by Ruth Rendell
“This is Heather, Mother,” Edmund said.
“How do you do?”
The girl said “Hello, Mrs. Litton” in the sort of tone too casual for Irene’s liking.
Nice hair, thought Irene, but otherwise nothing much to look at. “Can I get you some tea?”
“We’re going to the cinema,” the girl said.
“How nice. What are you going to see?”
“The Manchurian Candidate.”
“Oh, I’d love to see that,” said Irene. “Nicole Kidman’s in it, isn’t she?”
“I don’t think so.” Heather turned from Edmund to face her with a smile. “Will you excuse us, Mrs. Litton? We have to go. Come on, Ed, or we’ll be late.”
Ed! No one had ever called him that. She couldn’t help thinking how different Marion would have been. For one thing, Marion would certainly have asked her to join them when she had said she would like to see the film. It was only polite. Come to that, Edmund might have asked. A twinge gripped her in the region of her waist and she tasted hot bile in her throat. She wondered if she could possibly have gallstones. When Edmund came home she would ask him and he would know, even though he wasn’t a doctor.
Waking in the night after Andrew had gone and unable to go back to sleep, Ismay lay alone in the dark thinking about her sister. Was there a chance this man might marry Heather? She hadn’t even considered the possibility until Andrew suggested it. Edmund and Heather had been going out together for less than a month. But Heather seemed to like him, to be always out somewhere with him. Ismay had never known her to be absent from the flat so much since they had come to live here. And though Heather had had a boyfriend or two while at catering college, nothing, as far as Ismay knew, had been remotely serious.
She got up to go to the bathroom. Dawn had come and with it the gray light that is the precursor of sunrise. Heather had left her door open and Ismay stopped to look into the room at her sister lying fast asleep. Her beautiful hair lay on the pillow like a gold silk cushion, her strong and capable right hand spread out beside it. It was early days to think about Edmund marrying her, but on the other hand, there had never before been a situation like this. Ismay admitted to herself that she had somehow taken it for granted that Heather would never have a serious relationship, let alone marry. When she asked herself why, she came up with an unsatisfactory answer. Because she was Heather, because she’s not like other girls, because she’s not attractive to men. Yet she must be attractive to Edmund.
Of course, she had never committed herself to staying with Heather, the two of them sharing forever. There would have been no point in that. Heather was an independent person, quite capable of looking after herself, living alone or, she supposed, being a wife. She shouldn’t even be thinking about her the way Andrew did, as someone vaguely incapacitated. She could separate herself from Heather and they could be like any other normal sisters who loved each other, of course, but weren’t bound together….
It was the night, that was what it was, five o’clock in the morning, a mad sad time. She went back to bed and lay there, her eyes open in the pale-gray light and seeing at last that this was nothing to do with the time of day or wanting to live with Andrew or Heather’s temperament. It was to do with what Heather had done twelve years ago. Must have done, surely beyond a doubt had done.
No one knew but the three of them—herself, her mother, and Heather. The knowledge had driven her mother over the edge into the shadow world of schizophrenia. They had discussed Heather’s involvement, Heather’s guilt, she and her mother, but between themselves, never with Heather. Guy might still be alive, be on the other side of the world, lost or vanished, for all Heather ever spoke of him or his death or even, it seemed, remembered him. But he was dead, and that was due to Heather. Sometimes Ismay felt she knew it as if she had witnessed the act and sometimes that she knew it because there was no other possibility.
If Heather married Edmund Litton, should he be told? That was the great question. Could she let this apparently nice, good, intelligent man—or, come to that, any man at all—take on Heather without knowing what she had done? But if he knew, would he take her on? I love my sister, she whispered to herself in the dark. Whatever Andrew says, she is lovable. I can’t bear to hurt her, deprive her of happiness, cut her off from life, like they used to shut girls up in convents, just because…But, wait a minute, because she drowned someone?
She heard Heather get up and move very softly into the kitchen. Should she hand over her stewardship of Heather, halfhearted though it had been, to Edmund? It’s early days, she told herself; but she couldn’t get back to sleep.
Chapter Three
Unless you are very young, it is difficult to have sex if you haven’t a home of your own or the money to provide a temporary refuge. Edmund had had no sex for five years now. The last time had been with an agency nurse at the hospice Christmas party in a room full of washbasins known as the “sluice.” And that had been a one-off. Since going out with Heather he had looked back on his largely sex-free twenties with shame and incredulity. Those were the best years of a man’s life as far as desire and potency were concerned, and he had let them pass by because he balked at telling his mother he was bringing back a girl for the night. Regret was pointless. It wasn’t too late and he intended, this evening, to tell his mother he would be going away for the weekend—and why.
For some time now he had been standing up to her. Long before he met Heather he went home for a meal with his friend, the hospice palliative care doctor, Ian Dell, and saw Ian with his own mother. He had never imagined that his strong-minded decisive friend could be so enfeebled and conciliatory, and under the rule of a parent, as Ian was. Mrs. Dell was a little old crone (as Edmund put it unkindly to himself) quite unlike Irene Litton, but their dictatorial manner was similar. It seemed to him that Ian yielded in almost everything to Mrs. Dell, even apologizing to Edmund afterward for having refused—very gently—to take a day off from the hospice the next day to drive her to see her sister in Rickmansworth.
“I expect you think I should have taken her,” he said. “I do have time off owing to me and we aren’t that busy at the moment, are we? But I suppose I felt, rather selfishly, that it might be the thin end of the wedge. I’ll make it up to her. I’ll take her for a day out somewhere at the weekend.”
In Ian, Edmund had seen himself mirrored. He must change. If he failed to take a stand now when he was only a little over thirty, it would be too late. Although he and Heather had never discussed his mother, somehow it was Heather’s presence in his life that helped him. Gave him confidence and cheered his heart. So when Irene told him—told, not asked him—to come with her to his aunt and uncle in Ealing on the first free Saturday he’d had for a month, he took a deep breath and said no, he’d be busy. The ensuing argument became acrimonious and culminated in his mother having a panic attack. But it is the first step that counts, as Edmund kept telling himself, and after that things gradually got easier. He would be able to tell her about the planned weekend and its purpose and, he thought, screwing up his nerve, she would just have to get on with it.
When he first asked Heather out for a drink with him he had hardly thought of their relationship as coming to much. A few weeks, he gave it, and no sex because there never was. Besides, Heather hadn’t really had much attraction for him. She was a better prospect than white-faced, skinny, crimson-haired Marion, but almost anyone would have been. Now, though, they had been out for drinks, three meals, two cinemas, and one theater, and to a food-through-the-ages exhibition she had been keen on, and he looked at her with new eyes.
One evening she said to him, “I’m a silent person. I talk to my sister but not much to others. I can talk to you.”
He was enormously touched. “I’m glad.”
“It’s easy with you because you don’t say stupid things. It’s nice.”
He saw her home to Clapham. When he didn’t leave her at Embankment but came the whole way, she said, “You’re so k
ind to me. I don’t much like walking home from the station on my own.”
“Of course I’m coming with you,” he said and when they began to walk along the edge of the Common, he took her hand.
It was a warm hand with a strong clasp. He looked into her face under the lamplight and saw her eyes fixed on him, large blue eyes, opaque and cloudy as the glaze on pottery. Then there were the other markers, more obvious to any man, her full breasts and rounded hips, her plump lips and that hair, that glossy, dense, radiant hair whose color varied from flaxen through cornfield to eighteen-carat gold. She never wasted words but when she did speak her voice was soft and low, and her rare smiles lit her face and made her pretty.
The house where she lived was much bigger than he had expected, a detached house in a row of others like it but the only one with a glazed-in walkway from the gates to the steps and with stone pineapples on the gateposts. Lights were on upstairs and down.
“My sister, Ismay, and I have the ground floor, and my mother and her sister the top.” She stopped at the foot of the steps, keeping hold of his hand. “Ismay and her boyfriend,” she said softly, “will be away next weekend.”
“Can I take you out on Friday?”
She lifted her face and in the gleaming half dark he thought he had never seen anyone look so trusting. He brought his mouth to hers and kissed her the way he’d been kissing her these past few weeks, but something new in her response made him ardent, passionate, breathless when their faces parted. She held him tightly.
“Heather,” he said. “Darling Heather.”
“Come for the weekend.”
He nodded. “I’ll look forward to it so much.”
Edmund said to his mother, “I shall be away for the weekend, back on Sunday.”
They had just sat down to eat. Irene lifted her first forkful, set it down again. “You never go away for the weekend.”
“No, it’s time I started.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Clapham.”
“You don’t have to go away to go to Clapham. Clapham’s in London. Whatever you’re doing in Clapham you can do it in the daytime and come back here to sleep.”
Strength came to him from somewhere. From Heather? “I am going to spend the weekend in Heather’s flat.”
Edmund continued to eat. His mother had stopped. She shook her head infinitesimally from side to side, said, “Oh, Edmund, Edmund, I didn’t think you were that sort of man.”
He was still wary of her, but he contrasted how he now was and how he had been. There was a world of difference. His efforts had paid off and there was no doubt that now he sometimes got amusement out of their confrontations. “What sort of man, Mother?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”
“I am going away for the weekend with my girlfriend, Mother. I don’t suppose you want me to go into details.” It was the first time he had referred to Heather as his girlfriend. Doing so now seemed to bring him closer to her. “And now I’d like to finish my dinner.”
“I’m afraid I can’t eat any more,” Irene said, leaning back in her chair and taking deep breaths. “I feel rather unwell. It is probably the start of a migraine.”
Edmund wanted to say something on the lines of, “You always do feel ill when I say anything to cross you,” or even, “It couldn’t be psychosomatic, could it?” But he stayed silent, unwilling to argue further with her or defend himself (God forbid). Of course she would revert to the matter again—and again.
She did so at the moment he laid his knife and fork diagonally across his empty plate. “I shall be all alone in this house.”
“Unless you can get Marion to stay.”
“It’s hard when you’re my age and not strong.”
“Mother,” he said, “you have a good neighbor in Mr. Fenix next door and good neighbors opposite. You have a land line and a mobile phone. You are only sixty-two and there is nothing wrong with you.” Even six months ago he couldn’t have summoned the strength to say that.
“Nothing wrong with me!” The words were repeated on a note of ironic laughter. “It is extraordinary how one’s good little children can grow up so callous. When you were first put into my arms, a tiny child, after all I went through to give you life, I never dreamed you would repay my suffering with this kind of treatment, never.”
“I’ll get Marion on the phone for you, shall I, and you can ask her?”
“Oh, no, no. I can’t become dependent on strangers. I shall have to bear it alone. Please God I won’t be ill.”
In the event, Edmund left for Clapham on Friday but only after more battles. Irene “went down” with a cold the evening before. It was a real cold. Unlike acid indigestion, which needs only one’s word for it, sneezes and a running nose cannot be faked. Irene pointed out that it was only three weeks since she had had her last cold. It was a well-known fact that “cold upon cold” was the precursor of pneumonia. She had had it as a child as the result of a series of colds, double pneumonia.
“You aren’t going to get pneumonia, Mother,” said Edmund, the nurse.
Discouraging whiskey toddies, he made her a honey-and-lemon drink and advised aspirin every four hours. “You’re not a doctor,” she said, as she so often did. “I ought to be having antibiotics.”
“A cold is a virus and antibiotics don’t work against viruses.”
“It will be a virus all right when I get viral pneumonia.”
Irene Litton was a tall, well-built woman, having much the same sort of figure as Heather Sealand. Edmund had noticed this and refused to draw the psychologist’s conclusion, that he was attracted by women who looked like his mother. In any case, the resemblance ended there, for Irene’s hair was dark, barely yet touched with gray, and though English through and through, she had much the same features as Maria Callas: large, aquiline, striking. She was aware of this herself and had been heard to say that she might have had the same operatic success if she had only been able to have her voice trained. She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colors—garnet-red, sapphire, deep green, or amethyst—mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high. Her usual good health suited her type and she was at her worst when red-nosed and sniffing.
Marion noticed at once and poured out sympathy. She had arrived just before Edmund left for the weekend—timed her arrival, he thought, for he was sure that his mother had invited her, in spite of her avowals that she had not. That she knew where he was going and with whom he was also pretty sure, for while they were alone together in the hall, before she danced in to see Irene, she gave him a look of deep reproach, half smiling, yet sad. “I brought some of my homemade fairy cakes,” she said. “Fairy cakes have come right back into fashion, you know. They’re such comforting food and she’ll need comfort.”
When he had walked down the path and let himself out of the garden gate, he looked back to see them both watching him from the bay window. Those women were sure to make him—thoughtless, immoral, unfilial, callous, and not a doctor—the principal subject of their conversation. His ears ought to be burning all the evening. He was determined not to let thinking of it blight his weekend, and it didn’t.
Letting fall the beige damask curtain and returning to the fireside—a realistic-looking gas fire of smoldering yet everlasting coals and logs with flickering flames—Marion bustled about, feeling Irene’s forehead, refilling her water carafe, fetching echinacea drops and cough lozenges, and finally thrusting a thermometer into her mouth.
“You’d have thought Edmund would have done all this,” said Marion.
“Hmm-mm-hmm-hmm.”
“After all, he is a nurse.”
“Mm-hmm-hmm,” more vehemently.
The thermometer reading was normal.
“It can’t be!”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with it. I’ll try again later, shall I? Or shall I run out and see if I can get another on
e from the all-night pharmacist? Or I could run home and fetch mine.”
“Would you, Marion? You’re so good to me. I’m beginning to think of you as my daughter, you know. Or—dare I say it?—my might-have-been daughter-in-law.”
Marion ran to the station, changed her mind, and ran home through the winding streets to the Finchley Road. She ran everywhere, just as she talked all the time. Though she had made an attempt at courting him, Edmund’s defection hadn’t troubled her as much as Irene believed. What she wanted was not a young man’s desire but the devotion and admiration of elderly people with money. As well as Irene, she had old Mr. Hussein and old Mrs. Reinhardt, her sights on a couple of others, and she had had old Mrs. Pringle, only old Mrs. Pringle had died the previous year. True, she hadn’t bequeathed her enormous house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue to Marion, but she had left her a large sum of money and some very nice jewelry. This had enabled Marion to buy the ground floor and basement flat of the house in Lithos Road she now entered to find a thermometer. Since she was obsessively neat—a place for everything and everything in its place—she found it at once in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf next to the brown bottle of morphine sulfate, and she skipped back to get the tube this time, one stop to West Hampstead and Irene.
