by Ruth Rendell
“It’s quite pathetic the way my poor old dad looks forward to my visits,” Marion said in a suitably lugubrious voice. “I really do need to see him three times a week.”
Avice had just heard from her managing agent that she would be permitted to raise the rent of her houses in Manchester, so was in a gracious mood. “So you go. Of course you must see your dear father.”
At home, where she now went only to sleep, Marion picked up the Daily Telegraph, a stained and battered copy which could only have found its way there by means of Fowler. It had plainly been used to wrap a baby’s disposable diaper and it was enough to make her decide to have the locks changed forthwith. Just the same, she glanced at it before going to bed, turning first to the births, marriages, and deaths, as she usually did with newspapers. Halfway down the deaths column was announced the demise of Bernice Maureen Reinhardt in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. Eighty-seven years old, beloved mamma and grandmamma, greatly mourned by her devoted Morris, Emmanuel, Hephzibah, David, Lewis, and Rachel. Marion had had no idea Mrs. Reinhardt had so many descendants. She had kept them very dark. Surely one of them might have let her know, a great friend like she was left to find out from a newspaper rescued from a waste bin.
She put the paper down and went to examine the bottle of morphine sulfate. No use for Mrs. Reinhardt now. Still, the world was full of old ladies and Marion was slow to accept defeat. It was essential to find out if the morphine was tasteless or if it had the kind of taste that would blend unnoticeably with Avice’s favorites: tiramisù and tarte tatin. Unlike most women, Marion only felt truly secure when alone in her own flat after dark. There was no possibility then of her doings—seldom entirely above-board—being witnessed.
She took the bottle, labeled NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY, out of the bathroom cabinet. She was rather frightened of it but she had to find out. Unscrewing the cap broke the seal and she took it off. It was probably colorless but she couldn’t tell because the bottle was of brown glass and she had forgotten what it looked like. If she dipped her little finger in and just touched the tip of it on her tongue, would that be dangerous? Could she get hooked? Marion was very reluctant to try. She remembered the hallucinations that had resulted from her mother’s regular dosage, troops of white-robed people trailing through the room, haggard faces looming out of mist and receding again. Or would she develop a craving for the stuff, like Fowler for drink and various narcotics?
Gingerly she placed the tip of her finger on the surface of the liquid and quickly withdrew it. A tiny globule adhered to the skin. She dotted it lightly onto her tongue. It was faintly sweetish, slightly metallic. So might a coin taste if dipped in icing sugar, thought Marion, fancifully for her. It would, she supposed, scarcely affect the flavor of a tiramisù.
She waited rather nervously for an hallucination but after an hour had passed and none came she reflected that this was far too soon to think about taking any action in this area yet. The land must be spied out, Avice’s financial affairs investigated, what relatives and friends she had and, most significant of all, the situation with those two most precious of Avice’s possessions, her rabbits.
There were things Ismay thought she would never do. At all costs some measure of dignity had to be maintained. Better suffer in silence, be like that girl in the play who never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her damask cheek. Bear the agony but never show it. That was what she thought when there was no suffering and no agony. Now she told herself, if I don’t find him, if I don’t speak to him and ask him, I may miss the only chance I have of getting him back. It may be that he is only waiting for me to come to him and say I’m sorry, I should never have let Edmund come here, I should never have shared with my sister. Was she to humiliate herself like that? What would she care for humiliation if Andrew was back with her?
Try the wine bar in the evening. He sometimes went there after his day’s work was done. On two evenings in succession she went down to Brief Lives and waited for him just inside a passage that led into one of the Inns of Court. It was a narrow winding passage such as might have figured in a novel of Dickens but lit at intervals by modern lamps attached to its walls. She stood between two of these lamps, away from direct light, and waited for him to come.
Apart from a man who passed her very close by and said “What’re you doing later, sweetheart?” she was undisturbed. He didn’t appear and she went home after two hours, disconsolate. Had he not only deserted her but all his old haunts as well? She was no longer on the edge of hysteria, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, but empty now, cold, despairing. The next night she was in the alley a little earlier. It was April but very cold and she huddled inside the sheepskin coat which had been Andrew’s present at Christmas the year before.
It was just after six when he came, but not alone. He was one of a crowd of young men, all laughing and making wisecracks, who went into the bar together. She had thought that simply seeing him would cause her to cry out, even fling herself upon him, but the reality was different. She shrank against the cold brick wall of the passage. He was a very long time in there. They served food, she remembered him saying. Perhaps he had stayed to eat his dinner there. People came out of Brief Lives and fewer and fewer went in. The City died at night. The West End might throb with noisy life, be filled with loitering crowds who made fast walking impossible, but here there would soon be solitude and silence. Then, when she felt she had spent her whole life in this Dickensian passage, when she was frozen with numb hands and feet, when it was almost nine, he came out. Alone. He began to walk rapidly in the direction of Waterloo Bridge.
She followed him. The sight of him, even the back of him, had a curious effect on her. Few people were about, but it was as if there were none, that he and she were the only living creatures in the world, that he would walk and she would follow him, at this same distance apart, forever. He would never turn, she would never call out, she would never see his face again, hear his voice. They would be like that pair of lovers she remembered reading about at university—were they called Paolo and Francesca?—doomed to drift forever in the void, blown by the winds. But they had been together, eternally embraced. Ismay thought she wouldn’t mind the wild winds and the darkness and loneliness if she were with Andrew, in his arms, for always.
The idea was so wonderful and so painful that, as he crossed the street into the Aldwych and she followed him, she could no longer resist and called out to him on a passionate anguished note, “Andrew!”
He either didn’t hear or didn’t want to, though she thought she detected a sudden stiffening of his shoulders, a momentary faltering of his step. She called again, “Andrew!”
On the pavement outside the doors to a restaurant he turned and looked at her, unsmiling. He stood staring like someone who knows immediate escape is impossible. Here, not very far from Brief Lives, the streets were no longer unfrequented. People were everywhere, waiting at traffic lights to cross the road, entering bars and spilling out of them, and two couples, hand-in-hand and arm-in-arm, passed between him and her. For a moment he was invisible and she thought, he will go, he will get away from me…. But when the couples had gone into the restaurant he was still there, standing with his head bent and his arms hanging relaxed, the picture of exasperated patience, as if he had given up the struggle. She approached him, no longer afraid, no longer trembling, only aware that she had caught him, she had him in her net. He stepped back under an awning, his back against a plate-glass window. She went close up to him, said on a thin high strangled voice, “What has happened to us?” And then when he didn’t answer, “What have I done?”
He had such a beautiful speaking voice. After this man’s voice all other men’s voices were harsh or high-pitched or cockney or provincial or vulgar. He said, “It’s not what you’ve done, Ismay. I’ve told you often enough, but you took no notice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do. You brought those people into our home and
though I told you repeatedly that I couldn’t stand it, you absolutely refused to tell them to go.”
“But my own sister…” she stammered, almost unable to believe what she heard.
“I don’t really see that it makes a difference whether it was your sister or somebody else. That male nurse wasn’t your sister. I’m afraid, Ismay, that the plain truth is that I got tired of waiting for you to do something about it. Let’s say I knew you never would. No doubt you cared for them more than for me. That’s reasonable, I understand that. So I—made myself scarce.”
She didn’t know why the scream of horror just inside her head failed to make its way out into the shiny dark and bright of the Aldwych. It was a calm voice she spoke in. “Have you got someone else?”
It was at that moment that the girl appeared. She came out of the taxi that had stopped just behind where Ismay stood and which Andrew had been staring at while he spoke. Not perhaps as tall as she seemed to be owing to the height of her heels, she was recognizably Ismay’s own type, but an exaggeration of that type, slimmer, fairer, whiter, more attenuated, her features those of an elfin creature in a fairy-tale illustration. A fur stole wrapped around her, she came up to Andrew, laid a hand on his arm, and put her face close to his.
Always able to rise to the occasion, he said, “Eva, may I introduce Ismay Sealand? Ismay, this is Eva Simber.”
“Hello,” said Eva Simber.
“Is she your girlfriend?” Ismay wouldn’t look at her.
“I suppose that describes our relationship,” said Andrew. “Yes, that’s about it.” The girl gave a nervous giggle. “And now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re about to eat.”
Ismay was past dignity, past face-saving. “And that is to be it? We part like that? After two years together?”
“Better than making a scene, isn’t it?”
She would have made a scene. The crowds wouldn’t have mattered. The girl and what she thought would have mattered not at all. But at that moment a group of people, close together, talking at the tops of their voices, pushed their way between them, leaving Andrew and the girl on one side, Ismay on the other. When they had passed she was alone and the other two were inside the restaurant.
She stumbled away, afraid she would fall, but clinging now to an upright, a bus stop or parking notice. A woman on her own said to her, “Are you all right?”
Ismay nodded, unable to speak. She summoned up enough voice to ask a taxi driver to take her home to Clapham and, huddled on the backseat, gave way to tears and then to bitter sobbing.
Though making it a principle not to use the key to Ismay’s flat but always to ring the bell, Edmund had tried the bell push, tried it repeatedly, and on the doorstep, tried calling her on his mobile before letting himself in. He had come back for the remaining possessions Heather had left behind. She herself was spending the evening with his mother as part of their campaign to make Irene like her prospective daughter-in-law.
Always neat and methodical, Heather had left the things she wanted in three tidy stacks on the bed in her old bedroom. Edmund was packing them into the suitcase he had brought when he heard a key in the lock and Ismay come in.
He remembered how she usually danced in, threw her things down, bounced into a chair to relax. The sounds he could hear were those of a very old woman, returning home with heavy bags from a shopping trip. She didn’t fall but he thought he heard her drop down onto the floor. He went quickly out of the room, calling out so that she shouldn’t be frightened, “Ismay, it’s me, it’s Edmund.”
She was prone on the floor, her face turned away from him. He knelt down beside her. “What is it?”
Instead of answering, she said in a muffled voice crying had made hoarse, “I want to die.”
“Andrew? What has he said to you? Ismay, turn over, please. Look at me.”
“Leave me alone. I want to die.”
“You can’t stay there,” he said, and more firmly, the nurse taking charge, “Get up. Tell me what’s happened. Come on, get up.”
She did, turning to him a face that frightened him, it was so ugly with grief and pain and terror. He had never found her attractive—she was too fey, too slight and delicate, her features too childlike for his taste—but he could tell many men would. Hers was the fashion-model type, impossibly slender with thistle-down hair and bush-baby eyes. All that was gone. As she staggered to her feet, fell onto the sofa, he saw that she was skeletal, her face that old woman’s whose stumbling he had heard. She had become her own mother. He sat down beside her and took her in his arms.
For a few moments she let him hold her. Then she moved away, put her head in her hands, her fingertips pressed deeply into the skin. When she took them away and shook back her hair, she seemed a little restored. Without waiting to be asked again, she told him about the evening she had spent.
“He said it was my fault, Edmund. That he’d gone, I mean. He said I preferred having you and Heather here to him. And then this girl came.”
Edmund resisted the impulse to ask if she was thin and fair and wearing very high heels. Why let Ismay know her story wasn’t a surprise to him?
“I don’t think she knew about me. It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s called Eva something. I don’t know. It’s a name you give to lions.”
“Sheba?” hazarded Edmund.
“Simba, I think. That doesn’t matter either. What am I going to do? What can I do? I can’t live without him.”
Six months earlier, Edmund would have thought this declared intention, common to discarded lovers, an absurd exaggeration which in fact amounted to very little. But now, about to be married, he asked himself if he could live without Heather and thought that if it wouldn’t be utterly impossible it would be dreadful and its extent perhaps not imaginable. The very heart of loneliness, the depths of despair.
“She came up to him,” Ismay said, crying again. “She touched him. On the arm. I thought I’d die. I wish I had. Oh, I wish I had.”
“You can’t be alone here. Not the state you’re in. I’ll call Heather. We’ll both stay here with you.”
Unhappy at the prospect of spending hours alone with her prospective daughter-in-law, Irene had summoned Marion to “join us for supper.” She arrived early, bearing her usual gifts she had made herself, in this case chocolate fudge. Calling on Mr. Hussein an hour earlier, in the belief than an elderly Moslem gentleman would be at a loose end at six in the evening, she had found him having a patriarchal orange juice with three younger men around the ebony table. One of them let her in. He was enormous, a good foot taller than Marion, with luxuriant black hair and beard. She had never liked very tall men. They intimidated her. The other two were smaller but not much. The three of them with Mr. Hussein filled up the little room and there was nowhere for Marion to sit.
“May I introduce my sons?” Mr. Hussein indicated one after another with a wave of the hand. “Khwaja, Mir, and Zafar. This is Miss Melrose.”
“Melville,” said Marion, who for some reason had supposed him childless.
Accustomed to women standing about while they sat, none of the Hussein men got up to give her a seat. Marion didn’t care. She eyed them and while she was wondering if one of them might be single or between marriages, their father began telling the tale of how she had given him ham for Christmas, including the detail of how he carried it to the kitchen on the end of a kebab skewer. This was the first Marion knew that in doing so she had committed a solecism. Khwaja, Mir, and Zafar all laughed uproariously and Mir (who had also shuddered) slapped Mr. Hussein on the back.
“My dad’s a real comedian,” he said, not looking at Marion. “He ought to be on the telly.”
“I have had my offers,” said Mr. Hussein mysteriously, and then to Marion, “You can see yourself out, can’t you?”
She would never go there again, Marion was thinking as she sipped Irene’s Bristol Cream. There was someone she wouldn’t waste her morphine on. What would be the use when he was so palsy-walsy with those sons of h
is? Heather came down at twenty-five to eight.
“I think you’ve met,” Irene said.
“Briefly,” said Marion, and Heather said, “Hello, Marion. How are you?”
“People who make that inquiry,” Irene said in a conversational tone, “don’t expect a truthful answer, do they? They should, of course. Otherwise there’s no point in asking. But no, they expect to be told that you’re fine even if you’re at death’s door.”
When Heather could find nothing to say, Marion remarked that true though this was, Irene must never forget that not everyone was as clever as she was. Irene favored her with a smile and a deprecating shake of the head.
“I do actually try to answer that inquiry truthfully. I believe in speaking the truth, you see. When I’m asked how I am—and I’m usually unwell—I see no point in lying about it.” To Heather she said, “I won’t offer you sherry. I know you young people haven’t any time for it.” Ignoring Marion’s affronted look at being thus excluded from youthfulness, she told an anecdote to illustrate her point. “Imagine, my sister and her husband went to a restaurant the other evening, and when they asked for sherry, the staff—not much more than teenagers actually—had never heard of it.”
“Perhaps I could have a glass of wine,” said Heather, having noticed an opened bottle of Sauvignon.
