by Ruth Rendell
‘The thing is,’ Smith-King was saying, ‘it’s getting bigger. No getting away from it.’
‘I’d better take a look at it.’ Greenleaf said.
A fourth couple had joined the dancers. Greenleaf felt relieved. Patrick was a difficult fellow at the best of times but he could rise to an occasion. It was nice to see him rescuing the Carnaby girl and dancing with her as if he really wanted to.
‘You will?’ Smith-King half-rose. His movement seemed to sketch the shedding of garments.
‘Not now,’ Greenleaf said, alarmed. ‘Come down to the surgery.’
The sun had quite gone now, even the last lingering rays, and dusk was coming to the garden. Tamsin had broken away from Gage and gone to switch on the fairy lights. But for the intervention of his wife who marched on to the patio exclaiming loudly about the gnats, Gage would have followed her.
‘How I hate beastly insects,’ Nancy grumbled. ‘You’d think with all this D.D.T. and everything there just wouldn’t be any more mosquitos.’ She glared at Marvell. ‘I feel itchy all over.’
As if at a signal Walter Miller and Edith Gaveston broke simultaneously into gnat-bite anecdotes. Joan Smith-King gravitated towards Greenleaf as people so often did with minor ailments even on social occasions, and stood in front of him scratching her arms. He got up at once to let her sit next to her husband but as he turned he saw Denholm’s chair was empty. Then he saw him standing in the now deserted dining room confronting Patrick. The indispensable cigarette was in his mouth. Greenleaf couldn’t hear what he was saying, only Joan’s heavy breathing loud and strained above the buzz of conversation. The cigarette trembled, adhering to Denholm’s lip, and his hands moved in a gesture of hopelessness. Patrick laughed suddenly and turning away, strode into the garden as the lights came on.
Greenleaf, not sensitive to a so-called romantic atmosphere, was unmoved by the strings of coloured globes. But most of the women cried out automatically. Fairy lights were the thing; they indicated affluence, taste, organisation. With little yelps of delight Nancy ran up and down, pointing and exhorting the others to come and have a closer look.
‘So glad you like them,’ Tamsin said. ‘We do.’ Patrick coughed, dissociating himself. He was taking his duties to heart, Greenleaf thought, watching his hand enclose Freda Carnaby’s in a tight grip.
‘Now, have we all got drinks?’ Tamsin reached for Marvell’s empty glass. ‘Crispin, your poor arms!’
‘There are mosquitos at the bottom of your garden,’ Marvell said, laughing. ‘I meant to bring some citronella but I forgot.’
‘Oh, but we’ve got some. I’ll get it.’
‘No, I’ll go. You want to dance.’
Gage had already claimed her, his arm about her waist.
‘I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in the spare bedroom bathroom. Top shelf of the cabinet.’
Joan Smith-King was giggling enviously.
‘Oh, do you have two bathrooms? How grand!’
‘Just through the spare room,’ Tamsin said, ignoring her.
‘You know the way.’
The expression in her eyes shocked Greenleaf. It was as if, he thought, she was playing some dangerous game.
‘I’m being absurd,’ he said to Bernice.
‘Oh, no darling, you’re such a practical man. Why are you being absurd anyway?’
‘Nothing,’ Greenleaf said.
Marvell came back holding a bottle. He had already unstoppered it and was anointing his arms.
‘Thank you so much,’ he said to Tamsin, ‘Madame Tussand.’
Tamsin gabbled at him quickly.
‘You found the stuff? Marvellous. No, sweetie, that isn’t a pun. Come and dance.’
‘I am for other than for dancing measures,’ Marvell laughed. ‘I’ve been in the chamber of horrors and I need a drink.’ He helped himself from the sideboard. ‘You might have warned me.’
‘What do you mean, chamber of horrors?’ Nancy was wide-eyed. The party was beginning to flag and she was eager for something to buoy it up and, if possible, prise Oliver away from Tamsin. ‘Have you been seeing ghosts?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Tell, tell!’
Suddenly Tamsin whirled away from Oliver and throwing up her arms, seized Marvell to spin him away past the record player, past the birthday table, across the patio and out on to the lawn.
‘Let’s all go,’ she cried. ‘Come and see the skeleton in the cupboard!’
They began to file out into the hall, the women giggling expectantly. Marvell went first, his drink in his hand. Only Patrick hung back until Freda took his hand and whispered something to him. Even Smith-King, usually obtuse, noticed his unease.
‘Lead on, Macduff!’ he said.
6
If it had been earlier in the day or even if the lights had been on it would have looked very different. But as it was—day melting into night, the light half-gone and the air so still that nothing moved, not even the net curtains at the open windows—the effect was instant and, for a single foolish moment, shocking.
Marvell pulled a face. The other men stared, Paul Gaveston making a noise that sounded like a snort. Smith-King whistled, then broke into a hearty laugh.
The women expressed varying kinds of horror, squeals, hands clamped to mouths, but only Freda sounded genuinely distressed. She was standing dose to Greenleaf. He heard her low gasp and felt her shudder.
‘Definitely not my cup of tea,’ Nancy said. ‘Imagine forgetting it was there and then coming face to face with it in the night on your way to the loo!’
Greenleaf was suddenly sickened. Of all the people in the Selby’s spare room he was the only one who had ever seen an actual head that had been severed from an actual body. The first one he had encountered as a student, the second had been the subject of a post-mortem conducted on a man decapitated in a railway accident Because of this and for other reasons connected with his psychological make-up, he was at the same time more and less affected by the picture than were the other guests.
It was a large picture, an oil painting in a frame of scratched gilt, and it stood propped on the floor against the watered silk wallpaper. Greenleaf knew nothing at all about painting and the view many people take that all life—or all death—is a fit subject for art would have appalled him. Of brushwork, of colour, he was ignorant, but he knew a good deal about anatomy and a fair amount about sexual perversion. Therefore he was able to admire the artist for his accuracy—the hewn neck on the silver platter showed the correct vertebra and the jugular in its proper place—and deplore a mentality which thought sadism a suitable subject for entertainment. Greenleaf hated cruelty; all the suffering of all his ancestors in the ghettos of Eastern Europe was strong within him. He stuck out his thick underlip, took off his glasses and began polishing them on his alpaca jacket.
Thus he was unable to see for a moment the face of the man who stood near him on the other side of Freda Carnaby, the man whose house this was. But he heard the intake of breath and the faint smothered cry.
‘But just look at the awful way she’s staring at that ghastly head,’ Nancy cried, clutching Oliver’s hand. ‘I think I ought to understand what it means, but I don’t.’
‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ her husband said crisply.
‘What is it, Tamsin? What’s it supposed to be?’
Tamsin had drawn her fingers across the thick painted surface, letting a nail rest at the pool of blood.
‘Salome and John the Baptist,’ Marvell said. He was quickly bored by displays of naiveté and he had gone to the window. Now he turned round, smiling. ‘Of course she wouldn’t have been dressed like that. The artist put her in contemporary clothes. Who painted it, Tamsin?’
‘I just wouldn’t know,’ Tamsin shrugged. ‘It was my grandmother’s. I lived with her, you see, and I grew up with it, so it doesn’t affect me all that much any more. I used to love it when I was a little girl. Too dreadful of me!’
‘You’re n
ever going to hang it on the wall?’ Clare Miller asked.
‘I might. I don’t know yet. When my grandmother died two years ago she left all her furniture to a friend, a Mrs. Prynne. I happened to be visiting her a couple of months ago and of course I absolutely drooled over this thing. So she said she’d send it to me for my birthday and here it is.’
‘Rather you than I.’
‘I might put it on the dining-room wall. D’you think it would go well with a grilled steak?’
They had all looked at the picture. Everyone had said something if only to exclaim with thrilled horror. Only Patrick had kept silent and Greenleaf, puzzled, turned now to look at him. Patrick’s face was deathly white under the cloud of freckles. Somehow the freckles made him look worse, the pallor of his skin blotched with what looked like bruises. When at last he spoke his voice was loud and unsteady and the icy poise quite gone.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘the joke’s over. Excuse me.’ He pushed at Edward Carnaby, shoving him aside with his shoulder and stripping the counterpane from one of the beds, flung it across the picture. But instead of catching on the topmost beading of the frame it slipped and fell to the floor. The effect of its falling, like the sweeping away of a curtain, exposed the picture with a sudden vividness. The gloating eyes, the parted lips and the plump bosom of Herod’s niece arose before them in the gloom. She seemed to be watching with a dreadful satisfaction the slithering silk as it unveiled the trophy in the dish.
‘You bitch!’ Patrick said.
There was a shocked silence. Then Tamsin stepped forward and looped the counterpane up. Salome was veiled.
‘Oh, really!’ she said. ‘It was just a joke, darling. You are rude.’
Smith-King moved uneasily.
‘Getting late, Joanie,’ he said. ‘Beddy-byes.’
‘It’s not ten yet.’ Tamsin caught Patrick’s hand and leaning towards him, kissed him lightly on the cheek. He remained quite still, the colour returning to his face, but he didn’t look at her. ‘We haven’t eaten yet. All that lovely food!’
‘Ah, food.’ Smith-King rubbed his hands together. It would be another story if a scene could be avoided and Patrick perhaps yet made amenable. ‘Must keep body and soul together.’
‘The wolf from the door?’ Marvell said softly.
‘That’s the ticket.’ He slapped Marvell on the back.
Patrick seemed to realise that his hand was still resting in Tamsin’s. He snatched it away, marched out of the room and down the stairs, his dignity returning. With a defiant glance at Tamsin, Freda followed him.
‘It’s a lovely night,’ Tamsin cried. ‘Let’s go into the garden and take the food with us.’ Her eyes were very bright. She linked her arm into Oliver’s and as an afterthought clasped Nancy’s hand and swung it. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!’
They went downstairs and Tamsin danced into the dining-room. Greenleaf thought they had seen the last of Patrick for that night, but he was on the patio, subdued, his face expressionless, arranging plates on the wicker tables. Freda Carnaby stood by him, sycophantic, adoring.
‘Well!’ said Nancy Gage. She pulled her chair up alongside Greenleaf’s. ‘I thought Patrick made an exhibition of himself, didn’t you? Immature I call it, making all that fuss about a picture.’
‘It is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.’ Marvell passed her a plate of smoked salmon rolled up in brown bread.
‘Juvenile,’ Nancy said. ‘I mean, it’s not as if it was a film. I don’t mind admitting I’ve seen some horror films that have absolutely terrified me. I’ve wakened in the night bathed in perspiration, haven’t I, Oliver?’ Oliver was too far away to hear. He sat on the stone wall in gloomy conference with Tamsin.
Nancy, beckoning to him, raised the salmon roll blindly to her mouth.
‘Look out!’ Greenleaf said quickly. He knocked the roll out of her hand. ‘A wasp,’ he explained as she jumped. ‘You were going to eat it.’
‘Oh, no!’ Nancy leapt to her feet and shook her skirt. ‘I hate them, I’m terrified of them.’
‘It’s all right. It’s gone.’
‘No, it hasn’t Look, there’s another one.’ Nancy flapped her arms as a wasp winged past her face, circled her head and alighted on a fruit flan. ‘Oliver, there’s one in my hair!’
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Tamsin got up reluctantly and came between the tables. ‘Oh, wasps. Too maddening.’ She was taller than Nancy and she blew lightly on the fair curls. ‘It’s gone, anyway.’
‘You shouldn’t have brought the food out,’ Patrick said. ‘You would do it.’ Since he had been the first to do so, this, Greenleaf thought, was hardly fair. ‘I hate this damned inefficiency. Look, dozens of them!’
Everyone had pushed back their chairs, leaving their food half-eaten. The striped insects descended upon the tables making first for fruit and cream. They seemed to drop from the skies and they came quite slowly, wheeling first above the food with a sluggish yet purposeful concentration like enemy aircraft engaged in a reconnaissance. Then, one by one, they dropped upon pastry and jelly, greedy for the sweet things. Their wings vibrated.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Tamsin said. Her hand dived for a plate of petit fours but she withdrew it quickly with a little scream. ‘Get off me, hateful wasp! Patrick, do something.’ He was standing beside her but further removed perhaps than he had ever been. Exasperated and bored, his hands in his pockets, he stared at the feasting insects. ‘Get the food in!’
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ Marvell said. ‘They’re all over the dining-room.’ He looked roofwards. ‘You’ve got a nest, you know.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Walter Miller who lived next door. ‘I said to Clare only yesterday, you mark my words, I said, the Selbys have got a wasp nest in their roof.’
‘What are we going to do about it?’
‘Kill them.’ Edward Carnaby had opened his mouth to no one except his sister since, on their arrival, Tamsin had snubbed him. Now his hour had come. ‘Exterminate them,’ he said. He pulled the tin of Vesprid from its bag and dumped it in the middle of the table where Nancy, Marvell and Greenleaf had been sitting.
‘You should have let me do it before,’ he said to Tamsin.
‘Do it? Do what?’ Tamsin looked at the Vesprid. ‘What do you do, spray it on them?’
Edward seemed to be about to embark on a long technical explanation. He took a deep breath.
Walter Miller said quickly: ‘You’ll want a ladder. There’s one in my garage.’
‘Right,’ said Edward. ‘The first thing is to locate the nest. I’ll need someone to give me a hand.’ Marvell got up.
‘No, Crispin, Patrick will go.’ Tamsin touched her husband’s arm. ‘Come on, darling. You can’t let your guests do all the work.’
For a moment he looked as if he could. He glanced mulishly from Marvell to his wife. Then, without speaking to or even looking at Edward, he started to walk towards the gate.
‘Blood sports, Tamsin,’ Marvell said. ‘Your parties are unique.’
When Patrick and Edward came back carrying Miller’s ladder the others had moved out on to the lawn. By now the patio was clouded with wasps. Droves of them gathered on the tables. The less fortunate late-comers zoomed enviously a yard above their fellows, fire-flies in the radiance from the fairy lights.
Edward propped the ladder against the house wall. Making sure his heroics were witnessed, he thrust a hand among the cakes and grabbed one swiftly. Then he unscrewed the cap on the Vesprid tin and poured a little liquid on to the pastry.
‘You’d better nip up to the spare bedroom,’ he said to Patrick importantly. ‘I reckon the nest’s just above the bathroom window.’
‘What for?’ Patrick had paled and Greenleaf thought he knew why.
‘I shall want some more light, shan’t I?’ Edward was enjoying himself. ‘And someone’ll have to hand this to me.’ He made as if to thrust the poisoned cake into hi
s host’s hand.
‘I am going up the ladder,’ Patrick said icily.
Edward began to argue. He was the expert, wasn’t he? Hadn’t he just dealt efficiently with a nest of his own?
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Tamsin said. ‘This is supposed to be my birthday party.’
In the end Edward went rebelliously indoors carrying his bait. Marvell stood at the bottom of the ladder, steadying it, and when a light appeared at the bathroom window, Patrick began to climb. From the lawn they watched him peer along the eaves, his face white and tense in the patch of light. Then he called out with the only flash of humour he had permitted himself that evening:
‘I’ve found it. Apparently there’s no one at home.’
‘I reckon they’ve all gone to a party,’ Edward called. Delighted because someone on the lawn had laughed, he licked his lips and pushed the cake toward Patrick. ‘Supper,’ he said.
Greenleaf found himself standing close by Oliver Gage and he turned to him to make some comment on the proceedings, but something in the other man’s expression stopped him. He was staring at the figure on the ladder and his narrow red lips were wet. Greenleaf saw that he was clenching and unclenching his hands.
‘Oh, look! What’s happening?’ Suddenly Nancy clutched Greenleaf’s arm and, startled, he looked roofwards.
Patrick had started violently, arching his back away from the ladder. He shouted something. Then they saw him wince, hunch his shoulders and cover his face with his free arm.
‘He’s been stung,’ Greenleaf heard Gage say flatly, ‘and serve him bloody well right.’ He didn’t move but Greenleaf hurried forward to join the others who had gathered at the foot of the ladder. Three wasps were encircling Patrick’s head, wheeling about him and making apparently for his closed eyes. They saw him for a moment, fighting, both arms flailing, his blind face twisted. Then Edward disappeared and the light went out. Now Patrick was just a silhouette against the clear turquoise sky and to Greenleaf he looked like a marionette of crumpled black paper whose convulsively beating arms seemed jerked by unseen strings.
