Free Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams Page B

which
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Dimmock masturbates my husband in the children’s play area next to the Barnes tennis courts was powerful, vivid and full of an unexplained menace that was all the more potent for never being sufficiently explained. Who was the man in the white coat in the distance? Was that a dwarf on a bicycle disappearing, at speed, in the direction of the Lower Richmond Road? Why did Gerald shout, ‘Banzai!’ at the critical moment? Was she rubbing his semen into her hair and, if so, why?
    Do I sound as if I am above all this, Mr Gibbons? I hope so.
    I am, as you have probably already gathered, no mere jealous housewife, and your researches have not been commissioned simply in order to enable me to get rid of my husband quickly and easily. I don’t think, actually, that anyone can quickly or easily get rid of someone they have once loved. Believe you me, Mr Gibbons, I once did love Gerald a lot, unbelievable as that may seem.
    I want more fuel for my hatred of him. I want to know everything about what he gets up to with that unspeakable woman. I’ve started something I suppose I’ll have to finish. Perhaps I should talk more frankly about Mary Dimmock. And, indeed, Pamela Larner. Pamela Larner – it is easy for me to say this to you because I know we will never meet – was a self-centred, self-opinionated, profoundly silly, vulgar woman of a kind that was all too common in the St Jude’s Putney Parents and Teachers Association twenty years ago.
    For some reason still not clear to me, I found myself on holiday with her on several occasions. Her odious, talentless children went to the same primary school as my dear Conrad and my desperate Julia. Mary Dimmock and her ridiculous husband were also, usually, of the party when six of us St Jude’s parents went off to southern Europe, in search of sunshine, all those years ago. God knows why. I think Conrad liked their Elaine. It was pretty clear to me, too, that
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Larner had designs on my husband.
    You probably do not understand, Mr Gibbons, what it is like to love someone and to be betrayed by them constantly, as I have been betrayed by my husband for at least thirty years. You have probably never felt the self-hatred, the fury and inexpressible loneliness that goes with loving someone who does not love you back.
    Sniff around the Putney Thespians. Sniff around Mike Larner – if you can bear it. Bring me film and recordings and prose descriptions that make me cry. Get to know this ludicrous Dimmock woman. I certainly never want to see her again, but I like hearing about her, in just the way you scratch at a scab or open a newspaper in which you have been criticized. By all means go to the dentist – and allow me to pay! Ingratiate yourself with Mary’s equally loathsome husband. I will fund root-canal surgery if that is what is required.
    I enclose cash to the value of the amount you requested.
    Yours truly,
    Elizabeth Price
    PS I didn’t want to write ‘yours truly’ but the word-processing program made me do it. Even in letter-writing, surely one area where one might have thought that free will was still an option, we are being constrained!
    PPS Use as many ‘inverted commas’ as you like. Feel free to violate the rules of the thing what is called grammar; and be careless with the semi-colon. Question marks???? Why not???? Exclamation marks are good!!!! Perhaps the tone of my letter surprises you. I am certainly not the rational schoolmistress who wrote to you first, am I? But, then, I have just sat through a three-hour video of my husband performing sex acts with a dental nurse in her late fifties.

     
    From:
    Roland O. Gibbons
    Gibbons Detective Agency
    12 The Alley
    Putney, SW15
    8 September
    To:
    Elizabeth Price
    PO Box 132
    Putney
    Dear Mrs Price,
    Try not to worry about all this. I will take care of everything and, perhaps, in a few weeks we will have enough information to gain you a very satisfactory divorce settlement. It is a beautiful day and London is