by Ruth Rendell
It was an ordinary enough tale, fragmentary and very clipped. Charles felt that there was far more to it. The hardship and the privation had been left out. Money might have changed it all but she had never mentioned money. She had never mentioned her brother either.
"Isabel got married two years ago. Her husband's in the Post Office. I'm a secretary in a newspaper office." She raised her eyebrows, unsmiling. "I'll have to ask them if they've ever heard of you."
"Yes, do," said Charles with a suavity he didn't feel. He must get on to the subject of the money but he didn't know how to. Mrs. Fairest brought a carry-cot in from the other room, they placed the baby in it, bending tenderly over him and cooing. Although it was nearly noon neither of them had mentioned a drink or even coffee. Charles belonged to a generation that has accustomed itself to almost hourly snacks, cups of this, glasses of that, bits and pieces from the refrigerator. So, surely, did they. He thought wistfully of Roger's hospitality. Mrs. Fairest glanced up and said softly, "I do like coming here. It's so quiet." Above them the vacuum cleaner continued to whirr. "My husband and me, we've only got one room. It's nice and big but it's awfully noisy at weekends."
Charles knew it was impertinent but he had to say it. "I'm surprised your grandmother didn't leave you anything."
Angela Primero shrugged. She tucked the blanket round the baby and stood up. "That's life," she said in a hard voice.
"Shall I tell him, darling?" Isabel Fairest touched her arm and looked timidly into her face, waiting for guidance.
"What's the point? It's of no interest to him." She stared at Charles and then said intelligently, "You can't put that sort of thing in newspapers. It's libel."
Damn, damn, damn! Why hadn't he said he was from the Inland Revenue? Then they could have got on to money at once.
"But I think people ought to know," said Mrs. Fairest, showing more spirit than he had thought hex capable of. "I do, darling. I always have, ever since I understood about it. I think people ought to know how he's treated us."
Charles put his notebook away ostentatiously. "This is off the record, Mrs. Fairest."
"You see, darling? He won't say anything. I don't care if he does. People ought to know about Roger."
The name was out. They were all breathing rather heavily. Charles was the first to get himself under control. He managed a calm smile.
"Well, I will tell you. If you put it in the paper and I have to go to prison for it, I don't care! Granny Rose left ten thousand pounds and we should all have had a share, but we didn't. Rogerthat's our brotherhe got it all. I don't quite know why but Angela knows the ins and outs of it. My mother had a friend who was a solicitor where Roger worked and he said we could try and fight it, but Mother wouldn't on account of it being awful to have a court case against your own son. We were just little kids, you see, and we didn't know anything about it. Mother said Roger would help usit was his moral duty, even if it wasn't legallybut he never did. He kept putting it off and then Mother quarrelled with him. We've never seen him since I was ten and Angela was eleven. I wouldn't know him now if I saw him in the street."
It was a puzzling story. They were all Mrs. Primero's grandchildren, all equally entitled to inherit in the event of there being no will. And there had been no will.
"I don't want to see all this in your paper, you know," Angela Primero said suddenly. She would have made a good teacher, he thought, reflecting on waste, for she was tender with little children, but stern when she had to be.
"I won't publish any of it," Charles said with perfect truth.
"You'd better not, that's all. The fact is, we couldn't fight it. We wouldn't have stood a chance. In law Roger was perfectly entitled to it all. Mind you, it would have been another story if my grandmother had died a month later."
"I don't quite follow you," said Charles, by now unbearably excited.
"Have you ever seen my brother?"
Charles nodded, then changed it to a shake of the head. She looked at him suspiciously. Then she made a dramatic gesture. She took her sister by the shoulders and pushed her forward for his inspection.
"He's little and dark," she said. "Look at Isabel, look at me. We don't look alike, do we? We don't look like sisters because we aren't sisters and Roger isn't our brother. Oh, Roger is my parents' child all right and Mrs. Primero was his grandmother. My mother couldn't have any more children. They waited eleven years and when they knew it was no good they adopted me. A year later they took Isabel as well."
"But ... I..." Charles stammered. "You were legally adopted, weren't you?"
Angela Primero had recovered her composure. She put her arm round her sister who had begun to cry.
"We were legally adopted all right. That didn't make any difference. Adopted children can't inherit when the dead person has died without making a willor they couldn't in September 1950. They can now. They were making this Act at the time and it became law on October 1st, 1950. Just our luck, wasn't it?"
The photograph in the estate agent's window made Victor's Piece look deceptively attractive. Perhaps the agent had long given up hope of its being sold for anything but its site value, for Archery, enquiring tentatively, was greeted with almost fawning exuberance. He emerged with an order to view, a bunch of keys and permission to go over the house whenever he chose.
No bus was in sight. He walked back to the stop by the Olive and Dove and waited in the shade. Presently he pulled the order to view out of his pocket and scanned it. "Splendid property of character," he read, "that only needs an imaginative owner to give it a new lease of life..." There was no mention of the old tragedy, no hint that violent death had once been its tenant.
Two Dewingbury buses came and one marked Kingsmarkham Station. He was still reading, contrasting the agent's euphemisms with the description in his transcript, when the silver car pulled into the kerb.
"Mr. Archery!"
He turned. The sun blazed back from the arched wings and the glittering screen. Imogen Ide's hair made an even brighter silver-gold flash against the dazzling metal. "I'm on my way to Stowerton. Would you like a lift?"
He was suddenly ridiculously happy. Everything went, his pity for Charles, his grief for Alice Flower, his sense of helplessness against the juggernaut machinery of the law. An absurd dangerous joy possessed him and without stopping to analyse it, he went up to the car. Its body work was as hot as fire, a shivering silver glaze against his hand.
"My son took my car," he said. "I'm not going to Stowerton, just to a place this side of it, a house called Victor's Piece."
She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this and he supposed she knew the story just as everyone else did, for she was looking at him strangely. He got in beside her, his heart beating. The continual rhythmic thudding in his left side was so intense as to be physically painful and he wished it would stop before it made him wince or press his hand to his breast.
"You haven't got Dog with you today," he said.
She moved back into the traffic. "Too hot for him," she said. "Surely you're not thinking of buying Victor's Piece?"
His heart had quietened. "Why, do you know it?"
"It used to belong to a relative of my husband's."
Ide, he thought, Ide. He couldn't remember hearing what had become of the house after Mrs. Primero's death. Perhaps it had been owned by some Ides before it became an old people's home.
"I have a key and an order to view, but I'm certainly not going to buy. It's justwell..."
"Curiosity?" She could not look at him while she was driving but he felt her thoughts directed on him more powerfully than any eyes. "Are you an amateur of crime?" It would have been natural to have used his name, to end the question with it. But she didn't. It seemed to him that she had omitted it because "Mr. Archery" had suddenly become too formal, his Christian name still too intimate. "You know, I think I'll come over it with you," she said. "I don't have to be in Stowerton until half-past twelve. Let me be your guide, may I?"
Imogen Ide will be my guide ... It was a stupid jingle and it tinkled in his ears on a minor key like an old, half-forgotten madrigal. He said nothing but she must have taken his silence for assent, for instead of dropping him at the entry she slowed and turned into the lane where dark gables showed between the trees.
Even on this bright morning the house looked dark and forbidding. Its yellow-brown bricks were crossed with fretted half-timbering and two of its windows were broken. The resemblance between it and the agent's photograph was as slight as that of a holiday postcard to the actual resort. The photographer had cunningly avoided or else subsequently removed the weeds, the brambles, the damp stains, the swinging rotted casements and the general air of decay. He had also succeeded in somehow minimising its rambling size. The gates were broken down and she drove straight through the gap, up the drive and stopped directly before the front door.
This moment should have been important to him, his first sight of the house where Tess's father had committedor had not committedhis crime. His senses should have been alert to absorb atmosphere, to note details of place and distance that the police in their jaded knowledge had overlooked. Instead he was conscious of himself not as an observer, a note-taker, but only as a man living in the present, dwelling in the moment and discarding the past. He felt more alive than he had done for years and because of this he became almost unaware of his surroundings. Things could not affect him, not recorded fact. His emotions were all. He saw and experienced the house only as a deserted place into which he and this woman would soon go and would be alone.
As soon as he had thought this in so many words he knew that he should not go in. He could easily say that he only wanted to look at the grounds. She was getting out of the car now, looking up at the windows and wrinkling her eyelids against the light.
"Shall we go in?" she said.
He put the key in the lock and she was standing close beside him. He had expected a musty smell from the hall but he was hardly aware of it. Shafts of light crossed the place from various dusty windows and motes danced in the beams. There was an old runner on the tiled floor and catching her heel in it, she stumbled. Instinctively he put out his hand to steady her and as he did so he felt her right breast brush his arm.
"Mind how you go," he said, not looking at her. Her shoe had sent up a little cloud of dust and she gave a nervous laugh. Perhaps it was just a normal laugh. He was beyond that kind of analysis, for he could still feel the soft weight against his arm as if she had not stepped quickly away.
"Terribly stuffy in here," she said. "It makes me cough. That's the room where the murder was committedin there." She pushed open a door and he saw a deal board floor, marble fireplace, great bleached patches on the walls where pictures had hung. "The stairs are behind here and on the other side is the kitchen where poor old Alice was cooking the Sunday dinner."
"I don't want to go upstairs," he said quickly. "It's too hot amd dusty. You'll get your dress dirty." He drew a deep breath and, moving far from her, stood against the mantelpiece. Here, just on this spot, Mrs. Primero had felt the first blow of the axe; there the scuttle had stood, here, there, everywhere, the old blood had flowed. "The scene of the crime," he said fatuously.
Her eyes narrowed and she crossed to the window. The silence was terrible and he wanted to fill it with chatter. There was so much to say, so many remarks even mere acquaintances could make to each other on such a spot. The noonday sun cast her shadow in perfect proportion, neither too tall nor grossly dwarfed. It was like a cut-out in black tissue and he wanted to fall to his knees and touch it, knowing it was all he would get.
It was she who spoke first. He hardly knew what he had expected her to say, but not thiscertainly not this.
"You are very like your sonor he's like you."
The tension slackened. He felt cheated and peeved.
"I didn't know you'd met," he said.
To this she made no reply. In her eyes was a tiny gleam of fun. "You didn't tell me he worked for a newspaper."
Archery's stomach turned. She must have been there, at the Primeros'. Was he expected to sustain Charlie's lie?
"He's so very like you," she said. 'It didn't really click, though, until after he'd gone. Then, taking his appearance and his name togetherI suppose Bowman's his pseudonym on the Planet, is it?I guessed. Roger hasn't realised."
"I don't quite understand," Archery began. He would have to explain. "Mrs. Ide..."
She started to laugh, stopped when she saw the dismay in his face. "I think we've both been leading each other up the garden," she said gently. "Ide was my maiden name, the name I used for modelling."
He turned away, pressing the hot palm of his hand against the marble. She took a step towards him and he smelt her scent. "Mrs. Primero was the relative who owned this house, the relative who's buried at Forby?" There was no need to wait for her answer. He sensed her nod. "I don't understand how I can have been such a fool," he said. Worse than a fool. What would she think tomorrow when the Planet came out? He offered up a stupid ashamed prayer that Charles had found out nothing from the woman who was her sister-in-law. "Will you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive, is there?" She sounded truly puzzled, as well she might. He had been asking pardon for future outrages. "I'm just as much to blame as you. I don't know why I didn't tell you I was Imogen Primero." She paused. There was no deceit in it," she said. "Just one of those things. We were dancingsomething else came up ... I don't know."
He raised his head, gave himself a little shake. Then he walked away from her into the hall. "You have to go to Stowerton, I think you said. It was kind of you to bring me."
She was behind him now, her hand on his arm. "Don't look like that. What are you supposed to have done? Nothing, nothing. It was just aa social mistake."
It was a little fragile hand but insistent. Not knowing why, perhaps because she too seemed in need of comfort, he covered it with his own. Instead of withdrawing it, she left her hand under his and as she sighed it trembled faintly. He turned to look at her, feeling shame that was as paralysing as a disease. Her face was only a foot from his, then only inches, then no distance, no face but only a soft mouth.
The shame went in a wave of desire made the more terrible and the more exquisite because he had felt nothing like it for twenty years, perhaps not ever. Since coming down from Oxford he had never kissed any woman but Mary, scarcely been alone with any but the old, the sick or the dying. He did not know how to end the kiss, nor did he know whether this in itself was inexperience or the yearning to prolong something that was so much more, but not enough more, than touching a shadow.
She took herself out of his arms quite suddenly, but without pushing or struggling. There was nothing to struggle against. "Oh, dear," she said, but she didn't smile. Her face was very white.
There were words to explain that kind of thing away. "I don't know what made me do that" or "I was carried away, the impulse of the moment..." He was sick of even the suggestion of lying. Truth itself seemed even more compelling and urgent than his desire and he thought he would speak it even though tomorrow and in the days to come it too would appear to her as a lie.
"I love you. I think I must have loved you from the first moment I saw you. I think that's how it was." He put his hands up to his forehead and his fingertips, though icy cold, seemed to burn just as snow can burn the skin. "I'm married," he said. "You know thatI mean my wife is livingand I'm a clergyman. I've no right to love you and I promise I'll never be alone with you again."
She was very surprised and her eyes widened, but which of his confessions had surprised her he had no idea. It even occurred to him that she might be amazed at hearing from him lucid speech, for up to now he had been almost incoherent. "I mustn't suppose," he said, for his last sentence seemed like vanity, "that there's been any temptation for you." She started to speak, but he went on in a hurry, "Will you not say anything but just drive away?"
She nodded. In spite o
f his prohibition, he longed for her to approach him again, just touch him. It was an impossible hunger that made him breathless. She made a little helpless gesture as if she too were in the grip of an overpowering emotion. Then she turned, her face held awkwardly away from him, ran down the hall and let herself out of the front door.
After she had gone it occurred to him that she had asked no questions as to his reasons for coming to the house. She had said little and he everything that mattered. He thought that he must be going mad, for he could not understand that twenty years of discipline could fall away like a lesson imparted to a bored child.
The house was as it had been described in the transcript of the trial. He noticed its layout without emotion or empathy, the long passage that ran from the front door to the door at the back where Painter's coat had hung, the kitchen, the narrow, wall-confined stairs. A kind of cerebral paralysis descended on him and he moved towards that back door, withdrawing the bolts numbly.
The garden was very still, overgrown, basking under a brazen sky. The light and the heat made him dizzy. At first he could not see the coach house at all. Then he realised he had been looking at it ever since he stepped into the garden, but what he had taken for a great quivering bush was in fact solid bricks and mortar hidden under a blanket of Virginia creeper. He walked towards it, not interested, not in the least curious. He walked because it was something to do and because this house of a million faintly trembling leaves was at least a kind of goal.
The doors were fastened with a padlock. Archery was relieved. It deprived him of the need for any action. He leant against the wall and the leaves were cold and damp against his face. Presently he went down the drive and through the gateless entrance. Of course, the silver car would not be there. It wasn't. A bus came almost immediately. He had quite forgotten that he had omitted to lock the back door of Victor's Piece.
