‘Eventually, yes. But first, I’d like you to suffer,’ I tell him, unable to help myself.
‘Not much chance of that, I’m afraid,’ he says, seeming amused by the thought.
I know I have to keep focused, that the chances of Millie being a flesh-and-blood person to our friends rather than someone they only know about second hand are slipping away fast. I also know that if Jack suspects I want the party to go ahead, he’ll phone Esther back and tell her that we prefer it to be a private gathering.
‘Just cancel the party, Jack,’ I say, sounding as if I’m close to tears. ‘There’s no way I could sit through it and pretend that everything is fine.’
‘Then it is the perfect punishment for inviting Janice in the first place.’
‘Please, Jack, no,’ I plead.
‘I do so love it when you beg,’ he sighs, ‘especially as it has the opposite effect that it’s meant to. Now, up to your room—I have a party to prepare for. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all—at least once people have actually met Millie, they’ll be even more impressed by my generosity.’
I let my shoulders slump and drag my feet as I walk up the stairs in front of him in what I hope is a perfect picture of dejection. In the dressing room, I take off my clothes slowly while my mind looks for a way to distract him so that I can take the pills from my shoe and hide them somewhere on me.
‘So, have you told the neighbours that as well as having a manic-depressive wife, you have a mentally retarded sister-in-law?’ I ask, slipping off my shoes and beginning to undress.
‘Why would I have? They’re never going to meet Millie.’
I hang my dress back up in the wardrobe and take my pyjamas from the shelf. ‘But they’ll see her in the garden, when she’s having her party,’ I say, putting them on.
‘They can’t see into our garden from their house,’ he points out.
I reach for the shoebox. ‘They can if they’re standing at the window on the first floor.’
‘Which window?’
‘The one that overlooks the garden.’ I nod towards the window. ‘That one over there.’ As he turns his head, I crouch down, place the shoebox on the floor and pick up my shoes.
He cranes his neck. ‘They wouldn’t be able to see from there,’ he says, as I prise the tissue from my shoe. ‘It’s too far away.’
Still crouching, I tuck the tissue into the waistband of my pyjamas, place the shoes in the box and stand up.
‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I say, putting the box back in the wardrobe.
I walk towards the door, praying that the tissue won’t slip from its hiding place and spill pills all over the floor. Jack follows me out and I open my bedroom door and go in, half expecting Jack to pull me back and demand to know what I have stuffed into my waistband. As he closes the door behind me, I don’t dare believe that I’ve actually managed to pull it off, but when I hear the key turning in the lock, the relief is so great that my legs give way and I sink to the floor, my whole body trembling. But because there’s always the possibility that Jack is only letting me think I’ve got away with it, I get to my feet and slide the tissue under the mattress. Then I sit down on the bed, and try to take in the fact that I’ve achieved more in the last fifteen minutes than I have in the last fifteen months, acknowledging all the while that, if I have, it’s thanks to Millie. I’m not shocked that she expected me to kill Jack because murder is commonplace in the detective stories she listens to and she has no real idea of what it means to actually kill someone. In her mind, where the line between fact and fiction is often blurred, murder is simply a solution to a problem.
PAST