by Ruth Rendell
The next day he drove back to Aurora Road in the late afternoon. There were three elderly women walking along, walking abreast, but not going in the direction of her house, coming away from it. Was one of them she?
In the three faces, one pale and lined, one red and firm, the third waxen, sagging, he looked for the features of his Catherine. He looked for some vestige of her step in the way each walked. One of the women wore a burgundy-coloured coat, and pulled down over her grey hair, a burgundy felt hat, a shapeless pudding of a hat. Catherine had been fond of wine-red. She had worn it to be married in, married to him and perhaps also to Aldred Sydney. But this woman wasn’t she, for as they passed him she turned and peered into the car and her eyes met his without a sign of recognition.
After a little while he drove down the street and, leaving the car, walked along the footpath. The petals of the plum blossom lay scattered on the grass and the may was coming into green bud. The sun shone faintly from a white, curdy sky. This time he didn’t sit down on the seat but left the path to walk under the trees, for today the grass was dry and springy. In the distance he heard a train.
He was unprepared for so many people coming this way from the station. There must have been a dozen pass in the space of two minutes. He pretended to be walking purposefully, walking for his health perhaps, for what would they think he was doing, there under the trees without a companion, a sketching block or even a dog? The last went by – or he supposed it was the last. And then he heard soft footfalls, the sound light shoes make on a dry, sandy floor.
Afterwards he was to tell himself that he knew her tread. At the time, honestly, he wasn’t quite sure, he didn’t dare be, he couldn’t trust his own memory. And when she appeared it was quite suddenly from where the path emerged from a tunnel of trees. She was walking towards Aurora Road and as she passed she was no more than ten yards from him.
He stood perfectly still, frozen and dumb. He felt that if he moved he might fall down dead. She didn’t walk fast but lightly and springily as she had always done, and the years lay on her as lightly and gently as those footfalls of hers lay on the sand. Her hair was grey and her slenderness a little thickened. There was a hint of a double chin and a faint coarsening of those delicate features – but no more than that. If he had remained young, so had she. It was as if youth had been preserved in each of them for this moment.
He wanted to see her eyes, the blue of those hyacinths, but she kept them fixed straight ahead of her, and she had quickly gone out of his sight, lost round a curve in the path. He crept to the seat and sat down. The wonder of it, the astonishment! He had imagined her old and found her young, but she had always surprised him. Her variety, her capacity to astound, were infinite.
She had come off the train with the others. Did she go out to work? At her age? Many did. Why not she? Sydney was dead and had left her, no doubt, ill-provided for. Sydney was dead . . . He thought of courting her again, loving her, forgiving her, wooing her.
‘Will you marry me, Catherine?’
‘Do you still want me – after everything?’
‘Everything was only a rather long bad dream . . .’
She would come and live in his house and sit opposite him in the evenings, she would go on holiday with him, she would be his wife. They would have little jokes for their friends.
‘How long have you two been married?’
‘It was our second wedding anniversary last week and it will be our forty-fifth next month.’
He wouldn’t phone, though. He would sit on this seat at the same time tomorrow and wait for her to pass by and recognize him.
Before he left home he studied the old photographs of himself that were with the old photographs of her. He had been fuller in the face then and he hadn’t worn glasses. He put his hand to his high, sloping forehead and wondered why it looked so low in the pictures. Men’s fashions didn’t change much. The sports jacket he had on today was much like the sports jacket he had worn on his honeymoon.
As he was leaving the house he was assailed by the scent of the hyacinths, past their prime now and giving off a sickly, cloying odour. Dark blue flowers with a dark blue perfume . . . On an impulse he snapped off their heads and threw them into the wastepaper basket.
The day was bright and he slid back the sunshine roof on his car. When he got to Aurora Road, the field and the footpath, he took off his glasses and slipped them into his pocket. He couldn’t see very well without them and he stumbled a little as he walked along.
There was no one on the seat. He sat down in the centre of it. He heard the train. Then he saw it, rattling along between the tufty trees and the little choppy red roofs and the squares of green. It was bringing him, he thought, his whole life’s happiness. Suppose she didn’t always catch that train, though? Or suppose yesterday’s appearance had been an isolated happening, not a return from work but from some occasional visit?
He had hardly time to think about it before the commuters began to come, one and one and then two together. It looked as if there wouldn’t be as many as there had been yesterday. He waited, holding his hands clasped together, and when she came he scarcely heard her, she walked so softly.
His sight was so poor without his glasses that she appeared to him as in a haze, almost like a spirit woman, a ghost. But it was she, her vigorous movements, her strong athletic walk, unchanged from her girlhood, and unchanged too, the atmosphere of her that he would have known if he had been not short-sighted but totally blind and deaf too.
The trembling which had come upon him again ceased as she approached and he fixed his eyes on her, half-rising from the seat. And now she looked at him also. She was very near and her face flashed suddenly into focus, a face on which he saw blankness, wariness, then slight alarm. But he was sure she recognized him. He tried to speak and his voice croaked out:
‘Don’t you know me?’
She began walking fast away, she broke into a run. Disbelieving, he stared after her. There was someone else coming along from the station now, a man who walked out of the tree tunnel and caught her up. They both looked back, whispering. It was then that he heard her voice, only a little older, a little harsher, than when they had first met. He got off the seat and walked about among the trees, holding his head in his hands. She had looked at him, she had seemed to know him – and then she hadn’t wished to.
When he reached home again he understood what he had never quite faced up to when he first retired, that he had nothing to live for. For the past week he had lived for her and in the hope of having her again. He found his gun, the small unused automatic, and loaded it and put on the safety catch and looked at it. He would write to her and tell her what he had done – by the time she got his letter he would have done it – or, better still, he would see her once, force her to see him, and then he would do it.
The next afternoon he drove to her house in Aurora Road. It was nearly half-past five, she would be along at any moment. He sat in the car, feeling the hard bulge of the gun in his pocket. Presently the man who had caught her up the day before came along, but now he was alone, walking the length of Aurora Road and turning down a side street.
She was late. He left the car where it was and set off to find her, for he could no longer bear to sit there, the pain of it, the sick suspense. He kept seeing her face as she had looked at him, with distaste and then with fear.
Another train was jogging between the tree tufts and the little red chevrons, he heard it enter the station. Had the green, the many, varied greens, been as bright as this yesterday? The green of the grass and the new beech leaves and the may buds hurt his eyes. He passed the seat and went on, further than he had ever been before, coming into a darkish grove where the trees arched over the path. Her feet on the sand whispered like doves. He stood still, he waited for her.
She slowed down when she saw him and came on hesitantly, raising one hand to her face. He took a step towards her, saying, ‘Please. Please don’t go. I want to talk to you so much . . .�
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Today he was wearing his glasses, there was no chance of his eyes being deceived. He couldn’t be mistaken as to the meaning of her expression. It was compounded of hatred and terror. But this time she couldn’t walk on without walking into his arms. She turned to hasten back the way she had come, and as she turned he shot her.
With the first shot he brought her down. He ran up to where she had fallen but he couldn’t look at her, he could only see her as very small and very distant through a red haze of revenge. He shot her again and again, and at last the white ringless hand which had come feebly up to shield her face, fell in death.
The gun was empty. There was blood on him that had flown from her. He didn’t care about that, he didn’t care who saw or knew, so long as he could get home and re-load the gun for himself. It surprised him that he could walk, but he could and quite normally as far as he could tell. He was without feeling now, without pain or fear, and his breathing settled, though his heart still jumped. He gave the body on the ground one last vague look and walked away from it, out of the tree tunnel, on to the path. The sun made bright sheets of light on the grass and long, tapering shadows. He walked along Aurora Road towards the car outside her house.
Her front door opened as he was unlocking the car. An old woman came out. He recognized her as one of those he had seen on his second visit, the one who had been wearing the dark red coat and hat. She came to the gate and looked over it, looked up towards the left a little anxiously, then back and smiled at him. Something in his stare must have made her speak, show politeness to this stranger.
‘I was looking for my daughter,’ she said. ‘She’s a bit late today, she’s usually on that first train.’
He put his cold hands on the bar of the gate. Her smile faded.
‘Catherine,’ he said, ‘Catherine . . .’
She lifted to him enquiring eyes, blue as the hyacinths he had thrown away.
The Orchard Walls
I have never told anyone about this before.
The worst was long over, of course. Intense shame had faded and the knowledge of having made the greatest possible fool of myself. Forty years and more had done their work there. The feeling I had been left with, that I was precocious in a foul and dirty way, that I was unclean, was washed away. I had done my best never to think about it, to blot it all out, never to permit to ring on my inward ear Mrs Thorn’s words:
‘How dare you say such a thing! How dare you be so disgusting! At your age, a child, you must be sick in your mind.’
Things would bring it back, the scent of honeysuckle, a brace of bloodied pigeons hanging in a butcher’s window, the first cherries of the season. I winced at these things, I grew hot with a shadow of that blush that had set me on fire with shame under the tree, Daniel’s hard hand gripping my shoulder, Mrs Thorn trembling with indignant rage. The memory, never completely exorcised, still had the power to punish the adult for the child’s mistake.
Until today.
Having one’s childhood trauma cured by an analyst must be like this, only a newspaper has cured mine. The newspaper came through my door and told me I hadn’t been disgusting or sick in my mind, I had been right. In the broad facts at least I had been right. All day I have been asking myself what I should do, what action, if any, I should take. At last I have been able to think about it all quite calmly, in tranquillity, to think of Ella and Dennis Clifton without growing hot and ashamed, of Mrs Thorn with pity and of that lovely lost place with something like nostalgia.
It was a long time ago. I was fourteen. Is that to be a child? They thought so, I thought so myself at the time. But the truth was I was a child and not a child, at one and the same time a paddler in streams, a climber of trees, an expert at cartwheels – and with an imagination full of romantic love. I was in a stage of transition, a pupa, a chrysalis, I was fourteen.
Bombs were falling on London. I had already once been evacuated with my school and come back again to the suburb we lived in that sometimes seemed safe and sometimes not. My parents were afraid for me and that was why they sent me to Inchfield, to the Thorns. I could see the fear in my mother’s eyes and it made me uncomfortable.
‘Just till the end of August,’ she said, pleading with me. ‘It’s beautiful there. You could think of it as an extra long summer holiday.’
I remembered Hereford and my previous ‘billet’, the strange people, the alien food.
‘This will be different. Ella is your own aunt.’
She was my mother’s sister, her junior by twelve years. There were a brother and sister in between, both living in the north. Ella’s husband was a farmer in Suffolk, or had been. He was in the army and his elder brother ran the farm. Later, when Ella was dead and Philip Thorn married again and all I kept of them was that shameful thing I did my best to forget, I discovered that Ella had married Philip when she was seventeen because she was pregnant and in the thirties any alternative to marriage in those circumstances was unthinkable. She had married him and six months later given birth to a dead child. When I went to Inchfield she was still only twenty-five, still childless, living with a brother-in-law and a mother-in-law in the depths of the country, her husband away fighting in North Africa.
I didn’t want to go. At fourteen one isn’t afraid, one knows one is immortal. After an air raid we used to go about the streets collecting pieces of shrapnel, fragments of shell. The worst thing to me was having to sleep under a Morrison shelter instead of in my bedroom. Having a room of my own again, a place to be private in, was an inducement. I yielded. To this day I don’t know if I was invited or if my mother had simply written to say I was coming, that I must come, that they must give me refuge.
It was the second week of June when I went. Daniel Thorn met me at the station at Ipswich. I was wildly romantic, far too romantic, my head full of fantasies and dreams. Knowing I should be met, I expected a pony carriage or even a man on a black stallion leading a chestnut mare for me, though I had never in my life been on a horse. He came in an old Ford van.
We drove to Inchfield through deep green silent lanes – silent, that is, but for the occasional sound of a shot. I thought it must be something to do with the war, without specifying to myself what.
‘The war?’ said Daniel as if this were something happening ten thousand miles away. He laughed the age-old laugh of the countryman scoring off the townie. ‘You’ll find no war here. That’s some chap out after rabbits.’
Rabbit was what we were to live on, stewed, roasted, in pies, relieved by wood pigeon. It was a change from London sausages but I have never eaten rabbit since, not once. The characteristic smell of it cooking, experienced once in a friend’s kitchen, brought me violent nausea. What a devil’s menu that would have been for me, stewed rabbit and cherry pie!
The first sight of the farm enchanted me. The place where I lived in Hereford had been a late-Victorian brick cottage, red and raw and ugly as poverty. I had scarcely seen a house like Cherry Tree Farm except on a calendar. It was long and low and thatched and its two great barns were thatched too. The low green-hills and the dark clustering woods hung behind it. And scattered all over the wide slopes of grass were the cherry trees, one so close up to the house as to rub its branches against a window pane.
They came out of the front door to meet us, Ella and Mrs Thorn, and Ella gave me a white, rather cold, cheek to kiss. She didn’t smile. She looked bored. It was better therefore than I had expected and worse. Ella was worse and Mrs Thorn was better. The place was ten times better, tea was like something I hadn’t had since before the war, my bedroom was not only nicer than the Morrison shelter, it was nicer than my bedroom at home. Mrs Thorn took me up there when we had eaten the scones and currant bread and walnut cake.
It was low-ceilinged with the stone-coloured studs showing through the plaster. A patchwork quilt was on the bed and the walls were hung with a paper patterned all over with bunches of cherries. I looked out of the window.
‘You can’t see the cherry trees
from here,’ I said. ‘Is that why they put cherries on the walls?’
The idea seemed to puzzle her. She was a simple conservative woman. ‘I don’t know about that. That would be rather whimsical.’
I was at the back of the house. My window overlooked a trim dull garden of rosebeds cut out in segments of a circle. Mrs Thorn’s own garden, I was later to learn, and tended by herself.
‘Who sleeps in the room with the cherry tree?’ I said.
‘Your auntie.’ Mrs Thorn was always to refer to Ella in this way. She was a stickler for respect. ‘That has always been my son Philip’s room.’
Always . . . I envied the absent soldier. A tree with branches against one’s bedroom window represented to me something down which one could climb and make one’s escape, perhaps even without the aid of knotted sheets. I said as much, toning it down for my companion who I guessed would see it in a different light.
‘I’m sure he did no such thing,’ said Mrs Thorn. ‘He wasn’t that kind of boy.’
Those words stamped Philip for me as dull. I wondered why Ella had married him. What had she seen in this unromantic chap, five years her senior, who hadn’t been the kind of boy to climb down trees out of his bedroom window? Or climb up them, come to that . . .
She was beautiful. For the first Christmas of the war I had been given Picturegoer Annual in which was a full-page photograph of Hedy Lamarr. Ella looked just like her. She had the same perfect features, dark hair, other-worldly eyes fixed on far horizons. I can see her now – I can permit myself to see her – as she was then, thin, long-legged, in the floral cotton dress with collar and cuffs and narrow belt that would be fashionable again today. Her hair was pinned up in a roll off her forehead, the rest left hanging to her shoulders in loose curls, mouth painted like raspberry jam, eyes as nature made them, large, dark, alight with some emotion I was years from analysing. I think now it was compounded of rebellion and longing and desire.
