by Ruth Rendell
‘I’ll do it right now. Get it over.’ He closed the dictionary. Briller. To shine, to glow, emit a radiance. The verb perfectly expressed his own mental state. He was glowing with satisfaction and anticipation. Edouard brille, he said to himself, chuckling aloud. ‘I’ve promised to pass the stuff on to some people.’
‘What people?’
‘The gorgeous Mrs. Selby, if you must know. I met her last night and she was all over me. Insisted I go to her party tonight.’ Now you couldn’t say things like that to a wife. ‘She wouldn’t take No for an answer,’ he said.
Freda sat down.
‘You’re kidding. You don’t know Tamsin.’
‘Tamsin! That’s all right, that is. Since when have you and her been so pally?’
‘And what about me? Where do I come in?’
‘Now, look, Free, I’m counting on you to sit in with Cheryl.’
The tears welled into her eyes. After all that had happened, all the love, the promises, the wonderful evenings. Of course it wasn’t his fault. It was Tamsin’s party. But to ask Edward!
There’s no need to get into a tiz. She said I could bring a friend. I don’t know about Cheryl, though.’
‘Mrs. Saxton’ll sit,’ Freda said eagerly. ‘She’s always offering.’ Seeing his face still doubtful, his eyes already returning to the French primer, she burst out miserably, Ted, I want to go to the party! I’ve got a right. I’ve got more right than you.’
Hysteria in Freda was something new. He closed the book.
‘What are you talking about?’ She was his twin and he could feel the pull of her mind, almost read her thoughts. A terrible unease visited him and he thought of the previous night, the woman’s eyes staring past him towards the pond, her sudden unexplained coldness when he had said who he was.
‘Freda!’
It all came out then and Edward listened, angry and afraid. The happy mood had gone sour on him.
5
Strings of little coloured bulbs festooned the willow trees. As soon as it grew dusk they would be switched on to glow red, orange, green and cold blue against the dark foliage of the oaks in the Millers’ garden next door.
Tamsin had shut the food and drink in the dining room away from the wasps. Although she had only seen two throughout the whole day she closed the double windows to be on the safe side. The room was tidy, and apart from the food, bare. Functional, Patrick called it. Now, cleaned by him while Tamsin hovered helplessly in the background, it met even his exacting requirements.
‘It is, after all, a dining room, not a glory hole,’ he had remarked in a chill voice to the vacuum cleaner. To his wife be said nothing, but his look meant Please don’t interfere with my arrangements. When the tools were put away and the dusters carefully washed, he had taken the dog to Sherwood Forest, smug, silent with his private joy.
It was too late not to bother with a show of loving obedience. Tamsin dressed, wishing she had something bright and gay, but all her clothes were subdued—to please Patrick. Then she went into the dining room and helped herself to whisky, pouring straight into a tumbler almost as if it was the last drink she would ever have. Nobody had wished her a happy birthday yet but she had had plenty of cards. Defiantly she took them from the sideboard drawer and arranged them on top of the radiator. There were about a dozen of them, facetious ones showing dishevelled housewives amid piles of crocks; conventional ones (a family of Dartmoor ponies); one whose picture had a secret significance, whose message meant something special to her and to its sender. It was unsigned but Tamsin knew who had sent it. She screwed it up quickly for the sight of it with its cool presumption only deepened her misery.
‘Many happy returns of the day, Tamsin,’ she said shakily, raising her glass. She sighed and the cards fluttered. Somehow she would have liked to break the glass, hurl it absurdly against Patrick’s white wall, because she had come to an end. A new life was beginning. The drink was a symbol of the old life and so was the dress she wore, silver-grey, clinging, expensive. She put the glass down carefully (her old habits died hard), looked at the cards and blinked to stop herself crying. For there should have been one more, bigger than the others, an austere costly card that said To My Wife.
Patrick was never late. He came back on the dot of seven in time to bath and shave and leave the bathroom tidy, and by then she had washed her glass, returning it to its place in the sideboard. She heard the bathroom door close and the key turn in the lock. Patrick was careful about propriety.
Tamsin remained in the dining room for some minutes, feeling an almost suicidal despair. In an hour or so her guests would begin to arrive and they would expect her to be gay because she was young and rich and beautiful and because it was her birthday. If she could get out of the house for a few minutes she might feel better. With Queenie at her heels she took her trug and went down to where the currants grew in what had been the Manor kitchen gardens. The dog lay down in the sun and Tamsin began stripping the bushes of their ripe white fruit.
‘I will try to be gay,’ she said to herself, or perhaps to the dog, ‘for a little while.’
Edward and Freda came up to the front doors of Hallows at a quarter to eight and it was Edward who rang the bell. Freda, whose only reading matter was her weekly women’s magazine, had sometimes encountered the cliché ‘rooted to the spot’ and that was how she felt standing on the swept white stones, immobile, stiff with terror, a sick bile stirring between her stomach and her throat.
No one came to the door. Freda watched her brother enviously. Not for him the problem of what to do with one’s sticky and suddenly over-large hands that twitched and fretted as if seeking some resting place; he had the Vesprid in its brown paper bag to hold.
‘Better go round the back,’ he said truculently.
It was monastically quiet. The creak of the wrought iron gate made Freda jump as Edward pushed it open. They walked round the side of the house and stopped when they came to the patio. The garden lay before them, waiting, expectant, but not as for a party. It was rather as if it had been prepared for the arrival of some photographer whose carefully angled shots would provide pictures for one of those very magazines. Freda had read a feature the previous week, Ideal Homesteads in the New Britain, and the illustrations had shown just such a garden, lawns ribbed in pale and dark green where the mower had crossed them, trees and shrubs whose leaves looked as if they had been individually dusted. At the other end of the patio someone had arranged tables and chairs, some of straw-coloured wicker, others of white-painted twisted metal. A small spark of pleasure and admiration broke across Freda’s fear, only to be extinguished almost at once by the sound of water gurgling down a drainpipe behind her ankles. A sign of life, of habitation.
The garden, the house, looked, she thought, as if it hadn’t been kept outside at all, as if it had been preserved up to this moment under glass. But she was unable to express this thought in words and instead said foolishly:
There isn’t anybody about. You must have got the wrong night.’
He scowled and she wondered again why he had come, what he was going to say or do. Was it simply kindness to her—for he was, as it were, her key to this house—Tamsin’s fascination or something more?
‘You won’t say anything, will you? You won’t say anything to show me up?’
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I want to see how the land lies, what sort of a mess you’ve got yourself into. I’m not promising anything, Free.’
Minutes passed, unchanging minutes in which the sleek garden swam before her eyes. Then something happened, something which caused the first crack to appear in Edward’s insecure courage.
From behind the willows came a sound familiar to Freda, a long drawn-out bay. Queenie. Edward jerked convulsively and dropped the Vesprid with a clang—a clang like the crack of doom as the dog bounded from a curtain of shrubs and stopped a yard from him. It was an ominous sound that came from her, a throb rather than an actual noise, and Edward seemed to grow smaller. He p
icked up the tin and held it in front of him, a ridiculous and wholly inadequate shield.
‘Oh, Queenie!’ Freda put out her hand. ‘It’s all right. It’s me.’
The dog advanced, wriggling now, to lick the outstretched fingers, when the gate opened and a tall fair man entered the garden. He was wearing a green shirt over slacks and Edward at once felt that his own sports jacket (Harris tweed knocked down to eighty nine and eleven) was unsuitable, an anachronism.
‘How do you do?’
He was carrying something that looked like a bottle wrapped in ancient yellowing newspaper, and a huge bunch of roses. The roses were perfect, each bud closed yet about to unfurl, and their stems had been shorn of thorns.
‘I don’t think we’ve met. My name’s Marvell.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Edward said. He transferred the Vesprid to his left arm and shook hands. ‘This is my sister, Miss Carnaby.’
‘Where is everyone?’
‘We don’t know,’ Freda said sullenly. Till you came we thought we’d got the wrong night.’
‘Oh, no, this is Tamsin’s birthday.’ He pushed Queenie down, smiled suddenly and waved. ‘There she is picking my currants, bless her! Will you excuse me?’
‘Well!’ Freda said. ‘If those are county manners you can keep them.’
She watched him stride off down the path and then she saw Patrick’s wife. Tamsin got to her feet like a silvery dryad arising from her natural habitat, ran up to Marvell and kissed him on the cheek. They came back together, Tamsin’s face buried in roses.
‘Josephine Bruce, that’s the gorgeous dark red one,’ Freda heard her say. ‘Virgo, snow-white; Super Star—Oh, lovely, lovely, vermilion! And the big peachy beauty—this one—is Peace. You see, Crispin, I am learning.’
She stepped on the greyish-gold stone of the patio and dropped the roses on to a wicker table. The Weimaraner romped over to her and placed her paws on the table’s plaited rim.
‘And look, lovely mead! You are sweet to me, Crispin.’
‘You look like one of those plushy calendars,’ Marvell said laughing. ‘The respectable kind you see in garages on the Motorway. All girl and dog and flowers and liquor, the good things of life.’
‘Wein, Weib und Gesang, as Patrick says.’ Tamsin’s voice was low and her face clouded.
Edward coughed.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘O God, I’m so sorry.’ Marvell was crestfallen. ‘Tamsin dear, I’m keeping you from your guests.’
Afterwards, looking back, Freda thought Tamsin honestly hadn’t known who they were. And after all Edward’s stupid airs! Tamsin’s face had grown dull and almost ugly; her eyes, large and tawny, seemed to blank out. She stood looking at them still holding a rose against her paintless lips. At last she said:
‘I know! The man who goes to evening class.’
Freda wanted to go then, to slink back against the stone wall, slither between the house and the wattle fence and then run and run until she came to the chalets behind the elms. But Edward was holding her arm. He yanked her forward, exposing her to their gaze like a dealer with his single slave.
‘This is my sister. You said I could bring someone.’
Tamsin’s face hardened. It was exactly like one of those African art masks, Freda thought, the beautiful goddess one in the saloon bar of that roadhouse on the Southwell road. Freda knew she wasn’t going to shake hands.
‘Well, now you’re here you must have a drink. Masses of drink in the dining room. Where’s Patrick?’ She looked up to the open windows on the first floor. ‘Patrick!’
Edward thrust the Vesprid at her.
‘A present? How very sweet of you.’
She pulled the tin out of the bag and giggled. Freda thought she was hysterical—or drunk.
‘It’s not exactly a present,’ Edward said desperately. ‘You said to bring it. You said to come early. We could do the wasps.’
‘The wasps? Oh, but I’ve only seen one or two today. We won’t worry about wasps.’ She flung back the doors and Patrick must have been standing just within. He stepped out poised, smiling, smelling of bath salts. ‘Here’s my husband. Do go and check the lights, darling.’ And she linked her arm into his, smiling brightly.
Freda could feel herself beginning to tremble. She knew her face had paled, then filled with burning blood. Her hand fumbled its way into Patrick’s, gaining life and strength as she felt the faint special pressure and the familiar cold touch of his ring. As it came to Edward’s turn her heart knocked, but the handshake passed off conventionally. Edward’s spirit was broken and he gazed at Patrick dumbly, half-hypnotised.
‘What’s this?’
Patrick picked up the Vesprid and looked at the label.
Freda couldn’t help admiring his aplomb, the coldly masterful way he shook off Tamsin’s hand.
‘Doesn’t it look horrible on my birthday table?’ Tamsin bundled the tin back into the paper and pushed it into Edward’s arms. She took his fingers in her own and curled them round the parcel. There. You look after it, sweetie, or pop it in a safe place. We don’t want it mingling with the drinks, do we?’
Then Marvell rescued them and took them into the dining room.
By the time Greenleaf and Bernice got to Hallows everyone had arrived. He had been called out to a man with renal colic and it was eight before he got back. Fortunately Bernice never nagged but waited for him patiently, smoking and playing patience in the morning room.
‘I shall wear my alpaca jacket,’ Greenleaf said. ‘So it makes me look like a bowls player? What do I care? I’m not a teenager.’
‘No, darling,’ said Bernice. ‘You’re a very handsome mature man. Who wants to be a teenager?’
‘Not me, unless you can be one too.’
Well-contented with each other, they set off in a happy frame of mind. They took the short cut across the Green and paused to watch the swans. Greenleaf held his wife’s hand.
‘At last,’ Denholm Smith-King said as they appeared in the patio. ‘I was just saying to Joan, is there a doctor in the house?’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Greenleaf mechanically. ‘I hope no-one’s going to need one. I’ve come to enjoy myself.’ He waved to Tamsin who came from the record-player to greet him. ‘Happy birthday. Nice of you to ask us.’ He pointed to the now loaded table. ‘What’s all this?’
‘My lovely presents. Look, chocs from Oliver and Nancy, this marvellous bag thing from Edith.’ Tamsin held the gifts up in turn, pointing at the bag as she raised it. ‘Sweet delicious marrons glacés from Joan, and Crispin brought me—what d’you think? Wine and roses. Wasn’t that lovely?’
Marvell smiled from behind her, looking boyish. ‘Thy shadow, Cynara,’ he said. ‘The night is thine.…’
‘So kind! And Bernice …’ She unwrapped the tiny phial of scent Bernice had put into her hand. ‘Nuit de Beltane! How gorgeous. And I’ve just been telling Nancy how lovely she smells. Imagine, she’s wearing it herself. You’re all so good to me.’ She waved a long brown hand as if their munificence exhausted her, making her more languid than usual.
Greenleaf crammed himself into a small wicker armchair. From within the dining room the music had begun the Beguine.
‘Your daughter not coming?’ he said to Edith Gaveston.
She sniffed. ‘Much too square for Linda.’
‘I suppose so.’
Tamsin had gone, swept away in the arms of Oliver Gage.
‘If you’ve a minute,’ said Denholm Smith-King, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages. It’s about a lump I’ve got under my arm.…’
Greenleaf, preparing for a busman’s holiday, took the drink Patrick held out to him, but Smith-King was temporarily diverted. He looked quickly about him as if to make sure that most of the others were dancing, and he touched Patrick’s arm nervously.
‘Oh, Pat, old man.…’
‘Not now, Denholm.’ Patrick’s smile was brief, mechanical, gone in a flash. ‘I don’t care to mix bu
siness with pleasure.’
‘Later then?’
Patrick glanced at the ashtray Smith-King was filling with stubs, opened the cigarette box insolently and let the lid fall almost instantly.
‘I’m not surprised you’ve got a lump,’ he said, ‘but don’t bore my guests, will you?’
‘Funny chap,’ Smith-King said and an uneasy flush seeped across his face. ‘Doesn’t care what he says.’ The red faded as Patrick strolled away. ‘Now about this said lump.…’
Greenleaf turned towards him and tried to look as if he was listening while keeping his thoughts and half an eye on the other guests.
Most of them were his patients except the Selbys and the Gavestons who were on Dr. Howard’s private list, but he sized them up now from a psychological rather than a medical standpoint. As he sometimes said to Bernice, he had to know about human nature, it was part of his job.
The Carnabys now, they weren’t enjoying themselves. They sat apart from the rest in a couple of deck chairs on the lawn and they weren’t talking to each other. Freda had hidden her empty shandy glass under the seat; Carnaby, like a parent clutching his rejected child, sat dourly, holding what looked like a tin in one of Waller’s paper wrappings.
Beyond them among the currant bushes Marvell was showing Joan and Nancy the ancient glories of the Manor kitchen gardens. Greenleaf knew little about women’s fashions but Nancy’s dress looked out of place to him, ill-fitting (she’ll have to watch her weight, said the medical part of him, or her blood pressure will go soaring up in ten years’ time). It contrasted badly with the expensive scent she wore, whiffs of which he had caught while they were standing together by Tamsin’s birthday table. Why, incidentally, had Gage looked as black thunder when Bernice handed over their own phial of perfume?
He was dancing with Tamsin now and of the three couples on the floor they were the best matched. Clare and Walter Miller lumbered past him, resolutely foxtrotting out of time. Rather against her will Bernice had been coaxed into the arms of Old Paul Gaveston who, too conscious of the proprieties to hold her close, stared poker-faced over her shoulder, his embracing hand a good two inches from her back. Greenleaf smiled to himself. Gage was without such inhibitions. His smooth dusky cheek was pressed close to Tamsin’s, his body fused with hers. They hardly moved but swayed slowly, almost indecently, on a square yard of floor. Well, well, thought Greenleaf. The music died away and broke suddenly into a mambo.
