by Ruth Rendell
“Did I say that?”
“Indeed you did. You said you’d give some serious thought to leaving the flat to Heather and someone to share with her. Don’t you remember, Ismay?”
“I must have done if you say so,” said Ismay. “When am I going to see you?”
“Probably never if you go on dodging the issue like you do. Sorry, darling, I don’t mean that, but do give it some serious thought and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too,” said Andrew.
Chapter Five
Disliking the ornate and elaborate furnishings of his childhood and the Harrods stately home interiors that had been his late wife’s taste, Tariq Hussein had sparsely furnished his cottage with Swedish blond wood and stainless steel. His marble floor was bare but for the occasional kilim. Slatted blinds hung at his windows. For flowers he might have a single lily or a single fern frond in a tall black jar. A Giacometti nude sculpture stood alone in one corner.
“If this place was mine,” Marion was saying, “I’d carpet these floors and have some velvet curtains.” The little rugs seemed threadbare to her, and as for that rusty iron thing in the corner, it looked as if it came off a scrap heap. “Don’t you feel this house needs some warmth?”
“It is warm enough for me.”
“Backing up your heating with one of those big gas fires is not to be sneezed at.”
“Atishoo, atishoo,” said Mr. Hussein with heavy humor. “I sneeze at it. I don’t want it, my dear young lady. I won’t do it. My house stays as it is.”
Marion rather liked being called his dear young lady, especially the “young” part. Tariq Hussein was old but not very old like Mrs. Reinhardt, no more than, say, seventy. He was small and thin with copious white hair and the profile of a handsome hawk. When she called to see him he produced a pot of very strong coffee and they drank it in the living room Marion called a lounge. She thanked him for his Christmas present and he smiled. Christmas meant little to him, but he kept the custom of the country.
“When in Rome,” he said, incomprehensibly to Marion, “do as the Romans do.”
He had made it a rule some years before never to spend more than five pounds on presents for those people who expected them—the cleaner, for instance, his driver, and the paper boy. But inflation had become so shocking that two years ago he had been obliged to raise that ceiling to ten pounds. He had no objection to spending money, but he had his priorities. Apart from the value of the house, he had almost five million, appreciating fast, he had made from the bridal garment shops he had owned in Kilburn and Willesden until recently when his eldest son had taken them over. His eye on Marion, talking now about her friends the Littons and various other people he had never heard of, he wondered what she wanted of him. Was it possible she thought he was poor? Or could the reverse be true and she thought he was rich? Perhaps she hoped he would marry her. He looked no more than sixty or possibly fifty-five and she was forty if she was a day. Although he got a lot of amusement out of her visits, secretly laughing at her, he intended soon to terminate them. He owed it to his sons not to remarry. His money, his house, and his home in Derbyshire were reserved for the three of them to share. But even if he had considered remarriage he wouldn’t pick her. For one thing, she was as skinny as his Giacometti and far less valuable.
Absently pouring more coffee, Marion chatted away about someone called Joyce and a man called Edmund who had deceived her or betrayed her in some way. She had given these people and several others Christmas presents and all she had got in return was a scarf from Mrs. Litton. This reminded her that she had a gift for him. He was very thin, she was sure he didn’t look after himself, so she had taken the liberty of bringing something to eat. She had cooked it herself. All he would have to do was slice it up and eat it with some Branston pickle. She had taken the same thing to the Littons and they were so grateful, it was quite touching.
In the middle of Marion’s disquisition on a rabbit keeper who lived in Pinner, Mr. Hussein got up and said he must send her away now. “Mrs. Litton and Mrs. Reinhardt and Mrs. Pringle will be wondering where you are.”
Marion wasn’t clear what he meant by this. She had told him several times that Mrs. Pringle was dead. Perhaps he was losing it. Perhaps this was the start of Alzheimer’s, though of course he was an Asian and it might be no more than that. When she had gone Tariq Hussein opened his present. Inside the red and gold wrapping, the clear plastic and the greaseproof paper, was a knuckle of ham. Recognizably pig, he thought. A good mosque-attending Moslem, he recoiled and pushed it a little way away across the ebony and silver table. He found a long kebab skewer and stabbed the ham, holding it at arm’s length and carrying it into the kitchen, where he dropped it in the waste bin. He could see the funny side of it now and thought it would make a good story to tell his friends.
Then he called his driver and asked him to bring the Rolls around at one. Elegantly dressed in a light-gray suit with lilac tie, he set off for the Ivy to take his mistress, Fozia Iqbal, out to lunch.
It was done to protect her from Guy Rolland, to keep her safe. Afterward Ismay told her mother many things, but there was one thing she didn’t tell her: that she wouldn’t have minded if Guy had made love to her, that she would have liked it. He was her mother’s husband and it would have been wrong. Those were the considerations that held her back from overtly encouraging Guy, not that she didn’t want it, wasn’t excited by him, didn’t used to hope he would one night come to her bedroom. Heather knew nothing of this. All Heather saw was a man of thirty-four touching and kissing her beloved sister, a girl of fifteen, in an improper way. All Heather assumed was that her sister must dislike it because she herself would have disliked it.
Or that is what I believe happened, thought Ismay. I think it was like that. She realized then that every time she dwelled on those events of twelve years ago, she always prefaced them with that sentence or something like it. That is what I believe. It had to be that way. How else could it have been? She had disclosed it to no one. Only she and her mother knew, and it was hard now to tell how much of anything Beatrix knew anymore. For all Ismay could tell, the whole thing had passed utterly from her mother’s mind. It had marked her mind, wounded it, mutilated it, and then slid away as a disease may do, leaving ineradicable scars behind.
Early in their relationship she had considered telling Andrew. She loved him now, would love him forever, but then her passion had been starry-eyed, it had been worship. She had been able to find no fault in him and had seen him as a just judge, wise, forbearing, and kind. Knowing him better now, she told herself she must have been mad even to think of it, even to imagine she could reveal such a thing about Heather, who he already held in contempt. Anyway, it was basically nothing to do with Andrew and everything to do with Edmund.
But tell him that she was sure Heather had killed their stepfather? She couldn’t see herself doing it. She couldn’t see him and herself sitting opposite each other while she told him. Nor could she imagine what the result would be. Almost certainly to split him and Heather up. He seemed a good person, but was he good enough, magnanimous enough, saintly enough, to take Heather on in spite of what she told him? No man would. And once he knew, other possibilities would arise. Suppose he went to the police. He was a nurse, a part of the medical establishment; he might see it as his duty to tell the police what she had told him. A terrible urge took hold of her not to tell him. To say nothing and let things take their course.
What was she afraid of if she never told him and he married Heather? That Heather would do it again? Only perhaps if she, Ismay, were in danger as in Heather’s eyes she had been then. If someone threatened her as Heather saw Guy as threatening her. But that wasn’t going to happen. She was young and happy. She had Andrew, who loved her, as well as a good job and plenty of friends. Her mother was a perpetual worry, of course, but there was no crisis over her home or her care or her carer. The present arrangement worked well and would d
o so while Pamela was willing to live with Beatrix and her nieces lived on the floor below.
Ismay asked herself if there was anyone else Heather loved and would feel it her duty to protect or avenge but came up only with Edmund himself as the possibility. Was this what she had been afraid of from the start of Heather’s love affair? That she would marry Edmund and love him, devote herself to him, and when someone harmed him—this was bound to happen—take revenge on that person? It could be in connection with his job, some figure in authority failing to promote him or sacking him unjustly. Suppose someone brought an action in court against him for negligence. In the compensation culture this was happening all the time. And there would be children. Would Heather wreak vengeance on a child who bullied her child or fought him in the playground or a teacher who spoke harshly to him?
You’re letting this get out of hand, she told herself, you’re going over the top. This is all conjecture. She’s not a psychopath. There’s no rule that someone who kills once is bound to kill again, is there?
But they say it happens. The first time is the enormity. The next time would be easier…. If only, she thought, before I told him, I could get Edmund to promise not to desert Heather. Even if he did undertake that (which no one would) he’d break his promise when he knew what she had done. She couldn’t tell him. He must take his chance. And if Heather killed the man who had sacked him or the doctor who had failed to diagnose his illness or the driver of the car who hit his car or the little boy who teased their daughter—well, she would blame herself for the rest of her life.
“My son wants to buy a flat,” said Irene. “I don’t know why. I tell him that he already has a house. I regard this place as much his as mine.”
This was said in the presence of both Edmund and Marion, Edmund and his mother having already thrashed the matter out to exhaustion point earlier in the day. Excited as another woman might be by sexual desire or some great treat in prospect, Marion was stimulated by family rows, any sort of row and anyone’s family. Her face had taken on youthful color, her cheeks red and her eyes gleaming. Irene, by contrast, looked pale, even wan. Stately in a long black tunic over a long black skirt, her hair piled up on top of her head and kept in place precariously by silver pins, she sat like Patience on a monument, wondering at the vagaries of men. In her lap lay the coral beads she had been stringing onto a length of thread.
“You’d think he had everything he wanted here,” she said. “He doesn’t have to lift a finger. Even though I say it who shouldn’t, the food here is as good as anything cooked by that Jamie Oliver.” She turned to Marion. “You know who I mean.”
“Oh, yes,” said Marion. “Frankly, I think your cooking is better.”
“Cleaning the house from top to bottom, too. Bed making, the windows shining like—like diamonds—washing, ironing, all done for him.”
For a moment Edmund thought his mother was going to compare herself with some television star who demonstrated the arts of the laundry on screen, but instead she said, “What do you think, Marion, about this idea of leaving, of setting up home elsewhere? Have you ever heard anything so absurd?”
“I’d rather not discuss this in front of Marion,” said Edmund.
“Why on earth not?”
“Believe me, Edmund,” said Marion, “I have nothing but your interests at heart. Who knows? After all, I am practically an estate agent and I may be able to help.”
“Marion, you force me to say I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I shall move out of here the moment the purchase of my flat is completed and that’s all there is to it.”
Having already said more in front of Marion than he intended, Edmund went upstairs where he phoned Heather and told her there had been a row but he intended to move just the same. He sat in his bedroom, thinking about how Heather had said of course she’d move in with him once he had possession of the flat in Crouch End, how easy it had been to find the flat and how smoothly things appeared to be going, and that he must assess the size of Heather’s ring finger—and propose.
Downstairs, tactful Marion thought a change of subject would be the most acceptable course to take and had begun chatting about Avice Conroy. Three times since Christmas she had called on her in her house in Pinner and once she had done a stint of rabbit-sitting while Avice had gone away for the night to a friend’s funeral in Harrogate. Avice herself was very frail, Marion thought, though of course marvelous for an eighty-year-old. As for those rabbits—well, it took all sorts to make a world, didn’t it?
“She’s eighty-four,” said Irene in a doleful voice, and then, “I suspect he’s going to get engaged to that girl. I don’t see why they can’t live here. Not that I would allow it until they were married.”
“I wouldn’t think much of a girl who lived with a man without being married under his mother’s roof.” Realizing that she had got into a mess with that sentence, Marion amended it to, “I mean, I wouldn’t think much of an unmarried girl living with an unmarried man in his mother’s house.”
“Wouldn’t you, Marion?” said Irene wistfully. She sighed. “I wish things could have been otherwise.”
This was not a line Marion wanted the conversation to take, implying as it would that she had been left on the shelf. She reverted to her lame ducks and began talking about poor old Mr. Hussein, his few sticks of furniture, his single lily, and his childlessness. How he had loved the knuckle of ham! Irene interrupted her.
“I’m making this necklace for you, Marion, though I wonder if it’s quite your color. Would malachite perhaps be better?”
Having no idea what color malachite was, Marion said, “Anything you made would be delightful, I’m sure. May I look?”
Irene held out the uncompleted necklace listlessly. “I’m sure I don’t know when it will be finished. I can’t work when I’m upset. You’d better run away now, Marion. I’ve got terrible heartburn or it may be the start of a hiatal hernia.”
“Running away” was something Marion did all the time. It wasn’t in her nature to walk or stroll. She went home at breakneck speed, galloping down Chudleigh Hill and along Acol Road to Lithos Road. Though shabby, her flat was neat and pleasantly scented with floral air freshener.
Irene’s saying she had heartburn reminded her that it was time to check on the morphine. When her mother died a year earlier, a whole unopened bottle of morphine sulfate had remained among the medicaments, as well as an already opened bottle containing about half the quantity. Like a good citizen, Marion had handed the half-empty bottle and all the remaining vials and jars and packets to the nurse, but since no one asked for it, she kept the unopened bottle. At that time she had considered trying it on Mrs. Pringle, convincing herself that “putting her to sleep” would be a merciful release, a natural peaceful exit. The idea would be for Marion to pour a little on her homemade rhum baba, for instance, or a slice of tarte Tatin. She was always taking such delicacies to the house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue. But Mrs. Pringle forestalled her and in the course of nature achieved an even more merciful release than Marion had had in mind, leaving behind her that thoughtful will.
On the principle of where do you hide a leaf but in a tree, she first put the morphine in her bedside cabinet. But mistaking it for a dyspepsia remedy about six months later, she was on the point of unsealing it and unscrewing the cap before she remembered. Goodness, she might have killed herself! She took the morphine out and put it in the back of the bathroom cabinet along with items no one would consider consuming, a bottle of hand lotion and some vapor rub among other things. As soon as she got in she checked that it was still there. It was. Of course it was. Who would have moved it?
Well, Fowler might have. He’d drink anything if he thought it would intoxicate or stimulate him. Once, soon after Mrs. Pringle died and she’d first moved in here, he made his way in while she was out and drank a whole can of silver polish and half a bottle of Lancôme eau de toilette. It wouldn’t be easy for him to get in now, not easy even for him sinc
e she had had the locks changed. Still, it would be wise to take precautions. She found an adhesive label, one of many neatly stacked in the stationery drawer, wrote POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN on it, added INTERNALLY, and stuck the label on the morphine bottle.
“It may seem trivial to you,” said Andrew, coming back into Ismay’s bedroom after his shower, “but I don’t actually much like sharing this place with those two. I don’t like joining the queue for the bathroom. And most of all I don’t like coming back here after being out with you somewhere and finding them sitting on the sofa, then having to get up after half an hour and say, ‘Well, good night. Ismay and I are going to bed now.’”
“Oh, darling, you can’t mean it embarrasses you.”
“Not particularly. What I mean is I want to be allowed a bit of spontaneity. To make love to you on the sofa, for instance. On the floor—why not? In the bath. I don’t want to be treated like half of an old married couple stopping the night with friends.”
“It’s not like that, Andrew.”
“It is just like that. Are you going to tell me you don’t keep quiet because they’re there? You’re not careful to stop the bed from creaking? If you have to go to the bathroom you’re not conscious that one of them may be in it? Now that’s embarrassing, if you like.” Andrew was dressed by now, peering into the mirror to fix his tie. “And don’t say it’s as bad coming to me. You know Seb mostly stays in his room. Besides, I can’t live in my place without his rent.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.” Getting up, Ismay wondered if the bathroom was free but knew that if she asked Andrew another storm of protests would begin. “Edmund’s found a flat, and he’s expecting to sign the contract soon. He and Heather are engaged, and as soon as he can move he will and she’ll go with him.”
