by Ruth Rendell
That is not to say there were no strangenesses. I am sure there was much that was unique in the village and that much of what happened there happened nowhere else in England. Well, I know it now, of course, but even then, when I first came and in those first years . . .
I told Ben some of it before he left. I thought I owed him that.
“I shan’t want to socialize with a lot of middle-class people,” he said.
“You won’t be able to. There aren’t any.”
His lack of surprise was due, I think, to his ignorance of country life. I had told him that the usual mix of the working people whose families had been there for generations with commuters, doctors, solicitors, retired bank managers, university professors, schoolteachers, and businessmen wasn’t to be found. A parson had once been in the rectory, but for a couple of years the church had been served by the vicar of a parish some five miles away, who held a service once a week.
“I’d never thought of you as a snob, Louise,” said Ben.
“It isn’t snobbery,” I said. “It’s fact.”
There were no county people, no “squire,” no master of foxhounds or titled lady. No houses existed to put them in. A farmer from Lynn had bought the rectory. The hall, a pretty Georgian manor house of which a print hung in my house, had burned down in the fifties.
“It belongs to the people,” I said. “You’ll see.”
“A sort of ideal communism,” he said, “the kind we’re told never works.”
“It works. For them.”
Did it? I wondered, after I’d said it, what I’d meant. Did it really belong to the people? How could it? The people there were as poor and hard-pressed as anywhere else; there was the same unemployment, the same number living on benefit, the same lack of work for the agricultural laborer driven from the land by mechanization.Yet another strange thing was that the young people didn’t leave. There was no exodus of school graduates and the newly married. They stayed, and somehow there were enough houses to accommodate them. The old people, when they became infirm, were received, apparently with joy, into the homes of their children.
Ben went down there one afternoon in May, and he phoned that night to tell me he’d arrived and all was well. That was all he said then. Nothing about Sandy and the girl. For all I knew he had simply let himself into the house without seeing a soul.
“I can hear birds singing,” he said. “It’s dark, and I can hear birds. How can that be?”
“Nightingales,” I said.
“I didn’t know there were such things anymore.”
And though he didn’t say, I had the impression that he put the phone down quickly so that he could go outside and listen to the nightingales.
The front door was opened to him before he had a chance to use his key. They had heard the car or seen him coming from a window, having plenty of opportunity to do that, for he had stopped for a while at the point where the road comes closest to the lake. He wanted to look at the view.
He’d left London much later than I thought he would, not till after six, and the sun was setting.The lake was glazed with pink and purple, reflecting the sky, and it was perfectly calm, its smooth and glassy surface broken only by the dark green pallets of water-lily pads. Beyond the farther shore the forest grew black and mysterious as the light withdrew into that darkening sky. He’d been depressed, “feeling low,” as he put it, and the sight of the lake and the woodland, the calmness and the colors, if they hardly made him happy, comforted him and steadied him into a kind of acceptance of things. He must have stood there gazing, watching the light fade, for some minutes, perhaps ten, and they must have watched him and wondered how long it would be before he got back into the car.
The front door came open as he was feeling in his pocket for the key. A girl stood there, holding the door, not saying anything, not smiling, just holding the door and stepping back to let him come in. The absurd idea came to him that this was the same girl, the one he had seen bathing, and for a few minutes he was sure it was; it didn’t seem absurd to him.
He even gave some sort of utterance to that thought. “You,” he said. “What are you... ?”
“Just here to see everything’s all right, sir.” She spoke deferentially but in a practical way, a sensible way. “Making sure you’re comfortable.”
“But haven’t I—no. No, I’m sorry.” He saw his mistake in the light of the hallway. “I thought we’d”— met was not quite the word he wanted— “seen each other before.”
“Oh, no.” She looked at him gravely. “I’d remember if I’d seen you before.”
She spoke with the broad up-and-down intonation they have in this part of the country, a woodland singsong burr. He saw now in the lamplight that she was much younger than the woman he had seen bathing, though as tall. Her height had deceived him, that and her fairness and her pallor. He thought then that he had never seen anyone who was not ill look so delicate and so fragile.
“Like a drawing of a fairy,” he said to me, “in a children’s book. Does that give you an idea? Like a mythological creature from this book I’m translating, Oenone, the fountain nymph, perhaps. Tall but so slight and frail that you wonder that she can have a physical existence.”
She offered to carry his luggage upstairs for him. It seemed to him the most preposterous suggestion he had ever heard, that this fey being, a flower on a stalk, should be able to lift even his laptop. He fetched the cases himself and she watched him, smiling. Her smile was intimate, almost conspiratorial, as if they shared some past unforgettable experience. He was halfway up the stairs when the man spoke. It froze Ben, and he turned around.
“What were you thinking of, Lavinia, to let Mr. Powell carry his own bags?”
Hearing his own name spoken like that, so casually, as if it were daily on the speaker’s lips, gave him a shock. Come to that, to hear it at all.... How did the man know? Already he knew there would be no explanation. He would never be able to fetch out an explanation, now or at any time—not, that is, a true one, a real, factual, honest account of why anything was or how. Somehow he knew that.
“Alexander Clements, Mr. Powell. Commonly known as Sandy.”
The girl followed him upstairs and showed him his bedroom. I’d told him to sleep where he liked, that he had the choice of four rooms, but the girl showed him to the big one in the front with the view of the lake.That was his room, she said. Would he like her to unpack for him? No one had ever asked him that before. He had never stayed in the kind of hotel where they did ask. He shook his head, bemused. She drew the curtains and turned down the bedcovers.
“It’s a nice big bed, sir. I put the clean sheets on for you myself.”
The smile returned, and then came a look of a kind he had never seen before—well, he had, but in films, in comedy westerns and a movie version of a Feydeau farce. At any rate, he recognized it for what it was. She looked over her shoulder at him. Her expression was one of sweet naughty coyness, her head dipped to one side. Her eyebrows went up and her eyes slanted toward him and away.
“You’ll be lonely in that big bed, won’t you?”
He wanted to laugh. He said in a stifled voice, “I’ll manage.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage, sir. It’s just Sandy I’m thinking of—I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Sandy.”
He had no idea what she meant, but he got out of that bedroom quickly. Sandy was waiting for him downstairs and the table was laid for one, cold food on it and a bottle of wine.
“I hope everything’s to your liking, Mr. Powell?”
He said it was, thank you, but he hadn’t expected it, he hadn’t expected anyone to be here.
“Arrangements were made, sir. It’s my job to see things are done properly, and I hope they have been. Lavinia will be in to keep things shipshape for you and see to any necessary cookery. I’ll be on hand for the more masculine tasks, if you take my meaning, your motor and the electricals, et cetera. Never underrate the importance of organization.”
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“What organization?” I said when he told me. “I didn’t arrange anything. I knew Sandy Clements still had a key, and I’ve been meaning to ask for it back. Still, as for asking him to organize anything, to make ‘arrangements’ ...”
“I thought you’d got them in, Sandy and the girl. I thought she came in to clean for you and you’d arranged it that she’d do the same for me. I didn’t want her, but I hardly liked to interfere with your arrangement.”
“No,” I said, “no, I see that.”
They stood there until he was seated at the table and unfolding the white napkin Lavinia had presumably provided. I don’t know where it came from; I haven’t any white table linen. Sandy opened the bottle of wine, which Ben saw to his dismay was a supermarket Riesling. The horror was compounded by Sandy’s pouring an inch of it into Ben’s wine-glass and watching while Ben tasted it.
He said he was almost paralyzed by this time, though seeing what he thought then was “the funny side.” After a while he didn’t find anything particularly funny, but he did that evening. They had cheered him up. He saw the girl as a sort of stage parlor maid. She was even dressed somewhat like that, a white apron with its sash tied tightly around her tiny waist, a white bow on her pale blond hair. He thought they were trying to please him. These unsophisticated rustics were doing their best, relying on an experience of magazines and television, to entertain the visitor from London in the style to which he was accustomed.
Once he’d started eating, they left. It was quite strange, the manner in which they left. Lavinia opened the door and let Sandy pass through ahead of her, looking back to give him another of those conspiratorial naughty looks. She delayed for longer than was necessary, her eyes meeting his until his turned away. A fleeting smile and then she was gone, the door and the front door closing behind her.
Only a few seconds passed before he heard the engine of Sandy’s van. He got up to draw the curtains and saw the van moving off down the road toward the village, its red taillights growing small and dimmer until they were altogether swallowed up in the dark. A bronze-colored light that seemed to be slowly ascending showed through the treetops. It took him a little while before he realized it was the moon he was looking at, the coppery-golden disk of the moon.
He ate some of the ham and cheese they had left him and managed to drink a glass of the wine. The deep silence that prevailed after Sandy and the girl had gone was now broken by birdsong, unearthly trills of sound he could hardly at first believe in, and he went outside to try to confirm that he had really heard birds singing in the dark.
The rich yet cold singing came from the nearest trees of the wood; it was clear and unmistakable, but it seemed unreal to him, on a par somehow with the behavior he had just witnessed, with the use of his name, with the fountain nymph’s coy glances and come-hither smiles.Yet when he came inside and phoned me, it was the nightingales’ song he talked about. He said nothing of the man and the girl, the food, the bed, the “arrangements.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked him when I came down for a weekend in June. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I don’t know. I consciously made up my mind I wouldn’t. You see, I thought they were ridiculous, but at the same time I thought they were your—well, help, your cleaner, your handyman. I felt I couldn’t thank you for making the arrangement with Lavinia without laughing about the way she dressed and the way Sandy talked. Surely you can see that?”
“But you never mentioned it. Not ever till now.”
“I know,” he said. “You can understand why, can’t you?”
2
When I first came to Gothic House, Sandy was about twenty-five, so by the time Ben went there he would have been seven years older than that, a tall, fair man with very regular features who still escaped being quite handsome. His eyes were too pale, and the white skin of his face had reddened, as it does with some of the locals after thirty.
He came to me soon after I’d bought Gothic House, offering his services. I told him I couldn’t afford a gardener or a handyman and I didn’t need anyone to wash my car. He held his head a little to one side. It’s an attitude that implies total understanding of the other person’s mind, and indulgence, even patience.
“I wouldn’t want paying.”
“And I wouldn’t consider employing you without paying you.”
He nodded. “We’ll see how things go then, shall we? We’ll leave things as they are for now.”
“For now” must have meant a couple of weeks. The next time I went to Gothic House for the weekend, the lawn in front of the house that slopes down to the wall above the lakeshore had been mowed. A strip of blocked gutter on the back that I had planned to see to had been cleared. If Sandy had presented himself while I was there, I would have repeated my refusal of his services, and done so in definite terms, for I was angry. But he didn’t present himself, and at that time I had no idea where he lived or even his name.
On my next visit I found part of the garden weeded. Next time the windows had been cleaned. It was only when I came down and found a window catch mended, a repair that could only have been done after entry to the house, that I went down into the village to try to find Sandy.
That was my first real exploration of the village, the first time I noticed how beautiful it was and how unspoiled. Its center, the green, was a triangle of lawn on which the trees were the kind generally seen on park-land, cedars and unusual oaks and a swamp cypress. The houses and cottages either had rendered walls or were faced with flints, their roofs of slate or thatch. It was high summer, and the gardens, the tubs, the window boxes were full of flowers. Fuchsia hedges had leaves of a deep, soft green, spangled with sharp red blossoms. The whole place smelled of roses. It was the sort of village television-production companies dream of finding when they film Jane Austen serials. The cars would have to be hidden, but otherwise it looked unchanged from an earlier century.
A woman in the shop identified Sandy for me and told me where he lived. She smiled and spoke about him with a kind of affectionate admiration. Sandy, yes, of course, Sandy was much in demand. But he wouldn’t be at home that morning, he’d be up at Marion Kirkman’s. This was a cottage facing the pretty green and easily found. I recognized Sandy’s van parked outside, opened the gate, and went into the garden.
By this time my anger had cooled—the shopwoman’s obvious liking for and trust of Sandy had cooled it—and I asked myself if I could legitimately go up to someone’s front door, demand to see her gardener, and harangue him in front of her. In the event, I didn’t have to do that. I walked round to the back, hoping to find him alone there, and I found him—with her.
They had their backs to me, a tall, fair man and a tall, fair woman, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist. They were looking at something, a flower on a climber or an alighted butterfly perhaps, and then they turned to face each other and kissed. A light, gentle, loving kiss such as lovers give each other after desire has been satisfied, after desire has been satisfied many times over months or even years, a kiss of acceptance and trust and deep mutual knowledge.
It was not so much the kiss as their reaction to my presence that decided me. They turned around. They were not in the least taken aback, and they were quite without guilt. For a few moments they left their arms where they were while smiling at me in innocent friendliness. And I could see at once what I’d stumbled upon—a long-standing loving relationship and one that, in spite of Marion Kirkman’s evident seniority, would likely result in marriage.
Two women, then, in the space of twenty minutes, had given their accolade to Sandy. I asked him only how he had got into my house.
“Oh, I’ve keys to a good many houses around here,” he said.
“Sandy makes it his business to have keys,” Marion Kirkman said. “For the security, isn’t it, Sandy?”
“Like a neighborhood watch, you might say.”
I couldn’t quite see where security came into it, understanding as I always had
that the fewer keys around, the safer. But the two of them, so relaxed, so smiling, so firm in their acceptance of Sandy’s perfect right of access to anyone’s house, seemed pillars of society, earnest upholders of social order. I accepted Marion’s invitation to a cup of coffee. We sat in a bright kitchen, all its cupboards refitted by Sandy, I was told, the previous year. It was then that I said I supposed it would be all right, that of course he must come and do these jobs for me.
“You’ll be alone in this village otherwise,” said Marion, laughing, and Sandy gave her another kiss, this time planted in the center of her smooth pink cheek.
“But I’m going to insist on paying you.”
“I won’t say no,” said Sandy. “I’m not an arguing man.”
And after that he performed all these necessary tasks for me, regularly, unobtrusively, efficiently, winning my trust, until one day things (as he might have put it) changed. Or they would have changed, had Sandy had his way. Of course they changed anyway; life can never be the same between two people after such a happening. But though Sandy kept my key he was no longer my handyman, and I ceased paying him. I believed that I was in control.
So why did I say nothing of this to Ben before he went to Gothic House? Because I was sure, for reasons obvious to me, that the same sort of thing couldn’t happen to him.
The therapist Ben had been seeing since his divorce had advised him to keep a diary. He was to set down his thoughts and feelings, his emotions and his dreams, rather than the actual events of each day. Now, Ben had never done this, he had never “got around to it,” until he came to Gothic House. There, perhaps because—at first—he had few distractions and there wasn’t much to do once he’d worked on his translation and been out for a walk, he began a daily noting down of what passed through his mind.
This was the diary he later allowed me to see part of; other entries he read aloud to me, and he had it by him to refer to when he recounted the events of that summer. It had its sensational parts, but to me much of it was almost painfully familiar. At first, though, he confined himself to descriptions of his state of mind, his all-pervading sadness, a feeling that his life was over, and the beauties of the place, the lake, the woodland, the sunshine, the huge blue cirrus-patterned sky, somehow remote from him, belonging to other people.
