Free Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell

thinking about divorce now. The children were involved, so it couldn’t just be done by post. There would have to be a court hearing and custody decided. Jims wouldn’t wait. He was notoriously impatient. He had to get married, or at least get himself engaged, before someone outed him and that might happen any day. If she hesitated he’d go after Kate Carew.
    So if she married him, was she going to do it as a divorcee or a widow? If as a widow, wouldn’t Jims find it odd that she’d said nothing about Jerry dying in the train crash when it happened? It would have to be as a divorcee. Or, better still, as a single woman. Then she wouldn’t have to produce the decree absolute or whatever it was to show the registrar. Or the vicar. Jims might want to get married in church.
    Zillah hadn’t given a thought to religion since she was twelve, but so do old beliefs and habits resonate faintly throughout life that she balked at marrying in church in a false character. Besides, she’d been married to Jerry in church and she knew enough about church weddings to know that the vicar would say something about declaring if you knew any impediment to the marriage. If Jerry being still alive wasn’t an impediment she didn’t know what would be. She was balked but not put off the idea. Now she’d thought of these stumbling blocks she found she really wanted to marry Jims. There was no doubt. She’d say yes on Thursday.
    Dragging all those sopping wet and still dirty clothes out of the now cold water in the sink was one of the things that decided her. To get away from that. And the crack behind the outfall pipe from the lavatory where water (or worse) dripped, and the clothesline that fell into the mud when overloaded and the life-threatening electric wiring. And, when Annie didn’t offer her a lift, having to walk two miles to Fredington Episcopi where there was a small, ill-stocked village shop, and two miles back, laden with junk food in plastic carriers. She’d say yes.
    But somehow she’d have to get over the question of what, on forms you filled in, they called your marital status. And it was for Jims as well as the registrar or vicar. He was no fool. Why shouldn’t she say she and Jerry had never actually been married at all?

Chapter 5

    IN THE FRUIT and vegetable section of Waitrose at Swiss Cottage, Michelle Jarvey was choosing food for her husband. Matthew was with her, pushing the trolley, for it would have been difficult attempting to buy anything if he were absent. Besides, they did everything together. They always had. He’d try kiwi fruit, he was saying, now the Coxes were over. He couldn’t stomach any other sort of apple.
    To the other shoppers Mr. and Mrs. Jarvey would have presented a sight almost comic. If to themselves they were a serious, and to some extent tragic, pair, Michelle knew quite well that the rest of the world saw them as a grossly fat, middle-aged woman and a man so thin, worn, wizened, and cadaverous as to resemble someone freed after five years in a prison camp on a starvation diet. Matthew was too weak to walk far, and when he pushed the trolley, which he insisted on doing, he was forced to double up as if in pain. Michelle’s monstrous bosom rested on a stomach which, with her hips, resembled in shape the lower part of a spinning top, undulating as she walked. Today she wore a tentlike green coat with a fake fur collar in which her still pretty face nestled as if it were peeping out from a mound of clothes bundled up for the charity shop. The huge body balanced on surprisingly good legs with ankles so slender that you wondered why they didn’t crack under the weight.
    “I’ll just get two kiwis, then, shall I?” said Michelle. “You won’t want too much. You may not fancy them.”
    “I don’t know, darling. I’ll try.” Matthew shuddered a little, not at the kiwi fruit, which were just like bits of a tree, really, or even two small furry animals, but at an overripe banana among