Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘How did you find Sibyl?’

  Trixie wanted to say, I went in the train to Exeter and got out at the station and there was Sibyl waiting for me in her car . . . Only if you started mocking poor Mivvy where would you end? ‘Very frail, dear. I thought she was going a bit funny.’

  ‘I must drop her a line.’

  Mivvy always spoke as if her letters held curative properties. Receiving one of them would set you up for the winter. After she had gone Trixie considered replacing the clock on the shelf but thought better of it. Let it stay in the drawer for a bit. She had read of South American millionaires who have Old Masters stolen for them which they can never show but are obliged, for fear of discovery, to keep hidden away for ever in dark vaults.

  Just before Christmas a letter came from Sibyl. They always sent each other Christmas letters. As Trixie said, if you can’t get around to writing the rest of the year, at least you can at Christmas. Mivvy wrote hundreds. Sibyl didn’t mention the theft of the clock or indeed mention the gallery at all. Trixie wondered why not. The clock was still in the drawer. Sometimes she lay awake in the night thinking about it, fancying she could hear its tick through the solid mahogany of the drawer, through the ceiling and the bedroom floorboards.

  It was curious how she had taken a dislike to the convolvulus tea service. One day she found herself wrapping it in tissue paper and putting it away in the cupboard under the stairs. She took down all the trellis work round the front door and put up wires for the clematis instead. In March she wrote to Sibyl to enquire if there was a new exhibition on at Artifacts. Sibyl didn’t answer for weeks. When she did she told Trixie that months and months back one of those ceramic clocks had been stolen from the gallery and a few days later an embroidered picture had also gone and furniture out of the dolls’ house. Hadn’t Sibyl mentioned it before? She thought she had but she was getting so forgetful these days.

  Trixie took the clock out of the drawer and put it on the shelf. Because she knew she couldn’t be found out she began to feel she hadn’t done anything wrong. The Fishers were bringing Poppy round for a cup of tea. Trixie started unpacking the convolvulus tea service. She lost her nerve when she heard Gordon Fisher’s car door slam and she put the clock away again. If she were caught now she might get blamed for the theft of the picture and the dolls’ house furniture as well. They would say she had sold those things and how could she prove she hadn’t?

  Poppy fell asleep halfway through her second buttered scone.

  ‘She gets funnier every time I see her,’ Trixie said. ‘Sad, really. Sibyl’s breaking up too. She’ll forget her own name next. You should see her letters. I’ll just show you the last one.’ She remembered she couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be wise, so she had to pretend she’d mislaid it.

  ‘Will you be going down there again this year, dear?’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Oh, I expect so. You know how it is, you get to the stage of thinking it may be the last time.’

  Poppy woke up with a snort, said she hadn’t been asleep and finished her scone.

  Gordon asked Trixie, ‘Would you like to come with us and see Her Majesty open the new leisure complex in Rayleigh on Monday?’

  Trixie declined. The Fishers went off to do their shopping, leaving Poppy behind. She was asleep again. She slept till six and, waking, asked Trixie if she had put something in her tea. It was most unusual, she said, for her to nod off like that. Trixie walked her back to the bus stop because the traffic whipped along there so fast you had to have your wits about you and drivers didn’t respect zebra crossings the way they used to. Trixie marched across on the stripes, confident as a lollipop lady but without the lollipop, taking her life in her hands instead.

  She wrote to Sibyl that she would come to Devonshire at the end of July, thinking that while there it might be best to make some excuse to avoid going near Artifacts. The clock was still in the drawer but wrapped up now in a piece of old flannel. Trixie had taken a dislike to seeing the colour of it each time she opened the drawer. She had a summer dress that colour and she wondered why she had ever bought it, it didn’t flatter her, whatever it might do for the Queen Mother. Dorothy could have it for her next jumble sale.

  Walking back from posting a letter, Mivvy fell over and broke her ankle. It was weeks getting back to normal. Well, you had to face it, it was never going to be normal. You wouldn’t be exaggerating, Trixie wrote to Sibyl, if you said that obsession of hers for writing letters had crippled her for life. Sibyl wrote back to say she was looking forward to the last week of July and what did Trixie think had happened? They had caught the thief of the pieces from Artifacts trying to sell the picture to a dealer in Plymouth. He had said in court he hadn’t taken the clock but you could imagine how much credence the magistrate placed on that!

  Trixie unwrapped the clock and put it on the shelf. Next day she got the china out. She wondered why she had been so precipitate in pulling all that trellis off the wall, it looked a lot better than strands of wire on metal hooks. Mivvy came round in a taxi, hobbling up the path on two sticks, refusing the offer of the taxi driver’s arm.

  ‘You’ll be off to Sibyl’s in a day or two, will you, dear?’

  Trixie didn’t know how many times she had told her not till Monday week. She was waiting for Mivvy to notice the clock but at this rate she was going to have to wait till Christmas.

  ‘What do you think of my clock?’

  ‘What, up there? Isn’t that your Wedgwood coffee pot, dear?’

  Trixie had to get it down. She thrust it under Mivvy’s nose and started explaining what it was.

  But Mivvy knew already. ‘Of course I know it’s a clock, dear. It’s not the first time I’ve seen one of these. Oh my goodness, no. The young man who makes these, he’s a friend of my nephew Tony, they were at art school together. Let me see, what’s his name? It will come to me in a minute. A tree, isn’t it? Oak? Ash? Peter Oak? No, Elm is his name. Something Elm. Roland Elm.’

  Trixie said nothing. The glazed surface of the clock felt very cold against the skin of her hands.

  ‘He never makes them to order, you know. He just makes a limited number for a few selected galleries. Tony told me that. Where did you get yours, I wonder?’

  Trixie said nothing. There was worse coming and she waited for it.

  ‘Not around here, I’m sure. I know there are only two or three places in the country they go to. It will come to me in a minute. I shall be writing to Tony tomorrow and I’ll mention about you having one of Richard’s – no, I mean Raymond’s, that is, Roland’s, clocks. I always write to him on Tuesdays. Tuesday is his day. I’ll mention you’ve got one with bindweed on it. They’re all different, you know. He never makes two alike.’

  ‘It’s convolvulus, not bindweed,’ said Trixie. ‘I’d rather you didn’t write to Tony about it if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Oh, but I’d like to mention it, dear. Why ever not? I won’t mention your name if you don’t want me to. I’ll just say that lady who goes down to stay with Auntie Sibyl in Devonshire.’

  Trixie said she would walk with Mivvy up to the High Street. It was hopeless trying to get a taxi outside here. She fetched Mivvy’s two sticks.

  ‘You take my arm and I’ll hold your other stick.’

  The traffic whipped along over the zebra crossing. You were at the mercy of those drivers, Trixie said, it was a matter of waiting till they condescended to stop.

  ‘Don’t you set foot on those stripes till they stop,’ she said to Mivvy.

  Mivvy didn’t, so the cars didn’t stop. A container lorry, a juggernaut, came thundering along, but a good way off still. Trixie thought it was going much too fast.

  ‘Now if we’re quick,’ she said. ‘Run for it!’

  Startled by the urgency in her voice, Mivvy obeyed, or tried to obey as Trixie dropped her arm and gave her a little push forward. The lorry’s brakes screamed like people being tortured and Trixie jumped back, screaming herself, covering her face with her hands so as
not to see Mivvy under those giant wheels.

  Dorothy Fisher said she quite understood Trixie would still want to go to Sibyl’s for her holiday. It was the best thing in the world for her, a rest, a complete change, a chance to forget. Trixie went down by train on the day after the funeral. She had the clock in her bag with her, wrapped first in tissue paper and then in her sky-blue dress. The first opportunity that offered itself she would take the clock back to Artifacts and replace it on the shelf she had taken it from. This shouldn’t be too difficult. The clock was a dangerous possession, she could see that, like one of those notorious diamonds that carry a curse with them. Pretty though it was, it was an unlucky clock that had involved her in trouble from the time she had first taken it.

  There was no question of walking to Artifacts this time. Sibyl was too frail for that. She had gone downhill a lot since last year and symptomatic of her deterioration was her exchange of the grey wig for a lilac-blue one. They went in the car though Trixie was by no means sure Sibyl was safe at the wheel.

  As soon as they walked into the gallery Trixie saw that she had no hope of replacing the clock without being spotted. There was a desk in the first room now with a plump smiling lady sitting at it who Sibyl said was Judy’s mother. Trixie thought that amazing – a mother not minding her daughter cohabiting with a man she wasn’t married to. Living with a daughter living in sin, you might put it. Jimmy was in the second room, up on a ladder doing something to the window catch.

  ‘They’re having upstairs remodelled,’ said Sibyl. ‘You can’t go up there.’ And when Trixie tried to make her way towards the garden door, ‘You don’t want to be had up for trespassing, do you?’ She winked at Judy’s mother. ‘We’re none of us getting any younger when all’s said and done, are we?’

  They went back to Sibyl’s, the clock still in Trixie’s bag. It seemed to have grown heavier. She could hear it ticking through the leather and the folds of the sky-blue dress. In the afternoon when Sibyl lay down on the sofa for her rest, the lilac wig stuck on top of a Poole pottery vase, Trixie went out for a walk, taking the clock with her. She came to the hump-backed bridge over the stream where the water was very low, for it had been a dry summer. She unwrapped the clock and dropped it over the low parapet into the water. It cracked but the trellis work and the convolvulus remained intact and the movement continued to move and to tick as well for all Trixie knew. The blue and green, the pink flowers and the gilt, gleamed through the water like some exotic iridescent shell.

  Trixie went down the bank. She took off her shoes and waded into the water. It was surprisingly cold. She picked up a large flat stone and beat at the face of the clock with it. She beat with unrestrained fury, gasping and grunting at each blow. The green trellis and the blue sky, the glass face and the pink flowers, all shattered. But they were still there, bright jewel-like shards, for all to see who came this way across the bridge.

  Squatting down, Trixie scooped up handfuls of pebbles and buried the pieces of clock under them. With her nails she dug a pit in the bed of the stream and pushed the coloured fragments into it, covering them with pebbles. Her hands were bleeding, her knees were bruised and her dress was wet. In spite of her efforts the bed of the stream was still spread with ceramic chips and broken glass and pieces of gilt metal. Trixie began to sob and crawl from side to side of the stream, ploughing her hands through the blue and green and gold gravel, and it was there that one of Sibyl’s neighbours found her as he was driving home over the bridge.

  He lifted her up and carried her to his car.

  ‘Tick-tock,’ said Trixie. ‘Tick-tock. Convolvulus clock.’

  Loopy

  At the end of the last performance, after the curtain calls, Red Riding Hood put me on a lead and with the rest of the company we went across to the pub. No one had taken make-up off or changed, there was no time for that before. The George closed. I remember prancing across the road and growling at someone on a bicycle. They loved me in the pub – well, some of them loved me. Quite a lot were embarrassed. The funny thing was that I should have been embarrassed myself if I had been one of them. I should have ignored me and drunk up my drink and left. Except that it is unlikely I would have been in a pub at all. Normally, I never went near such places. But inside the wolf skin it was very different, everything was different in there.

  I prowled about for a while, sometimes on all fours, though this is not easy for us who are accustomed to the upright stance, sometimes loping, with my forepaws held close up to my chest. I went up to tables where people were sitting and snuffled my snout at their packets of crisps. If they were smoking I growled and waved my paws in air-clearing gestures. Lots of them were forthcoming, stroking me and making jokes or pretending terror at my red jaws and wicked little eyes. There was even one lady who took hold of my head and laid it in her lap.

  Bounding up to the bar to collect my small dry sherry, I heard Bill Harkness (the First Woodcutter) say to Susan Hayes (Red Riding Hood’s Mother):

  ‘Old Colin’s really come out of his shell tonight.’

  And Susan, bless her, said, ‘He’s a real actor, isn’t he?’

  I was one of the few members of our company who was. I expect this is always true in amateur dramatics. There are one or two real actors, people who could have made their livings on the stage if it was not so overcrowded a profession, and the rest who just come for the fun of it and the social side. Did I ever consider the stage seriously? My father had been a civil servant, both my grandfathers in the ICS. As far back as I can remember it was taken for granted I should get my degree and go into the civil service. I never questioned it. If you have a mother like mine, one in a million, more a friend than a parent, you never feel the need to rebel. Besides, Mother gave me all the support I could have wished for in my acting. Acting as a hobby, that is. For instance, though the company made provision for hiring all the more complicated costumes for that year’s Christmas pantomime, Mother made the wolf suit for me herself. It was ten times better than anything we could have hired. The head we had to buy but the body and the limbs she made from a long-haired grey fur fabric such as is manufactured for ladies’ coats.

  Moira used to say I enjoyed acting so much because it enabled me to lose myself and become, for a while, someone else. She said I disliked what I was and looked for ways of escape. A strange way to talk to the man you intend to marry! But before I approach the subject of Moira or, indeed, continue with this account, I should explain what its purpose is. The psychiatrist attached to this place or who visits it (I am not entirely clear which), one Dr Vernon-Peak, has asked me to write down some of my feelings and impressions. That, I said, would only be possible in the context of a narrative. Very well, he said, he had no objection. What will become of it when finished I hardly know. Will it constitute a statement to be used in court? Or will it enter Dr Vernon-Peak’s files as another ‘case history’? It is all the same to me. I can only tell the truth.

  After The George closed, then, we took off our make-up and changed and went our several ways home. Mother was waiting up for me. This was not invariably her habit. If I told her I should be late and to go to bed at her usual time she always did so. But I, quite naturally, was not averse to a welcome when I got home, particularly after a triumph like that one. Besides, I had been looking forward to telling her what an amusing time I had had in the pub.

  Our house is late Victorian, double-fronted, of grey limestone, by no means beautiful, but a comfortable well-built place. My grandfather bought it when he retired and came home from India in 1920. Mother was ten at the time, so she has spent most of her life in that house.

  Grandfather was quite a famous shot and used to go big game hunting before that kind of thing became, and rightly so, very much frowned upon. The result was that the place was full of ‘trophies of the chase’. While Grandfather was alive, and he lived to a great age, we had no choice but to put up with the antlers and tusks that sprouted everywhere out of the walls, the elephant’s foot umbrella
stand, and the snarling maws of tigris and ursa. We had to grin and bear it, as Mother, who has a fine turn of wit, used to put it. But when Grandfather was at last gathered to his ancestors, reverently and without the least disrespect to him, we took down all those heads and horns and packed them away in trunks. The fur rugs, however, we did not disturb. These days they are worth a fortune and I always felt that the tiger skins scattered across the hall parquet, the snow leopard draped across the back of the sofa and the bear into whose fur one could bury one’s toes before the fire, gave to the place a luxurious look. I took off my shoes, I remember, and snuggled my toes in it that night.

  Mother, of course, had been to see the show. She had come on the first night and seen me make my onslaught on Red Riding Hood, and attack so sudden and unexpected that the whole audience had jumped to its feet and gasped. (In our version we did not have the wolf actually devour Red Riding Hood. Unanimously, we agreed this would hardly have been the thing at Christmas.) Mother, however, wanted to see me wearing her creation once more, so I put it on and did some prancing and growling for her benefit. Again I noticed how curiously uninhibited I became once inside the wolf skin. For instance, I bounded up to the snow leopard and began snarling at it. I boxed at its great grey-white face and made playful bites at its ears. Down on all fours I went and pounced on the bear, fighting it, actually forcing its neck within the space of my jaws.

  How Mother laughed! She said it was as good as anything in the panto and a good deal better than anything they put on television.

  ‘Animal crackers in my soup,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘There used to be a song that went like that in my youth. How did it go on? Something about lions and tigers loop the loop.’

  ‘Well, lupus means a wolf in Latin,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re certainly loopy! When you put that suit on I shall have to say you’re going all loopy again!’