A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  At the Comprehensive Teddy did well. He showed particular promise at art and, later on, at the subject called Design Technology. He wanted to learn to draw, but there were no facilities at the school for actually teaching drawing, so Mr. Chance taught him. He taught him precision and accuracy and to be clean. He made him draw, over and over, circles, and told him the story of Giotto’s O, how when the Pope’s messenger came to him to collect an example of his work, Giotto produced no elaborate painting but with a flourish of his brush drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper. Teddy never got to draw a perfect circle, but he didn’t do badly.

  He liked drawing and soon he liked making things in Mr. Chance’s workshop, simple objects at first, then more complicated pieces and carvings. He took his GCSEs and transferred to a sixth-form college to study for A Levels in Art and Graphic Design and English.

  At home, of course, no one took the slightest interest in what he did at school, though his father had begun making noises about its being time for him to leave and earn money. Now Teddy was growing up, all three senior Brexes were beginning to see him with new eyes, as someone who might be of help to them, a member of the household they might use. A runner of errands, a mediator with any representative of the local authority or Gas Board, a breadwinner, even a cook and cleaner. That they had largely ignored his existence up till now weighed nothing with them. They were unaware of any lapse on their part. But, in a small way, scarcely consciously, they began courting Teddy. Eileen put cans of Coke in the fridge for him, having never noticed that he hated all fizzy drinks, and they all took to offering him cigarettes.

  But he was seldom there. Or, if he was, he made his domain in the dining room. That was where he did his homework and hung up his drawings on the walls the way Mr. Chance did. He framed them himself, using Mr. Chance’s picture-framer’s cramp. Jimmy toddled in there one evening, found his son sitting on the camp-bed reading Ruskin’s The Two Paths and asked him if he didn’t think it was time he took his backside down the Job Center.

  “Why don’t you take yours down there?” said Teddy, barely looking up.

  “Don’t you speak to your father like that!”

  Teddy thought this undeserving of any reply, but after a while, during which Jimmy shouted a bit and banged his fist on the dusty sideboard, he said, “I shall never have an employer.”

  “What? What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You heard,” said Teddy.

  Jimmy came at him then with his fists up, but he was too fat and feeble to do much and all that shouting had brought on a hacking cough. It doubled him up and he stood there, in front of his seated son, bent over and heaving, obliged finally to clutch at Teddy for support. In silence Teddy removed the shuddering hands that clutched at his Oxfam-shop sweatshirt and guided his father out of the room, holding him by the back of his jacket collar, rather as one might grasp a struggling animal by the scruff of the neck.

  But even Jimmy and Eileen knew about unemployment. If Teddy left school there would be no work for him to do. He would be obliged to stay at home, occupying the dining room, a threatening presence. And a very tall and powerful one, for Teddy had grown to six feet one and though slim was well-built and strong, so when the forms came for his university grant they signed them and did so almost with relief. Not that Teddy would be going far or living away from home. He would merely be at college up at the end of the Metropolitan Line, a tube-train ride away.

  So fat had Eileen grown that she could no longer wear her engagement ring. By greasing her finger with Vaseline she managed to get it off, but the wedding ring remained, becoming embedded in flesh until only a gleam of gold showed like a sequin fallen among pink cushions. She had begun upon her magnum opus, the crowning of her life’s work, a lace counterpane to cover the double bed she shared with Jimmy. The thread she used was pure white but already, after she had been crocheting it only a month, the work had taken on a uniform yellowness, as if it had been dipped in tea.

  Keith exchanged the Lincoln for a primrose-colored Ford Edsel Corsair, dating from the late fifties. Perhaps Americans of the time were not happy with a perpendicular gear shift or perhaps they disliked the shape of its grille, a mouth saying oooh! instead of a shark’s grin. Whatever it may have been, the Edsel was a notorious failure from the start, which was possibly why Keith picked his up for only five thousand pounds from a dealer in south London.

  Before Keith, in spite of its age, it had had just one owner, had seldom been driven and had clocked up only ten thousand miles. Nevertheless, Keith took the engine to pieces and reassembled it. He worked outside all that long, hot summer and the noise he made met no competition from sawing next door, for Mr. Chance died in July.

  He had no descendants and his nearest relative was a cousin. When he died this cousin was the only mourner. It never occurred to Teddy to go to the funeral. His sole concern was that now he would have nowhere to work, for the house would certainly be promptly sold. His worries were somewhat mitigated when he learned Mr. Chance had left him all his tools plus a lot of wood, paints and drawing materials. He tried to stuff it all in the dining room and when he found this impossible, experienced the first real burning rage of his life. He was a cold person, but his anger was hot and fierce, a silent interior boiling that swelled and crimsoned his face, and made veins stand out on his forehead.

  It was the horrible junk in the dining room that should have been put outside to rot in rain and sun. He would have put it there if he could have got it through the narrow French windows. At one point he thought of dismantling those windows, tearing the back of the house apart, kicking out the glass and splintering the wood, but he was cautious as well as angry. They were capable, the lot of them, of fetching the police. How had the furniture ever got in there?

  Keith told him. “It was my grandad’s. My dad loved them tables and chairs. And that sideboard, that’s a fine piece of craftsmanship. They don’t make furniture like that no more.”

  “Hopefully,” said Teddy.

  “You watch your mouth. What do you know? You show me a piece of furniture that old bugger Chance made that ever come up to that. My dad bought this house—did you know that? He was just a working man, but he wasn’t paying no council rents, getting into that trap. He saved. He bought his house and when this furniture come to him and he saw he couldn’t get it indoors it near broke his heart. So he had it taken to pieces and put together again when it was inside. And who do you think did that?”

  “Don’t tell me. I can guess.”

  “Chance was only too happy to do it for the money. Falling over himself to do it, he was.”

  It was the ultimate disillusionment. If Teddy had for a while believed Alfred Chance was different, he did so no longer. People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down. They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.

  As for the tools, in the end he had no choice but to keep them in the small area of garden that wasn’t occupied by Keith’s Edsel. He couldn’t use them out there. He had to keep them on the “lawn,” covered up under plastic sheeting. If Keith didn’t live there or hadn’t had that car he could have built himself a shed like Mr. Chance’s.

  But Keith did live there, though very soon Eileen didn’t. Eileen came to a bad end. When she was a child her mother had often told her she would, but this particular exit was not what she had in mind.

  4

  Being naughty saved Francine’s life. She had survived because she had misbehaved. Or that was what Julia said. Julia hadn’t been there, no one had been but herself and her mother and, of course, the man, but Julia always knew everything. He came upstairs looking for you, Julia said. Why else would he have gone into one bedroom after another?

  The strange thing was that for a long time afterward Fran
cine could never remember what the naughty thing was that she had done. Been noisy or disobedient or rude? And yet such behavior wouldn’t have been typical of her; she had never been that sort of child. But she must have done something she shouldn’t because her mother hadn’t been a strict woman but quite easygoing. Making a noise or being difficult about eating bread and butter wouldn’t have led to the exasperated voice saying, “Francine, that was very stupid and careless. You had better go up to your room.”

  Perhaps, after all, she had been that sort of child. How would she know? What had happened in the next half hour had changed her life, made her into a different person, and she had no means of knowing if her character then had been refractory and mischievous or the same as it was now. She hadn’t argued with her mother. She had obeyed and gone upstairs and into her bedroom and closed the door. It was about ten to six on a June evening, fine and warm. She hadn’t yet learned to tell the time. Her father said that learning to tell the time was harder for children now than it had once been because while some clocks had hands, others were digital and only had figures. But she knew it was ten to six because her mother had said so just before she sent her to her room.

  Her bedroom window was open and for a while she had leaned on the windowsill, looking out across the garden into the lane. There were no other houses or gardens to look at, the nearest was a quarter of a mile away. She could see a field and trees and a hedge, and a long way away the church spire. A car had pulled up on the opposite side of the lane and parked on the verge, but she hadn’t taken much notice of it, she wasn’t interested in cars and afterward couldn’t even remember what color it was. She hadn’t noticed the driver or if there was anyone else in the car.

  A butterfly in her bedroom, fluttering against the glass, that she remembered, and how she caught it, holding it between thumb and forefinger, delicately so as not to brush the dust from its wings. It was a red admiral and she had released it out of the open window, seen it fly up into the sky and watched it until it was just a speck in the blue. Then she had come away from the window and lain on her bed, bored by this solitude, wondering how long it would be before her mother came up and opened the door and said, “All right, Francine, you can come down now.”

  Instead, someone rang the doorbell. They weren’t expecting anyone and that made it more exciting because a visitor calling, a neighbor, a friend, would almost certainly result in her being fetched downstairs. She got off the bed, went back to the window and looked down. From here it was possible to see someone who came to the door, at any rate to look down on to the top of his head. Once, she had looked down and seen a totally bald top of someone’s head, a white, shiny moon. This one wasn’t like that, but a good head of hair, brown hair, though she couldn’t see any more except his brown shiny shoes.

  Her mother answered the door. It must have been her mother because there was no one else to do it and the door closed. She heard it close quite quietly. At first there were no voices, then she heard his voice. Rough, not very loud, but angry, very angry. That surprised her, someone coming to their house and being angry, shouting at her mother. She heard her mother’s voice but not what she said, but she spoke calmly, steadily. The man asked her something. Francine pressed her ear to the door. The next thing she heard was her mother crying out, “No!”

  Just that, just a single “no,” and then gunfire. A shot, followed by more shots. She had heard shots on television so she knew what they were. But whether the scream came before the first shot or between the shots or after all the shots were done she could never remember. Something fell to the ground or was turned over, it might have been a piece of furniture, a chair or, more likely, a small table, because there came a slithering sound and a crash, a tinkling of broken glass. Then noises she had never heard before, thuds, a gasping, choking groan, and one she had heard, a whimpering like her friend’s puppy made when it was left alone. And after that, one more final shot.

  Francine thought of getting out of the window. She went to the window and looked down, but it was too far. Besides, she had to hide, and getting into the front garden wouldn’t be hiding. Julia always said she hid because her instinct told her that the man would come upstairs in search of her, intending to shoot her too. But she was sure she hadn’t thought like that at the time. If she had had to account for why she hid she would say it was because children always hide instinctively when there is any danger, like animals do.

  At the door she had listened, heard something being pulled across the floor. It was the sound a rolled-up rug makes, dragged across carpet. Once, and only once in her short life, she had seen a grown-up cry. It was her mother who had cried when her own mother died. That sound, a grown-up sob, far far worse than a child crying, she heard the man make. It was more frightening than the shots and the dragging sound. She got into the cupboard.

  Inside the cupboard her clothes hung on hangers and her shoes stood on the floor. There was also a cardboard box full of toys she had got too old to play with. She pushed her shoes up against the toy box and crouched on the floor. At first it looked as if the cupboard door wouldn’t shut from the inside, there was no handle, but she found she could close it by inserting her fingers between the bottom of the door and the carpet. That was an advantage of being only seven, her fingers were very small. If she had been older she wouldn’t have been able to do that and the man would have found her when he came into her room. So said Julia.

  He did come in. She heard his footsteps on the stairs first. Hers was the door you came to immediately at the top, so he came into her room first. Came in, looked around, left again. She heard him in her parents’ bedroom, opening drawers, throwing the contents on to the floor. Throwing the drawers themselves on to the floor. She was icy cold with fright and her teeth were chattering the way they had last year when she had been swimming in that cold sea. Her mother had wrapped her in a big beach towel and then in her father’s jacket. There was no one to do that for her now.

  She heard him run downstairs. He closed the front door after him very quietly. Like a person does at night when they don’t want to wake people who are asleep. Her mother wasn’t asleep. She was dead. But at the time she didn’t know that, she didn’t know what death was, though when she crept downstairs at last and saw her lying there on the hall floor she knew the man had hurt her and that she had been terribly hurt.

  She knelt beside her mother, and picked up her hand and moved it about. Strangely, she didn’t notice the blood then. That might have been because her mother had dark hair and the carpet was dark red. Later, she remembered that there had been blood because when she took her hand from stroking her mother’s hair the palm and the fingers were red, as if painted with a fine brush. And some people who came later, men in uniform, policemen, nurses, one of them said she had been sitting in blood, her school skirt was red with it.

  Her father would come home soon. Usually this was at seven or a quarter to seven. She looked at the clock and saw hands pointing at incomprehensible angles. It was only when they pointed straight up or straight to the sides that she had much idea of what the time was. She sat on the floor beside her mother and watched the clock, wondering why you could never see the hands move. But if you looked away for a while and then looked back they had moved.

  Her teeth had stopped chattering. Everything had stopped, really. The world. Life. But not time, for when she looked at the clock again, one of the hands had crept up and was pointing straight to the side, the left side. She could tell right from left.

  Her father’s key in the lock made a scrabbling noise, a mouse-scratching noise, and then the door opened and he was inside. Standing there, staring, Richard Hill made a sound unlike all the other sounds she had ever heard. She could never have described it, even when she regained the power of speech, it was too dreadful and too different, not a people sound at all, but the roar of an animal alone in the wilderness.

  She couldn’t talk to him. She could tell him nothing. It wasn’t that her voice was smal
l or hoarse or whispery like her mother’s had been when she had laryngitis. Her voice wasn’t there, the words weren’t. When she opened her mouth and moved her lips and her tongue, nothing happened. It was as if she had forgotten how to speak or had never learned to talk.

  Richard Hill held her in his arms and called her his baby, said he was there now, he had come home, he would never leave her. Even at that moment he was able to tell her that all would be well, he would keep her safe forever. But she couldn’t answer him, only turn to his a frozen face and eyes which, he later said, had grown to twice their size.

  The psychologists got to work on her. Not Julia, not then. Later on, she understood how careful and caring they had been. The police had, too. No one had pressed her. No one had shown the least impatience with her. The psychologists had given her dolls to play with and in after years she understood this had been in the hope she would act out, in her play, the events of that evening. There was a man doll and a lady doll and a little girl doll.

  Francine had never been a doll person.

  “She doesn’t like dolls,” Richard Hill told them, “she never has.”

  But dolls were the recognized tool whereby children revealed themselves and their experiences to psychologists. If they had given her toy rabbits or dogs she might have acted something out with them, but they never did. Sometimes the police came and talked to her. The women officers were the kindest, gentlest people she had ever known, so kind and gentle that they made her suspicious.

  She understood why they questioned her. They wanted to catch the man who killed her mother. She couldn’t talk to them, she couldn’t write much more than her name or read more than simple words, so there was little communication. But it wasn’t for years that she found out they had suspected her father. For two days they believed Richard Hill might be responsible for the murder.