Page 25 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

DAPHNE: Look, no one was healthy back then.

Everyone was just too grateful to have made it through the war to give a shit about carbs and second-hand smoke.

And sure, I was hungry and felt like crap, but I also felt this funny kind of sharpness, as if after months of being stuck at home, slowly fading away, I was finally waking up.

But once I was awake, I began to notice how hollow it all was.

RUTH: Hollow?

DAPHNE: I had lost the weight. I had bought everything I could think of and then did it again in a different color. But there was nothing left to distract me from my biggest problem: Geoffrey.

HauteHistoire: “Hey everyone, it’s time for another TikTok video inspired by Daphne’s fashion journey!

So, I was so relieved that in this podcast episode, she’s finally taking an interest in fashion!

I’ve gone for a real Sixties rich-bitch look.

This isn’t a look for teenage hippies, it’s the look for a gold digger done good, who wants the Upper East Side togs to match!

And there’s really only one designer that’ll give you that Jackie-Kennedy-with-a-twist vibe and that’s Chanel.

I’ve chosen a vintage black Chanel suit with heeled booties and a studded necklace to make it more modern.

Any color of Chanel suit will work although I suggest staying away from pink Chanel suits because they were iconic in the Sixties for ALL the wrong reasons!

After all, no one, not even Jackie herself, has successfully pulled off blood spatter as an accessory, although I do wonder if Daphne’s given it a whirl! ”

Geoffrey noticed my transformation and it revived his interest in me.

That was the only downside to the whole journey, how it increased the number of times I woke up in the middle of the night with him pawing at me, whispering sour, filthy things in my ear.

It didn’t stop him from sleeping with other women though.

When a man starts stepping out on you, it becomes a habit that’s hard to break, like when a dog starts pissing on the furniture.

At first Geoffrey was delighted with his ‘angels’ and would admire their tiny, pink lips and their delicate fingernails.

But the truth of parenthood sank in quickly: the wet diapers, the squawking, the nights spent walking up and down the hall getting one to sleep only for the other one to wake up.

Not that Geoffrey was doing any of that of course.

He never lifted a finger, leaving all the work to me and the help.

But even having to share an apartment with the babies irritated him.

I guess what he had really wanted was for me to birth a ten-year-old, someone ready to be shipped off to private school and only summoned back for the occasional father-son sailing trip.

Geoffrey thought having a child would be like buying a rug, something beautiful to ornament a house and induce envy in others.

But the first time one of his rugs puked on his bespoke suit, the fantasy was broken.

Then he began to hate us. I would see him come in and stare at us with bleary eyes, slitted like a snake’s, and know that he wished he’d never gotten married or had any children.

They hadn’t saved him. It turns out that babies can’t cure cancer.

Which is shocking, I know, as they’re so famous for their medicinal properties.

To make matters worse, Geoffrey really wasn’t dying fast enough. I had nightmares of him chasing tail for decades while I slowly fossilized on the couch, becoming just another forgotten antique in an Upper East Side apartment.

One night, when I felt particularly lonely, I sat on the bed, watching him get ready for a night on the town.

I was wearing a new dress and had been to the salon that day, but he was too busy whistling and fixing his tie to notice.

I hated how joyful he seemed, how the thought of leaving us all behind was like a balloon tied to his head, lifting him off the floor.

“Hey, how about you stay in tonight?” I asked. “We could open a bottle of wine? Relax?” I felt pathetic just saying this out loud. I didn’t even like Geoffrey. It just irritated me that he was still having all the fun I used to have.

“Hmph? Oh, maybe another night,” he replied, too busy preening to even look at me.

“Come on, you said you wanted this family life. You gave me that whole spiel. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about your promises to adopt James. That was a load of shit. You can’t even take one night off from ogling waitresses?” I asked bitterly.

“Maybe I just don’t like your attitude. I give you everything and you nag me for wanting to grab a drink?” he said, his voice as tight as a guitar string.

“You go out every night! And you and I both know you’re sleeping around!

” I was aware of how loud I was becoming.

I hated how he’d turned me into this clich éd wife.

Where was the gratitude? He’d begged me to marry him, to give him a child.

I gave him two babies and went right back to being beautiful and this was the thanks I got?

A second-hand pecker that still smelt like another woman’s toothpaste?

“You don’t know shit. You’re just some white-trash whore who thinks she’s fancy because she worked in a department store.

And now I’m stuck with an ungrateful wife, a brat that isn’t even mine, and a couple of screaming babies.

So I better see some gratitude when I get back!

” He spat, every inch the nasty old snob.

“You’re just a pathetic drunk who’s scared shitless of dying!” I retorted. He shoved me hard and I fell back on the bed as he stormed out of the room.

I lay sprawled across the bed, frozen in the position he left me. A normal woman would have sobbed, turning the bedcover damp and spongy with her tears until she fell into a numb sleep. But I didn’t feel like crying. I felt a searing hatred bleach me from the inside out like bone in the desert.

It gets a lot easier to hate your husband after you have a baby.

That’s a dirty little secret no one tells you.

The same newlywed who can’t stop talking about what a special man she’s found transforms into a bitter, resentful person who watches her husband keep himself even as she loses everything.

These women spend their days wondering if they’re crying because of the sleep deprivation, the hormones, or because their wretched husbands don’t understand why their wives don’t want to be seductresses in their five minutes of free time a day.

And there’s no escaping it. No matter the city, no matter the class, you see it all the time: women who lose all their light because they’re not allowed to keep it.

Of course, most women just swallow their resentment.

It seeps out of their pores as they snap at their children or cry in the night, haunted by the person they used to be.

But I reckon there are also a lot of women out there who killed just one teeny-tiny husband and got away with it.

Women who sleep easy with neither their spouse nor their conscience to bother them.

I bet there are even more women who have daydreamed about it.

Women need fantasies, even ugly ones, to survive.

For most women, after they have kids, marriage doesn’t feel like a choice anymore.

But I knew I would do just fine without Geoffrey.

There are benefits to having a useless husband.

It makes you brave. Every time I saw him walk out the front door, intent on another night on the town, with steaks and champagne, whores and gambling (the whole Thanksgiving dinner!), I saw him spending my future.

Every dollar he threw down on a gleaming bar, every minute I spent married to him, it was all coming out of my future happiness.

I needed him dead sooner rather than later.

And that was when I decided to help him along.

[EDIT: DO NOT INCLUDE IN PODCAST]

RUTH: But you were killing the father of your daughters.

DAPHNE: Why is it so hard to imagine killing a father? Look at you. You told me your father wasn’t in your life, that he had an affair with your mother and preferred his original kids to a baby born out of wedlock.

RUTH: Okay I feel like you’re elaborating a lot. And it was just the one kid, a daughter.

DAPHNE: And you told me you’re not in his will, that he doesn’t give you money. Doesn’t that make you angry? Wouldn’t you like to see him experience some consequences for his actions?

RUTH: . . . No. . . I really don’t think about it. . .

DAPHNE: Come on. You’re lying.

RUTH: Just drop it.

DAPHNE: Would it be so bad if someone knocked him off? Really?

RUTH: Are you kidding me? It’d be a fucking tragedy if any of my family members died! These are human beings you’re talking about. And fine, my father wasn’t around when I was growing up, but we’ve reconnected as adults. I’m not like you, Daphne! I actually have the capacity to forgive people!

[A chair clatters over. Ruth has stood up and gone to the bathroom. Eventually, she returns.]

DAPHNE: Okay, message received. And don’t worry, no one’s going to kill your family.

RUTH: Just leave it. I-I’m a journalist, trying to do a job. Just leave my family out of this. Please can we move on.

DAPHNE: I don’t even remember what we were talking about before your little hissy fit.

[END OF REMOVED SECTION]

RUTH: This was your first poisoning? The police have said that’s your favorite MO. Do you agree?

DAPHNE: Yes. Poison’s a girl’s best friend.

Men are violent; they like knives because they can swing them around like their dicks, then stick ’em in someone.

But women just want to get the job done, as calmly and as quietly as possible.

People say that’s cowardly but there’s nothing cowardly about growing up being a woman and knowing the whole world (hell, even your own house!) is full of men who might one day decide to rape and kill you.

Living with that knowledge without going insane, that takes bravery.

Every man I ever married weighed fifty to one hundred pounds more than me.

They didn’t earn that, it was just nature that gave them that advantage.

So, I had to use the other advantages you could find in nature.

RUTH: So you’re saying poison’s a tool of feminism? A great emancipator of women?

DAPHNE: Well, it levels the playing field. But it takes guts, to smile in someone’s face while you serve them a piping-hot cup of mortality, to hold them at night while they suffer, and then wake up every day and kill them a little more. Could you do that?

RUTH: No, I could never do that.

DAPHNE: Well, it was easy with Geoffrey.

Every morning he would take a fistful of tablets to manage his cancer symptoms. He wasn’t much of a details person; he was the kind of man who would drink perfume if you left it too close to the liquor cabinet and never wonder why his breath smelled like roses.

It was nothing to dig out an old bottle of his father’s heart medicine and some downers that his mother used to take before they put her in the funny farm.

And then I just switched his pills for theirs.

I knew nobody would be suspicious because everyone was expecting Geoffrey to die.

I figured he would either be poisoned by the pills or die because he wasn’t getting the proper medication. Win-win.

RUTH: Well, win for you, lose for Geoffrey.

DAPHNE: Same thing really.

It took a month and a half. I probably could have done it faster, but I wanted to be careful, to make it look natural.

Geoffrey developed stomach complaints and doctors prescribed him more pills, which he struggled to keep down.

He got weaker and weaker, although he heroically refused to stop drinking.

One night, he went to bed with a double whiskey and never woke up.

That was my first time waking up next to a dead body but it certainly wasn’t my last. It’s a bit of an occupational hazard.

On the day of his funeral, I dressed the twins (who were ten months old) in little black dresses and James in his first suit.

I wore a black Chanel suit and a large hat with a black veil.

I didn’t want anyone to see the look of triumph on my face when they lowered his coffin into the ground.

I would not be buried with him, this weak and disappointing man.

He was given everything in life and pissed it up the wall. I would do better.

HauteHistoire: “I couldn’t resist doing another Daphne aesthetic for you guys as this podcast episode is the best yet!

So, this is my Funeral Chic look. All black of course but it’s important to play with textures, so I’ve gone for a Saint Laurent latex pencil skirt, a blouse with a lace collar, an oversized blazer and a killer pair of Christian Louboutin spike heels, just to signal to any eligible men in the audience that you might be delivering the eulogy today but you’re free for drinks tomorrow!

And don’t forget your mourning veil, ideally hanging from a fabulous hat.

It’s Jackie Kennedy again, this time at JFK’s funeral, but it’s also an excellent way to hide the fact that you might not be as sad about becoming a widow as people expect.

So that’s the look! My aunt recently died in a golf cart accident so I can’t wait to rock this look! ”

PreyAllDay:

Okay, we’ve got another poisoning! So far in the podcast, she poisoned Geoffrey and she’s pushed Ted and Frankie to their deaths. But we know that she also poisoned Warren Ackerman, we just haven’t gotten to that part in the story yet.

StopDropAndTroll:

It’s psycho tho, to share a bed with someone while you poison them more and more.

ShockAndBlah:

OOOOH that gives me CHILLS.

CapoteParty:

Hey, does anyone know if you can actually call Daphne? I heard a rumor that she’s in an old folks’ home and that you can call her on the phone.

PreyAllDay:

There’s no way that’s true. Too many guys would be getting their rocks off by calling her.

BurntheBookBurnerz:

Interesting that that’s where your brain went automatically. Says a lot about you. . .

StopDropAndTroll:

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