag was missing. This led them to the conclusion that Alice had disturbed a thief, who had inflicted those terrible injuries on her, and that Charles had suffered a massive heart attack and died whilst coming to the aid of his poor battered wife.

Alice convalesced with her daughter in Somerset and made a full recovery. She eventually sold the house in Brittany and returned to England to be nearer her family.

Charles’s ashes came home to England with her and, with the local parish priest’s permission, were buried beneath the old oak tree in the churchyard of the village in which Alice made her new home.

Alice paid for a bench to be erected in a shady spot on the village green overlooking the pond. There was a shiny brass plate screwed to the back which carried the following inscription:

In loving memory of

Charles Edward Grey

11 April 1948 to 23 September 2008

Always the Perfect Gentleman