The Club(70)

You had to admit, it was quite the spectacle. The cloaks. The masks. The solemn, torchlit procession through the gardens, the candles in the windows of The Manor, the spark-scattering braziers on the main lawn. The beckoning woman in the flowing white dress, bearing a lantern, who had suddenly appeared at the mouth of one of the paths into the woods. The moustached man in the three-piece vintage shooting suit, fob watch in hand, abruptly striding, head down, through the gathered guests, intent on his timepiece, muttering to himself. The whispering voices in the hedgerows, the glimpses of faces amongst the trees. The sudden scream from a nearby, suddenly illuminated grove of trees.

From behind her mask, Jess kept her eyes pinned on the woman in front of her.

It had not come to her all at once, this plan. For a long time, when she imagined taking her revenge on Jackson Crane – and it was Jackson Crane who was always the focus of these fantasies – it was a simple, bloody, spectacular vengeance she had wreaked. In how many different vehicles had she run that man over in her head? How often in her dreams had she found herself somehow serving him in a restaurant, perhaps the grill room at The Grange, and realized as she looked down at the white tablecloth in front of him that there was a steak knife in her hands, a carving knife, a corkscrew. And it was always at the moment of that first stab that she woke up, always at the moment the car she was behind the steering wheel of hit him, that the fantasy faded, because that was all they were, dreams, fantasies. It was when her brain started working on specific, detailed ways of killing Jackson and getting away with it that she knew this was turning into something more.

It was the idea of the overdose that came to her first, the idea of spiking his drink. Then the idea of somehow planting the rest of the bottle of pills on Georgia. And that had seemed like the appropriate punishment, the fitting reward, for Georgia Crane.

This final touch had come to her only on the island itself. Only after she had seen that footage. Only when she had watched, over and over, as Jackson slurred his guilt, as in the background Georgia Crane – the woman she had always somehow imagined as bullied by her husband into silence, into complicity – took phone calls, made phone calls, took control of the situation. If Jackson was responsible for the crime, it was clear who was responsible for the cover-up.

There had been no problem getting her hands on a mask and cloak of her own, that afternoon. Jess had simply presented herself and requested one for a member who she said was running late and would have to join the performance on the lawn itself. All kinds of details she had worked out in case they asked her who had authorized that, who the member was. All the guy had actually asked was what size cloak was needed, and what kind of mask.

Evidently Jess had looked blank. Then for the first time he had glanced up at her.

‘The mask – comedy or tragedy? Which one?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Jess had told him.

A little way up ahead through the woods Jess tried to move slightly closer to Georgia as their group merged with another larger group, people exchanging nods as they did so, calling out through the trees. How strange a sensation this must be, for some of them, to be moving through the world unrecognized. How convenient for her.

So focused was Jess’s attention on Georgia that for the most part the performance itself – how much had all this cost? How much work had gone into it all? – hardly registered. At one point a young man with a powdered face, in tights and breeches and a uniform covered in buttons appeared around a corner of one of the greenhouses and slipped a wax-sealed letter into Jess’s hand. A moment later a girl in a tall white wig had appeared from behind them and started asking whether anyone had a message for her; it had taken Jess another moment to work out why everyone was all of a sudden looking at her. At one point, in a glade – she had rather lost track of where they were on the island by this point – they watched a duel between two men in tricorne hats, saw one suddenly plant his blade deep into the other, heard the other let out an all too convincing grunt of pain, and crumple. In a corner of the sunken rose garden they had come upon a man with rope-bound hands and a sack on his head standing on the boards of a raised platform, a noose around his neck; listened as another man holding a scroll read from it his sentence; watched as the rope of the noose was thrown up – second attempt – over the branch of an oak tree that overhung the garden. Then they were hustled swiftly away.

Only once, and only for a moment, was Jess nearly separated from Georgia, as they were nearing The Manor for the grand finale, when someone stepped out from behind a bush (‘Quickly! This way! We must hurry!’) and laid a hand on Jess’s forearm and tried to steer her and two or three of the people from their group off in a different direction, the wrong direction. Jess had only managed to break away and catch up with the others by ignoring the cast member, literally tugging her arm out of their grip, ignoring their calls as she forged off after the others, in pursuit of Georgia’s departing back.

And now here they all were, gathered on the main lawn again, torches glimmering through the trees as, group by group, the audience were led back to where they had started, the wind setting the flames in the braziers jumping and skipping. The tragic masks looked more mournful than ever. The grins on the comic masks appeared maniacal and mocking.

Through the windows of the ballroom, the dim glow of candlelight was visible; through the ballroom’s open doors the sound of instruments being tuned could be heard. Then they were all ushered up the stone steps from the lawn to the broad balustraded terrace and, from there, directed into the ballroom. There, a dozen musicians in evening dress and half-masks occupied one corner, while a group of dancers all in cotton shifts or their shirtsleeves, all shoeless, all utterly expressionless, stood frozen in the centre of the room – and she found herself (at last) right next to Georgia Crane, so close that she could have reached out and touched her, so close that when she muttered something it was only Georgia who turned around.