Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

She kept on with her temping job, making sure she stopped in time to be home before Henry and get his dinner. It was ridiculous to waste money on a cleaner, so she cleaned the house on Sundays. Henry played golf on Saturday mornings and he liked her to go with him, though she was hopeless when she tried to learn. He said it was an inspiration to have her there and praise his swing. On Saturday afternoons they went out in the car and Henry had begun teaching her to drive.

They had quite a big garden — they had bought the house on an enormous mortgage — and she did her best to keep it trim because Henry obviously didn’t have the time. He was engaged on a big project for his new company, which he worked on in his study for most of the evenings. Fiona did the shopping in her lunchtime, she did all the cooking and all the washing and ironing. It was her privilege to care for someone as brilliant as Henry. Besides, his job was so much more demanding than hers, it took more out of him, and by bedtime he was sometimes white with exhaustion.

But Henry was first up in the mornings. He was an early riser, getting up at six-thirty, and he always brought her a cup of tea and the morning papers in bed. Fiona had nothing to do before she went off to take first a bus and then the tube but put the breakfast things in the dishwasher and stack yesterday’s newspapers in the cupboard outside the front door for recycling.

The Times would usually be on top, folded with the lower left-hand quarter of the back page uppermost. Fiona soon came to understand it was no accident that the section of the paper where the crossword was, the completed crossword, should be exposed in this way. It was deliberate, it was evidence of Henry’s pride in his achievement, and she was deeply moved that he should want her to see it. She was touched by his need for her admiration. A sign of weakness on his part it might be, but she loved him all the more for that.

A smile, half-admiring, half-tender, came to her lips as she looked at the neatly printed answers to all those incomprehensible clues. She could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had failed to finish the crossword. The evening before his father died, for instance. Then it was anxiety that must have been the cause. They had sent for him at four in the morning and when she looked at the paper before putting it outside with the others, she saw that poor Henry had only been able to fill in the answers to four clues. Another time he had flu and had been unable to get out of bed in the morning. It must have been coming on the night before to judge by his attempt at the crossword, abandoned after two answers feebly pencilled in.

His father left him a house that was worth a lot of money. Henry had always said that when he got a promotion, she would be able to give up work and have a baby. Promotion seemed less and less likely in time of recession and the fact that the new company appreciated Henry no more than had his previous employers. The proceeds of the sale of Henry’s father’s house would compensate for that and Fiona was imagining paying off the mortgage and perhaps handing in her notice when Henry said he was going to spend it on having a swimming pool built. All his life he had wanted a swimming pool of his own, it had been a childhood dream and a teenage ideal and now he was going to realise it.

Fiona came nearer than she ever had to seeing a flaw in her husband’s perfection.

“You only want a baby because you think he might be a genius,” he teased her.

“She might be,” said Fiona, greatly daring.

“He, she, it’s just a manner of speaking. Suppose he had my beauty and your brains. That would be a fine turn-up for the books.”

Fiona was not hurt because she had never had any illusions about being brighter than she was. In any case, he was implying, wasn’t he, that she was good-looking? She managed to laugh. She understood that Henry could not always help being rather difficult. It was the penalty someone like him paid for his gifts of brilliance. In some ways intellectual prowess was a burden to carry through life.

“We’ll have a heated pool, a decent-size one with a deep end,” Henry said, “and I’ll teach you to swim.”

The driving lessons had ended in failure. If it had been anyone else but Henry instructing her, Fiona would have said he was a harsh and intolerant teacher. Of course she knew how inept she was. She could not learn how to manage the gears and she was afraid of the traffic.

“I’m afraid of the water,” she confessed.

“It’s a disgrace,” he said as if she had not spoken, “a woman of thirty being unable to swim.” And then, when she only nodded doubtfully, “Have you got the Times there?”