by Ruth Rendell
“He’s probably in a meeting,” said Edmund, wondering why he seemed to be furthering that philanderer’s deception. But it was to protect Ismay, who would soon be his sister-in-law. After all, she might never need to know. It wasn’t inevitable that she find out, and if she could be kept in ignorance for a while, Andrew might get over this attraction and return to her. Strangely, for he had not found this other woman particularly fetching—too pale and childlike—he thought of her high golden heels and glistening wrap before he turned his attention to his dinner.
Ismay, who normally had a healthy appetite, found she couldn’t eat much of Heather’s avocado mousse with pears and arugula or her roast quails with sweet-sour orange sauce. She had only once before known Andrew to turn off his mobile, and that had been on Christmas Day when he was with his parents. If he was working late he should be in chambers, but when she called the number there was no reply. Pamela had given Heather the latest six DVDs of Sex and the City for a birthday present, and she and Edmund put on the first one of them after they had finished eating. Ismay went into her bedroom and tried Andrew’s mobile number again. It was still switched off.
She attempted to think of other things, but all that came to mind was Heather’s remark that began, “When we’re married.” It had brought her a faint feeling of sickness. Every mention of the coming marriage did that. The only one of “the other things” that came to mind was the tape. A plan to find out about safe deposit boxes had come to nothing. It seemed too grand a project and there was a flavor of espionage about it. People like her didn’t possess and conceal secret documents—for this was what the tape amounted to. Anyway, she was beginning to think the whole idea of the tape had been rather silly. She was a little ashamed of making it, of sitting there and talking into a recording device about her beloved sister. Especially when, though it was designed for that sister’s future husband, she knew she never would give it to him.
She slept badly, waking every hour or two to ask herself why Andrew had turned off his mobile. The next morning, she tried it and got a message that he wasn’t available. Strange how every time her glance took in the shelf where the tape was (and where the CDs and her iPod and Walkman radio also were), the first thing her eyes rested on was that tape. Rainy Season Ragas. It was quite safe where it was, she reminded herself. The eyes of others wouldn’t see it or would not see it any more than they would see the Mozart or the dangling headset on her radio.
In the train she began once more worrying about Andrew. He’d behaved like this at Christmas, true, but Christmas was an exceptional time when the usual rules hardly applied. There had been another occasion, the summer before, when he had seemed to disappear for a few days and she had been frantic with worry. He soon explained that his mother had been ill. He had been in the hospital with her in some remote place in the Scottish Highlands where, for some reason, his mobile didn’t work. She had worried then. She always thought of an accident in that fast sports car of his father’s he liked to borrow. If he was injured who would let her know? She wasn’t Andrew’s partner or his fiancée but only his girlfriend. His parents might not even know of her existence. It brought her a shaft of pain to think that might be true. Did he talk about her to other people? She didn’t know but she was sure Edmund talked to his friends about Heather.
Now that Edmund was regularly absent from Chudleigh Hill three nights a week, Irene had begun to understand he really did intend to get married. He really meant to move out and buy a flat five miles away. Her making it plain that she disapproved, disliked what she knew of Heather Sealand and believed that “anticipating marriage” doomed any subsequent union to failure, had had no effect on his conduct.
She devoted a large proportion of her thoughts to plans for showing him what a grave mistake he was making. Mostly these schemes came to no more than telling him to wait a little longer, that she was not well enough to be left on her own and that he couldn’t afford to get married. She even asked him if he knew as much as a putative husband should about his future wife’s background and antecedents, but this, as even she could see, had a fatal effect and resulted in his changing his mind about inviting Heather for Sunday lunch. Heather had only twice been to the house in Chudleigh Hill, the first time when she had more or less told Irene outright that Edmund’s mother wouldn’t be welcome to join them at the cinema and the second when she and Edmund had come home together after work.
Edmund had phoned but only half an hour ahead of their arrival. Naturally, she hadn’t been very welcoming to Heather—how could she be after the way the girl had snubbed her about the cinema?—but when she had said she couldn’t possibly produce a meal at a few minutes’ notice, Edmund had chosen to take it badly. He and Heather would go out to eat, he had said, and come back to see her later.
“I don’t think so,” she had said quite reasonably. “It’s nearly eight now and by the time you get back I shall be thinking about bed.” His shrug annoyed her. “You’re here so seldom I expect you’ve forgotten I go to bed quite early.”
Surprisingly, the girl had suddenly said, “Why don’t you come with us?”
Edmund had probably told her off for her behavior over going to see that film. That would be it. “Oh, no, my dear, that wouldn’t do. I don’t suppose Edmund’s told you but I’m not a very well person. This has been one of my bad days.”
They had gone and not come back. Irene told Joyce, first on the phone, then face-to-face. Joyce was unsympathetic, but that was only to be expected; they had never been close as sisters. “That’s a game you can’t win,” she said. “The mother always loses. All you’ll succeed in doing is alienating your son. He won’t stay away three nights a week. He’ll stay away every night. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t get an invite to the wedding.”
“What do you know?” Irene said rudely. “You’ve never had any children.”
She painted a different picture for her new neighbor. “My son and his fiancée are always begging me to come with them when they go out, but I seldom feel up to it. I’ve never been strong, you know. Between ourselves, I shall be relieved when he’s married and in a home of his own. I shall be left to my own devices at last.”
Barry Fenix was a tall, soldierly-looking man with thick white hair and a small mustache. Every inch the colonel of the regiment was how Irene saw him, though he had told her in a burst of confidence that while doing his National Service he had never risen above the rank of lance-corporal. Another thing he told her was that he had a unique collection on DVD of films about the Indian Army and the Northwest Frontier. “You should think about going,” he said, speaking to her over the garden wall. “You ought to get out more, a fine-looking woman like you. This could be your opportunity. Your son’s wedding, I mean. Seize the day, Irene, seize the day.”
“Do you mean, go out with them or go out—well—with other people? You seem a bit confused.” She smiled encouragingly, sure he was going to invite her out. For a drink, wasn’t that what they said? Or maybe to watch his DVDs. “Now which is it?”
“I was only trying to be helpful.” He went back into the house.
Andrew was back. His mobile was on all the time, and he was taking Ismay out in the evenings and spending the nights with her. Perhaps it was his imagination, Edmund thought, that he was less ardent, less fixed on Ismay than formerly. It must be imagination, it must be an illusion created in his mind by what he had seen that evening in Lancashire Court. And the girl in the fur with the golden heels? Someone from Andrew’s past, a former girlfriend, a cousin, or even a one-off evening’s companion, picked up somewhere in a moment of madness, of aberration…. Anyone could see he was in love with Ismay—or did he mean that anyone used to be able to see?
When he had first met Andrew, Edmund fancied that he had complained less. Now it seemed that he was always grumbling and mostly that the flat was overcrowded. Without quite coming out with it and saying Edmund wasn’t welcome there overnight, he constantly harped on the nuisance of havi
ng only one bathroom between four people, of one couple being obliged to go out in the evening so as to leave the other alone, of what he called the “chaos” of breakfast eaten standing up or sharing the tiny kitchen table. Edmund discussed it with Heather, even suggesting most unwillingly that he should cut his overnight stays down to twice a week. Or, tired of waiting for the seemingly interminable chain to show its last links, rent a flat somewhere.
Prudent Heather didn’t encourage this. She had paid her rent up to the end of April and couldn’t ask Ismay to reimburse her. Her suggestion was that they share his room in his mother’s house.
“It will only be for a few months.”
“It will be hell,” he said.
She said in a very serious tone, “We can get married first if you like.”
“Of course I like. But I know her. I know how she can be. I don’t want her breaking up my marriage when it’s only just begun.”
Ismay was beginning to see that marriage as inevitable. She was tempted to take the easy option, to relax and let it happen. But what she had foreseen—that once she had made the tape she would cease to think about its contents—hadn’t happened. She dwelled on it nearly as much. And now she began asking herself if she could be quite sure, positive, certain beyond a doubt, that Heather had killed Guy. There was of course the evidence of the wet dress as she came downstairs when they arrived home. The very fact of her coming downstairs counted against her. So did her agreeing with Ismay and her mother when they said she had been out, buying her school uniform, with them. An innocent person would surely have denied that. Ismay had expected her to deny it and had felt sure of her guilt when she didn’t.
But there was—just—an alternative. There was the inquest’s version. Enfeebled Guy, taking a bath in water which was too hot, had lost consciousness. Fainted, she supposed you would call it. His head had sunk below the surface of the water and in his weak state he had been unable to struggle out. So the coroner had said. Or there was the fact that, however inaccessible it seemed to be, the door to the balcony had been open. It would have been hard to get into the garden but not impossible. As for climbing up a ladder to get to it, a neighbor seeing that would have assumed it was the window cleaner.
These solutions dwindled into thin theories against the evidence of the wet patch on Heather’s dress or the lie Ismay and her mother had told and Heather confirmed, the lie that gave her an alibi. Would she have needed an alibi if she had been innocent? Of course, it might be that she had let Beatrix lie for her because it saved trouble. Seeing how it looked, the wet dress, the wet shoes, her dislike of Guy, she might only have been relieved that her mother intended to protect her from police questioning. It was a strange answer to the dilemma of Heather, but it was a possible one.
Everyone accepted the coroner’s verdict. Pamela had never questioned it. Nor had their mother’s brother nor any friend or neighbor. She wouldn’t have questioned it—except that she had been there and seen Heather and heard what she said. Perhaps what she should try to do now was attempt to see that verdict as true and right, the way others saw it. The trouble was that, looking back, she saw that she and her mother had modeled their subsequent lives on the assumption that Heather had done it. They lived the way they lived, Beatrix in madness, Ismay watching over Heather, because they had been convinced Heather had murdered her stepfather. Could they undo the structure of that after all these years?
Chapter Eight
The man in Crouch End who was selling Edmund his flat insisted he wasn’t backing out of the deal. He couldn’t help it if his vendor wanted a further month’s delay on signing the contract for the sale of his house. Edmund couldn’t expect him to sign the contract on the sale of his own until he was sure of somewhere to go when he moved out. Edmund, of course, agreed. The alternative was to start again with another property. He and Heather loved the Crouch End flat, already thought of it as their future home, and hated the idea of trying to find somewhere else.
Meanwhile, a row had taken place with Andrew one Saturday morning. He found himself alone with him while the girls were out shopping. Edmund had no idea what Andrew wanted to say when he asked if he could have a word, but he soon found out.
“Are you and Heather any closer to moving into this place you’re buying?”
“The vendor keeps delaying. It’s not likely to be much before May.” Edmund hadn’t particularly liked Andrew’s adversarial tone. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, frankly, because there isn’t room for four in this flat.”
“I think that’s down to Ismay and Heather, don’t you?”
“Not entirely, no, I don’t. It’s a matter of priorities. I was here first. From what Ismay tells me you have a home in West Hampstead that is a considerable size. What stops you taking Heather there until this elusive purchase of yours is available—if it ever is?”
“That house belongs to my mother. My mother lives there.” Edmund wasn’t about to go into reasons why Heather and his mother wouldn’t get on. Now, he decided, was the time to clear the air, though air clearing was seldom what a row achieved. “I don’t see what this has to do with you. Two sisters are the tenants of this flat, and you and I are here as in my case the fiancé of one of them and in yours as the boyfriend of the other. On equal terms, in fact.” Because he was growing angry and remembered the scene in Lancashire Court, he said, “I at least am going to marry Heather.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you,” said Edmund, again seeing the girl with the golden heels, “are not going to marry Ismay. You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?”
Andrew, who had been walking up and down like a lawyer in an American courtroom, stopped and stood very still. “Who told you that?”
Almost an admission, Edmund thought. He hadn’t intended things to go as far as this, but now he thought he had better come out with what he had seen. “I saw you getting out of a cab in Brook Street with a girl.”
“You mean that in your philosophy sharing a taxi with someone who’s not Ismay amounts to infidelity? If that’s so, God help you.”
“The way you and she were together amounts to it in anyone’s view.”
“Have you said anything to Ismay?”
“No, and I shan’t. I haven’t even said anything to Heather.”
The sudden change in Andrew was shocking. He came over to Edmund and stood over him, pointing one long finger in his face. “You stupid, lower-class, puritanical bastard!” he shouted. “You, you paramedic, you male nurse. A so-called man who lives in his mother’s house till he’s thirty-five, a queer, a pansy, who takes up with the ugliest girl he’s met because that’s all he can get. You make me puke, you fucking mummy’s boy!”
Edmund got to his feet, pushed the quivering finger away with his right hand, and thought of hitting him. It would make matters worse. He turned and walked away into Heather’s room, closing the door behind him and sitting on the bed until he heard Andrew bang out of the flat. When Heather came back she came alone, Ismay having gone to her yoga class. Edmund told her what had happened, leaving out his accusation of infidelity and Andrew’s unjust and untrue description of her.
“Why did he get so angry, Ed?”
“I suppose because I—well, I suggested that while I wanted to marry you he’d no intention of marrying Ismay.”
Heather laughed, then looked grave. “Well, what shall we do now?”
“It’s pretty clear I can’t come here again. Not after the things he said. It wouldn’t be possible to be in the same room with him.”
“That means we may be apart for months.”
“You’ll have to let me rent somewhere, darling.”
“Let me think about it. It’s such a waste of money. I could come to you. I wouldn’t mind about your mother. Or you could smuggle me in after dark. It might be fun.”
Fun when you were sixteen, thought Edmund, on his way home to Chudleigh Hill. Not now. He wanted Heather, he wanted to go on maki
ng love to her, but he wanted to eat his meals with her too and sit and talk to her, and listen to music with her and hold hands on the sofa in front of the television. He wanted to be able to sit in the same room with her, both of them reading but without awkwardness, in close companionable silence. She would sometimes raise her eyes and smile at him and he would sometimes raise his eyes and smile at her. Or she would get up and come to him and nestle in his arms. Of all this he naturally said nothing when he got home and met Irene in the hallway.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
If she had heard anyone else say it she would have called them common. Edmund nodded and smiled, though he didn’t feel like smiling.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be staying.”
“Yes, I shall. For this weekend.”
Irene put down the duster she was holding, approached him in much the same manner as Andrew had done before his outburst, and said in the voice of a TV detective who has made the discovery that solves the case, “You’ve quarreled with her.”
Patience extends only so far, but Edmund still kept his. “No, Mother. Heather and I haven’t quarreled. I shall see her this evening.”
“Oh, Edmund, I know you so well. Your mother knows every look on your face and the look I see there now tells me you’ve had a serious row, perhaps even an engagement-breaking row. Isn’t that so?”
Perhaps he was catching it off Andrew, but his control broke. “For God’s sake, Mother,” he said. “Be quiet and mind your own business.”
“Those two are going to be living here till midsummer,” Andrew said. “Or beyond.”
A cold note in his voice Ismay found disquieting. “May at the latest was what Edmund said.”
“What that man says and the actuality are two very different things. I’m not sure how long I can put up with it, my darling. I’m used to your sister, but her paramour is rather beyond the pale.”
