Free The Wimbledon Poisoner by Nigel Williams

what his mother always used to call ‘nice things’. ‘Think about nice things!’ she would say to Henry as she tucked him into bed at night. And, as he coasted towards Maple Drive through the suburb’s still deserted streets, Henry thought about nice things. He thought about thallium and the Guillain-Barré Syndrome and whether it was or wasn’t too late to have Elinor heavily insured.

8
    Everything happened very quickly after he had got Maisie back to the house.
    Elinor was still asleep. Before she should have a chance to wake and discover the edenwort, Henry got to work on the supper. Maisie sat in the corner of the kitchen with one chocolate bar in her mouth, another in her right hand, another in her lap and a fourth beside her on the draining board, in case anything should happen to the other three.
    Henry paused over a half-dismembered edenwort. He had better catch up on Elinor’s latest batch of instructions.
    She wrote him notes. Notes saying what to get for supper, notes telling him not to leave his shoes by the bed . . . sometimes she left him notes telling him how she felt. About life, about the world, and above all, about him. Since she had started going to therapy, these notes had got longer and more articulate. They didn’t start ‘Dear Henry’, or ‘My Dear Husband’, but simply began, picking up (as her therapist had taught her) at ‘the moment of rage’. There was one, now, lurking in the vegetable basket and Henry moved towards it as one might move towards an unexploded bomb.
    Why do you not understand my needs as a woman? You do not commit to the home, do you, Henry? You are (I have to say) intensely judgemental. You block and deny my aspirations to creativity and permanence.
    Elinor attended art classes at Wimbledon School of Art. She was particularly keen on pottery, a skill she had, in Henry’s view, even less hope of acquiring than her daughter.
    You deal death to the need in me to grow and change and become myself. Like a huge wall that shields tender shoots from the light, you do not allow my passions and sensations their scope. I am afraid of you, Henry!
    Not half as much as I am of you! thought Henry, as he ran his eyes down the rest of the manuscript (she must have written it before going to sleep).
    I am afraid of the male violence that is in you. In a world run by men, for men . . .
    Maybe, thought Henry, but, if so, run by other men for other men. I am not one of these men!
    A world of cruel greed, rape, nuclear war, phallocentric control, where women are pushed to the sidelines, how can I not be afraid of you? With the fierce hatred that I know is in you? Like a mugger you leap out at me from the dark, and my rights as a woman are violated by your obscene masculinity!
    Henry looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, as he crumpled up the other three pages of this latest missive and threw it in the swingbin. He looked, he had to admit, the very picture of obscene masculinity. Glumly, he began to pull out okra and edenwort. If she didn’t eat the vegetables, she was almost sure to eat the meat.
    Elinor was a star pupil in her therapy class. Having been taught, first at an expensive public school and then at Oxford University, to express herself to order, she found the poor creatures who shambled along to 23 Dorman Road every Saturday, Thursday, Monday and Wednesday absolutely no competition at all. Most of these women had been in what they called ‘the therapy situation’ for years. Elinor’s difficulties were, at least from her description of the classes, bigger and better than those of her fellow therapees. She was a kind of Stakhanovite worker in the field of female suffering, setting new targets for pain, finding each week some new emotional cross to bear. The main topic on the agenda of the therapy class was, to start with anyway, Henry. They all sat around in a circle agreeing what a swine Henry was.
    But as the therapy continued, Henry had observed, others were found to