by Ruth Rendell
‘Or of loss,’ said Zoe. ‘She lost her father. Perhaps she’s afraid of losing you.’
‘That’s the last thing she need be afraid of,’ he said.
It was midnight before he left. The next day he meant to tell Lisa where he had been. There were no secrets between them. But Lisa was nervous and uneasy – she and Mrs Cleasant had been to a spiritualist meeting – and he thought it unwise to raise once more a subject that was better forgotten. So he said nothing. After all, he would never see Zoe again.
But a month or so later, a month in which he and Lisa had been happy and tranquil together, he met the older girl by chance in the Portobello Road. While they talked, it occurred to him that he had eaten a meal in her flat and that he owed her dinner. He and Lisa would take her out to dinner. In her present mood, Lisa would like that, and it would be good for her to see, after the lapse of time, how her superstitiousness had led her into error. He put the invitation to Zoe who hesitated, then accepted when he explained it would be a threesome. Dinner, then, in a fortnight’s time, and he and Lisa would call for her.
‘I met that girl Zoe and asked her to have dinner with us. All right with you?’
The frightened child look came back into Lisa’s face.
‘Oh, no, Peter! I thought you understood, I don’t ever want to see her again.’
‘But why not? You’ve seen the photograph, you’ve seen how silly those ideas of yours were. And Stephen won’t be there. I know you didn’t like him and neither did I. But they’re not together any more. He’s left her.’
She shivered. ‘Let’s not get to know her, Peter.’
‘I’ve invited her,’ he said. ‘I can’t go back on that now.’
When the evening came, Zoe appeared at her door in a long gown, her hair dressed on top of her head. She looked majestic, mysteriously changed.
‘Where’s Lisa?’ she asked.
‘She couldn’t come. She and her mother are going on holiday to Greece at the end of the week and she’s busy packing.’ Part of this was true. He said it confidently, as if it were wholly true. He couldn’t take his eyes off the new transformed Zoe, and he was glad he had booked a table in an exclusive restaurant.
In the soft lamplight her youth had come back to her. And for the first time he was aware of the likeness between her and Lisa. The older and the younger sister, by a trickery of light and cosmetics and maybe of his own wistful imagination, had met in years and become twins. It might have been his Lisa who spoke to him across the table, across the silver and glass and the single rose in a vase, but a Lisa whom life and experience had matured. Never could Lisa have talked like this of books and music and travel, or listened to him so responsively or advised with such wisdom. He was sorry when the evening came to an end and he left her at her door.
Lisa seemed to have forgotten his engagement to dine with Zoe. She didn’t mention it, so he didn’t either. On the following morning she was to leave with her mother for the month’s holiday the doctor had recommended for Mrs Cleasant’s health.
‘I wish I wasn’t going,’ she said to Peter. ‘You don’t know how I’ll miss you.’
‘Shan’t I miss you?’
‘Take care of yourself. I’ll worry in case anything happens to you. You mustn’t laugh, but when my father was alive and went away from us, I used to listen to the news four or five times a day in case there was a plane crash or a disaster.’
‘You’re the one that’s going away, Lisa.’
‘It comes to the same thing.’ She put up her hand to the charm she wore. ‘I’ve got this, but you . . . Would you take my four-leaved clover if I gave it to you?’
‘I thought you’d given up all that nonsense,’ he said, and his disappointment in her soured their farewells. She kissed him good-bye with a kind of passionate sadness.
‘Write to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll write every day.’
Her letters started coming at the end of the first week. They were the first he had ever had from her and they were like school essays written by a geography student, with love messages for the class teacher inserted here and there. They left him unsatisfied, a little peevish. He was lonely without her, but frightened of the image of her he carried with him. He needed someone with whom to talk it over and, after a few days of indecision, he telephoned Zoe. Ten minutes later he was in her flat, drinking her coffee and listening to her music. To be with her was a greater comfort than he had thought possible, for in the turn of her head, a certain way of hers of smiling, the way her hair grew from a widow’s peak on her forehead, he caught glimpses of Lisa.
And yet on that occasion he said nothing of his fears but ‘I can’t understand why I thought you and Lisa weren’t alike.’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘It’s almost overpowering, it’s uncanny.’
She smiled. ‘If it helps you to come and see me to get through the time while she’s away, that’s all right with me, Peter. I can understand that I remind you of her and that makes things easier for you.’
‘It isn’t only that,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t think it’s only that.’
She said no more. It wasn’t her way to probe, to hold inquisitions, or to set an egotistical value on herself. But the next time they were together, he explained without being asked, and his explanation was appalling to him, the words more powerful and revealing than the thoughts from which they had sprung.
‘It isn’t true you remind me of Lisa. That’s not it. It’s that I see in you what she might become, only she never will.’
‘Who would want to be like me?’
‘Everyone. Every young girl. Because you’re what a woman should be, Zoe, clever and sane and kind and self-reliant and – beautiful.’
‘And if that’s true,’ she said lightly, ‘though I disagree, why shouldn’t Lisa become like that?’
‘Because when she’s eighteen she’ll be rich, an heiress. She’ll never have to work for her living or struggle or learn. We’ll live in a house near her mother and she’ll get like her mother, vain and neurotic, living on sleeping pills, spending all her time with spiritualists and getting involved in sick cults. When I look at you I don’t see Lisa’s double. I see her, an alternative she, if you like, thirteen years ahead in time if another path had been marked out for her in life. And at the same time I see you as you’d be if you’d led the sort of life she must and will lead.’
‘You can help her not to lead that life if you love her,’ said Zoe.
And then Lisa’s letters stopped coming. A week went by without a letter. He had resolved, because of what was happening to him, not to see Zoe again. But she lived so near and he thought of her so often that he was unable to resist. He went to her and told a lie that he convinced himself might be the truth. Lisa was too young to have a firm and faithful love for anyone. Her letters had grown cold and had finally ceased to come. Zoe listened to him, to his urgent persuasions, his comparison of his forsaken state with her own, and when he kissed her, she responded at first with doubts, then with an ardour born of her own loneliness. They made love. When, later, he asked her if he might stay the night, she said he could and he did.
After that, he spent every night with her. He hardly went home. When he did he found ten letters waiting for him on the doormat. Lisa and her mother had gone on to some Aegean island – the home of a mystic Mrs Cleasant longed to meet – where the posts were hazardous. He read the childish letters, the ‘darling Peter, I miss you, I’ll never go away again’ with impatience and with guilt, and then he went back to Zoe.
Why did he have to mention those letters to her? He wished he hadn’t. It was for her wisdom and her honesty that he had wanted her, and now those very qualities were striking back at him.
‘When is she coming home?’
‘Next Saturday,’ he said.
‘Peter, I don’t know what you mean to do, leave me and marry her, or leave her and stay with me. But you must tell her about us, whatever you decide.’
‘I can’t do that!’
‘You must. Either way, you must. And if you mean to stay with me, what alternative have you?’
Stay with them both until he was sure, until he knew for certain. ‘You know I can’t be without you, Zoe. But I can’t tell her, not yet. She’s such a child.’
‘You’re going to marry that child. You love her.’
‘Do I?’ he said. ‘I thought I did.’
‘I won’t be a party to deceiving her, Peter. You must understand that. If you won’t promise to tell her, I can’t see you again.’
Perhaps when he saw Lisa . . . He went across the park to her mother’s house on the Sunday evening. The medium was there and another woman who looked like a participant in a Black Mass, earnestly listening to Mrs Cleasant’s account of the mystic and his investigations into the mysteries of the Great Pyramid. Lisa rushed into his arms, actually crying with happiness.
‘This child has dreamed about you every night, Peter,’ said Mrs Cleasant with one of her weird faraway looks. ‘Such dreams she has had! Of course she’s psychic like me. When we knew the posts were delayed I wanted her to get a message through to you by the Power of Thought, but she was unwilling.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t like it,’ said Lisa. She sat on his knee, in his arms. Of course he couldn’t tell her. In time, maybe, if he got their wedding postponed and cooled things and . . . But it was out of the question to tell her now.
He told Zoe he had. In order to see her again, he had to do that.
‘How did she take it?’
‘Oh, quite well,’ he lied. ‘A lot of men have been paying her attention on holiday. I think she’s just beginning to realize I’m not the only man in the world.’
‘And she accepts – us?’
Why did she have to persist, why make it so painful for him? He spoke boldly but with an inner self-disgust.
‘I daresay she sees it as a let-out for her own freedom.’
She was convinced. The habitual truth-teller is reluctant to detect falsehood in others. ‘Of course I’ve only met her once, and then only for a few minutes. But I wonder if you weren’t deceiving yourself, Peter, when you said she loved you so much. You aren’t going to see her again?’
He said he wasn’t. He said it was all over, they had parted. But the enormity of what he had done appalled him. And when next he was with Lisa he found himself telling her all over again, and meaning it, how much he loved her and longed to take her away. Was he going to sacrifice that childish passionate love for a woman five years older than himself? They were, in many ways, so alike. Suppose, in time to come, he grew tired of the one and regretted the other? Yet, that night, he went back to Zoe.
With a skilful but frightening intrigue, he divided his time between the one and the other. It wasn’t too difficult. Social – and occult – demands were always being made on Lisa. Zoe believed him when he said he had been kept late at work. Autumn came, and it was still going on, this double life. His need for, his dependence on, Zoe intensified and he had begun to resent every moment he spent away from her. But Lisa and her mother had fixed his wedding date and with fatality he accepted its inexorable approach.
On an afternoon in October he was to meet Zoe in Holland Park, by the northern gate. Lisa was going for a fitting of her wedding dress and afterwards to dine with her mother in what he called the medium’s lair. So that was all right. He waited by the gate for nearly an hour. When Zoe didn’t come, he went to her flat but received no answer to his ring. From his own home he telephoned her five times during the evening, but each time the bell rang into emptiness. He passed a sleepless night, the first night he had been on his own for four months.
All the next day, from work, he kept trying to call her, and for the first time since he had known her he made no call to Lisa. But his own phone was ringing when he got home at six. Of course it was Zoe, it must be. He took up the receiver and heard the fraught voice of Mrs Cleasant.
‘Peter?’
Disappointment hurt him like pain. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How are you? How’s Lisa?’
‘Peter, I have very bad news. I think you had better come here. Yes, now. At once.’
‘What is it? Has anything happened to Lisa?’
‘Lisa has – has passed over. Last night she took an overdose of my pills. I found her dead this morning.’
He went out again at once. In the park, at dusk, the leaves were dying and livid, some already fallen. At this point, when they had been showing their first green of spring, he had taken the photograph, at this, he had seated her in a sunny open space and she had seen Zoe.
Mrs Cleasant wasn’t alone. Some of the members of her magic circle were with her, but she was calmer than he had ever seen her and he guessed she was drugged.
‘How did it happen?’ he said.
‘I told you. She took an overdose.’
‘But – why?’ He shrank away from the medium’s eyes which, staring, seemed to see ghosts behind him.
‘Nothing to do with you, Peter,’ said Mrs Cleasant. ‘She loved you, you know that. And she was so happy yesterday. Her fitting was cancelled. She said she wanted fresh air because it was such a lovely day, and then she’d walk over to you. She’d thrown away her charm – that amulet she wore – because she said you didn’t like it. I told her not to, as it was a harmless thing and might do good. Who knows? If she had been wearing it . . .’
‘Ah, if she had been under the Protection!’ said the medium.
Mrs Cleasant went on, ‘We were going out to dinner. I waited and waited for her. When she didn’t come I went alone. I thought she was with you, safe with you. But I came back early and there she was, looking so tired and afraid. She said she was going to bed. I asked her if there was anything wrong and she said . . .’ But Mrs Cleasant’s voice quavered into sobs and the witch women fluttered about her, touching her and murmuring.
It was the medium who explained in her corpse voice. ‘She said she had seen her own double in the park.’
‘But that was six months ago,’ he burst out. ‘That was in April!’
‘No, she saw her own double yesterday afternoon, her image walking in the garden. And she dared to speak to it. Who can tell what your own death will tell you when you dare to address it?’
He ran away from them then, out of the house. He hailed a taxi and in a shaking whisper asked the driver to take him to where Zoe lived. All the lights were on in her windows. He rang the bell, rang it again and again. Then, while the lights still blazed but she didn’t come down, he hammered on the door with his fists, calling her name. When he knew she wasn’t going to come, that he had lost her and her image, her double and her, for ever, he sank down on the doorstep and wept.
The taxi driver, returning along the street in search of a fare, supposed him to be drunk, and learning his address from the broken mutterings, took him home.
The Venus Fly Trap
As soon as Daphne had taken off her hat and put it on Merle’s bed, Merle picked it up and rammed it on her own yellow curls. It was a red felt hat and by chance it matched Merle’s red dress.
‘It’s a funny thing, dear,’ said Merle, looking at herself in the dressing-table mirror, ‘but anyone seeing us two – any outsider, I mean – would never think that I was the single one and you’d had all those husbands and children.’
‘I only had two husbands and three children,’ said Daphne.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Merle, and Daphne, standing beside her friend, had to admit that she did. Merle was so big, so pink and overflowing and female, while she – well, she had given up pretending she was anything but a little dried-up widow, seventy years old and looking every day of it.
Merle took off the hat and placed it beside the doll whose yellow satin skirts concealed her nightdress and her bag of hair rollers. ‘I’ll show you the flat and then we’ll have a sherry and put our feet up. I got some of that walnut brown in. You see I haven’t forgotten your tastes even after forty years.’
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Daphne didn’t say it was dry sherry she had then, and still, preferred. She trotted meekly after Merle. She was just beginning to be aware of the intense heat. Clouds of warmth seemed to breathe out of the embossed wallpaper and up through the lush furry carpets.
‘I really am thrilled about you coming to live in this block, dear. Ths is my little spare room. I like to think I can put up a friend if I want. Not that many of them come. Between you and me, dear, people rather resent my having done so well for myself and all on my own initiative. People are so mean-spirited, I’ve noticed that as I’ve got older. That’s why I was so thrilled when you agreed to come here. I mean, when someone took my advice.’
‘You’ve made it all very nice,’ said Daphne.
‘Well, I always say the flat had the potential and I had the taste. Of course, yours is much smaller and, frankly, I wouldn’t say it lends itself to a very ambitious décor. In your place, the first thing I’d do is have central heating put in.’
‘I expect I will if I can afford it.’
‘You know, Daphne, there are some things we owe it to ourselves to afford. But you know your own business best and I wouldn’t dream of interfering. If the cold gets you down you’re welcome up here at any time. Any time, I mean that. Now this is my drawing room, my pièce de résistance.’
Merle opened the door with the air of a girl lifting the lid of a jewel case that holds a lover’s gift.
‘What a lot of plants,’ said Daphne faintly.
‘I was always mad about plants. My first business venture was a florist’s. I could have made a little goldmine out of that if my partner hadn’t been so wickedly vindictive. She was determined to oust me from the first. D’you like my suite? I had it completely re-done in oyster satin last year and I do think it’s a success.’
The atmosphere was that of a hothouse. The chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little piecrust tables with their load of bibelots, were islanded in the centre of the large room. No, not an island perhaps, Daphne thought, but a clearing in a tropical jungle. Shelves, window sills, white troughs on white wrought iron legs, were burgeoned with lush trailing growth, green, glossy, frondy, all quite immobile and all giving forth a strange green scent.
